Lone Wolf (13 page)

“Come, come,” the Masked Owl said. “It’s safe. The fire will not leap from my forge. Don’t worry.” She took out her tongs. With a slightly alarming twist of her head, she indicated to Faolan that he should make himself comfortable near the fire with his bone.

Suddenly, there were several new sounds, sounds he had never heard before. The clank of the iron tongs, the crackling of the fire, the huff of the wind-catcher claws that the Masked Owl squeezed and pointed at the embers in the fire to bring the flames to life.

“What are those claws?” asked Faolan, his ears tilted toward her.

Gwynneth turned around and churred softly to herself. “These? These are bellows. I’m a Rogue smith. A blacksmith. I craft things out of iron and metals.”

“What kinds of things?” Faolan asked.

“I’ll show you. But first we should introduce ourselves.” Gwynneth wanted to hear this wolf speak some more. His howling had been unique, and so was his speaking voice. There was a curious roughness to it, not unlike the soft trilling burr of the clan wolves. Yet there was something different. No one, however, would ever mistake him for an outclanner. His ways were somewhat formal. He had a grace, a dignity that usually came with
being raised in a pack where one was taught to respect rank, order, and, most important, one’s elders.

Gwynneth had noticed the malformed front paw immediately and surmised that he had been cast out from the pack yet had survived. So where had he acquired these qualities, these manners that were so much a part of the wolf world? The two Milk Givers? A reference, even an indirect one, to these Milk Givers would perhaps open the conversation. That could be her “first strike,” as they said in the parlance of Rogue smiths—the first strike was the first blow of the hammer when the metal had been heated sufficiently.

“My name is Gwynneth. I was named for my mother because she died before I hatched. Another owl had to sit the egg. She also helped raise me. She sometimes called me Gwynnie. And what is your name?”

The wolf was suddenly alert. He dropped the bone for the first time and peered hard at the owl.

“Faolan. She called me Faolan.” Gwynneth did not have to ask who “she” was. It was the grizzly bear. He moved a bit closer, with his paws still on the bone. “Your mother died? Another took care of you?”

“Helped care for me and taught me the craft of smithing,” Gwynneth replied.

“So you had a father and a second mother?” Faolan asked.

“Yes, I said we had a lot in common.”

Faolan crept even closer now to the fire with his bone. He had never felt this kind of warmth before. The fire itself was a landscape. The flames danced in a wind of their own. Like trees, they grew out of the bed of glowing coals that were their earth. The snaps and crackles of the fire often were accompanied by explosions of starry sparkles. It was not just a landscape, but a world—an entire universe.

As he stared into the fire, Faolan began to speak slowly in his rough, lilting voice. It sounded to Gwynneth as if he had not conversed in a long time. His voice scraped, creaked a bit like the rusty hinges the Masked Owl sometimes pried from the doors of the Others’ ruins to melt down for her fires.

“I don’t know who my father was. I think I have a milk memory of my mother. Just her scent, that is all. But there is more than a milk memory of Thunderheart.”

“Thunderheart?”

“Yes, she raised me.” Faolan paused a moment and then began to speak again, but now it was as if the hinge broke in two. His voice cracked. “She left…I don’t know why.”

“Thunderheart was a bear, wasn’t she? A grizzly.”

Faolan dragged his eyes from the fire and nodded. Something touched him deeply when Gwynneth spoke the grizzly’s name out loud. He had never heard it spoken aloud by any creature other than himself. His paws rested on the bone and then he laid his head atop his paws and gazed at Gwynneth. “She left. That was her skull and now I only have this…this bone.” He licked the bone. “She would hold me in her arms while I nursed, hold me close with her huge paws and I could hear her booming heart.”

“And so you called her Thunderheart,” Gwynneth said quietly.

“Yes.” He raised his head now. “Did your father leave you? Did your second mother as well?”

“My father died in war. My second mother was murdered.”

“What is murdered?”

“She was killed for no reason—not prey for food or for a cause.”

“But she didn’t leave you. Not your second mother or your father. Neither one of them left you.”

“And I don’t think either your first mother or Thunderheart left you.”

“But my first mother did leave me,” Faolan said
stubbornly. “And I was found by Thunderheart. If it hadn’t been for Thunderheart—”

Gwynneth interrupted. “You were taken from your first mother.”

“Taken!” Faolan, suddenly alert, raised his head. Every hair in his ruff stood out.

“Faolan, I learned the craft of smithing from my second mother. But I learned the ways of wolves, the wolves of the Beyond, from my father, Gwyndor.”

“Tell me then. Tell me about the wolves and why I was taken,” Faolan pleaded. The burr in his voice thickened. His gleaming green eyes were fixed on the bone of Thunderheart.

And so Gwynneth told him about the Obea and how when a
malcadh
was born it was required by ancient wolf laws to take the pup and leave it to die. That the mother and the father were driven from the pack.

The sky grew darker, and in the folds of the night by the Rogue smith’s fire, Faolan listened while Gwynneth explained the ways of the wolves. As he listened, he began to gnaw on the bone of Thunderheart lightly, the delicate etching noises threading through Gwynneth’s words.

“But if that wolf pup lives it may rejoin the pack as a gnaw wolf.”

“A gnaw wolf? What’s that?”

Gwynneth waited a moment before answering and cocked her head to look at the lines Faolan had etched on the bone. “It is what
you
have become, but your designs are beyond your years, almost better than any I have ever seen, even at the
drumlyn
of Hamish, the Fengo of the Watch.”

When she said those last words there was a familiar resonance to them, as if Faolan had heard them somewhere before. Not heard them! Seen them! He recalled the paintings on the cave walls where the five volcanoes were depicted—the towering mounds, the
drumlyn
with a wolf perched atop each one. It was as if he had not just seen those paintings, but lived them in some dim, misty time.

“So if I return I am to become a gnaw wolf?”

Gwynneth tipped her head straight up, then straight down. Faolan had never seen a bird or any animal able to move its head in the peculiar way an owl did.

“Yes,” she replied. “And it’s hard.”

“But you say I am good at it.”

“That will make it harder for you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They treat gnaw wolves especially roughly when they
first return. Other young wolves will be jealous. You need to prove yourself.”

“Isn’t being abandoned, carried away, and expected to die, rough enough? Haven’t I proven enough already?” He paused and muttered something almost unintelligible in a deep reverberating tone that sounded quite bearish. Indeed it was the old bear oath that Thunderheart often growled when she was irritated. Urskadamus, curse of a rabid bear.

He sighed deeply. “So my first mother, my first Milk Giver did not leave me. I was taken. But what about my second, Thunderheart?”

Gwynneth blinked her dark eyes. “You don’t mean to say that you think that Thunderheart abandoned you?”

“It’s not like with wolves and Obeas. No one takes things from a grizzly bear,” Faolan replied evenly.

Gwynneth was caught up short by the young wolf’s response. Of course it was absolutely true. No creature in his or her right mind would try to take anything from a grizzly. “She did not leave you, Faolan. You must stop that kind of thinking right now.”

“Then why did she go away?” Faolan shoved his ear forward, and his hackles rose up. He was quivering with a new terror, a possibility he had never really thought of, or
faced. The emptiness that had become an omnipresent space beside him seemed now to engulf him. It almost radiated with not just his loneliness, but his fear that he was completely and forever unlovable.

This terror came with its own shadow and the bright reflections of the flames from Gwynneth’s fire, which had moments before filigreed the darkness with bright orange light raked with sparks, seemed to be quenched. The very air turned darker.

“Maybe she went to find you. To search for you. Maybe she thought you were lost.” He cringed and pulled his lips back so they cleared his teeth. Fear and shame coursed through him. It all made a terrible kind of sense now. He had found the winter den boring. He could not believe how much Thunderheart slept. The thickness of her sleep lay like a heavy pelt on the air of the den. Sometimes he had to get out—to run, hunt. He loved leaping through the big soft drifts of snow. And he remembered how slowly her heart beat. Not the familiar booming rhythm, but softer, sluggish. He could get up and turn around two times then snuggle back down against her between the beats of that slow heart. And every once in a while she would wake up, groggy and slightly confused. If he had been out on a run when she woke, she might have
panicked and gone out to find him. The shadow of the void, that omnipresent space retreated a bit. The terror grew slightly dimmer, the flames once more threaded the black with glints and winks of light.

“You are right. She left to search for me because sometimes I would get bored in the winter den. She must have forgotten that she told me it was all right to go out and hunt sometimes.”

“The cold sleep is the way of bears.”

“Yes, and she knew I wasn’t a bear.” Faolan paused. “But…” He could not finish the thought.

“But what, Faolan?” Gwynneth asked gently.

“But what am I?”

“You are a wolf.”

“A cursed wolf.”

“Not cursed forever. You will prove yourself.”

Faolan held up his splayed front paw. “This is why I am cursed.”

“I know, your paw. I see it.”

“No, you have not seen all of it. Take a closer look.” Faolan flipped himself onto his back and showed the bottom of his paw, the pad with the spiral marking. He saw Gwynneth flinch, and flipped instantly back to his feet.
I am worse than
malcadh.
Much worse!

But Gwynneth hopped closer to him and spread her immense wing over his head, patting him gently as she combed a burr from his ear with her beak. “You are a good wolf, Faolan. You are a good and honorable wolf. Both of your milk mothers would be proud of you.”

He looked into the Masked Owl’s dusky face. Her eyes were like gleaming blue-black river stones. They were darker than Thunderheart’s, but he could see his reflection in them as he had once seen this face shining in Thunderheart’s eyes. Faolan suddenly realized that this was his first conversation with any living creature since Thunderheart. It felt good. It felt comfortable. He sensed that he could say anything to this owl and that she would understand. The fire that had scared him at first now wrapped him in its warmth.

“MAY I STAY WITH YOU? I CAN hunt. I can get you big meat. Not just these little voles.” Faolan nodded toward the bodies of the small rodents he saw stashed under a rock.

Gwynneth swiveled her head slowly, a wide arc that was almost a complete circle. But the meaning of the gesture was clear:
No!

“What do I need with anything bigger than a vole? I am small compared to you. I can’t get off the ground if I weigh myself down with too much food.”

“But I want to stay.”

“You belong with the wolves. You
are
a wolf.”

“You don’t want me.” He stepped back.

“It’s not a question of me wanting you or not.” This was slightly untrue, but it was difficult to explain to a social animal like a wolf. Owls, especially Rogue smiths,
were known for their solitary ways. So she simply repeated, “You belong in a pack.”

“On the fringes of a pack.”

“Not always. No. You’ll learn. You will gradually find a place in the pack and most likely will become a member of the Watch at the Ring of the Sacred Volcanoes.”

“I know nothing about the ways of wolves and I am sick of this Sacred Volcano stuff,” Faolan snarled.

“What do you mean sick of it? You don’t know anything about it.”

Faolan lowered his head and shifted his gaze. It was his turn to not be completely honest. He had not told Gwynneth about the Cave Before Time and now he was unsure if he ever would.

“If only Thunderheart were here.”

“She’s not. She’s gone on.” Gwynneth now flipped her head up so it was upside down and backward, and scanned the sky for the Great Bear constellation. It made Faolan dizzy just to see this extraordinary move.

“How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“That thing with your head.”

“We—owls, that is—have extra bones in our neck. It allows us to spin and twitch our heads every which way.” Gwynneth began to demonstrate.

“Don’t!” Faolan growled. “It’s making me nauseous.”

“Sorry! But as I was saying, Thunderheart is gone now. You can’t recapture that time.” Gwynneth spoke firmly, restoring her head to a fairly normal position with her eyes looking straight at Faolan.

Faolan huffed. Hadn’t he done that in the cave? He had gone back to a time before time. He thought of those two owls separated by time: one plunging in what appeared to be a suicidal dive into the crater to retrieve the enigmatic ember; the other flying through a curtain of flames with the ember in its beak.

“But I can,” Faolan said softly.
Can’t I?
he thought.

“You must not think of time as a quantity, a period, a measure. Look at the sky,” Gwynneth said. “The moon has now slipped away to another night, into another world. It was not the time it was here that you remember, Faolan, but rather the luminescence of the air, the blue shadows cast by the trees in its light. It was not the length of the time but the quality of the moon’s light that you felt and remember.” Gwynneth paused. “It is the value, the quality that lives on.”