Wolves of the Beyond: Watch Wolf (13 page)

THE MOON OF THE FLIES HAD
come and gone, along with the Moon of the Mossflowers and the Caribou Moon, followed by the three winter moons. The odd thing was that, although the sun still rose and fell according to the seasons and the days were growing longer now, the rivers were still frozen. It was the Moon of the Cracking Ice, but snow still lay thick on the
ground. Faolan and Edme were nearing the completion of their first year on the Watch of the Ring. They had now perched on every cairn that overlooked each of the five volcanoes. They had learned the volcanoes’ temperaments and how their moods changed through a moon from first shine to no shine, when the moon vanished. They knew the smell of each volcanoes’ sulfurous expulsions. They knew that the most boring watch was on Kiel,
a shield volcano whose long, gently sloping lava flows yielded the fewest retrievable coals and therefore was the least visited by colliering owls.

One evening early in the Moon of the Cracking Ice, Faolan stood perched on a cairn overlooking Dunmore. He had just completed a series of scanning jumps off the keybone when he looked down and saw a wolf trotting toward him. An unmistakable wolf, the Sark of the Slough.

She was a freakish creature with eyes of different colors — one the true green of a wolf of the Beyond, the other an amberish gold that skittered about without any seeming focus. Her pelt blew like a She-Wind in raging disorder about her bony frame, so she looked like a small approaching weather front. Icicles had formed on the fur beneath her jaw so it seemed as if she had a long, glistening beard, which added to the strangeness of her appearance. But along with Gwynneth and Edme, the Sark was one of Faolan’s closest friends in the Beyond.

She looked up at Faolan and said, “Come with me.”

“I can’t. I’m on watch,” Faolan answered.

“I’ve arranged it with the Fengo,” the Sark replied. And sure enough, Faolan saw Twistling trotting toward the cairn.

“Go along now, young’un. You got business to do with the Sark. I’ll take this shift and have arranged to cover the rest while you’re gone.”

Business?
Faolan was completel
y confused and suddenly apprehensive. A quiver ran through his marrow.

Before the moon had risen to wolf’s peak, they were well on their way. The Sark had set a course due north, but now they had begun to veer to the east. She hadn’t spoken since they left, not a word about their destination or why she was taking him to it. He knew better than to ask. Unnecessary questions made the Sark incredibly
cranky, and a cranky Sark was not one that any wolf wanted to deal with. A Masked Owl suddenly appeared overhead.

“Gwynneth!” Faolan howled. But she merely looked down and gave him an intensely somber look. The quiver that had coursed through his marrow quieted and was replaced with a strange and deep longing. He quickened his pace.

“Slow down,” the Sark said gently. “Don’t wear yourself out. We’ll get there in time.”

In time for what?
he wondered. He thou
ght he noticed a glimmering in the Sark’s steady eye, a tear. Gwynneth
swooped down to fly low, and Faolan felt a quiet shudder of air as she hovered over him. It seemed to Faolan as if he were folded into the shadow of her wings, as if she were tying to protect him. For the next day and a half, they traveled this way, making only brief stops for rest. Faolan had never been so far north. It was in the late afternoon with the sun still bright on the horizon that he realized they were crossing the top of a peninsula.

“We’re going to the MacNamara clan, aren’t we?” Faolan said.

The Sark stopped. The snow was up to her belly. Gwynneth lighted down on a snow-covered rock and spread her talons wide to support her weight so that she didn’t sink into the powder. Faolan looked at the
two creatures regarding him with tear-filled eyes. “Would
you two like to tell me what this is about?”

“Fao-lan.” The Sark’s voice cracked. She began
again. “Faolan, we’re taking you to meet your first Milk Giver.”

The Namara herself came out to greet them and lead them to a den at the edge of the encampment. “She’s waiting. Brangwen thought it best that we not tell he
r yet.” The Namara turned to Faolan, who was still reeling
with astonishment and had not uttered a word since being told. “You mother, your first Milk Giver, is dying. She’s blind, so she might not know you.”

“Oh, but she will! SHE WILL!” he replied fiercely.

“Come, young’un.” A large, h
andsome red wolf appeared beside Faolan. “I am your mother’
s second mate, Brangwen MacDonegal. Follow me.”

The den was a small west-facing cave flush with the low-angled afternoon sun. On a pile of thick elk skins lay a frail but once beautiful silver wolf. As soon as they entered the cave, Morag’s nostrils began to twitch. She lifted her head from the pelt, but just barely. “Who is this? Who comes?”

No one spoke a word as Faolan crawled on his belly toward his first Milk Giver. He tipped his muzzle so she could sniff him. Tears began to stream from her filmed eyes. “Is it? Is it really you?” she asked.

Faolan lifted his splayed paw and pressed it gently to Morag’s mouth. She knew instinctively what he wanted. Her tongue slipped out and began to lick the spiraling marks on the pad of his paw.

“Great Lupus, I am blessed! You survived! You survived! I thought so when I found the bones of the grizzly. What was it, ten moons after your birth? I smelled you on
those bones. I had hoped, I had prayed. Bu
t now I know it’s true. The blessed grizzly gave you her m
ilk. I smell that, too, even now.”

“Yes, Mum. I survived. Thunderheart made me grow. I am a wolf of the Watch now.”

“The Watch!” she exclaimed as tears streamed from her sightless eyes and she began to lick his face. “Thunderheart was the name of your second Milk Giver?”

“Yes, Mum.”

He nestled closer to her until he could feel the beat of her heart, its strange rhythms as it sped up, then seemed to falter. He closed his eyes and listened as he rested his face against her shoulders. Her breathing grew ragged.

“And what do they call you?” she gasped.

“Faolan. Thunderheart named me Faolan. It means ‘gift from the river.’”

“Gift,” she murmured. “I had planned to name you Skaarsgard after the Star Wolf, who helps spirits climb the star ladder to the Cave of Souls.”

“Why?” Faolan asked.

“Because although your pelt was not yet thick, I could tell it was silvery and it looked as if the
stars had fallen into it. But Faolan, that is a lovely name. Gift, yes. That’s
a perfect name, for I felt blessed when you were born. You were not cursed in the least. You were my gift and they took my gift away…. Gift …” she whispered, her voice growing dimmer. “Gift,” she said, her tongue still on his paw. Once more she said the word, barely audibly, then Faolan felt the last beat of her heart.

He lay there for a while. But soon the warmth began to seep out of her body, and he knew that he must go out into the cold for the last part of his
Slaan Leat,
a final part of the journey he would never have anticipated te
n moons ago.

HE TRAVELED ALONE TO THE END
of the peninsula, an icy point that jutted out into the raging Sea of Hoolemere. It was here that he had decided to build the
drumlyn
for his mother, Morag, with bones he’d found buried in the snow along the way.

The Sark and Gwynneth said they would wait for him. “No matter how long it takes,” the Sark said. “And in the summer, if ever the
re is a summer again, you can come back and add her bones to the
drumlyn.”

Faolan found a rough shelter in the lee of the point and set about incising the bones. He would add more, including some from his first Milk Giver, as the years passed. Perhaps soon the huge skeleton of Thunderheart might break apart, and he could carry one to this point. But he would not worry about that now. A small
drumlyn
was better than no
drumlyn.
He began his carving with what he thought might have been his first memories — those of the other wriggling pups beside him, their scent. He only remembered their scent for, as a newborn, his eyes were sealed shut and he would not have known the other pups by sight. The sensations of those first days came back to him one by one. Many of them were feelings of absence — the absence of the wriggling movement; the void of scent; the lack of warmth. Then these vacancies were filled with something unbearably cold — the sterile smell of what he presumed must have been the Obea.

After a full night of carving, Faolan looked at the bones and realized that, although he had carved them eloquently, he had very little to say. In comparison to the bones he had carved for Thunderheart’s
drumlyn,
these seemed empty. But he knew so little about his first Milk Giver in comparison to Thunderheart. He was not sure what to carve next. From the first moment he entered the den where she lay dying, he knew he loved her. It seemed in a strange way as if he had never left her. Her pelt was familiar although much less lustrous than it must have once been. He had loved the feeling of her tongue trac
ing the spirals on his splayed paw. It was so alive, so intimate,
so motherly.
I have a mum.
The words streamed through his mind. And so that was what he carved, over and over until it became
I have two mums. I grew with the milk of two mums in my blood. The milk of two in my marrow.

A blizzard had been blowing for the two days Faolan carved, but on the night of the second day, as he began to build the small
drumlyn,
the snow began to fall more slowly. The wind ceased and each flake appeared like a jewel against the blackness of the night. The Great Star Wolf had just begun to climb out of its winter den on the other side of the earth to appear in the eastern sky along with the ladder to the Cave of Souls. Faolan howled as he built the
drumlyn.
It was the howling known as
glaffling,
the howl of grief and mourning. But as he
placed the last bone
and looked up, he saw something astonishing. The mist of Morag was shimmering in th
e sky, and then not far behind it was a larger mist, an immense
vaporous shape that
loomed at the base of the star ladder and followed his first Milk Giver. It was his second Milk Giver. It
was Thunderheart! Finally, she had sprung from the
drumlyn
he had made by the river. Finally, she ha
d left the earth. Finally, she knew he had grown up safely and
she could look down at him from Ursulana!

His
glaffling
turned to joy. He began to howl louder
than ever. How often had he looked at the spiraling lines on his paw and felt as if they marked a larger pattern, a larger plan, one of endlessly swirling harmonies like the movement of the stars. For they, too, were part of something larger as the sky turned around the earth. Of all this, Faolan howled.

The Sark and Gwynneth, waiting for him at least two leagues away, turned to each other. “What is he howling?” Gwynneth asked.

“Ursulana, the Cave of Souls. Two heavens are one,”
the Sark replied softly to the Masked Owl.

So sayeth Faolan, Watch wolf of the Ring.

THE AUTHOR WISHES TO ACKNOWLEDGE
that the Namara’s speech in Chapter 22, “Drums of War,” is based largely on General George S. Patton’s
speech to the American Third Army, Sixth Armored Division, on May 31, 1944, in England shortly before the Allied invasion of Normandy.

K
ATHRYN
L
ASKY
is the author of the bestselling Guardian
s of Ga’Hoole series, which has sold more than four million copies and has been made into a major motion picture,
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole
. Her books have received a Newbery Honor, a Boston Globe—Horn Book Award, and a Washington Post—Children’s Book Guild Award. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“In this tightly plotted, lyrical tale … [Lasky] builds the wolf society as if it were a human tribe of both wise and blind leaders, living in a culture of cruelty, survival, evil, and honor.”

—
School Library Journal,
praise for Wolves of the Beyond Book 2:
Shadow Wolf

Copyright © 2011 by Kathryn Lasky
Interior illustrations by Richard Cowdrey
Interior illustrations © 2011 by Scholastic Inc.
Cover art by Richard Cowdrey
Cover art © 2011 by Scholastic Inc.
Cover design by Lillie Howard

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Publishers since 1920.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lasky, Kathryn.

Watch wolf / Kathryn Lasky ; [interior illustrations by Richard Cowdrey]. — 1st ed.

      p. cm. — (Wolves of the Beyond ; [3])

Summary: Faolan, poised to take his place as a member of the revered Wolves of the Watch, may be the only one who can stop Dunbar MacHeath and his clan from provoking a
war between the Watch and the bears.

ISBN-13: 978-0-545-09314-9

ISBN-10: 0-545-09314-7

[1. Wolves — Fiction. 2. Fantasy.] I. Cowdrey, Richard, ill. II. Title.

PZ7.L3274Wat 2011

[Fic] — dc22

2010049786

First edition, June 2011

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eISBN: 978-0-545-38872-6