Authors: Carmella Jones
The shape reached the crossbowman, who was hurriedly attempting to load another bolt. And then he was down, his crossbow some distance away. He cried out, and then was silenced.
After that, the attacks came swiftly. In the chaos. One or two of them tried to run, but the creature gave chase, and they were swiftly dispatched. Elspeth, tried, too, to run, but her ankle wouldn’t let her. It couldn’t have been that bad, she thought. An ankle hurt this way should not cost her her life. But nonetheless, things are not always as they should be, and when Elspeth tried to put too much weight on it, she fell again to the ground.
She could hear her own breath, loud in the now-quiet forest. There were no men here, now. The soldiers were, it seemed, all passed to whatever hell Englishmen go to when they die.
She made out the sound of paws on the damp forest soil. They were hard to distinguish; the beast was nimble. But they were there, and they were getting closer.
She could hear its breath. It was panting only a little, barely exerted from killing all those men.
It began to keep pace with her own, until it sounded like one breath being drawn in two bodies. Elspeth tried to remember a prayer, but nothing came to her mind. She only had time, she thought, to hope for a moment that wherever her parents were, there she would be to.
But the blow she expected – the flurry of teeth and blood and claws – never came. The beast just sat there, next to where she sat frozen on the ground.
After a minute, Elspeth forced herself to look up. The beast was there in front of her, sitting like a common dog would sit for its owner, only so much bigger. Elspeth had only seen wolves once dead, carted back into the village. She had not seen many of them, but she knew even from this limited experience that they should be nowhere near this large. The wolf was like a small tower before her, easily the full height of a man standing, when it was only sitting down.
And then it lay down. It was only about a foot from her now. It lay down its ears like she had seen dogs do to their masters, but something in the wolf’s eyes, catching a tiny piece of the limited moonlight, struck Elspeth with the unshakeable feeling that this was a beast that had no master.
No, it was trying to communicate with her. It was showing her something. It was setting her at ease.
Unbidden, her hand reached out as though to touch the head, but her better sense stopped herself. Why would she do something so foolish? The creature may not kill her, but that was no reason to tempt fate.
She stood and began hobbling toward home.
It was slow going, and it hurt. By moving slowly and looking down carefully for roots or rocks, she could avoid another fall, but she knew it would still be a long time before she would be able to get to her home.
The wolf kept pace with her, drawing closer now and then. For a long time, Elspeth drew away when this happened, but as they went on and on together, she stopped drawing away. Eventually, the wolf was right next to her, close as her little sister walked when she was afraid.
Elspeth was distracted by the feel of the creature beside her. She felt as though she could sense its great beating heart through the space of the small expanse of air between them. Now and then some of its fur rubbed up against her side.
The distraction was too great for her, and she fell, suddenly, on her face. She cursed herself for not being better at walking through the dark, and for the pain that shot through her side. She’d landed on a rock. She wasn’t injured, but it would leave a bruise, she could be certain.
The creature wrapped around in front of her. Its nose came close to her neck, its great head nuzzling her. Then it stepped back and lay its front paws down in front of her.
It jerked its head toward its back, as though trying to make a motion. But surely a beast couldn’t communicate this way?
Elspeth hesitated. The beast whined. It felt strange to hear that small sound come from such a great creature. It stood, drew a little closer, and did the same thing again.
In later days, Elspeth would think of how foolish she had been. She couldn’t have known this would not spur the beast to kill her. She couldn’t have known this was anything the beast would want. But in the moment she
did
know, and she
could
be certain. She felt it clear through her that this creature would not hurt her,
could
not hurt her, and she climbed, as surely as she could, onto its back.
It stood and moved cautiously at first. It seemed to be moving deliberately and slowly, keeping her from falling off. She grasped some of its thick, tufted fur in her hands to hold on. She had a fleeting thought that this might hurt the beast, but she dismissed it. This is the creature that had murdered six men with as little thought as swatting a fly. It was great, and huge, and felt ancient. It would not be hurt by her little hands grasping at it.
After a little while, when Elspeth had grown accustomed to the odd motion of sitting on its back, it began to speed up. It was a gradual change, and Elspeth barely noticed it was happening until the ground was flying by quickly, and she had a sense that their speed isolated them from the forest around them. They were flying, as it were, in their own little bubble, as separate from the cool night and the dark forest around them as was the moon from the earth.
A brief worry flickered through her mind that the beast would take her somewhere she didn’t mean to go, but the thought swiftly disappeared. It wouldn’t harm her, she knew. It wouldn’t take her anywhere she didn’t want. It would know, she felt, what she needed.
She was proved right when they reached the edge of the forest. Elspeth shook her head as if waking from a strange but pleasant dream. The wolf was lowering itself to the ground and she slid off, looking towards the roofs of her village and the smoke drifting into the sky from the houses, and the glow of the candles and lamps lighting the windows.
Then as suddenly as it had appeared when she’d been surrounded in the forest, the creature was gone.
Elspeth began the slow limp over the relatively short distance left to the village, suddenly feeling much more alone than she ever had before.
The next morning, Elspeth woke to raised voices out the window. There was a crowd gathered in the open ground in front of the village church. She looked at the bed next to her. Fiona wasn’t there. She must have overslept.
As quickly as she could, she slipped on her dress and her still-muddy shoes from the night before. She passed woven baskets on the way out – all the plants Granaidh had harvested from the garden before they were truly ready. She’d walked into the house the night before as though still in a dream, and all night had in fact dreamed of the wolf. She’d forgotten, somehow, the difficulty and the danger. She’d forgotten that she was about to be forced from her home and away from her parents by a war she had no interest in fighting, for a protector of the realm she had no reason nor inclination to love.
The crowd was centered around a man, tall and lanky, but well-built with a kind of wiry strength. He was being jeered at and questioned by the crowd around him. He looked as though he wanted to speak, but couldn’t have been heard over the crowd around him, so rather than try, he waited.
There were many people, all the people in the town, it almost felt to Elspeth, but he didn’t seem afraid. He seemed steady and sure, and unbowed. He seemed…patient?
Elspeth found the baker’s daughter, and asked her what was going on.
“He’s English,” she said. “He stayed last night at the inn, and only spoke very little, and the innkeeper didn’t notice. But this morning he was speaking more, and now we know what he is.”
“And what is he?” Elspeth asked, bristling.
The baker’s daughter was taken aback, not expecting this reaction.
“He’s…he’s English. He might be a spy?”
Elspeth looked at the man, drinking him in with her eyes. A spy? He didn’t seem shifty-eyed or disingenuous. She would imagine spies were creatures who hid in the darkness and slithered away to betray. This man, whatever he might do, would never slither.
“Wait!” Elspeth yelled out, with a firmness to her voice that surprised her. “Everyone, please, be quiet!”
The general clamor of the crowd decreased, but wasn’t gone. She called again.
“Please, everyone, close your yapping mouths! I want to hear what he has to say!”
He was looking at her now. Everyone was looking at her, yes, but
he
was looking at her.
“Well?” she said, quietly. Too quietly to be heard, almost. But he heard her.
“I’m English, it is true,” he said. His voice was measured, and his accent was English, but a much softer, much less angular English than the soldiers in the woods last night.
“But I’m not a spy. I owe no loyalty to the English, and I don’t intend to help them. I intend to help you.”
The hubbub from the crowd began again. Wild speculation. Expressions of mistrust. Elspeth was about to yell again, but she found she didn’t need to. A few men from the crowd were interested in the taking over that particular duty. They quieted everyone back down, and the man continued.
“The English will return. I think you know this. I think you know this and you intend to leave, and I don’t think that is fair. You’ve harbored the army, yes. You’ve helped your Scottish army as was asked of you by the protector of Scotland. You’ve helped their wounded. The English will see this as a crime. They will see this as treason.”
There was no clamor of the crowd at this. They were all silent, waiting for his next words.
“I don’t agree,” he said. “I don’t see it as treason to help the men of your land as they fight for your land. I see it as your duty. And when the English send men to destroy what’s left of your village, after the battle and the army have taken so many of your young fighting men from you, I mean to help you stop them.”
A gentle murmur went through the crowd. Their fears had been given voice. The monster pacing in the back of their hearts, waiting to overwhelm them, had been called from the darkness and brought into the light.
“You’re just one man,” someone said. Elspeth wasn’t sure who. She only knew that the man was looking at her again, and there was something in his eyes that felt familiar. “What can you do against the full army of the English?”
“I am just a man, it’s true.” He spoke with a smile playing at this lips, as if there were some private joke no one was privy to but himself. “But the English will not send their entire army. They need as many of their men as they can to go west, to meet the Scottish army. They will send only as many of the men as they deem necessary to overpower the village and send a message. We do not need to defeat an army – we only need to be stronger than they think we are.”
We
, Elspeth thought,
he said “we.”
“And how do we do that?” the same man as before asked. Elspeth could focus now that the man’s eyes weren’t on her. She saw that it was the blacksmith who had spoken, his hands grasped around a hammer Elspeth guessed he’d brought with him to inflict harm on the Englishman.
“We ask for help,” the man said.
Help from whom, exactly? The man played coy. He said at first that they wouldn’t believe him. That they didn’t really want to know. The crowd, or rather, various people in the crowd who stayed as those who had only come for violence wandered away, kept asking. He said they would doubt him. He said they wouldn’t believe.
The thinning crowd let Elspeth get closer to the man. She felt drawn, and she felt curious. She wanted to hear his words, for she felt she knew what he would say.
“The wolf,” he finally said. “We ask for help from the wolf.”
The talk with the crowd did not convince the village. They did not believe in the wolf, and most of them believed he was a charlatan who must want something from them. He insisted over and over that he didn’t want anything from them. He said that he knew the way to ask the wolf for help, and that he would do it for them, if they would only agree to stay and fight, and that it would cost nothing of the village.
There were some who agreed, and there were some who were determined to fight anyway, wolf or no wolf, so had no issue with whether or not it would be true to begin with, but there were many who thought him a madman or a liar.
But there were none, in any case, who thought him a spy.
None but the innkeeper.
“You can stay at my house,” Elspeth heard herself offer, after the innkeeper walked away, telling the man he was not welcome at the inn.
“It is only three women in a house meant for a family. We can make space.”
They were nearly alone now. Only a few stragglers from the crowd were left. And those stragglers were wandering off, one by one, as though they knew they were interrupting something.
Elspeth sensed this, though she knew clearly in her own mind that of course she had never met this man, and there was nothing that they were interrupting.
The man agreed. Elspeth asked him to go get his things, but he said he had none. He had nothing but the clothes on his back, and the few coins in his pockets to pay for a room.