He nodded and she let him go, turning to go back to her cottage. He watched until she was inside, then closed and locked the barn door.
Beyond them and unseen by either, a shadow crouched at the edge of the forest, only a few yards beyond Anrin’s hill.
Late in the night Anrin heard the barn door rattle. He woke right away, for he had slept lightly, his dreams turbulent and incomprehensible. Quickly he climbed down from the barn loft and went to the door. “Is that you, Baba?”
There was a moment’s silence from beyond. “It’s not Baba, lad,” came the smith’s voice. “Open the door.”
In Anrin’s belly the little flutter rose to a steady beat, spreading foreboding through his soul like night-breezes through trees. “You have work for me, sir? So late?”
The smith laughed. “Work? Yes, lad, work. Now let me in.”
“Old Baba told me not to.”
“As you like,” the smith said, but Anrin saw from the shadows under the door that the smith’s feet did not move away. Instead the door began to rattle again, and Anrin remembered that the smith carried his tools with him always.
In the back of Anrin’s mind, the night breezes rose to a sharp, cold gust.
There was a horse door at the back of the barn. Anrin went there and pushed aside the pickle-barrel that blocked it. If anyone had asked, he could not have told them why he fled. All he could think of was the smith’s wide smile, and the sound of groaning wood, and the fear in Old Baba’s eyes. These indistinct thoughts lent him strength as he wrestled the heavy, half-rusted latch open.
And then Anrin was free of the barn, running blindly into the bitter night. At his back he heard the smith’s curse; the squeal of wood and metal; the querulous voice of Baba from within her cottage calling, “Who’s there?” Into the forest, the night breezes whispered, and into the forest he ran.
When the boy fell, too weary and cold to run any further, the shadow closed in.
Anrin awoke in dim smoky warmth and looked about. A fire flickered at his feet; the roof of a cave loomed overhead. He turned and found that his head had been resting on the flank of a great forest wolf. Silently it watched him, with eyes like the winter sun.
Anrin caught his breath and whispered, “Beautiful.”
Something changed in the wolf’s golden eyes. After a moment, the wolf changed as well, becoming a man.
“You do not fear me,” the wolf said.
“Should I?”
“Perhaps. You were nearly meat when I found you in the forest. I might eat you yet.” The wolf rose from his sprawl and stretched from fingers to toes. Anrin stared in fascination. The wolf’s body was broad and muscled, sleek and powerful, a model of the manhood that Anrin might one day himself attain. He stared also because had never seen a grown man unclothed before, and because Old Baba was not there to tell him to look away.
The wolf noticed Anrin’s gaze and lowered his arms. “Do you still find me beautiful?”
“Yes.”
The wolf smiled, flashing canines like knives. “Good.” He crouched, leaning close to sniff at Anrin. “You are not like other men. They fear the forest and all things beyond their control. They are like two-legged, hairless sheep.”
Anrin considered his lifetime among the villagers and found that he agreed. “Perhaps it is because I am a whore’s son.”
“What is a ‘whore’?”
“I have never been certain. The villagers call my mother that when they think I cannot hear them. Old Baba tells me only that my mother was too curious and too free, straying too often from propriety. I don’t see how that could be so terrible, since now it seems they want me to be like her.”
“Yes,” the wolf said. “That is the way of things.” He leaned closer, sniffing at Anrin’s hair, then his ear, then down the curve of Anrin’s neck. Anrin remained submissive when the wolf took hold of his shoulders and pressed him back on the packed earth. He knew that animals often inspected one another on first meeting, checking for health and strength. As a guest in the wolf’s den, he wanted to be polite.
“You are on the brink of a change,” the wolf said, tugging Anrin’s shirt open with his teeth. He sniffed at Anrin’s chest, lapped in passing at one of Anrin’s nipples. “You have felt it coming for some time now, I think. I have seen you sitting on the hilltop watching for it.”
Anrin shivered at the brush of the wolf’s nose against his skin. “I have been watching for nothing. Just the moon and the trees.”
“In your head, perhaps. But your body has been watching for what will come. It has grown and made itself ready. Are you?”
“I don’t know,” Anrin said. This troubled him for reasons he could not name.
The wolf sat up on his haunches, straddling him now. Anrin saw that the wolf’s skin was heavily furred with down. The wolf reached down to stroke Anrin’s chest and Anrin felt the caress of fur on the wolf’s palms as well. The sensation stirred yet another strange feeling within Anrin—something powerful for which he had no name. It was like the spike of fear that had shot through him when the smith came, and yet somehow entirely different.
“Others can smell your body’s readiness as I can,” the wolf said, his eyes gleaming in the dim light. “They will steal the change from you if you do not lay claim to it yourself. That is inevitable.”
“But . . . I don’t want to change,” Anrin said. “Why can’t I remain as I am?”
The wolf’s hands paused. “Because innocence never lasts.” Abruptly the wolf rose and went over to crouch by the fire, apparently losing interest. “But perhaps you are not yet ready.”
Anrin sat up and pulled his shirt closed, his hair tumbling disheveled about his face and shoulders. The wolf spoke in riddles, and yet Anrin thought he understood. The answers he wanted were here, if he could only grasp them. If only he dared.
“What should I do?” he asked the wolf.
“That is for you to say—for now,” the wolf said. “If you want to return to your village, follow the sun east. Take the bearskin in the corner since you have so little fur of your own.”
So Anrin rose, wrapped himself in the bearskin, and went to the thick oiled-hide curtain which served as the cave’s door. He paused at the threshold, but the wolf did not turn from the fire, and so Anrin stepped out into the light.
“When you grow tired of playing sheep,” the wolf called as the flap closed behind him, “come back to me.”
With his mind full of thoughts he had never pondered before, Anrin returned to the village.
But the smell of death was on the wind as Anrin stepped out of the trees.
It came from the barn, where the half-hinged door swayed like a drunkard in the noontime breeze. The creak of the hinge stuttered now and again as the door stopped against something lying across the threshold. A pitchfork, its tines dark and red at the tips. Beyond that lay Old Baba.
After gazing down at her body for a very long while, Anrin left the cottage and went back into the woods.
The sun had just set when Anrin found the wolf’s den again. The wolf crouched beside the fire as if he had not moved since Anrin left. Anrin walked up to him and stopped, his fists clenched at his sides.
“Old Baba taught me there are secrets in the forest,” Anrin said.
“That has ever been true,” the wolf agreed.
“She told me there are things in the forest that eat fools like me.”
“There are indeed,” the wolf replied.
“Make me one of them,” said Anrin, and the wolf turned to him and smiled.
When the wolf stood, Anrin saw that his body was different: still as muscular and powerful as before, but this time a part of the wolf had grown and now stood forth from his body unsupported. It was not the first time Anrin had seen such a thing—for his own body had done the same at times—but now at last he understood the why of the phenomenon, and what it implied for the immediate future. And this understanding in turn clarified the past: the smith’s offer of the strawberry, and Old Baba’s anger, and even the circumstances of Anrin’s birth. Both the
