Willow had taken a mouthful of her ale and set the cup down. “Of course, the druid had tried to find out whose son this wild boy was, but his enquiries bore no fruit,” she said. “The girl who had left her child out for the wolves was long forgotten. Wolf-child was nobody; a conundrum; a puzzle. The druid, patient man as he was, had a longing to return to his cave out in the forest, his own place where he could sleep under the oaks and make his prayers beneath a canopy of bright stars, unbounded by wall or enclosure. Given years, he might teach the feral child skills sufficient to allow him a place on the very edge of human society. Whether that was right or not was a question one might be a lifetime answering. The boy would grow up neither wolf nor man. His mother had done him no favors that chilly night when she decided to abandon him to fate.

“Now,” said Willow, “there are many possible endings to this tale, and the one that suits you best may not be the one I like. There might be one for a warrior and one for a lady and one for a boy of Wolf-child’s age. So we’ll have three tonight, and you will help me tell them. Let us begin with the warrior, for we have a good supply of those here. What about you, young man?” The storyteller was looking at Johnny.

My cousin smiled. “Aidan is both warrior and bard,” he said. “I delegate the task to him.”

“Very well,” Willow said. “And how would Aidan finish this tale?”

Aidan cleared his throat. He’d been taken off-guard. “I would like to see this boy make something of himself,” he ventured. “In my story, the druid persisted in his patient training of his young charge, and in addition he sought the help of the local nobleman”—he nodded courteously in my father’s direction—“who should perhaps have been the first person consulted by the villagers. When the nobleman came down to see the lad he brought his own son, a warrior in training. They came on horseback, and while the nobleman discussed matters with the druid, the young warrior took his first steps toward befriending Wolf-child, for they were close in age, if not in understanding. Wolf-child growled at the horse, which laid back its ears and twitched its tail. All the same, that day the wild boy learned something he had not quite realized before. In this fine young man he saw a vision of himself as he might be. From that day things began to change more quickly for Wolf-child, for now he wanted to learn, to grow, to become a man. I would leave the story at that point, where this boy so cruelly abandoned found that he had a real future ahead of him.”