Wolfish

Christiane M. Andrews

Contents ( 127)

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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First Edition: November 2022

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Andrews, Christiane M., author.

Title: Wolfish / Christiane M. Andrews.

Description: First edition. | New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2022. | Audience: Ages 8–12 | Summary: “A young shepherdess, her wolf companion, and a young oracle-apprentice must stop a king’s reign of terror after he receives a frightening prophecy”— Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021056401 | ISBN 9780316496063 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316496070 (ebook)

Subjects: CYAC: Prophecies—Fiction. | Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction. | Fantasy. | LCGFT: Fantasy fiction. | Novels.

Classification: LCC PZ7.1.A5327 W65 2022 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056401

ISBNs: 978-0-316-49606-3 (hardcover), 978-0-316-49607-0 (ebook)

E3-20220920-JV-NF-ORI

For my parents and my sister

I

ELEVENTH, OR COOKED CREAM

Once, long ago, in a distant, more brutish age, lived a boy with a face as flat and blank and soft as a dish of cooked cream.

Cooked cream was, in fact, the most interesting part of his days: He ate it in the humid evenings alone in his chamber while the mosquitoes whined behind the linen-wrapped windows; he ate it, sometimes, in the mornings, on the little shaded stool beside the door, when his governor had been convinced he had learned enough—if not all—of his lesson; he ate it furtively, in quick, gulping bites, in the afternoons in the kitchen when Cook had taken herself off to the ponds to splash water over the redness of her face and arms. He liked to crumble honeycomb over it, or smear fig paste into it, or swirl plum passum around it… he would hold the sweetness on his tongue and close his eyes and listen to the distant sounds of Gardener or Governor or Cook, or, rarely, Mother, moving about the house and grounds. Yes, his flat, blank, soft face hovering over the dish—cooked cream over cooked cream—would nearly smile. Yes.