She tried to conjure her home. She thought of the clover-bright meadows, the deep blue light of late afternoon, the trees in new leaf. She sounded out words, softly mouthing them, shifting them, trying them, moving them. Like a bear licking her cubs into shape, she thought. The longer she thought, the more lines she gathered, the more the dark walls fell away. She felt herself standing in the fields at home.

“The meadows now all wait for us,

the hills, the cliffs, the stream,

the forest with its endless dusk,

the hushing fern-swept green,

the wind-tossed fields, the pebbled brook,

the ridge of sharpened pines,

the thistles purpling all the wood,

the starling-polished skies,

the bees in honeyed hum at noon,

the moth-wing quiet shade,

the crickets singing up the moon,

the birdsong dappled glade,

the little house, the lantern light,

the garden by the door,

the warmth around the hearth at night,

the love as soft as wool.”

The wolf grew quiet as she sang. He ceased his pacing. At last he relented. Spinning once, twice, three times, finally he lay on the straw beside her. He gave a long, shuddering sigh and tucked his head on his paws.

“That’s right, wolf. It’s all waiting for us.” Hesitantly, Rae put her hand on his back. He flinched, but did not raise his head. He had come to trust her, she thought. When he was this close, when she could see the sharpness of his fangs in his half-open sleeping mouth, when she could sense the solidness of his muscles beneath his fur, she still sometimes felt a flicker of terror, as she knew it would take just one flash of frightened teeth, one leap of angered body for her to be knocked senseless, ripped apart. But this close, too, she felt somehow that he would not hurt her. Something… she could not say for sure, but beneath his mountain-honed muscles, she felt another quieter something. She wondered if what she sensed was the real nature of a wolf—not, as the guard had said, to be always hungry, but this gentler thing she felt him to be.

Rae, feeling the rise and fall of the wolf’s sleeping breaths beneath her hand, stared at the little square of light at the top of the wall. Gradually, the square lost its luster. Gradually the chamber grew darker. Gradually, only the light from the door’s smaller square remained, the on-and-off flickering of a lantern, then that, too, went out.

Rae, the wolf sleeping beside her, sat in the dark.

The room smelled of stone. And earth. And animal.

“The meadows now all wait for us,

the hills, the cliffs, the stream,” she whispered.

It won’t be too long, she told herself. It can’t be too long.

XLVIII

ALL BELLY EMPTY AND FULL

The wolf raised his nose. He did not raise his nose. He sniffed. He did not sniff. It did not matter. The smell did not change. With every breath, he tasted dark earth and sharp stone. The smell was not like the smell of the den, the smell of warm pup and warm milk, the smell of roots turning through loam, of shrews burrowing in soil. No. It was the smell of old bone. Of charred stump. Of emptiness dreadful and vast. His fur prickled with the old-bone emptiness.