The guard hesitated. “My orders,” he said at last, voice trembling. “My duty—”

“A sausage,” Rae said. “Just one link. Or a crust of bread. Please. Why won’t you help me?”

The door was silent. Rae stretched to look through the window. The guard had moved down the hall. She could just see him standing against the wall, cratered eyes darting now and again at her door.

“Please!” she yelled through the gap.

Eyes growing darker, he moved farther away.

Rae sat on the floor. She watched the wolf. The dullness of his eyes, the flatness of his coat, the protrusion of his bones all told her of a coming crisis: His slow, distraught motions reminded her of the desperate final scramblings of a ewe or lamb before it succumbed to injury or disease.

Her own stomach was painfully empty. She’d had water to drink, but water only marked the emptiness more. Her whole body, her whole mind, seemed to slosh with fatigue.

The light from the tiny window was a heavy gray: It had been raining for hours. The rocks in the walls were slick with damp.

Tentatively, standing and reaching, she ran her fingers between the stones. She scraped a little, digging into the earth. She tried here. And there. Her nails grew black as she scratched and scratched. Another place. Another. She dug and scraped. Finally—there. She found one.

Pinching the spongy body, she pulled it from its earthen nest. A grub rolled, soft and fat and ghostly, into her palm. Its tiny legs, missing the dirt they usually held, churned frantically.

“Sorry,” she whispered to it, then, “Wolf,” she called. She held the pallid thing on the flat of her palm.

He nosed it—a soft breath in her hand.

He ate it—a delicate bite with his muzzle.

His eyes were as dull as before. He returned to his pacing.

Well, thought Rae. It’s something. She looked again at the walls, wondering how many creatures stirred deep behind the stones.

LII

DRIP

For days, Alba sat below, tormented by the memory of the advisor’s twisting worm. Hour after hour in the dark, she saw the gray tail squirming into the slack cheek—and her own stomach turned with the worm’s corkscrewing; she knew what his writhing grin meant.

She beat her fists against the door. She cried into the gap. “You cannot!” she wailed. “You cannot leave her to be torn apart!”

Her voice grew hoarse, her hands splintered and bruised. But no one answered. No passing guard ever turned his head.

“Rae!” she tried. She scratched at the walls, pulled at the stones. Though her nails cracked and blackened with soil, she could not loosen more than a few spoonfuls; she could not shift any of the rocks. “Rae!”

She tried to comfort herself. She no longer heard the distant cries of children in the dark; perhaps they’d been freed. She tried to imagine their homecomings… how they’d be swept into their parents’ arms, how the villages would ring with music and celebration, how for days and months, perhaps even years ahead, the mothers and fathers—on the most mundane of errands—would take their children’s hands as if they were still small, and even the oldest, most cynical of all, would not pull away but walk with their parents’ hands clasped tight in their own.… but these imaginings were not comfort enough.