For a moment, Alba felt only relief—the thing had not eaten her—but panic rose again almost as suddenly. Rae. RAE. It would devour her. Leaping up, pushing her way through the breach in the wood, she raced after the creature.

LVIII

HE LEAVES THE BONES

When Rae awoke, she lay for a time with her eyes closed, thinking of how frightened she had been when the wolf had come to her in the middle of the night. No, she thought. That wasn’t him. It must have been a dream forced on her by hunger—by too many days alone underground. She reconsidered the rank, matted beast that had loomed over her, its twisted scar, its unearthly howling; she listened now to the steady breaths of the animal beside her—soft, unperturbed—and reassured herself. The wolf was hungry, but he was not yet the brutish thing she had seen. Starvation had not carried him there yet.

Opening her eyes, she glanced over at the sleeping creature to reassure herself once more, but was startled to see no wolf there at all—not a wolf! not a wolf!—but a boy—a boy! a boy!—the shape and form of a person where she expected a beast sending her into terror—

—and in nearly the same moment, she saw at once the cell door was open and thought at once the wolf must have escaped—where is he? where has he gone?—and, scrabbling up, she looked again at the boy and stared uncomprehending…

He was pale, as pale as though he had spent his whole life in shadows, and soft—almost grub-like—in the sponginess of his skin, as though he had spent his whole life beneath the earth and scraped himself out only now.

She gaped, trying to fathom what was before her, but when the boy opened his eyes, she understood.

Ah, there you are.

Not really. She did not really fully understand, but she sensed that he was the wolf and that the wolf was he—that the figure she’d once seen sleeping under the tree with the twitching, dreaming fingers was the same boy, the wolf himself. They knew each other.

His gray eyes met hers. If he was frightened or confused at suddenly not being a wolf, he did not show it: He gazed unblinkingly at her just as he had when a wild creature.

Rae, grabbing her shawl from her shoulders, wrapped it around the boy, covering his nakedness. Kneeling beside him, she found herself babbling—“You must be cold… here, take this, it’s warm”—not sure even if he could understand. Tying the wool about him, she took note of his bones, so much more prominent without his tawny fur. “I know you’re hungry,” she murmured. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” The bones ridging his grub-like skin revealed a desperate, terrifying hunger… the knobs of his knees, the bulbs of his elbows, the furrows of his ribs—how had he not devoured her?

She rocked back on her heels. The boy, raising his nose, sat up. Only in sitting—or perhaps in sniffing—did he seem to notice anything had changed in his body: His eyes flickered over his own limbs. Though his brows wriggled a little, he showed no surprise or fear: He took in his own form as though it had always been a part of him. Still, while accepting, his eyes had a haziness in them that spoke of weakness and starvation. Even sitting, he appeared unsteady.