“You needn’t rise!” the chorus of advisors chanted.

“Please,” Alba said. She rubbed her brow, trying to clear the last traces of confusion. “I will be glad to help these people. I just need a chair where I might sit for a time.”

LXI

WRRRR

Furless, how the boy shivered. How his skin prickled. Wind and sun—first one, then the other pinched at his furless hide. The boy who had been a wolf raised his face to the light; he breathed great gulps of open air.

Beside him was the delicate creature: He smelled its unease, heard the uneven thudding of its heart. The world was strange around him—strange sounds, strange smells, strange shapes—and he, too, felt fear turning in his chest. Still, they pushed forward, padding on toward sky, sky, sky.

Belly full, he felt his limbs full, too, with warmth and strength. His legs—an odd new movement. Where was running? Where were four paws bounding? His longer limbs carried him in awkward, bending strides across sloping ground, and his body and head bumped along, an unfamiliar rolling motion. Under his feet, stones nipped and jabbed in a way they had not before: He shook out his toes as they walked.

He sniffed and sniffed, trying to smell out sky, sky, sky—trying to nose out pine and mountain and moss and field.

The creature beside him was a steady murmuring of sounds. They seemed to him like sounds of a river turning over stones. Of wind pushing through leaves. He kept his ears raised to the murmuring—these gentle noises. The sounds bounced along with their long-legged padding over the land, followed rounded hills and flattened terrain—a rising and falling that was the form of the land. Now, though, the sounds of the delicate creature—he could hold some of them. He felt them making a shape in his mind. A shape in his mouth. They came and went. He listened for them as before he had listened for rabbit rustling in bracken or shrew burrowing in soil. Sounds that before were the feeling of hunger, of belly empty or full, were now a new hungering. What what what. He wanted to know all these noises. Chew them. Eat them. Fill himself with them.

They walked and walked. Sometimes, they rested, and his body was tired in ways he had not known it could tire. These longer limbs—they felt hot and unsteady. Like brittle dry grass. He lay beneath the open sky, letting his limbs cool and grow supple again. Though he smelled in the distance the leaf-shufflings of pheasant and the patter-soft tappings of deer, his belly did not ask him to chase: He ate and drank what the creature placed before him. Furless, he slept, curling beneath the thuddy oily fleece the delicate creature wrapped over his body.

He awoke in the dark, dew- and moon-covered. Shivering, he made himself small in the fleece. Beside him, the delicate breaths of the delicate creature. He listened and listened and listened—the creature made no murmurings, but he still felt the shape of its sounds in his ears. In his mouth. Silent, he tried to fit his mouth around them. Mmm. Nnnn. A buzzing through his nose, like the spinning of flies. In darkness, his face grew hot. All discomfort over these sounds. He did not like this new feeling of heat in his face. He turned beneath the fleece.