He learned to hunt. Long-legged, he learned to pounce, to snatch with his teeth the vole, the squirrel, the rabbit. With the other pups, he learned to track and surround and bring down deer and boar and, later, sometimes, when hunger drove them on, bear. He learned to eat—eat as though he would not eat again, fill his belly with great feasts of flesh, gnaw all the goodness out of bones. He grew larger and faster and stronger: Though still the runt, he surpassed his mother in size before the first year was over.

Though a wolf-child, a creature unpicked and restitched by the grubs and creeping things of the earth, he still looked the part of a wolf. He had the tawny pelt and light eyes and full tail and sharp jaws of a wolf. He had the smell of a wolf. Perhaps, in some lights, if any of the other wolves had looked just so, just as the light was slanting, they would have seen something not wolf shifting beneath the fur—but most of what was boy was buried deep beneath wolf skin.

Whatever was boy was quiet, for there were no words to shape and name the world around him. No—This is tree. And this is den. And this is wolf. And I am—not wolf. There was only sensation: the smell of mountain after rain, the feel of belly full of meat, the warmth of wolf piled on wolf, the sound of howling wolf and the echoing howls of other wolves—which was also the feeling of warmth piled on wolf.

Only sometimes as the wolf-child, warm beside the other wolves, drifted to sleep, did he feel the emptiness of what had been once his hand. And he reached, searching, finding only a sensation like sunlight, like sunlight on mountain rock, and fur, a great heaping of rough, woolly fur, rising and falling in the same way the wolf-pile rose and fell as it breathed.

XIV

THE LIMBS OF ANTS AND BEETLES

Moonlight shuddered on the water. Folds of her shift gathered about her, waves lapping at her calves, Alba stared at the fleecy reflections.

Nothing.

Maybe… that bit of light and shadow there… a dog?

An ear? A muzzle?

No, nothing.

Nothing but pale light on dark water. Nothing but what it was.

Alba felt the dull familiar ache of disappointment. The oracle never left these waters without some sign; why did Alba never see anything but what she, with too much squinting and too much guessing—a dog? a goat?—shaped out of the whiskery light? Frustration growing, she waded farther into the pool, the cold enveloping her legs, then her waist.

“Don’t,” said a voice behind her.

“You didn’t have to follow me.” She stepped deeper, trailing her fingers through the water. “Or you could have let me into the chamber.” She kept her gaze on the reflection. “I wish,” she said quietly enough that the boy-priest who’d followed her could not hear, “to know the fate of the babes.…”