Anrin shook his head. “The moon is beautiful, Baba. The forest is beautiful. I am neither.”
“No, you’re the same,” she said. “Just as wild, and just as strange—but innocent, at least for now.” She sighed almost to herself. “So many things out there would devour that innocence if they could.”
“Things . . . in the forest, Baba?” Anrin frowned.
She smiled a little sadly and let him go. “Yes, child. In the forest. Now get to bed.”
All through the next day, Anrin pondered the conversation with Old Baba. Should he have refused the smith’s gift? Baba had denied being angry with him, but if not him then whom? The smith, perhaps . . . but why?
He had come to no conclusion by the time he finished bringing water to fill the leatherman’s curing-cistern, and climbing trees to gather winter nuts for the trapper’s wife. At sunset he wandered back to Baba’s, intending to climb the hill again. But when the old woman’s cottage came into view, the door was open with a familiar man’s silhouette blocking the light from within. Voices drifted to him, sharp and angry on the chilly wind.
“—a fair price,” the smith was saying. All but shouting, and Anrin saw that his nearby hand gripped the doorjamb so tightly that the wood groaned. “I’m generous even to offer. It’s time the boy earned his keep!”
“Not like that,” Baba’s voice snapped from within. Anrin had never heard her so angry. “And you’ll not take him either, not while I still have lungs that can shout and hands that can wield a pitchfork. Now get out!” And her gnarled hand shoved against his chest; when he stumbled back the door slammed in his face.
The peculiar flutter in Anrin’s belly returned fourfold. He stepped off the dirt path that led to Baba’s farm and crouched in the bushes. A moment later the smith passed by, muttering imprecations and swinging his great clenched fists. When he was gone, Anrin climbed out of the bushes. He considered going to the house to talk to Baba, but already the day had been too strange; he wanted no more of it. He went to the hill, climbed up, and sat there too troubled to find any of his usual comfort in the night.
“Anrin,” Baba called after a while, and silently he went down to her.
Her lips were still tight with anger, though she said nothing of the smith’s visit and he did not ask. Instead she took him by the shoulder and steered him toward the barn as they walked. “Before you go to work in the morning, Anrin, I want to talk to you. Not now, of course; you’ve had a long day.”
“Yes, Baba,” he said uneasily. He suspected she meant to speak of the smith. He would be able to ask her all the questions in his mind at last, he realized, but he was no longer certain he wanted to know the answers.
“Sleep well tonight, Anrin—and be sure to lock the barn door behind you.”
Anrin blinked, for he had never locked the barn in all his years of sleeping there.
“Mind me, child,” she said, pushing him into the barn. “Bolt it fast, and open it for no one before dawn.”
He turned to her on the threshold, all the small disturbances of the past three days welling up inside him. He wanted to somehow vomit the strange feelings forth, expel them from his heart before they could poison him any further, but he could think of no way to do so.
She stood watching him, perhaps getting some inkling of his thoughts from his face; her own was softer than usual. She put a hand on his shoulder and he almost flinched as one more disturbance jarred him, for she had to reach up to touch him. Unnoticed, unmarked, he had grown taller than her.
“In case of wolves, child,” Baba said. “Lock the door in case of wolves.”
It was a lie, he sensed, but also a gift. Until morning, the lie would give him the comfort he needed.
He nodded and she let him go, turning to go back to her cottage. He watched until she was inside, then closed and locked the barn door.
Beyond them and unseen by either, a shadow crouched at the edge of the forest, only a few yards beyond Anrin’s hill.
Late in the night Anrin heard the barn door rattle. He woke right away, for he had slept lightly, his dreams turbulent and incomprehensible. Quickly he climbed down from the barn loft and went to the door. “Is that you, Baba?”
There was a moment’s silence from beyond. “It’s not Baba, lad,” came the smith’s voice. “Open the door.”
In Anrin’s belly the little flutter rose to a steady beat, spreading foreboding through his soul like night-breezes through trees. “You have work for me, sir? So late?”
The smith laughed. “Work? Yes, lad, work. Now let me in.”
“Old Baba told me not to.”
“As you like,” the smith said, but Anrin saw from the shadows under the door that the smith’s feet did not move away. Instead the door began to rattle again, and Anrin remembered that the smith carried his tools with him always.
In the back of Anrin’s mind, the night breezes rose to a sharp, cold gust.
There was a horse door at the back of the barn. Anrin went there and pushed aside the pickle-barrel that blocked it. If anyone had asked, he could not have told them why he fled. All he could think of was the smith’s wide smile, and the sound of groaning wood, and the fear in Old Baba’s eyes. These indistinct thoughts lent him strength as he wrestled the heavy, half-rusted latch open.
And then Anrin was free of the barn, running blindly into the bitter night. At his back he heard the smith’s curse; the squeal of wood and metal; the querulous voice of Baba from within her cottage calling, “Who’s there?” Into the forest, the night breezes whispered, and into the forest he ran.
When the boy fell, too weary and cold to run any further, the shadow closed in.
Anrin awoke in dim smoky warmth and looked about. A fire flickered at his feet; the roof of a cave loomed overhead. He turned and found that his head had been resting on the flank of a great forest wolf. Silently it watched him, with eyes like the winter sun.
Anrin caught his breath and whispered, “Beautiful.”
Something changed in the wolf’s golden eyes. After a moment, the wolf changed as well, becoming a man.
“You do not fear me,” the wolf said.
“Should I?”
“Perhaps. You were nearly meat when I found you in the forest. I might eat you yet.” The wolf rose from his sprawl and stretched from fingers to toes. Anrin stared in fascination. The wolf’s body was broad and muscled, sleek and powerful, a model of the manhood that Anrin might one day himself attain. He stared also because had never seen a grown man unclothed before, and because Old Baba was not there to tell him to look away.
The wolf noticed Anrin’s gaze and lowered his arms. “Do you still find me beautiful?”
“Yes.”
The wolf smiled, flashing canines like knives. “Good.” He crouched, leaning close to sniff at Anrin. “You are not like other men. They fear the forest and all things beyond their control. They are like two-legged, hairless sheep.”
Anrin considered his lifetime among the villagers and found that he agreed. “Perhaps it is because I am a whore’s son.”
“What is a ‘whore’?”
“I have never been certain. The villagers call my mother that when they think I cannot hear them. Old Baba tells me only that my mother was too curious and too free, straying too often from propriety. I don’t see how that could be so terrible, since now it seems they want me to be like her.”
“Yes,” the wolf said. “That is the way of things.” He leaned closer, sniffing at Anrin’s hair, then his ear, then down the curve of Anrin’s neck. Anrin remained submissive when the wolf took hold of his shoulders and pressed him back on the packed earth. He knew that animals often inspected one another on first meeting, checking for health and strength. As a guest in the wolf’s den, he wanted to be polite.
“You are on the brink of a change,” the wolf said, tugging Anrin’s shirt open with his teeth. He sniffed at Anrin’s chest, lapped in passing at one of Anrin’s nipples. “You have felt it coming for some time now, I think. I have seen you sitting on the hilltop watching for it.”
Anrin shivered at the brush of the wolf’s nose against his skin. “I have been watching for nothing. Just the moon and the trees.”
“In your head, perhaps. But your body has been watching for what will come. It has grown and made itself ready. Are you?”
“I don’t know,” Anrin said. This troubled him for reasons he could not name.
The wolf sat up on his haunches, straddling him now. Anrin saw that the wolf’s skin was heavily furred with down. The wolf reached down to stroke Anrin’s chest and Anrin felt the caress of fur on the wolf’s palms as well. The sensation stirred yet another strange feeling within Anrin—something powerful for which he had no name. It was like the spike of fear that had shot through him when the smith came, and yet somehow entirely different.
“Others can smell your body’s readiness as I can,” the wolf said, his eyes gleaming in the dim light. “They will steal the change from you if you do not lay claim to it yourself. That is inevitable.”