“Learn?” He tore his attention away from his hunger. “Learn what?”
Wiktor came to the end of his patience. “You’re not a half-wit! Stop acting like one! Listen to what I’m saying: I want to teach you what’s in these books! And what I know about the world, too! The languages: French, English, German. Plus history, mathematics, and—”
“Why?” Mikhail interrupted. Renati had told him the white palace and this forest would be his home for the rest of his life, just as it was for the others of the pack. “What use would I have for those things, if I’m going to stay here forever?”
“What use!” Wiktor mocked him, and snorted angrily. “What use, he says!” He strode forward, brandishing the torch, and stopped just short of Mikhail. “Being a wolf is a wonderful thing. A miracle. But we were born humans, and we can’t let go of our humanity—even though the word ‘human’ shames us to our core sometimes. Do you know why I’m not a wolf all the time? Why I don’t just run in the forest day and night?” Mikhail shook his head. “Because when we take the form of wolves we age as wolves, too. If we were to spend one year as wolves, we would be seven years older when we returned to human form. And as much as I love the freedom, the aromas, and… the fine wonder of it, I love life more. I want to live as long as I can, and I want to know. My brain hurts for knowledge. I say learn to run as a wolf, yes; but learn to think like a man, too.” He tapped his bald skull. “If you don’t, you squander the miracle.”
Mikhail looked at the books he could see by the torchlight. They appeared very thick and very dusty. How could anyone ever read one book that thick, much less all of them?
“I’m a teacher,” Wiktor said. “Let me teach.”
Mikhail considered it. Those books frightened him, in a way; they were massive and forbidding. His father used to have a library, though the books were thinner and they had gilded titles on their spines. He remembered his and Alizia’s tutor, Magda, a large gray-haired woman who used to come to their house in a buggy. It was important to know the world, Magda had always said, so you could find your place in it if you were ever lost. Mikhail had never felt more lost in his life. He shrugged, still wary; he’d never liked homework. “All right,” he agreed, after another moment.
“Good! Oh, if the linen-shirted regents could see their professor now!” He grunted. “I’d tear out their hearts and show them how they beat!” He listened to the scratchings of the clawed intruder. “The first lesson isn’t in a book. Your stomach’s growling, and I’m hungry, too. Find the rat and we’ll have our meal.” He clubbed the torch on the floor, and sparks flew until the flames were beaten out.
The chamber was in darkness. Mikhail tried to listen, but his heartbeat was a thunderous distraction. A rat could be a good, juicy meal if it was large enough; this one sounded large enough for two meals. He’d eaten the rats Renati had brought him. They tasted like stringy chicken, and their brains were sweet. He looked slowly right and left in the dark, his head tilted to catch the sound. The rat scratched on, but it was hard to pinpoint its location.
“Down on the rat’s level,” Wiktor advised. “Think like a rat.”
Mikhail got down on his haunches. Then on his belly. Ah, yes; now the scratching led him to his right. The far wall, he thought. Maybe in a corner. He began crawling in that direction. The rat abruptly stopped scratching.
“He hears you,” Wiktor said. “He reads your mind.”
Mikhail crawled forward. His shoulder bumped something: a pile of books. They slithered to the floor, and he heard the rat’s claws click on the stones as it scuttled along the far wall. Going from right to left, Mikhail thought. He hoped. His stomach growled, an alarmingly loud noise, and he heard Wiktor laugh. The rat stopped, and remained silent. Mikhail lay on his belly, his head cocked. A sharp, acidic odor came to him. The rat was terrified; it had just urinated. The smell was as clear a pathway as a lantern’s beam, but exactly why that was Mikhail didn’t yet fully understand. His vision detected more piles of books around him, all outlined in a faintly luminous gray. Still he couldn’t see the rat, but he could make out the volumes and shelves on the far wall. If I were a rat, he thought, I would squeeze into a corner. Someplace where my back was protected. Mikhail crawled forward, slowly… slowly…
He could hear a muffled, steady thump about thirty feet behind him; Wiktor’s heartbeat, he realized. His own pulse was all but deafening, and he stayed where he was until it had calmed. He angled his head from side to side, listening.
There, A quick tick… tick… tick like a small watch. To Mikhail’s right, perhaps another twenty feet or so ahead. In the corner, of course. Behind an untidy heap of luminous-edged books. Mikhail crawled toward the corner, his movements silent and sinuous.
He heard the rat’s heartbeat increase. A rat had the sixth sense; it could smell him, and in another moment Mikhail smelled the dusty hair of the rat, too. He knew exactly where it was. The rat was motionless, but its heartbeat indicated it was about to burst from its cover and run along the wall. Mikhail kept going, inch after inch. He heard the rat’s claws click—and then it darted forward, a blurred luminescence, as it tried to flee across the chamber to the far corner.
All Mikhail knew was that he was hungry and he wanted the rat, but his mind worked instinctively, calculating the rat’s angle and speed with an animal’s cold logic. Mikhail lunged to the left. The rat squeaked and darted away from his hand. As the rat swerved and shot past him—a streak of gray fire—Mikhail instantly turned to the right, reached out, and gripped the rodent behind the head.
The rat thrashed, trying to get its teeth in Mikhail’s flesh. It was a large rat, and it was strong. In another few seconds it was going to fight free. Mikhail decided the issue.
He opened his mouth, put the rat’s head between his teeth and bit down on the tough little neck.
His teeth worked; there was no rage or anger in this, just hunger. He heard the bones crunch, and then warm blood filled his mouth. He ripped a last piece of flesh loose. The rat’s head rolled over his tongue. The body’s legs kicked a few times, but with dwindling strength. And that was the end of a very unequal contest.
“Bravo,” Wiktor said. But his voice regained its sternness. “Two more inches and you would’ve lost it. That rat was as slow as a muffin-stuffed grandmother.”
Mikhail spat the severed head onto his palm. He watched as Wiktor approached him, outlined in luminescence. It was good manners to offer the best portion of any meal to Wiktor, and Mikhail lifted his palm.
“It’s yours,” Wiktor told him, and took the warm dead carcass.
Mikhail worked the skull between his teeth, finally breaking it open. The brains reminded him of a sweet-potato pie he’d eaten, in another world.
Wiktor ripped the carcass open from stub of neck to tail. He inhaled the heady fragrance of blood and fresh meat, and then scooped the intestines out with his fingers and pulled pieces of fat and flesh away from the bones. He offered a portion to Mikhail, who took his share gratefully.
The man and boy ate their rat in the dark chamber, with the echoes of civilized minds in the shelves all around them.
4
The golden weave of days became tinged with silver. Frost gleamed in the forest, and the hardwoods stood naked before the bitter wind. It was going to be a bad winter, Renati had said as she watched the bark thicken on the trees. The first snow fell in early October, and covered the white palace with white.
As the winds of November shrieked and the snow blew like scattershot, the pack huddled together in the depths of the palace, around a fire that was never allowed to burn too high or completely extinguish. Mikhail’s body felt sluggish, and he wanted to sleep a lot, though Wiktor kept his head filled with questions from the books; Mikhail had never known there were so many questions, and even in his sleep he dreamed of question marks. Before very long, he began to dream in foreign languages: German and English, in which Wiktor drilled him with merciless repetition. But Mikhail’s mind had sharpened
, as well as his instincts, and he was learning.
Alekza’s stomach swelled. She stayed curled up a lot, and the others always gave her extra portions of the kill. They never changed within sight of Mikhail; they always went up the stairway and into the corridors on two legs before they left the white palace to hunt on four. Sometimes they brought back fresh, dripping meat, sometimes they returned sullen and empty-handed. But there were a lot of rats around, drawn to the heat of the fire, and those were easily caught. Mikhail knew he was one of the pack now, and accepted as such, but he still felt like what he was: a cold, often miserably uncomfortable human boy. His bones and brain still sometimes ached with a ferocity that almost drove him to tears. Almost. He sniffled in pain a few times, and the stares he received from Wiktor and Renati told him crying was not tolerated from someone who didn’t suffer gut worms.
But the change remained a mystery to him. It was one thing to live with the pack, and quite something else to fully join them. How did they change? Mikhail wondered, adding to his burden of questions. Did they take a deep breath, as if about to leap into dark and icy water? Did they stretch their bodies until the human skin split open and the wolves burst free? How did they do it? No one offered to tell him, and Mikhail—the runt of the pack—was too skittish to ask. He only knew that when he heard them howl after a kill, their voices echoing over the snowy woods, there was a burning in his blood.
A blizzard swept down from the north. As it raged beyond the walls Pauli sang in a high, frail voice a folk song about a bird who flew amid the stars, while her brother, red-haired Belyi, kept time with the clicking of sticks. The blizzard settled in, and roared its own music day after day. The fire lost its heat, and the food was gnawed away. Stomachs began to sing. Wiktor, Nikita, and Belyi had to go out into the blizzard to hunt. They were gone for three days and nights, and when Wiktor and Nikita returned, they brought back the half-frozen carcass of a stag. Belyi did not return; he’d gone after a caribou, and the last Wiktor and Nikita had seen of him he’d been zigzagging through the storm after his prey.
Pauli cried for a while, and the others left her alone. She didn’t cry so much, though, that she didn’t eat. She accepted the bloody meat with the same hunger as the others, including Mikhail. And Mikhail learned a new lesson: whatever tragedy might happen, whatever torment should befall, life went on.
Mikhail awakened one morning and listened to silence. The storm had ceased. He followed the others up the stairway and through the chambers, where snow lay in drifts on the stones and ice-covered tree limbs stretched overhead. The sun was shining outside, the sky azure over a world of dazzling white. Wiktor, Nikita, and Franco burrowed a path through the snow into the palace courtyard, and Mikhail walked outside with the others to feast on fresh, frosty air.
He breathed deeply until his lungs burned. The sun was fierce, but it made not a dent in the smooth snow. Mikhail was thoroughly enraptured by the beauty of the winter forest by the time a snowball blasted against the side of his head.
“Good shot!” Wiktor shouted. “Give him another one!” Nikita was smiling, already cupping more snow. Nikita reared his arm back to throw it, but at the last second he whirled and flung it into the face of Franco, standing about twenty feet away.
“You ass!” Franco yelled as he dug for a snowball. Renati flung one that grazed Nikita’s head, and Pauli threw a snowball with deadly accuracy into Alekza’s face. Alekza, laughing and sputtering snow, went down on her rear end, her hands pressed to her pregnant belly.
“You want a war?” Nikita hollered, grinning at Renati. “I’ll give you a war!” He threw a snowball that clipped Renati’s shoulder, and then Mikhail stood in Renati’s shadow and threw one that burst between Franco’s eyes and staggered him back. “You… little… beast!” Franco shouted, and Wiktor smiled and calmly dodged a snowball that sailed over his head. Renati was hit by two at once, from Franco and Pauli. Mikhail plunged his numb hands into the snow for another barrage. Nikita ducked Renati’s salvo and scrambled to a place where the snow was fresh and unmarked. He dug both hands deeply into it for double snowballs.
And he came up with something quite different. Something frozen, red, and mangled.
Renati’s laughter ended on a strangled note. A last snowball thrown by Franco exploded off her shoulder, but she stared at what Nikita held. Mikhail let the snow slither to the ground. Pauli gasped, her face and hair dripping.
Nikita had brought a severed, mutiliated hand up from the snow. It was as blue as polished marble, and two fingers had been torn away. The thumb and forefinger were shrunken and curved inward—the last vestiges of a paw—and fine red hair covered the back of the hand.
Pauli took a step forward. Then another, up to her knees in snow. She blinked, stunned, and then moaned the name: “Belyi…”
“Take her inside,” Wiktor said to Renati. Instantly she took Pauli’s arm and tried to guide her back to the palace, but Pauli jerked free. “Go inside,” Wiktor told her, stepping in front of her so she couldn’t see what Nikita and Franco were uncovering from the drift. “Now.”
Pauli wavered on her feet. Alekza caught her other arm, and between them she and Renati led Pauli into the palace like a hollow-eyed sleepwalker.
Mikhail started to follow them, but Wiktor’s voice lashed him: “Where do you think you’re going? Come here and help us with this!” Wiktor knelt down to push aside the snow with Nikita and Franco, and Mikhail came over to add his shivering strength.
It was a mass of crimson, blood-crusted bones. Most of the meat had been ripped off, but a few shreds of muscle remained. Some of the bones were human and some were wolf, Wiktor quickly saw; Belyi’s body, in death, had warred between its poles. “Look at this,” Franco said, and held up part of a shoulder blade. Across it were deep scrapes.
Wiktor nodded. “Fangs.” There was more evidence of powerful jaws at work: furrows on an arm bone, the jagged edges of the broken spine.
And then, at last, Nikita brushed away some hard-crusted snow and found the head.
The scalp was gone, the skull crushed and the brains scooped out, but Belyi’s face remained. Minus the lower jaw, which had been torn away. The tongue, too, had been wrenched from its roots. Belyi’s eyes were open, and the red hairs covered his cheeks and forehead. The eyes were directed for a few seconds right at Mikhail, until Nikita moved the head again, and in them Mikhail saw a glassy shine of pure terror. He looked away, shivering but not with the cold this time, and retreated a few paces. Franco picked up a leg bone that still held a few fragments of frozen red muscle, and examined the bone’s splintered edges. “Great strength in the bite,” Franco said quietly. “The leg was broken with a single crunch.”
“So were both the arms,” Nikita said. He sat on his haunches, looking at the bones arranged around him in the snow. A patchwork of shadows and sunlight lay on Belyi’s face, and the ice in the single remaining eyelid was beginning to melt. Mikhail watched with dreadful fascination as a drop of water trickled down Belyi’s blue cheek like a tear.
Wiktor stood up, his eyes blazing, and slowly turned his gaze through all points of the compass. His fists clenched at his sides. Mikhail knew what he must be thinking: they were no longer the only killers in the forest. Something had been watching them, and knew where their den was. It had crushed Belyi’s bones, torn out his tongue, and scooped the brains from his skull. Then it had brought the broken skeleton back here like a taunt. Or a challenge.
“Wrap him in this.” Wiktor removed his deerskin cloak and gave it to Franco. “Don’t let Pauli see him.” He began to walk, naked and with a purposeful stride, away from the white palace.
“Where’re you going?” Nikita asked him.
“Tracking,” Wiktor answered, his feet crunching in the snow. Then he began to run, casting a long shadow. Mikhail watched him weave through the tangle of surrounding trees and spiky undergrowth; he saw gray hair ripple across Wiktor’s broad white back, saw his spine start to contort, and then Wiktor vanished
into the forest.
Nikita and Franco put Belyi’s bones in the robe. The head, with its silent jawless shriek, was the last to go in. Franco stood up, the folded robe clutched in his arms and his face gaunt and gray. He looked at Mikhail, and his lip curled. “You carry them, rabbit,” he said in a tone of derision, and he put the sack of remains in Mikhail’s arms. Their weight instantly dropped the boy to his knees.
Nikita started to help him, but Franco caught the Mongol’s arm. “Let the rabbit do it alone, if he wants to be one of us so much!”
Mikhail stared into Franco’s eyes; they laughed at him, and wanted him to fail. He felt a spark leap inside him. It exploded into incandescent fire, and the heat of anger made Mikhail strain to stand with the sack of bones in his arms. He got halfway up before his feet slipped out from under him. Franco walked on a few paces. “Come on!” he said impatiently, and Nikita reluctantly followed. Mikhail struggled, his teeth gritted and his arms aching. But he had known pain before, and this was nothing. He would not let Franco see him beaten; he would let no one see him beaten, not ever. He got all the way up, and then walked with unsteady steps, his arms full of what used to be Belyi.
“A good rabbit always does as he’s told,” Franco said. Nikita reached out to carry the bones the rest of the way, but Mikhail said, “No,” and carried his burden toward the white palace. He smelled the coppery aroma of icy blood from Belyi’s remains. The deerskin had its own smell—higher, sweeter—and Wiktor’s sweat smelled of salt and musk. But there was another odor in the chill air, and it drifted past Mikhail’s nostrils as he reached the doorway. This odor was wild and rank, a smell of brutality and cunning. The smell of an animal, and as different from the odors of Mikhail’s pack as black differs from red. It was wafting, he realized, from Belyi’s bones: the spoor of the beast that had slaughtered him. The same odor that Wiktor was now tracking across the smooth, blizzard-sculpted snow.