When Winter Bared Our Bones by Emily Asimov

Author:Emily Asimov [Asimov, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reagent Press

3

The girl’s face was tense, showing both her astonishment and her eagerness to hear more. “Song of the Moon goaded you into a fight? Did she want your pack for her own?”

The zombie was silent for a time. “More than that. Much more than that. She was lost to her great sorrow. The heartbreak of such loss had consumed her. She wanted me gone, dead. She wanted all the wolves who sided with me gone, dead. Old Blue wouldn’t have betrayed her otherwise.”

The girl leaned forward, touching a hand to the round table. “Old Blue betrayed Song of the Moon? But you said it was a chance encounter?”

“A poor choice of words then, because it was not so much chance as providence. Old Blue wanted to be found and we happened to find him. But Old Blue didn’t betray Song of the Moon completely. Instead he spoke of a vision he’d had. A vision in which the packs were united after the downfall of a leader who intended murder.”

“Murder?” the girl asked.

“It’s as close a word as fits, for wolves do not kill wolves as men kill men, nor do wolves speak with words of such fixed meaning. A wolf’s howls can have many meanings, many ways of interpretation. Everything from the pitch of a yip to the sloping of an ear has meaning and changes the context and nature of what’s said.”

The zombie was looking out the window again. A silence hung in the air while his eyes scanned the street below. The girl heard the sound of a car, a car door closing, a woman’s heels on concrete. Then the car drove on and was gone.

“So what did you do?” asked the girl. “Did Song of the Moon accept your challenge?”

“She did. It’s what she wanted more than life’s breath itself. She called for a meeting of the packs under the next full moon and I accepted. But I knew I couldn’t face Song of the Moon and live. The she-wolf was easily twice my size, with strength and cunning far surpassing my own.”

“However did you survive then?” the girl asked.

“I didn’t really. Or I should say that the wolf I was then didn’t because I knew I couldn’t face Song of the Moon as I was. I knew I needed to become more than a wolf. The next full moon was many nights away. I looked inward for days and the answer came to me in a dream, a whisper of a dream really. But it was enough and I knew that to face Song of the Moon I needed something forgotten in my past.

“And so, I began searching. What I searched for, I didn’t really know and yet I knew I would know it when I found it. My search took me across leagues of frozen forest. A great arcing circle, carrying me back to a place I thought vaguely of as having once been my home—a home really. It wasn’t a wolf home certainly and so I could only see it at the edges of my mind, in places I hadn’t dared look as a wolf.

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