The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell
Suddenly, abruptly, he stopped, grinning and breathing as if he’d run a race. He sniffed. “Those apples smell done—don’t they, Sasha?”
Sasha smiled, shaking her head at him, and reached down some bowls from the mantelpiece.
“Food,” he said, “is the only thing more important than justice.”
“We ate a big lunch,” lied Feo. “We only need a little bit.”
The apples were sweet and hot. Sasha produced some slabs of the burnt sugar, and they used them to spoon up the pulp. Feo ate hers too quickly, and spent the next ten minutes picking the peeling skin off the roof of her mouth. She shared out the bread, and she and Ilya made sandwiches with lumps of cheese softened over the fire. The taste was spectacular after eating nothing but snow.
She shook White awake and held out half her sandwich. White had always loved cheese, and as the wolf chewed, it seemed to give her courage. Cheese often does. White approached Alexei and sniffed his feet. The boy stiffened.
“Does he bite?”
“She. I don’t actually know,” said Feo honestly. “She’s never met so many strangers at one time before.” White was not growling; she looked warm and tired. “No. Probably.”
White’s tongue came out. Alexei gasped as it reached his ankles. Then White began to lick Alexei’s toes.
“That tickles!” he said, but he kept his feet still, and the expression on his face was respectful, Feo thought. She grinned at him.
“That blood, there—is she all right?”
“I don’t know.” Feo chewed on the inside of her mouth. “I think not really, but I’m not sure what to do.”
“Do you have bandages?” asked Sasha.
“We don’t,” said Ilya. “Just our socks.”
“No, keep your socks,” said Sasha. She was watching from the one chair in the place, balancing the bundle of pup and baby on her lap. The pup held the baby’s hand in his jaws and was drooling lovingly. “You’ll need them. Socks are key ingredients for adventures.”
“How do you know we’re—”
“I just do. But you could clean the wound, at least. Alexei, my towel’s over there—use that.”
Feo’s cloak was steaming in front of the fire. The smell, more than the sight of it, sparked an idea. “Would it work if we cut the hem off my cloak? I know bandages aren’t supposed to be made of velvet, but it would be better than nothing, wouldn’t it?”
Tending to White’s bullet wound took the best part of an hour. She lay still while the three of them swabbed ice and bark and dirt from her side. Once or twice the wolf growled, and each time Ilya and Alexei leaped backward, knocking heads. Feo tied the knots: Her hands knew how to read the twitching of the wolf’s muscles, when to pull tighter, when to loosen. When they had finished, White’s back half was entirely encased in red velvet, and she was much steadier on her feet.
“That looks a good job,” said Sasha. “You’ve got old hands for someone so young.”
Feo did not, at that moment, feel very young, but she grinned. The warmth was prodding her brain back to life. “Could we do the same for Alexei? To make him some shoes?”
“Yes!” said Alexei. “Can you?”
Sasha smiled, but shook her head. “They’d need to be waterproof.”
Ilya cleared his throat. “Have you got any cooking oil?”
“A few spoonfuls in a jar somewhere, I think,” said Sasha. “Most of it burned.”
“And soap?”
“I’ve got a bit,” said Alexei. “I can skip washing. Nobody really needs baths in the winter. Why?”
“Well,” said Ilya, “if you mix oil and soap and ashes, you get a waterproof mixture.” And, in answer to Feo’s startled face, “I read a story, once, where the hero makes a cloak out of it. We could coat some strips of velvet with that, and weave them triple thick. It would be better than nothing.”
The shoes took even longer than the bandage, partly because Alexei was not good at sitting still while they wrapped the cloth around his feet, but when they had finished, the effect was spectacular. They looked, Feo thought, like enormous blackish-red slippers.
Alexei did a moonlit lap of the house to test them, and came back grinning. “Watertight!” he said. He slapped first Feo and then Ilya on the back. “One point to us, no points to Rakov.”
Nobody changed their clothes for bed: Nobody had clothes to change into. Sasha brushed Varvara’s tuft of hair, and then Feo’s. Feo plaited it, wound it around her head, and held it in place it with her knife, safely in its scabbard.
“Very nice. In Saint Petersburg they would call that statement fashion,” said Sasha.
Ilya laughed. “The statement is: This person is probably going to kill you.”
The baby cried a little when she was placed in her cot—it was made of a drawer, well nested with furs. Alexei stopped talking about the tsar again for long enough to sing. He sang old Russian peasant songs in a voice that made Feo think of mountains. Ilya listened with his chin on his knees and his eyes screwed tightly closed. He wasn’t, as far as Feo could see, breathing.
Feo lay awake, twisting under her blanket, for hours after the snores of the two boys had filled the house. The wind had stopped, and the snow outside looked soft and familiar. She took the thick blanket Sasha had given her, the last of the stewed apples, and a burning branch from the fire. She filled her hood with firewood.
Black was waiting exactly where she had left him; a few meters away Gray lay unmoving, watching the road and the north. Feo piled branches on the ground, lit them with the taper. Black was aloof at first, but once Feo gave him the applesauce and rubbed both wolves down with the blanket, he unbent enough to give her knee a bite and to chew on her hair. Feo rolled herself in the blanket and lay with her face inches from the cinders. Black paced over to her and lay down across her legs: And there is no warmer blanket than a wolf. From her fire a smell rose up: flames burning night air, mixed with frost and the wolves’ familiar earthy tang. It was like breathing in hope. Feo lay awake for as long as she could, and it was to the song of the flames and of Black’s breath that she at last fell asleep.
NINE
White woke her the next morning. Wolves make very emphatic alarm clocks: Feo had no choice but to sit up before she drowned in wolf spit.
“All right! I’m here. I’m awake.” She wiped her eyes and pushed away the wolf’s tongue, which was trying to infiltrate her nose.
Alexei stood at a distance, watching. The expression on his face was unfamiliar: full of purpose, and something like respect.
“Here,” he said. He handed her a cup of steaming liquid. In his other hand he held the pup, and under his arm an ax. “The white one was scratching at the door. I came out for firewood.” He looked down at Gray, at the slant of her shoulders, the yellow of her eyes, and the elegance of her ears.
“That’s very much not a dog.” And, when she didn’t reply, “That’s a wolf, isn’t it?”
Feo scrambled to her feet. She tried to bluff, to make her voice haughty. “What makes you think that?”
“Ilya accidentally mentioned it. Sasha wasn’t happy. She tends to express unhappiness with broken objects, so I came outside. I know who you are now.”
Feo busied herself with White, checking the velvet bandage, feeling her nose. She said nothing.
“You are the girl Rakov’s men are after. I mean, I guessed you might be. But I thought it was just a rumor. I mean, a wolf girl blinding Rakov. You know. It sounds crazy.”
“It does sound crazy,” said Feo. She held the pup up to her face. He licked her forehead, and she breathed in his sweet, dusty animal smell.
The pup was boisterous after his sleep, and his claws tangled in her hair. “Did Ilya look after him?” she asked.
“Yes; and I woke up before Ilya, so I fed him.”
“What did you feed him?” Feo hadn’t meant it to sound so sharp.
“Milk and water.”
“Oh, that’s fine! I mean—thank you.” She smiled
He grinned and nodded at her cup, which she had set down in the snow. “Drink it quickly. It’s hot, but not delicious. When it stops being hot, it starts being undrinkable.”
Feo drank it. It scorched her gums, and she stuffed snow into her cheeks, gasping. “What is it?” she asked, muffled.
“Tea. Sort of. Well, it’s the last dust of berries from the summer—dried—and the apple water from last night. And a bit of burnt toffee. And sugar. Ilya found some sugar lumps in his pack. It’s got energy in it, if nothing else, and it’ll warm you.”
“Thank you. It’s”—she couldn’t say it was nice, when it so manifestly was not—“wet,” she said.
He hunkered down beside her in the snow, a safe distance from the still-sleeping wolves.
“So,” he said, “I’ve got a small question.”
“All right.”
“What were you doing in the middle of a field with a pack of wolves in the worst storm in twelve years?”
“That’s more of a medium-size question,” said Feo, but she grinned. She hefted the pup closer to her heart and told him: about Tenderfoot, about Rakov and his black patches of madness, about her mother, and about her journey to Kresty Prison.
Alexei was not a good listener: He interrupted, and laughed in unexpected places, and threw a lot of snow in the air when she told him about Rakov’s eye, but at last the story got told.
“And who is there besides your mother?” he asked when she had finished. “Is Ilya some kind of relation?”
“No! Definitely not. He’s just a boy I know.” Feo stopped, considered. “He’s all right, though. He’s good.”
“Good.”
“He’s got skinny wrists, but a muscly brain. He’s read a lot of books. But at home it’s just us: me and Mama. And the wolves.” Feo wished she could explain—that the beauty of the world is itself a kind of company, and they lived in one of the most beautiful spots in the world. “You can make the snow a kind of friend, if you know how.”
“Tell me more about your home before they burned it. What was it like?”
Feo gave the pup her forefinger to chew on. “Do you know the feeling when it’s raining outside, but you have a fire? And you’ve got wolves licking your hands and trying to eat the rug. That’s what happiness is.”
“Yes! I know that feeling. Well, not the wolves, but the rest.”
“And Mama and I would roast chestnuts and dip them in cream. There’s a wire net to roast them in so they don’t get burned. At least, there was.” Feo flinched at the thought, and the pup mewed in protest. “I suppose that’s gone now.”
“Exactly! They destroyed your home! Doesn’t that make you want to fight?”
Feo shrugged. “I’m going to go and get Mama, and we’re going to rebuild the house. Somewhere new. We’ll make it exactly like it was.”
“You’ll need help. Kresty Prison isn’t a friendly place. I know people who have been in it.”
“I have Ilya,” she said. “I have wolves.”
“Listen, I want to make a bargain with you.” He looked much older than fifteen as he said it. “Will you?”
Feo narrowed her eyes. “Depends what it is.”
“I need help. People are frightened of the tsar—and even more of Rakov.”
“Well . . . if I was going to choose someone to be afraid of, it would be him. Rakov. Have you seen his face? He’s not sane.”
Alexei nodded, his face serious. “You could use his soul as a skating rink. But that’s the point—my parents, and Sasha and her husband, and all my friends—they think there’s nothing we can do.”
“Isn’t that sort of true?”
“Of course not! But there’s only one thing that will make them willing to fight back.”
Feo gestured at the soot that had turned the snow black in patches. “I would have thought burning their houses would do that.”
“No! It scared them stiff—literally. They all talk like he’s some kind of evil spirit, but he’s just a man: You hurt him! He’s coming after you, a twelve-year-old girl! You’re barely big enough to touch the top of the door frame, but you nearly killed him! You’re proof that he’s not invincible!”
“I don’t think I nearly killed him.” Feo was eager to have accuracy on this point.
“I need stories. Stories like yours. You could shock people into action. Stories can start revolutions.”
“I thought that man you were talking about last night . . . Lenny? I thought he was going to start your revolution.”
“Lenin’s in exile. And Lenin doesn’t care about Rakov: He only cares about Bolsheviks. I need you, Feo.”
“I don’t have time for revolutions. I have to be in the city by Friday! It’s Sunday already.”
“No, listen! It would only need a single village-worth of people to begin. Other people would join us.” He grinned, a smile that stretched his whole face into something impish and wild, and Feo wrinkled her nose. People should not be allowed to be so beautiful and so mad. One or the other, not both. He said, “We could change the whole world!”
Feo shook her head. The pup began to scrabble at her wrist, hoping to draw milk from her fingertip.
“Feo, ignore the pup for a second. Half my village wants to fight. But the other half wants to wait it out. They say if we do anything—anything at all—Rakov will just get worse.” Feo rearranged her sleeve to stop the pup scraping all her wrist skin off. “Listen, Feo—I need your help. You’ve got to come and tell the village what happened. If a kid like you was ready to fight him, it would make the others ashamed not to. It would make them believe it was possible.”
Feo thought about it: It hurt to disappoint him. But: “I can’t. I need to get to Mama.”
“Please! Just come with me to the village. You wouldn’t have to say anything. Just . . . prove I wasn’t making you up. Because . . . I might have embroidered things, sometimes. But if you were there!”
“But your revolution has nothing to do with me, Alexei! I have to get to Kresty.”
Alexei bit his lips and changed tactics. “Then you’ll need food. We ate everything you had last night.”
“I can hunt—”
“And there are things you don’t know, about the city—about the soldiers and the gates.”
Feo looked up, her heart dropping. “Are there? What?”
“I’ll tell you, if you come with me to the village.”
“That’s blackmail!”
“Bribery.” His eyes—huge, thick lashed, grinning—met hers. “There’s a difference.”
Feo shook her head. “I’m not interested in politics. I just want Mama. And . . . I’m sorry, truly, but I don’t think it would work.”
“Well, now you’re being boring,” he said, standing up.
“I’m being honest!”
“That’s the thing, though! If you pick the most depressing answer,” said Alexei, “you get to say you’re ‘brutally honest.’ But I say it would work, and I once punched a bear in the face.”
“Are . . . those two things connected?”
“Yes,” said Alexei. “I have brutally honest fists. People say we can’t do anything about the way the world is; they say it’s set in stone. I say it looks like stone, but it’s mostly paint and cardboard. Believe me. I’ll help you, if you’ll help me.”
Feo squinted. “I’m . . . not sure I absolutely understand. I’ve never punched a bear. I head-butted an eagle once, but that was an accident. But Rakov took Mama—”
“Exactly!” Alexei interrupted. His whole face glittered with purpose. “He kills people, Feo! It’s not just about your mother. Don’t you want to fight, for yourself? For people like my sister—so her baby doesn’t grow up to watch her world burn? I didn’t think you were the kind of person who would want to live on her knees.”
Feo looked at his face, stark and vivid and streaked with wolf spit. “If you promise to tell me about the gates and get us food—real food—I’ll come.”
Alexei, Ilya, and Feo were in sight of the chimney smoke of the village when a thought occurred to her, and she tipped herself off Black’s back.
“Why are we stopping?” asked Alexei. “Come on! We’re nearly there.”
“Two reasons. First, I thought it might be best if they didn’t see us riding. Just in case.”
“Just in case what?” said Ilya.
“Well—just in case they have laws against it. Or something.”
“Laws against riding wolves on village streets? Is that likely?” But Ilya climbed off Gray’s back and stood beside her.
“Just in case,” she said again. In fact, just in case it went badly and they had to make an escape, she thought, it was best if people didn’t know how fast they could go. It was best to be wary. “Let’s leave the wolves here, if they’ll stay. I don’t want anyone to hurt them.” And then, seeing the incredulity in Alexei’s face, she added, “Or the other way round.”
“You said two reasons,” said Ilya.
“I’m hungry. Aren’t you? I think I’d feel a lot braver with food. Alexei, did you bring that jackdaw?”
They found a spot where the snow was thin, and Feo tore down some branches for firewood. Ilya struggled with the fire, fumbling with the matches in cold hands. She watched Alexei, ready to bite him if he laughed—if anyone was laughing at Ilya, it would be her—but he only squatted on his haunches and stared at the world around them. She followed his gaze. The sky was the blue of winter palaces. The snow stretched, untouched, for miles, and the half-grown trees dipped like praying polar bears.
“That’s a special kind of lovely,” said Ilya, looking up as the fire stuttered into life. “Even if we get caught, I’m glad I came.”
Feo halved and gutted the jackdaw. They decided not to waste time plucking it: Instead, they sliced the skin off and threw it to the wolves.