“They’re testing me? The vines are testing me?”
“Twice in my tenure as a guardian, I’ve found villagers hanging from vines draped over tree branches, as if from a gallows. You should not get in the habit of standing still for long out here.”
“Considering that I don’t plan to be in the dark wood very often—”
“You will be.” The gaze she turned on me felt heavy. “You must be, Adele. Come. There’s the path.”
I looked in the direction she pointed, and I saw the path worn into the forest floor by years of traffic—foot, hoof, and cart wheel. I’d never had a clearer view of it. And there, just a few feet away, lay the basket of bread I’d dropped.
“I’m sorry, Gran.” I knelt on the ground next to the loaf of raisin bread, which sat on its side beneath a broad fern leaf. “It’s ruined.” The rye bread hadn’t fared much better.
“Don’t fuss over the bread, child. It was only an excuse to send you out here.”
But she loved sweet breads, and raisins were too costly to waste. And yet, despite the squandered expense, bread did seem like a pointless thing to fret over, considering that somewhere out there in the forest, a merchant and his wife had lost their lives. That moments before, I’d stood on four legs, just like the beast that killed them.
A fresh bolt of fear crashed over me as that understanding finally seemed to settle in. “Gran, how are you so calm? They’re going to burn me alive in the village square, just like Papa.”
“They’re not going to burn you.” She waved away my fear with an off-hand gesture. “No one’s going to know about this.”
“Of course people will know! How could I possibly keep them from finding out?”
“You will keep your secret the same way your mother and I have kept ours.”
“You . . . ?” I blinked at her. “And Mama? What . . . Gran, what’s happening?” I demanded softly as I picked up my empty basket and shook off the cloth covering, trying to hide the tremor in my hands.
She stepped onto the path and tugged me forward with her, and finally I regained my sense of direction. Her cabin was directly ahead. “You are becoming what you were always meant to be. You and Sofia are descended from a long line of women gifted with great abilities and burdened with an even greater responsibility.”
I stumbled to a stop on the path, frowning at her. “This is how you can live alone in the dark wood?” How she could see so well and move so lithely through the forest? “We’re all . . . What are we?” Werewolves, obviously. Yet not infected. Not snow-white, like the beast I’d killed.
“There are many words for what we are, child, and you’ve heard most of them. Yet they all fall short of the truth.”
“Monster,” I said as a chill worked its way across my flesh. “We’re monsters.”
“Yes.” She nodded firmly, and I felt a little sick at the admission. I’d expected her to deny it. “Never doubt that we are monsters, Adele. But that is perhaps the vaguest of all the descriptors. We are werewolf. Loup garou. Lycanthrope. Every region has its own name for us, and none is more common than simply ‘witch.’ Because your neighbors’ superstitions are rooted in truth; what we do—what we are—relies on a very particular and ancient kind of magic. An ability to alter our forms and a set of skills that are just as natural to the women of our line as any of your human abilities are.”
“Werewolves.” My voice echoed with shock. “We are monsters.”
“Yes. But of a kind unlike any other. The wolf you killed—she was a beast. A whitewulf. They are destroyers. Indiscriminate slayers. Consumers of human flesh.”
“And we are not?” The tension in my voice begged her for a word of solace.
“No, child.” Her gentle smile did more than her words to ease my mind. “We are redwulf. We are guardians. You are destined to protect your village, as your mother has for years. As I did, before her. As Sofia will, some day. And as your own daughters will.”
Confusion and fear battled within me, but before I could ask the rest of my questions, my grandmother pointed at a familiar landmark: a narrow, subtle fork in the path, where it turned toward her cabin. “This way.”
Her clearing appeared within minutes, an oasis of light in a sea of darkness, and a comforting sight that had never failed to make me smile. As far as I knew, this was the only place in the entire dark wood where daylight ventured. And for the first time in my life it occurred to me to wonder why.
“This place is special, isn’t it?” I felt that today, in a way I’d never been able to before. “Why is there light here? How is there light here?”
“There is light here because I persist against the darkness,” she said as we stepped into the clearing. “The forest continually encroaches, but just like the village woodsmen do for Oakvale, I chop the trees down when they intrude upon my clearing. I cut the vines. I beat back the brush and the roots. I fight for this land, to keep it from being swallowed by the dark wood, as my mother did before me. As your mother will, soon. Your ascension has come just in time, because I cannot fight this battle forever. I am an old woman now.”
Yesterday, I would have believed that. But today . . . “You just told me you tracked and captured a wolf. A whitewulf,” I corrected myself, before she could.
“Yes. And if my strength holds out, I will be able to do the same for Sofia in a few years. If not, that will be up to your mother. And to you.” As if to punctuate her point, my grandmother pulled the hatchet from her belt, and as we approached her cottage, she bent to swing it at the ground, where a woody vine was coiling almost leisurely toward her foot.
Her hatchet cleanly bisected the vine. The amputated bit went still, seeming to shrivel right before my eyes, while the rest slithered back into the woods faster than I’d ever seen a vine move. Before today, I’d only ever seen them writhe slowly, and that had been eerie enough.
“Persistence,” Gran announced as she slid the hatchet back into the loop on her belt.
On our way across the clearing, she stopped at her small stone well and pulled up a bucket of water, which she hoisted off the hook and handed to me. I took the heavy pail and followed her up three steps into the main room of her small but cozy cabin.
A fire blazed in her hearth, a pot of stew suspended over it.
“First, wash your face.” She handed me a rag as I set the bucket on the table. “Then change into that, and I’ll work on your dress.” Gran waved one hand at the nightgown draped across her bed, and I realized she’d laid it out for me.
“You knew I would arrive covered in blood?”
“I certainly hoped so. The first kill is important. Without it, you would never have been able to claim your wulf form. To ascend to your role as a guardian.”
I wiped my face thoroughly, and the rag came away stained red. “So, if I’d been unable to kill that whitewulf, I wouldn’t have turned into a redwulf?”
Gran took a wooden bowl from a shelf on the wall and filled it with a ladleful of stew from the pot. “If you’d been unable to kill her, you would be dead.”
Horror washed over me. “Has that happened? To someone in our family? To one of the other . . . guardians?”