Chapter Eight
Which Is Finally Getting Somewhere
Tasia had taken Mitch’s advice and practiced flicking open her knife with great diligence.
Her attempts had to be discreet around the Galanis family and Pagona’s friends, of course, but three days into the week, she was able to get the knife from closed-in-pocket to open-in-hand in a single, fluid motion.
It helped that she hadn’t needed to play tea hostess for the full week.
The first of the torrential rainstorms common this time of year had kept Bunny and the others at their own homes for four days.
Then the thick mud discouraged travel for a couple more.
Stavros was part of the crew lining the pathways with fallen branches from the initial windstorm.
The rough bark kept the round limbs from spinning in the mud for the most part, but walking was still tricky and wheels didn’t work well on them.
Nor had the wood lining made it as far as the Galanis home by the time Tasia ventured out for her next delivery.
The mud was most treacherous on the frequently traveled paths. She had less difficulty navigating the area by the “apothecary” and when looping around the village to meet up with Mitch. This increased her hopes for a less arduous journey.
Mitch seemed to have pulled back into himself. He did offer a brief smile when she showed off her new trick, but he didn’t volunteer any conversation—which she had expected—and he returned to grunting answers to her questions—which she had not expected.
The mud wasn’t deep this far into the woods. It was, however, ridiculously sticky. Every step added to the layer of sludge on the bottom of her boots. Her increasingly heavy boots and stubbornly taciturn companion tired Tasia out by the troll boulder. She begged for a break, and Mitch obliged.
As she perched on what could have been considered the troll’s knee, her thoughts ran to the bedtime stories she had heard about trolls way back when.
She didn’t think that sunlight actually transformed trolls into stone, but they weren’t a type of faery that frequented Diomland, so she couldn’t be sure.
Thoughts of bedtime stories brought Mother Anthi’s most recent one to mind.
Stuck in the house for days on end, Anthi had begun to behave in some of the ways one expected of a mother. She interacted with Chara during the day and tucked her into bed at night. Tasia had been treated to a recitation of Chara’s new favorite tale five nights in a row.
“Can you talk in your wolf form?”
Mitch, who had been leaning on the boulder and staring at nothing, straightened to look at her. She bit her lip to hide the smile that wanted to come out and play when she saw how he tipped his head. It reminded her of a dog’s questioning head-tilt.
“No.”
“Hmm, I’ve never heard of a talking wolf,” she said as she leaned back and closed her eyes.
“Chara’s new favorite story is about a little girl who encounters a talking wolf in the woods.
I would have thought it was too scary for her because the wolf impersonates the girl’s grandmother before eating them both.
But her favorite part is when the woodsman cuts open the wolf with an axe and saves them. ”
She frowned. “It’s a bit gruesome, to be frank. Not a story I would share with children.”
When Tasia opened her eyes, she saw that Mitch looked as though he might hurl. She sat up and reached a hand toward him, then held back, uncertain if he would welcome the touch.
“What’s wrong?”
Her rough-and-ready guardian took a deep breath that shook a little. “That’s—” He cleared his throat. “That’s not quite how it went.”
Shock flashed through Tasia’s body, a wave of hyperawareness that faded into numbness. It was a struggle to push her next words out. “You are the wolf in the story?”
Mitch scrubbed at his face with both hands. “You gotta understand,” he began, and Tasia’s heart melted at the broken tone, “I wasn’t able to control my transformations when I was younger.”
Sensing a deep hurt that needed space and a total lack of judgement to be shared, she held her tongue and waited.
“We moved around a lot when I was a kid. A lot–a lot. After my mother died, I finally found a group of friends that didn’t mind that I was forced to be a wolf during the full moon.
” He shook his head and glared at the spindly branches arching over the troll boulder.
“I didn’t realize for far too long that their ‘acceptance’ only lasted as long as I did their dirty work. ”
Tasia wanted to ask more about that, but he forged ahead, speaking quickly. It seemed that since he had breached the wall guarding this story, he now needed to get everything out as fast as he could.
“I left them and struck out on my own. Eventually, I ran into Red.” He clenched his jaw as he continued to stare up at the trees. “She played me like a triangle.”
“I thought the phrase was ‘like a fiddle,’ ” Tasia couldn’t help inserting.
Mitch blew a self-mocking breath through his teeth. “Fiddles take skill and finesse. She didn’t need any subtlety. She said exactly what I wanted to hear, and I lapped it up like a starving dog.”
A protest jumped to Tasia’s lips, then died when he rolled his eyes at his own thoughts and finally looked at her.
“She told me she needed my protection walking through the woods to visit her grandmother in another town. Kept up the act for months.” He glanced at the ground and knocked some of the mud from his boot against the base of the boulder. “Had me pretty well convinced she was in love with me, too.”
From the empty bitterness in his words, Tasia gathered that he had invested everything into a relationship that she suspected was painfully one-sided.
Mitch bent to pick up a loose rock, then chucked it into the undergrowth as hard as he could. “Turns out, she was using me as safe passage to visit her woodcutter boyfriend in the next town. I overheard them laughing about how gullible I was.”
A sound of outrage escaped Tasia. How could anybody treat another person like that?!
“I didn’t stick around after that.” He looked at her, and his eyes lingered on the bright-red cape that held the cold back. “That stupid story started circulating soon after.”
Tasia now understood why he had been so affected by the sight of her wearing the red wrapping. As she tried to think of something to say that acknowledged his hurt without making it worse, he straightened to his full height and brushed off the back of his jacket.
“Let’s keep going.”
It wasn’t until delivering the basket’s contents that Tasia felt comfortable poking at Mitch. They had been walking in unusual silence. After lunch, she thought he might have regained his sense of equilibrium.
“Were you born with the ability to be a wolf?”
A snort of amusement answered her first. She could have been affronted, but she was happy that he wasn’t taking offense.
“I wondered when your curiosity would lean that direction.”
Tasia carefully did not share that she had been speculating on the specifics of his condition since she first discovered his secret.
His sigh loosened his shoulders. “I will share that information”—he turned to look at her—“if you tell me your story in return.”
“I can do that.” Her gut twinged as an inner voice warned her that Mitch would think poorly of her when he heard what she had to say.
The part-time wolf went back to slogging through the mire. “I was a regular little boy. My father died when I was three.”
Chara’s age. What a terrible time to lose a father. Tasia didn’t remember her birth father, but the death of her stepfather still stole the breath from her lungs at unexpected times.
“My mother always took the blame, but she never told me why I was cursed. Looking back, I suspect her loyalty to my late father offended the one who did it.” He slowed to scrape the accumulated mud off his boots.
“Not sure if he cursed me instead of her because his conscience wouldn’t let him leave a kid with a wolf for a mother, or because he thought it would hurt her more. ”
“Either way is despicable,” Tasia muttered.
A shrug lifted and lowered his shoulders, temporarily distracting her as she admired their breadth.
“I remember very little about him, except that he was the darkest-skinned man I have ever seen. That, and he had a huge pack on his back. I remember wanting to explore all of the pockets.”
Tasia liked the mental image she formed of a tiny Mitch nosing through a giant bag.
“Nobody keeps a wolf as a pet, even a puppy-sized one, so my mother had to hide us in the woods.”
“Wait, you were a wolf all the time?”
He nodded. “At first. When I was eight, a different stranger offered to fix the curse. He looked nothing like the first man, but something about him felt the same.” Mitch gave a laugh edged with scorn.
“Unfortunately, he wasn’t as good at magic and had to tie my curse to the cycle of the moon.
I transformed back into a human, but now I turn whenever the full moon is in the sky, whether I like it or not. ”
As they rounded a bend, the scar on his jaw came into sight. Tasia rarely thought about it anymore, but something about his tone when he mentioned shifting into his human form made a connection in her mind.
“Is that how you got your scar? You—oof!” She slammed into his back when he stopped walking.
Mitch spun to face her with wide eyes. “How on earth could you have known that?”
Tasia tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “That one time I saw you change, I noticed that it starts with your head and moves down. If you were transformed without knowing it was going to happen, I thought maybe you had been scratching your jaw with your back paw or something.”
A disbelieving laugh softened his shock. “That is exactly what happened. I dealt with a lot of fleas as a kid. I can avoid them now, but I was really itchy when the stranger was trying to save the day.” He ran a hand over the scar. “My face reverted to human skin before my claws disappeared.”
When he shook his head again, Tasia promised not to share that particular detail. “I mean, I haven’t told anyone anything about you, and I can’t tell anyone without revealing that you can turn into a wolf, but I get the feeling that your reputation would take a hit if this got out, and—”
Mitch held up a hand and laughed. “Whoa there. I know. I trust you not to say anything.”
“Oh, right.” Heat crept up her neck. “Well, good.”
He smirked at her for a moment, then slowly turned around to keep walking.
Another aspect of his story snagged her interest. “I’ve never heard of a human being able to do magic like that . . .” she mused aloud.
His grunt suggested he didn’t have an answer for that. Several steps later, he spoke over his shoulder. “Your turn. How did you find yourself in Boschivo?”
After hearing him share such intimate (and potentially embarrassing) details about his life, there was no way she couldn’t reciprocate. Her stomach clenched at the idea that he might hate her when he knew why she was here.
Taking a deep breath, she dove right in. “My sister, Cindy—or stepsister, rather—wanted to marry Prince Frank. His brother, Charming, is the crown prince of Diomland.” Tasia noticed she was waving her hands a bit wildly as she talked and folded her arms to control them. “I—”
Her throat closed, and she tried to swallow, then coughed when she choked on her own saliva. Mitch walked on, giving her time to compose herself.
“I betrayed my family by telling Prince Frank something that caused him to change his mind about her.” Tasia took a shaky breath; she could still hear the angry accusations of her mother and sisters telling her that she had ruined everything.
“I take it she didn’t marry him?” Mitch prompted.
“No. She had to settle for Prince Charming.” She thought she heard him react, but her mind was already on what had happened afterward. “As soon as they found some relatives far enough away, they shipped me out here.”
Tasia watched his back move as he filled his lungs. She prepared herself for the clarifying questions he was going to ask. Explaining in detail how dumb she had been had her hunching against the dismissal and scorn she had come to expect.
“Tell me about the family you are staying with now. Galanis, is that right?”
It took her a moment to adjust to what he had asked and not what she thought he would ask. “They are something like eight cousins four times removed.”
“Oh, so you’ve always been close, then.”
A laugh flavored with relief and amusement poured out of Tasia. “Yes.” She giggled. “Very close.”
“I bet you’ve been exchanging letters since before you were born,” he teased.
Her posture relaxed in increments as he asked more questions about her “cousins.” He thought that Chara sounded like a cute handful and sympathized over Mother Anthi’s refusal to acknowledge uncomfortable subjects.
They spent no small amount of time hypothesizing about Stavros’ employment and about the actual fairness of being expected to donate “all” of her earnings to the family coffers.
When she told him about Pagona and her friends, Mitch turned around to raise one eyebrow at the name Bunny. This derailed Tasia’s train of thought so thoroughly, they had to stop before crossing the log bridge so she could finish laughing.
They parted ways soon after. Tasia knew Mitch hadn’t fully bought her story about what had happened in Diomland, but she was grateful for the reprieve. She would share the rest of the details, in time. For now, it was enough that he hadn’t rejected her yet.