12. Cain
Cain
Noah's head came up inside the cottage before he knew why.
I was in the herb bed at the back of the cottage with the spade in my hand, finishing the line of rosemary I turned the afternoon before, and I heard the boy through the kitchen wall — the sharp inhale, the half-beat of stillness, then the wolf in his small throat saying a name.
"Mommy… it’s Mommy…!"
Marion.
Both our wolves knew. And panicked.
I was on my feet and moving before the second shout came through the wall, and the spade was already in the soil where I dropped it, and the back door of the cottage was already open under my hand.
Noah was on the back step with his bare feet on the boards and the lore book on the floor behind him where he dropped it.
I came down the path to the river.
The trees blurred on either side. The path under my boots was the same one I watched her walk an hour before, a wooden bucket against her hip and a carrying-stick over her shoulder — and I didn't see that either.
I let my wolf take over. The man in me had never been quick enough for the moments that mattered in his life and wasn't going to be quick enough for this one. The wolf in me was.
I came to the bank.
The bank dropped away to the gravel where I saw her start down the path in the half-light at dawn, and the turn of the water below was no longer shallow.
The river was running high. The current took the gravel bend and ran hard against the stone at the far side, and Marion was against it — half against the stone, half in the current, her shawl in the water around her shoulders.
Her face had no color. Her body had stopped fighting the river.
I went in.
The cold of the water came up the line of my legs, over my belt, and into the wool of my shirt.
I reached her in three strides. The current pulled her shawl against my hand — I let the shawl go and got the meat of my forearm under her shoulders, and I lifted.
Her head came back against my collarbone, and the wolf in me made a sound of terror and panic with six years of weight behind it.
I carried her out.
I laid her on the flat stones at the bank.
I checked her ribs first, because her body had been up against a stone.
Her head next — the cut at her hairline was already darkening above the left eyebrow, a thin red line that wasn't on her face an hour ago.
Her hands next, because the hands were how I knew her at the kettle nights ago, and I needed to know they were still hers.
I checked her throat for the pulse and I found it.
I checked the bones on her wrists. I checked every finger.
I checked everything.
I hadn't put hands on a human woman this way in six years and the way I was doing it wasn't 'field-medicine' by any measure.
I didn't look at her face until I counted every finger, and by the time my hands reached her right ankle, a roar built in my chest that I wasn't going to be able to keep quiet for much longer.
I laid my palm against her cheek. Her skin was cold under it.
The cold was the wrong cold, and I held my palm where it was and waited.
She coughed.
She coughed river water onto the stones beside her head and she opened her eyes.
She saw what was in my face.
I saw what was in hers.
Something in my chest let go.
Neither of us spoke. Noah came down the path at a hard run a half-beat behind us and pressed his wet face into her shoulder and didn't let go — his fingers in the wool of her shawl, his body shaking.
I sat back on my heels on the cold of the gravel, my hand on Marion's cheek and Noah at her shoulder, and I let the wolf in me hold the three of us where we were.
After a few minutes, I carried her back to the cottage.
I didn't set her down. Noah walked at my side the whole way up the path with his small wet hand wrapped around two of his mother's fingers where they hung over my arm.
The three of us came up the path together like a small fierce family — the man with the woman in his arms, the boy at his side, the cottage at the end of the path with its kitchen door still open from where I came through it at the run.
I laid her on the bed in the back room.
I didn't let myself look at her bed. I set her down. I pulled the wet shawl out from under her shoulders and laid it on the chair, and I stayed for one beat to be sure her chest was rising under the dry cover before I went back out.
Noah was at the stove with the kettle already on.
He set it on himself. He was nine and a half-wolf, and his hands moved across the kitchen at the steady pace of a boy who watched his mother set a kettle a thousand times.
He was tending the fire at the grate with the iron tongs he wasn't tall enough to use without standing on the step. He didn't look up when I came in.
I poured the water.
I carried the cup back to the back room and sat down on the edge of the bed beside her, held the cup in both hands and waited for her to be ready to take it.
She slept.
I sat on the edge of the bed until Noah came in from the kitchen and climbed up onto the foot of the cover, his small dark head against the rise of her hip, and then I moved to the chair beside the bed and sat down in it with my hands open on my knees.
Both the wolf and the man in me were pulling in three directions at once.
A few hours later, the afternoon went the long way.
I sat with my hands open on my knees. The boy had gone down on the floor at my foot sometime in the second hour.
The cover hadn't moved off her shoulders since I pulled it up there.
I watched the steady rise of her chest under the cover.
I watched the thin red line above her left eyebrow that she would carry for the rest of her life.
I counted the rise of her chest under the cover.
Somewhere in the third hour of the counting, the man's mind came back.
The man's mind asked the question the wolf's mind wasn't bothering to ask, because the wolf had answered it already at the bank with the cold under my palm. This was no mere slip and fall.
Who in the neutral woods between Swiftwater and Brackenhold would put a hand at the back of a witch's apprentice who walked the same river path for five years?
The answer was a thing the man in me had no desire to give yet — though the wolf was eager to.
* * *
She woke at dusk.
She opened her eyes and she looked at me in the chair.
I held out the cup.
She took it in both hands and drank slowly. I didn't ask her how she felt. The wolf in me knew. The man in me sat in the chair for four hours and the man in me wasn't going to begin asking her questions he didn't need her to answer.
The boy on the floor stirred and climbed up onto the foot of the bed and pressed his small dark face against her shoulder and stayed there.
She put one hand on his hair.
She kept the cup in the other.
She ate a little of the broth Noah brought her from the kitchen and she didn't speak more than a word or two through the eating of it. The back room held the three of us in the dusk light like a true family. She slept again.
I went out to the porch.
I sat on the top step.
The night came up over the cottage. The moon came up over the woods to the east, and I sat with my hands open on my knees and didn't know what I was waiting for.
I found out an hour after full dark.
The kitchen door opened behind me. The latch turned, careful.
The bare foot on the boards was the one I came to know through the wall of the back room over three weeks of nights, and the woman behind it crossed the porch in her dressing gown to the top step and sat down beside me.
She didn't look at me. She held her arms around her knees, and the cold of the boards was under both of us.
The wool of my cloak was in the small space between her hip and mine, like the last time we were here.
She didn't move away.
She spoke, very quietly. "I felt a hand."
The wolf in me had known it before she said it, but it didn’t take the anger out of me.
"I know," I replied.
She didn't speak again.
The night moved over the cottage with the moon over the woods to the east.
I didn't put my hand on her hand. I kept my hand where it was.