Page 86 of With Fangs and Claws (The Wolf Queen 1)

“Wolf prints?” Weyland said, staring down at the tracks into town.

But I was down and out of my saddle before any of them could say anything about it, walking over the tracks and obliterating them with my own, squelching through the thin layer of mud before I came to a stop by the piece of cloth.

“What’ve you found?”

I just stared at Axe, feeling like I was looking at him for the first time. He was just a face, a man, a good-looking one, but one of many. Nothing to do with me. But his gentle tone, I clung to that, somehow knowing I’d need it. I turned back to the fabric and then pulled it from the mud.

She was well loved, this dolly. Made from brightly coloured cotton that had long faded after being dragged around, chewed on and clutched tight, I knew exactly how she’d been constructed. Women in the villages often made them for their daughters, using a square of old fabric from a ruined dress. The ‘head’ was created from a wad of cloth pushed into the centre of the square, then the maker stitched around it, the rest of the fabric forming a primitive dress. If the woman had the skill, she might stitch on a face, like this little poppet. The thread had gone fuzzy from being handled so often, but the blue eyes and cupid’s bow mouth were still plain. The little face wore a veil of black mud and for some reason that had my hand gripping the doll tight.

“Darcy?” Axe said, following me as I walked now, briskly, towards the first house. I stuffed the doll into my pocket and then pulled the swords I’d been given out of their scabbards, moving faster now I was armed. “Darcy?”

Something was wrong. Dolls like this were treasured little effigies, talismans for a young child against all that scared them about the world. They hugged them close when they saw strangers, at night when in bed and everything was dark, when their father appeared at their door, demanding you walk down the hall to his room to answer for your sins. No girl let go of her dolly without due cause.

“Darcy!”

Axe shouted, several of the men shouted to me, as I broke into a run. I moved so much easier now that this other part of me had risen, with the endless lope of a wolf. Because I was on the hunt and I had the scent in my nose, but unlike an animal I would not like what I caught.

I wrenched open the door to the nearest building, the stone walls having saved it from much of the fire damage, though the roof was just a cluster of bare broken boughs. But when I looked inside, I think I wished the fire had burned out the contents as well.

It could’ve scoured the site clean, burned up all the evidence of what had been perpetrated here, turned it all into innocuous black ash. Instead, I was forced to face something I hadn’t for some time.

When I was a young girl,I used to help Cook feed the chickens. It was really the job of the kitchen girls, but they were busy enough to dump the chicken feed with me and let me scatter seed to my heart’s content. If the daughter of a duke wanted to dirty her hands caring for the birds, then who would say no to me?

The chickens had come to know and like me, as provider of the food, and when I turned my hand at taking the eggs from their nests, they seemed remarkably placid about it. I was stealing their babies for Cook to turn into my delicious breakfast, but people had done this since the first time they produced an egg, so they seemed to accept this as a necessary sacrifice for the sake of being fed.

The kitchen staff had warned me of the folly of naming chickens, but I did, in the contrary way of privileged children. I was an only child with few friends and only a bewildering array of adults bossing me around. Giving every chicken a name, developing a sense of each one’s personality, having endless conversations with them as I fed them, then raked out the chicken poo from their enclosure seemed natural.

And then I discovered why I’d been warned.

The stupid thing about eradicating all the wolves in Grania meant that we had a serious fox problem, because there were few large predators to keep their numbers in check. I knew this, but somehow I’d felt like I’d cast a spell on the chicken coop, with my names and morning feeding ritual. I was Lady Darcy of Chickentopia and no ill could come to my subjects during my reign.

“Darcy…”

Cook said then, Axe said now, as I walked up to the doorway, standing in it but not willing to step any further. Cook had said something hurriedly, her hands, Axe’s hands trying to steer me away from the carnage within.

“Don’t look, don’t look,” they said.

But how could I look away? The chickens had been torn to pieces; blood and feathers and limp bodies littering the coop with no one to mourn them but me and, right now, I felt the same way. There were bodies here, adults and children, but I couldn’t say exactly how many, because just like the chickens, they’d been ripped asunder, reducing people to chunks of meat, destroyed not to fill an animal’s belly or for any other reason than for the thrill of the kill.

I wrenched myself away, went stumbling into the burnt remains of a cottage garden, the trail rations we’d eaten for lunch coming right back up. Axe grabbed me, held me still, pulled my hair out of my face and his big hand rubbed circles on my shoulder blades as I emptied everything out of me.

“What the fuck?” came a low growl, indicating someone else had seen the grave site, but that’s not what caught my attention.

I spat out the last of my bile, then moved, thrusting my swords in my scabbards before throwing myself over the low stone fence then walking swiftly across the burnt rows. I dropped my centre of gravity right down until I was almost crawling, then over in the shadows of a small lean to, I saw a pair of eyes. I moved slower, much slower, then sent a frantic hand signal to whoever was following me to stop, then pulled out the little muddy doll from my pocket.

“Hello…” My voice sounded rough and rusty and that sent the pair of eyes scuttling back deeper into the shadows. “I’m sorry, I know I sound a little growly, but I’m not going to hurt you.”

I laid the doll on the ground then, just inside the darkness of the structure. I shuffled back a little then and waited. Frantic little whispers broke the silence, but only just, then were followed by a little sniffle. A small hand reached out then, one so tiny it hurt my heart to see it, jerking out and then snatching the doll before it was gone again.

“Something came here,” I said. “Something that hurt you. We just want to help because—”

A thready little growl cut my speech off and with it came a wild scrabble of limbs. A boy, perhaps all of nine, popped out of the shadows, but he wasn’t just a boy. His eyes blazed bright blue, his teeth had become tiny fangs as his bloodied, muddied form launched itself at me.

“Gods above, Darcy!” Axe shouted, but I didn’t care. I caught that thin little body in my arms, felt him thrash in my grip, copping a smack to the ear that had my head ringing, then felt his fangs sink into my shoulder, bringing with it a sharp, bright burst of pain.

“It’s alright.” My attempt to soothe the boy was pitiful, tears clogging my throat because everything hurt. The bite hurt, the devastation in the house hurt, that tiny little hand snatching the doll hurt, and I wasn’t sure if I could bear it. I would’ve gladly gone back to the castle and let Malia and the queen trample me over and over rather than deal with this. But I held the boy as he worried at my flesh, right up until Axe stepped up, pushing a finger between the boy’s teeth and my skin, forcing his jaws open.

“You’ve done well, young warrior,” he said in a voice as rich and warm as a fur cloak. “You’ve protected your family, kept them safe until help arrived, and now help has come. We’re here to look after you, to right whatever wrongs caused this.”

I felt the moment when the boy went limp in my arms, a small girl crawling out when he did. She held the dolly tight to her chest, staring up at us with wide blue eyes, but not coming forward until her brother burst into tears.

These were not the sobs of a spoiled child or the wails of a deprived one. These were the ugly, hacking howls of a child who has seen something they never should have, where all of their helplessness, desperation and rage was cried out of them. And as I soothed the boy through this, I found I did the same. I tried to keep my tears quiet, to try not to compete with his pain, but damn me, if I could hold them back. They burned their way out of my sockets like caustic acid, turning my vision to a blurred mess. And that’s when she crept closer. Tiny arms went around her brother, around me, and for just a moment, we grieved under the cool mountain sky.

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