Page 93 of With Fangs and Claws (The Wolf Queen 1)

Chapter 38

“The girl must come with us to the temple to train with the Wolf Maidens.”

The next morning, I walked up the grand stairs of the temple and saw the ancient carvings of wolves with arched backs in the granite stone. Semiprecious gems had been roughly faceted and used to create eyes in the beasts as they were frozen mid lope along the walls of the building. And at the top of the steps, Mother Aeve stood, wearing a flowing robe of dark velvet, her gnarled hands resting on her cane.

She and the queen had appeared in the princes’ suite early the morning after our return to Snowmere, just as the lot of us were stumbling out of bed. Queen Aurora had stared at me, sporting a smug smile as the priestess made her declaration. There would be no further procrastination. So, here I was. I would find out exactly what these Wolf Maidens were and why the queen seemed so enthusiastic about putting me among them, but first, I bowed to the priestess.

“Welcome, young wolf,” she told me, then smiled. “Come, come. I’ll take you to where the Maidens practise their arts. You know very little about them, yes?”

“Yes. Apart from the fact they are fearsome warriors, always female and always celibate. Oh, and they protect the royal family.”

Mother Aeve snorted. “The pack leader will weep at how her order has been summarised. Back before the humans came, the two-souled outnumbered those with one in this land.”

We passed inside the temple as she spoke, a strange kind of hush settling over us. The ceilings were high here, but not in the pitiless way of the palace. Rather than trying to make you feel small, this place seemed to place you in amongst a great mythos. Murals on the wall depicted men, women and wolves completing feats of wonder, their stories playing out as you passed.

“There were those of the two-souled, women who did not wish to take a husband nor bear children. The wolf spirit beat hard in them, resulting in women who ran across the plains for the sheer pleasure of it. Ones who caught their food in their hands and tore it to pieces. Ones that refused to be domesticated.”

The priestess eyed me then and it felt like she could see straight through me.

“Having packs of feral wolf women roaming the foothills was… discomfiting at best and resulted in the wanton deaths of citizens at worst.”

I shuddered then, seeing again the destruction of Wildeford.

“So the order was formed. In here, women with a wolf soul can be free to nurture it, to feed that part of themselves.”

“And that’s what you think I have?” I asked. “A wolf soul?”

She paused then, and that stopped me in my tracks. She stared at me with a small smile on her face, like I wasn’t a person whose humanity hid my emotions, but rather as though my inner self was covered in a thin, semi-permeable membrane. All of my secrets, my thoughts, my feelings, they were exposed to her and she searched with sharp eyes for what she needed to know.

“You’ve never really found anywhere where you fit in, have you, Darcy?”

I went to answer, but my words stuck in my throat.

“The Granians would have put forward considerable… incentives for you to sit quietly, to be demure, to be a good little girl, but you couldn’t, could you? Something throbbed deep inside you, something that had you striding across land my forebears ran across on feet as well as paws. You went to the places of mystery.”

I saw then the pool with the rocks carved with wolves, my fingers tracing the shapes.

“You hunted the open plains.”

The stag, standing there and munching on the grass as I stood hidden, my bow drawn.

“You sought to sharpen your teeth and your claws with Nordred, even when women in your world were told to stay placid and docile. They had a wolf in their midst and on some level, they knew it.”

When Mother Aeve moved toward me, I just blinked, too slow to jerk away when she grabbed my shirt and pulled the collar back as far as it would go. She nodded when she saw the scars on my skin, as if they confirmed something to her.

“There is a wolf that grows in some women, one that is always hungry. It forces her to move, to pace, to run. It forces her to hunt. It meets a challenge with four paws planted on the earth and it will not back down until it succeeds or is bested.” She let out a shuddering breath.

“Is that you, Darcy?”

She looked impossibly sad then and I had no idea why. But her words, they stirred something inside me, something restless. Fur prickled across my skin, appearing and disappearing with each breath. When I inhaled, I was human, but when I exhaled? I felt the bones in my face begin to ache, wanting to shift, but I shook my head, suppressing it.

“I feel like I should be able to answer that question,” I replied. “I’m twenty. Surely, I should know, but…” I traced the intricate designs on the temple floor with my eyes, some of the tiles featuring the imprint of a wolf’s paw. “But I feel like I grew up in a world that was too small and I thought that was all there was. I’ve had that world torn away and now I’m too busy trying to understand it to be able to work out where I fit in.”

“A good answer,” Aeve said finally, then tapped her cane on the ground, before leading me further into the temple. “I sensed that ambivalence too. But the only way to discover what you are is to try things, yes?”

“Yes,” I replied and then my eyes started questing down the hall to where I could hear the muffled sounds of women doing something.

“Come then, young wolf, and let’s see what you are to become.”

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