The words stick in his throat, and he chokes on them, but then they’re out, falling heavily to the ground between them.
‘I become a wolf.’
Her silence is a wall. Perhaps she thinks he speaks in jest or riddles. Perhaps she’s waiting for him to dig deeper into his own grave. He swallows, mouth dry, and tries to pull togetherfurther explanations, but can think of none. What else is there to say?The deer that were found dead in the king’s forest, that was me. I am a monster. I have always been a monster.
He says instead, ‘I go into the forest. I try not to stray too far from home, so that I can find my way back.’
She meets his gaze. ‘You are a garwolf.’ Her careful, even tone frightens him; it is as impossible to interpret as her expression.
‘If that is what you call it when a man loses his skin but not his mind,’ he says. ‘I . . . I know myself, usually. But yes. I suppose that is the word for it.’
He sees her swallow. Her throat is so pale and fragile. He understands too well what it means to be afraid of him, of the wolf, and he hates that she now shares that fear, and that he cannot relieve it. He knows that, in this moment, it means nothing that she has slept by his side for a year and always woken unhurt, because the man she thought she was sleeping beside is not the one who has revealed himself to her.
She says, ‘Clothed?’
He cannot help himself: he frowns. ‘What?’
‘Do you go clothed, when you are a wolf?’
‘No,’ he admits. Somehow there’s shame in that confession, though he’d never expect his hounds and beasts to wear garments. ‘I go naked.’
She considers this. Perhaps these practical questions are a way to avoid the horror of it all, keeping it at arm’s length, or perhaps she doesn’t believe him, thinks this a figment of an imbalanced mind, and probes him only to see how far the story goes.
‘What do you do with your clothes,’ she asks at last, ‘when you . . . change?’
‘I leave them somewhere I can find them again,’ he says. ‘I—’ He breaks off. He has never had to explain this before;his cousin knew him in his youth and understood his condition before he had the language to describe it. Now that he must articulate it aloud, he struggles to shape it into phrases that make sense. ‘I need my clothes to stay human,’ he confesses. ‘Without them, I might not be able to come back.’
Her expression doesn’t change, but when she says, ‘Oh,’ there’s an odd note in her voice, as though she is beginning to understand him.
‘Yes.’ He sounds pitiful. He almost pities himself, and he hates it, that desolate helplessness in his tone –yes, I hide them in the woods so that I might dig them up later like the dog I am. ‘There is . . . a chapel, a little way off the road, where I am able to leave them and know that they will be undisturbed.’ He creeps in there with his skin still shifting and seeks absolution and humanity at the same time, dressing himself before the altar and the eyes of God.
‘You must struggle,’ she says carefully, ‘without somebody to help you.’
For a moment, he imagines her going out to the edge of the woods to clothe him as he stumbles home, still half a beast. Her hands fastening his garments, sewing his sleeves, binding him into his skin. A little too late, he realises that this is another way to ask if he has trusted some other with his secret, in place of her.
‘My cousin has helped, in the past. He is the only one who knows. Otherwise I must manage for myself.’
He cannot interpret the look on her face. He feels as if he has lost the right to understand her, after so many months of lies and masks. He waits for her to push him away, or to run screaming from the house, but she doesn’t.
‘But if your clothes were taken . . .’ she begins.
‘I might come back.’ Or he might not. Or he might comeback only for his bones to twist and warp on him again, inverting him even when he thought he was safe. He might spend days and nights shifting back and forth, his organs remade over and over until there was nothing left of them and nothing left of him. Perhaps it would kill him, eventually. Perhaps it would drive out his sense and condemn him to madness. ‘I think I would struggle to stay. It’s my greatest fear, you know. Not being able to stay.’
‘You want to come back.’
‘Always,’ he tells her, voice low and hungry. ‘Were it my choice, I would never leave you. You must know that.’
There’s a long pause during which he expects her to refute it –how can I know that, when you have lied to me for so long?– but at last she smiles and says, ‘I know that.’
He doesn’t dare lean forward to kiss her. He’s terrified, however irrationally, that she’ll recoil despite her gentle words. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says instead. ‘I should have told you. I couldn’t find the words.’
She nods. She hasn’t forgiven him, but maybe she understands his sin a little better now that she has the truth of it. ‘Your cousin is the only one who knows?’
‘Since my mother died, yes. I have always kept it secret.’
‘So you have not told the king.’
‘No, and were it my choice, I would that it would stay that way. I don’t intend to give him any cause to regret knighting me, but if the truth were to become known, no doubt many would think he shouldn’t have done so. Perhaps they’re right.’
