Hans was in a surprisingly good mood when she found him filling the divots left around the butcher’s shop by the elk. She’d only ever seen three expressions on Hans: vacant curiosity, frustrated anger, and unbridled glee. The glee was fading back into curiosity as he watched the village square.
“Do you have time for me today?” Liesel asked. She’d planned other words, nicer words, but face-to-face with him she couldn’t get them out.
“Oh. Yes.” Hans sat back on his heels, throwing a hand over his eyes to block the weak sunlight. “My father’s busy with the elk Gottfried took down, so we don’t have to go to the barn. Wasn’t that amazing? All those elk?”
“Shouldn’t you be helping him? That must be a lot of meat.”
“No—he’s angry at me.” Hans rolled his eyes. “He thinks I stole another one of his knives. The little ones that Godric makes for him. Told me to stay out here until I decide to give it back to him.”
Something down the street caught his attention and the expression on his face was immediately eclipsed by frustrated anger. Wenzel and Heike had come out of the inn and were making their way across the square.
“Ishouldtake one of those knives and plant it in the inn. Do you think my father would think Wenzel stole it? Maybe I couldconvince him Wenzel was going to trade it for something nice when the merchants came to town...”
“I think he’d think you put it there to frame Wenzel. Now are we going, or have you decided to sit here all day talking about elks and sabotage?”
Hans grumbled something she didn’t hear, stood, and took her hand. He pulled her around to the back entrance of the shop, where he and his father lived.
The rhythmicthump thumpof the butcher’s knife accompanied them the entire time they spent in Hans’s bed. Between the thumping and Hans’s mechanical indifference, Liesel felt like she spent two hours there, though the sun had hardly moved in the sky. When they finished, Hans looked her over and said, “You should put your hair in a braid.”
She clamped her lips shut and left. Hans didn’t chase after her. Halfway home, she started to cry again, and didn’t stop until she buried herself beneath the covers of her bed.
The storm did not reappear that night, but Tomas did.
Liesel had dragged his bed in front of the door again in case the wind picked up, and she’d fallen into a light and restless sleep. A knock roused her from her uneasy nightmares. It was prim, three short raps, like Heike’s had been that morning, excepteven Heike would know better than to go around knocking on doors in the middle of the night.
Tomas sat on the edge of his bed, watching her. His glow filled the room, though his body looked shrunken, as if his insides had shriveled up and were leaking out his eyes. He looked starved. He looked dead. Liesel’s breath caught like she’d been dunked in cold water. She held tight to her screams and sat up.
“You needed to tell me something,” she said. “What was it?”
Tomas disappeared from the edge of his bed and reappeared on the edge of hers. His hand was close enough to grab hers where it rested on top of the sheets, though he didn’t. It took all her willpower not to move away from him.
“Do you remember what father said about the children of Greymist Fair when we were young? Remember?” Tomas looked up at her, eyes pleading. “He used to say there were no wolves in the forest because they were all here, causing trouble. He said we were little wolves. I used to believe him. I was never afraid of the forest because I was a wolf, and nothing hunts wolves.”
Liesel remembered her father coming home from long hours on the Klein farm, yelling about wolves and mayhem because he couldn’t get his two children under control. His temper had always cowed her, but it had excited Tomas.
“I was afraid of the forest that day. Something was watchingme, waiting. I was chased. There were two wolves. The first one was on all fours, huge and dark, but it disappeared when the second wolf appeared.” Tomas touched his chest with the fingertips of his left hand. They circled his heart, miming tearing, ripping his chest open. “The second one stood on its hind legs like a man but had a great big belly like a pig, and its claws flashed in the light.
“The second wolf clawed into me. I leaked out. The wolf tore my clothes and took my shoes off, and then carried me into the forest. Not far from the road, just far enough that no one would come looking. The wolf covered me with leaves and branches. It’s cold here, it’s so cold here.”
He scooted closer. He cried, and his insides gushed down his cheeks.
“You wouldn’t run away, Liesel, would you? You wouldn’t run away if you saw the second wolf.”
“No, I wouldn’t run.”
“Please stop crying,” he said. “It’s so cold here already.”
Liesel blinked and he was gone.
The next morning she dressed, gathered some water and bread, and set off down the west road before the sun came up.
Three
Liesel had never spent much time on the road. When she was younger, the children of Greymist Fair had dared one another to see how far they could go to the east or the west without turning back. Liesel had gone only once, and when she’d rounded the first bend and was out of sight of the village, the hairs on her neck prickled. When she turned back, the road was longer than it had been before, and she couldn’t see the village through the trees. Only when Tomas started calling to her did the trees part and the lanterns lead her home.
This time there was no one to call her home, so she imagined Tomas standing on the road at the edge of the woods, waiting for her.
The walk to the Idle River Bridge took hours. When she passed over the river and looked up, a heavy blanket of gray clouds covered the sky, but it was still bright enough for Liesel to know that it had to be nearing noon. The woods around herwere still, the silence broken every now and then by distant calls of winter birds.
