Running with the Pack

BLENDED C.E. MURPHY

The pack had been born savages and had, almost to a man, died that way.

Almost: almost. She had been a whelp the day the hunters came, dozens of them on their thundering black horses with the pack fleeing before them. Her mother had thrown her beneath a long-dead tree, and she’d watched dark legs flash by, dangerous broad hooves kicking up the snow.

She had seen the blood, from her hiding place. Had seen it when the hunters rode back, triumphant despite their own losses. Stripped skins still steamed in the cold, making their horses toss their heads at the scent of death. She hadn’t known, then, that it was her family, her cousins and her friends, who lay strewn across saddles and stuffed into saddlebags. Not until she was much older did she come to understand what had happened. That her family had run until they could run no more, and then had turned to fight. Beasts, turning tooth and claw against the men who hunted them. Horses died; men died.

But mostly, wolves died.

Fear had held the whimpers in her throat, even when the smell of men and killing was gone. Only when the forest went black with night did she creep forward on her belly and put her nose out into the cold.

A man’s big hand caught her by the scruff and hauled her into the air. She had never seen a man so close: he was huge and completely without fur except long gray crackling stuff on his head, and unlike the men on horses he wore no coverings to keep himself warm. Her tail clamped over her belly, wet with terror.

He curled his lip back, showing long teeth, though the wrinkle of his forehead was like her alpha’s: hiding amusement behind more obvious exasperation. Cubs, that expression said, and was always followed by a pack-wide chuckle that was as much attitude of pose as vocalization. The tip of her tail relaxed from its clench to offer a tentative wag.

“Well,” he said, and it was the first time she ever heard a wolf speak so, aloud and with words used by men. His voice was light, a thinness to it that said its howl would pierce the moon. “One left, of a pack. But a young one, so perhaps there’s some hope you might listen.” He dropped her with the carelessness of any parent weary of carrying a wriggling cub. She scrambled back to the snow’s crusty surface and he crouched, brushing cold from her ears and nose. “Come, pup. We must teach you to survive.”

Then he turned, and before his hand touched the snow it was a paw, and his gray grizzling hair thick fur, and his tail made a beacon for her to follow as they ran from where their pack had died.

“No ward?” The question cut through polite murmuring, briefly silencing it. Markéta knew already not to turn; not to admit she’d heard. It wasn’t that anyone imagined the sharp words hadn’t reached her. It was merely that humans, inexplicable humans, pretended rudeness and gossip didn’t exist, as if by so pretending they could excuse their own bad behavior. Few of them would survive a week, within a pack. They would be cuffed, stared down, and ultimately rejected, if they played at the back-biting which was a figurative, if not literal, part of human society.

The pack had been born savage, Markéta thought dryly, but humans had taught her the real meaning of the word.

“But she is too young to be a widow . . . !” The woman—an older one, with breasts of a size to feed a litter of puppies for all that she had only two—modulated her voice this time, but it made no difference. She might have whispered, and even through the ballroom’s endless echoing chatter, Markéta would have heard her. It was not a gift, the retention of hearing and scent in her human-changed form; humans stank, and covered it with perfumes that worsened the original stench. Worse, they insisted on gathering in huge packs, where their sweat and nattering voices blurred into a nauseating background.

Still, she would have humans change, not herself. She had gone far enough already in becoming as they were, a truth she was reminded of every time another woman learned her story and spread it as a bit of titillating gossip. She was quite young, she heard it emphasized, somewhere between seventeen and twenty-one. Old enough, certainly, to be married—but if not married, much too young to be on her own. But her guardian, if he’d ever existed, had died, leaving her to make her way as an eligible female amongst society’s snapping wolves.

Markéta snorted loudly enough to cause comment, and thrust off societal grace to elbow her way out to the manor gardens. They were too tame, too controlled, but they were also as close to wilderness as she would find so long as she maintained the fiction of polite birth. She was aware—as a human woman would not be—that two men followed her, both trying harder to avoid one another than find her. One was older, in his forties at least, and the other hardly more than a whelp of her own tender years.

Which were far more tender than the gossiping women within could ever imagine. Wolves lived only a short span. It was an ancient beast indeed who saw fifteen summers. Markéta was three, breeding age to be sure, but there were almost no others of her kind left with whom to mate. The hunters had seen to that. The hunters, and her people’s determination to live the free life of wild things, no matter what the cost. The memory of scent rose up, bitter, black. The hunt’s leader had smelled that way, like hot tar sitting at the back of her throat. She would never escape its flavor.

“Miss Alvarez.” Her name sat awkwardly on a British tongue, but she’d had no sense of how human names were put together, when she’d chosen it. She’d merely liked its sound, Markéta Alvarez, and had only later realized that they were not two names that the English race expected to lie cheek and jowl. She might have been Margaret Allard and satisfied them, but by then it was too late.

Its advantage was that, like everything else about her, it offered no answers, but miles of gossip-satisfying questions. She was surely not dark enough for the Mediterranean descent her last name implied, nor square-faced enough to be from north of the Danube, as her first name suggested. Her eyes were distressingly yellow—a hallmark even the change couldn’t disguise—and her hair, shaggy and thick, was too many colors to be called one. Light, they tended to decide; she was light-haired, but sharp-featured as a Spaniard, and no one could name a family of merit whose bloodlines ran to such extraordinary lengths.

But meritous she must be, else men of various wealth and standing would hardly bother following her into the gardens. Markéta nodded to her suitor without turning his way: his scent was of more use in identifying him than sight. “Master Radcliffe. Surely you endanger my reputation by encountering me unescorted.”

“Surely I’m too old and dull for anyone to think your reputation in any but the safest of hands, with me.” There was not a single note of deprecation in the older man’s voice; he sounded as utterly sincere as any man could. But his posture, half-glimpsed, shouted amusement, announcing he didn’t for a moment believe himself. “If I were some handsome young rake, perhaps . . . ”

“And now I must protest your attractiveness, sir, a boldness which is no fit thing for a lady to do.”

“I should hardly ask you to belie yourself, Miss Alvarez. I have, in my time, made use of a mirror.”

Now she turned to him, smiling, though his attitude would still tell her more than his face ever could. “And what does the mirror show you, Master Radcliffe? A well-dressed gentleman still possessed of a leonine head of hair, whose face bears the wisdom of a man in his prime?”

“My mirror,” he said with a bow, “is not so kind.”

If only his eyes were yellow, and not dark, he would be a man worth mating. Her pack leader had made that clear, as he’d taught her how to cast off the wolf and pretend at being human. There were some few of their people wise enough to put aside the beast in a world growing increasingly cruel to wolves. Some few who had become as Markéta now was, wearing sheep’s clothing in a rather literal sense. Not that her ball gown was wool: it was summer and warm, but she had more often made a dress of what she would have once considered a meal than she liked to think.

It struck her for the first time, as she gazed at Master Radcliffe, that her years were limited. Even with whole seasons spent as human, she might not extend her lifetime beyond two or three times its natural length. She would be dead by thirty, and long since too old to breed by then; that was a duty that should be given over to her daughters as she aged.

Daughters she might never have, if she couldn’t find a mate of her own breed. The pack leader hadn’t told her what to do, should that come to pass. Die alone, without a pack and family of her own, or risk all on a human? Wolves, like humans, largely mated for life. It would be impossible to take a human mate without telling him the truth, even if she were willing to remain human and bear one cub at a time through a pregnancy that lasted most of a year, instead of a blissfully short two months.

The forest and its hunter threat sounded suddenly far more appealing than it had since the day her pack had died. A short and savage life, to be sure, but a simple one too, without the complications of society or the difficulties of cross-breeding. Some of those thoughts were perhaps reflected in her gaze, because Radcliffe stepped forward, a question in his pose.

For the first time in her own memory, Markéta stepped back, avoiding the confrontation of entanglement.

Radcliffe hesitated, surprise and disappointment marking his stance. Before she could speak, another man’s voice said, “Master Radcliffe. Miss Alvarez.”

Her name had a crack in it, wide as a board; her second suitor was barely a man at all. She had been introduced to him earlier in the season, at another ball so crowded his scent was indistinguishable from the masses even when they had danced. Twice, if she recalled; he was handsome enough, and struck her as a man who would spend his life doing her bidding without ever wondering why. Thomas, his name was; the young Master Alistair Thomas. His father and his fortune were of note, and those combined with his affable nature made him the apple of many a young lady’s eye. It would not endear Markéta to her competition that he had come to the gardens seeking her.

She regretted her retreat from Radcliffe already, and all the more as he took a discreet step back, appointing himself the position of elder and guardian with that single move.

“Miss Alvarez,” Thomas said again, then stopped, evidently flustered by her silence. Markéta curtsied toward him, letting the action take her a half-step nearer Radcliffe. The older man’s posture improved very slightly—there was no room for improvement beyond that; he stood straight and tall as a youth already—and Thomas managed to falter again, even without moving or speaking.

“Master Thomas,” Markéta said. “Do you find the gardens to your liking?”

“Gardens?” He blinked, as though unaware of his surroundings until she mentioned them, then rallied with a smile that understandably set hearts a-flutter. “Truly, Miss Alvarez, their beauty diminishes into nothing when such a flower as yourself stands among them. I should hate to take you from your company,” he added, all polite form that had nothing of truth in it. His expression took Radcliffe in, weighed him, and dismissed him as too old and probably too poor. “But perhaps when you return to the ball you would care to dance.”

He irritated her, for some reason. For dismissing Radcliffe, for intruding on the moment she and the older gentleman had shared. It would never do to scold him for his behavior, but there were other ways to make displeasure known. Markéta turned her gaze full on Radcliffe and spoke as clearly as she ever had. “I should like that very much.”

Thomas was affable, perhaps, but not a fool. He stiffened and took one sharp step in retreat. “Then I shall see you inside.”

Markéta nodded, a cool smile already in place as a breeze carried the scent of his tension to her. Black, tarry, thick: a familiar smell strong enough to taste, lingering at the back of her throat. Her remoteness scampered before shock and an upswell of anger. She ought not have mocked Thomas for the break in his voice, for it was hers now, shrill and unattractive: “Do you smoke, Master Thomas?”

Surprise splashed across his face. “I can’t say that I do. What—” Clarity rolled after surprise, and he bent his head to sniff at the shoulder of his coat. “My father’s tobacco. He’s only just back from France, so perhaps I’d have not smelt so strongly of it when first we met. My apologies, Miss Alvarez, if it offends you.”

“It’s . . . ” Markéta closed her eyes, willing away the memory scent brought, though in truth it was her nostrils that needed closing; vision would never offer her as much information as odors could. A moment passed before she looked on the young man again, ready to trust her voice. “It’s an unusually pungent breed of tobacco, I should say. I imagine I’ve encountered it before. Your father hunts, perhaps?”

Delight lit Thomas’s smile. “He does. Are you a hunt enthusiast, Miss Alvarez?”

“I have an unusual interest in hunting.” So softly spoken, eyes downcast, anything to keep the words from the wild honesty they were. It had been so long, so long since she had taken to four legs and chased rabbit and deer; since she had used her senses and her body the way they were meant to be used. And there was more besides, threat in the softly spoken admission; threat which dull human ears couldn’t be permitted to hear.

Nor did Thomas hear it, his zeal entirely for the topic he believed at hand. “How splendid. That is, in fact, why Father’s been to France. He hunts there; the sport here has grown weak, with the eradication of wolves.”

“Come,” Radcliffe said abruptly. “There have been no wolves in England for centuries, Thomas. Watch your tongue; you’ll alarm the lady.”

“There have been a few,” Thomas corrected, but without aggression. He kept his eager eyes on Markéta, not so much as challenging Radcliffe with his gaze. “It is the story put about that there have been none, but there were, indeed, packs left roaming until only a few years ago. They are startlingly canny, wolves, and seem to go to ground for years at a time. But my family has hunted them for generations, at the throne’s behest. Here, in Scotland, in Wales, even in Ireland, and now in France because there’s nothing left to hunt in the isles.”

“I do not believe it.” Radcliffe huffed, and Thomas finally looked away from Markéta, patience in his bearing.

“Perhaps you would like to visit our manor, Master Radcliffe. There my father keeps pelts from all his hunts, and you will see the newest of them has hardly had time to let dust settle. He prefers the alpha male, but in his last English hunt that beast escaped him. It was old, though, and will have died since then, and he has its mate’s fur instead.”

“I should like to see these furs,” Markéta said distantly. “If I may be so bold as to invite myself along, Masters Radcliffe, Thomas?”

Smugness rushed through Thomas’s posture and scent, and the glance he threw at Radcliffe was triumph embodied. “I shall have my coach fetch you on Thursday next, if it suits?”

“That will do,” Markéta whispered. “That will do very well.”

She wanted so very badly to shed her human form and hunt the hunter. For almost a week she’d waited, keeping herself confined in her townhouse, because to leave was to invite temptation. Even cobbled streets and the sour wind carrying civilization’s stench through the city was close enough to wilderness when she had the temptation of a hunt at hand.

It was temptation she could not risk. The thinking part of her—the part her pack leader had tried so hard to develop—recognized that. A wolf wouldn’t go unnoticed in London’s streets, and even if by chance it should, she dared not meet the hunter who had destroyed her family in her lupine form. His gift was killing wolves. Her only chance lay with striking as a woman.

So she paced before the windows until the servants blushed with discomfort; a well-bred young woman did not stare into the world so hungrily, as if waiting to invite it in to ravish her. As if waiting, she thought, to be loosed on it, so she might savage it. It was preposterous, playing the role of a maiden fair, dressed in soft white muslin and pointed shoes. She would have herself barefoot in red and black, the colors of blood and death, but no, no, no. She had to think, keep her mind clear; the man she went to see would be her family’s murderer, and she the only one left to seek vengeance.

“Mum.” The housemaid’s voice stopped Markéta’s stalking. She swept up her cloak, adjusting it crookedly over her shoulders and throwing off the maid’s attempt to help. The girl’s words followed her, their information already imparted by her arrival in the parlour: “The carriage is here, mum . . . .”

“Hold supper,” Markéta commanded. “I don’t know when I shall return.” When, or if, though she would never add fear to the maid’s scent by saying such a thing. The maid agreed, and Markéta was out the door to the coach before her manservant could lend a hand.

The pair of matched bays before the carriage tossed their heads and whickered uncomfortably. Markéta quenched the urge, as she always did, to put her hand beneath their noses and drive their discomfort to madness. Animals knew; they always knew. Horses shied from her, and even the most aggressive dogs snarled and backed away. Cats stood wary, one paw lifted, then disappeared into darkness. Only humans saw nothing more than the girl she presented as; only humans were so blind.

“Miss Alvarez.” The coachman opened the door, but it was the man within who offered his hand to help her up. Radcliffe, not Thomas, and his expression lit with sly pleasure at her surprise. “I was so crass as to insist I be allowed to escort you, Miss Alvarez. My town house is so much nearer your home than Master Thomas’s. It seemed unkind to make his man come all this way, when I was obliged to pass you regardless.”

“I’m delighted. The journey will go so much more quickly with pleasant company.” Markéta drew her skirts in, childishly pleased she hadn’t frightened the horses after all. “Your horses are very fine.”

“Thank you. My family breeds them on our country estate. It is, I’m afraid, the source of our income: gross commercial ventures in horseflesh. Are you shocked, Miss Alvarez?”

“I should think a man able to persuade a thousand pounds of beast to his will would be a firm and fair hand with a household as well. What woman would find that anything but enticing? You must have a fair stretch of land, then, Master Radcliffe.” For a moment the city houses outside the window slipped away, turning in her mind’s eye to pastures and rolling green hills.

“Enough,” Radcliffe admitted. “My favorite stretches are the woods. We have several, some of them very old and peaceful.”

“And unriddled by wolves,” Markéta said softly. “How lonely for them.”

“For the woods, or the wolves?” Radcliffe wondered, and when she glanced at him, lifted his eyebrows. “You disapprove of the hunt.”

“I believe I said I had a peculiar interest in it, sir.”

“You did, but it was my thought that the words said something entirely other than the heart felt. Forgive me my presumption. I did not mean to offend.”

“No,” Markéta said, softly once again. “You have not.”

He put a hand over his heart, and took the topic to the pleasant inconsequentiality of the season’s fine weather, but her gaze strayed to him time and again and she wondered what else he had heard, that she had not said.

Alistair Thomas greeted them with her mother’s pelt in hand.

Society had rules of engagement, meaningless twitter of words like so much hurried birdsong; Markéta knew she must be participating in that, because there would be a resounding, deadly silence if she were not. She did not admire the pelt; that much she was certain of, because Thomas’s pleasure in displaying it faltered. Radcliffe was reserved, allowing precisely what Thomas had insisted on: that it was a new fur, recently taken, and so there had indeed been wolves on England’s shores more recently than he’d known. Markéta had no idea what she herself said, nor how she could say it with any degree of calm.

The fur’s scent was so long gone it might never have been, but even without scent, without life, it could be no one other than her mother. The darker grey streaks above once-yellow eyes had made her fierce, and stripes of white on her muzzle had given her canines extra length to threaten both prey and ill-behaved pups with. She had been mother to the pack, and to see her reduced to a flopping length of skin turned Markéta’s insides cold and hard.

“Did you join this hunt?” She barely knew her own voice, dissonance ringing through it. Worse than dissonance: she could hear the wolf in her voice, even if the men couldn’t. It wanted to howl, and only stringent human decorum kept her from letting it loose.

Disappointment flashed over Thomas’s face. “My father wouldn’t have it. I was a poorer shot than I might have been, and he wouldn’t risk me or the hunt on it. Three men died that day even so.”

“And how many wolves?”

“Nine.” Another man’s voice, deeper and richer than Alistair’s, broke in, and was accompanied by a clatter of footsteps on marbled stairs. Markéta startled, knowing it to be a violent reaction, but there had been nothing to her beyond her mother’s fur in Alistair’s hands. Only lately did she look upward, take in the echoing length of hall they’d been ushered into, its walls mounted with animal heads and its ceiling painted with scenes of the hunt. And this a town house, she thought; the country estates would be exhausting in their attention to murderous detail.

The man on the stairs was as unlike his son in form as could be, an oak to a sapling. He carried no extra weight, just size, and his chiding was good-natured. “Al, you can’t intend to leave our guests in the foyer all afternoon. Forgive my son, madam, master. His enthusiasm at times overwhelms his sense. I’m Alan Thomas, Lord Thomas if you must, though too much ceremony is tedious. And you must be Miss Alvarez. Master Radcliffe. My home is yours, won’t you come in?”

Radcliffe guided her forward when her own feet wouldn’t take her. Her breath was lodged in her throat, stuck there by tar and blackness as Alan Thomas’s scent rolled down the stairs with him. She had thought him a black devil, not fair and jovial, but the taste of blood and death clung to him without remorse. She managed a curtsy so stiff it hurt her knees, but Lord Thomas took no offense. Instead he looked her over, then threw a tobacco-stained smile toward his son.

“This is the young lady with the interest in the hunt? You could hardly have found better, Alistair. Look at her coloring, those eyes, she could be a wolf herself. Oh, Lord forgive me, I’m as rude as he is. I’m a man who speaks my thoughts, Miss Alvarez. Perhaps you won’t hold it against me.”

“Do you favor women who speak theirs, my lord?” Her voice was strangled in her throat, and Radcliffe, unexpectedly, put his hand at her spine, a show of—not lending strength, she thought. Of solidarity, as her mother had once stood by the pack leader.

Lord Thomas’s eyes narrowed, making him suddenly wolfish himself. Not so convivial after all, for all that his gaze was the ice blue of a cub and not gold like an adult. “Would you think it fair, Miss Alvarez, if I said I’d met few women who voiced their thoughts? Whether they have none or whether society has trained restraint into them, I cannot say, but a woman of reason and consequence is a rare thing, in my view.”

Her vision was not good: she saw few colors, and her focus was that of a hunter’s, honing in on a single individual. But it worsened now, until Thomas stood out against a blurred background, prey for the hunting. “Then I will endeavor to impress upon you that a few of us, at least, are as capable of matching wits as any man, my lord.”

“I look forward to it. So you have an interest in the hunt. Do you ride, Miss Alvarez? Can you shoot?” Lord Thomas escorted them into sitting rooms so opulent Markéta might otherwise have laughed. Crystal turned sunlight to shards of light glittering across parquet floors, and overstuffed chairs were gathered to make different sitting areas. One was by the unlit fire, but they were guided to seats overlooking the gardens. A wolf’s pelt, older than her mother’s, lay across one of the sofas, and Alistair tossed her mother’s there with as little regard.

Markéta sat there so she would at least not have to look at the furs. Alistair Thomas sat beside her, casting a subtle glance of victory toward Radcliffe, who gave no signs of noticing as he settled into a chair across from them. Lord Thomas dropped into another armchair, but leaned forward, gaze avid as he awaited Markéta’s answer.

“I’m afraid I’m a poor rider, my lord. Horses do not like me. And the sound of a rifle hurts my ears.”

Polite doubt crawled into his expression. “How then can you be enamored of the hunt?”

“I can track.” Again, Markéta barely knew her own voice. She had spent so long training the snarls and yips out of it, so long working away the growl so all that was left was a pleasant alto. But she bit off the words as though her teeth were long and sharp, and no man who called himself a hunter could mistake the challenge behind them. “What I track, I can kill. What else is there to the hunt, my lord Thomas?”

His lips peeled back from his teeth in what might have been a smile. “No one can always kill what they track, Miss Alvarez. Not even I, and I have many more years experience than you.”

“Almost always,” Markéta whispered, “is often enough.”

Alistair shifted uncomfortably on the seat beside her. “Surely this isn’t an appropriate discussion to hold with a young lady, Father.”

“Oh, on the contrary.” Wicked delight gleamed in Radcliffe’s eyes. “I think it most fascinating. Perhaps a wager, if Miss Alvarez is willing. You have extensive gardens here, Lord Thomas. Dare you pit your tracking skills against the lady’s?”

Curiosity burgeoned in Markéta’s breast, distracting her from the reminders of her family’s death. Lord Thomas could hardly refuse such a wager without a degree of humiliation, which Radcliffe surely knew. She knew her own reasons, certainly, for needling at Thomas, but it had not struck her that Radcliffe might have his own. Nor was there a discrete way to ask, but if they had a common goal she could at least apply more pressure to the suggestion Radcliffe had laid down.

Her smile was brief, but genuine. “A challenge,” she said lightly. “How delightful. I accept.”

Emotion flew across Thomas’s face: chagrin and pride and a willing-ness to humor the poorer folk. “I cannot refuse, if our guest is so certain of herself. You must promise to forgive me if I should come out ahead in this wager, Miss Alvarez. It’s ungentlemanly, but I hate to lose. I cannot make allowances for your sex.”

“I wouldn’t want you to, my lord. And if I should win, I trust you will be as forgiving. What shall our quarry be?”

“I’ve seeded wild boar on the estate.” Thomas watched her carefully, and Markéta made no effort to hide the lifting of her eyebrows.

“Boar is an animal harried by packs, even packs of men, my lord. Would you dare the kill, all alone?” She would not; she was not, even in the face of vengeance, that great a fool. It had been decades and more since boar had roamed Britain freely, just as it had been so long since wolves had. Pack memory told of stolen piglets, delicious to eat, but also told of the size and speed and rage of a full-grown boar. Markéta’s people were larger by some significant part than their single-aspected brethren, but boar met them weight for weight, and sometimes better than. One wolf against a boar was madness.

But one man, unarmed, was dead.

“I have a horse, a gun, and no fear of the creatures. Are you so bold, Miss Alvarez?” Thomas’s smile was the wolf’s again, though no wolf had such a streak of cruelty in it. That was a human trait.

“I had thought a deer, or even a game of hide and seek,” Radcliffe said, dryly enough to almost hide the note of concern in his voice. “Miss Alvarez has made no pretense of tracking differently than you, my lord. She would have no horse, no gun. Surely you wouldn’t pit her against a monster capable of killing a man with a single blow?”

“No,” Markéta said. “Thank you for the concern, Master Radcliffe, but I believe I accept. I should like to prove to Lord Thomas that the hunt can be carried out in more than one way.” This time her smile was as false as firelight was to the sun. “And prove, perhaps, that a woman can be equal to a man in many ways.”

Thomas stood with a clap of his hands. “I’ll have my men harry a boar from the wood, then.”

“Oh, no, sir.” Markéta came to her feet as well, as full of wide-eyed innocence as she could be. “Not on my behalf. I shall enter the wood myself and find my own boar. Perhaps he who returns with the kill first will be declared the winner?”

Tension flushed Lord Thomas’s face, but he nodded. “And tomorrow we’ll dine on the fruits of—our,” he conceded graciously. “Our labor. If you would be so good as to remain with us overnight, Miss Alvarez? Master Radcliffe? I assure you, the estate can absorb you with no thought.”

“It will be our pleasure.” Markéta spoke for Radcliffe, thoughtlessly, but he chuckled and made a murmur of agreement. Smiling, she bobbed a curtsy. “Shall we hunt, then, my lord?”

Boars grunted and squealed, distressed by the scent of a half-forgotten predator. They were complacent, unaccustomed to being harassed by any but men on horseback, and therefore less inclined to fight than to trot heavily through the wood, grumbling without being genuinely afraid. It helped that she only wanted to direct them; one wolf was not enough to hunt a boar, but with canny foresight and enough speed, she could herd a pack.

The numbers mattered: there was the king and his mate, and a handful of half-grown piglets old enough to be both delicious and dangerous. An armed man might succeed against any one of them, but anger the lot and weapons would do little good. That was why hunters, human or otherwise, separated one from its pack.

That was why Markéta did her best to drive them all into Thomas’s arms. Not just for vengeance, though that was key, but because it was good to run, to hunt and harry, to leap from one side of the offended herd to another, snapping her teeth and catching wild scents. She hadn’t stretched her legs so well in months, and playing at a whole pack of wolves was work enough to keep her thoughts honed and focused wholly on the moment.

Even she was shocked when Thomas came out of the brush. He had used the wind well, staying upwards of it, while it had been to her advantage to keep the pigs downward, where their crashing and snorting might carry as well as their scent. She had been at the boars’ heels, far enough back to not anger them; far enough, now, to meld into the low undergrowth and watch as panic struck hundreds of pounds of pig flesh.

The piglets broke in every direction but hers, one rushing for Thomas’s horse. Its mother struck out after it, too late; hooves flashed and the smaller beast’s skull collapsed. It rolled forward, dying body tangling in the horse’s legs, and Thomas fired his gun as the mother boar charged at him. A single shot, and he made it count; few men might have struck the pig’s eye, though her momentum carried her forward and brought the horse and rider down even as she fell.

Thomas leapt clear, the blood that spattered belonging to the horse, not himself: it was done for, belly split open by the female’s bite as she died. The male, screaming fury, rushed Thomas, who flung his gun away and drew a long knife, his pigsticker spear broken by the horse’s fall. There was no fear in his scent, nor could there be, should he hope to survive.

A snarl rose up in Markéta’s throat. She turned it to the sky in a howl, sharp sound of warning and loss, and trotted out of the brush to let the hunter see her.

For a deadly instant surprise took him, and in that moment, so did the boar.

She had never seen one throw a man. It caught his gut easily, and turned its weight against him, flinging him a distance only aborted by the presence of an oak tree. Thomas hit it with bone-cracking force and slid down, blood turning his shirt and hands to crimson. The boar snorted, charged again, then veered away into the broken underbrush, chasing after its offspring.

The horse lay on its side, thrashing. Markéta darted around its dangerous legs, scampered back from bared teeth broader and stronger than her own. There were other predators better suited to this kill than wolves; her jaws were strong, but she had seen how big cats could strangle their prey in mere seconds. Wolves tore and shredded at haunches, only taking the throat last, when the beast was already weakened, and the horse was still too strong with fear to be called weak. Still, it deserved better than the death coming to it, and she lunged in when silence took it for a moment.

It took a long time, blood hot and sweet on her tongue. As its gasps died, she heard Thomas’s increasing, and rolled her eyes, desperate to see but unwilling to release the horse and extend its death any longer. The gun was gone: Thomas had flung it well away, and was bleeding too heavily to search for it. But he was strong, and mercy shown to the horse could count against her own life.

It finally shuddered and died, strength gone from its great muscles. Markéta backed off, head lowered as she swung toward Thomas.

He was white-faced, drained of blood but not emotion; rage etched deep lines in his skin.

“What is man but a pack animal?” The words came from Markéta’s throat distorted, harsh, angry; a wolf was not meant to form human speech. She changed again, staying where she was, lithe on all fours, horse blood drooling down her chin. She had abandoned her clothes before taking lupine form; they would not change with her, and she knew now she looked a wild thing, monstrous human bathed in blood.

“We are only those who chose to heed the wild, so long ago. We learned to stay away from your penned cattle, your easy sheep, your fine horses. We hunted in the wood, and ran as one, while you our brothers constricted yourselves into dull unsensing human form. We did not threaten you, hunt your children, ruin your lives, and yet you came for us. That was my mother!”

She forgot, in springing forward, that she was only a woman, and had no teeth to tear his throat with. Instinct older than thought judged her and made weapons of her hands, curved to dig fingers in where tooth would not do. She might not have bothered; her weight was on his belly, where the boar had seized him, and the man screamed.

It drew her up. Not from mercy, but because to talk, to threaten and to posture, was the human and not the lupine way. A wolf hunted and killed, rather than allowed its prey to linger.

A pity, then, that this man, and others like him, had obliged her live so long in their world. “My mother,” she whispered again. “My family. My pack, dead for sport.”

He smiled, bloody and brief. Drew breath, held it, and spat it: “Dog. Do you think . . . we didn’t know . . . what we hunted? Mongrels. Monsters. Sinners. You are the last . . . in England . . . and my son will carry on the hunt in Europe!”

She ought to have been wary. Ought to have known he would carry another weapon; that a second knife could be secreted more easily than a gun. He moved faster than a dying man should, but the surge of muscle warned her. The blade glittered and she turned into it, ducking low, body transformed without a thought. The horse’s neck had been massive in her jaws; his wrist was fragile, and bone shattered all too clearly beneath his scream.

She tore the sound out with a single bite, spitting away flesh she had no desire to feast on. A wolf would have taken his throat before, and never learned that he’d known what he hunted. That was worse, worse by far, than she might have imagined. She would have to leave Britain, find her brethren elsewhere and warn them.

A branch cracked, folly of human intrusion. Markéta snarled and fell back from Thomas’s body, lost between knowing whether to run or to take human form and bluff. Run; she would run, away from England’s shores, but first there were other men to be dealt with.

Radcliffe stood at the edge of the clearing, a gun held loosely in his hands as he stared at Thomas’s body. “His father stole horses from my grandfather,” he said eventually, softly, though there were no other humans nearby to hear him. “I had hoped for some satisfaction in that. Some mark of watching him embarrassed by a woman out-hunting him. I had not imagined . . . this. It is you, Markéta, is it not?” His gaze lifted to her, almost apologetic. “I saw, when you . . . when you spoke to him. When you took human form. You are a . . . ”

“Wiaralde-wulf.” Those words, so ancient they were made for a wolfen tongue, still hurt her throat. Markéta changed, cautiously, to her human form, to speak more easily. “A world wolf, by our own name. Werewolf, by yours. As old as man, and closer to the world than you now are.”

“Mother of God.” Radcliffe fell back a step, gun clutched to his chest like a woman might clutch a kerchief. “Markéta?”

“Please, sir.” A whisper of humor bent her smile, though she could feel blood drying around it. “’Miss Alvarez.’”

He drew himself up, gun still held like a bludgeoning weapon. “You are naked in my sight, dear woman. I believe I might call you by your given name.”

“Only if you intend to make me your wife.” Her gaze flickered to the gun. “Will you shoot me, if I run?”

“Would you have me?” he asked at the same time. They stared at one another, Markéta still primed to run, and Radcliffe’s eyes dropped to the gun he held. He cast it away with a shudder, then looked to her again. “You said to Thomas that you were the ones who chose to heed the wild. Can a man make that choice even still? Can he become . . . wiaralde-wulf even now?”

“Not in memory.” Markéta hesitated, creeping forward a few steps. He was unarmed; she could kill him, if she must. “But in legend . . . .”

“In legend, as we tell it? Through a bite?”

“And through the tending of the wound. Why would you want it? We are hunted.” Markéta spat at Thomas’s body.

Radcliffe smiled faintly. “What man would want a wife capable of such astonishing feats that he could not himself achieve? Would you have me, Markéta Alvarez?”

She glanced at herself: naked, bloody, fingers caked with gore and her face and throat no doubt worse. Beneath the horror, well-enough endowed in human standards, her frame neither overwhelmed nor embarrassed by the curves she possessed. Then she lifted her gaze to Radcliffe’s, watching his face and stance as she shifted to her wolf form. Scenting for his apprehension, preparing herself to face fear.

She found curiosity in his cant, and wonder, easily read as a puppy’s. Eagerness, like a pup’s enthusiasm for exploration, though he was a man fully grown. Caution threaded through it: he saw her as the predator she was, but extended wary trusts. Beneath it all, though, a line of confidence was struck, familiar tone seen in any pack leader. He was certain of the choice he was asking both himself and her to make.

Humans were clearly mad. Markéta changed again—she hadn’t made the change so many times in a day in years, if ever—and sat staring at Radcliffe with a wolfish gaze, waiting for him to falter. Minutes dragged on, and he remained steady, until she herself looked away and gave a short sharp laugh. “Then I suppose we should find water that I might wash myself in, and my clothes, and then go to young Lord Thomas with the sad news about his father. And then I think we shall visit France, Master Radcliffe, there to further discuss our future.”

“Randolf,” he said absently, and offered her a hand to help her stand. “My given name is Randolf. Will you call me by it?”

Markéta froze, then laughed and put her hand in his. “Randolf. Wolf’s shield. Did you know the meaning of your name, sir?”

He drew her upward, only smiling when she was on her feet. “I did. It bodes well, does it not?”

“If one is bound by superstition and coincidence, perhaps.”

Radcliffe’s eyebrows rose. “And are you?”

“I’m wiaralde-wulf, Master Radcliffe, a creature of superstition myself. I suppose I must then be bound by it.” Her teasing faltered. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had anyone to walk beside, Randolf. Are you certain of this?”

“I am certain,” he murmured, “that there is a world awaiting us that we cannot yet imagine. Let us not disappoint it, Markéta. Let us see what discoveries lie in store.”

And what future her people might find, she did not say, if there were men even now willing to embrace the wiaralde. There would be time enough for those thoughts in the years ahead, and she had spent so long thinking as a human did. It would be good, for a little while, to embrace the wolf.

With a smile and a loll of her tongue, she leapt forward, not to abandon, not ever to abandon, but to scout ahead of her shield until he might learn to be a wolf himself.