"A sorcerer of AramĂ n murdering some drunken crofter's wife and daughter? And of course, there were no bodies, no blood. Perhaps she just thought better of her lot in life than to spend it with you."
"No. No, she was happy. Fuck you. We were happy."
"Or maybe…maybe it was all just a dream. After all, a tracker like you should have been able to pick up some kind of trail."
Episode 29 hit like a truck and brother, I am roadkill.
“Ummm, arf?” She barks out uncertainly, but with a gap-toothed, mischievous smile that he knows all too well by now.
“Silly pixie,” he laughs, setting the bolt aside to get down on all fours, he crawls toward her until they’re almost nose-to-nose. “A real wolf howls,” he growls in a low voice, “and eats up silly little pups who think they’re tough enough to be a wolf.”
He finds a real wolf not two weeks later. A dead one, and the biggest damn wolf he's ever seen, her leg caught in a rusty jaw trap. The flies have just begun their feast and the carrion birds probably aren’t far behind.
“Damn poachers,” he mutters to himself, and sets his atlatl down to pry the trap open. There’s nothing he can do for the wolf, but he’ll be damned if he lets the poachers claim the pelt after claiming this creature’s life. A sudden movement under the wolf startles him, and he falls back ungracefully on his ass.
“Well fuck me,” he breathes as a small gray form wriggles out from under the dead wolf. The pup can’t be more than a month old and still has its milk teeth which it bares at him in a weak display of defiance.
“She’s your mum, then?” He reaches for the pup, but stops when its growls turn into a yelp of distress. Its leg is caught in the trap alongside its mother. Kattigan exhales slowly through his nose. Leaving it here is death, but the leg is mangled nastily so freeing it doesn’t carry much better odds. The pup wriggles out of his arms and goes back to lay beside its dead mother even group of crows start to circle overhead.
Damn thing is stubborn, though, he’ll give it that. And that’s something he can respect.
“Feverfew? Don't know that’d help the poor bugger. Paw’s gonna have to go, I wager.” Kattigan is already holding out the pup’s injured leg for her inspection and falling into old rhythms they’d established years ago when there’d been a lot more at stake than a single injured wolf pup.
“So that's how you tame a kid, then?” Kattigan follows her with a single gesture. She clears off the big wooden table in the kitchen to make room for her work.
“It's how I tamed you." She looks up from the pup at hime with a sly little smile.
“Tamed, huh?” He grins at her, playfully baring his teeth. She huffs in amusement then sets herself back to work cleaning and examining the poor pup. Her hair falls forward over her shoulder in a long curtain as she hunches down to get a better look. Kattigan wordlessly steps behind her and gathers her hair back to keep it out of her way.
“It's a work in progress.”
---
The pup sleeps fitfully in a pile of warm, clean rags in front of the fireplace. A clean bandage marks the stump of the paw they couldn't save, but the pup itself has a better chance of making it now.
"You're going to name a wolf 'Wolfie'?" He can't help that laugh that escapes. His daughter turns her scowl on him. "Alright, alright. We can name him Wolfie. Now, you have everything you need for bed?"
"All better now, lovey?" He asks, trying to shepherd her toward her bed.
"We can name him Wulferic," she says decisively, tucking the beloved stuffed cat next to the sleeping pup. It is not a suggestion so much as a statement of fact.
"Is it bad to eat that many fireflies? Should we step in?" Kattigan wonders aloud as a few more of the green lights disappear.
"Do you mean the pup, or your daughter?" Marienna asks. They're sitting on the ground with her back leaning against his chest watching the merry chaos unfold. He cards his fingers through her hair, drinking the clean, earthen smell of her.
"What do you mean, my daughter. Feral little pixie's all yours." He maneuvers a hand in under her arm and launches a sneak attack on the most ticklish spot on her ribs. She gasps, then laughs and grabs his hand and the next thing he knows the world is flipped upside down with him on his back and her looming over him.
"Hm, you might be right about that," she says with a smirk. Gods, but she's beautiful. Her hair catches the moonlight gleam and casts her features in soft shadow. He reaches up to run his thumb across the line of freckles that stretch across her cheeks and over her nose. She hums and leans into the touch, then murmurs in a low voice, "Let's get the little pups to bed, shall we?"
He can only grunt his enthusiastic agreement.
---
Wulferic is a natural tracker, of course. The pup can find trails that would baffle even Kattigan. But getting him on a track and keeping him on it prove to be two very different tasks.
They follow the trail of trampled ferns and broken branches in the understory. The hoof prints of the boar that trampled the cottage garden, broke open the goat pen, and terrorized the chickens are as clear as day in Kattigan's mind's eye. The tracks vanish when they arrive at a wide, stony brook.
"Which way'd he go, huh?" He crouches down to be at eye level with Wulferic. "You wager he went upstream or down?"
Wulferic sniffs the ground. His ears prick up and he looks up past Kattigan. Following his gaze, there's a line of fallow deer strolling casually across the brook not a hundred yards upstream. A picture appears in his mind of a haunch of roast venison as Wulferic happily wags his tail.
"Hmm, that does sound tasty. But if we play this right, we get roast boar tonight. Now, which way?" He holds out a piece of broken fence post for the wolf to sniff, and soon enough Wulferic is taking off downstream, on the scent once again.
"Good boy", he says, and tosses him a piece of dried meat from his pouch. Wulferic turns his head to catch it in his mouth midstride without missing a beat and continues leading the way. Behind them, the deer scatter frantically, and Kattigan gets a distinct sense of amusement from the wolf.
---
"Papa? Mama?"
Kattigan freezes in place at the sound of his daughter's voice in the middle of the night. Marienna does likewise, but with her back pushed up against a wall, her long legs wrapped around his waist, and her shift up over her hips it's considerably more difficult for her. He clears his throat before answering through the door.
"You're out past your bedtime, pixie. Something wrong?"
"I heard a noise. I got scared," she says plaintively. His eye flick to Marienna, whose cheeks take on an interesting shade of red. "Ricky and Wulferic say they got scared, too."
Kattigan muffles something between a groan and a laugh against his wife's shoulder, then eases her down so her feet are on the floor. He arranges his trousers and throws on a shirt. "I've got this," he whispers with a quick kiss.
In the end it takes a cup of warm milk, two lullabies, and her favorite bedtime story (the one about how the stars kissed her the night she was born, and that's why she's got freckles like her mother) to get her to settle back down.
But true to her promise, Marienna is waiting for him when he gets back to their room, ready to pick up right where they left off.
---
He's always known that men like him don't get to have happily ever afters like this. It's only a surprise that it lasts as long as it does.
A scream. A shadow. Two thuds that forever echoes in his nightmares. And they're gone. Like they never existed.
He tracks and tracks and tracks every clue he can find until his feet bleed through his tattered boots but he finds nothing but scorn and indifference. There can be no answers from a shadow, no justice extracted from a ghost that can't be found.
He breaks himself on the injustice of the world until there are only scarred and broken pieces left. There's solace in the constant haze of drunkenness which blurs the line between dream and memory, but even that just leaves him worse off.
Only Wulferic keeps him from losing himself entirely, anchoring him to the world of the living through sheer stubborn will. The wolf is living testament to the fact that his family wasn't a passing dream. But that brings him no closer to justice.
He doesn't mean to give up the hunt, but it's hard to keep looking for something, anything, when no one seems to give a damn. And why should they?
After all, he's just another dog with his leg caught in a trap, snarling his defiance while the carrion birds circle overhead.
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