was taking up his bow and quiver, making ready to leave.
“And so the Night comes,” Thorne whispered. “And
we’ll try again to kill the wolf, to end the curse.”
His words fell heavily into silence. Guarinn turned his
back on the lights of Dimmin and began the climb to the
tall hill in the forest, the bald place where the ruin lay.
Thorne followed, and didn’t trespass into the dwarf’s
silence.
Their friendship was older than people in Dimmin
realized. Guarinn knew that the mage was once called
Thorne Shape-shifter. And he knew that Thorne Shape-
shifter was the wolf. With Tam Potter, Guarinn had been
present twenty years ago when Thorne had bared his
wrists and taken up a keen-edged dagger, blindly seeking
to end the curse by killing himself.
“There IS no hope but this blade,” Thorne had cried
that day, sickened by the taste of what the wolf had killed.
“I will change every year, unless one of you kills the wolf.
Neither of you has been able to do that.”
He’d meant no reproof, for he knew why his friends
had failed each year. That, too, was part of the curse. Still,
they reproached themselves, and he knew that, as well.
He found no hope anywhere, not even among the wise
at the Tower of Wayreth. He’d fled there, after the curse
had been spoken, but he’d been driven from that haven by
the dark magic of the curse itself, compelled to return to
the broken ruin in the mountains at the rising of the full
autumn moons. Ten years he’d hidden there. The efforts of
the most skillful mages at Wayreth had not been able to
blunt that compulsion. The wisest had sadly counselled
Thorne that he must accept that there was only one way to
end the curse. The wolf must die, and only Guarinn or
Tam Potter could kill it. So said the curse. But they had
failed him.
It was twenty years ago that Thorne decided there
might be another way to end the curse. And so, with
careful precision, he’d set a dagger’s glinting edge against
the blue veins in his wrist. In the end, whether by some
agency of the curse itself, or an innate will to survive that
was stronger than he’d guessed, he’d not been able to draw
the steel across his wrist.
Guarinn had wept for both joy and rue over his friend’s
inability to end his life. And Tam Potter, taking the dagger
gently from the mage’s hand, said: “Thorne, come back
and live in Dimmin with Guarinn and me. We’ll find a
way to kill the wolf. We’ll keep trying.”
In the summer when Tam died, Roulant Potter
learned that he’d inherited his father’s part in a curse that
was older than he. Thorne had told Roulant just what he
knew his father had believed – what Guarinn yet believed:
when the wolf was dead, the curse would end. “What will
happen to you?” young Roulant had asked. “I will not be
hurt,” Thorne had replied. “I will be free.”
Some of that was true, and some of it wasn’t. Thorne
never told his friends all he’d learned during the time at
Wayreth.
*****
Shrouded in shadow, hidden beneath a stone
outcropping at the forest’s edge, Una wrapped her arms
around her drawn-up knees, hugged herself to muffle the
drumming of her heart. She was outside after sunset on
the Night of the Wolf. Una had not lived in Dimmin but
five years, come to stay with her cousin, the miller’s wife,
after her parents died. She’d been thirteen then, and it
hadn’t taken her very long to learn that no one in the
village ventured outdoors on the first night of autumn.
No one, that is, except – lately – Roulant Potter. He
would stealthily enter the forest here soon. Una had seen
him do this each year on the Night for two years, and
there had never been a question in her mind that she’d
keep Roulant’s secret faithfully. She’d loved him as long
as she’d known him, and he’d never been shy about letting
her know that he felt the same way. They would marry