Mages enjoyed no good reputation in those days just after the Cataclysm, but the villagers liked Thorne. From the headman to the lowliest dairy maid, they knew him as "our mage." Even Guarinn Hammerfell — the dwarf who did the blacksmithing — couldn't hide a grudging fondness for Thorne, and that was saying something. Until the mage's arrival, Guarinn could name only one friend — Tam the potter. But for Tam the potter, Guarinn had always kept to himself, a grim fellow, without much warmth of feeling. Yet, when Thorne arrived, Guarinn made room in his lean heart for another friend. Long-lived dwarf and long-lived mage… the villagers joked that Guarinn must have reckoned Thorne would be around for a while, so he might as well get used to him.
The people in Dimmin didn't know the half of what was to be known about Guarinn and Tam and Thorne, though they did consider it natural that Roulant Potter, grown to manhood tagging at the heels of Tam and his friends, stepped into his father's place after the potter's death — and became just as friendly with Guarinn and Thorne.
Likely, they predicted, when young Roulant married Una the miller's girl they'd get themselves a son who'd inherit his grand-da's friends. No one thought it would be a bad inheritance, mage and all. People had gotten used to Guarinn the blacksmith. And Thorne was helpful in the way mages can be, for he was able to charm a fretful child to sleep or bring water springing up from a dry well — always willing to turn his mysterious skills to good use.
No one blamed Thorne that he was never able to do anything about the Night of the Wolf.
Anyone with eyes in Dimmin could see that it was a great source of frustration and sorrow to their mage that he could offer them no protection against the wolf that terrorized the countryside one night each year. For thirty years it had avoided traps and hunters, and that was enough to make people understand that this was no ordinary wolf. What natural beast could live so long?
Yet Thorne could offer no better wisdom than that everyone keep within-doors; for life's sake, never venture out into the dark when the two moons rose full on the first night of autumn. And so, on this one day each year, all around Dimmin, small children were shooed early into cottages, cached behind bolted doors. And if a child's bed should be near a window, this night the little one would sleep in the loft with his parents.
Most often a stray sheep or roaming dog, sometimes a luckless traveler benighted in the forest, satisfied the hunger of the great beast. But only three years ago on the Night of the Wolf, a farmer who lived but a morning's walk from Dimmin had wakened at moonset to hear one of his children wailing. Fast as he ran to the youngster's bed, he'd found only an empty pallet, and the broad, deep tracks of a large wolf outside the window. No one questioned Thorne's advice to keep close to home on the Night.
It must be a curse, they muttered as they bolted their doors. What else could it be?
It was exactly that. Thorne had always known how to end the curse, and no one wanted that ending more than he.
On the first day of autumn, Thorne sat before a banked hearth-fire. Outside the stone house, cold wind hissed around the eaves, but he didn't hear it. Eyes wide, he dreamed as though he were deep asleep. In his dreams the two moons, the red and the silver, filled up the sky, showered their light upon the jagged back teeth of a ruin's broken walls while cold, hungry howling ran down the sky. In his dreams Thorne cried out for mercy, and got none.
He sat so all morning, sat unmoving all afternoon. When the light deepened toward the day's end, he heard his name urgently whispered, and he came away from his dreaming slowly, like a man swimming up from dark, deep waters. Guarinn Hammerfell stood at his shoulder, waiting. The dwarf's face was white, drawn in haggard lines; his dark, blue-flecked eyes were sunk into deep hollows carved by weariness. Thorne hadn't stirred even once during the long day, but he knew that Guarinn had kept watch beside him and never took a step away.
"It's time, my friend," Thorne said.
Guarinn nodded, wordlessly agreeing that it was. He said nothing as he and the mage dressed warmly in thick woolen cloaks and stout climbing boots, spoke no word as he slung a coil of heavy rope over his shoulder and thrust a short-hafted throwing axe into his belt.
They crossed the brook by the old footbridge and entered the darkening forest. At the top of the first low hill, Thorne stopped to look down upon Dimmin as lights sprang up in the windows of the cottages, little gleams of gold to console in the coming night. He watched the last cottage, the one that stood alone at the far end of the village where the street became a narrow footpath winding down toward the potter's kiln at the edge of the brook. When that light sighed to life he knew that Roulant Potter 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 Shapeshifter 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.