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 soon. Maybe.
And maybe not. Una's faithful silence on the subject of Roulant's Night-walk extended to Roulant himself, for she didn't know how to ask the question
that would sound like an accusation: What do you know about the Night of the Wolf that even our mage doesn't?
And so the secret cast a shadow between them. Day by day, a little at a time, the shadow was changing them, as if by a malicious magic, into uneasy strangers.
As darkness gathered beneath the forest's thin eaves, old dead leaves ran scrabbling before the wind. In the luminous sky, one early, eager star shone out. A dark shape stood atop the hill, a young man with a great breadth of shoulder and a long, loping stride. Roulant stopped at the crest and stood silhouetted against the sky, the last light shining on his brown-gold hair. Still as stone, he hung there, between the village and the wildwood — stood a long time before he at last vanished into the twilight beneath the trees.
The wind moaned round the rocks, and Una shivered as she checked the draw of the dagger at her belt. She was afraid: of the Night, and of what she might discover, and of what she might lose. But she hugged her courage close. She would follow Roulant tonight, and she wouldn't turn back. She had to know what part he played in this yearly night of dread.
Soft on the cold air, Roulant heard a whisper, the dry rattling of brush behind him. He turned quickly, saw a flash of red in the tangled thickets on the slope below: some padding fox or vixen on the trail of prey. Roulant went on climbing. He must reach the ruin before moonrise.
The tumbled stone walls atop the bald hill in the forest had been his destination each Night for the past two, as it had been his father's every year since Roulant could remember. When he was a boy, after his mother's death, Roulant used to think he knew why his father went out into the forest on the Night of the Wolf. He believed that Tam was a brave champion upon a secret quest to help save the people of Dimmin. Roulant'd never told anyone what he believed, nor did he mention it to his father. A secret is a secret, and Tam need not carry the burden of knowing his had been discovered.
The year the wolf had killed the farmer's child was the last Tam went up to the ruin. The summer after, he died. Roulant was seventeen then, and that was when he learned that Thorne was the wolf.
It was a hard thing to learn. Roulant had known Thorne since childhood, had felt for him the magical awe and affection that is hero-worship. Even knowing that the mage became the wolf, once every annum, could not break their bond. From that year to this, enmeshed in the web of an old curse, Roulant had been drawn out into the forest on the Night to stand with Guarinn Hammerfell and promise Thorne they would kill the wolf, swear they would free their friend from the curse.
This, on the face of it, was a difficult promise to keep, for wolves are hard to hunt and kill. But Roulant, in youthful zeal, had never truly thought it would be impossible. He was a good hunter. His father had taught him to be a faultless shot with bow and arrow. Guarinn had taught him to track, and made the lessons easy, companionable rambles in the forest. As he'd stood faithfully with Tam, Guarinn was always with Roulant. Yet, just as Tam had failed his own promise, Roulant had, too — so far.
There were reasons for that, the kind Roulant dared not think about here and alone in the dark forest.
Wind soughed low, herding fallen leaves. All around, the night drew in close, dark and sighing. Roulant stopped for breath before he began to climb the last stony path, the barely seen trace that would lead him to the ruin. Watching his breath plume in the frosty air, he thought that the pale mist was just like the promises he'd made to Thorne — easily blown away.
And Roulant knew that if he failed again tonight, he'd be forced to break a different promise, one that had nothing to do with wolves and curses. If he didn't kill the wolf tonight, in the morning he would go to Una and tell her that he couldn't marry her. He would do that, though both their hearts would break.
A dear and pretty girl, his Una, with her earnest green eyes and her red-gold hair. He was no poet, but late at night Roulant liked to watch the fire in the hearth and think that the rosy flames, so lovely and generous with their warmth, reminded him of Una. Whatever joy would come on their wedding day would be swiftly overshadowed by his terrible obligation to go up to the ruin year after year, trying, as his father had tried, to bring an end to the Night of the Wolf. How could Roulant come back to Una every year, with blood on his hands as surely as it was on Thorne's?
And yet… how could he bear to look down the long years of a life without her?
Roulant put his back into the last climb and soon left the dark fastness of the forest to see Thorne and Guarinn waiting in the paler light of the clearing. The moons were rising, mere suggestions of light above the mountain. Soon they would spill red and silver light on the bald hill crowned by frost-whitened, shattered walls. Roulant left the forest, trying to shut out the grim sense that the events of this Night were fated.
From the obscuring dark at the forest's edge, Una watched him join his friends. Once Roulant and Thorne and Guarinn climbed the hill to the ruin, Una went noiselessly around the base, up the slope as silently as a shadow, and entered at the opposite side to hide in the small shelter of blackened beams and piled stone that once had shaped a bridal chamber.
Thorne stood in the center of the ruin, surrounded by the broken stone, his back to the rising moons. He lifted his head, sniffed the air. Guarinn tied a slipknot around one end of the rope he'd carried. Roulant strung his bow and placed three arrows in easy reach on the flat of a broken stone.
"Time, my friend," the dwarf said, his forge-scarred hands shaking a little, though he gripped the rope hard. They'd tried to hold Thorne with rope before, five years ago. It was Tam who had stood readying bow and bolt then, not Roulant. Guarinn thought it might be different this time with a younger eye, a steadier hand to take a well-timed shot at the instant of changing. Thorne closed his eyes, shut out the sight of the rope that would hold him, of Roulant readying a long, steel-headed shaft for flight, and nodded to Guarinn.
"Do it, and hurry."
When the noose passed over his head and settled on his neck, Thorne heard himself panting hoarsely, like an anxious beast mindlessly straining for release. The rope stank of hemp and tar and the dark scent of smoke, fire's ghost. In moments, like the return of an unhealed malady, he'd feel the bonds of humanity fall away from him: compassion replaced by hunger, an imperative that knew no mercy. Reason and skill changed by fast, fevered degrees to instinct, which existed only to serve the needs of survival. Even now, his senses filled with the complex richness of scent only an animal knows. Even now the scents aroused hunger.
The man knew the fear he smelled on Guarinn as welljustified, not to be scorned. The wolf would only smell the fear and know instinctively that this was a victim to feed hunger. Thorne wished that Guarinn would hurry, for very soon Thorne Shape-shifter, once known for his mastery of this most difficult of the magic arts, would not be able to hold back the changing.