connor est le (grandemauvais) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-05-27 22:54:00 |
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Entry tags: | door: tales, rose red, wolf |
Who: Rose and Wolf
What: Rose is minding her own business and Wolf tries to eat her. Not in the sexy way.
Where: The forest around Rose's cottage, then the cottage.
When: Recently.
Warnings/Rating: A is for Action, P is for Paranoid, C is for Count on some bloodthirstiness and gore.
The woods were mangled darkness. Unforgiving branches and brambles that reached and tore, as if they had intention. There had been no food in the woods for years, not since the Adversary, when the witches hid themselves in the Witching Wood, away from persecution and from battle. After, once things had quieted into a still Hell, the Witching Wood remained, a cursed thing that kept the weirds (they'd stopped calling themselves witches then) safe from the good people of the four kingdoms, the people who remembered the Blue Fairy and her puppetry, the people who distrusted anything that smelled of magic. And, years later, the the forest remained, dead and dark and full of poisons and creatures that tore and ripped. Dotted throughout the woods were cottages, small things created by magical hands. Some were abandoned, some had been claimed long after their witches were gone, and some had been handed down.
Rose's cottage was the latter.
A cozy, one-room building, it was perpetually hearth lit and inviting, with a loft at the end of a wooden ladder and a cozy mattress lifted high off the clean rushes that lined the cottage floor. The garden outside yielded fruit and vegetables, and the well beyond boasted clean water. The smoke from the small chimney proclaimed the place as inhabited, as did the candleglow in the windows, but Rose wasn't scared. Her mother's magic guarded the clearing in the woods that held her small home, and Faust's protection spell added a second layer of security. Her own magic, sought after by the villagers in the neighboring kingdoms, was good for breaking curses, yielding crops and making barren women fruitful, but she didn't have the skill for protection yet.
She wasn't frightened.
And the dead wood loved her. Nature had always loved her, as had the creatures that roamed the woods and the greenery beyond. This was home, and she felt safe.
Which explained why, without concern and without fear, she was traipsing through the dead wood in search of sap from a certain foul tree that only grew deep, deep in the darkness. She was a spot of red in an endless night, copper hair and a rose cloak to keep her arms and legs from being torn by greedy brambles. She tugged the hood of the cloak up, and she sung to the trees as she went, smiling as their branches moved aside to let her pass.
Nature might love the girl in the cottage, but the Wolf loved nothing.
Alone in the wood, he had always been able to take care of himself. Even after his pack had left him, he had been able to do that. When he had stumbled across their bones years after, he had known that he was the last, that he had outlived the ones who had abandoned him so that they might survive. All that remained in the wood now were those creatures that scraped and scrounged to live, and they were not enough food to feed a wolf, even a very small one. The few predators that had not died when the wood faded had been forced to become...creative.
And the Wolf had survived. He had made it through long, dark years alone. The winters did not bear thinking of, white and wet times with nothing but acres of wasted earth and the villages outside it. The wood was always dead, but in the winters it was also harsh, the cold providing another threat to his survival. The winters drove him most mad.
The only spots of life left in the forest were the cottages. The Wolf knew them. They stank of magic. He had tried poaching their inhabitants early on. They were protected from the horrors that had been inflicted on the creatures of that wood, but he had sometimes succeeded. Unfortunately, a witch here and a straying girl there were not enough to sustain him, and he had begun to pick through the inhabitants of the villages, ravaging their livestock and killing any farmer foolish enough to put himself or his family too close to the forest's edge. A massive black shape in the night, he had been a thing of legend, swift and vicious, destruction and reckoning, the story that kept children tucked safely in their beds and people out of the forest. In stories he had burning red eyes and teeth as long as a man's hand, claws the size of a bucket handle and breath that smelled of carrion and death. One long new moon night the winter before, he had ravaged an entire village, left the huts there ragged and vacant of all but gristle and bone, the remnants of those who could not run fast enough from the shadow with teeth.
Now he stood just under six feet tall, and the world was a dull, flat place. His ears felt as if someone had gouged them out, his eyes as if they looked through fog, his nose as if it had been cut from his face. He walked with all the gangly lack of coordination of a new cub. His teeth were dull as stumps in his mouth, and all he wanted was to eat.
He was cursed by the man in the woods days ago, and had eaten nothing since. He stood at the edge of the woods for a long night, and tried to find a moment to attack one of the men who lived in a farm there, but was unable to catch any alone. His new body crippled him. He could not hunt like this, so how could he be expected to feed himself? Whatever the man with his magic touch had thought he might do to the Wolf, whatever mercy he thought he might extend, all he had really done was doom him to the death he had been staving off for years - starvation.
The farms and villages were not safe. He could be overwhelmed there, now. So the Wolf went looking for one of those cottages, islands of comfort in the midst of the wood. He knew one that was closeby that had been occupied, once. Though his skill for the hunt had been ripped from him like a lost limb with the horrible changes to his body, he still had the instincts of a hunter, and he still knew the scent, so weak to his nose now, of a healthy and content human girl. When he arrived, the house was empty, but she would not go far. He drove deeper into the wood, and he found a quiet place, and he waited.
He smelled the girl before he saw her. His senses were dull as rocks, but still sharper than a human's ought to be, and he caught her scent on the wind as she approached. He crouched behind a tall oak, and he waited.
She looked plump enough. She would do. She carried magic on her, but only one who did could live in a place like this. Whatever tricks she had up her sleeve would be worth the risk. It had been so long since he had eaten that he was beginning to truly flag, his strength near exhaustion. He did not have the time or resources, anymore, to choose easier prey. At least she was alone. No one would ride to this girl's rescue, not here.
The scarlet cloak made her stand out more than a light shining in the dark against those dark trees. It was the only really advantage to these eyes that he had found - they did not catch movement as they should, but colors were intense and varied in a way he’d never known. He hid, close to the bark of the tree, shaking with hunger, and he watched her singing. The wood itself bent to her will, he saw, turning away from her passage. Perhaps she was the one, then, who had done this to his home. Perhaps it was her who had made him go hungry, all these years. He hoped so. Her flesh would be so much sweeter if she was.
He struck as she brushed by him, a pale blur emerging from nowhere, throwing himself at her to pin her to the ground. He was naked, hair clotted with dirt and mud and old, blackened gore. It splattered the rest of him, too, dirt caked beneath his long sharp nails, lips cracked, cheeks hollowed in with the hunger of years. His ribs were as defined as the dead branches on the trees around them, and on his stomach, a gash, only partially healed, was clotted over with rust red blood. His eyes were hidden under that thick, matted hair, and while his body was filthy, his teeth, when he opened his mouth to snap at her, were white, the edges sickly tinged with pink. The snarling that was coming from his throat did not sound the least bit human.
He did not know how he would kill her, but his nails still had jagged edges, and he still had strength. He would pin her to the ground, that much he knew, make her struggling stop. Then he would see what effect these blunt, short teeth had on her throat.
She wasn't expecting him, not in her wood. Dead or not, she had grown up amid these trunks and these branches. The woods knew better than to harm her, as did the villagers and the ones that came seeking to be uncursed. Even the witches knew better, the tales of Snow and her rose red sister carrying far and wide. And yet here this thing was, pouncing. She knew he was no animal; no animal would throw himself on her. And she knew he was male, because she knew the unmistakable feel of legs and arms weighing her down, of a man, his rutting foul breath and hard bones.
She didn't look at him, nor did she scream. She was no longer the scared thing she had become living with the merchant. She had lost her humanity, and she had embraced the wildness of her youth. She no longer feared monsters in attic shadows. She longer allowed herself the weakness of remaining with a beast who didn't respect her. And she wouldn't give into this thing atop her, his fingers pressing into the thick folds of her cloak in search of some kind of purchase.
Not sex, then. Purchase, not tearing. Not sex, then.
The branches moved, shook, protested their anger. They reached jagged fingers, bowed and bent and broke their trunks to reach him, to throw him off. It was intentional, deliberate and terrifying, the army of rotting wood and dead sap. "Get off me," she hissed. Calmly, it was a calm hiss. So calm. Too calm. "Get off me."
The trees screamed.
The Wolf was not expecting the forest to fight for the girl in the red cloak.
Perhaps he should have. Perhaps he ought to have realized when the branches bent to let her go by, knowing she was some kind of witch, that she might put up more of a fight than just tossing her auburn hair. But he had known nothing, really - just hunger, well worth the risk of achieving death some faster way than starvation.
That changed as the branches began to fight him. He was not afraid of the trees. He had lived in this forest all his life - he knew, better than most, that everything left in it could turn on the unsuspecting. This much deliberate swiping and striking with a common goal was new for the trees. He barely knew what to do with his new body, much less how to fight back with it, so he tried at first to just kill the girl before they caught him, leaning sharply down toward her, mouth open to tear out her throat.
A thorny branch lashed across his face, drawing blood, and he snapped at it, whipping around. The defensive posturing left him open to a sharp jab from behind. One of the trees had bent almost in half to sweep him from atop the girl, and a branch hooked under his arm, yanking him off so hard he went skidding across the ground. He scrambled to his uncooperative feet, practically spitting with anger at being denied his prize, by the very force that had warped these trees and everything else in the forest. If he could just kill the girl, everything would be fine.
The trees would not have it, striking him back from her sharply enough to draw blood in a thin gash along his middle. He snapped at the trees as if he could frighten them off, hunched in on himself. The trees turned into a deafening, shrieking crackle and crash of heavy wooden limbs, endlessly scraping for him.
Then, of all times for weakness to set in, the world warped briefly black at the edges, the adrenaline and the flurry of activity taking its toll. His limbs were heavy for just long enough. With a cracking groan of split bark and wood, a tree branch thick as a man swept down, like a hurricane had hit the forest, and struck him squarely. It knocked the wind from him, and he dropped back onto the muck and the dead leaves. His vision flared spots, black and white. He rolled over, struggled to get up, to breathe, get away from the girl before she revenged herself on him. Dimly, he heard the trees scream. Finally, he felt flat, cold fear.
She stood, and she straightened. She brushed at her cloak, and she tugged the dead leaves from her hair. She did all these things while he sprawled there, as if he was no concern at all to her. And he wasn't any concern; not here. Not in these woods that existed to shield and guard her kind. It was the wrong place to attack her. Out in the open, she wouldn't have been able to draw on anything readily. She needed earth to grow anything. She needed potential, grass or something else that was plant life. In buildings and towns, like Fabletown, she was often useless, but not here.
But the fact that he wasn't something feared didn't change the fact that he was very, very annoying.
She watched as he rolled over, and she watched as he struggled to breathe. Her hands rested on her hips, bunching up the cloak's thick fabric, her cheeks almost as flush-red as the fabric. "Whatever you think you're doing, it's not going to work at all," she informed him. And one of the trees proved her words to be true. After a shake of limbs, the tree reached for him and dragged him close, wrapping him in a biting embrace, arms against his body and legs immobile as he sat against the trunk.
She crouched in front of him, once he was secure, and she looked at his filthy, bloody face. "Who are you?" she asked him. She'd been away from the woods for years, and she had never seen him there in her youth. He seemed young, even beneath the blood and matting, but physical age didn't count for anything in the Homelands. It was only in the Mundane world that aging told a story. She looked to be no more than a teenager, but she was certainly much, much older than that.
The Wolf tried to twist away from the grasping branches, but it was already too late. They took hold of him just as he was getting to his feet and yanked him against the tree bark. He yelped, and they clutched him tighter. The rough edges and splinters dug into his skin.
Blood oozed from the cuts on his cheek, and the still-healing wound on his stomach had begun to bleed a little as well. He began to get his breath back, but the pain prevented him thinking about much else. If he still had his teeth, he could chew through these trees. He could slice through these branches with his old claws and be out of these bindings in a moment.
She wasn't even a large girl, hardly more than a mouthful. Only a witch that size could do this much damage to him, whatever state he was in, whatever body he occupied. She looked as flush and hale as one of the village maids he'd been killing just a week before, and not a single one had lasted more than a few minutes on their short, pale, underworked little legs. Just because they walked on two legs didn’t make them much different from the sheep in the field they tended. They all screamed when they died, and they all scampered away from a death they couldn’t outrun like they would make it.
He seemed to wilt against his bonds, then twisted sharply, without warning, to break the bent branch that held him. Nothing happened but a sharp twist back against the tree, and he yelped again, panting for breath.
Up close he was a horror show, all that blood and muck from prey weeks old and wending his way through the woods alone. Under the thick, clotted hair were eyes, staring back at her, black and flat as the devil's. They weren’t entirely human, those dark disks. If she could tell one magic from another, there was something with the forest in it coming off him like a whipcrack, and something subtler too, something not from this part of the world. His eyes were wide and too open, though there was swelling forming around the edge of his right from the strike of a reaching branch. He did look young, no more than a youth, wiry enough in his half-starvation to be formidable if he had the opportunity to build his strength..
When she crouched so close, he snapped at her, as far forward as he could reach with his torso pinned tight to the trunk, the intent to harm real enough that his teeth clicked when they met nothing but air.
She wanted words from him. He knew words. He understood her. Every creature in this land knew enough of the language of humans to know when to run and when to strike. He had never had the kind of tongue that could speak it back, and even when he decided he wanted to say something back to her, it took work to get it right. "Who?" It was the kind of philosophical query that he had no answer for, and it infuriated him that she'd even bother to ask. She wanted an identity, a name. All the humans had them - frivolous things, not based on role or skill, but the sound as they tripped out of human mouths, insubstantial on the wind as leaves. But this girl wasn't human, not really. She wasn't like him, but she wasn't human. "I don't...have a name," he said, working his tongue around the words with a vaguely glottal click. That was going to take work, not that he really wanted to learn. His tongue protested the act of speech, twisting unnaturally. His voice was surprisingly low for his youth. "Witch," he added, because he did know that word. "Ask the others. Him...in your pack. He will tell you. Who I am."
"Witch," she agreed, after regarding him and finding him disgusting. He looked dreadful beneath all that muck and blood, and she stood from her crouch and looked down at him, the position giving her the upper hand, the looming. "I don't have a pack. Witches don't have packs," she explained, though she understood him perfectly well. He couldn't mean the Beast. The Beast never came here. And she hoped he didn't mean that terrible Caterpillar that she couldn't manage to eradicate from her garden. Draco? Faust? Snow? The blonde girl that never came in for tea, as if her garden was a waiting room for that horrible Caterpillar that didn't die.
But none of that would fix the matter at hand, would it?
"You're hungry, and you're a filthy mess. Do you want help, or do you want to stay there and starve in the tree's arms?" she asked, queen of this wood, her expression saying she was doing him a favor, and he'd be smart to realize it.
She was young yet, but there was nothing in her expression as she looked down at him that indicated youth. There was coldness and a threat. If you betray me, her expression said. And, should he refuse to play by her rules, she would leave him there. He was a man. Beneath all that blood and muck, she was a man, and Rose could count the men she cared about on one hand. Had he been an animal, she would have helped him, even if he bit and clawed and thrashed. Had he been a woman, she would have helped, even if she hated helping. But her dislike of men meant that she wouldn't extend herself that far. She'd help, if he agreed.
The wild girl of the woods wasn't there just then. Just then, she was a witch, and she was little more than that. Maybe Faust was right. Maybe this cottage had changed her. Maybe leaving the Beast had changed her, too.
"If I help you, you do what I say. No trying to kill me, and no trying to eat me. If you try, you'll be very sorry you did," she assured him. "If I help, you help me. You remain in my woods, and you serve as sentry."
And then, she waited.
The Wolf didn't have pride. He had only a will to survive, encompassing everything. But he did chafe at the thought of being tamed, like a dumb dog, to stand guard for the young girl with the old eyes.
Hunger won out over worry in the end, as hunger had won out over everything in the past few years. If he refused the girl, she would leave him. He believed her. She would leave, and he would starve to death. He had come this far by being cleverer, faster, and bolder than the humans that hunted him, right up to the one that had extended him 'mercy' by making him one of them. He had also stayed alive by knowing when he was overpowered. He was only one, now, with no pack to help him when he was overpowered, and bravery made for dead wolves. He had not fought so long to lie down and die here, not in the name of pride. He had bitten off more than he could chew, with this girl, and the only way to survive it was to do what she asked.
"They are not your woods," he snapped, unable to let that go by. It was this girl, and the pack she claimed not to have, who had destroyed the forest. He was sure of that. Their little isolated patches of green made so much more sense, now that he had seen the way the trees themselves came to her rescue. They had done this because they thought the woods belonged to them, but the animals had been there long before she arrived, before she was a seed in her mother’s womb.
He rested wild eyes on her, blood beading scarlet around his bottom lip. "I will help," he said, with the deepest of begrudged grating. For now.
She didn't trust him, and that had as much to do with the blood and filth as it had to do with his maleness. She looked at his wild eyes for a long time, her own golden eyes sharp and intelligent. She could be childish, and she could be cruel. She could be wildness, and she could snuggle harmlessly. She was a girl, and she was a crone. Most of all, she was learning that she was witch. Above everything else.
She backed away slightly, and she looked up at the trees. A command without words, and the branches that held him gave way.
"These are my woods. These woods chose to belong to the Weirds. During the war, when everything died, they shielded us," she told him, and the only proof she felt she needed to give was the behavior of the woods themselves. He could doubt, if he wanted to. He could disagree, if he pleased. It wouldn't change anything.
She tugged up her hood, and she began to walk. She didn't look over her shoulder to ensure he was following, and she didn't look to ensure he wouldn't pounce. The trees gave way, branches moving aside for her (and for him, if he stayed close). She stopped at the clearing, and she motioned to the back of the cottage, where the well led the path to the river. "Wash up, then come inside," she told him. "Don't eat anything along the way," she cautioned, turning a possessive glance turned toward her garden, before she disappeared inside.
The Wolf growled at the girl, even as the branches dropped and he slumped forward. Her woods. "The woods never choose to go dead. Not for anyone," he said, and that was all he'd give her in words on that.
He rolled onto all fours, and then pushed carefully to his feet. Walking on two legs was tricky. His body knew how to do it, but his mind had yet to get comfortable with being so far from the ground. He stayed a few steps behind the girl, eyes leveled at the back of her head, but he did not reach for her again, nor pounce on her. He watched how she moved, and kept one eye on the trees around them, half-expecting one to snag him once he'd walked a few steps behind her. Though walking was still a skill he was getting down, he was strangely quiet on his feet, instinctively picking around twigs. He padded gently, barely rustling the dead leaves underfoot. The only real sign he was still following her was his breath, panting softly still, occasionally quickening just a little when one of those obliging branches bent too close.
The cottage was as he remembered it: offensive in its greenness and its growth. It looked like a story, more beautiful even than the villages outside the forest. It looked like the forest had, once.
When the girl disappeared into the house, the Wolf went to the well, sniffing at the water. It smelled cleaner than anything that ran in the river outside the boundaries of the witch's safe haven. The water wasn't close enough to reach with his hands, though he tried, so he dropped the pail in instead. It wasn't too difficult to get the gist of. He had seen the villagers go about their business, and knew generally how they lived their lives. He had seen girls on the farms draw up pails from the wells on cranks, so he did what they had done, and was rewarded with a pail full of clean, cool water.
He turned the pail over himself and then shook his head, fiercely. Water streamed down his body and into the grass, making muddy rivers at his feet, red and brown and black as the grime washed from his skin. Everything stuck to him now. No wonder humans were always washing themselves.
A few more buckets of water and most of the grime rinsed off. He would not have admitted it to the girl, but it did feel better, cleaning off. It was always satisfying to take a rinse in the stream and get the muck and dried, itching gore from his fur. He ran wet fingers over his eyes, and gingerly through his hair, dislodging clumps of dirt, leaf edges and the errant string of grass. Then he took the pail, filled it again, and emptied it into his mouth, drinking as much water as he could swallow. Untainted water was hard to find in the forest, and there was no sense it letting it go by. It might have been poisoned, of course, or the girl might have bewitched it somehow, but he did not worry. He was sure he could smell it, if she had.
That done, he dropped the pail in the grass and walked around the front of the house, scrutinizing the vegetables in the garden. Why would she worry that he would eat those things? He was hungry, yes, but they weren’t really food. His head felt light from not eating, and wet enough that the wind bit sharply. He walked inside without waiting for Rose to answer the door, seeking warmth. Bodies without fur got very cold indeed.
The Wolf was something of a different sight, with the coat of filth cleaned off. He was still dirty, still had gore under his too-long nails and dirt collected in the joints and the hollows of his clavicles, but the sheen of grime, spittal, and blood was gone. Underneath, he was pale. The gash in his stomach was mostly healed, though red now, inflamed in protest of the twisting his torso had taken. There were small red bite marks where the tree had really sunk its branches in, and the swelling beside his eye was coloring startlingly quickly. It seemed to already have gone down a bit, though that had to be too fast for anything to heal.
Now that the dirt was out of it, his hair was blond. There was far too much of it, and it still hung over his eyes. He had no perspective on what kind of man he made, or what he appeared to be. One of the young maids he’d devoured in the past few years might have said that he had a pretty face. He had broad cheekbones, a squared nose, and deep hollows for his sharp, darting black eyes. "Food," he said, cautiously, not a request so much as a confirmation that she had some.
She merely rolled her eyes at his attempt to speak for the woods. As if the woods needed anyone to speak for them, when they could easily speak for themselves. The Witching Wood wasn't like the woods that had died here during the Beast's war, and they weren't like the woods that had fallen during the Adversary war. The Witching Wood was magic, and he was wrong if he didn't think they retained some sentience. But he would learn that on his own, eventually. She had no idea how long he'd been there, since she'd been living with the merchant for years before ending up the Beast's prisoner. But, eventually, he would learn.
She went inside, and she rummaged through the cedar trunk beneath the window nearest the kitchen. There, she found a pair of soft tan trousers and a white t-shirt. She had brought many clothes back from Fabletown and, stupidly, had included some items in case Henry stayed Henry and came here. He had come in a dream, but it hadn't gone how she'd hoped, and the clothes were there, unused and Mundane.
She set them on the step, and by the time he was making his comment about food, she was coming back out with a bowl of beef stew, hearty and filled with vegetables from the garden. She didn't bother bringing a spoon, but the bowl was filled to overflowing, and she waited for him to come around before holding it out.
"Eat it before you dress," she told him, knowing he would be a mess. And, begrudgingly, she admitted that he might be handsome once the swelling completely ebbed. "We should cut your hair," she said thoughtfully of his overlong curls. But that could wait. "Eat, then dress. Supper will be ready at nightfall. You can sleep in front of the hearth when it's cold," she added, not intending to make that final offer, but he was younger than she had expected beneath the dirt and blood. And he didn't have old eyes like she did.
She gave him a look for a moment longer, and then she retreated into the cottage. She'd lost part of the day, and she had cures to deliver in the morning.
The Wolf didn't even hear her speak, because he could smell the food before she presented it to him. He took the bowl from her with greedy hands and ate it standing up, pouring the hot broth into his mouth. It burned his tongue, and he wrinkled his nose, but that was all the pain he could express while still eating. He didn't understand why the food needed to be hot, or why she'd ruined it by putting all the little plants in it, but that didn't matter. It was food.
He was a mess, as she’d guessed. All he cared about was getting the food into his stomach as quickly as possible. He tore only briefly at any bits that he couldn’t swallow whole with his stupid blunt teeth. When the bowl was empty, he licked at the inside. She was saying words about his hair, but he did not care, did not care at all. When there was nothing left to find in the bowl, he cleaned off his fingers with his tongue.
She was still speaking. "Dress?" he rumbled, still a little dazed from having food for the first time in a week. He still felt hungry, and he licked his thumb again. He didn't ask about the hearth. He'd seen them before, when winter had grown desperate and he had torn down the doors to houses, losing claws and blood in his effort to crack the door like a shell to get at the meat inside. Dress. He saw the clothes then, the soft stuff on the step, and he furrowed his brow but didn't say anything about it. Begrudging or not, warmth would be a welcome change. It was always unseasonably cold in the wood since everything had gone dead, and with no fur it felt all the colder.
He suspected that the blood the meat and plants had been suspended in would make the clothing stick and itch to his ridiculously bare skin, so he got another pail of water after she went inside and rinsed off the drips of the food she'd brought. His mouth stung with heat, and he was still hungry, but not as much.
He dressed - or he tried to. It took some studying, but he'd seen enough humans to know what went where, and there was a certain logic to it. He put the shirt on backwards, and it was a strange thing. It didn’t have the shiny circles on it he was accustomed to on the people of the village, but it was soft, and almost made up for not having proper fur to keep warm. He didn’t like the idea of it, but, as usual, the practical answer won out. He didn’t know what to do with the metal bits on the pants, so he left them alone. The material was loose around his too thin hips, and with the fly gaping open it was all he could do to keep them on.
There would be 'supper'. He was fairly sure that supper meant more food. He moved through the little clearing, investigating the garden and the place where the green grass stopped, and dragged his fingers over the trees there. His scent, he suspected, had not changed. He wouldn't properly mark this place as his territory. Not yet. The girl didn’t get that kind of protection until he saw supper. For now, even a hint of his scent would be enough to make almost anything give this place a wide berth.
When the sun grew dim behind the trees, he went to the door again, nudging it with his shoulder and poking his head inside.
She looked at him when he entered. She'd begun making use of what she'd held onto in the woods, and she now had brown-paper wrapped with twine in the basket on the worktable, almost ready to be delivered come morning, and she looked up, twine still twisting in her fingers. Inside, it was warm and cozy, and she'd already changed into a pair of red pajamas she'd purchased with snow, buttons and long sleeves and pants that reached her toes and made her look very small. Her copper hair was braided, and there was a ribbon at the end.
She tsked when she saw him. "Stupid male," she said, walking up to him and tugging at the tag that was on the shirt, near his neck. "This goes in the back. Turn it around," she ordered, and she motioned to his pants next. "And that goes up," she said of his fly. She'd need to get him underthings, she realized. All it would take was one accident, and she'd have a feral blond running around in a shirt and no pants. "Be careful of that hair," she said, pointing down. "She motioned toward the hearthside rug, where she'd set a tin plate and some crusty, day-old bread dipped in broth and dried. "Don't make a mess. I have work to finish," she said, keeping an eye on on him as she returned to her worktable and the twine there.
The Wolf grumbled and pulled his arms into the shirt, turning it around with some difficulty, and one arm briefly going through the wrong sleeve. It was so much bother for such a thin layer of warmth. Why did they even do this?
He looked Rose over. She seemed even tinier than before, and even more cream white above and below those bright red clothes. It made him think of a little thing he'd hunted in the woods, once. She had a long, delicate neck, and his eyes lingered on it a little too long before he realized what he was doing. He turned to the fly of the pants, then, and tried to work out how it came up. Pulling the two sides together didn't seem to do anything. "The villagers don't wear things like these," he said, and looked up at her sharply. He didn't know if the clothes were bewitched, or why they looked so different. But the Wolf wasn't stupid. He was inexperienced in the ways of men, yes, but still knew more about them than most wolves ever did. He had gone further into their lands than any of his kind from the forest had, and he had seen them in their homes. He had not survived the long years of hunger by sheer luck, after all. He had learned when they went for water, when they went for wood at the forest’s edge, when they sent their children to tend to their sick and wounded. He learned quickly, and the gaze that fell on her then was keen indeed. "You aren't just a witch," he said.
He moved past her and the stench of magic on the work table, to the food by the fireplace. He had no more to say about it, not just yet. It could wait until he'd rested. The rug before the hearth was soft as a bed of pine needles, and the warmth was a steady comfort. He ate, and he watched the flames, and eventually he slept, curled in tightly. And he stayed close to the surface of waking, just in case. The girl might still bring the tall dark man back to the cottage for him, after all, to finish what he’d started with his sword.