A Mystery of Wolves Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1 A Herd of Dreams

  CHAPTER 2 The Sick Human

  CHAPTER 3 A Song of Hope

  CHAPTER 4 A Mystery of Wolves

  CHAPTER 5 The Zoo

  CHAPTER 6 Graysong

  CHAPTER 7 The Crossroads

  CHAPTER 8 The Fjord Spirit

  CHAPTER 9 The Elf Warrior and the Troll Princess

  CHAPTER 10 Wolf Keep

  CHAPTER 11 The King

  CHAPTER 12 The Joining

  CHAPTER 13 Spirit Eater

  CHAPTER 14 The Great Weaving

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  LITTLE FUR’S TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS CONTINUE IN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ISOBELLE CARMODY

  COPYRIGHT

  For Adelaide

  my elf troll

  my muse

  CHAPTER 1

  A Herd of Dreams

  Winter brings to the Land a mighty silence. Many beasts and birds fall deeply asleep under its spell, and the air turns thick with dreams.

  Those who are wakeful can sense the chaotic power of these long, strange dreams. But only the creatures from the last age of the world know what is to be done with them. As the midwinter night approaches, they journey to one of the secret places where magic remains strong, and they enact the ancient ceremony of the Great Weaving to summon the dreams and weave them into a potent gift for the earth spirit.

  Only two kinds of creatures do not attend the midwinter weaving: trolls, who loathe the earth spirit with a deadly passion, and elves, for none survive in this age when magic is grown so thin.

  Yet elf blood is not quite gone from the world, for there is one creature in whom it flows: a small elf troll named Little Fur.

  Strangest of all the things of the last age she may be, for her father was an elf and her mother a troll. How this came about was not known, for Little Fur had no memory of her parents. She has lived her whole long life in a patch of wilderness that once lay at the heart of a vast forest of singing trees. Seven trees are all that remain, but these seven, known as the Old Ones, are saturated in the power of their fallen brethren. Though they sing no more, these sentinels protect the wilderness and all that dwell within it from the great dark human city that surrounds it. Such is the power of the seven that even those humans who live alongside the wilderness never think of it.

  Though it was still weeks away, Little Fur was already preparing for midwinter night with the help of the beasts and birds of the wilderness. The squirrels were so mad with excitement that even their usual scatterbrained usefulness evaporated. The birds who were willing forgot any instruction almost the moment it had been given. But the rabbits were steady as long as boldness was not required. The weasels and stoats were clever and nimble, and several older burrowers were hard at work making different sorts of hollows and nests for the visitors.

  One afternoon Little Fur paused from the preparations to tend to a wild rabbit that had gotten her paw crushed by a branch. The wan sun was already setting as she carried the rabbit into a cave whose entrance was partly concealed beneath an icefall. This was where she made and stored her potions and herbs and did much of her winter healing. Little Fur set the rabbit’s tiny bones and mended her torn skin. Then she held her firmly as Tillet bandaged the paw. Tillet, a large hare, was Little Fur’s most competent and steadfast helper.

  “You have been brave,” Little Fur whispered very softly, stroking the rabbit and looking around the cave.

  The walls had niches of varying sizes that had been made by obliging moles. Many of the spaces were filled with piles of leaves and packets of herbs and powders all carefully made up and labeled. Other niches were heaped with stones, dried roots, tubers and bags of seeds. One large niche held an abandoned beehive. Its honey had been drained into a gourd, but its wax was yet to be scraped out. Field mice slept in a nest in the niche beside the beehive; below, a recovering ermine lay curled asleep. Higher up were nests, several occupied by birds that had hurt their wings before they could fly away for winter.

  The cave was warmer at the back because a trickle of hot springwater welled from a split rock and pooled in a natural stone bowl, where it shimmered with a strange blue light. Beside the stone bowl slept a blind tabby cat with three of her kittens. A fourth kitten swaggered in a circle beneath a cluster of bats suspended from a stalactite. Dangling beside the bats were a fat braid of garlic, strings of wild onions and three great, knotty, earth-encrusted roots. Toward the front of the cave, dried leaves and berries dangled from plaited reeds. Along a special shelf were small nut gourds containing Little Fur’s more dangerous potions.

  Though there were herbs waiting to be steeped and a great clump of spiderweb that needed weaving into bandages, Little Fur felt content. All these tasks could be dealt with after midwinter night. The one thing she ought to do before then was to make herself another cloak. The last one, sewn from a bit of human cloth, had fallen apart, and although Little Fur did not feel the cold as keenly as humans, she did need the cloak for all the pockets she could sew into it.

  She sighed, remembering the gray cloak her elf father had left her. It could make its wearer hard to see and remained light as thistledown no matter what she put in the pockets. But a human had taken it the first time Little Fur had ever gone out into the city. All she had of her parents now was the green stone that had once belonged to her mother, which she wore on a thong about her neck. Little Fur had thought it merely a pretty bauble until she had learned that the stone was also worn by troll royalty.

  Her longing to learn more of trolls was another reason that she looked forward to the coming midwinter ceremony. Little Fur had not thought much about her parents before traveling to the troll city of Underth, but that perilous adventure had awakened both her troll blood and a powerful curiosity. It was strange that the newly awakened troll blood was not constantly at war with her elf blood, but it was as if they had agreed that whichever served best would take charge.

  “Finished,” Tillet said.

  Little Fur composed her mind and sang a song to the rabbit’s spirit so the wounded paw could heal properly. A swan waiting to have his wings cleaned waddled nearer to listen, and a big beaver with a toothache ceased his restless movements. Once the rabbit was asleep, Little Fur lifted her gently into one of the ground-level niches.

  An enormous black dog lay sprawled asleep against the wall with a small red snake coiled under her chest, a family of mice sleeping on her tail and a tiny owl perched on her back. The owlet opened her round yellow eyes and hooted a forlorn inquiry. “Crow will come soon, Gem,” Little Fur murmured, aware that the orphaned owl saw Crow as her brother, much to his disgust.

  Crow was one of Little Fur’s best friends, and their spirits were linked. This allowed her to sense that he was even now winging his way to the wilderness. She could feel that he had news, but that was nothing unusual. Crow loved to play messenger, and if the news was not exciting enough, he was happy to exaggerate it. Thinking about Crow turned Little Fur’s mind to the cat Ginger. Her spirit was linked to his as well, but she had not seen him since they had been separated fleeing from Underth.

  Little Fur began to examine the swan, grimacing at the sticky mess on his feathers. It smelled like the food that humans fed their road beasts, and she wondered how it had come to be in the pond. Fetching a bowl of water from the spring, she set it on the sand so that Tillet could pour in the frothy mixture she had prepared. The swan gave a hiss as he felt the warmth of the water, and Little Fur bade him be still, for the filth would not come off properly in cold water.

  As she worked, her thoughts circled back to Ginger. He had taken the under-road from Und
erth, which went all the way to a distant city by the sea. The way back overland was much longer, for there were lakes and swamps and human settlements to avoid, as well as a high range of mountains to cross. With Ginger were a rat and two small ferrets, one of which had been injured, so that would have slowed him further. Because of their connection, Little Fur could feel Ginger coming steadily closer each day. By her reckoning, he would arrive just before midwinter night.

  Sorrow, the fox, would return then, too, or so he had promised when he’d left the wilderness the previous darkmoon. He had gone to the Sett Owl to ask her advice about a mate, only to be told there was no one for him and that he must learn to be wild.

  Be patient, Little Fur told herself.

  Little Fur sat back on her heels with weary satisfaction, seeing that the swan’s feathers once again glowed white and clean. “Now you must preen out some oil,” she told him. The swan thanked her and went to sit on a small puddle of meltwater, eyeing the dog mistrustfully. Little Fur was puzzled, for the swan knew that the earth magic that flowed through the wilderness would not allow the dog to attack any of Little Fur’s patients.

  Little Fur sniffed and was startled to find the faint but unmistakable scent of human. The black dog had noticed as well. She had not been near a human since her escape from them. Now she stiffened and all the hair along her spine stood up as she rose, smelling of anger. The snake coiled himself more tightly, and the mice squeaked indignantly as they were spilled gently into the soft sand. Only the orphaned owlet clung to the dog’s back with small thorny talons, her yellow eyes wide.

  “What is the matter?” Little Fur asked.

  The black dog loped past the meltwater pool and under the cluster of icicles at the mouth of the cave, the owl still clinging to her back.

  Little Fur followed more slowly. Outside, the black dog was standing in the fresh snow as still as one of the great stones humans carved in their own likenesses. It was close to true darkness now, and there was a sharp blueness to the air.

  Tillet bounded lightly outside, too. She stood up on her hind legs, long ears and nose twitching.

  “Do you smell something?” Little Fur asked her.

  The hare did not answer, but now her whiskers twitched as well.

  “Something…,” Gem hooted softly from her perch atop the black dog. “Definitely. Definably.”

  Little Fur was about to hush her nonsense when the black dog turned to look at her, eyes glowing ferociously. “I smell human.”

  Little Fur stared at her. “A human? But you don’t…you can’t mean that there is a human in the wilderness?”

  The black dog gave a loud bark, bounded up the steep side of the valley and disappeared behind a line of fir trees cloaked in white.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Sick Human

  The human had not so much invaded the wilderness as it had fainted and sprawled into it. Indeed, it was only the upper half of its body that lay within it. Nevertheless, Little Fur, the creatures who had followed her, the black dog and Tillet stared in disbelief.

  “Is it a giant troll?” asked a small weasel.

  “It is a human,” said his sister, and the saying of it frightened her so much that she burst into tears.

  “Is it an invasion?” asked her little brother, half in terror, half in wonder. “Are they coming to kill us?”

  “Sickness,” said the black dog suddenly. The scent of anger she had given off shaded into something more complicated. Little Fur sniffed, and it was true: the scent of sickness rose unmistakably from the human.

  “Bad sick,” hooted Gem. “Sick of badness.”

  Little Fur went two steps closer, wondering what to do. She was not a healer of humans. Yet the wilderness had allowed this intrusion. No matter that the human had staggered here in a fevered daze, it would not have been able to enter had not the seven Old Ones permitted it. Did the trees wish her to heal the human? Or was it only an oddity caused by the long dreams of the birds and beasts caught up in winter’s grip?

  The black dog went closer to the human and nosed fearlessly at it.

  Little Fur held her breath, half expecting it to wake and spring at her. But the human only moaned softly.

  “It is in pain,” she said, taking another step forward.

  “Humans have their own healers,” Tillet said firmly.

  “We could pull it onto the black road. One of its own kind will see it soon enough,” suggested a mink, glaring at the human with her shining black eyes.

  Her mate nodded.

  “It might be hurt by a road beast,” Little Fur murmured. “They are the pets of humans, but I have heard many stories in which humans are mauled and killed by road beasts, just as animals and birds are.”

  “The human may be too sick to be moved,” suggested a tomcat who had come to find out what was happening.

  Little Fur drew a long breath to steady herself and went to kneel beside the human. It was much bigger than she had expected, and its scent was so soured with despair that it smelled almost like a greep, one of the degenerate humans that in other seasons slept under trees and in holes and doorways throughout the city, stinking of the fermented juices they drank. Mingled with the reek of despair was the rotting stench of disappointment and the slick, sharp odor of helplessness. The human’s body was weak with hunger and thirst, but the smells told Little Fur that its sickness lay in its spirit. It was rare to find a spirit that sickened while the body was sound. The last time she had smelled it had been in the fox Sorrow.

  Little Fur gathered her courage and put out her hand to lay it on the human’s bony wrist. Its pulse raced with fever and with the boiling turmoil of its dreams, and she struggled for the courage to merge spirits so that she could find the song to heal it.

  The human opened its eyes and looked straight at her with eyes as blue as the summer sky, but it did not see Little Fur. Indeed, its eyes fell closed almost at once. Little Fur knew that when it woke, it would think she had been a dream.

  “What you are doing, Little Fur?” screeched Crow, landing in the snow beside her with a frenzied black flutter of his wings. “That being human! Must not touching it!”

  “It is sick,” Little Fur said.

  “What that got to doing with Little Fur? You not healer of humanness!”

  Little Fur ignored Crow and asked the black dog if she could drag the human around the wilderness and across the road to the pony park, where Brownie and his brothers lived with their human. Brownie was a small pony who visited Little Fur in the wilderness. He and his brothers gave rides to human children in the pony park in spring and summer.

  The black dog said she could manage the task, and she twitched her back to dislodge the little owl. Gem fluttered to the ground with an enthusiasm that matched her awkwardness, landing beak-first in a drift. Crow plucked her out and set her upright.

  “Heroic hero,” Gem hooted adoringly.

  “Stupidness,” Crow muttered, hopping over to Little Fur’s side.

  Little Fur bade him fly ahead to make sure there were no humans about. Crow gave a caw of irritation but launched himself into the air and followed the black dog. Gem gave a little hoot of wistfulness as Little Fur picked her up and set her onto a branch, her head swiveling to watch Crow.

  “You really must learn to fly up soon, Gem. How will you ever get to know any other owls if you can’t fly up to them?”

  “I am crowful,” said the owl soulfully.

  Little Fur set off after the black dog, calling for Tillet to watch over the patients until she returned.

  “Foolishness,” the hare sighed under her breath.

  Brownie suggested that the black dog pull the human close to the front of his human’s dwelling and then bark until the human came out. Little Fur observed from behind a bush as the black dog followed these instructions. She watched eagerly, as she had never seen Brownie’s human before.

  It was not long before the door of the dwelling opened and Brownie’s human stepped out. It had
gray and brown hair, which shone in the false light that poured out over its head and shoulders and lay glistening on the snow. Little Fur could not see the human’s face because of the blinding glare of the false light, but she saw it stiffen when it saw the unconscious human and the black dog. It called out some words, and Little Fur smelled a question in them. Of course the sick human did not answer, but the black dog barked. Even though humans had almost no understanding of beast speech, Brownie’s human seemed to get the sense of the black dog’s barks.

  It shouted something and then vanished inside. Little Fur relaxed, for its words had smelled of concern and haste. A moment later, it came out wearing boots and a coat and carrying a blanket bundled up in its arms. It walked toward the unconscious human slowly, but its eyes were on the black dog. The human did not smell frightened, but its movements showed that it was wary. At last, it stood over the unconscious human, looking at the black dog. No words were spoken, yet it seemed to Little Fur that something passed between them.

  Brownie’s human bent to examine the sick human. The black dog watched for a time and then backed away. Noticing her retreat, Brownie’s human called out. Little Fur could smell that the human had asked the black dog for help. She could hardly believe her eyes, but slowly the black dog retraced her steps.

  Between them, Brownie’s human and the black dog dragged the sick human toward the door. The black dog stopped at the edge of the dazzling spill of false light, and Brownie’s human spoke again, holding out one hand in entreaty. This time the black dog gave a low warning growl and showed her teeth before turning and loping across the pony park to a border of fir trees that marched down one side in a line. Little Fur knew she had not gone toward the wilderness in case that made the human notice it.