The Rise of the Fire Moon

  ***

  For the first time in her life, Alanki was rendered speechless.

  The brown wolf, Tir—her brother—was staring at her with an open mouth. He appeared to be in shock; his green eyes were wide and glassy and he didn’t make a sound. But Arwena was twisting in the red snow beneath her, trying to see Alanki better. Tir made no move to still her.

  “Alanki!” she said in delight, when Alanki turned to look at her. She repeated the name, as if enjoying the way it sounded. “Alanki! Alanki, don’t you understand? You’ve come for me. Alanki.”

  Alanki could only stare. Mixed emotions swam in her mind like colorful fish. She had no idea what to say or think—half of her was still lost out in the battle, fighting the packwolves. Alanki knew anger and hate, she knew the hollow feel of loss and the stillness of the warm seasons. She knew fear and the panic of the hunted animal as well as the savage joy of revenge. But complete and utter shock was something new to her—that everything she had thought she had known her entire life, everything since she had been born—was suddenly not at all as she believed.

  “A—Arwena?” she said. It hurt to talk. “Mother?”

  Arwena looked as though she was about to explode with joy.

  “She knows me!” she said to Tir. “Oh, she knows me! It is perfect! Oh, Alanki.”

  Something was surfacing in Alanki. It prickled like a tiny spider bite beneath her shock, but she could feel it growing stronger as she stood in the red snow and looked down at the battered, dying old wolf who was her mother. Her mother.

  The others were staring at her. They were waiting for her to speak, for her to bow her head and nuzzle her mother’s ear, maybe. But Alanki’s legs were frozen. She didn’t know what to do. Delphinium had been warm and maternal when she was a pup, but there had always been a sort of strict divide between Alanki and the deer. She lived among them, briefly, but she was not one of them. That was made clear to her on the day she killed Tormentil.

  On that day, her paws and muzzle had been red with blood. And so they were now; so they had been many times since Tormentil’s death. But in the snow, Arwena was smiling at her as though Alanki’s fur was as white and clean as the stars.

  “I don’t understand,” Alanki rasped. She looked from Tir to Misari, and then back to Arwena. “How—how could this happen? There was a fire, he told me, ‘twas not so long ago…I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve never seen another wolf until this summer.”

  “But you are here now,” Arwena said, as though she were explaining something very simple. “And I am, too. We all are. It is perfect.”

  “What? No, that is not—I don’t know what you’re talking about! I want an explanation.” Alanki whirled around to face Tir and Misari, her breath shortening and a prickly, strange panic rising in her throat. “If she is my mother, then why am I here? Why did I not flee the fire with the rest of you? Why was I raised by deer—why did I grow up alone?”

  Beneath her, Arwena released a long, hoarse breath. To Alanki’s surprise, she did not say a word. She seemed to deflate in the snow, her pain-hazed eyes still fixed on her daughter’s face but the light inside of them retreating like a frightened animal.

  “It is an old law,” Misari rumbled at last. Beside him, Tir gave a sharp intake of breath, but Misari only shook his head. “She deserves to know,” he told him, and when he turned back to Alanki his deep orange eyes held the same fog of mortal pain that Arwena’s did. “In harsh and dry seasons, the runt of a litter must be sacrificed, and it is the mother’s duty. It is terrible, yes, but I know that you foster no illusions—you grew up on your own and so you must know the terrible things creatures must do to survive. Runts are almost always too weak to live, and what short lives they do have are filled with pain until they are killed by hard, cruel natural means—it is best for the mother to do it herself, out of love, to spare her child the suffering that is its birthright.”

  Alanki stared at him. His words reached her through a fog of confusion and dull shock. Somewhere inside of her, she was listening and nodding in agreement; of course she understood that these things must happen—it is only practical, it is what we must do to survive. But Alanki was hearing him speak as though he were reciting nothing more than a cold rule. Dimly, she was aware that this was not a theory, this was something real—the runt was not a faceless variable, the runt was her. He was talking about killing her.

  “Please,” Arwena said. Her voice was small, cracked, withering away as though it was being forced through a thin hole in her lungs. “My child, my—my daughter…I am sorry, I am terribly, terribly sorry. I told myself I said the proper prayers, did what is right—but in truth I am a coward, and I know it.”

  “You never did it,” Tir said in a hoarse voice, and Arwena released a thin cry.

  “I couldn’t. You can’t understand; you’ve never had a child! She looked at me the way they do, so trusting, thinking in her simple little mind that this was another pretty game, that I had brought her out there to—to…oh…”

  Her voice trailed away into a horrible, gurgling gasp as blood welled up in her throat in slow pulses like the beating of her heart. Tir and Misari leaned forward, faces contracted in panic, but Arwena’s breaths evened back out into a faint rhythm. She twisted to look at Alanki’s face. Her eyes were wet and rimmed with red. “I left you by the river,” she whispered brokenly. “And I looked back as I walked away. You were watching me. I felt you watching me still, when the pack moved on through the forests and seasons; I felt your clear gaze and I could see your face as it was when I left it, and I thought of how long it must have taken. How you must have suffered, starved, alone, all because I was too afraid to do what I was meant to do. How I, your mother, had abandoned you to die under the claws of a scavenger.”

  Alanki’s throat was dry.

  “My dear,” Misari said. He sounded hoarse.“I never knew.”

  “You never wanted to know!” Arwena hissed at him. “After that day, you never spoke of her again. Never so much as looked me in the face. Tir was a yearling before you finally began treating him like he was your son.”

  Misari bowed his head as though he no longer had the energy to lift it. “I will neither deny nor excuse my actions. I deserved what rage you directed towards me. And I deserve whatever disasters you have brought me, Alanki.”

  “You knew me,” Alanki said, turning to him. “You knew who I was, that night I came into your settlement. You saw Arwena crying, and—and you realized, and you recognized me. So why did you—”

  “Agree to fight with you? Because, Alanki, I owe you at least that much.”

  “We wanted her dead,” Tir spoke up, looking at his paws. “We would never have let her go. Misari couldn’t have done anything at all.”

  “Did you think I could fall for a simple renegade’s trick?” Misari said with a sad, wry smile. “I, who have been alpha since before your birth? No, Alanki, I knew who you were and the trouble you were in. So I agreed to lead my wolves into battle, as I would do for any other member of my pack. And I would fight for you now as I failed to do years ago.”

  There was a silence now, and Alanki could feel the sorrow hanging in the air. She found herself looking into Arwena’s eyes—sad, leaf-green eyes that were now glazed with pain. A shiver ran down her spine. Didn’t she know those eyes?

  “I never forgot it,” Arwena breathed. “Not after seasons and seasons. It drove me mad, thinking of your death—sometimes I imagined you were still alive, in terrible pain, calling for me to make things right again. I slept, but nights were worse than days—in my mind, I ran and ran until my legs were broken beneath me. I was looking for something. I never knew what it was in the dream, but I awoke with the memory of your face the last time I saw you.”

  She could see something deep in Arwena’s eyes—something that Tir and Misari neither possessed nor would know to recognize, something visible only as a subtle darkness in her gaze. It was something that Alanki had seen in herself, when she look
ed at her reflection in the river. It was the look of one who had spent a lifetime forcing away terrible thoughts that refused to leave. In her dreams, Alanki had run miles over a black, featureless expanse, killing wolves and deer and scattering their corpses like dead leaves over the raging Lankhi.

  Arwena, too, had known nightmares.

  Alanki took a step backwards, her head reeling. The blood in the snow beneath her mother’s head seemed to blur before her eyes and before she knew it she was standing at the edge of her forest again, watching the bloody sunrise, blood on her paws and in her eyes and burning a red hole in the fields where it had been shed—red yew berries tumbled from a dark tree in a shining river, a poison river, and she was racing across the dark fields through the screaming wind, tearing out the throat of the wolves who had killed Sundew, and again blood spread crimson and warm over the ground…She shut her eyes. When she opened them again, she felt drained of all energy. The clearing was blurry, and the three wolves there were watching her with some unease, as though she were a fierce and cornered animal who may erupt unpredictably at any moment.

  “I told you that what I did was for the good of the pack, Alanki,” Misari was saying, his voice low and gentle. “A feeble excuse for you now, perhaps, but I would kill for those I had sworn to protect. And you, I know, would only do the same.”

  Alanki stared at him. Inside of her, her heart was pounding like a fall of boulders, and she could feel icy trembles shaking up from her paws. Her father’s solemn gaze was more deeply understanding than she could have hoped for—she clung to these shreds of sympathy, as a shriveled fern leans towards a shaft of sunlight. She had. She had killed for her pack, yes, the deer.

  “Mother,” Alanki whispered as she turned to Arwena, not knowing quite why she was doing so. “I’ve done terrible things.”

  “I know, my dear.”

  “‘Tis my fault you are here now. You are dying. I brought these wolves upon you.”

  “No,” Arwena said. “I am glad. This is not an occasion for sorrow. Perhaps I said the proper prayers after all. It seems The Spirits have taken mercy on me at last, if I can trade my own life for yours.”

  “I never wanted it.” Alanki felt crumpled, filthy, broken. “I never wanted this, any of this, a—and I only wanted to protect the deer; they were so helpless, and I had done them wrong already…please,” she said, finding herself pleading now. She turned feverishly to Tir, whose level green gaze reminded her of the wolves of her nightmare. “I didn’t know! I didn’t know I would go so far. I never would have killed them if…”

  “I understand,” Misari said. “I have done the same.”

  Alanki shuddered. The blood in her fur had dried and stiffened into clumps and spikes that prickled like electric shocks when she moved. A sour taste lingered in her mouth and all at once she felt the blood dripping off of her, encasing her. The waters of the Lankhi are sticky and warm. The waters of the Lankhi are not suited for washing away blood; the Lankhi has been red since its source.

  “It no longer matters.” Arwena’s voice had softened; she had begun to smile again. She closed her eyes. “We are here now. We are all here. And it is perfect.”

  No, Alanki wanted to say. This is still far from perfect. The thought of what her mother had done—had failed to do—sent chills down Alanki’s spine. Yet, if Arwena had performed her duty as she thought was right, Alanki would not be alive today. The others seemed to take it for granted that she would forgive Arwena. But where should her forgiveness begin? Was she expected to forgive her father for sentencing her to death, and her mother for shying from the task? Alanki knew that any anger on her part would, now, certainly be justified. But the rage would not come. Instead, she wanted to cry. She could not remember the last time she had cried.

  All her life, Alanki had been something terrible. To the deer, she was the wolf fawn, the fierce being from legend who would one day, inevitably, turn on the very people who had fostered her. She was the white renegade, the vengeful shadow who stalked the packwolves as they killed Tormentil again and again. It is a reminder, the old memory whispered again. It is your fault, your fault, your fault.

  But now, her mother was watching her from the snow as though nothing else—not the raging battle, not the canyon in her throat nor the blood on the snow—was important. Alanki was filthy and reeked of death, but Arwena was looking at her as no one had looked at her before, without the packwolves’ anger or the fear and pain that hung deep behind even Delphinium’s eyes. Arwena didn’t see the renegade; she saw the pup she had left on the riverbanks years ago, miraculously returned to her. And she was pleased with what she saw.

  “Yes, mother,” Alanki whispered. The words hurt to say, but she spoke all the same. “It is perfect.”

  Arwena smiled again, the muscles in her face trembling. She closed her eyes. With each labored breath, she shuddered, as though it were causing her pain. Blood welled up in her throat. Alanki thought of the strength of will and the agony she must have endured just to live this long, to say these words, to hear Alanki speak and forgive her.

  Without a sound, Misari turned and slipped out of the clearing. His orange-golden eyes were filled with old pain and within seconds after he had left, his howl could be heard climbing to the heavens—mournful, weary, and ancient. The alpha, paying his final respects. Their father, apologizing for his weaknesses.

  “Alanki…” Arwena whispered, as though she had been saving her words for last. “Tir…”

  Her voice faded away into a misty silence. The blood on her neck glinted in the weak moonlight, and brother and sister watched as the life drained out of their mother and onto the snow. Arwena’s breath wheezed in her throat for a few moments, but then it softened to a faint whisper, like a gentle breeze.

  Just for a second, her eyes opened in one last sliver of green before they fluttered shut. She relaxed and released herself, floating out on her last breath, gently off and away, over the rustling branches of the yew tree and up to the night sky where a few stars were glittering like open eyes in the dark.