The Wolves' Last Gift

Chapter4: The anteroom

Before

Ironclad Packhouse — Age 17

The medicine was called silverroot extract and it came from a healer two settlements east, a woman named Pell who ran her practice out of a converted stable and charged fair prices and did not ask questions. Miyuki knew this because she had asked around quietly, the way she asked around about everything. Never directly, never in a way that could be traced back to her. She had been doing it for three years by then. She was good at it.

Her mother had been coughing since the autumn. Not the sharp, productive kind that means the body is fighting something and winning. The other kind. The low, persistent kind that settles into the chest and does not leave, that shows up in the morning and is still there at night, that eventually stops being something you even mention because it has just become part of what you are.

Miyuki mentioned it. She mentioned it twice, quietly, to the packhouse healer who came through on Thursdays. The healer was a young male wolf with a gift for tissue repair, very good at the things wolf bodies needed and a lot less familiar with the things human-adjacent bodies needed, and both times he said "I'll make a note," with the gentle vagueness of a man making a note he is never going to look at again.

She found out about Pell in November. She worked out the route. Two hours on foot, easy terrain, nothing she couldn't manage in half a day and still be back before dark. She had a little money, just enough. The only thing she needed was permission to leave the territory.

Pack-adjacent residents did not leave without authorisation. She knew this rule. She had been operating inside the rules of Ironclad for three years, because operating inside the rules was the only leverage she had, the only thing that kept the residency document from becoming a question somebody asked out loud. So she would go through the proper channel. She would ask. She would be reasonable, and specific, and polite, and she would get what she was asking for, because what she was asking for was half a day's leave to fetch medicine for a sick woman.

That is what she thought, on a Tuesday morning in November, when she walked to the Beta's office and gave her name to the clerk at the desk.

She waited three hours in the anteroom.

The anteroom had four chairs and a window that looked into a courtyard where nothing was happening, and after an hour she had memorised every detail of it. The grain of the wooden floor. The small c***k running up from the bottom corner of the window. The way the light changed as the morning moved toward noon. She watched wolves come and go. A tracker brought in a report and was seen immediately. Two senior wolves arrived with no appointment and were waved straight through. A maintenance request from someone named Dorn went in, and came back out approved, in the time it took Miyuki to stand up, stretch her back, and sit back down again.

Just past midday the Beta himself came through. A wide-shouldered man in his forties named Carrick, who always looked like he was calculating something, and he looked at her the way you look at something you don't recognise in a place it should not be.

"Pack-adjacent residents don't petition," he said.

"I understand," she said. "I just wanted to ask once. My mother is ill, and there's a healer two settlements east who has the medicine she needs. I'd be back before dark."

He looked at her for a moment with the expression of a man who is not going to say yes and would rather not have to say no either.

"I'll have someone look into it," he said.

He went into his office. The door closed.

She waited another hour. The clerk did not look at her. At some point he began tidying his desk in the specific way that means the working day is winding down, and she understood then that "I'll have someone look into it" was not a thing that was ever going to be looked into. She stood up, straightened her jacket, and walked out of the anteroom and down the main corridor and out the packhouse door.

It was raining. A light grey November rain that wasn't cold enough to be dramatic and wasn't warm enough to be anything but miserable. She stood at the gate for a while. She thought about just walking, just going, without the authorisation, taking her chances on whatever happened when she came back. She thought about it seriously, the way she thought about most things, running the possible outcomes one by one. None of them were good. The best one still came with consequences she couldn't afford.

She walked back inside.

She did not fetch the medicine. She told herself there would be another way, a better time, a different route through the rules that she just hadn't found yet. She was seventeen, and she still believed, then, that the rules could be navigated, if you were just careful enough and patient enough and didn't ask for too much at once.

Her mother died in February. Eleven weeks later.

Miyuki stood at the small burial on the packhouse grounds and held her face still and did not cry in front of anyone, the way she had promised herself she wouldn't. And afterward she went to her corridor and sat on her pallet with her back against the shelving unit and thought, very quietly, in the voice she only ever used for herself: the medicine might not have helped.

She thought that for a long time.

Later that night the boy found her in the storeroom off the kitchen, where she had gone because she didn't want to be in the corridor, which still smelled like her mother's last visit, the particular soap she used. She was sitting in the dark between the flour sacks and the oil drums, and she was not crying, she was just there, taking up as little room as she possibly could.

He didn't turn the light on. He didn't ask what was wrong. He sat down on the floor across from her, close enough that she could just make out the shape of him in the dark, and he stayed.

She hadn't eaten in God knows how long. Everything reminded her of her mother. She didn't even notice until the boy opened something. And the smell that wafted through her nostrils. My God!!! It made her stomach growl. But before she could even feel hungry she remembered all the times her stomach had growled before and who had given her food those times.

"A fine young lady is not supposed to wait till her stomach goes full werewolf before she eats dear."

"You need to have some meat on those bones"

"Ok thats enough for today. I fear your tummy will transform and bite my head off"

"Come dear, thats enough cleaning for today. Let's eat"

All things her dear mother used to say whenever her stomach was in danger of turning when it was under a full moon of hunger. She did not know when, but the tears she had been holding back started flowing down her eyes.

"She wouldn't want you to go to bed without eating again. Live how she would want you to." The boy said.

That was the first time she had heard him speak. As if a dam burst, she started crying uncontrollably and the boy moved closer to her and held her small head into his chest and she bawled and bawled. He took the food, and blew air on it to cool it down as he fed her. She cried and ate, and cried some more. Then, after the flask was licked clean, the boy took the flask, the cutlery and cleaned it. He said nothing after that and just sat with her in silence.

She doesn't know for how long. She lost track of time at some point, and when she found it again he was gone, and she felt, not better, but less alone inside the not-better, which was something.

She never told him about her mother. She never told him anything. He just always seemed to know where she was. And then, he had given her the courage to take life on, no matter how bleak it looked, just as her mother would've wanted.

She's in a forest now, in the dark, and there's no one to ask permission from and nowhere she has to be by nightfall, and she isn't sure yet what that is. Whether it's freedom, or just a different kind of lost. She keeps walking anyway. One foot, and then the other. That's all it has ever really been.