My five guardians

Chapter 2. A kind wolf.

Conall was not a man of unnecessary words.

Indira had watched him from a distance often enough to know that. She had seen him patrol the village boundaries with that deliberate calm that wolves possess when they don’t want anyone to know they’re keeping watch over everything. She had seen him ignore conversations, decline invitations, remain on the fringes of village celebrations, attending as if compelled by duty, yet maintaining his choice not to participate in them.

Once, just once, his blue eyes had met hers in the market square, and he hadn’t looked away in disgust like everyone else.

He simply looked at her.

She was the one who had looked away at first.

Now she was lying on the floor of what appeared to be an abandoned mill on the outskirts of the village, resting on a bed of straw that offered her no comfort, and every part of her body kept reminding her of what she had just been through. Her lip was split—she could taste the copper tang of dried blood every time she swallowed. Something on her left side protested with every breath—not broken, but close. Her hair felt sticky and stiff; there was surely more blood somewhere, matting the strands to her scalp.

Conall was sitting a few feet away, with his back to her, looking toward the half-open doorway. Waiting or watching. Indira wasn’t sure what the difference was at that moment.

The mill smelled of old grain and damp stone, of neglect and the emptiness of places people had abandoned. Somewhere above them, a floorboard creaked in the wind. Indira listened to it for a long moment, letting the sound anchor her to the present, to the fact that she was still breathing, still there, still alive against all probability.

“Why?” Her voice sounded worse than she’d expected. Harsh, broken by something that wasn’t just crying.

He didn’t move right away. When he answered, he did so without turning around.

“Because I could.”

That wasn't enough of an answer. Indira opened her mouth to say so—to demand more, to push against the wall of his silence—but he continued before she could, his voice carrying the same measured calm he wore like a second skin.

“And because what you did tonight was unjustifiable.”

The silence that followed was strange. It was uncomfortable, not because of hostility but because of the absence of it, because Indira didn’t know how to be in a space where someone spoke to her as if their words carried any weight. She had spent so many years absorbing the village's contempt that kindness—if this was kindness—felt like a language she had forgotten.

She tried to sit up. Her left side protested violently, and her whole body trembled with the effort. Conall stood up before she could finish the movement, not to help her —or not exactly— but to step closer and stay at a distance from which he could do so if she needed it.

But he let her decide.

Indira finished sitting on her own. The world swam for a moment, dark at the edges, and then steadied. She kept her eyes fixed on the doorway, on the sliver of moonlight visible through the gap, and breathed until her vision cleared.

“They’re coming to get me.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.” He didn’t sugarcoat that either. “Aldric thinks I took you because you were already dead, but he’ll surely want to see your body before he believes me.”

Aldric. The name landed on her chest like a stone, heavy and cold. They had been born together in the village, on the same day—so their parents had joked that it was a sign. She had watched him grow up as they played together, and she had been there when he transformed for the first time during the ceremony she had been denied. She had seen him become the man who filled a room with his mere presence. And tonight she had seen him order her death with the same calmness with which ordinary things are ordered.

“Then I have to go.”

“Yes.”

“Tonight.”

A brief pause. “Yes.”

Indira looked at her hands on the ground, her fingers still stained with dirt from the forest, from the herbs she had gathered hours earlier when the world still made a little more sense. She thought of the empty hut. She thought of the two mounds of earth at the edge of the forest that she visited with pain and regret when she thought no one was watching.

Her parents had been dead for three years, and she still hadn’t found a way to think about it without something inside her threatening to shatter completely.

“Did you know this was going to happen?” she asked, and the question was sharper than she intended.

This time Conall did turn around. He looked at her with that expression she couldn’t name—it wasn’t pity, though it resembled it; it wasn’t guilt, though it had a touch of that too.

“I suspected it.”

“And you didn’t say anything.”

“No.” He didn’t apologize. He didn’t offer an explanation. He held her gaze as if he were ready to face whatever came next.

Indira wanted to be furious. She had every right to be. But fury required energy her body simply didn’t have, and beneath the rage was something more urgent pressing against her ribs —the image of that colorless space, the spinning blue lights, forcing her to walk through that gate, which seemed to be the connection to reality.

She was the only one.

That’s what she’d been told. Or not told, but conveyed in that way that didn’t use words but was understood all the same. Somehow, that was giving her the courage to keep going; it was the push she needed to be able to get up, to move, to survive when everything in her wanted to lie down and let the darkness take her.

She thought of the door again—the crack in space. The lights had said the world was dying. They had said she was the one. She didn't know what that meant. She didn't know if it was madness or prophecy or something in between. But she knew she couldn't die in this village, under this chief's boots, without finding out.

“Have you heard about the contaminated zones?” she asked. “A while back I heard there was one nearby, but I didn’t know where I’d have to go to get there.”

Conall’s blue eyes narrowed slightly, almost imperceptibly.

“Do you think I’m going to believe that lie?”

“What?”

"The herbs you usually gather mark the path to those places." His voice held no accusation, only the certainty of someone who has observed more than he has said. "I've seen you on the way back several times when I have to go out to check that they're still where they are. Are you going to tell me now that you never made it to those places, and now you need directions? Besides, why would anyone want to go to places where you're about to lose your mind?"

She stared into his eyes for a long time.

The truth was that she didn’t know; she genuinely had no idea that those leaves which were saving her from starvation were the path to a place that might give her some clue or hint about what she had seen.

“So, I just have to follow the plants, and I’ll end up in one of those areas?” she asked, her voice breaking with confusion and amazement. The words came out smaller than she intended, almost childlike.

“That’s right,” replied Conall, who looked at her with bewilderment, thinking that perhaps the blows had caused her to lose her mind and she was now ready to end her life.

People who went to the contaminated zones did not come back. Everyone knew that. The zones were places where the earth itself had grown sick, where the veil between worlds had thinned too much, where even the strongest shifters could lose themselves to madness.

“All right,” she said as she staggered to her feet and made her way to the door.

When she was standing by the door, he looked at her for a moment that lasted longer than necessary.

Then he pulled something from his clothes and held it out to her. A piece of bread. Small, the kind the guards carried on patrol. Indira took it without saying a word because words of thanks felt inadequate, and any other kind of words even more so.

“Conall.” She said without turning around. “If anyone asks, tell them you’re certain I’m dead.”

She didn’t wait for an answer.

Outside, the darkness of the road greeted her in silence. Somewhere among the trees, the herbs she had gathered all her life were waiting for her, unwittingly tracing a map she was only just beginning to see.