episode 3:The Alpha
1944 Words
Ashwood was nothing like the nightmare.
She had expected darkness. Hostility. The grim, teeth and shadow wilderness her father had described since she was old enough to understand warnings.
What she got was ancient trees so vast their roots arched out of the earth like the ribs of something enormous. Moss in every shade of green she had a name for. Light falling through the canopy in slow gold columns. Air so clean it almost hurt to breathe after twenty two years of capital smoke.
She stopped walking.
"This isn't" She turned, looking. "This isn't what he said it was."
Caelan kept moving. "No."
"He called it a wound in the earth."
"I know what he called it."
"He said nothing lived here that wouldn't tear a person open."
"He needed you afraid of it." He glanced back. "Afraid people don't ask questions about places they've been told not to go."
She stood in the light and felt something shift underneath everything she thought she knew.
"How long?" she said.
He stopped. "How long what?"
"How long has he been lying? About all of it. The wolves. The forest. The wars."
A pause.
"Since before you were born," he said.
She absorbed that quietly. Let it settle the way heavy things settle slowly, displacing everything else.
Then she kept walking.
The grey wolf fell into step beside her without invitation close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating off his coat. She looked at the arrow wound in his flank. Cleaned now, she realised. Someone had tended it while she wasn't watching.
"He let Soren look at it," Caelan said, without her asking.
"Soren?"
"My Beta." Something in his voice. Warmth, carefully restrained. "He complains the entire time but he doesn't miss."
"Your Beta." She glanced sideways at him. "You have a whole structure. A hierarchy."
"Did you expect chaos?"
"I expected wolves."
"We are wolves." His expression didn't change but something in his eyes did. "We are also a great deal more than what your father's textbooks described."
She looked at the grey wolf padding alongside her. At the easy, unhurried way it moved through the forest. Not like an animal navigating territory. Like something completely, entirely home.
"What's his name?" she asked.
Caelan looked at her. Like the question surprised him slightly.
"Grey," he said.
She waited.
"That's it?"
"He didn't like the one I gave him when he was a pup. Made his feelings clear. We compromised."
She stared at him.
He kept walking.
She filed that away next to everything else the growing collection of small things about this man that kept refusing to fit the shape she had assigned him in the square.
They walked in silence for a while. The forest shifted and deepened around them, the trees spacing differently, the light changing quality. Then Caelan stopped.
She nearly walked into him.
"What"
He held up one hand.
She went quiet. Listened.
Footsteps. Distant but moving fast. Multiple sets, disciplined rhythm.
Soldiers.
"They followed us in," she said quietly.
"Some of them." His jaw set. "Braver than usual."
"Or more afraid of my father than they are of the forest."
He looked at her. That reading quality.
"Yes," he said. "Probably that."
Grey made a low sound. Three other wolves materialised from the shadows between the trees she hadn't even known they were there and positioned themselves without a word from Caelan.
"Do they always do that?" she whispered.
"Do what?"
"Appear from nowhere the moment you need them."
"Yes."
"How?"
"They know me." Simple. Complete. "The same way you know when someone you love is in a room before you see them."
She looked at the wolves fanning out through the trees. At the absolute, quiet certainty with which they moved.
"What do we do?" she said.
"We keep walking." He started moving again. "They'll handle it."
"Handle it how? I don't want anyone"
"No one will be killed." He said it before she finished. "That is not how we do things here."
She followed him, watching the wolves disappear into the forest. "Then how?"
"They'll be turned around. Disoriented. They'll find their way back to the road eventually." A pause. "Confused and somewhat embarrassed."
"That's it?"
"What did you want? A battle?"
"No." She thought about it. "No, I just" She shook her head. "Every story I was ever told about this place said the wolves killed without reason."
"Every story you were told about this place," he said, "was written by your father."
The words landed simply. No drama. No anger. Just the flat, certain weight of a truth that had been waiting a long time to be said to her specifically.
She walked with it for a moment.
Then "Can I ask you something?"
"You've been asking me things since the square."
"A different kind of something."
He looked at her sideways. "Ask."
"In the square." She held his gaze. "My father when he saw you the colour left his face. Completely." She paused. "He signed my death warrant without his hand trembling. I watched him do it through the cell window. He felt nothing." Another pause. "But he felt something when he saw you."
Caelan said nothing.
"You've met before," she said.
Still nothing.
"He knows who you are."
"Yes." Quiet. Final.
"And whatever passed between you"
"Is the reason I came."
She stopped walking.
He took two more steps before he stopped too. Turned.
They stood in the ancient green dark of Ashwood, four feet apart, the forest breathing around them. She looked at this man the scar, the pale eyes, the face that gave away almost nothing and felt the shape of something enormous she couldn't yet see whole.
"The debt," she said. "It's about more than money."
His jaw tightened slightly.
"Yes," he said.
"It's about my father."
"Yes."
"And you."
"Yes."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"Tell me," she said.
He held her gaze.
"Tonight," he said. "The cottage first."
She wanted to argue. She could see in his face that he knew she wanted to argue, and that he had already decided the argument was finished.
She turned and started walking.
Grey padded up on her left side without being asked, warm and solid and quietly certain.
Like he'd already decided she was worth walking beside.
She didn't know what to do with that.
- Writer
