Hollow victory

[Cherny]

It is dark by the time Cherny returns to the tavern lawn; to the lakeshore, and the bloody ruin that lies there, limbs stiff, fur clotted with drying gore. He comes prepared, moving with careful deliberation, mindful of the bruises that stretch across his stomach just beneath his ribs. The squire's mailshirt had spared him a gutting, and for that he can only be thankful. He sets a lantern down beside the sprawled body, and starts unfolding an old blanket on the bloodsoaked grass.

The wolf-thing is dead. Slain, after months of fear and uncertainty by Noura's knife in his guts and Cherny's sword for his wrist. A monster, a terror, thief of a seamstress' hand. Yet the boy can find no jubilance in his heart, nor even much by way of relief. He's suspected the beast's origin for a while, wondered, but it had been the wildling who'd put it into words.

Don'cha think that it looks kind of like your mutt?

He crouches at the beast's side, inspecting it by candlelight; the form of it, powerful, strong, as suited to two legs as to four. He touches fingertips to a rigid forelimb, tracing over a paw that more resembles a hand, claw-tipped digits that had curled round the haft of a stolen sword. He reaches to comb his fingers through the fur at the beast's neck, brindled beneath the grey guard-hairs, before gently smoothing it down again.

What follows is an ordeal, silent but for muffled grunts of effort and the occasional muffled oath, but he eventually manages to roll the corpse onto the spread blanket; lengths of cord bind the cloth into a clumsy shroud, with further lengths by which the whole might be pulled along.

He cannot say how long it takes to complete his task; the summer stars turn overhead as he places one foot in front of the other, leaning his meager weight into the rope, huffing and sweating as he follows the unsteady circle of lantern light cast ahead of him and the heavy bundle drags and scuffs over the ground at his back. All he knows is that the body could not be left where it fell to be discovered and examined as an oddity. Observations would be made, features noted, and for that to happen risked too much. Night-roaming creatures scurry away into the undergrowth, while moths and midges blunder about the lantern-glass. Cherny sets his teeth and places one foot in front of the other.

Eventually - finally - the boy and his burden draw near to the lodge that has become a refuge of sorts. He stops at the edge of a clearing that might once have been a lawn between house and lake, now overshaded by trees, and sits heavily on the ground with a sigh that is nearly a sob. Sore, aching, it takes him a long time to catch his breath as he stares dully at the construction in the centre of the glade. Sticks and branches, hastily piled together in a long, low heap. A bonfire. A bier. Looking at it now he realises that it will be wholly insufficient for the task, and scrubs angrily at his eyes with a bony wrist. Tired, far too tired to find more firewood. But what's there will never support flames enough to consume the blanket-wrapped brute at his side.

It's frustration that has him clambering stiffly to his feet again, hauling vindictively at the rough shroud as he might have handled a heavy sack of grain at the mill, a lifetime ago. Somehow he manages to get the body up onto the heap of sticks, though the effort is be no means dignified. At last he stands panting beside the inadequate pyre, glaring at the lumpen mass that rests atop it.

He'd been stirred to pity when first he saw the body - the sad remains of a creature both fearsome and majestic in its strength, for all that it had cost the boy and his friends. Now, sore and exhausted, there is only a dull resentment for all the harm it has caused, all that it has taken. Noura had claimed the beast's fangs, and on an impulse Cherny draws the little knife from his belt, clambering up until he can get at the cords tied around the middle of that morbid bundle, shoving at clotted fur and rigid limbs until - there. The work of a moment to saw through what few shreds of sinew and skin remain, and when he retreats from the bier it is with a grisly trophy: a bestial parody of a hand in payment for one lost to gnashing teeth.

Not justice, but something like a reckoning. It's enough.

He'll get more firewood later. For now the squire turns to trudge back to the lodge, weariness dulling whatever satisfaction he might feel.

[catch]

He had been so proud of his new teeth.

She kept him as he recovered. Kept him far away from the humans that drove him to rage. It was the essential difference between them; she had the wariness of the mother, and he had the power of the father. Together, they were a force, a pack. They cemented each-other's weaknesses, formed a single organism that could face the world, together.

So proud of his new teeth.

He had split from her, and she had not quite noticed. When she did notice, she did not worry overmuch. She had skirted the Tavern in a large-enough arc. He must have gone to hack at logs, testing the steel teeth he had taken from the men-camp. Perhaps he went to hunt. They hunted often, these days. He was her brother, her love, and she kept him, but he was also his own mind, his own independence that she had no interest in quashing.

Besides, she was anxious to return to the den. She didn't like being away overlong, anymore. The pork-side that she had taken was a good meal, thick and salted and creamy-white with lard. It filled her body up with it's goodness, made itself into milk for the tiny, squalling infants that she had given birth to that past moon. She held each one up to her face, her cheek, breathing in their milk-scents, feeling their velvet fur against hers. They had strange, little hands, and she let them pat her nose as love, a strange, painful emotion, pulsed through her.

She had not loved so dearly since the Mother-love had gone. Only her brother did she love this much.

As the day faded, as she waited, caring for her pups and gnawing pieces off from the pork-side, her worry began to grow. It brought back terrible, unpleasant memories, of days and nights she and her brother-love had waited, cold and hungry, for a Mother that would never return. She did not wait as long, this time. She picked up her children, and kissed each one, and left them with strips of goodly fat to gnaw on in her absence.

She took up the hunt.

What she found at it's end crushed her heart as thoroughly as the death of the Mother-love.

It was mud and it was blood. It was a trail, heavy, dragged through the woods. It was a cold, hard body, set upon sticks and leaves, wrapped in an old, burlap blanket. It was fixed, staring eyes, glassy, red, and ruined. A crow's feathers still beating around mangled, mutilated teeth.

She reached out and touched the great, beaten body. He was so cold. He was so stiff. His tooth, the notched sword, was still gripped in death, his other hand... gone. Strings of sticky tendons, and as she watched, a blue-bottle fly landed and crept into the ruins of a thick artery.

She crouched back on her haunches, and she tried to think, but she couldn't. Like the Mother-love, something has been physically cut from her. The thing that she has become was capable of a depth of feeling unknown to her genes. The loss she felt, she could not describe, nor could she put it into words. It was beyond pain. It was beyond love. It was beyond loss, and it froze her mind and her body, until she felt herself carved from ice, cold, cold, cold.

The puppies.

That is the only thing that kept the blood pumping sluggishly in her veins, a damnable, persistent warmth at her core. Her children. Her remnants of the Brother-love. If she died, so would they. If she froze, they would waste away - or worse. Worse. The human-beasts would find them, as the beast-boy had found her. They would tie thongs about their muzzles and their throats, and drag them through the streets, and would cut them with knives and laugh if they cried.

She could not allow that.

She finally began to move. She did not notice the crows about her, and she did not care. With gentle firmness she peeled back those iron fingers, and took the bloody sword from the brother-love's grasp. She held it high above her head, still moved by that unfathomable sorrow and grief within her.

She must have him with her. She chopped, and she chopped again; the blood did not spurt, but ran like a sluggish river. His blood was good to have on her. She put her hand to her mouth, and she tasted it, not knowing what hot tears were as they came from her eyes.

She left with her brother's sword. She left, too, with his head. The rest of him stayed behind, on that pitiful pyre.