2: The Path Through the Woods

The river border was nothing more than a line of white stones running down to the water and a ford where the current spread thin over pebbles. On our side, birch and alder. On the other side, the pines began, black and close-set, so dense the moonlight seemed to stop at their edge like water hitting a wall.

The elders didn't cross. Nobody crossed.

Harrow hauled me out of the cart by my bound wrists and set me on my feet at the edge of the ford. One of the others pushed the basket into my hands. Harrow sliced the silver cord with a knife. Not out of mercy, I realized, but because silver burns wolves, and the elders didn't want to hand the Blackthorn Alpha a gift that would scald him.

"Walk across," he said. "Follow the path until it ends. He'll find you."

"And if I don't follow it?"

He looked at me with something that was almost pity. "Then he'll still find you. But he'll be angry."

They watched from the cart while I waded in. The water was cold enough to stop my breath. It soaked the hem of the red cloak and dragged at it, and halfway across I thought very seriously about lying down in the shallows and letting the current take me somewhere else. Anywhere else.

But I'd been the Ashgrove family's punching bag for fourteen years, and I hadn't died yet. I was damned if I'd do it now to save a monster the trouble.

I climbed out on the far bank, dripping. When I looked back, the cart was already rolling away.

*   *   *

The path was real. I hadn't believed in it; I'd thought it was part of the story, like the flowers. But there it was, a narrow track of packed earth threading between the pines, faintly pale in the dark, worn smooth by a great many feet over a great many years.

Eleven girls, I thought. Eleven girls walked this.

I followed it for perhaps a quarter of a mile. Long enough for the cart's rattle to fade. Long enough for my teeth to stop chattering. Long enough to think.

Then I set the basket down, hitched up my wet skirts, and stepped off the path.

Grandmother used to say it to me when I was small. Don't stray from the path, Ruby. Back then I thought she meant she wanted me safe. Now I understood she had only wanted me predictable.

I went north, uphill. If I could reach the ridge before dawn, I might see the road to Harlow's Cross, and from there the coaching road, and from there anywhere at all. I had no money, shoes worn through at the soles, and a cloak that marked me out like a bonfire. But I had my legs, and I had spite, and I'd built a life out of less.

The forest let me go for about ten minutes.

Then something moved behind me.

It wasn't loud. That was the worst part. A breath of displaced air, a soft give of pine needles, the sense of weight shifting just past the edge of sight. I stopped. The sound stopped.

I walked again, faster. It came with me.

Not chasing. Pacing. Keeping exactly level with me twenty yards off to my left, in the blackness between the trunks, step for step. When I sped up, it sped up. When I stopped to listen, it stopped too, and the silence afterward was so complete I could hear my own blood.

It was playing with me.

I ran.

Branches whipped my face. The cloak snagged and tore. I fell twice, hard, and the second time I landed on my wrist and screamed, and somewhere off to my left something huffed: a short, sharp breath that could have been laughter.

I scrambled up and kept going, and a hand closed around my arm and yanked me sideways behind a fallen trunk.

I swung at him. He caught my fist in his palm without apparent effort.

"Stop," a man hissed. "Stop, you'll bring him straight to us."

Moonlight filtered through a gap in the canopy, and I saw him: a man of maybe forty, bearded, dressed in oilcloth and leather, with a hunting bow slung across his back and a knife at his belt. He smelled of woodsmoke and gun oil. Human. Definitely human.

"Who are you?" I panted.

"Name's Hale." His eyes flicked over me: the red cloak, the scratches, the raw cord burns on my wrists. Something tightened in his face. "They actually did it. That old witch actually did it."

"You know my grandmother?"

"I know of her." He looked past me into the trees. "Listen. You can't outrun him. Nobody outruns him. But there's a stream east of here, and if you get into the water it'll break your scent for a—"

He stopped.

He went utterly still, the way deer go still, and I watched the color drain from his face.

"What?" I whispered. "What is it?"

Hale looked at me. Something crossed his face that I couldn't read: guilt, maybe, or calculation, or plain fear. I didn't find out which, because in the next breath he let go of my arm and melted back into the dark between the pines, so quietly and completely I wasn't sure he'd ever been there at all.

He'd left me.

Of course he had. Why would anyone not leave me?

"Coward," I spat into the dark, and stood up.

There was nowhere else to go, so I ran again.

*   *   *

I don't know how long. Long enough that my lungs burned, my legs turned to water, and every breath came out as a sob. The ground fell away into a hollow, and I half ran, half slid down into it, and came out at the bottom into a small clearing where the moon fell straight through a gap in the trees like a lamp over a stage.

I stopped in the middle, gasping. Silence all around.

Then the darkness at the far edge of the clearing moved, and stepped out into the light.

I'd seen wolves before. My whole family were wolves. I'd watched my uncles shift on full moons and run the fields in shapes the size of large dogs, gray and lean.

This was not that.

It was the size of a horse. Black from nose to tail, black so deep the moonlight didn't touch its fur so much as sink into it. Its shoulders stood higher than my head. Its paws, pressing into the moss, were as broad as dinner plates. When it breathed, steam poured from its muzzle in long white plumes, and I could hear the bellows of its lungs from where I stood.

And its eyes.

Not the dim coin-gold of my grandmother's. These burned. Molten, liquid, like metal poured fresh from the crucible, and they were fixed on me with an attention so total I felt it on my skin.

It took one step toward me. Then another.

I didn't run. There was nowhere left to run to.

I stood in the middle of the clearing in my torn red cloak with my bloody hands at my sides, and I lifted my chin, and I looked the Big Bad Wolf in the eye.