As she perched on what could have been considered the troll’s knee, her thoughts ran to the bedtime stories she had heard about trolls way back when. She didn’t think that sunlight actually transformed trolls into stone, but they weren’t a type of faery that frequented Diomland, so she couldn’t be sure. Thoughts of bedtime stories brought Mother Anthi’s most recent one to mind.
Stuck in the house for days on end, Anthi had begun to behave in some of the ways one expected of a mother. She interacted with Chara during the day and tucked her into bed at night. Tasia had been treated to a recitation of Chara’s new favorite tale five nights in a row.
“Can you talk in your wolf form?”
Mitch, who had been leaning on the boulder and staring at nothing, straightened to look at her. She bit her lip to hide the smile that wanted to come out and play when she saw how he tipped his head. It reminded her of a dog’s questioning head-tilt.
“No.”
“Hmm, I’ve never heard of a talking wolf,” she said as she leaned back and closed her eyes. “Chara’s new favorite story is about a little girl who encounters a talking wolf in the woods.I would have thought it was too scary for her because the wolf impersonates the girl’s grandmother before eating them both. But her favorite part is when the woodsman cuts open the wolf with an axe and saves them.”
She frowned. “It’s a bit gruesome, to be frank. Not a story I would share with children.”
When Tasia opened her eyes, she saw that Mitch looked as though he might hurl. She sat up and reached a hand toward him, then held back, uncertain if he would welcome the touch.
“What’s wrong?”
Her rough-and-ready guardian took a deep breath that shook a little. “That’s—” He cleared his throat. “That’s not quite how it went.”
Shock flashed through Tasia’s body, a wave of hyperawareness that faded into numbness. It was a struggle to push her next words out. “Youare the wolf in the story?”
Mitch scrubbed at his face with both hands. “You gotta understand,” he began, and Tasia’s heart melted at the broken tone, “I wasn’t able to control my transformations when I was younger.”
Sensing a deep hurt that needed space and a total lack of judgement to be shared, she held her tongue and waited.
“We moved around a lot when I was a kid. A lot–a lot. After my mother died, I finally found a group of friends that didn’t mind that I was forced to be a wolf during the full moon.” He shook his head and glared at the spindly branches arching over the troll boulder. “I didn’t realize for far too long that their ‘acceptance’ only lasted as long as I did their dirty work.”
Tasia wanted to ask more about that, but he forged ahead, speaking quickly. It seemed that since he had breached the wall guarding this story, he now needed to get everything out as fast as he could.
“I left them and struck out on my own. Eventually, I ran into Red.” He clenched his jaw as he continued to stare up at the trees. “She played me like a triangle.”
“I thought the phrase was ‘like a fiddle,’ ” Tasia couldn’t help inserting.
Mitch blew a self-mocking breath through his teeth. “Fiddles take skill and finesse. She didn’t need any subtlety. She said exactly what I wanted to hear, and I lapped it up like a starvingdog.”
A protest jumped to Tasia’s lips, then died when he rolled his eyes at his own thoughts and finally looked at her.
“She told me she needed my protection walking through the woods to visit her grandmother in another town. Kept up the act for months.” He glanced at the ground and knocked some of the mud from his boot against the base of the boulder. “Had me pretty well convinced she was in love with me, too.”
From the empty bitterness in his words, Tasia gathered that he had invested everything into a relationship that she suspected was painfully one-sided.
Mitch bent to pick up a loose rock, then chucked it into the undergrowth as hard as he could. “Turns out, she was using me as safe passage to visit her woodcutter boyfriend in the next town. I overheard them laughing about how gullible I was.”
A sound of outrage escaped Tasia. How could anybody treat another person like that?!
“I didn’t stick around after that.” He looked at her, and his eyes lingered on the bright-red cape that held the cold back. “That stupid story started circulating soon after.”
Tasia now understood why he had been so affected by the sight of her wearing the red wrapping. As she tried to think of something to say that acknowledged his hurt without making it worse, he straightened to his full height and brushed off the back of his jacket.
“Let’s keep going.”
It wasn’t until delivering the basket’s contents that Tasia felt comfortable poking at Mitch. They had been walking in unusual silence. After lunch, she thought he might have regained his sense of equilibrium.
“Were you born with the ability to be a wolf?”
A snort of amusement answered her first. She could have been affronted, but she was happy that he wasn’t taking offense.
“I wondered when your curiosity would lean that direction.”
