eyes could show him. His mind sped over the previous day. Maybe his father had left it on the forge.
He turned. The wolf’s dark shadow tracked nearer, now blocking his path. Its eyes lit up in the rush light: bright blurs of hunger, malice, and death.
Oh, God, please, he prayed. It was going to happen a second time. He hefted a hammer and threw it at the wolf, which yelped in anger. Merlin’s escape lay over the workbench. He planted both hands and vaulted up, but — still stiff from his flogging — his foot caught one of his father’s smaller anvils. He flipped to the ground, falling on his side. His wounds screamed, and pain ripped across his back.
Sucking air through his teeth, he reached to the top of the forge and groped for the sword.
The stink of rotting flesh sickened the air as the wolf rounded the corner. It snapped its teeth and lunged at him.
In one swift motion, Merlin found the sword’s makeshift wooden handle and leveled the blade’s point at the wolf. With a force that knocked the breath from Merlin’s lungs, the creature impaled itself on the blade, yet it still tore at Merlin’s forearm, snarling and thrashing as it died.
A moment later someone pounded on the double doors. “Open up!”
Merlin heaved the dead wolf away, slid the blade from its body, and limped over to the doors. Shaking, his back in agony, he unbarred the entrance.
His father burst into the room, the bright smear of a torch in his left hand and a spear in his right. “Wolves outside. Scared them off, and the goats are fine. What’s —” His father stopped speaking and surveyed the smithy. “By the High King’s justice, what happened?”
“A wolf … the window,” Merlin said. The bloody sword trembled in his hand.
Small footsteps interrupted his father’s stunned silence as Merlin’s nine-year-old half sister, Ganieda, padded into the smithy with a dark shawl over her head. She flew around the workbench and knelt before the great wolf’s body.
She stroked its head. “Poor wolf.”
Merlin touched the deep scars that emanated from his eyes and flinched as he remembered the wolves of seven years ago. “Get away from there, Ganieda!”
“She’s my friend, and you murdered her.” She began to sob.
Her wolf? Merlin knew the girl had an imagination, but this?
His father examined the wolf’s body and whistled. “You killed it with one blow, and with my new blade, I see.”
“I lost my dirk.”
“You almost lost your life. Look at its teeth.”
“She was just defending herself,” Ganieda said between sobs.
These words stung Merlin worse than his wounds. Had his sister ever shed a tear over his scars, or the loss of his eyesight? Never. Had she expressed her thanks to him for saving her? Not that he could remember. And with each of her sniffles and cries for the wolf, the bile rose higher in his throat. Angry words were on the tip of his tongue when his father interrupted.
“You’re a foolish girl. Now get up and wash your brother’s arm while I put some planks in the window.”
Merlin sat down on his bed, his head a little dizzy, and the slashes on his back beginning to burn.
Ganieda brought a wet rag from the washbucket and quietly began washing the blood from Merlin’s forearm. “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I didn’t know she bit you.”
The rag dabbed lightly across his wounds, and he winced as the cold water stung.
“I forgive you,” he said, but his heart wasn’t in it. Did she really care for him? He didn’t know.
“You didn’t have to kill her.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Across the smithy, his father finished sawing a plank and began pounding it in place using an iron peg.
Ganieda wrung out the rag, the water dripping and splashing into the bowl, and then ran over to their father. “Can I help?” she asked, and he directed her to hold the planks in place.
When the window was boarded up, he asked Ganieda to hold a torch while he dragged the wolf’s body outside.
“Are you going to build a cairn over her?”
“It’s a dead animal, Ganieda.”
“I know what you’re going to do,” she said, her voice rising in timbre. “You’re going to throw her in the ditch!”
“Merlin, I know you’re not feeling well, but I need you to hold the torch.”
Ganieda ran shrieking from the smithy.
Merlin rose, ignoring the pain, and held the torch while his father dragged the wolf’s body out past their stacked stone wall,