good woman and a good queen? The next morning over breakfast I tried to talk to the boy about women and their qualities, and about wiving, but he listened with obvious boredom and resentment, tossing the ring up and down in his hand and occasionally letting it fall and roll away to scour my nerves.
Cloud-Marie ceases brushing to bring me honeyed tea, and I sip at it, grateful for its sweetness, its warmth coiling down into me. I close my eyes, but the thought comes nagging and plucking at me that, although I did not bid my son hunt again after the last dreadful hunt years past, I never did officially command him to leave off hunting. And the night before, pity for his diminished state had persuaded me to remove his chain and release him into the Wolfsgate Valley to run there for the night. I had used a bespelled chain my mother-in-law had given me to stop him roaming out of the valley in case he wandered into a village and devoured some hapless peasant with too little magic to stave him off. But it would not have prevented him travelling to the human realm.
What if he had gone there to choose another girl before returning to be chained up again in his yard at dawn? What if the howl I heard earlier was truly a howl signalling the arrival in the Wolfsgate Valley of his chosen, the beginning of a new testing?
Was it possible?
His father had found me there, and perhaps my son retained some dim memory of it, or it might be that my angry words about the worth of mortals tested by the valley had remained even when his human form was lost, to work their way to the surface of his wolf brain. But how could he hunt in the real world where wolves do not routinely run about the streets, and in that city of all cities, where there is no wilderness except the wildness of degeneration? At night he might conceivably pass as a dog, but even if he had managed to find the will to go there and to hunt, what sort of girl would dare accept a battered ring from the neck of a great white wolf? For him to come close enough to bestow it on her, she could not fail to see the savagery in his eyes and know him for a beast. And what of the ring? Certainly I had not taken it from him after what happened to the last candidate, but surely the ribbon had rotted long since, and the ring fallen into a bog or crack. But supposing he still had the ring, and had hunted a girl brave enough to take it from his neck? Would she imagine it could reveal the name of the owner of what she might suppose to be a tame wolf? But what human woman would then obey an eldritch voice issuing from the ring, commanding her to go thence and do this and that in order to free a nobleman’s son from a spell?
In the mirror I see that Cloud-Marie’s errant eye is turning sideways. My breath catches in my throat as she turns her head so that, for a moment, both eyes regard curtains I have not drawn in two years. I had not thought to ever open them again, for the window behind them looks out on the same mist garden as can be espied from the balcony of the Princess Chamber where, when a hunt begins, white roses bloom in profusion.
I know I must look out, have known it since the howl waked hope in me, yet if no roses have bloomed, my son is lost. But in this moment it is horror that deters me more than the fear of having to abandon hope, for, with all my heart, I do not want to be reminded of what I beheld the last time I entered the mist garden.
Cloud-Marie’s good eye turns back and holds my gaze, and I realise that I am not breathing. I release it in a hissing moan as I remember the scarlet beads of blood caught on my son’s muzzle. And though my mind shies from it, I remember following the trail of blood to the body of the young woman in the mist garden. She was dead because she had made the mistake of going outside, rather than staying in the Princess Chamber and sleeping as I had