was nothing to do but to go on, since I had no means of making him give me water or food and he was clearly waiting for me to leave.
Mistaking my hesitation for incomprehension, he again pointed insistently along the path and shook three fingers in my face. I nodded wearily and trudged off, consoling myself that it would be better anyway to find a place where I could beg a bed for the night, as it was growing late.
By now I had given up all hope of trying to make any sense of what was happening to me. I must go through it, that was all, and when I came to the end of whatever it was, I would understand it. There were times in life when that was the only thing you could do. The affair with the married man had been just such a thing; an inexplicable and inescapable folly, seen as such only from without. Sometimes you simply could not see properly when you were in the middle of something, no matter how clear-headed and certain you were.
The path narrowed to a mere track as it wound among the trees, which were thick enough that the path grew quite dark in places, certainly dark enough for me to have to slow down to be sure I had not strayed from it. The old man’s stern warning had impressed me, and now I thought I understood his insistence. He had been trying to tell me that I must not leave the path lest I lose sight of it and become irrevocably lost. I was uneasily conscious, too, that the day was steadily but surely drawing to a close. Whether or not I had reached a village, I would have to stop once it became too dark to see.
I was terribly thirsty by now, for I had drunk nothing since I had left the pension to seek out the library. Was it really possible this was the same day? If only I could find a stream, but I dared not leave the path. In faerie stories, the worst thing anyone could ever do was to leave the path. A path was like a clear intention that must be followed, but there were always other tempting possibilities trying to draw the hero or heroine away from their original pure purpose.
But I am not a heroine in a story, I thought. I am a historian and the daughter of two pragmatic parents who disliked imaginary games and thought imaginary stories the province of the foolish and uneducated. And I am thirsty. As if conjured by my desire, I saw a gleaming pool of water in a little clearing only two or three steps from the path. Head pounding with thirst, I hurried to the edge and flung myself down on my belly to drink. The water was ice cold and very pure. I drank until my belly ached and then I lifted my head to gasp a breath and saw it: a coal-black wolf sitting on the other side of the pool watching me with eyes that shone like mercury.
I froze, water dripping from my chin and the ends of my hair, but I could not push them back or mop my face without moving, for I was still kneeling forward, resting on my hands. On all fours, I thought, wildly. I could feel gooseflesh rising over my entire body, even on my scalp. I did not want to be eaten by a wolf. Especially I did not want to be eaten in the middle of an inexplicable adventure so that I would never know how it ended.
Except that I would know exactly how it ended.
It is not the end of the story that matters, I think, my needle darting in and out of the tapestry, but understanding the meaning of it, unless the end is the meaning. The memory of the extreme terror I experienced seeing the black wolf gazing at me is dimmed in my mind for a moment by this thought, by the sense of its importance. Then memory floods back, carrying me with it into the past.
The stone armlet suddenly slipped from where it had been lodged about my upper arm and fell down to give the back of my hand a good hard rap. I bit back a cry of pain, but perhaps I made some involuntary sound, for the black wolf suddenly rose.
I sat back onto my heels, lifting my hands to defend myself.