As she rages I do my best to ignore her, trying to focus on drinking my water, each gulp mercifully silencing her for a second. The first moon this happened I came so close, so very close, to opening the door and letting her do as she would, for nothing could be as bad as listening to her tell me Lief and my father were gone because of me. She spent hours telling me how she hated me, how she’d never wanted me, how my father had wept with sorrow when I’d been born and begged her to drown me. Then it changed, and she told me she loved me, that we only had each other, and that was all she ever wanted. She told me she’d been chosen, and I’d been chosen too, and if I’d open the door…
Then, as I do now, I stuffed bits of rags soaked in wax into my ears, tying strips of fabric around my head to hold them in place. It doesn’t drown her out completely, but it muffles the worst of it. When the banging becomes violent enough to shake the pipkin on its hook I turn to watch the door carefully, but so far she hasn’t had the strength to break it down. I wait for her to exhaust herself, for the violence to tire her, and when it has – and knowing the respite won’t last for long – I tiptoe across the room and open the chest. As I do, memories wash over me, pressing against me and crowding my senses.
My father’s cloak is in here and I think I can still smell him as I lift it out, the scent of hay and earth still embedded in the thick woollen fibres. As I press it to my face it feels like beard scruff against my cheeks, as if I’d leant in for a goodnight kiss, and loss twists in my heart again.
I paw silently through the chest, moving old books, texts and lists and charts from my old life, a velvet-wrapped pair of bronze scales, too precious to use here, too important to sell, a present from Master Pendie when I passed my third-year tests with full marks.
And at the bottom, buried, as it always is now, is the thing I’m looking for: Mama’s huge leather-bound book of tales. The edges of the spine are frayed and worn, the binding peeling away where the spine is separating from the pages. Dark prints stain the leather where our fingers have grabbed for it, the prints of adults and children marking a tapestry of us across the once-pristine cover.
I learned the old stories before I learned to milk a cow, and I take it back to my pallet nest, opening it by instinct to the story of the Scarlet Varulv. It’s become a ritual, digging the book out from the bottom of the chest when the moon is full and reading the story version as the real-life beast plots in the next room. The reality of a curse is different from the storybook version, something the whole realm is learning now.
In the story “The Scarlet Varulv”, a young girl is lost in the woods and rescued by a beautiful woman, taken to her castle, and feasted and feted. Only to be woken in the night by the feeling of sharp teeth on her leg, red eyes glinting at her under the bedclothes. She runs for her life, finally making it back to her home, where she collapses into the arms of her relieved father. A moon later she goes to bed early, feeling strange. When she wakes the next morning, she finds blood on her nightgown, gristle between her teeth. And when she leaves her bedroom, she finds her poor old papa dead, all the doors still locked from inside. She runs into the woods, hiding amongst the trees, where she bites a lost woodsman the next moon. He escapes with his life, tells his friends and fellow villagers of the attack, and they hunt through the woods until they catch her.
She is tied to a stake in the town square and a pyre is lit beneath her. And as she perishes in the flames, the villagers light torches and carry them to the home of the woodsman, deaf to the pleas for mercy from the terrified family within, their faces pressed against the windows as they watch their friends and neighbours burn their home, knowing they were all inside.