dragged herself through the doorway toward the wolf, her arms sinking nearly to her elbows in the snow, but she no longer felt the cold.
“Please do not kill me. Please do not kill me,” she breathed over and over as she neared the fallen animal.
Afraid. Afraid—afraid—afraid…
A sob caught in Evelyn’s chest. “I know, lovely. I am afraid, as well,” she whispered as she closed the gap.
Evelyn was finally close enough to the animal that she could have touched it. But she did not have the opportunity as the wolf abruptly kicked and yelped and tried to gain its feet.
Evelyn screamed and instinctively threw up an arm, but the wolf crumpled to the ground once more, its little remaining energy spent. Its ragged breaths squealed in its wide chest.
Hurts.
Evelyn drew a deep breath and moved closer to the enormous beast. Her leg throbbed and her heart pounded so that she fancied she could hear her ribs rattling together.
She saw the deep gouges in the wolf’s back and neck, the still-trickling stickiness on its muzzle and wide, black nose. But the ragged gash in the animal’s flank was the most dire—gaping, torn flesh revealing stringy muscle and a white chip of rib. Here, the blood flowed onto the snow.
How had it escaped when so outnumbered?
“Have a bit of a scrape there, did you, lovely?” she asked in a shaky whisper.
The wolf whined deep in its throat.
Evelyn looked back the way she’d come for the first time since crawling from her accidental shelter, and was so shocked at what she saw that, for an instant, she forgot her injuries and her fear.
It was…a cottage.
Of sorts.
Low, sod walls and a thatch roof poked out from beneath the snow on the bank behind it, and Evelyn realized she must have fallen through the smoke hole.
A cottage. Abandoned, obviously.
The wolf whined again in a series of short, breathy bursts and then Evelyn heard the chorus of howls from the wood beyond.
Her eyes sought the path of blood leading from the forest and she knew the gray beasts had likely torn what was left of Minerva’s mare to shreds and were now on the trail of the fallen black. Should they find the animal—and Evelyn, as well—injured and exposed as they were, Evelyn knew both their lives were forfeit.
She looked to the cottage door and then back at the black. To the door again, then the considerable mass of the wolf, trying to gauge the distance against her own meager strength.
The animal whined pitifully.
Afraid.
Evelyn closed her eyes. God, give me strength. Then she opened her eyes and without hesitation, laid a palm firmly on the black’s hip.
It flinched, whined again, but did not turn on her.
Deep in the forest, but closer now, gaining, the grays howled again.
Closing her mind to the fact that she was readying to take into her hands a deadly, wild, injured animal nearly equal to her own size, Evelyn slid through the snow closer to the black’s back, her hand never breaking contact with the animal.
She tried to steady her voice. “I’ll not hurt you. I’ll not let them hurt you,” she promised.
The wolf’s ears twitched, but it did not move.
So, before she could think better of it, Evelyn snaked an arm around the black, leaned into it, and pulled up.
The animal gave a weak struggle and an even weaker growl, but Evelyn did not loose it. Instead, she quickly fished her other arm beneath the wolf and lifted it to her chest, crying out in pain as she did so. Her back now toward the cottage door, she dug in the snow with her uninjured leg until her slipper found purchase with the frozen ground beneath and she pushed with all her strength.
They moved perhaps an inch.
She hitched the animal higher onto her torso, clasped her hands together in a tight fist beneath its chest, conscious of the warm blood soaking through her thin cloak and into her kirtle. The black suddenly went limp against her and Evelyn thought her arms would rip from their sockets.
She kicked again, pushed at the ground. And again. Over and over she crooked and then straightened her leg. Her muscles screamed, burned. She began to weep.
After what seemed an eternity, the doorway was at last at her back, a red path of blood spread cleanly over the crushed and rutted snow before her.
And the gray wolves burst from the woods.
With a final, scrambling shove, Evelyn slid into the cottage. She kicked the springy door closed and held her foot against it even as it shuddered, jarring her leg to her spine. She screamed in both pain and surprise.
One of the grays had thrown himself at the door with a furious snarl.
The black in her arms stirred and Evelyn let it slide to the ground. “’Tis all right, lovely—we’re safe,” she breathed. “We’re safe now.”
She spied a length of rough-planed wood leaning against the wall in the dim light of the hut, as well as the crude brackets embedded in both the door and the sod walls to either side. Without removing her bracing foot, she reached for the plank and stretched up to mate it with the brackets.
The door shuddered again and Evelyn skittered backward in the dirt. She felt a warm wetness on the back of her palm and snatched her hand to her bosom with a cry before looking down.
The black stared up at her through glassy, clouded eyes.
It had licked her hand.
Now, Evelyn hummed as she laid a fresh piece of damp moss against Alinor’s side and held the spongy mass in place as she slid the other wide length of rose-colored cloth—remnants of her ruined kirtle—under and around Alinor’s midsection. She fastened the rather fine linen bandage in a stiff knot and then, on impulse, tucked the ends into a pretty bow.
“Fetching,” Evelyn said, leaning back to inspect her handiwork.
Alinor’s thick tail thumped the dirt floor twice.
Evelyn ruffled the wolf’s fur and then rose stiffly, gathering up the used strips of cloth and then dropping them in a bucket near the door. While she set to laying more peat on the fire, Alinor, too, gained her feet and crossed the hut to enter one of the cottage’s odd indoor pens. The black lay down on the fresh pine boughs Evelyn had piled within and promptly closed her eyes.
The fire smoking in earnest now, Evelyn pulled the remainder of the cooked meat from the spit and laid it next to her dagger—its tip now broken and jagged—on the narrow plank set into the rear wall. The afternoon light was fading into an early evening and she made mental note not to forget the snow bucket when she and Alinor went out to seek their final relief. After that, they would barricade themselves in for the night.
The
