4.
The hunter comes after three days.
There's a curious crowd gathered in the town square as the carriage stops. It's black, pulled by four horses; dark curtains shadow the windows. Soldiers follow on horseback. Misty walks a little closer, stopping as soon as she can see well enough. Her father stands ahead of everyone else, his face hardened, his arm held by a sling.
No one speaks. The horses' neighs cut sharp through the air.
When the door opens, she's expecting to see some tall, hefty man, with wide shoulders and muscular arms. But the silhouette that walks out of the carriage, wrapped in a black cape, is slender and undoubtedly a woman's. Her hair is light, an almost blue gray, cut chin-length. A wide-brimmed hat casts a shadow on her eyes.
Her father shakes his head, looking at the carriage as if waiting for someone else to get out. No one does, though, and one of the soldiers closes the door behind the woman's back.
"…What does this mean?" he asks, finally breaking the silence. "Who are you?"
The woman takes a few steps forward, looking at him. "The hunter you called."
He frowns, bewildered. "With all due respect, ma'am, the wolf killed two men. Strong, armed men."
"That wasn't your wolf," she says, calm. Her voice is as cold as the snow. She walks closer, studying his bandaged arm. "If it had been, you, sir, would be doomed. And so would be everyone else that was bitten by that beast."
Her father blinks. "What are you talking about?"
She turns slowly, her gaze scanning the crowd. She raises her voice to speak to everyone: "The bite of a werewolf will turn the victim into another wolf," she says, then looks back to her father. "If the wolf you're looking for were the one that bit you, I would have to kill you now. But that's not a concern, because it didn't happen on a full moon night, did it?"
"No," he answers, after hesitating for a moment. "On the full moon the wolf killed my wife. We hunted it the following night."
"A werewolf is only a wolf during a full moon," the woman says. She looks again at the crowd around the carriage and Misty shudders when she feels her eyes run over her, even if she still can't see them. "During the day and every other night of the month, the wolf is a human being. Every inch. Just like me or you."
"With all due respect," someone behind Misty's back shouts, "we've lived with that beast for more than twenty years. We know what we're dealing with."
"With all due respect, you have no idea," she retorts, unfazed. She raises her voice again: "A werewolf is a man until a full moon rises. Only then it turns into the beast you think you know. You think it lives in the woods, like an animal? You're wrong. The wolf lives here. In this village, amongst you. It could be your father, your son, your sister or your wife, and there would be no way for you to tell."
Her father shakes his head again. "But the wolf we found— "
"Merely a common gray wolf," she cuts short, interrupting him. She looks up. Her eyes are gray, dark but reflecting the light like mirrors. "Probably an extraordinarily big specimen, if it was able to kill two men, but nothing more. If it had been a werewolf, it's quite likely that none of you would have lived to tell the tale."
"How will you be able to kill it, then?"
"It's been five nights since the full moon. Twentythree until the next. Twentythree days before the wolf is a wolf again. All we'll have to do is find it and kill it before then." Her eyes scan the crowd again and Misty shudders once more, fighting the impulse to draw back. "Are you innocent? Then you have nothing to fear. But if you are not, know that hiding cannot help you. Every one of your secrets will be disclosed. Every one of your most hidden thoughts will be revealed. The wolf could be anyone. You might have slept next to it for ten years and never once noticed a thing. A werewolf is cunning; it has to be to survive. It knows how to hide its secret. And none of you is above all suspects."
She turns back to her father and adds: "Not even you, sir".
Misty wraps her arms around herself and searches the crowd, looking for Ash. He isn't there.
Her father is silent for a few moments. The woman looks at him, her head held high. "I hope you will not try to stop me. I might think that you have something to hide."
He shakes his head. "I won't try to stop you," he says. "No one will."
She smiles slightly, for the first time. It's just a vague stretching of her lips, terrifying on her otherwise emotionless face.
"Good."
She draws a sword from under her cape. The blade, long and narrow, shines bright in the white sunlight like her eyes.
"A werewolf, regardless of its appearance, can only be killed by silver. I suppose you don't have much of it here."
Some whispering. Someone shakes his head.
"Just like I thought," she says. The sword disappears again in the folds of the black fabric. "I'll keep my eyes on you. I'll notice every move you make. If you have something to hide, you might as well admit it now."
No one speaks.
"What should we call you?" her father asks, after a moment of silence.
"You don't need to know my name," the woman says, cold. "I'm a werewolf hunter. You can call me J."
—-
"That woman creeps me out."
She pulls her knees closer to her chest, sitting on the stone steps in front of Ash's house. He gives her a curious look before swinging his axe; it hits the wood wrong, cutting away a thin slice rather than splitting it in two, and Ash grumbles a curse under his breath and stoops down to adjust the log on the stump again.
"I haven't seen her yet," he says then.
"Yeah, I didn't see you there," Misty remembers. He lowers the axe again and wipes sweat from his brow with his sleeve.
"I was busy here," he explains, vague. "My father wanted me to finish this."
Misty doesn't reply. She thinks of Ash's father grabbing him by his shirt and shoving him aside in the snow, and of all the times Ash told her I have to finish here, I have to do this, my father told me to; and curiosity prickles on her skin like needles. But he'd probably smile and tell her there's nothing to worry about, and maybe she'd hear his voice tremble just a little, barely enough for her to notice.
She looks at his hands as he takes another log from the wood pile. They're even more red and chapped now, and he blows on them to warm them up, distractedly. He raises the axe again, then seems to remember something and sets it down, turning back. "Wait here," he tells her, and runs towards the house, hopping past her on the steps.
"What for?" she wants to know. Ash answers without stopping: "Wait there, I'll be right back!"
She waits, a bit puzzled. He's back after a couple minutes and lays her basket on her lap. "This is yours," he says. He hesitates for a moment, then cracks a smile and adds: "You were right, the cake was alright this time."
She looks at the basket as if it were from a past life, one where her mother was alive; and the back of her eyes stings a bit. "Thank you," she whispers. "I forgot". Ash gives her shoulder a squeeze, then goes back to the wood. He stretches his arms above his head before picking up the axe again, and rubs his right shoulder, looking pained.
"Why don't you rest a little?" Misty asks. He shakes his head without turning.
"I have to finish this."
She hesitates for a moment, biting her lip. She lays the basket at her feet.
"Or else your father will be mad at you?"
Ash freezes for a moment, less than a blink.
"Or else we won't have wood for the fire," he says. He swings the axe with more force than usual, hitting the wood hard, and she jumps at the sound.
She's about to insist—there's quite enough wood for many fires already, she thinks—but she doesn't have the time to ask anything else.
"Hey there, loser!" Gary's voice calls from the street, and Misty curses to herself, because it would have been hard enough already to get something out of him but now it's just impossible. Ash sets down the axe and looks up.
"What do you want?" he sighs.
Gary shrugs. The wolf hunt left him a cut on his cheekbone, right under his left eye. "Just happened to be around here," he says. He looks at Ash: "So you deserted the wolf hunt, huh, pansy? I knew you didn't have the courage to stick around till the end."
"It was my fault," Misty replies, before Ash can do it. "I made him come back. Leave him alone."
Gary raises an eyebrow and his lips curl into a wider smirk. "Right, I forgot he needs his knight in shining armor to defend him," he comments.
"Quit it, Gary," Ash grumbles. He places another log on the wood pile. "It wasn't even the wolf, anyway."
"Well, you certainly weren't so eager to find out," Gary keeps provoking him. Misty shakes her head.
"Stop it!" she insists. She stands. "Want me to give you another punch?"
Gary tilts his head and looks at her. "Try and I'll hit back this time, carrot top," he retorts. Before he's even done saying it Ash straightens his back, drops the axe and throws himself at him, grasping his arm and raising a fist to hir face.
"Touch her and I swear you'll wish you hadn't," he assures him. Gary blinks, surprised, then shoves him away.
"I'm not touching your fiancée, don't worry," he mumbles, wiping his hands on his pants as if he'd touched a pile of dirt. Ash glowers at him, looking almost ready to jump to his throat; but he marches back to the stump instead and grabs the axe to hammer away at the log. Just as surprised as Gary, if not more, Misty can't find anything to say. When it occurs to her that she should retort "I'm not his fiancée" it's been too long already.
"Bah, I wonder why I keep wasting my time with you two," Gary says. He waves a mocking goodbye as he turns: "See you, pansy."
Ash doesn't reply. Misty waits for Gary to be out of sight, then picks up her basket and walks to him, and shakes her head a bit.
"What was that?"
He looks up. "What was what?"
She shrugs. "You. Defending me from Gary."
"I was just sick of hearing his crap," he grumbles, looking away again, his face a little red. She hesitates for a moment, then lays a hand on his arm.
"Thank you."
He turns back to her and gives a surprised half-laugh. "For what?"
"Defending me."
"You don't need me to."
"Yeah, I don't. But it was nice, so thank you anyway."
He laughs openly now. "You know, on one hand I'd like to see you and Gary in a fist fight, I'm sure he'd regret ever thinking about it."
"That's for sure," she grins. Then pulls the hood of her cape on. "I have to go now. My father gets worried if I'm not back before dark."
"See you then," he says, the smile still on his lips. She nods: "See you."
—-
Lily plays with Daisy's hairbrush, turning it over and over in her hand. Daisy never took it with her because it's broken: the handle got a crack from being dropped or tossed at some disagreeing sister one time too many and finally fell off, and now it's hard to hold it. After Daisy got married it became Violet's hairbrush, and now it's Lily's. It'll probably be hers in a while.
The wedding will still happen, even if it's been postponed. Lily turns to her, her hair falling on her shoulders in big curls, her eyes a bit red.
"Father will want you to marry as well," she says.
Misty freezes, her feet still halfway on the ladder. "What?" she cries out then, climbing the last couple steps in a hurry. Lily just shrugs.
"Did you hear him say something?" Misty wants to know.
Lily sets Daisy's brush down. "No, but he surely will," she says. "He wouldn't know how to take care of a daughter… without our mother."
"He doesn't need to take care of me, I'm not five," Misty retorts. Her stomach has suddenly crumpled in a tight ball. Lily shrugs her shoulders again, slightly.
"I thought I'd warn you," she tells her, then turns to look at her and arches her eyebrows. "And he won't give your hand to Ash, no use deluding yourself."
"…I don't want him to give my hand to Ash!" But it takes her a moment too many. Her sister's eyebrows rise a little higher.
"If you say so. Good for you then, because he won't," she states. She turns to the window; snow is piling on the sill again. "He'd never want to have anything to do with that bad lot of his father. But maybe he'll give you to Gary. He's from a good family."
Misty's eyes widen. "Don't even think about that."
"I warned you," Lily says. "Maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe I'm not."
Her heart hammering in her chest, Misty sits on the edge of the bed, nearly missing it. The snow keeps falling on the windowsill; downstairs the fire crackles. "You're wrong," she states after a handful of moments. Her sister answers with another shrug.
She can't sleep that night. She tosses in her bed until dawn, while Lily breathes slowly by her side, her eyelashes quivering slightly from time to time. Finally she stands, shivering a little in her nightgown, and walks up and down the room touching all the objects she's known her whole life: the candle holder with nothing but a wax stump stuck at the bottom, the broken hairbrush, the dried flowers woven into crowns, daisies and violets and wild lilies. The round pebble she took from Ash six years ago at the bottom of a drawer. She tries to picture waking up in a room she doesn't know, sleeping with someone she didn't get to choose, and her eyes sting with furious tears. She wipes them away.
—-
She meets the wolf hunter in person two evenings later.
She's late; she met Ash at the market and stopped to talk to him, and only after a while she realized that it was getting dark and she should have been home already. She hurries her steps stumbling on the fresh snow, her basket bumping against her knees, even if by now her father will be angry anyway. She's not expecting someone to call her, and she jumps when she hears the voice.
"It's late for such a young girl to walk around alone."
She spins around. J, as she wants to be called, is standing behind her. On instinct Misty grasps the basket tighter and takes a half-step back.
"I know. I'm late, I was just going home."
The hunter watches her without talking. She can't see her eyes, hidden under the brim of her hat, but she still feels her glance run straight through her almost as if she weren't there, cold and sharp like a blade. She takes another step back, the worn-out straw of the handle of her basket scraping her palm. The hunter takes two steps forward.
"You're the daughter of the woman that was killed by the wolf, aren't you?"
Misty bites her lip hard and then nods. "Yes."
She feels the hunter's eyes scanning her still. She walks back another step and her shoulder blades bump against a wall. Her heart suddenly starts racing, nearly stopping her breath in her throat. The hunter walks closer, reducing the distance between them to two, three steps almost. She's slim and not much taller than she is, and yet she seems to tower over her, her shape dark and looming. Her hands are hidden under her black cape. Misty thinks of the silver sword and shudders a little, wondering if she's holding it now.
"I'll ask you directly," the woman says. She can see her eyes now, looking straight into hers. Silver, like her blade "Do you know anything I should know as well?"
Misty shakes her head so eagerly that her hair flies on her face. "No."
J doesn't flinch. She takes another step and Misty presses her back against the wall, as if she could squeeze through. The hunter raises a hand and takes a strand of her hair in her long fingers.
"You hair is the color of the devil, do you know that?" she says. Misty feels her breath on her skin and holds hers in her chest. "The color of witches."
"My mother's was the same color," she manages to reply. Her voice is shaking. The hunter studies her, unperturbed.
"Maybe that's the reason why the wolf killed her."
Misty blinks. "No," she retorts, more firm now. "My mother was not a witch!"
The woman lets her hair fall, but doesn't draw back. She keeps breathing on her and she feels crushed somehow, like her presence was weighing physically on her chest. Her fingernails trace the curve of her cheek, long and sharp like a wolf's claws.
"Are you sure?" she asks. Suddenly she grasps her chin in her fingers, forcing her to not look away. "You never felt that she was hiding something from you? That there was something you didn't know about her, something she was not telling you? Something strange she said, some strange behaviour, different from the usual? Never, not even once?"
Misty parts her lips to say no, then suddenly remembers her red eyes and her messy braid. How the lines of her face often looked too dark, too deep, as if she were much older or much more sad.
She shakes her head anyway.
The hunter looks at her. "Mh," she says, raising an eyebrow. "Now I might think that your mother was successful in hiding something from you, or that you're trying to hide something from me."
"I'm not hiding anything," Misty retorts. "My mother wasn't a witch, and I'm not either."
She tries to turn away and J's finger clutch her chin tighter, enough to hurt. She leans even closer. "Of course you'd deny it," she exhales.
"I'm not a witch!" she insists. Her voice is trembling again now, harder, and she presses her lips together to avoid crying, trying to free herself from her grasp. The basket slips from her fingers, falling on the snow with a soft thump.
"If you're lying to me," the woman hisses, not letting go, "I will find out and make you wish you'd never been born. And I will find out, be sure of it, even if it means walking over the dead bodies of every person you care about, and yours as well."
"I'm not lying," Misty says one more time, the not coming sharp out of her throat. Her heart is hammering. "Please let me go. I have to go home."
The hunter watches her for a moment still, then lets go. Misty turns away immediately, breathing in short bursts.
"I'll keep my eyes on you," J promises her, ice cold. "If you're hiding something you'll regret thinking you could fool me."
"I said I'm not hiding anything," she insists. Her eyes burn and she wipes them with the back of her hand, furious at her tears, then bends down to pick up her basket. Her fingers are shaking as she grasps the handle.
J turns her back on her. The heavy fabric of her cape whishes around her, swelling from a gust of wind. "We'll see," she says. Misty watches her walk away and only when she disappears behind a corner she dares to stop looking.
It's dark. Her father will be furious. She wipes her eyes again and hurries her steps, starting to run.
—-
She doesn't tell her father about what happened, nor Lily, but she tells Ash the next day. He sits down next to her on the steps as she talks, frowning.
"She seriously scared me," she says, looking at her feet. She grasps the fabric of her skirt and shakes her head. "She threatened me. She'll kill me if she thinks I'm a witch."
"She won't," he assures her. "C'mon, she'd have no reason to suspect anything like that!"
Misty keeps staring at the ground. She reaches for her hair, almost without realizing it, clutching the ends on her shoulder. "My hair," she whispers. She hesitates for a moment, then adds: "And my mother."
"She wouldn't have had anything to suspect about her either," Ash retorts. Misty looks up.
"I don't know for sure," she says. Her voice stumbles a little. "I don't know why the wolf killed her. What if she was really hiding something? There has to be a reason why she was outside that night, she knew it was the wolf's night."
"Well, I'm sure it had nothing to do with witchcraft or any of that nonsense," he insists. He sounds certain of it; much more than she is.
She wipes the corner of her eye with the hem of her cape.
Ash lays a hand on her arm. "Hey, you're not crying, right?" he says. "It's all going to be fine. I'm sure."
"What if it's not?" she retorts. "What if she really think I'm a witch?"
He doesn't answer straight away. He looks at her for a moment first, then shrugs. "She won't hurt you anyway," he assures her. "I won't let her."
The start of a laugh escapes Misty's lips, but it leaves behind a bitter taste. "You won't let her?" she repeats. "And what are you going to do? Fight her and all of her soldiers with your axe?"
She doesn't add "you'd only get yourself killed if you tried", but she thinks it. Ash frowns again.
"I don't know, but I won't let her anyway," he states. He puffs his cheeks: "She'd better never even come near you again."
Misty stares at him, not sure if she should thank him or call him an idiot. In the end she just shakes her head.
"Don't do anything stupid," she sighs. "That woman is seriously scary."
"I know, I saw her yesterday," Ash says. "She was just across the street, she didn't talk to me or anything, but I got the creeps anyway."
"Well, just don't do anything," Misty insists. He doesn't reply; he looks away at nothing in particular and purses his lips, thoughtful. Misty bumps his arm slightly. "Are you listening to me? I'm serious. Stay away from her."
He turns to her and smiles: "Don't worry. I won't do anything."
But it's an unconvincing smile, hiding something else underneath, and for a moment she thinks of grasping his shirt and holding tight to make sure he'll stay there, and not get into who knows what trouble. She feels stupid, though, and so she just hugs her knees instead, fingers digging into the fabric of her skirt again. The wind blows strands of her hair on her face, too red, too striking, witch-hair; and she pulls her hood up to hide it. She remembers her mother's watery eyes, her red braid undone in places. Lily said she had been somewhere.
Ash looks at the street and frowns, lost in his thoughts again.