Rebecca trotted on four feet along the snowy road, enjoying the clean scent of the wind, the winter's peace. This was how a wolf was meant to live all the time, not fenced in on all sides by buildings and roads, people who took for granted you'd risk your own life to protect them, too many other wolves all compressed into one too-small territory like animals in a zoo...
A tantalizing scent caught her attention, and she paused to investigate. Hare, and the trail was fresh. She considered going after it, a fresh kill would be the crowning pleasure, but decided against a hunt just now. There'd always be another, and she did want to see the art displayed in the village. Despite, or perhaps because of, their weakness, humans and elves and dryads could be fascinatingly creative. And it went without saying that of course any wolf who chose to make the effort could turn wild spirit into physical form, although the others would never truly comprehend what they saw.
Like her own coven... She turned her thoughts from them in disgust. Why ruin a pleasant day?
Maybe this art show would take her mind off it.
Haven was fairly quiet for a Sunday. Today was the first day of the show, and the only day she'd have free until the next weekend; nine-to-five jobs were such a nuisance, but someone had to do them, and better her at the bank than many she could think of. At least it was better than the college, which she'd abandoned as pointless frustration around the time Deanna and Bane had stolen Kevin from her.
The library was the first she reached of the places housing the art show. Just outside the door, she changed back to human, twitched her bright magesilk skirt into place, and went inside.
The hall just within was lined with paintings, some of them fairly pleasing to the eye; one in particular she liked was of a moon rising full behind winter-bare trees. She wandered along the hall, contentedly evaluating each painting, and deciding that mostly they were tolerable but not outstanding.
Not until she reached the end of the hall did she recognize the two other voices that were speaking counterpoint with Bryan's: Kevin and Gisela. Bryan was shelving books, while Kevin straddled a chair backwards and Gisela perched on a second. Library must be empty, otherwise they wouldn't be talking full-volume. Discussing the art show, in fact, and a few ink drawings Sonja was offering for sale that were at White Stag.
Rebecca hesitated a moment; she hadn't planned on confronting anyone today, even Kevin. Yet if she left, she'd never get to see what was inside.
Head high, she stepped into the library.
All three glanced towards her. Bryan greeted her with a neutral nod, Gisela with a wary expression, and Kevin with, “Heya, Becky, checking out the art?”
“Yes. I assume it doesn't stop in the hall.”
Bryan indicated the far end of the room, down where there were chairs and a couch for those who felt like staying here to read. “There's another half-dozen or so there.”
She inclined her head in acknowledgement, and wove her way between the shelves. Behind her, she head Gisela whisper, “How can you be so friendly to her?” but no reply followed.
Almost-silent footsteps, Kevin's familiar scent.
“That one's neat,” he commented. “All the faeries hiding in the forest, and you can't see them unless you really look. Maybe one time the forest really was alive like that.”
“Maybe,” she agreed.
“Jesse's back in Haven, he has been for a week or so.”
“I know.”
“But you've been leaving him alone. Thank you.”
That was too unexpected; she had no reply ready. “Why should I care about him?” she asked disdainfully.
“I don't know. Do you care if he's ever whole and healed?”
“No wolf is whole in this time,” she hissed. “I hope he never heals, I hope he can never shapechange. Then he'll never have to know half-freedom.”
“Freedom's in your mind. Putting chains on other people because you feel like there are chains on you is crazy.”
“I don't recall asking what you think.”
“True, you didn't.” He sighed. “I just wanted to thank you for staying away from Jess. Enjoy the art.” He turned away, and went back to his friends.
It wasn't fair! Kevin was meant to be hers, to protect from all the bad things drawn to mages and to watch over and love and to love her, and he'd been stolen away from her. By Deanna first; his present coven kept him away; now that little thief and that damned healer, they had what should be hers. And he went along with it, instead of choosing to stand by her.
Anger welling up hot and strong again... she leashed it firmly, concentrated on what she was here for. The last painting was of a man on his knees, eyes closed, in the middle of a field being reaped by women with sickles; given the sun and moon overhead, the garlands that were all he wore, she judged it to be the Green God dying with the harvest. Attractive, but imagery for farmers, not hunters.
Without acknowledging the presence of anyone but herself and Bryan, she left the library, tried to decide where next while shifting back to fur. The Brewery and Venus Alive were both fairly close, and after them she could do the others.
Much later, she loped home. She shifted to human on the back porch, and went through the warm kitchen to the living room.
Karl was watching TV; he looked away to greet her, and his nostrils flared, catching some scent.
“What have you been doing with Kevin?” he growled.
“Is that any of your business?” She was growing more than a little weary of his possessive attitude of late.
“Yes! I thought we decided that August was the last revenge we'd think about!” He rose, and came to face her. He was only a little less than a head shorter than her, more solidly built; he'd taken to wearing unrelieved black which, given his sandy-blonde colouring, made him look like the walking dead. “Bad enough that you waste calling demons on telling you things about that new pet of his, but now you're off socializing with him? After he betrayed us?”
“Stay out of what you don't understand. And don't you ever question me or anything I do. Is that clear?”
He challenged her, holding her gaze for longer than she expected, but in the end he looked down and said sullenly, “Yes.”
“Remember it. Go on back to your TV and your video games. Some of us have real lives to live.”
“As long as that life doesn't include Kevin Lioren,” Karl growled, but he kept his eyes down.
“It includes whomever I wish it to include.” She swept by him towards the stairs, up to her own room where she could close the door, sprawl on the bed, and let the bittersweet memories flood over her.
She'd come here to go to the college, of course. It was a given for the highly gifted who needed to be part of a coven with a wolf to keep them safe from predators, and for elves and dryads who could only interbreed with humans for so many generations before their children became gifted humans instead, and for the wolves who were responsible for that safety. For anyone else, it was optional, but who would really want to go to school surrounded by humans who thought they were all there was and that magic was superstition, unless it were absolutely unavoidable?
Her third day of classes, walking back to her aunt Sylvia's house, she'd seriously wondered whether it could possibly be worth it. People everywhere, wolves everywhere... she'd been miserably tense for the past three days, watching every direction at once, though encounters with other wolves had been carefully neutral on all sides. High emotions everywhere, making the air thick with scents and driving voices up to levels that made her wince, anxiety and optimism, excitement and homesickness.
Perhaps the most disheartening was that as far as she could tell, everyone around her was perfectly happy to swallow everything they were told without question, willing sheep, even the wolves who tamely accepted leashes and muzzles. Probably she should never have expected that to be any different here than it was in Endor, though. After all, much of Endor had been through the college as well, and had been instilled with the same dogma. Presumably it was conducive to the harmony and mutual support of the mixed villages in a hostile world, but it strangled. Couldn't anyone else feel that?
She'd just skipped her final class, in fact, unable to bear it and hoping to walk home without being part of a crowd.
Near a corner, she'd paused, overhearing voices.
“Not a great way to start off the school year,” a very young female voice said in exasperation. “Getting everyone mad at you and making one intramural team look bad?”
“Oh, come on,” laughed a male voice, also young. “I was doing it so obviously that no one could possibly claim that Red Team won on skill. And you have to admit, my way it was a lot less boring to watch.”
“A bit trickier to play, however,” said a different male voice, dryly. “More of a challenge, but it was already too much of a challenge for half my team-mates to begin with.”
“Which is why I did it. There was no way you guys were going to win, and it was boring watching Blue keep scoring over and over and over. What's the point of being a mage if I'm not allowed to use it to keep my brain from oozing out my ears and running away in self-defence? C'mon, Dia, I heard you giggling when Alan slipped and I made the little birds around his head. He wasn't hurt. He's a wolf, paying attention to a couple of bruises would mean losing face anyway, and I distracted him.”
Curious, Rebecca resumed walking, and within a few more steps, could see them. The trio was coming from the direction of the high school, and she could see the strap of a backpack on the shoulder of each. One male, who was grinning, was an elf, tall and bright golden-blonde and white-skinned, all in colourful magesilks; he was playing with a handful of sunlight, turning it into a bird, then a flower, then a long ribbon that danced around the three of them before coming back to his hand. The other male was somewhat shorter, a duller sandy blonde and tanned, his build more solid, and also in magesilks but they were muted brown shades. Probably a wolf. The one female was very likely a dryad, curvy and dark, in an oak-green magesilk dress that fit and flattered her perfectly and a matching ribbon braided into her long auburn hair.
“All right, it was funny,” the dryad conceded. “But it wasn't at all funny for everyone in range trying to grab control of the ball back. And he wouldn't have fallen at all if you hadn't added an illusory ball too.”
“Then they shouldn't be trying to fight me directly, now should they?” the elf said. “Right, like one half-trained mage who's nowhere near as strong and a handful of telekinetics are going to be able to go against me?”
Now that was an interesting statement, delivered in a completely matter-of-fact tone—coloured now not by amusement but by creeping frustration.
“To be fair,” the wolf said, “it was better than being bored for another half hour and being thoroughly beaten. If a few people got annoyed, well, it's not going to kill them. They should be used to the idea of Kev being ridiculously strong by now and know better than to try brute force. I'm not sure asking nicely would have made him listen but it would have had a better chance of success than trying to overpower him. I mean, how stupid is that?”
“Thank you,” the elf said. “ At least someone has some appreciation.”
“Excuse me,” Rebecca said, offering them her best smile. “I gather there's a restaurant around here with no sign, just in case of tourists wandering through? I can't seem to find it.”
All three paused.
“You're about four blocks from it,” the dryad said, gesturing in what Rebecca assumed was the correct direction—she hadn't paid much attention.
“We can show you where,” the elf said. “We're, um, out a bit early and we've got time. I'm Kevin. That's Deanna, that's Karl. You just started at the college?”
“Yes. I'm Rebecca. And thanks. Maybe when we get there, I can buy you a snack and you can tell me about Haven.”
“Snack, the magic word to an elvenmage,” Karl said. Nostrils flared as he took in her scent; well, she was investigating his, too, though both played the civilized game on the surface. Wolf dynamics showed in the details of body language, though: this was his territory and she was new, but she was older and had the confidence of an alpha, and he chose to drop his gaze and turn very slightly away in respect. “This way, milady, after you.”
Comfortably seated in the Brewery, each with a drink and with a shared appetizer platter to nibble on, they talked: about Haven, about Endor, about how being in French-speaking Quebec made Endor different from Haven despite the pragmatic emphasis on bilingualism, about the trio who already considered themselves a coven and were unsure whether to bother with the college.
“An elvenmage needs a wolf around,” Karl said. “Especially a really strong one, obviously. But Kev's already got me. And where Kev goes, Dia goes. That's just a given. Why look for more than that?”
“Sounds practical,” Rebecca agreed. “What about the actual educational side of it?”
“I'm probably going to take some of the horticulture and herbalism classes,” Deanna said. “I'm good at kitchen-witch stuff so probably I'll watch for a job that uses that. I've got another year after Kev and Karl are done, to make up my mind. Karl can't sit still through high school classes, I don't think college classes are likely to be any better. And Kev would have to actually take something seriously long enough to make up his mind, which is probably not going to happen in the next two years before he graduates.” The affectionate tone took all the sting out of the words, and Kevin just grinned at her.
“I can be serious,” Kevin said. “I just find it hard to take the same things seriously that everyone else does. I don't know what I want to do. I mean, it's kind of a given that I'm eventually going to be considered Adept. I'm really strong and really good. But everyone expects Adepts to be all responsible and, y'know, pillars of the community with sensible jobs. One runs this place, and the other is our local psychotherapist who also teaches humanities classes at the College, and that's around the expectation of teaching magic too. That doesn't sound particularly appealing. What's the point of being a mage if I'm not supposed to use it to have fun and show off a bit, and I have to devote my whole life to everybody else?”
“That is not what anyone is saying,” Deanna sighed.
Rebecca figured that was, in fact, exactly what they were saying, or at least what lay underneath everything that they were saying.
A couple of years wasn't so big a difference, really, not when in front of her was a kindred spirit, one who was no more comfortable fitting into the role ordained by their culture than she was, one who wanted to be free.
She could show him how, or at least as far as she'd managed to get, and maybe together, they could find the rest of the path.
The other two might be inconvenient, but which one, ultimately, was Kevin going to listen to? An earth-bound dryad who was the voice of convention, wanting him to act in ways that clearly chafed, or a wolf who was trying to show him how to escape the cage and fly? Deanna could safely be ignored until Kevin outgrew her. Karl's views were clearly more flexible, and it was possible he could be swayed. Breaking down the other connections that confined him shouldn't be all that hard; though Kevin laughed it off, she was beginning to suspect that many people were uneasy with a strong mage-gift in the hands of someone they saw as impulsive and unreliable. That would be predictable and normal, and he didn't need them or their approval as much as he currently believed he did.
Maybe coming to Haven hadn't been such a mistake after all, she'd thought.
Until Deanna had forced him to choose, and Kevin had chosen Deanna over Rebecca, a cage over freedom.
Her current coven and, to the best of her knowledge, Haven in general all believed that it was some sort of relentless and irrational desire for revenge that drove her. That was only further proof of how little they understood her.
Duayne's dream about the stranger sleeping by the side of the road had seemed like a godsend. Driving to the general area, she'd investigated furform, confirmed the noxious smells of the city and a fainter scent of wolf. With more time to think, she would probably have been less willing to risk Jesse's life, but how could she pass up such an opportunity?
Some gifted could get away with staying solitary and trusting to the density of wolves in Haven protecting them from predators. Not elvenmages, and least of all strong ones. Without Bane, Kevin would have no choice but to find another wolf. There were few solitary wolves, and none of them were at all likely candidates; no existing coven would accept him. Haven had had too clear a glimpse of what Kevin truly was, and their little sheep souls remained terrified of it. Possibly Bryan would try for the sake of Lori's fondness for her cousin, though two elvenmages in one coven was asking for trouble; possibly Evaline might, even though adding Kevin to a coven already in precarious balance because of Nick's moods and Sonja's odd gifts would be an equally bad idea. Without Deanna, it was all the more certain that he'd turn back to Rebecca.
Then they could go away, just the two of them, and leave Whitethorn to Karl and the remainder of Sundark could do whatever they liked. She could get back to work on undoing the damage caused by Kevin's struggle to convince everyone, including himself, that he was a tame little caged songbird instead of a wild raptor that could shatter those bars just by spreading his wings fully.
The whole plan had failed, had increased the friction within her current coven, had led to her losing face with the Haven wolves and to a warning from several alphas that she was once again venturing into behaviour they wouldn't tolerate. Had even led to a lingering trace of guilt that she'd been so willing to sacrifice Jesse or condemn him to a miserable life of fences and walls, though she remained unconvinced that the world would particularly suffer for it. Probably, it had ultimately reduced any chance of future success, adding an extra barrier between them.
Maybe she should try to be content with what she had.
An elvenmage who depended heavily on feeling useful to and accepted by her coven—at least it was only her coven and not Haven in general, but she'd proven resistant to Rebecca's attempts to break her of it. A witch, lifelong friend of the mage, who was obsessed with books and pushing magical boundaries. An elf seer deeply fascinated by old and often forbidden knowledge. At least those two made a good pair, and Moira and Duayne got along well since he had the tact to thank her often. A wolf who increasingly believed that he wasn't beta to her alpha but was her equal and entitled to opinions about what she did. All of them often reluctant to grant her the respect and obedience she needed in order to best protect them, without constant wearying reminders.
Well, it could be worse.
But given the choice, she'd walk away from them without hesitation if she could just have Kevin back.