Frost Wolf (17 page)

Splendid
, whispered a voice that was not quite a voice.
Splendid, dear!

“SO HERE WE ARE,” FAOLAN SAID quietly. “I built it here because there is a good view of the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes, and on a clear night when I am on watch, I can see Broken Talon Point from my cairn and imagine that I can see the
drumlyn
of our mother.”

The lashing of the winds off the Bittersea had stripped snow from the
drumlyn
. The bones were clearly visible, looming pale in the moonlight. They seemed almost transparent, and it crossed Dearlea’s mind that they could have been made from crystal.

“Dearlea, are you cold?” Faolan asked.

“No, no. I just … I can’t explain.” Then very softly she said, “Mum?”

“She died very peacefully, Dearlea. And Brangwen was a good mate.”

“It’s too bad that we didn’t get to meet him,” Mhairie said.

On their arrival they had been told that Brangwen had left for the Blood Watch a few days earlier.

“Can you show us Thunderheart’s bone?” Mhairie asked.

“Well, if you really look I think you’ll see it.”

“That one!” Mhairie said, touching her nose to a huge bone at the base of the
drumlyn
.

“Yes, her paw bone.” It was one of the largest bones in the
drumlyn
. “I had buried it on a slope near the salt lagoons in the Slough. I retrieved it about six moons ago to bring here.”

“I can see the carving you did. It’s so beautiful!” Dearlea said.

“It’s the story of our time together — the summer we spent fishing on the river, the fall, and then our winter den.” He paused. “Would you like to carve a bone for Morag?”

The Namara had diligently kept watch over Morag’s bones as her body decomposed. She had even posted a guard to protect Morag’s remains so that Faolan could come back for more bones to add to the
drumlyn
.

“But what will we say? We never knew her,” Mhairie said.

“Tell her about yourself. She was an outflanker, Mhairie, and so are you. And, Dearlea, you had been selected to be a
skreeleen
, to read the
ceilidh fyre
. You have much to inscribe. Stories that a mum would be proud of.”

“Are you going to carve any more?” Dearlea asked.

“Not tonight. Now it’s your turn.”

Faolan knew he shouldn’t carve while his sisters were trying to incise their own stories. Watch wolf carving skills were vastly superior to those of ordinary clan wolves. It would only make Mhairie and Dearlea anxious if he were to gnaw beside them. “There’s a shelter in the lee of the point. I think I’ll go there for a rest. But you begin your bones. It will feel good, I promise.”

“We’re not nearly as skilled as you, Faolan,” Mhairie said.

“But your story is yours, and yours alone. You are the only one who can tell it to our mum.”

“Our mum,” Mhairie repeated, savoring the words on her tongue.

And Faolan’s sisters began their stories. At first their incisions were stiff and rigid, blunt marks staccato in their rhythms.

Mum. They named me Mhairie. Was this the name you chose? I grew up to be an outflanker, like you, only not as good. Mum, you should know that Caila took good care of
me —
Mhairie stopped. Should she write about Caila’s rejection? Faolan said that one must never lie on a
drumlyn
bone. So she began scratching lightly with her incisors.
Until the famine sickness came upon her, she took very good care of us.
And now the marks flowed like small ripples in a river touched by wind.
Dearlea and I think something happened to her marrow. She said we were not her daughters. She rejected us. And I suppose she was right. She was not our first Milk Giver, you were. But she raised us as if she were our true mum. We never felt she loved us less than any other litters. She loved us and took care of us until the famine sickness came upon her. She was so proud of me when I became an outflanker and when Dearlea was chosen to train as a
skreeleen.
She was a proud mum.

Faolan was more tired than he’d thought, and while his sisters carved, he fell into a deep sleep. In his dream he carved as well. Bone that was slightly familiar. It was a twisted femur, and he couldn’t understand why he felt he’d come across it before. He loved that bone, but it wasn’t his mother’s, nor was it Thunderheart’s. It was a wolf bone, not a bear’s.

I was a bear
, he said in his dream.

He felt a deep thrill surge within him. Suddenly, it was as if he had been transported back to the Cave Before Time. He could feel those walls that seemed to breathe with life surrounding him, the animals pounding across the rock face of the cave. He could hear their panting and see the spiraling painted marks on the stone, just like the dim tracery on the pads of his splayed paw.
I am so close
, he thought,
I am so close to the answer, so close to the heart of a secret — my secret. What is it?

Not yet! Not yet!
a dream voice whispered. And once more the spirals from the cave walls that matched the marks on his splayed paw emerged from the mists of Faolan’s dreams and reminded him that he was but part of a larger design.
I was not born for death and yet I have died a thousand times
, he thought.
And now I am born again for these hard times.

His marrow began to boil and his dream split, as if a bolt of lightning had cracked open his skull. There standing beside him was another wolf, a paltry creature so old it looked as if his legs would not support him. A tattered pelt hung over stick-thin bones that seemed rimed in frost.

I was not born for death and yet I have died a thousand times
, the wolf echoed.

Faolan jolted awake. “Who said that?” he asked. Those were the words from his dream, from the frost wolf. Faolan got up and walked to the mouth of the den to look out. He saw his sisters working diligently on their bones. On the edge of the wind, he could feel a deeper cold coming. It was now almost fall. What would the hunger moons of winter bring?

Faolan looked up at the sky. The stars blurred, as if the constellations were stumbling toward a precipice, like Beezar the blind wolf. There was but one thought in Faolan’s mind:

My service is not over. I am in but my first pelt of a new season. Can this be so?

THE AUTHOR WISHES TO ACKNOWLEDGE that the notion of a shadow freezing was first suggested by Mark Twain in his book
Following the Equator
. She’s also indebted to the poet William Butler Yeats, in particular for his poems “The Second Coming” and “Sailing to Byzantium.”

K
ATHRYN
L
ASKY
is the author of the bestselling Guardians of Ga’Hoole series, which has sold more than four million copies and has been made into a major motion picture,
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole.
Her books have received a Newbery Honor, a Boston Globe—Horn Book Award, and a Washington Post—Children’s Book Guild Award. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Copyright © 2011 by Kathryn Lasky
Cover art by Richard Cowdrey
Cover art © 2011 by Scholastic Inc.
Interior illustrations by Richard Cowdrey
Interior illustrations © 2011 by Scholastic Inc.
Map illustration by Lillie Howard

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.
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                                                Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lasky, Kathryn.
     Frost wolf / Kathryn Lasky; [interior illustrations by Richard Cowdrey]. — 1st ed.

p. cm. — (Wolves of the Beyond ; [4])

   Summary: When a terrible danger threatens the wolves of the Beyond, outsider Faolan must take a leadership role and inspire the pack to stand together.
   ISBN-13: 978-0-545-09316-3
   ISBN-10: 0-545-09316-3
 [1. Wolves — Fiction. 2. Fantasy.] I. Cowdrey, Richard, ill. II. Title.

PZ7.L3274F r 2011
       [Fic] — dc23

                                                                               2011028151

First edition, December 2011

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eISBN: 978-0-545-38837-5