**A Winter's Gift**
by Renee Carter Hall
He struck the match, and the flame hissed into life, catching the kindling in a slow, curling dance of red. In a few moments, the fire caught, and he carefully added a couple of larger logs. Glowing sparks crawled along the bark, snapping in the growing heat.
He sat back on his heels, pleased. He'd brought enough wood in to keep the fire blazing through the night, all piled against the far wall of the empty one-room cabin.
Their cabin, now, starting this night. He didn't know who had built it, likely a hunter or a trapper, but he'd watched it for months and seen no one, and his footprints were the only ones in the dust that covered the floor.
It was warming up now, slowly. He could no longer see his breath. Good, good. He wanted it warm by the time she came. He wanted everything ready.
Thank God it hadn't snowed any more. Back home their house was surrounded with tracks through the drifts--his, his younger brother's, his sister's, his father's. (His mother never went out in bad weather if she could help it; she said that was why she had sons.) All those tracks would make his own hard to follow, make it hard to pick out his path.
And thank God he'd always been one to wander, long before he first met her, always one for long walks all alone through these woods. They let him alone about it, mostly, though his father called him moony sometimes, but he still got all his chores done on time, so what did it matter?
There were two pieces of furniture in the cabin: a table with a broken leg, good for nothing but burning, and a feather mattress. He'd aired the mattress a week before the snow came. It still smelled a bit musty, but it didn't set him to sneezing anymore, and he figured it would be all right. He wouldn't care about something like that, but women did. Having a sister had taught him that.
There was one window, of thick, uneven glass. He saw a hint of movement through it now, and his heart leapt--but then he saw it was snowing again, big wet flakes drifting down from a gray sky.
If the snow kept her away--
He nearly laughed out loud at his own foolishness. Her people ran in snow and rain and storms as easily as they ran under blue skies.
If anything kept her away--
No. She would come. She had to, just as he had to, had no choice.
He unloaded his pack. There was a packet of the molasses cookies she'd liked so much the day they'd first met, up by the stream. Some salt pork and leftover cornbread he hoped his mother wouldn't miss. And two brown eggs, still faintly warm, as fresh as eggs could be. She would want hers raw, but he'd brought a can to boil his in.
The fire washed the room in warm light. He took off his shirt, fumbling a little with the buttons. Layer after layer he removed, until he was dressed only in firelight. The air felt warm on his skin.
The door creaked, and his heart stuck in his throat. The wind, or--?
She came in with a swirl of snow, the flakes scattered like stars through her charcoal-gray coat. Her ears pricked at the sound of the fire, and he saw its light reflected in her eyes as her expression relaxed from caution into a wolfen smile.
He did not remember her crossing the room, did not remember standing up to greet her. He only knew she was there, and then he was holding her, and she was holding him, the snow on her coat melting against his skin.
"I thought Yata would never fall asleep," she murmured after several long, sweet moments. "It felt like half the night before she started snoring."
They lay down on the mattress, and he propped himself on one elbow, admiring her. She was all alert elegance, soft eyes, sensitive to everything, nothing between her and her world. She had been born to live as she did, where he required all kinds of tools just to survive. She didn't need the fire at all, but oh, she was lovely in it, and his body ached to be against hers, in that touch of fur silken against skin that excited him in so many different ways.
"You tremble," she said. "You softskins are so... so *bare*. Are you cold?"
"No," he said, and moved closer. He nuzzled against her throat, bit her lightly there the way she'd told him she liked, the way that made her whine so softly it almost couldn't be heard. She pressed against him, her strong muscles tensing, and now he buried his nose in her thick ruff and breathed deep, savoring the rich, musky scent of her as it grew stronger. He was stiff and full already; they'd waited so long...
They'd met in the spring, a wet wonder-wild spring where all the earth smelled rich and deep in the new sunlight, and all through the flowerings of spring and ripenings of summer they'd met in secret, here in a thicket, there by the stream, over in a cave barely big enough to hide them, talking, laughing, whispering, daring, touching here, stroking there, learning how to please, discovering what pleased. Every night she had been the last thing he thought of, and her scent lingered on his clothes and teased him in his dreams.
Was this, he'd wondered, what everyone did, what everyone felt? His head told him yes--his older brother was set to marry a town girl in the spring, and surely they'd met like this--and yet, and yet this was new and real in a way it could never have been for anyone else before, ever. The few girls he knew were nothing like her, and he could not imagine how it would be, skin against sticky skin, nothing to lose himself in, nothing to wake up every inch of his body. Just touching her was like touching thunder, like holding a storm and shaping it under his hands.
She pulled him against her, her claws digging into his back, the pain pricking like ice and making him shiver. She opened her legs, and he entered her as if they'd done this a hundred times, and it felt so right and easy and perfect that it nearly shocked the breath from him.
She was hot around him, a second fire he'd kindled. He pressed harder, instinct driving him to a slow rhythm that grew faster as she moved under him in counterpoint.
He groaned and forced himself to stop. Too soon, too fast; he wanted all of it to last longer, but his body was blazing and the quenching too sweet. She growled and pulled him against her again, and the rhythm took them both. He heard her breathing hitch and grow faster, and knowing what it meant sent him over the edge as well, every muscle tensed in release, sweet and soaring, feeling the fluttering pulse of her own climax as his began to ebb.
At last, it was done. Their breaths slowed to normal in the silence, and the dizzying pulse of their heartbeats settled into comfortable harmony.
He started to withdraw, but she stopped him. "Wait," she said. "Just a moment. It's so nice..."
He could already feel himself slackening and slipping out, but he held her anyway. She had told him long before that her people stayed joined, that it was a time of bonding, of safety and comfort and love.
She looked up at him, the firelight dancing in her eyes. She smiled, and he smiled, too.
"Irasha," he breathed. "Irasha... You said someday you'd tell me what it meant."
"The silence after the storm," she replied. "This moment." She sighed happily. "I have dreamt of this for so many days..."
"So have I." He stroked the fine fur of her throat, her cheek. Then he saw tears welling in her eyes, and he drew back. "What is it?"
"Not now," she whispered. She touched his hair, his shoulder, his chest. The leathery pads of her fingers felt hot against his skin. "A little while, just a little while longer..."
\* \* \*
She told him afterward, after her scent had dried on him, after he boiled the egg and shared the food with her.
"At the full moon," she said. "Not this next night, but the next. That is when it will be."
He didn't have to ask what she meant. He knew enough of the wolfen tribes to know of the Ascension, the day a young wolfen became a full member of the pack.
"You look grown up to me," he said, and was pleased to see her smile--but it faded quickly.
"There is something you don't know," she said, her voice barely audible.
"What?"
"The ceremony I told you about. That was for the men."
"What do the women do, then?"
She looked away from him, into the fire. "We sing our lives and our triumphs, as the men do. We issue the challenge to any who would oppose us, as the men do. But then there is something else. The women are mated, when we come of age, and we are bound that night to our mates."
"Mated?" The word felt strange in his mouth, stranger in his mind.
"Aleru has asked for me," she said softly. "He has killed a strong buck and brought its heart to our *manu*, and our *manu* has agreed. He is worthy, and when I Ascend we will belong to each other. He will hunt for me, and I will bear for him."
"No--you can't--"
"I must."
He tried to find words, tried to form them into speech. "Can't you refuse?"
She smiled, but her eyes were sad. "If I refuse the *manu*'s choice, I must fight Aleru, and I must kill him. Only then may I choose my own mate."
She hesitated, flicked her gaze to his for an instant, then looked away again. "Aleru is a good man. I would not take his life."
"But you're letting him take yours," he said.
The fire crackled in the quiet. He no longer felt its heat.
"You could leave," he said. "*We* could leave--the two of us--go somewhere--"
She idly stirred the bits of eggshell on the dusty floor. "You humans," she said finally, using the word she knew he preferred. "You can make a world out of two, and be happy in it."
She raised her eyes to meet his. He was not sure how to name what he saw there. Sorrow, yes, but something else.
"I cannot," she said. "I want to live in the lands of my pack, with my sister and my brothers and my parents. I want to bear strong pups and raise them in the way of the pack, so that they may sing of me when I die.
"I cannot make a world out of two," she finished quietly. "I cannot live apart from my pack."
"Then why did you come?" The anger in his voice surprised him. "Why did you even come here?"
The fur beneath her eyes was wet. "Because I wanted to give you everything I could. Because I love you."
"Then stay with me," he said, but he already knew it was useless. "Irasha..."
"There is one thing more I can give you," she said.
She reached to the leather pouch that was always strapped to one thigh, even now, when she wore nothing else. The outer flap was painted with a circle edged in a crescent, the sign of her pack. The ties that held the pouch closed were knotted several different ways, but she undid each one quickly and deftly.
Once--how long ago it felt now--he had asked her what was in it. "That is for no man to know," she had said solemnly, but his pestering, coupled with constant absurd guesses as to its contents, later earned him another reply.
"I will show you one day," she promised. Back then, he'd imagined it would be their wedding day, or some other time far into their shared future. Now, in the dust and the ashes and the half-lit dark, that day had come.
She took the objects out one by one: A dark brown feather barred with black. An arrowhead crusted with dried blood. The skull of something small, perhaps a squirrel. And a smooth gray stone neatly broken in two, with veins of gold streaking the rough edges.
She picked up one half of the stone. "I was born in a storm, and on her way back to the denning-grounds, my mother found this. Our *ayla* told her that lightning had split it in two, and that it meant her child's spirit would be split as well. I never understood what that would mean, until now."
She fingered the rough edge, turning the stone so that the bright veins sparkled in the firelight. "But there is beauty here, where it is broken. I am no *ayla*, but I think there will be joy still for both of us, even apart."
There was no joy, no hope, not even breath, nothing. He saw her searching his face and could not imagine what she saw.
"Will you say nothing?" she whispered finally.
Of the thousand thoughts hammering in his head, he chose the loudest, the strongest.
"Then leave," he said. "If you're going to leave, just--leave."
In some other time, when his heart was not a cold fire in his chest, he might have been sorry for the hurt in her eyes. She gathered her things, leaving half of the stone by him, and opened the door. Cold air rushed in, and he looked up to see her silhouetted against the slow-falling snow.
"Goodbye," she said, and the door closed behind her.
He sat until the fire died to coals, then ash. At last, shivering, he dressed and went out into the snow, carrying the half-stone in one hand.
Dawn was a pale wash in the eastern sky; the night, dead in the west. He felt like cursing but knew no words strong enough to hold his pain or sharp enough to serve his anger. He threw the stone as far as he could and turned toward home before he could see where it fell.
\* \* \*
Another winter came, and that winter passed into spring. Slowly, the fire in him cooled, until one day there was only the ash of long memory. He knew women now, the softness of bare skin and the sensitivity of touch, but more than once he had woken from dreams of sweet musk and a thick pelt against him, and the ache of it struck him like a blow, taking his breath before it passed.
He woke now to a chilly midnight, the April moon slanting its light into the room. He wondered if he had been dreaming again--
--but it came again, a rising howl so distant and yet so near, so close, and another joining in, and another...
He was out of bed before he could think, glancing back only to make sure that Rebecca hadn't stirred. Her pale skin shone in the moonlight, and he thought of how Irasha's fur would shine, how the light would tip each hair in silver, how she could seem soaked in moonlight, bathed in it, clean and bright and pure.
He slipped out of the house. Beyond the trees, the song rose and fell, turned and ebbed and surged again. Was it her pack? He followed without knowing, without caring.
He almost missed seeing the wolfen at the stream. He saw a darting shadow, a flare of moonlight on fur, and he called out in their speech before he knew what he was doing. "Wait. Please."
A single leaf stirred. Grasses bent silently. The wolfen who stood before him now was male, his fur so light it was almost white. He wore a rabbit-fur loincloth, and the leather pouch at his thigh bore the same mark that Irasha's had.
The mark of her pack. His heart pounded. He didn't know the words to ask what he needed to ask. Still...
"Do you understand me?" he asked, hope and fear knotting in his stomach.
The wolfen said nothing.
"Do you understand? Please, I have to ask you something."
"I understand," the wolfen said finally, though his eyes were dark and wary.
"The one called Irasha in your pack--"
"Irasha?" the wolfen echoed.
The knots tightened. "Yes."
"There is none called Irasha among us."
"Are you sure? A female. Aleru's mate," he added, aware of the sudden ache at having to refer to her that way.
The wolfen's expression changed. At first, he thought it was anger, then realized it was more like fear.
"Aleru's mate," the wolfen repeated.
"Yes. They were mated at her Ascension, last winter."
The wolfen took a step back, holding one hand oddly in front of him. "That one is called Mala."
"But she told me her name was Irasha."
"Then she told you what none may know."
"I don't understand."
The wolfen lowered his hand, though his body stayed tensed in a half-crouch. "She gave you her song-name. None know it but our *ayla* and Mala's mother." The wolfen's gaze locked on him. "Who are you, that you should know her song-name?"
"I'm..." He swallowed. "A friend."
The wolfen accepted this, though he didn't look as if he quite believed it. "I would not have been so foolish," he muttered.
"Please--is she well?"
"Yes. Aleru is a good hunter for her and their pups."
"She has pups," he breathed.
"Three, all sons. All strong. We sang their Welcoming at the last moon."
"Is she happy?" He felt foolish for asking. How would this one even know if she weren't?
"She is strong. She is a good mother. And there is no sorrow in her song. That is all I can know."
"Please..." His mouth was dry. "Don't tell her you saw me. Don't tell her you spoke to me."
The wolfen considered this in somber silence. "I saw no one at the stream," he said finally. "I drank, and only the moon saw me."
He tried the wolfen speech again. "Thank you."
The male nodded. "One thing more. You do not understand, so I must tell you. You must never speak the name she gave you. There is power in it. I cannot think why she would dare to trust a softskin with it, but I will honor it even so.
"She gave you a great gift," he continued, more quietly. "In this world and the next, those who carry her song-name hold claim to a piece of her soul. Guard it well."
And the wolfen turned and became a shadow, then a part of the night itself. And he was alone.
\* \* \*
He did not go back home that night. With moonlight as his lantern, he wandered old trails and deer-paths through the trees, knowing where he was headed, but wanting to pretend it wasn't his own choice.
The cabin looked much as it had the year before, though the wood was a bit more weathered and the window hazy with dust. The door stood slightly ajar, and he opened it cautiously, afraid that something might have turned the cabin into a convenient winter den.
But it was empty, except for the table and the mattress still lying where he had left them. Something had gnawed the mattress open and scattered tiny white feathers over the floor--mice, he figured--and then as he looked, he saw them: the prints of broad paws, the scrapes of claws. Wolfen pawprints, old enough to have a film of dust but fresher than their last night here.
Then he saw something else. The hearth was cold and heaped with white ashes, but something lay before it: half a stone, veined with gold.
He picked it up, running his fingers over the rough edge.
I think there will be joy still for both of us, even apart.
There is no sorrow in her song.
He thought, suddenly, of Rebecca. Had she woken? Was she worried?
He pulled the door closed as tightly as he could, tugging at the warped wood. Outside, the sky was lightening already, pink and gold glimmering through the gray-green leaves. The stone was a comforting weight in his palm as he walked back home, and as dawn became morning, every breeze that stirred the leaves, every whisper of grasses, every rustle and flutter and splash of the wakening woods sang a name he would never speak again.
Irasha, Irasha, Irasha.
*This work and all characters(c) 2007 Renee Carter Hall ("Poetigress"). May not be reprinted, reposted, or redistributed without written permission.*