Sleeping Beast Ch. 09

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"What tales do the villagers tell?"

Argus had heard them, too; he and Talgut quickly realized they'd heard the same few stories repeated down the years--- travelers driven back from the road through the pass, men attacked at the edge of the taiga, whole parties vanishing in the dark of the night.

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Wolves. Women. The witch.

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The locals were so convinced of the pack's invincibility they wouldn't come this way, and many others were scared off by the wolves themselves. "Even people walking along the woods' edge are--"

"What?" Troi asked, her gaze at once sharply focused.

Yes... apparently they all went snarling down the hillside once every fortnight, driving travelers from the pass.

Talgut laughed again, a scratchy, weak huff. "They always warn me before I leave, act like I'm the bravest man alive, venturing into the wood without strapping myself into a suit of armor."

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The wolves... the women... the woods... around and around and around.

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"But you said you'd... caught..." Her nostrils flared and twitched. "...women at the edge of the taiga?"

That wasn't what he'd said, she thought-- he'd said, "Occasionally we caught one," as though the women they'd seized were genderless bugs, and the taiga merely a trap waiting to be emptied and reused.

Used....

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Troi stared expressionlessly at the Denova brothers. In the hours since she lectured them this morning, they'd already begun to share more freely. In conversation... at table... Her breath caught in her throat. In bed...? The desperation with which Nivid had taken her that afternoon made her wonder.

As though he wished to illustrate her observation, he spoke.

"We've never--" he began.

"--seen them go after a woman at the edge of the woods," Argus finished. "Not the way they attack the men."

Women... the wolves... women.

The whirling cloud of gravel in her mind imploded. It coalesced into a single, shining thought, a question for them to answer.

Had the wolves behaved this way with other women?

She waited and held her tongue.

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The men were silent, musing, questioning disparities they'd never seen.

Nivid. Argus. Talgut. The points of the triangle darted looks between them.

"We seldom waited more than a few days..."

Three of them speaking in turns as they made the leap.

"...mayhap a week... and--"

Folding brows and frowning faces.

"We NEVER encountered a party without a woman."

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She kept her counsel, holding her question close.

"So the women you took?"

They barely needed a prompt this time, as their memories flowed together. "Most of the women who were taken in the pass were ones we saved."

"Saved?"

Talgut answered. "I told you, those creatures are vicious."

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Her vision wavered in the lamp's smoky light. Without asking a single question, Troi had been granted many answers.

The wolves hunted with Nivid.

Her body stiffened on the soft, padded seat.

She was the same.

A long moment passed while Troi marshaled her emotions, holding on to reason by a fine, worn thread.

"So the vicious, man-eating wolves killed everyone... but you got there just in time to save the only woman in the party?"

No, the women ran instead of trying to fight like their foolhardy men. Half of them appeared on the doorstep of Zamok Denova.

Too hurt to even say the words, Troi ignored the "half" who had arrived in a different way. Had he carried them with the same gentleness? Had Argus given them the exact same speech he'd given her? Had he comforted them as his brother used their bodies?

"Wolves couldn't run fast enough to catch these women??" The derision in her voice wasn't quite drowned out by skepticism, but it was a close contest between the two.

The men tensed and straightened, sensing danger as Troi rose slowly to her feet. Clearly, her fury wasn't for the wolves.

"And every one of the women who escaped the wolves was a suitable... a suitable slave... for--" Grimacing, she waved a hand in Nivid's direction, as though she could no longer bear to speak his name.

After one last sweeping glare around the circle, Troi cursed and stalked away, aghast. She'd gotten the information she needed, and she didn't want to spend another minute here. In this room. In this castle. With these men.

In the corridor, her steps faltered. Slave-- the sharp edges of the word had torn at her soul as it rasped from her tongue.

It was one thing to say they weren't responsible for the effects of the curse, one thing to see Argus and Nivid as worthy of compassion, and to accept in design an animal's uncontrollable drive to mate. But it was another altogether to consider those women individually, to put herself in the place of a woman who had seen her whole party slaughtered as she ran away in terror, only to find that the sanctuary she'd discovered wasn't safe at all.

Troi bent forward, a hand to her belly as it roiled in grief.

They mightn't be responsible for the curse, but they'd planned those abductions, and she'd seen not a smidgen of remorse in their eyes tonight. With detached deliberation, these men had gone about destroying the lives of one woman after another. Men she loved. Men she claimed as family. Men who, dozens upon dozens of times, had done to other women exactly what had been done to Troi.

Where was the difference between them -- the men she loved -- and the slavers who'd taken Troi from her family's yurt, raping the sister who lay at her side even as she slipped away into the arms of death?

Straightening her spine despite the weight of her rending heart, Troi marched away from her home and her family.

With five rooms, two galleries, a stone corner, and half a hundred tapestries between them, everyone in the drawing room heard the thunderous boom of the new door slamming shut. The men were silent, stunned by the vehemence of Troi's anger-- and wondering how they could possibly respond to its source.

Talgut, the least wounded of them, came to his senses first. He erupted from his seat. The others followed a second later, sharing a single, terrifying thought: the wolves were out!

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END NOTE- Sometimes life gets in the way, but I swear NEVER to leave you hanging. Thank you again for reading and dropping me a note now and then! --Stefanie

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