Elsa Crane's Arc

Chapter 28 of 66

By dawn the fever had broken in three of the four houses. By noon the mothers were at the well, and the word passing between them was not chest cold. It was wolf. Clara came to Elsa's door with her scarf still on. "They saw it standing behind you in the lane. They're calling it an omen. If you don't answer it before dusk, the crown comes off him tomorrow." Elsa set down her bread. "Then I answer it at the stage. Ring the bell. Everyone." Fern arrived within the hour, the teal crystal at her hip. "You want him up there? In the open?" "Beside the wolf," Elsa said. "If they see the animal choose him, they stop whispering." Fern's jaw tightened. "And if it doesn't choose him in front of them?" "It already has." The bell rang at three. The village gathered before the tall arched stage in the square, the one built for weddings and namings, its painted columns pale in the winter light. Elsa climbed the steps alone at first. Then she turned and held out her hand. The wolf came from the alley behind the baker's shuttered shop. Frost clung to its coat. Its blue eyes moved over the crowd once and settled on her. The mothers in the front row stepped back. A woman crossed herself. Bodhi came next, small in his brown parka, the chalk stub gone from his hand for once. He stopped on the far side of the wolf, as Elsa had told him. The wolf did not turn its head. It stood between them like a post driven into the boards. Elsa spoke without raising her voice. She told them the wolf had come to her in autumn. She told them she had tested it — with meat it refused, with a knife it ignored, with the names of every candidate she had considered. She said its answer had been steady and it had been Bodhi. "It came the way the old stories come," she said. "Quiet. Certain. I would call it angelic if the word weren't so worn." She rested one hand on the wolf's shoulder. It did not flinch. "It stayed for the boy," she said. "Not for me. It will not harm any of you. It will harm anyone who reaches for him with harm in their hand, or for those who stand with him." She looked at Clara at the foot of the steps, at Fern beside her. "That is the whole of it." The Peters girl's mother was the first to lower her shoulders. Then the miller's wife. Then the rest, one by one, the way a rope goes slack. A man near the back called, "And if it turns?" "It won't," Elsa said. "But if it does, it will turn on me first." The crowd broke into quiet talk, not fear. Bodhi reached across the wolf's back and touched Elsa's sleeve. The wolf let him. The whispering stopped that afternoon. By evening, three mothers had sent bread to the schoolhouse door. Elsa stood at her window and watched the snow start again, and knew she had spent the wolf. She could not summon it twice for the same crowd. Whatever came next would have to be answered with something she had not yet named.