Ruby Littlefoot's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Ruby Littlefoot had her pack ready for the wolf-riders' camp when the bell above the hall started ringing wrong. Two short, one long. A beast at the fences. She was four feet tall in her boots, and the saddle she wanted to sit in belonged to riders who called her Pocket and laughed when she said she meant to join them. She had planned to leave at dawn. Instead she followed the shouting to the west pen, where the elders stood in a tight knot and the miller's dog was already dead in the mud. The wolf on the other side of the rails had three heads. One head watched the dog. One head watched the sky. The middle head watched Ruby, and its eyes were the color of a bruise going old. The elders told her to drive it off. They said it plain, the way people say a thing when they are too frightened to ask. She was the smallest in the village and the only one who had ever stood close to a wolf without running. She climbed the rail before her hands could argue. The three-headed wolf did not charge. It lowered the middle head and sniffed at her boots, and she felt the breath go through her trouser leg. She remembered the trick the riders used on green mounts: move slow, move under, never above. She ducked beneath its chest. Her shoulder brushed fur. She unhooked the miller's dog from where a claw had pinned it to the post, and she backed out the way she came, one short step at a time. The wolf watched her go with all three heads. Then it turned and walked back into the pines, unhurried, as if it had come only to be seen. The elders cheered. Ruby did not. She had felt the middle head's eyes track her the whole way out, and she knew it had chosen to leave. She shouldered her pack again while the bell was still ringing and started up the road toward the riders' camp, because whatever had come to the fence had come looking, and the riders needed to know before it came looking again.