When I smooth out the tape, my fingers stray beyond the edge of the tape. I pull back quickly at the warmth of his skin against mine. Sitting with my arms wrapped around my legs, I prop my cheek on my knees and watch the slow up and down of his chest.
When we first became schildere, I’d asked Ronan if I could touch him when he was in skin, because lots of schildere already had and I’d been prey to so many longings. Not for Ronan, but longings nonetheless.
“Remember what Leonora said when we asked her if humans had schildere?” he asked when he’d finished laughing.
I did remember. Still do. Leonora had thought for a moment and then told us that the closest thing humans had to schildere is buddies. “Buddies,” she said, “will hold the bathroom door closed for you if the lock is broken.”
That’s what we are, Ronan had said, still chortling. Buddies.
I didn’t like the word. Sounded silly and childish. I like the Old Tongue better. Schildere, a shielder.
But supposing the Shifter feels that the only thing a crippled runt is good for is holding the bathroom door closed when the lock is broken? Then what? I will have passed up my chance to touch him.
So, I do. I touch the scarred ring at the base of his neck. Those lines are thick and rough. No one cared for them, and they healed badly.
I touch the sweep of high cheekbones and soft, dark cheek that blends into what was probably once a neatly cropped beard and mustache but is now a little wild. I touch his full lips, leaning down until I catch his warm breath against my own mouth.
This man’s body is tough and sinewy, packed hard into his taut skin. My fingers tease across, down to the contours of his chest, crisscrossed with veins that give way under the gentle pressure of my fingers and muscles that don’t.
I stop at his waistband. We are always told not to smell or touch humans here, because that is considered bestial. I touch him, feeling him warm and solid and thickening through his jeans, because what am I if not a beast?
I hold tighter until a growl, like a dreaming wolf, rattles in his chest.
Covering him with the open sleeping bag, I go about shaking the pup fur out of the tent. With a good-size stone, I pound in the stakes, set up the tent, then stretch the bed pad across the top so that it can air out.
Between all the fur and the partly gnawed cheese chew, it smells like childhood.
Chapter 4
It’s dark when Tiberius wakes up. I hand him a bottle of icy spring water laced with more electrolytes and poke the embers of the fire I built close by. I add cornmeal and dried cranberries and ghee and maple sugar to the water in the pot hanging from the green aspen branch I angled into the ground.
He holds the sleeping bag tightly around himself and shivers.
“I brought you some clothes.” I toss him the four enormous things that were taking up so much space in my backpack.
He pulls on the flannel shirt and the hoodie, then puts his hand to his blood-crusted jeans and looks at me.
I cock my head.
“Well?” he says.
“Well, what?”
“A little privacy?”
“For what?”
“I was in kind of a hurry when I left.”
“Yes?”
“I’m not wearing underwear.”
“Yes?”
“I will be naked.”
“So? We are all naked when we change.”
He stares at the sweatpants in his hands, pulling at the loose ends of the waistband ties.
“Phase? Turn? Shift?” I continue. “What do you call it?”
“We call it going to the dogs. It’s something we avoid at all costs.”
“What?”
“We are not like you. We don’t run around sniffing each other’s asses and pissing on trees. We drive and talk and shoot and make money. We are human. I,” he repeats firmly, “am human.”
Dumbstruck, I turn away, giving him his stupid human privacy.
“But…but…you can change, right?”
“Hmm? Can I? Yeah. Probably.”
Probably? It never occurred to me that someone who could change wouldn’t. Every minute I’m in skin, I can’t wait to get out of it. When we are in skin, we are anfeald. Single fold: one and singular. Alone. But when we are wild, we exist beyond the limitations of our poor bodies and weak senses. We are ourselves, but we are also part of the land and the Pack. We are manigfeald, manifold and complex.
“You really have no idea what you got yourself into, do you?” I say to the fire, listening while his jeans come off in a cloud of dried blood. I can hear him hop from foot to foot.
“My mother died when I was born.” He regains his balance quickly, and cotton swishes over skin. “But she’d tried to convince my father to join the Pack. She’d told him that all you needed was to mate a lone wolf and—”
“Ohmigod. You have no idea. None. I hardly know where to start.”
I really don’t know where to start. So I start at the beginning with our first Alpha. She knew that the natural Packish resistance to outsiders would eventually breed weakness. Strength, she said, could only come from fresh bloodlines, which meant taking new wolves from disintegrated packs. Some other Packs do now, but we were the first. And we are still the strongest.
We don’t make it easy. A lone wolf can easily disrupt our carefully constructed order, so one of our wolves has to be willing to tie their fate to that of the stranger. To be the stranger’s schildere during the three months when they are considered table guests. Three Iron Moons. That’s how long they—we—have to prove ourselves worthy of the Pack.
“What’s schildere?”
“It’s… You don’t speak the Old Tongue?”
“Unless by Old Tongue you mean French, no.”
“It means…” I start, but I can’t spit out the word buddy. “‘Shielder,’” I say. “It means ‘shielder.’ But here’s the thing… The Pack isn’t going to bother even taking you as a table guest unless they’re sure you can fight. They won’t waste time on the weak or cowardly. And our fights are always wild. Fang and claw. Never in skin. Here.”
Ti stabs his spoon into his bowl. “What is this?”
“Cornmeal.”
He pokes his spoon into the cornmeal. “Any meat?”
“Are you listening? If we lose that fight, we’re out, immediately. No three months, no nothing.”