Fic - Remarkable
Title: Remarkable
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Lisa, Tosh, Gwen, Owen, Jack's fairy godfather
Rating: R
Summary: Once upon a time, in a small village in a distant province of a peaceful kingdom, there lived a boy called Ianto...
A/N: For tw-bigbang, in three parts on LJ. Part Two || Part Three
Betaed by 51stcenturyfox
Part One
Once upon a time, in a small village in a distant province of a peaceful kingdom, there lived a boy called Ianto. He grew up in an unremarkable way, playing out in the woods and fields with the other boys of the village, never the strongest or the fastest or the bravest, nor the weakest or the slowest or the most cowardly. In competitions and sport, and later work and hunting, he was invariably average. And as is the way of the world, he was generally ignored and forgotten as a result.
As the years went by, he was set to minding the villagers’ flocks, an unremarkable job for an unremarkable boy, and, as he did with everything, he quietly accepted his lot in life and did his best not to let anyone down. And so he spent his days out on the hills in sunshine and rain, and every morning when he led the sheep out from their pens he would pass by the houses on the edge of the village, and the miller’s daughter Lisa would give him a smile and the first loaf of the day.
At thirteen, Ianto got out of bed every day looking forward to warm, fresh bread. At sixteen, it was Lisa’s smile that drew him out from under the covers every morning when daylight was only just creeping over the horizon. He knew, though, that a girl like Lisa would never have more than a smile for such an unremarkable boy, so as the years went by he would smile and take the loaf, and linger for only a moment in Lisa’s company, though they spent much more time together in his daydreams.
He was a week shy of eighteen when the first remarkable thing in his life happened. Tracking a lost lamb into the hills, he strayed further from the safety of the village than he had ever been, and was caught quite by surprise when the rocks he was climbing over gave way under his weight.
He ended up at the bottom of a sheer drop, bruised and grazed and winded, with empty space in front of him and slippery slate cliffs behind. He knew the hunters from his village were not out in this direction today, and any rare visitors would be approaching from the city side, so there was no point in calling for help, and he didn’t. He took a few moments to catch his breath, and started investigating the cliff for a climbable route back up, at which point a wolf appeared at the top and peered down at him.
Ianto regarded it for a moment.
“By rights, wolf,” he said, “I should drive you off however I can. But I don’t really think I’m in any position to start throwing stones at you. As long as you don’t eat me when I get up there I’m happy to let you be.”
The wolf lay down, front paws dangling over the edge, and watched him. He ignored it and traced the cracks in the slate, finding a few potential foot and hand holds. He started up, and managed to climb his own height up, a third of the way, before his wrists burned with pain and he had to slither back down, panting.
The wolf licked its lips, and Ianto put his hands on his hips and frowned at it.
“I don’t find that very reassuring. Laugh if you like, but I’ll get out of here, and if you try to eat me I’ll fight you off.”
“Would you like me to help you up?” asked the wolf, and Ianto had to take a moment to regain his balance.
Being a well-educated boy, for his village, he’d heard the stories of demons and spirits and fairies, of course, and he knew too well that caution and cunning would win the day where panic and foolishness would see him served up for dinner in a heartbeat. He kept his surprise from his face, therefore, and considered before he answered.
“I would appreciate a little help,” he admitted. “But what would you want in return? It’s no use my letting you pull me up if you’re only going to eat me.”
The wolf grinned, and with that many teeth it was an impressive sight. “Oh no,” it told him. “I won’t eat you. Not unless you ask nicely, of course. But I’ll happily pull you up in exchange for a lamb. That one you’ve lost. It’s not far from here, and it looks nice and juicy. I doubt you’d find it anyway.”
Ianto considered for a few moments more, then nodded. “We can spare one lamb,” he agreed. “If I don’t get out I’ll lose more anyway. But it’s just the one, you understand? Don’t go thinking this gives you licence to go picking off lambs any time you like.”
“Of course,” the wolf told him. “Completely understood.”
It got up and vanished back over the top, and there was a brief wait in which Ianto thought hard about their deal, trying to find the catch. He was still considering when a group of thick vines slithered down beside him.
“I’ve tied them to a tree up here,” the wolf told him, reappearing at the lip of the cliff. “I’d pull you up but my teeth might cut through the vines. You look strong enough to manage, though. I’ll brace them for you, too.”
Ianto grabbed the vines as the wolf vanished again, and tested their strength. They seemed to take his weight, so he clambered up as quickly as he could, determined not to be at the mercy of wolf or snapping vines for any longer than he needed to be.
Up at the top, he crawled back onto firm ground and found the wolf lying on the vines to keep them steady.
“Thank you,” he told it warily, and it grinned at him again, getting up and shaking itself out.
“You’re quite welcome. You’d better get back to your flock. I have a lamb to catch.”
It loped off before Ianto could say anything else, and he found his way back to his sheep and had barely sat down on his usual rock before there was a terrible, panicked bleating back the way he’d come, and his lost lamb came haring out of the woods at top speed. He caught it and picked it up, despite its struggles, and walked back to the edge of the woods, where the wolf was sitting, grinning at him.
“This is yours,” Ianto told it. “Thank you for not coming nearer and scattering the flock.”
The wolf snapped its jaws shut and regarded him for a moment, then said, “You brought it back to me?”
“We had a deal,” Ianto told it. “I always keep my promises.”
“You are a remarkable man,” the wolf said, and stood up. “Keep the lamb. There is no debt.”
It started to walk away, and Ianto called after it, “You can’t change your mind. If you don’t take the lamb by sunset you can’t come back for it another day.”
The wolf laughed, and grinned at him. “I’ll be back,” it promised him. “But not for the lamb, don’t you worry.”
Ianto returned to his flock, a little perturbed by the wolf’s parting words, but the rest of the day was quiet and uneventful, and when he returned home for the night he didn’t speak of it to anyone.
A few days later he saw the wolf again, at a distance, and it watched him and his flock from a hilltop for a while, then vanished. It became a regular occurrence, and once Ianto had learned what to look out for he realised that the wolf was keeping an eye on him almost every day.
One day there was blood and fur on the grass when he led the sheep out, and when he followed the trail he found his wolf standing guard over another two, dead and dying from their wounds.
“Their pack won’t be back,” his wolf told him, its ribs heaving as it panted for breath. “And they’ll spread the word. You won’t lose any more sheep to the likes of them.”
“I’m in your debt again,” Ianto said quietly. “What can I do to repay you? Are you hurt?”
“It’s nothing,” the wolf told him, but it limped when it began to walk away, and Ianto hurried after it and caught hold of its fur to stop it.
The wolf swung with a snarl, and for a second they both froze, then Ianto swallowed and knelt beside it, inches from its bared teeth, and told it, “Let me see that paw. I can fix that up for you.”
He took the wolf’s leg in his hands, and found the bloody bite. He took the strip of cloth from the pouch on his belt, and his canteen of water, and cleaned and bound the wound while the wolf gradually sat down beside him and stopped snarling.
“That wasn’t necessary,” the wolf told him, but Ianto shrugged.
“After all you’ve done for me I couldn’t just let you go off injured.”
“Well, thank you,” the wolf said grudgingly.
Ianto smiled. “You’re welcome. Is there anything else I can do to repay you?”
The wolf regarded him for a moment, then said, “Never speak of me to anyone who doesn’t mention me first. And trust your heart, always.”
Ianto blinked in surprise at such advice, but the wolf pulled away and stalked off, hardly limping at all with Ianto’s bandage in place.
That night, on his way home, he stopped at the miller’s house and asked, blushing scarlet, if Lisa would like to accompany him to the Harvest Ball the next week.
Much to his astonishment, she agreed.
The night of the Harvest Ball was the most singularly wonderful night of Ianto’s life to date. He discovered that having a beautiful, outgoing partner turned the previously embarrassing event of a dance into a glorious string of excuses to hold her close, and laugh and joke with her, and sneak glances at the envious looks on the faces of the other young men of the village. He walked a little taller, spoke a little louder, and smiled from start to finish, except for a few delightful stolen minutes near the end, when he and Lisa had snuck around the back of the barn and he was far too busy discovering the joy of kissing to spare his mouth for anything else.
The next day, out on the hills, the wolf was sitting waiting for him at the edge of the woods. He left the sheep grazing and went over, beaming, and the wolf gave him a grin.
“You look happy.”
“I have to thank you again,” Ianto told it, and it cocked its head to one side, a curious look in its eyes. “I took your advice. There’s this girl in town, Lisa. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
He proceeded to tell the wolf all about her, and explained the Harvest Ball and how wonderful it had been, and thanked the silent wolf another half a dozen times for being the spur to make him ask Lisa out.
“Happy to help,” the wolf said gruffly, eventually, and stood up to go.
Impulsively, Ianto hugged it. The wolf’s fur was softer and deeper than he’d expected, and he buried his hands in it, telling the wolf again, “Thank you. So much.”
The wolf planted its paw on his shoulder, an awkward attempt to hug him back, and Ianto remembered its wound and pulled away to inspect its leg. It was healed, with only the faintest trace of a scar, and the wolf stepped back as soon as he’d had a good look.
“I lost your cloth,” it told him. “Sorry.”
“That’s alright,” Ianto assured it. “I have another. If you ever need it, come to me. I hope you don’t, obviously. Need it, I mean. You can come to me whenever you want.”
The wolf grinned at him, just a little, and turned and vanished off into the woods.
The following months were busy for Ianto. Every morning he drove the sheep out to the hills and stopped to collect a loaf and a kiss from Lisa on the way, two or three kisses if he was lucky and her father didn’t come out to hurry him along. Every day he would find the wolf waiting for him, ready and willing to scare any wandering sheep back his way. They would talk and sit together, and as the days went by he grew ever more at ease with the wolf, stroking his fur and wrestling with him playfully, and even tweaking his ears and tail and kissing the top of his head, as if he were a mere dog, rather than a wild beast, and a miraculous one at that. The evenings he spent with Lisa, when the sheep were in and the mill was quiet, and they could sneak into the barn as the nights grew colder, and further explore the art of kissing.
The wolf kept him safe through the icy winter, walking beside him as he patrolled the snow-covered hills, and more than once it was only through grabbing his thick fur as he fell that Ianto was saved from disaster. In return, Ianto offered to share what little food he had, and broke ice with his shepherd’s crook to let the wolf drink. The wolf was always gone before sunset, though, and Ianto considered a few times asking him to stay longer, sure that his better night vision would be helpful. He always decided against it, reminding himself that he was lucky to have any help at all, and it would only be selfish and greedy to ask for more than what the wolf gave freely.
He saw less of Lisa during the dark months, too, it being too cold to go and hide anywhere away from a fire for private trysts, but that left him with more time for pleasant dreams of running in warm sunshine with his wolf, so it wasn’t all bad.
In spring and summer he was full of energy and brimming with happiness, and everything seemed perfect as he spent more time with both Lisa and the wolf, and it came as quite a surprise to him when harvest approached again and his sister asked him in exasperation one day if he was waiting for Lisa to get pregnant before he proposed.
The thought of proposing, if he was honest, hadn’t even crossed his mind, and he was in a pensive mood when he took the sheep out the next morning.
“It’s not exactly that I don’t want to marry her,” he told the wolf later that day, lying in the sun-drenched field with his head pillowed on the wolf’s chest. “I just thought there would be... I don’t know, a bit more to do in life before I got married and had children and that was it.”
The wolf huffed but said nothing, and Ianto sighed.
“What do you think? Should I do it?”
“Trust your heart,” the wolf told him quietly. “As long as you know what you want, life is simple.”
“Maybe for you,” Ianto sighed. “Sometimes I think it would be so much better to live like you. But I suppose as long as I have you to talk to it’s not so bad.”
The wolf huffed again, and Ianto turned his head, pressing his cheek to the wolf’s fur.
“I love Lisa. I’ve never doubted that for a moment. So I guess that means I marry her. If she’ll have me. You never know, she might turn me down.”
“She’s not that foolish,” muttered the wolf. “More’s the pity.”
“What does that mean?” Ianto asked, with a laugh, and the wolf shrugged him off and got up. It stalked a few steps away as he sat up, then turned and stalked back, staring him down, eye to eye.
“You are a remarkable man,” it told him. “You deserve more than this village can offer you.”
Ianto looked away from its earnest gaze. “There’s nothing remarkable about me. Nothing. Except that Lisa loves me, when she could have any man in the village. That’s all, and that’s more than I could ever have dreamed to have, and I would be a fool to walk away from it.”
“Are you afraid to take a chance?” the wolf demanded, and Ianto shook his head sharply.
“No. Not willing to take a risk. Why throw away something that makes me happy when the chances of finding anything better are... Well. Non-existent.”
The wolf stood very still for a few moments, and was very quiet when it spoke again.
“So you’ll marry her?”
“Yes,” Ianto said firmly, and the wolf quivered from head to tail.
“I wish you well,” it told him softly, and turned and bounded away, vanishing into the woods.
Ianto thought things over for another week, during which time he didn’t see the wolf once. His sister started to worry about him, commenting on his lack of appetite and return to his old, quiet ways, but at the end of the week he went round to the miller’s house and sought his permission and Lisa’s hand.
When she said yes and flung herself into his arms, he was surprised to find that in among the joy and love and happiness was a tiny smudge of disappointment. It worried him for weeks, and while he was out watching the sheep he went looking for his wolf, desperate for his advice. There was no trace of him, no sign, not a single fresh track.
His evenings with Lisa were taken up planning the wedding from then on. They decided to wait until the next summer, to take the whole day to celebrate, and Ianto tried not to feel relieved that there were so many months to go before the big day.
The winter dragged by miserably, and he struggled through by himself, slipping on the hillsides and shivering through the short, cold days with no warm wolf to huddle with when it got too much for him. He told himself not to worry about the wolf’s absence, and that he couldn’t have expected the wild beast to stay with him forever, but he couldn’t help feeling a little anxious. The hunters from his village were good, but had been bemoaning the lack of good prey recently. He was sure he would have heard if they’d taken down another wolf.
By spring Lisa was occupied most evenings working on her dress, and Ianto was resigned to having no more wolf to talk to.
And then, one day, three weeks before the wedding, he was on the point of heading back to Lisa’s for lunch when he looked back at the woods and saw a wolf hurtling towards him at full speed. For half a second as the wolf leapt, he knew a blinding moment of terror, convinced it wasn’t his wolf at all, and then it hit him in the chest and knocked him flat, pinning him down and snarling.
He looked up into its eyes, and even with its breath hot on his skin and its teeth hovering over his throat, he found himself relaxing.
“It’s been a while,” he said calmly. “What brings you back here?”
“Stay put,” his wolf told him. “Stay still or I’ll rip your throat out.”
“That’s not like you,” Ianto pointed out quietly. “What’s wrong?”
The wolf just growled and refused to speak, but its weight and warmth were soothing after so many months of its absence, and Ianto buried his hands in its fur and breathed in its scent, and smiled.
“I missed you,” he told it, and the wolf stopped snarling, nudging his cheek with its nose. “Why did you leave for so long?”
“I didn’t leave,” his wolf said softly. “I was trying to let you live your life. I swore I would only show myself again if you were in danger.”
Ianto looked about the field, but could see nothing threatening. “Why are you here now?”
The wolf growled quietly, and didn’t answer.
“Wolf,” Ianto said flatly. “Why won’t you let me up?”
The wolf bared its teeth and pressed them to his neck, and told him, “Stay put. Stay here. Or I will bite.”
Ianto, being Ianto, thought for a moment, then said aloud, “You only showed yourself when I was going to get lunch. To the village. Please, tell me the village is safe. Tell me Lisa’s safe and I’ll let you keep me here as long as you like.”
The wolf spread its jaws around his throat, and growled, “Move and I will tear you apart.”
“I don’t think you will,” Ianto gasped, and shoved it away. He caught the wolf by surprise, and was running for the village before it had even regained its paws.
The first thing Ianto saw when he reached the miller’s house was blood on the door. He staggered to a halt, panting for breath and praying desperately, and dared to go inside after a few moments of agony and despair.
Lisa’s father was dead halfway up the stairs, run through. He made himself look further, breathing hard, but there was no sign of Lisa, and he stumbled back out and bent over, hands braced on his knees, trying not to throw up.
The wolf was waiting for him, and came over to prop him up, nuzzling his neck. He sank to one knee for a moment, gripping its fur, then hauled himself back up. The wolf clamped its jaws down on his sleeve.
“Let go,” Ianto told it. “I have to find Lisa.”
“If they see you they’ll kill you,” the wolf mumbled around his sleeve. “Please. Come away with me.”
Ianto wrenched free and ran on.
The village was a wreck. There were bodies everywhere, people he’d known his whole life, their homes ablaze, their possessions strewn about, rifled and pillaged. He turned his back on the burning shell of his house, briefly glad that his sister and her husband had travelled away to fetch distant family for the wedding, and went hunting for Lisa.
He found her down at the far end of the village, lying by the riverside path, with a rusted old sword still clutched in her hand.
He couldn’t say how long he stood there, just looking at her, but it was only when fur brushed his hand that he blinked and looked down at the wolf.
“I’m sorry,” the wolf told him quietly, pressing up against his leg, pushing its muzzle into his hand. “I couldn’t help them. The best I could do was keep you away.”
“Help me,” Ianto asked it. “I’ve never asked you for anything. Help me find the men who did this. Help me kill them.”
The wolf was silent for a long time, but finally told him, “Yes. Take care of your dead today. I will return at dawn.”
And so Ianto buried his village, and spent the night alone by Lisa’s grave, silent and dry-eyed. Dawn found him still there, and the wolf found him shortly afterwards, and sat beside him in silence for a few moments.
“Do you still wish to kill the ones who did this?” it asked eventually, and Ianto took a deep breath.
“They should die for this, and there’s no one else to do it. I’m not afraid to get blood on my hands. I’m capable. For Lisa.”
“Remarkable man,” the wolf told him quietly, and pressed its nose to his cheek for a second, then stood and walked a little way along the riverside path.
“Bring what you think you’ll need. We won’t be returning.”
Ianto took up his shepherd’s crook and got to his feet.
“Show me the way.”
“No sword?” asked the wolf.
“What good would it do me? I’m better off with what I know. I have my knife. I’ll find a way to kill them.”
The wolf regarded him in silence, then bared its teeth in approval, and led him away from his home.
For a week, Ianto followed the trail of the bandits that had destroyed his village, led by the wolf during the day, living off the land and sleeping on the ground in the warm summer nights. There were twenty four men in the group he was after, and at the end of the first week, when they reached the city and took rooms in the cheapest inn, he crept in during the night and slit his first throat.
It was a strangely unsatisfying experience, and the gang left in the morning joking about their comrade’s inability to cope with his ale, assuming he would join them later.
The wolf led Ianto ahead of them, and they set up some beautiful traps that killed another three before they even noticed. And when they realised they were being hunted and raced off on horseback, the wolf took another two off their horses and raced after them, leaving Ianto to dispatch the dazed riders.
When the wolf returned, blood on its muzzle, it stood in the road and told him, “There’s one man ahead who’ll beg for your knife. He’ll die in an hour without it. Have you lost your taste for this yet?”
“I have no taste for this,” Ianto informed it. “I do what must be done, nothing more.”
The wolf snapped its teeth at him and growled approval, and led him on.
For all the months of summer Ianto hunted the men who had taken his old life from him, and though they separated and fled in fear, the wolf always tracked them down. It led him many leagues from home, to distant lands he’d never even heard of, and he was far south and had no idea how to return home when he finally killed the last man.
With the wolf at his side, in a clearing in the woods, he used his humble shepherd’s knife one last time, and dug a pit the depth of his arm. He cast the knife in and buried it, and with that done he sat back against a tree, the wolf’s head in his lap, and looked up at the blue sky.
“I think,” he told the wolf, stroking its fur idly, “I’d like to go home now.”
“Come away with me,” the wolf offered again, but Ianto sighed and shook his head.
“I need to tell my sister I’m alive. And we’ll have to rebuild. She’ll need my help.”
The wolf sat up beside him, and held his gaze.
“They will not want you back. They will fear you and all you have done, and all you have seen, and there will be no space in their tiny little lives for the man you have become. You know this. I will ask once more. Come away with me. I promise you nothing but that we will be together. Is that not what you want?”
“What I want is impossible,” Ianto told it. “I want Lisa back. I would do anything, give anything, to hold her again. But I can’t. So I have to go back to my sister and help her. She’s the only person in the world who needs me. She’s the closest I can get to having my old life back. That’s what I want.”
The wolf stared at him a few moments longer, then stood up, and scratched an arrow in the dirt with one paw.
“Then this is where I leave you. Walk this way for one hundred days and you will be in lands you know again. I can’t help you any more.”
Ianto hugged it tightly, burying his hands and face in its soft fur, breathing in its scent.
“You’ve already done more for me than I should ever have asked. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“I hope you’re satisfied with what you find on your return,” it told him quietly. “Trust your heart.”
It pulled away and vanished into the trees with a bound, and Ianto took a deep breath, aligned himself with the arrow in the dirt, and started walking.
One hundred days later, he reached the city that had once been the most exciting, distant part of the world he’d ever visited. From there it was a week to his village, and he walked on through the darkening days, huddling in the shelter of tree trunks as frost laced the ground at night, and finally came over the hills and saw before him new houses on the ruins of the old.
His sister was hurrying towards one house as he dashed down the hill, and he yelled her name and saw the look of utter shock on her face as she turned. They collided in an embrace, laughing and talking over each other, and she yelled for her husband and children, and there was something of a family reunion in the middle of the new town square.
They brought him into their new house, still smelling of fresh-cut wood, and sat him down for dinner as the sun began to set. Then he watched them exchanging glances while they ate, and once they’d finished dinner and the children had been sent to bed, they sat back down with him and asked, quietly, exactly what had happened.
He told them about the bandits, leaving out the wolf’s part, and when they gasped in horror and started to fear a return visit, he assured them there was no need to worry.
“How can you be so sure?” Rhi asked him, and he regarded them for a moment, remembering the wolf’s warning.
“There are none left,” he told them. “I followed them until they were all dead.”
“You murdered them,” Rhi said, in quiet horror.
“I made sure they would never hurt anyone again,” Ianto corrected her. “I took revenge for what they did to Lisa, what they would have done to you if you’d been here.”
“Are you proud of it?” Rhi gasped, clutching at Johnny’s arm. “Oh God, Ianto, what’s happened to you? I don’t know you.”
Ianto sighed, and stood up, and they flinched away from him.
“I’m not proud of it,” he said quietly. “The same way I was never proud of minding the sheep. I’m not ashamed, either. It was a job that needed done, so I did it. I’ll go now. Thank you for dinner, and I wish you all the best fortune starting again here.”
“Ianto,” Rhi began, but he collected his shepherd’s crook from beside the door and stepped outside.
He was at the end of the little street when she caught up to him, a heavy sheepskin coat in her arms.
“I can’t just let you go out and freeze,” she told him, “even after what you’ve done.”
Ianto shook his head. “I’ll be fine. You’ll need that in the coming months. I won’t take anything from you.”
“You already have,” she said quietly, hugging the coat to her. “You took my brother.”
Ianto showed her no surprise or hurt, simply wished her farewell and went on his way. He put the village behind him and went up to the field where the sheep grazed, and sat on his rock for a while, wondering what to do next and trying not to think about the candles he’d seen flickering in the mill as he passed.
He was strangely lost now, with nothing driving him on, and after a long time sitting out in the cold and the dark, he realised he was waiting to hear his wolf’s advice. He hung his head, bitterly regretting parting ways with his wolf, and suddenly it all tumbled in on him, everything he’d lost, everyone he’d never see again, and he snapped the shepherd’s crook over his knee and hurled the pieces away. He stood and started walking, no idea where he was going, but knowing exactly what he was leaving behind.
He walked for three days, heading north, and on the fourth day he emerged from the woods and saw rolling, windswept, treeless hills stretching out ahead of him to the horizon. He tugged his little sleeveless jacket tighter around himself, and started out into the wild unknown.
At midday he heard a scream too close, and looked around quickly, ready for a fight if necessary. There was no-one in sight, and he spun on the spot as the scream came again, then looked up, and saw a crow tumbling through the sky, trying frantically to escape the talons of a shrieking hawk.
Ianto ran after them, sympathising far too much with the crow, and watched in horror as the hawk raked its talons over the crow’s back and the crow fell screaming from the sky.
Quickly, he ran to where the crow lay in the grass, and flung his jacket over it, yelling at the hawk as it swooped down. The hawk veered off, and he knelt and picked up the crow, bundled in his jacket.
“Thank you,” the crow gasped, muffled by his sheepskin, and Ianto almost laughed.
“Are you badly hurt?” he asked, unfolding the jacket and taking a look at the crow’s ruffled feathers.
“I don’t think so,” the crow told him. “It hurts, but I don’t think it’s serious.”
Ianto gently parted feathers to look at her scored back, and discovered that the scratches were not deep.
“I’m better with sheep,” he told her, “but I can clean that up for you if you’d like.”
“That would be wonderful, thank you,” the crow said gratefully. “Would you take me with you for a while? Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” Ianto admitted, getting cloth and his canteen out of his belt pouch. “I have nowhere to go, now. I was just going to walk until I find something to give my life meaning again. That or I freeze to death. Whichever happens first.”
The crow fixed one beady eye on him, and told him, “I wouldn’t give up just yet, if I were you, sweetheart. There’s a lot of land up north.”
Ianto smiled, and patted her back dry. There wasn’t much blood on the cloth, and she fluffed her wings and gasped a little at the stretch of her scratches, then climbed into his arms once he’d packed his things away and put his jacket back on.
At the crow’s urging he walked until he was ready to drop, and lay down to sleep in the lee of one small hill, the crow settling near him, covered by his jacket, despite her protests. Despite the cold, he was so tired he was asleep in moments.
He woke in the hazy light of dawn, surprisingly warm, and found himself covered by a long and elegant cloak, lined with wolfskin.
For a little while, he just lay there, stroking the inside of the cloak, eyes closed, thinking of his wolf. He knew the cloak was a gift from him, and the thought that he was still being looked out for warmed him even more than the wolfskin, but it was a gift and an honour he didn’t deserve. When he opened his eyes he saw a wolf watching him from another hill. It stood, and turned and walked down the far side, out of his sight. He huddled in his cloak and stared at his hands.
“I don’t see any sign of that hawk today,” the crow said brightly, and he got up, taking back his jacket and fastening the cloak around his shoulders.
“How do you feel?” he asked her, and she flapped her wings and fluttered up to his shoulder.
“Much better, thank you. I’ll return home today. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, stand under the open sky and call, ‘Creature of the air, I have need of your wings.’ I’ll do what I can to help you.”
“Thank you,” Ianto told her. “I hope you get home safely.”
“I hope you do too,” the crow said, and brushed her beak against his cheek before she took off.
Ianto watched her go, a sudden tightness in his throat, and walked on.
Another week and he crested a hill and saw sand and dunes ahead of him. They rolled down to the cold grey winter sea, and Ianto followed them, finding his way along to a sheltered harbour filled with fishing boats.
He went down to talk to the fishermen, thinking perhaps they could use a spare pair of hands, and fishing couldn’t be that much harder than shepherding, and at least you’d get a decent meal out of your charges at the end of the day, but the fishermen were all crowded around one boat, shouting at each other.
“It’s an abomination,” one was yelling. “We should kill it now, before it murders us in our sleep.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” a second snapped back. “It’ll make our fortune. People will come from miles around to see it. We can charge what we like.”
“It’s a demon,” insisted another, and, “No, a messenger from the other side,” from a fourth.
Ianto started to get the strange feeling that he knew what he would find in the centre of the crowd, and pushed his way through roughly.
There was a seal trussed up in the bottom of a rowing boat, tangled in fishing nets and struggling in vain to get free, and growling, “Let me go, or you’ll regret it. Get me out of here!”
Ianto wasn’t the least bit surprised.
He was shoved back out of the way as the fishermen decided to lock the talking seal up overnight and discuss its fate in the pub. Three of them heaved the seal out of the boat and carried it, struggling and yelling, up the beach to lock it in one of their huts.
A couple of them noticed Ianto properly then, and nudged their friends, pointing out the tall stranger in the ostentatious cloak. They all eyed him with suspicion, aware he’d seen their new prize.
“That was quite extraordinary,” he told them all politely, drawing his cloak tighter about himself in the chill sea breeze.
“Bet you’ve not got anythin’ like that at home, eh?” one of the older fishermen said proudly, and Ianto shrugged.
“Actually, I have seen similar things before. I passed through a town in the far south that caught a talking deer a few years ago. They weren’t sure what to do with her at first, either. It all ended terribly, of course.”
“What village was this?” one of the fishermen demanded.
Ianto sighed. “A little place called Heleth, down in the Green Valleys.”
The fisherman shook his finger at Ianto, grinning in triumph. “Ha! I went through the Green Valleys this summer. Never heard of any Heleth.”
“Well,” said Ianto, with a shrug, “they don’t like to talk about it. And of course, it’s not there any more. Terrible decision, they made. Completely the wrong thing to do. I’m sure you gentlemen will be fine, though. You all seem like sensible men. I’ll stop wasting your time and be on my way.”
He turned and started walking as the group cast glances at each other, visibly trying to make the term ‘sensible men’ fit around their comrades.
Ianto was twenty steps away when they started yelling for him to come back, and could they buy him a drink and let him finish his fascinating story?
So Ianto spent the evening with them in the pub, spinning out the tale of the talking deer, veering from one terrible course of action to another until there was uproar and argument over what to do, some men had already come to blows, and the rest were getting raucously drunk, since Ianto insisted they couldn’t do him the honour of buying him a drink without buying one for all their friends, and in the crowd and confusion and the smoky room, it was little trouble to keep switching his full mug with the half-empty ones beside him, and back again when theirs were empty and he’d taken but one swallow of his own.
By the time most of the men were starting to hit their limits, Ianto had probably drunk something like a pint and a half, by his reckoning, and he theatrically drained his empty mug and slammed it down, spurring the remaining fishermen to do the same. Two of them keeled over on the spot, and the remaining three called loudly for more ale.
Ianto pushed back his chair and stood, and realised belatedly that their ale was stronger than the stuff back home when he suddenly felt a little queasy. He hid it, and slapped one of the final three on the shoulder, telling him, “Nature calls. Keep the ale coming, I’ll be back in a minute.”
The last three cheered and raised fresh mugs to him in salute, and the bartender patted his back in delight as he passed by.
Outside, Ianto took a moment to catch his breath in the bracing cold air, breathing deeply until his stomach settled, then headed down to the bay and the hut the seal was locked in.
When he found a large fishhook and started using it to pry the door open, the seal inside called to him, “Come in here and I’ll bite! With my teeth your leg’ll get infected and drop off. Just try it!”
“Shut up,” Ianto told it sharply. “I’m here to help. Keep quiet unless you want the whole town down here.”
That met with silence, and he managed to force the door open, ripping the old lock right out of the damp wood.
The seal was still entangled in the nets, and he hurried over and started pulling them off, straining his eyes in the darkness and untangling it as fast as he could.
“Take your time,” the seal snorted, and Ianto shook his head in exasperation.
“For a group of cursed animals,” he muttered, getting the seal’s head free and starting to shimmy the net down its body, “the lot of you aren’t very mystical and impressive.”
The seal barked a laugh. “And Jack said you weren’t that quick on the uptake.”
“And who’s Jack?” Ianto asked archly.
The seal laughed again. “Okay, now I see his point. Come on, shepherd boy, get me back in the sea.”
Ianto raised an eyebrow, trying to fit the name ’Jack’ to his wolf, but after two and a half years of thinking of him just as his wolf, it was difficult. He yanked the last of the net free, and the seal flopped forward with a grunt, struggling over the floor of the hut towards the door.
“That’s never going to work,” Ianto said, with a sigh. “Are you hurt too?”
“I’m fine,” the seal told him. “I move better in water. I’d like to see you try this with a stupid, useless body like mine.”
“Come here,” Ianto told him, taking off his cloak and laying it on the floor. “This’ll be quicker.”
The seal snorted, and waddled onto the cloak, muttering, “You’ll never manage it, you know. It took three of them to get me up here.”
“You were struggling then,” Ianto pointed out. “And nobody said I was going to carry you.”
He took up the end of his cloak and started out of the hut, dragging the seal behind him. The shingle beach crunched and grated under his feet and the seal’s weight, and the seal told him, “You’ll wreck your fancy cloak doing this.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ianto grunted, not stopping for a moment, knowing momentum of any kind was not something to let go easily. “Just don’t get caught again. I won’t be here next time.”
“Oh, yeah,” the seal huffed, “’cause I got caught on purpose this time, didn’t I? How about we punch holes in all their stupid boats, then I won’t get caught again.”
“Then they’d starve,” Ianto panted, halfway to the water. “I’m not taking your side, I’m just trying to keep everyone alive.”
“That’ll be new for you,” the seal snorted, and Ianto stopped dead.
There was silence for a moment, and then the seal said quickly, “Well, I’m sure I can reach the sea from here. Thanks for all that. See you.”
“Not yet,” Ianto said quietly, starting towards the sea again, cloak stretching and scraping as he went. “Not far now.”
He trudged on in silence, not looking back, and in a few more minutes he reached the water’s edge. The seal waddled off his cloak and into the water, and Ianto shook his battered cloak out, ignoring the rips, and swung it back around his shoulders.
“Wrecked that,” the seal muttered. “Hardly worth wearing now.”
“It was a gift,” Ianto snapped. “And it’s all I have. I suggest you start swimming.”
The seal coughed awkwardly, and looked away at the sea. “Yeah. Well. Thanks, and everything. If you need a hand with anything - well, flipper - stand by the water and call, ‘Creature of the sea, I have need of your skin’. You know, if you feel like looking like a prat. Good luck.”
It turned and started into the water, and vanished in one quick dive a few feet further in.
Ianto stared out at the water until the sun’s first rays danced across the waves. He turned, and saw a familiar shape up at the top of the beach, the dawn light gleaming in his wolf’s eyes. He swallowed hard, gripped by a sudden longing, and then the wolf turned and loped off into the shadows, and he could breathe again.
He pulled up his hood, wrapped the cloak around himself, hands bunched in comforting wolf fur, and set off along the coast, squashing down the well of pain the seal’s words had almost sprung open.
He walked up the coast for another three weeks, plunging into the heart of winter, huddling in his torn cloak as snowstorms blew in and the longest night of the year came and went. It was during one of the cold, pale days that he entered another forest and heard a quiet whimpering off to one side.
Investigating, he found a small, thin vixen caught in a trap, her front leg broken quite badly.
“Hold still,” Ianto told her, kneeling and prising the vice open, cutting his fingers on the spikes, but forcing the jaws wide enough for her to pull her leg free.
“Thank you,” she panted, and Ianto wasn’t remotely surprised. He pulled his hands away and let the trap snap shut, and went for his pouch.
He cleaned them both up, and found a solid, straight stick to splint her leg.
“What else can I do for you?” he asked her, dabbing blood from his hands. “You clearly can’t go anywhere by yourself.”
“I need to go home,” she told him wearily. “If I get home Jack can fix this easily. He’s got potions for this sort of thing.”
“I’ll take you,” Ianto assured her. “Just guide me. And tell me about Jack, and why I keep running into you lot.”
“Jack’s not his real name,” the vixen told him, as he picked her up and tucked her inside his cloak. “Head into the forest. We live in the centre.”
“What is his real name?” Ianto asked, walking on, and the vixen settled into his arms, holding her leg awkwardly out of his grip.
“We don’t know. He won’t tell us. He says that part of his life is over. He’s a good man, though. He’s kind to all of us. He gave us all shelter when we were cursed, and he’s done all sorts of things for us. He visited Gwen’s husband to leave him a token to let him know she’s still alive. She couldn’t carry it, you see. She can’t fly with much weight. And she was so upset that she couldn’t go home.”
“What happened to you all?” Ianto asked, and the vixen sighed.
“We ran afoul of a sorceress,” she told him. “She cursed us all. Jack’s sure he’ll break his one day, but we’re doomed. Our curses are different and we don’t know how to break them. We can’t kill her ourselves, even if we knew for sure it would help. It’s been almost five years for me and Owen. Almost two for Gwen.”
“Don’t give up,” Ianto told her. “If there’s anything I can do to help...”
“You can’t,” the vixen sighed. “Not me. The sorceress said that only love would find the way. And you don’t love me, and I don’t love you.”
“Is there someone you do love?” Ianto asked, and she nuzzled his hand.
“He doesn’t love me. I know I’m doomed. Owen, too. He doesn’t love anyone. Gwen might stand a chance, but she won’t let her husband get involved. She’s afraid the sorceress will curse him too.”
Ianto nodded, with a sigh, and the vixen led him on into the forest until dusk drew in.
“You’d better wait here,” she told him, and he gently set her down. “I’m not allowed to invite you in. Thank you, though. If I can ever repay you, just call for me. ‘Creature of the earth, I have need of your paws.’ I’m sure you know how it works by now.”
Ianto stroked her fur gently, and she nudged his hand with her nose and set off in a determined hobble, leaving him with a sudden ache for his wolf’s fur, and grin, and scent. It hurt so much he found tears on his cheeks, and he sat down against a tree and wrapped himself up in his cloak, hood up to press his cheek against wolf fur, and cried himself dry, for Lisa and his village and what he’d had to do to accept his own survival, and for Rhi and how he’d had to leave his home and the last of his family, and for his cursed wolf and how he’d only ever pushed him away.
He cried himself to sleep, and woke just after dawn, looking straight into the eyes of his wolf.
The wolf was up and away before Ianto could untangle himself from his cloak, but he scrambled up and gave chase, ducking through the trees and calling breathlessly, “Wait! Wait, I’m sorry! Please!”
The wolf cast a glance over its shoulder as they reached a clearing around a still pool, somehow free of ice, and then with no hesitation it leapt right into the middle and vanished. Ianto slipped the clasp of the cloak as he ran, and dived straight after it.
Part Two
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Lisa, Tosh, Gwen, Owen, Jack's fairy godfather
Rating: R
Summary: Once upon a time, in a small village in a distant province of a peaceful kingdom, there lived a boy called Ianto...
A/N: For tw-bigbang, in three parts on LJ. Part Two || Part Three
Betaed by 51stcenturyfox
Part One
Once upon a time, in a small village in a distant province of a peaceful kingdom, there lived a boy called Ianto. He grew up in an unremarkable way, playing out in the woods and fields with the other boys of the village, never the strongest or the fastest or the bravest, nor the weakest or the slowest or the most cowardly. In competitions and sport, and later work and hunting, he was invariably average. And as is the way of the world, he was generally ignored and forgotten as a result.
As the years went by, he was set to minding the villagers’ flocks, an unremarkable job for an unremarkable boy, and, as he did with everything, he quietly accepted his lot in life and did his best not to let anyone down. And so he spent his days out on the hills in sunshine and rain, and every morning when he led the sheep out from their pens he would pass by the houses on the edge of the village, and the miller’s daughter Lisa would give him a smile and the first loaf of the day.
At thirteen, Ianto got out of bed every day looking forward to warm, fresh bread. At sixteen, it was Lisa’s smile that drew him out from under the covers every morning when daylight was only just creeping over the horizon. He knew, though, that a girl like Lisa would never have more than a smile for such an unremarkable boy, so as the years went by he would smile and take the loaf, and linger for only a moment in Lisa’s company, though they spent much more time together in his daydreams.
He was a week shy of eighteen when the first remarkable thing in his life happened. Tracking a lost lamb into the hills, he strayed further from the safety of the village than he had ever been, and was caught quite by surprise when the rocks he was climbing over gave way under his weight.
He ended up at the bottom of a sheer drop, bruised and grazed and winded, with empty space in front of him and slippery slate cliffs behind. He knew the hunters from his village were not out in this direction today, and any rare visitors would be approaching from the city side, so there was no point in calling for help, and he didn’t. He took a few moments to catch his breath, and started investigating the cliff for a climbable route back up, at which point a wolf appeared at the top and peered down at him.
Ianto regarded it for a moment.
“By rights, wolf,” he said, “I should drive you off however I can. But I don’t really think I’m in any position to start throwing stones at you. As long as you don’t eat me when I get up there I’m happy to let you be.”
The wolf lay down, front paws dangling over the edge, and watched him. He ignored it and traced the cracks in the slate, finding a few potential foot and hand holds. He started up, and managed to climb his own height up, a third of the way, before his wrists burned with pain and he had to slither back down, panting.
The wolf licked its lips, and Ianto put his hands on his hips and frowned at it.
“I don’t find that very reassuring. Laugh if you like, but I’ll get out of here, and if you try to eat me I’ll fight you off.”
“Would you like me to help you up?” asked the wolf, and Ianto had to take a moment to regain his balance.
Being a well-educated boy, for his village, he’d heard the stories of demons and spirits and fairies, of course, and he knew too well that caution and cunning would win the day where panic and foolishness would see him served up for dinner in a heartbeat. He kept his surprise from his face, therefore, and considered before he answered.
“I would appreciate a little help,” he admitted. “But what would you want in return? It’s no use my letting you pull me up if you’re only going to eat me.”
The wolf grinned, and with that many teeth it was an impressive sight. “Oh no,” it told him. “I won’t eat you. Not unless you ask nicely, of course. But I’ll happily pull you up in exchange for a lamb. That one you’ve lost. It’s not far from here, and it looks nice and juicy. I doubt you’d find it anyway.”
Ianto considered for a few moments more, then nodded. “We can spare one lamb,” he agreed. “If I don’t get out I’ll lose more anyway. But it’s just the one, you understand? Don’t go thinking this gives you licence to go picking off lambs any time you like.”
“Of course,” the wolf told him. “Completely understood.”
It got up and vanished back over the top, and there was a brief wait in which Ianto thought hard about their deal, trying to find the catch. He was still considering when a group of thick vines slithered down beside him.
“I’ve tied them to a tree up here,” the wolf told him, reappearing at the lip of the cliff. “I’d pull you up but my teeth might cut through the vines. You look strong enough to manage, though. I’ll brace them for you, too.”
Ianto grabbed the vines as the wolf vanished again, and tested their strength. They seemed to take his weight, so he clambered up as quickly as he could, determined not to be at the mercy of wolf or snapping vines for any longer than he needed to be.
Up at the top, he crawled back onto firm ground and found the wolf lying on the vines to keep them steady.
“Thank you,” he told it warily, and it grinned at him again, getting up and shaking itself out.
“You’re quite welcome. You’d better get back to your flock. I have a lamb to catch.”
It loped off before Ianto could say anything else, and he found his way back to his sheep and had barely sat down on his usual rock before there was a terrible, panicked bleating back the way he’d come, and his lost lamb came haring out of the woods at top speed. He caught it and picked it up, despite its struggles, and walked back to the edge of the woods, where the wolf was sitting, grinning at him.
“This is yours,” Ianto told it. “Thank you for not coming nearer and scattering the flock.”
The wolf snapped its jaws shut and regarded him for a moment, then said, “You brought it back to me?”
“We had a deal,” Ianto told it. “I always keep my promises.”
“You are a remarkable man,” the wolf said, and stood up. “Keep the lamb. There is no debt.”
It started to walk away, and Ianto called after it, “You can’t change your mind. If you don’t take the lamb by sunset you can’t come back for it another day.”
The wolf laughed, and grinned at him. “I’ll be back,” it promised him. “But not for the lamb, don’t you worry.”
Ianto returned to his flock, a little perturbed by the wolf’s parting words, but the rest of the day was quiet and uneventful, and when he returned home for the night he didn’t speak of it to anyone.
A few days later he saw the wolf again, at a distance, and it watched him and his flock from a hilltop for a while, then vanished. It became a regular occurrence, and once Ianto had learned what to look out for he realised that the wolf was keeping an eye on him almost every day.
One day there was blood and fur on the grass when he led the sheep out, and when he followed the trail he found his wolf standing guard over another two, dead and dying from their wounds.
“Their pack won’t be back,” his wolf told him, its ribs heaving as it panted for breath. “And they’ll spread the word. You won’t lose any more sheep to the likes of them.”
“I’m in your debt again,” Ianto said quietly. “What can I do to repay you? Are you hurt?”
“It’s nothing,” the wolf told him, but it limped when it began to walk away, and Ianto hurried after it and caught hold of its fur to stop it.
The wolf swung with a snarl, and for a second they both froze, then Ianto swallowed and knelt beside it, inches from its bared teeth, and told it, “Let me see that paw. I can fix that up for you.”
He took the wolf’s leg in his hands, and found the bloody bite. He took the strip of cloth from the pouch on his belt, and his canteen of water, and cleaned and bound the wound while the wolf gradually sat down beside him and stopped snarling.
“That wasn’t necessary,” the wolf told him, but Ianto shrugged.
“After all you’ve done for me I couldn’t just let you go off injured.”
“Well, thank you,” the wolf said grudgingly.
Ianto smiled. “You’re welcome. Is there anything else I can do to repay you?”
The wolf regarded him for a moment, then said, “Never speak of me to anyone who doesn’t mention me first. And trust your heart, always.”
Ianto blinked in surprise at such advice, but the wolf pulled away and stalked off, hardly limping at all with Ianto’s bandage in place.
That night, on his way home, he stopped at the miller’s house and asked, blushing scarlet, if Lisa would like to accompany him to the Harvest Ball the next week.
Much to his astonishment, she agreed.
The night of the Harvest Ball was the most singularly wonderful night of Ianto’s life to date. He discovered that having a beautiful, outgoing partner turned the previously embarrassing event of a dance into a glorious string of excuses to hold her close, and laugh and joke with her, and sneak glances at the envious looks on the faces of the other young men of the village. He walked a little taller, spoke a little louder, and smiled from start to finish, except for a few delightful stolen minutes near the end, when he and Lisa had snuck around the back of the barn and he was far too busy discovering the joy of kissing to spare his mouth for anything else.
The next day, out on the hills, the wolf was sitting waiting for him at the edge of the woods. He left the sheep grazing and went over, beaming, and the wolf gave him a grin.
“You look happy.”
“I have to thank you again,” Ianto told it, and it cocked its head to one side, a curious look in its eyes. “I took your advice. There’s this girl in town, Lisa. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
He proceeded to tell the wolf all about her, and explained the Harvest Ball and how wonderful it had been, and thanked the silent wolf another half a dozen times for being the spur to make him ask Lisa out.
“Happy to help,” the wolf said gruffly, eventually, and stood up to go.
Impulsively, Ianto hugged it. The wolf’s fur was softer and deeper than he’d expected, and he buried his hands in it, telling the wolf again, “Thank you. So much.”
The wolf planted its paw on his shoulder, an awkward attempt to hug him back, and Ianto remembered its wound and pulled away to inspect its leg. It was healed, with only the faintest trace of a scar, and the wolf stepped back as soon as he’d had a good look.
“I lost your cloth,” it told him. “Sorry.”
“That’s alright,” Ianto assured it. “I have another. If you ever need it, come to me. I hope you don’t, obviously. Need it, I mean. You can come to me whenever you want.”
The wolf grinned at him, just a little, and turned and vanished off into the woods.
The following months were busy for Ianto. Every morning he drove the sheep out to the hills and stopped to collect a loaf and a kiss from Lisa on the way, two or three kisses if he was lucky and her father didn’t come out to hurry him along. Every day he would find the wolf waiting for him, ready and willing to scare any wandering sheep back his way. They would talk and sit together, and as the days went by he grew ever more at ease with the wolf, stroking his fur and wrestling with him playfully, and even tweaking his ears and tail and kissing the top of his head, as if he were a mere dog, rather than a wild beast, and a miraculous one at that. The evenings he spent with Lisa, when the sheep were in and the mill was quiet, and they could sneak into the barn as the nights grew colder, and further explore the art of kissing.
The wolf kept him safe through the icy winter, walking beside him as he patrolled the snow-covered hills, and more than once it was only through grabbing his thick fur as he fell that Ianto was saved from disaster. In return, Ianto offered to share what little food he had, and broke ice with his shepherd’s crook to let the wolf drink. The wolf was always gone before sunset, though, and Ianto considered a few times asking him to stay longer, sure that his better night vision would be helpful. He always decided against it, reminding himself that he was lucky to have any help at all, and it would only be selfish and greedy to ask for more than what the wolf gave freely.
He saw less of Lisa during the dark months, too, it being too cold to go and hide anywhere away from a fire for private trysts, but that left him with more time for pleasant dreams of running in warm sunshine with his wolf, so it wasn’t all bad.
In spring and summer he was full of energy and brimming with happiness, and everything seemed perfect as he spent more time with both Lisa and the wolf, and it came as quite a surprise to him when harvest approached again and his sister asked him in exasperation one day if he was waiting for Lisa to get pregnant before he proposed.
The thought of proposing, if he was honest, hadn’t even crossed his mind, and he was in a pensive mood when he took the sheep out the next morning.
“It’s not exactly that I don’t want to marry her,” he told the wolf later that day, lying in the sun-drenched field with his head pillowed on the wolf’s chest. “I just thought there would be... I don’t know, a bit more to do in life before I got married and had children and that was it.”
The wolf huffed but said nothing, and Ianto sighed.
“What do you think? Should I do it?”
“Trust your heart,” the wolf told him quietly. “As long as you know what you want, life is simple.”
“Maybe for you,” Ianto sighed. “Sometimes I think it would be so much better to live like you. But I suppose as long as I have you to talk to it’s not so bad.”
The wolf huffed again, and Ianto turned his head, pressing his cheek to the wolf’s fur.
“I love Lisa. I’ve never doubted that for a moment. So I guess that means I marry her. If she’ll have me. You never know, she might turn me down.”
“She’s not that foolish,” muttered the wolf. “More’s the pity.”
“What does that mean?” Ianto asked, with a laugh, and the wolf shrugged him off and got up. It stalked a few steps away as he sat up, then turned and stalked back, staring him down, eye to eye.
“You are a remarkable man,” it told him. “You deserve more than this village can offer you.”
Ianto looked away from its earnest gaze. “There’s nothing remarkable about me. Nothing. Except that Lisa loves me, when she could have any man in the village. That’s all, and that’s more than I could ever have dreamed to have, and I would be a fool to walk away from it.”
“Are you afraid to take a chance?” the wolf demanded, and Ianto shook his head sharply.
“No. Not willing to take a risk. Why throw away something that makes me happy when the chances of finding anything better are... Well. Non-existent.”
The wolf stood very still for a few moments, and was very quiet when it spoke again.
“So you’ll marry her?”
“Yes,” Ianto said firmly, and the wolf quivered from head to tail.
“I wish you well,” it told him softly, and turned and bounded away, vanishing into the woods.
Ianto thought things over for another week, during which time he didn’t see the wolf once. His sister started to worry about him, commenting on his lack of appetite and return to his old, quiet ways, but at the end of the week he went round to the miller’s house and sought his permission and Lisa’s hand.
When she said yes and flung herself into his arms, he was surprised to find that in among the joy and love and happiness was a tiny smudge of disappointment. It worried him for weeks, and while he was out watching the sheep he went looking for his wolf, desperate for his advice. There was no trace of him, no sign, not a single fresh track.
His evenings with Lisa were taken up planning the wedding from then on. They decided to wait until the next summer, to take the whole day to celebrate, and Ianto tried not to feel relieved that there were so many months to go before the big day.
The winter dragged by miserably, and he struggled through by himself, slipping on the hillsides and shivering through the short, cold days with no warm wolf to huddle with when it got too much for him. He told himself not to worry about the wolf’s absence, and that he couldn’t have expected the wild beast to stay with him forever, but he couldn’t help feeling a little anxious. The hunters from his village were good, but had been bemoaning the lack of good prey recently. He was sure he would have heard if they’d taken down another wolf.
By spring Lisa was occupied most evenings working on her dress, and Ianto was resigned to having no more wolf to talk to.
And then, one day, three weeks before the wedding, he was on the point of heading back to Lisa’s for lunch when he looked back at the woods and saw a wolf hurtling towards him at full speed. For half a second as the wolf leapt, he knew a blinding moment of terror, convinced it wasn’t his wolf at all, and then it hit him in the chest and knocked him flat, pinning him down and snarling.
He looked up into its eyes, and even with its breath hot on his skin and its teeth hovering over his throat, he found himself relaxing.
“It’s been a while,” he said calmly. “What brings you back here?”
“Stay put,” his wolf told him. “Stay still or I’ll rip your throat out.”
“That’s not like you,” Ianto pointed out quietly. “What’s wrong?”
The wolf just growled and refused to speak, but its weight and warmth were soothing after so many months of its absence, and Ianto buried his hands in its fur and breathed in its scent, and smiled.
“I missed you,” he told it, and the wolf stopped snarling, nudging his cheek with its nose. “Why did you leave for so long?”
“I didn’t leave,” his wolf said softly. “I was trying to let you live your life. I swore I would only show myself again if you were in danger.”
Ianto looked about the field, but could see nothing threatening. “Why are you here now?”
The wolf growled quietly, and didn’t answer.
“Wolf,” Ianto said flatly. “Why won’t you let me up?”
The wolf bared its teeth and pressed them to his neck, and told him, “Stay put. Stay here. Or I will bite.”
Ianto, being Ianto, thought for a moment, then said aloud, “You only showed yourself when I was going to get lunch. To the village. Please, tell me the village is safe. Tell me Lisa’s safe and I’ll let you keep me here as long as you like.”
The wolf spread its jaws around his throat, and growled, “Move and I will tear you apart.”
“I don’t think you will,” Ianto gasped, and shoved it away. He caught the wolf by surprise, and was running for the village before it had even regained its paws.
The first thing Ianto saw when he reached the miller’s house was blood on the door. He staggered to a halt, panting for breath and praying desperately, and dared to go inside after a few moments of agony and despair.
Lisa’s father was dead halfway up the stairs, run through. He made himself look further, breathing hard, but there was no sign of Lisa, and he stumbled back out and bent over, hands braced on his knees, trying not to throw up.
The wolf was waiting for him, and came over to prop him up, nuzzling his neck. He sank to one knee for a moment, gripping its fur, then hauled himself back up. The wolf clamped its jaws down on his sleeve.
“Let go,” Ianto told it. “I have to find Lisa.”
“If they see you they’ll kill you,” the wolf mumbled around his sleeve. “Please. Come away with me.”
Ianto wrenched free and ran on.
The village was a wreck. There were bodies everywhere, people he’d known his whole life, their homes ablaze, their possessions strewn about, rifled and pillaged. He turned his back on the burning shell of his house, briefly glad that his sister and her husband had travelled away to fetch distant family for the wedding, and went hunting for Lisa.
He found her down at the far end of the village, lying by the riverside path, with a rusted old sword still clutched in her hand.
He couldn’t say how long he stood there, just looking at her, but it was only when fur brushed his hand that he blinked and looked down at the wolf.
“I’m sorry,” the wolf told him quietly, pressing up against his leg, pushing its muzzle into his hand. “I couldn’t help them. The best I could do was keep you away.”
“Help me,” Ianto asked it. “I’ve never asked you for anything. Help me find the men who did this. Help me kill them.”
The wolf was silent for a long time, but finally told him, “Yes. Take care of your dead today. I will return at dawn.”
And so Ianto buried his village, and spent the night alone by Lisa’s grave, silent and dry-eyed. Dawn found him still there, and the wolf found him shortly afterwards, and sat beside him in silence for a few moments.
“Do you still wish to kill the ones who did this?” it asked eventually, and Ianto took a deep breath.
“They should die for this, and there’s no one else to do it. I’m not afraid to get blood on my hands. I’m capable. For Lisa.”
“Remarkable man,” the wolf told him quietly, and pressed its nose to his cheek for a second, then stood and walked a little way along the riverside path.
“Bring what you think you’ll need. We won’t be returning.”
Ianto took up his shepherd’s crook and got to his feet.
“Show me the way.”
“No sword?” asked the wolf.
“What good would it do me? I’m better off with what I know. I have my knife. I’ll find a way to kill them.”
The wolf regarded him in silence, then bared its teeth in approval, and led him away from his home.
For a week, Ianto followed the trail of the bandits that had destroyed his village, led by the wolf during the day, living off the land and sleeping on the ground in the warm summer nights. There were twenty four men in the group he was after, and at the end of the first week, when they reached the city and took rooms in the cheapest inn, he crept in during the night and slit his first throat.
It was a strangely unsatisfying experience, and the gang left in the morning joking about their comrade’s inability to cope with his ale, assuming he would join them later.
The wolf led Ianto ahead of them, and they set up some beautiful traps that killed another three before they even noticed. And when they realised they were being hunted and raced off on horseback, the wolf took another two off their horses and raced after them, leaving Ianto to dispatch the dazed riders.
When the wolf returned, blood on its muzzle, it stood in the road and told him, “There’s one man ahead who’ll beg for your knife. He’ll die in an hour without it. Have you lost your taste for this yet?”
“I have no taste for this,” Ianto informed it. “I do what must be done, nothing more.”
The wolf snapped its teeth at him and growled approval, and led him on.
For all the months of summer Ianto hunted the men who had taken his old life from him, and though they separated and fled in fear, the wolf always tracked them down. It led him many leagues from home, to distant lands he’d never even heard of, and he was far south and had no idea how to return home when he finally killed the last man.
With the wolf at his side, in a clearing in the woods, he used his humble shepherd’s knife one last time, and dug a pit the depth of his arm. He cast the knife in and buried it, and with that done he sat back against a tree, the wolf’s head in his lap, and looked up at the blue sky.
“I think,” he told the wolf, stroking its fur idly, “I’d like to go home now.”
“Come away with me,” the wolf offered again, but Ianto sighed and shook his head.
“I need to tell my sister I’m alive. And we’ll have to rebuild. She’ll need my help.”
The wolf sat up beside him, and held his gaze.
“They will not want you back. They will fear you and all you have done, and all you have seen, and there will be no space in their tiny little lives for the man you have become. You know this. I will ask once more. Come away with me. I promise you nothing but that we will be together. Is that not what you want?”
“What I want is impossible,” Ianto told it. “I want Lisa back. I would do anything, give anything, to hold her again. But I can’t. So I have to go back to my sister and help her. She’s the only person in the world who needs me. She’s the closest I can get to having my old life back. That’s what I want.”
The wolf stared at him a few moments longer, then stood up, and scratched an arrow in the dirt with one paw.
“Then this is where I leave you. Walk this way for one hundred days and you will be in lands you know again. I can’t help you any more.”
Ianto hugged it tightly, burying his hands and face in its soft fur, breathing in its scent.
“You’ve already done more for me than I should ever have asked. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“I hope you’re satisfied with what you find on your return,” it told him quietly. “Trust your heart.”
It pulled away and vanished into the trees with a bound, and Ianto took a deep breath, aligned himself with the arrow in the dirt, and started walking.
One hundred days later, he reached the city that had once been the most exciting, distant part of the world he’d ever visited. From there it was a week to his village, and he walked on through the darkening days, huddling in the shelter of tree trunks as frost laced the ground at night, and finally came over the hills and saw before him new houses on the ruins of the old.
His sister was hurrying towards one house as he dashed down the hill, and he yelled her name and saw the look of utter shock on her face as she turned. They collided in an embrace, laughing and talking over each other, and she yelled for her husband and children, and there was something of a family reunion in the middle of the new town square.
They brought him into their new house, still smelling of fresh-cut wood, and sat him down for dinner as the sun began to set. Then he watched them exchanging glances while they ate, and once they’d finished dinner and the children had been sent to bed, they sat back down with him and asked, quietly, exactly what had happened.
He told them about the bandits, leaving out the wolf’s part, and when they gasped in horror and started to fear a return visit, he assured them there was no need to worry.
“How can you be so sure?” Rhi asked him, and he regarded them for a moment, remembering the wolf’s warning.
“There are none left,” he told them. “I followed them until they were all dead.”
“You murdered them,” Rhi said, in quiet horror.
“I made sure they would never hurt anyone again,” Ianto corrected her. “I took revenge for what they did to Lisa, what they would have done to you if you’d been here.”
“Are you proud of it?” Rhi gasped, clutching at Johnny’s arm. “Oh God, Ianto, what’s happened to you? I don’t know you.”
Ianto sighed, and stood up, and they flinched away from him.
“I’m not proud of it,” he said quietly. “The same way I was never proud of minding the sheep. I’m not ashamed, either. It was a job that needed done, so I did it. I’ll go now. Thank you for dinner, and I wish you all the best fortune starting again here.”
“Ianto,” Rhi began, but he collected his shepherd’s crook from beside the door and stepped outside.
He was at the end of the little street when she caught up to him, a heavy sheepskin coat in her arms.
“I can’t just let you go out and freeze,” she told him, “even after what you’ve done.”
Ianto shook his head. “I’ll be fine. You’ll need that in the coming months. I won’t take anything from you.”
“You already have,” she said quietly, hugging the coat to her. “You took my brother.”
Ianto showed her no surprise or hurt, simply wished her farewell and went on his way. He put the village behind him and went up to the field where the sheep grazed, and sat on his rock for a while, wondering what to do next and trying not to think about the candles he’d seen flickering in the mill as he passed.
He was strangely lost now, with nothing driving him on, and after a long time sitting out in the cold and the dark, he realised he was waiting to hear his wolf’s advice. He hung his head, bitterly regretting parting ways with his wolf, and suddenly it all tumbled in on him, everything he’d lost, everyone he’d never see again, and he snapped the shepherd’s crook over his knee and hurled the pieces away. He stood and started walking, no idea where he was going, but knowing exactly what he was leaving behind.
He walked for three days, heading north, and on the fourth day he emerged from the woods and saw rolling, windswept, treeless hills stretching out ahead of him to the horizon. He tugged his little sleeveless jacket tighter around himself, and started out into the wild unknown.
At midday he heard a scream too close, and looked around quickly, ready for a fight if necessary. There was no-one in sight, and he spun on the spot as the scream came again, then looked up, and saw a crow tumbling through the sky, trying frantically to escape the talons of a shrieking hawk.
Ianto ran after them, sympathising far too much with the crow, and watched in horror as the hawk raked its talons over the crow’s back and the crow fell screaming from the sky.
Quickly, he ran to where the crow lay in the grass, and flung his jacket over it, yelling at the hawk as it swooped down. The hawk veered off, and he knelt and picked up the crow, bundled in his jacket.
“Thank you,” the crow gasped, muffled by his sheepskin, and Ianto almost laughed.
“Are you badly hurt?” he asked, unfolding the jacket and taking a look at the crow’s ruffled feathers.
“I don’t think so,” the crow told him. “It hurts, but I don’t think it’s serious.”
Ianto gently parted feathers to look at her scored back, and discovered that the scratches were not deep.
“I’m better with sheep,” he told her, “but I can clean that up for you if you’d like.”
“That would be wonderful, thank you,” the crow said gratefully. “Would you take me with you for a while? Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” Ianto admitted, getting cloth and his canteen out of his belt pouch. “I have nowhere to go, now. I was just going to walk until I find something to give my life meaning again. That or I freeze to death. Whichever happens first.”
The crow fixed one beady eye on him, and told him, “I wouldn’t give up just yet, if I were you, sweetheart. There’s a lot of land up north.”
Ianto smiled, and patted her back dry. There wasn’t much blood on the cloth, and she fluffed her wings and gasped a little at the stretch of her scratches, then climbed into his arms once he’d packed his things away and put his jacket back on.
At the crow’s urging he walked until he was ready to drop, and lay down to sleep in the lee of one small hill, the crow settling near him, covered by his jacket, despite her protests. Despite the cold, he was so tired he was asleep in moments.
He woke in the hazy light of dawn, surprisingly warm, and found himself covered by a long and elegant cloak, lined with wolfskin.
For a little while, he just lay there, stroking the inside of the cloak, eyes closed, thinking of his wolf. He knew the cloak was a gift from him, and the thought that he was still being looked out for warmed him even more than the wolfskin, but it was a gift and an honour he didn’t deserve. When he opened his eyes he saw a wolf watching him from another hill. It stood, and turned and walked down the far side, out of his sight. He huddled in his cloak and stared at his hands.
“I don’t see any sign of that hawk today,” the crow said brightly, and he got up, taking back his jacket and fastening the cloak around his shoulders.
“How do you feel?” he asked her, and she flapped her wings and fluttered up to his shoulder.
“Much better, thank you. I’ll return home today. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, stand under the open sky and call, ‘Creature of the air, I have need of your wings.’ I’ll do what I can to help you.”
“Thank you,” Ianto told her. “I hope you get home safely.”
“I hope you do too,” the crow said, and brushed her beak against his cheek before she took off.
Ianto watched her go, a sudden tightness in his throat, and walked on.
Another week and he crested a hill and saw sand and dunes ahead of him. They rolled down to the cold grey winter sea, and Ianto followed them, finding his way along to a sheltered harbour filled with fishing boats.
He went down to talk to the fishermen, thinking perhaps they could use a spare pair of hands, and fishing couldn’t be that much harder than shepherding, and at least you’d get a decent meal out of your charges at the end of the day, but the fishermen were all crowded around one boat, shouting at each other.
“It’s an abomination,” one was yelling. “We should kill it now, before it murders us in our sleep.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” a second snapped back. “It’ll make our fortune. People will come from miles around to see it. We can charge what we like.”
“It’s a demon,” insisted another, and, “No, a messenger from the other side,” from a fourth.
Ianto started to get the strange feeling that he knew what he would find in the centre of the crowd, and pushed his way through roughly.
There was a seal trussed up in the bottom of a rowing boat, tangled in fishing nets and struggling in vain to get free, and growling, “Let me go, or you’ll regret it. Get me out of here!”
Ianto wasn’t the least bit surprised.
He was shoved back out of the way as the fishermen decided to lock the talking seal up overnight and discuss its fate in the pub. Three of them heaved the seal out of the boat and carried it, struggling and yelling, up the beach to lock it in one of their huts.
A couple of them noticed Ianto properly then, and nudged their friends, pointing out the tall stranger in the ostentatious cloak. They all eyed him with suspicion, aware he’d seen their new prize.
“That was quite extraordinary,” he told them all politely, drawing his cloak tighter about himself in the chill sea breeze.
“Bet you’ve not got anythin’ like that at home, eh?” one of the older fishermen said proudly, and Ianto shrugged.
“Actually, I have seen similar things before. I passed through a town in the far south that caught a talking deer a few years ago. They weren’t sure what to do with her at first, either. It all ended terribly, of course.”
“What village was this?” one of the fishermen demanded.
Ianto sighed. “A little place called Heleth, down in the Green Valleys.”
The fisherman shook his finger at Ianto, grinning in triumph. “Ha! I went through the Green Valleys this summer. Never heard of any Heleth.”
“Well,” said Ianto, with a shrug, “they don’t like to talk about it. And of course, it’s not there any more. Terrible decision, they made. Completely the wrong thing to do. I’m sure you gentlemen will be fine, though. You all seem like sensible men. I’ll stop wasting your time and be on my way.”
He turned and started walking as the group cast glances at each other, visibly trying to make the term ‘sensible men’ fit around their comrades.
Ianto was twenty steps away when they started yelling for him to come back, and could they buy him a drink and let him finish his fascinating story?
So Ianto spent the evening with them in the pub, spinning out the tale of the talking deer, veering from one terrible course of action to another until there was uproar and argument over what to do, some men had already come to blows, and the rest were getting raucously drunk, since Ianto insisted they couldn’t do him the honour of buying him a drink without buying one for all their friends, and in the crowd and confusion and the smoky room, it was little trouble to keep switching his full mug with the half-empty ones beside him, and back again when theirs were empty and he’d taken but one swallow of his own.
By the time most of the men were starting to hit their limits, Ianto had probably drunk something like a pint and a half, by his reckoning, and he theatrically drained his empty mug and slammed it down, spurring the remaining fishermen to do the same. Two of them keeled over on the spot, and the remaining three called loudly for more ale.
Ianto pushed back his chair and stood, and realised belatedly that their ale was stronger than the stuff back home when he suddenly felt a little queasy. He hid it, and slapped one of the final three on the shoulder, telling him, “Nature calls. Keep the ale coming, I’ll be back in a minute.”
The last three cheered and raised fresh mugs to him in salute, and the bartender patted his back in delight as he passed by.
Outside, Ianto took a moment to catch his breath in the bracing cold air, breathing deeply until his stomach settled, then headed down to the bay and the hut the seal was locked in.
When he found a large fishhook and started using it to pry the door open, the seal inside called to him, “Come in here and I’ll bite! With my teeth your leg’ll get infected and drop off. Just try it!”
“Shut up,” Ianto told it sharply. “I’m here to help. Keep quiet unless you want the whole town down here.”
That met with silence, and he managed to force the door open, ripping the old lock right out of the damp wood.
The seal was still entangled in the nets, and he hurried over and started pulling them off, straining his eyes in the darkness and untangling it as fast as he could.
“Take your time,” the seal snorted, and Ianto shook his head in exasperation.
“For a group of cursed animals,” he muttered, getting the seal’s head free and starting to shimmy the net down its body, “the lot of you aren’t very mystical and impressive.”
The seal barked a laugh. “And Jack said you weren’t that quick on the uptake.”
“And who’s Jack?” Ianto asked archly.
The seal laughed again. “Okay, now I see his point. Come on, shepherd boy, get me back in the sea.”
Ianto raised an eyebrow, trying to fit the name ’Jack’ to his wolf, but after two and a half years of thinking of him just as his wolf, it was difficult. He yanked the last of the net free, and the seal flopped forward with a grunt, struggling over the floor of the hut towards the door.
“That’s never going to work,” Ianto said, with a sigh. “Are you hurt too?”
“I’m fine,” the seal told him. “I move better in water. I’d like to see you try this with a stupid, useless body like mine.”
“Come here,” Ianto told him, taking off his cloak and laying it on the floor. “This’ll be quicker.”
The seal snorted, and waddled onto the cloak, muttering, “You’ll never manage it, you know. It took three of them to get me up here.”
“You were struggling then,” Ianto pointed out. “And nobody said I was going to carry you.”
He took up the end of his cloak and started out of the hut, dragging the seal behind him. The shingle beach crunched and grated under his feet and the seal’s weight, and the seal told him, “You’ll wreck your fancy cloak doing this.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ianto grunted, not stopping for a moment, knowing momentum of any kind was not something to let go easily. “Just don’t get caught again. I won’t be here next time.”
“Oh, yeah,” the seal huffed, “’cause I got caught on purpose this time, didn’t I? How about we punch holes in all their stupid boats, then I won’t get caught again.”
“Then they’d starve,” Ianto panted, halfway to the water. “I’m not taking your side, I’m just trying to keep everyone alive.”
“That’ll be new for you,” the seal snorted, and Ianto stopped dead.
There was silence for a moment, and then the seal said quickly, “Well, I’m sure I can reach the sea from here. Thanks for all that. See you.”
“Not yet,” Ianto said quietly, starting towards the sea again, cloak stretching and scraping as he went. “Not far now.”
He trudged on in silence, not looking back, and in a few more minutes he reached the water’s edge. The seal waddled off his cloak and into the water, and Ianto shook his battered cloak out, ignoring the rips, and swung it back around his shoulders.
“Wrecked that,” the seal muttered. “Hardly worth wearing now.”
“It was a gift,” Ianto snapped. “And it’s all I have. I suggest you start swimming.”
The seal coughed awkwardly, and looked away at the sea. “Yeah. Well. Thanks, and everything. If you need a hand with anything - well, flipper - stand by the water and call, ‘Creature of the sea, I have need of your skin’. You know, if you feel like looking like a prat. Good luck.”
It turned and started into the water, and vanished in one quick dive a few feet further in.
Ianto stared out at the water until the sun’s first rays danced across the waves. He turned, and saw a familiar shape up at the top of the beach, the dawn light gleaming in his wolf’s eyes. He swallowed hard, gripped by a sudden longing, and then the wolf turned and loped off into the shadows, and he could breathe again.
He pulled up his hood, wrapped the cloak around himself, hands bunched in comforting wolf fur, and set off along the coast, squashing down the well of pain the seal’s words had almost sprung open.
He walked up the coast for another three weeks, plunging into the heart of winter, huddling in his torn cloak as snowstorms blew in and the longest night of the year came and went. It was during one of the cold, pale days that he entered another forest and heard a quiet whimpering off to one side.
Investigating, he found a small, thin vixen caught in a trap, her front leg broken quite badly.
“Hold still,” Ianto told her, kneeling and prising the vice open, cutting his fingers on the spikes, but forcing the jaws wide enough for her to pull her leg free.
“Thank you,” she panted, and Ianto wasn’t remotely surprised. He pulled his hands away and let the trap snap shut, and went for his pouch.
He cleaned them both up, and found a solid, straight stick to splint her leg.
“What else can I do for you?” he asked her, dabbing blood from his hands. “You clearly can’t go anywhere by yourself.”
“I need to go home,” she told him wearily. “If I get home Jack can fix this easily. He’s got potions for this sort of thing.”
“I’ll take you,” Ianto assured her. “Just guide me. And tell me about Jack, and why I keep running into you lot.”
“Jack’s not his real name,” the vixen told him, as he picked her up and tucked her inside his cloak. “Head into the forest. We live in the centre.”
“What is his real name?” Ianto asked, walking on, and the vixen settled into his arms, holding her leg awkwardly out of his grip.
“We don’t know. He won’t tell us. He says that part of his life is over. He’s a good man, though. He’s kind to all of us. He gave us all shelter when we were cursed, and he’s done all sorts of things for us. He visited Gwen’s husband to leave him a token to let him know she’s still alive. She couldn’t carry it, you see. She can’t fly with much weight. And she was so upset that she couldn’t go home.”
“What happened to you all?” Ianto asked, and the vixen sighed.
“We ran afoul of a sorceress,” she told him. “She cursed us all. Jack’s sure he’ll break his one day, but we’re doomed. Our curses are different and we don’t know how to break them. We can’t kill her ourselves, even if we knew for sure it would help. It’s been almost five years for me and Owen. Almost two for Gwen.”
“Don’t give up,” Ianto told her. “If there’s anything I can do to help...”
“You can’t,” the vixen sighed. “Not me. The sorceress said that only love would find the way. And you don’t love me, and I don’t love you.”
“Is there someone you do love?” Ianto asked, and she nuzzled his hand.
“He doesn’t love me. I know I’m doomed. Owen, too. He doesn’t love anyone. Gwen might stand a chance, but she won’t let her husband get involved. She’s afraid the sorceress will curse him too.”
Ianto nodded, with a sigh, and the vixen led him on into the forest until dusk drew in.
“You’d better wait here,” she told him, and he gently set her down. “I’m not allowed to invite you in. Thank you, though. If I can ever repay you, just call for me. ‘Creature of the earth, I have need of your paws.’ I’m sure you know how it works by now.”
Ianto stroked her fur gently, and she nudged his hand with her nose and set off in a determined hobble, leaving him with a sudden ache for his wolf’s fur, and grin, and scent. It hurt so much he found tears on his cheeks, and he sat down against a tree and wrapped himself up in his cloak, hood up to press his cheek against wolf fur, and cried himself dry, for Lisa and his village and what he’d had to do to accept his own survival, and for Rhi and how he’d had to leave his home and the last of his family, and for his cursed wolf and how he’d only ever pushed him away.
He cried himself to sleep, and woke just after dawn, looking straight into the eyes of his wolf.
The wolf was up and away before Ianto could untangle himself from his cloak, but he scrambled up and gave chase, ducking through the trees and calling breathlessly, “Wait! Wait, I’m sorry! Please!”
The wolf cast a glance over its shoulder as they reached a clearing around a still pool, somehow free of ice, and then with no hesitation it leapt right into the middle and vanished. Ianto slipped the clasp of the cloak as he ran, and dived straight after it.
Part Two