Her Wolf King

{sauvetage}

THE RESCUE

He started from his memories as if breaking out of a trance.

Lenore. She needed him. Maybe it was the wedding or the bargain or this soul-deep knowledge of these grounds... but he needed to find her.

On all fours, he prowled the grounds that he had lived in for so long, each pebble and leaf and breeze as familiar to him as his own breathing. There was no part of this place that he had not familiarized himself with, no part that he did not know. Until she came along and disturbed his too-familiar life, his too-comfortable existence.

No, how could he call a cursed existence comfortable and familiar? How could he say it was anything remotely close to monotonous and tedious? Yet, as he wove his way along the well-trodden paths between the copses of golden-leaved trees and dens of rabbits and squirrels, he realized he had been asleep for years, for decades. He had gone through the same routine for nearly half a century, burying himself alive instead of trying to save himself.

Perhaps he had thought in part that he was not worthy of being saved. That he really was the monster Marya had cursed him to be.

So many years he'd spent on this estate, not trapped, but never leaving. Never trying. Never venturing any further than the village to snatch a child, to see if they could be the key to his salvation. He'd made a few feeble attempts, until her. Until she'd walked up to him and taken her own life into her hands, and caused him to rethink his.

"Lenore!" he shouted, transforming back into a man and leaning against a tree. He could smell her scent on the wind: roses and something bitter, something sharper, richer, like the wine that had not passed his lips for years. "Lenore, please."

What if she was hurt? These woods were dangerous. Even for a girl whom a fairy had shrunk from, whom Marya's messenger had shrivelled at the sight of... No, he'd admit she was no average human girl. Perhaps she, too, was part-faerie.

"Lenore, I apologize." His voice sang on the wind, but it was an empty breeze, carrying back nothing more than his own disappointment.

A horse's whinny reached his ears, sharper than a normal man's. He stiffened, and became a beast again, chasing the scent of blood. There was no iron-sharp, metallic tang on the wind, but he'd heard the horse. There was no doubt about it. His mind's eye showed him once more that white mare, its golden mane rippling as it ran, hooves pounding on the forest floor.

Could it still be alive? He was sure that the horse had something to do with his former wife--that she'd enchanted it somehow, or perhaps cursed it to be immortal and serve her forever. If the latter, there was no reason to him for her to have left it.

Maybe it had left her. Maybe it could only tolerate the pure of heart.

He ran faster, his paws thudding against the carpet of leaves until they turned to flowers, until he reached spring. Until he reached the abandoned hut in the woods, where he had lived all those years ago. When he had been a normal man, and Marya a loving wife.

His heart nearly stopped at what he saw.

Lenore was leading the horse by the bridle, petting its mane, looking for all the world perfectly at ease, as if the whole forest was hers to explore. He supposed it was; she was his wife now, as she'd thrown in his face only hours before.

Her head snapped up at his approach, but she didn't step away from the horse. "I made a new friend," she said levelly.

He made no motion to turn back into a man. He needed time to think, to breathe, to formulate some kind of thought that wouldn't send her fleeing deeper into the darker parts of the wood.