The Keeper of Wolves

Chapter 3

When the sun slanted through the leaves like that, Kosazana wondered how anything evil could exist in the world.

The rainforest was beautiful, her father told her: the most beautiful place on earth. It was why he had chosen to live there, and raise his family there. Meliz and his wife, Linwe, had lived there for several years now, welcoming their daughter into one of the most tranquil and wild places on the planet. The Amazon was so much smaller than it had been, Meliz explained to Kosazana, but now that they were there, they would protect the rest of it.

Birds with colorful beaks and other birds with colorful plumage flew by overhead, crying out with shrill and hoarse songs alike. Chattering monkeys chased them through the treetops, darting from limb to limb and shaking water down on the giggling child as she ran beneath them, grinning ear-to-ear from the joy of belonging to the race. On one side of her self-made path, a group of large, four-legged beasts not unlike North American deer suddenly looked up, alert, and watched her pass. Kosazana's voluminous black hair, thick and curly, bounced along behind her, and her bare feet splashed in the mud. All around her, the warm golden light beamed through the trees, green in places from filtering through the canopy. There was such joy to be had here, and Kosazana assumed that, as it was for her, it was infectious to all.

When the birds burst through the trees and winged their way across a small gorge carved by flash floods, the monkeys came to an abrupt halt with a sharp rustle of many disturbed leaves and branches all at once. But Kosazana did not hesitate to make a leap far too big for a young girl her size, one that was probably too big for even her exceptionally-tall father. As she soared through the air, though, her deep cocoa skin flared with shimmering patterns like so much liquid gold running down her arms and legs. She leaped far too high and traveled far too long and stayed in the air far too much before alighting gracefully on the other side, laughing, and continuing the chase.

Witch-children were hardly deterred by such silly matters as ravines.

***

"Utata, how come you were chosen to protect the forest?"

Meliz had smiled down at Kosazana, slid his chair back from the kitchen table, picked her up, and set her down on his knee. "Kosa," he started, using the nickname that always brought a smile to her face, too, "we were given a special job when we were given these powers. If we wanted to take something, we had to give something back, right? So when we accepted our powers as witches, we also accepted the responsibility of protecting that which gave us these powers."

"Who gave us the powers?"

"Our mother," Melix replied, in an awed whisper just for Kosazana. Gasping, elated, she laughed and brought her small, balled fists up to her mouth in excitement as she began to bounce. "Tell me about The Mother again, Utata!"

It was her favorite story, and Meliz told it with the same passion he had had when he told it the first time. "Long ago, when the earth was new, and people had not yet formed," he intoned, voice deep and rich but with undertones of his own jubilee, "the animals and the insects and all the wonderful things in the world came together and said, 'we need a leader.' They knew that their leader must be just, and wise, and able to protect them. So each of them set out to find, or create, a suitable being to lead them.

"From the north came the Vampire, strength as his ally. From the west came the Wolf, loyalty as her tribute. From the south came the Witch, with cunning to his aid. And from the east came the Fae, communion with the earth to serve her. The sky gave us the Elf, and the moon gave us the Dwarf, and the stars gave us the Drow, and the sea gave us the Nymph, and the woods gave us the Druid, and all manner of creature came together to choose their protector.