The Wolf Wilder - Softcover

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Katherine Rundell is the author of Rooftoppers, Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner), The Wolf Wilder, The Explorer, and The Good Thieves. She grew up in Zimbabwe, Brussels, and London, and is currently a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She begins each day with a cartwheel and believes that reading is almost exactly the same as cartwheeling: it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless. In her spare time, she enjoys walking on tightropes and trespassing on the rooftops of Oxford colleges.

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The Wolf Wilder

ONE

Once upon a time, a hundred years ago, there was a dark and stormy girl.

The girl was Russian, and although her hair and eyes and fingernails were dark all the time, she was stormy only when she thought it absolutely necessary. Which was fairly often.

Her name was Feodora.

She lived in a wooden house made of timber taken from the surrounding forest. The walls were layered with sheep’s wool to keep out the Russian winter, the windows were double thick, and the inside was lit with hurricane lamps. Feo had painted the lamps every color in her box of paints, so the house cast out light into the forest in reds and greens and yellows. Her mother had cut and sanded the door herself, and the wood was eight inches thick. Feo had painted it snow blue. The wolves had added claw marks over the years, which helped dissuade unwelcome visitors.

It all began—all of it—with someone knocking on the snow-blue door.

Although “knocking” was not the right word for this particular noise, Feo thought. It sounded as though someone was trying to dig a hole in the wood with his knuckles. But any knocking at all was unusual. Nobody knocked: It was just her and her mother and the wolves. Wolves do not knock. If they want to come in, they come in through the window, whether it is open or not.

Feo put down the skis she was oiling and listened. It was early, and she was still wearing her nightdress. She had no dressing gown, but she pulled on the sweater her mother had knit, which came down to the scar on her knee, and ran to the front door.

Her mother was wrapped in a bearskin housecoat, just looking up from the fire she had been lighting in the sitting room.

“I’ll do it!” Feo tugged at the door with both hands. It was stiff; ice had sealed the hinges.

Her mother grabbed at her—“Wait! Feo!”

But Feo already had pulled the door open, and before she could jump back, it slapped inward, catching the side of her head.

“Ach!” Feo stumbled, and sat down on her own ankle. She said a word that made the stranger pushing his way past her raise his eyebrows and curl his lip.

The man had a face made of right angles: a jutting nose and wrinkles in angry places, deep enough to cast shadows in the dark.

“Where is Marina Petrovna?” His boots left a trail of snow down the hall.

Feo got to her knees—and then lurched back, as two more men in gray coats and black boots marched past her, missing her fingers by inches. “Move, girl.” They carried between them, slung by its legs, the body of a young elk. It was dead, and dripping blood.

“Wait!” said Feo. Both wore the tall furry hats of the tsar’s Imperial Army, and exaggeratedly official expressions.

Feo ran after them. She readied her elbows and knees to fight.

The two soldiers dropped the elk on the rug. The sitting room was small, and the two young men were large and mustached. Their mustaches seemed to take up most of the room.

Up close, they looked barely more than sixteen; but the man with the door-beating fists was old, and his eyes were the oldest thing about him. Feo’s stomach bunched up under her throat.

The man spoke over Feo’s head to her mother. “Marina Petrovna? I am General Rakov.”

“What do you want?” Marina’s back was against the wall.

“I am commander of the tsar’s Imperial Army for the thousand miles south of Saint Petersburg. And I am here because your wolves did this,” he said. He kicked at the elk. Blood spread across his brightly polished shoe.

“My wolves?” Her mother’s face was steady, but her eyes were neither calm nor happy. “I do not own any wolves.”

“You bring them here,” said Rakov. His eyes had a coldness in them you do not expect to see in a living thing. “That makes them your responsibility.” His tongue was stained yellow by tobacco.

“No. No, neither of those things is true,” said Feo’s mother. “Other people send the wolves when they tire of them: the aristocrats, the rich. We untame them, that’s all. And wolves cannot be owned.”

“Lying will not help you, madam.”

“I am not—”

“Those three wolves I see your child with. Those are not yours?”

“No, of course not!” began Feo. “They’re—” But her mother shook her head, hard, and gestured to Feo to stay silent. Feo bit down on her hair instead, and tucked her fists into her armpits to be ready.

Her mother said, “They are hers only in the sense that I am hers and she is mine. They are Feo’s companions, not her pets. But that bite isn’t the work of Black or White or Gray.”

“Yes. The jaw marks,” said Feo. “They’re from a much smaller wolf.”

“You are mistaken,” said Rakov, “in imagining I wish to hear excuses.” His voice was growing less official: louder, ragged edged.

Feo tried to steady her breathing. The two young men, she saw, were staring at her mother: One of them had let his jaw sag open. Marina’s shoulders and back and hips were wide; she had muscles that were more commonly seen on men, or rather, Feo thought, on wolves. But her face, a visitor had once said, was built on the blueprint used for snow leopards, and for saints. “The look,” he had said, “is ‘goddess, modified.’?” Feo had pretended, at the time, not to be proud.

Rakov seemed immune to her mother’s beauty. “I have been sent to collect compensation for the tsar, and I shall do that, immediately. Do not play games with me. You owe the tsar a hundred rubles.”

“I don’t have a hundred rubles.”

Rakov slammed his fist against the wall. He was surprisingly strong for so old and shriveled a man, and the wooden walls shuddered. “Woman! I have no interest in protests or excuses. I have been sent to wrest obedience and order from this godforsaken place.” He glanced down at his red-speckled shoe. “The tsar rewards success.” Without warning, he kicked the elk so hard that its legs flailed, and Feo let out a hiss of horror.

“You!” The General crossed to her, leaning down until his face, veined and papery, was inches from hers. “If I had a child with a stare as insolent as yours, she would be beaten. Sit there and keep out of my sight.” He pushed her backward, and the cross hanging from his neck caught in Feo’s hair. He tugged it away viciously and passed through the door back into the hall. The soldiers followed him. Marina signaled to Feo to stay—the same hand gesture they used for wolves—and ran after them.

Feo crouched down in the doorway, waiting for the buzzing in her ears to die away; then she heard a cry and something breaking, and ran, skidding down the hall in her socks.

Her mother was not there, but the soldiers had crowded into Feo’s bedroom, filling her room with their smell. Feo flinched away from it: It was smoke, she thought, and a year’s worth of sweat and unwashed facial hair. One of the soldiers had an underbite he could have picked his own nose with.

“Nothing worth anything,” said one soldier. His eyes moved across her reindeer-skin bedspread and the hurricane lamp and came to rest on her skis, leaning against the fireplace. Feo ran to stand protectively in...