Learning the Ways of the Night from the Wolf - Chapter 12

Night fell, the low-hanging sun tucking itself behind the snow-covered trees.

“You must have been so scared today. I’m sorry.”

Tina sat half-reclined on the bed, stroking the small creature’s back. She had just bathed, and soft fur caught against the still-damp edges of her clothes.

“I really didn’t think Father would do something like that. No, I should have been more careful…”

Tina’s string of apologies broke off abruptly. The instant the word “Father” left her lips, the little one that had been lying still began to growl, low in its throat.

The sudden hostility startled her. But thinking of how a gun had been shoved in their faces earlier that day, she could understand the reaction, so she simply lay down and gathered the little one close, holding it snugly against her.

“I’m sorry. You must have been really frightened.”

When Tina lay down beside it, the little creature wriggled closer. She watched it and spoke in a gentle voice.

‘Up close, its eyes look just like hawthorn berries.’

Gazing at the yellow eyes blinking right beside her, the thought flickered through Tina’s mind. Then, sensing the little one’s gaze as it peered quietly up at her, she slowly opened her mouth again.

“I’m sorry I scared you today. But Father really is a good person. Please don’t hate him too much.”

When Tina finished, the small beast tilted its head to the side, as though it couldn’t possibly comprehend what she’d said.

The way it responded stirred something peculiar in Tina. The uncanny sense that it truly understood her words.

“It’s true. Father is a high-ranking nobleman, so there was a lot of opposition when he married my mother, who was a commoner. But he cherished Mother so much that he overcame all the objections and married her anyway.”

Tina sent her gaze toward the window for a moment before continuing. Snow had begun to fall again.

“After that, the reason Father left Mother alone… it was just that carrying on the family business he’d inherited turned out to be harder than he expected, and the people around him kept putting terrible ideas in his head, or so she told me.”

As Tina drew these words from memory, she recalled what her mother used to tell her as a child: “No matter what anyone says, you are your father’s daughter.”

Thinking back on those moments, Tina’s mind drifted naturally to her earliest years. Her father, drunk, hurling objects and screaming. The slur-laced accusation that Tina was some bastard her mother had conceived outside the home. The contemptuous glares. The shouting, always dominated by accusations of betrayal.

And through it all, her mother, wordlessly pulling her close. The incantation-like whisper murmured over and over in her ear: “Your father is a good man. No matter what anyone says, you are your father’s daughter.”

Even the day her stepmother arrived at the estate holding her half-brother’s hand. Even when Sophianne was born and Tina could no longer live in the main house. Her mother had always told her the same thing.

“Hm?”

Just then, something warm and blunt brushed against Tina’s cheek. She looked down and found the little one licking her face. She had been crying without realizing it.

“Oh…”

In that moment, she felt a block of ice wedged deep in her chest begin to melt.

Believing that the father who treated her with cold indifference was a good man. Missing the mother who had planted that belief in her and then left to seek her own freedom.

Those feelings reached the warmth the little one had given her and came spilling out through her tears.

For a long while after, as Tina wept, the small creature lay nestled in her arms without a sound, licking away her tears.

To Tina, it felt like a greater comfort than any words could have offered.

“You know…”

After crying for a good while and once her tears had soaked the blanket through, Tina grew embarrassed at having wept so much. She let out a sheepish laugh and spoke.

“Having you come to me feels like real luck. When I’m with you, it’s like… I’m not the only one left here.”

A comfortable smile, the first of its kind, settled on Tina’s lips. Having let out all the tears pent up inside, her heart felt as light as a down-feather blanket.

“Hmm… but it feels strange calling you ‘you’ all the time.”

After a brief silence, Tina spoke again. She had pulled the little one just a bit deeper into her embrace, and its movements had gone completely still. The little one was getting sleepy.

“I’ll give you a name.”

After saying this, Tina called to mind the name she had been thinking of for some time. As it happened, snow was falling outside the window. There couldn’t be a more fitting moment to bestow this name.

“Rus. How about Rus? From ‘purus.’ It means ‘pure white.'”

That night, Tina rolled the name she had given slowly over her tongue and drifted off to sleep. Perhaps because she had been comforted despite the long day’s turmoil, her sleeping face was filled with nothing but peace.

Afterward, in the darkness, the beast’s bright yellow eyes began to glow, slowly but only once sleep had claimed Tina completely.