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chroi?” I asked quietly.
     
    He looked at me intensely with his golden eyes and eventually said, with resignation: “Forever, you know that. I can forgive you this David as I know he only has now with you and I will have forever. Our bond is too strong for me to desert you, even if I wanted to.”
     
    Gunward's expression hardened for a moment.
     
    “You humiliated me by leaving me, but you do know that the elders - that includes your parents these days - would never acknowledge your union with a human. I could simply force you to go with me, but I know you would just run away again. I want you to come of your own will and I can wait, so I've decided to stay close by.”
     
    “Thank you, a chroi,” I said gratefully.
     
    I firmly believed that as long as Gunward was on my side, he would protect me and my family. Even if it brought him pain, he would do it, because he truly did love me. He pulled me close and wrapped his mind around mine. Then he gave me a wolfish grin and was gone.
     
    I felt an overwhelming emptiness. I knew he was right. Any pack of wolves would think my union with David a joke, and a very bad one at that. Wolves were strictly monogamous. They really did stay together till death did them part, and this meant forever in a situation like Gunward’s and mine. Wolves also mated with only one male, so I may well have been the only wolf in history who was separated. A separated wolf with a spouse still alive. Thus, in the eyes of the wolves, I was still as married to Gunward as I had been in 1820.
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    I was born in Norway, in the province of Tromsö on the island of Senja in the year 1818. Our pack was a small one. It consisted mainly of my small family and two of my mother’s brothers. My mother, Faol, and my father, Baz, were both shape shifters. My mother’s family had lived in the moors of Scotland for centuries, but when there were no more shape shifter wolves left, my mother and her brothers had slowly migrated northwards and ended up in Norway, where my mother fell in love with my father. In the usual course of events shape shifters would mate with their own kind, but occasionally a shape shifter wolf fell in love with an ordinary wolf, and slowly the number of shape shifters diminished. Cubs from matings between shape shifters and ordinary wolves showed no signs of being able to transform, and the shape shifters had to migrate farther away from their home ranges to look for their likes in other packs.
     
    My mother’s brothers were wolves of this kind. They had both fallen in love with ordinary wolves and when their spouses had fallen victim to hunters, they had become widowers. When my mother decided to leave Scotland in 1610, her brothers gladly followed her. Farkas and Gur were both magnificent large males. Their fur was clean white and soft, their bodies muscular and strong. Their yellow eyes were set well apart from each other, and slanted. They were about 1.5 meters tall and weighed some 75-80 kilos. Both were extremely dangerous, even though when looking at them play with me and my brothers, one would have thought one was observing large household dogs at play. But I had seen them change in a flash from kind uncles to killers who protected our pack from danger. All my mother’s family had been killed by 1743, and my mother refused to return to Scotland. My father’s family was the only family I knew, and even that for only a short while, because when I was a year and a half of age I fell in love with Gunward and migrated with him to Sweden. We wandered to the Sarek national park in northern Sweden, as this was where his small pack lived. The pack consisted of a few shape shifters and three of their offspring, who were unable to change. Sarek was an absolutely fabulous place. Even though I had loved Senja, Sarek with its stark beauty made me breathless. The unspoiled wilderness seemed to stretch forever. Wherever you looked, you could see breathtakingly beautiful