Tales of Arilland Read Online Free PDF Page A

evening they would trek to the edge of the village, to the top of the hill that looked down over the Wild Wood, and they would farewell the day. The selections varied with their moods and the seasons, but the last song was always the same lullaby Aurelia had sung to her son every night since his birth.
    Have wonderful dreams, love
    And dream while you wonder
    Of things that are sure as
    The sound of the thunder
    Love leaves too sudden
    And death comes too soon
    And wolves they all bay at
    The full of the moon
    When the sound of his fiddle surpassed that of his voice, Bane played instead while his mother sang. And when his grandmother’s apprentice herb-girl returned his shy smile, he asked her to marry him. And when Harvest became pregnant with their child, the nightmares began. For the first three months, one came at every full moon. Bane dreamt of running through the autumn trees at twilight to the top of the hill, hair brushed with dew by the welcome chill of the wind. There, along with his brethren, he turned up his face and howled to the sky. Harvest teased him about his twitching and the soft whimpering noises he made in his sleep.
    In the second three months, the dreams increased with both frequency and intensity. Bane imagined himself grooming, hunting, mating, and feeding kits. He awoke angry, amorous, and exhausted in turns—sometimes all three at once. In the daylight hours he found himself resisting the urge to rub his face in the cool spring grass or growl at the rabbit vermin that ran amok in the garden.
    In the seventh month of Harvest’s pregnancy, Bane’s dream-self fought brutally with a wolf from another pack. He awoke on all fours, looming over Harvest and staring at the crescent-shaped marks on her pale white throat. She had slapped him out of his vision; his cheeks stung from the deep scratches her prenatal nails had raked across him. In the midnight silence, a drop of blood fell from his face to her breast.
    “Sweetheart,” Harvest said calmly, “this has to stop. You have to go to the wolves and ask them for help.”
    On any other day those words might not have made a lick of sense to him, but right there, bathed in bright moonlight, with the salty taste of his wife’s sweat and fear fresh upon his tongue, Bane knew what he had to do. When dawn broke, he packed up his fiddle and a blanket and set out for the hill at the edge of the Wild Wood. Harvest stayed behind at the garden gate, but not before handing him a small bag of food. She had noticed the look in his eye, the look of every man who has left home with no idea of when he might return, or if he should.
    “Sweetheart, come back to me,” she said as she embraced him. “Come back to me before our baby is born.”
    Bane kissed his wife hard, with all the love in his golden heart, and promised that he would.

    B ane went to the top of the hill that overlooked the Wild Wood and stayed there for three days. He fiddled from twilight into the wee hours of the morning. He played until his throat went hoarse and his fingers bled. He collapsed on the cold, hard ground as the sun rose, breathed in the lingering scent of his wife on the blanket, and slept the day away. He woke in the late afternoon, broke his bread and had a small meal, and waited. He lifted his fiddle and bow in time to farewell the sun, and continued to serenade the waning moon until he could continue no longer. The wolves did not come.
    The next day, Bane walked down the hill and into the Wild Wood. He walked through spider webs and sunlit meadows. Every morning he slept, every evening he walked, and every night he lifted his fiddle and bow and sang into the twilight. He slept fitfully on beds of hay and early summer wildflowers that made his golden heart ache for his wife and unborn child. Impatient and frustrated he wandered and played, played and wandered, deeper and deeper into the Wild Wood. Still, the wolves did not come.
    After the new moon, after the darkest night in the