Animal Skins by Ilye

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Lone Wolf

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“So I summoned a giant eagle for you, and the best you could do was pass out on my shoulder?”

Irissë’s voice was muffled through the furs heaped on top of him. He cracked an eyelid, half-buried inside his den. The prey-bird had passed. The wolf had awoken.

He only really slept when they drugged him and Irissë knew it. She also knew that he hadn’t been drugged last night, so instead he would be lurking, half-awake, always on his guard and ready to rush his next assailant until neither could tell predator from prey any longer. This wasn’t Irissë's first attempt to get him talk, but now she'd learned to keep her distance and taunt him out of his den rather than approach and earn herself a set of teeth to her flesh. That half-waking rest was precious as a fresh kill in a mid-winter blizzard and he resented having it disturbed.

Wolf growled, softly. At his side, Huan shifted. Irissë ignored the warning.

“Your brothers want to see you.”

He grizzled again, then finally conceded, “Which ones?”

“Maitimo and Curvo.”

He poked his head out of the den with lips curved in something not quite smile, not quite snarl. It was cold outside; outside the thick pelts that brushed against his skin as warmly as if they were his litter-mates.

“Well,” he rasped, “who am I to refuse my alpha?”

Irissë sighed. “King, Tyelko. The term you’re looking for is king.”

Wolf ignored her and pawed the covers aside so he could sit up. His chest and foreleg had been done-up in a leather contraption that immobilised his shoulder and bound his limb across his underbelly. He stared at it, then dropped his head and sniffed at it. The leather smelled like it had been a horse, once.

“Does it hurt?”

Wolf flicked an ear at her. “I’ve had worse.” He lifted his head again to ease the strain on his neck, although his muzzle was still filled with the tangs of new leather and old blood. He ran his tongue across the unevenness of his teeth, fighting the urge to tear the bandage from his limb and lick at the wound.

“I tried to chew it off myself when I was hanging up there, you know.”

Irissë’s eyes ticked down to his bandaged stump and back up again. He grinned and bared his snapped-off canines. “Didn’t do me much good. The bastards broke my fangs.”

Her jaw tightened and her expression grew somehow more streamlined, as though she were pinning her ears back in displeasure. She stalked up to his den and dropped to a crouch at its opening so she could look him in the eye. From her, the only one with whom he’d ever considered himself mating as a pair, it was no threat. She stared at him for a moment as though she were gauging what yet lived in their depths.

“I thought you were an eagle when you were hanging up there?” she said finally. He cocked his head; not confused, but canny.

“I was.”

Her brow creased, like she was on the cusp of comprehension. Something visceral inside him twisted and, for just a moment, he pushed Wolf away and reached for Prey-Bird.

Sometimes I still am.

Her eyebrows lifted; then realisation softened her features and at last she nodded.

“But today you’re a wolf,” she said carefully. He returned her nod. She let her breath out across her teeth.

“I’ll warn them,” she said, and ducked outside.

His brothers appeared moments later. He smiled at them, or thought he did, but Maitimo’s lips tightened and Curufinwë’s eyebrows drew together in an enviable impression of their late father.

“Snarl at me all you like, Tyelko,” he said, and settled gracefully onto a stool at the side of the bed. “I’m not one of the healers to be intimidated by your ways .”

Wolf sent a bark of laughter up to the ceiling. “And what are my ways? If you’re intimidated by that, whelp, you should see me when I’m trying.”

“I didn’t say I was intimidated,” Curufinwë said mildly. “Irissn5; says you’re a wolf today.”

Wolf grinned like the thing you didn’t want to meet in the dark.

“Better listen to her, then, just in case she’s right.”

Curufinwë lifted an eyebrow, but his eyes were bright with a fervid curiosity and the cutting remark Wolf expected never came. It reaffirmed Wolf’s decision that he disliked Curufinwë the least of all his brothers; Curufinwë at least treated him with interest, like he were a puzzle to analyse.

On the other side of the bed, Maitimo huffed to a halt in a swish of red and gold. Regal, he was, and arrogant with it. Wolf found it at the same time oppressive and exhilarating. When he closed his eyes he could see another kind of red, the kind that ran foaming and hot, and another kind of gold that glistered wicked in the night. He’d been the red and fought the gold; fought the red and been the gold. Something lurched awake beneath his breastbone and began to slaver quietly.

“Stop it, Nelyo,” he snapped, fighting to keep his hackles down. “You’ve got that pitiful expression on your face. It's making my bollocks itch already.”

Maitimo’s back straightened. “Glad to see your humour survived,” he muttered. “As well, apparently, as your bollocks.”

“He’s just jealous because he can’t lick them like wolves can,” Curufinwë murmured under his breath, without moving a muscle in his face. Wolf snorted, and Maitimo’s face rearranged itself into something soft and sad that Wolf had forgotten the name for. He curled his lip over one broken canine.

"I heard what you said last time, Nelyo. I don’t want to hear it again. I'd've abandoned me too. It's what the pack does to anyone stupid enough to get themselves caught."

Maitimo regarded him for a moment, even and cool. "I don't believe you really regard us as your pack any more," he said then.

"No," Wolf agreed, "I don't. My pack was massacred when Moringotto trapped me."

“You led them to it, Turkafinwë,” Maitimo said, “like lambs to the slaughter.” He spoke with narrowed eyes and pulled up to his full height, but Wolf had seen far taller, far darker, far hotter, and was not cowed.

“Lambs do not follow.” He cocked his head slowly; dangerously. If he’d still had his fangs, they’d have been glinting by now. “They flee in the opposite direction. They were wolves and I was their alpha. They chose to follow me.”

Maitimo threw his hands up with a splutter of annoyance. “And in your monolithic stupidity, you got every last one of them killed!”

“They weren’t animals,” remarked Curufinwë, sanguine. He had begun to inspect the leather limb brace. “They had free choice.”

Celegorm snickered. “Only one of those statements is correct.”

Maitimo’s breath hissed over his teeth and he spun on his heel. Wolf thought he was going to leave, but he just stood tense and quivering like a creature deciding whether to fight or flee. He was a rabbit in the lamplight. Wolf licked his lips as the glory of the chase and the kill howled deep in his soul.

“Why are you here, Nelyo?” he drawled. Maitimo’s head turned enough that he could glance back at Wolf over his shoulder. “Are you going to apologise again? Are you going to flagellate yourself for leaving me in the enemy’s hands for twelve years?” Maitimo flinched and something inside Wolf yipped an early triumph.

“I know how you love to suffer,” he pressed on. “You’d be wallowing in self-made misery by now if it were you in my place – but oh, you’d never be stupid enough to get caught in the first place, would you? Well, stop making yourself feel guilty over this so you can palm yourself off to it later. If you had any kind of mettle as a leader at all then you’d acknowledge the advantage and take credit for this because I know what we’re up against. I have seen the enemy, I have met him in the darkness, I have fought and I have won .”

Maitimo spun around, then froze. Silence clattered down around them. Wolf was vaguely aware that Curufinwë’s hands had stopped moving, although they still rested on the leather brace. Maitimo stared for a heartbeat, before his face closed down to marble.

“So help me, I’m not sure we haven’t brought the enemy into the heart of our camp,” he muttered, just loudly enough for the edge of Wolf’s hearing. Then he stalked out in that flurry of red and gold, and left the air frigid behind him.

“Don’t mind him,” Curufinwë said, reaching again for Wolf’s forelimb. “He’s just concerned that you’ve turned into an Orc.”

“The bastard!" Wolf tore himself from Curufinwë's grip. "How very dare he!” He threw the covers aside, ready to bound after their eldest brother. Huan leapt up, startled by the sudden rush of cold air and instantly alert to his master’s purpose.

Curufinwë’s sigh came just before his forge-hardened grip seized Wolf by both shoulders. Relentless fingers bit through the leather brace and wrenched his damaged joints hard enough that he collapsed back into his den with a whimper of pained surprise. Curufinwë simply patted him on the chest as he let go and, with academic patience, reached again for Wolf’s limb.

“Well, I can see how he might,” he said, as though the violent break in conversation had never occurred. “You are a bit of a savage these days.”

Wolf glared, still catching his breath, but Curufinwë was already too engrossed in his thoughts. “Yes,” he murmured under his breath, gently manipulating the elbow joint, “yes, I think it could work.” He looked up, and his grin was every bit as sharp and canny as one of Wolf’s own pack.

“What say you to a prosthetic paw, then?”

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Chapter End Notes

Random animal fact: The alpha wolf theory is turning out to be more myth than fact. The initial experiments observed alpha behaviour and dominance battles in captive animals, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that wild wolves don’t act like this. The closest known behaviour in wild wolves is amongst family groups, where elders (sometimes seen as alphas) exert dominance over their juniors in the way that human parents do over their children and dog owners do over their pets. When the pups mature, they don’t overthrow the alpha to become pack leader – instead, they disperse and form packs of their own.

That all seemed remarkably fitting for the Fëanorian situation, which from wolf-Celegorm’s point of view is unnatural and uncomfortable.