Chapter 15: The Healer's Hut
The howl that echoed through the pines was not singular. It was a conversation. A chorus of sharp, yipping cries that spoke of a coordinated hunt, and it was far too close.
Aldric froze, his hand going to the hilt of his sword. Elara stopped breathing beside him. Rhia melted behind the trunk of a massive fir, becoming just another shadow.
“Wolves?” Elara whispered, the word barely shaping the air.
“Not just wolves,” Rhia murmured back, her voice taut. “That’s a pack on a trail. And we’re making more noise than a wounded deer.”
She was right. Elara, despite her determination, was flagging. Her steps were uneven, her breathing a ragged effort. They’d been moving for hours in the treacherous dark, guided by slivers of moonlight and Aldric’s memory of maps he hadn’t seen in years. Every rustle of undergrowth sounded like a soldier’s boot.
Another howl, this one to the east. Closer.
“We need walls,” Aldric said, his mind scrabbling over the terrain. The logging track was lost, swallowed by brambles and new growth. They were off-course and exposed. “Anything.”
Rhia pointed, a sharp gesture. “There. A break in the trees. Something square.”
It was little more than a darker blot against the night, a geometry that didn’t belong to the forest. They moved toward it, urgency lending speed to Elara’s steps. The structure resolved from the shadows as they approached: a hut. It leaned badly, its roof a sunken mouth of mossy thatch and broken timbers. One wall had partially collapsed, spilling stone into a furrow of ferns. The single window was boarded, but a plank had fallen away, leaving a jagged black slot.
It looked less like sanctuary and more like a carcass.
“It’ll do,” Aldric grunted. Better than open ground.
The door was a slab of rotten wood hanging by one rusted hinge. He pushed it inward, the groan it emitted louder than he liked. The smell hit them first: damp hay, wet earth, the pungent, eye-watering scent of animal musk, and underneath it all, the sweet-sour tang of something long dead.
Elara gagged, covering her nose with her torn sleeve.
Aldric stepped inside, sword drawn. The interior was one room, cluttered with the detritus of abandonment. A crude table lay on its side. A rusted iron pot sat in the hearth, filled with black rainwater. Bundles of dried herbs, gray with dust and mold, hung from the rafters. In the corner, a pile of hay might have once been a bed. Something small and furred scurried away from their entrance, vanishing into a hole in the wall.
“Hermit. Or a hunter,” Rhia said, kicking aside a shattered stool. “Gone a long time.”
Another chorus of howls, unmistakably closer now. The sound skittered down Aldric’s spine. Wolves were one thing. A pack this bold, this focused, in woods this deep? They were desperate, or they were not entirely natural. He thought of the thing in the cave, of Rhia’s stories about what lived in the stone.
“Bar the door,” he said.
There was no bar. Rhia braced the broken table against the doorframe. It was a pathetic defense. The collapsed wall was a bigger problem—a yawning hole large enough for a man, or a beast, to climb through. They were in a stone box with a wide-open mouth.
“Check for anything useful,” he told Elara, his eyes scanning the shadows of the hut. “Herbs, cloth. Then get in the farthest corner.”
He and Rhia took up positions flanking the collapsed wall, weapons ready. The moonlight through the opening painted a silver rectangle on the filthy floor. It was a killing floor. They both knew it.
Elara didn’t argue. She moved to the hanging herbs, her hands trembling slightly as she brushed the dust from brittle leaves. She sniffed a few, coughed, discarded them. She found a clay mortar and pestle on a shelf, filmed with grime. She wiped it out with her skirt. Her movements were frantic, focused.
“Here,” she said, pulling down a skeletal bundle. “This is yarrow. Or it was.” She crumbled a leaf. It powderized into nothing. “It’s too old.”
A low, vibrating growl came from just outside the open wall. Not a howl. A promise.
Aldric tightened his grip on his sword. He saw the shift in the darkness beyond—a liquid movement, the glint of two low-slung eyes reflecting moonlight. Then another pair. And another.
“Stay behind us,” he said, his voice low and flat.
The first wolf leapt through the opening.
It was huge, its ribs showing through a matted, brindled coat. Its lips were pulled back from yellowed teeth in a soundless snarl. It landed in the rectangle of light, hackles raised.
Rhia moved. She didn’t wait for it to charge. She threw her dagger. The blade spun through the air and sunk into the beast’s shoulder with a thick thunk. The wolf yelped, stumbling sideways. Aldric was already there. His sword stroke was not elegant. It was a brutal, downward chop that caught the animal at the base of its neck. Bone crunched. The wolf collapsed, twitching, dark blood spilling onto the earth floor.
The smell of it—hot and coppery—filled the hut.
Two more wolves slunk in from the sides of the opening, their movements coordinated, tactical. These weren’t just hungry animals; they were working as a unit. One feinted toward Rhia, drawing her spear-thrust, while the other darted for Aldric’s left flank.
Aldric pivoted, his sword a silver arc in the dimness. He caught the second wolf across the muzzle, shearing through its jaw. It fell back, whimpering and thrashing. The one facing Rhia lunged. She sidestepped, using the spear’s haft to block its snapping jaws, then drove the iron point into its side.
A fourth shadow filled the opening. This one was bigger. A massive, gray-alpha, its muzzle streaked with silver. It didn’t enter. It stood just outside, watching with cold, intelligent eyes.
“It’s directing them,” Rhia panted, yanking her spear free.
The wounded wolf with the shattered jaw was still moving, a desperate, pained scramble. Its cries were pitiful. The alpha outside let out a short, sharp bark. The wounded wolf instantly stilled. Then, with a terrifying obedience, it turned its head and began dragging itself back out through the hole, leaving a slick trail behind.
The alpha’s eyes held Aldric’s. It was an assessment. A recognition of equal threat. Then it turned and melted back into the forest. The remaining wolf, the one Rhia had speared, limped out after its leader.
Silence crashed back in, broken only by their harsh breathing and the dying gurgle of the first wolf at their feet.
Aldric didn’t lower his sword. He listened. The howls had stopped. The hunt had been called off. For now.
“They were testing us,” Rhia said, wiping her spear-blade on the hay. “Sent the desperate ones in first. The young, the sick. The alpha saw the cost wasn’t worth the meal.”
Elara was pressed against the far wall, her hands clenched over her mouth. She was staring at the dead wolf, at the spreading pool of blood creeping toward her feet. Her face was ghostly in the bad light.
“Elara,” Aldric said, sheathing his sword. He stepped toward her, careful to avoid the blood.
She lowered her hands. “I’m all right.” Her voice was thin. “It’s just… the smell. It’s like the attic after… after my brother visited.”
The casual horror of the statement hung in the foul air. Aldric wanted to burn the world down.
“We can’t stay here with this,” Rhia said, nudging the carcass with her boot. “The blood will draw everything else with teeth before dawn.”
“We patch up first. Then we move.” Aldric’s shoulder was screaming. The fight had pulled at the wound. He could feel a warm, fresh dampness seeping through the linen bandage.
Elara pushed off from the wall, her moment of shock passing into that eerie, focused practicality. She went back to the shelves, searching with renewed desperation. She pulled down a small, wooden box, its lid warped shut. She pried it open with a rusted nail.
Inside, wrapped in a scrap of waxed cloth, was a dense, dark lump. She brought it to her nose and a faint, real smile touched her lips. “Beechwood tar,” she said. “It keeps. It’s not ideal, but it’s antiseptic. It will seal the wound.”
She found the bandages then, tucked behind the box. They were linen, old but clean, still folded in a tight, square bundle. She held them like a treasure.
“Sit,” she told Aldric, pointing to the overturned table they’d moved from the door.
He obeyed. The hut was still a tomb, still stank of death and decay, but as she knelt before him, carefully peeling back the blood-soaked strip of her undershift, the world narrowed to her hands. To the concentration on her face.
She cleaned the reopened wound with the last of their water. Her touch was steady. She scooped a small amount of the sticky, pungent tar from the waxed cloth with two fingers. “This will hurt worse,” she warned, her amber eyes meeting his.
“Do it.”
She applied it. The pain was immediate and fierce—a deep, burning sting that made the muscles in his neck cord tight. He didn’t flinch. He watched her instead. The faint line between her eyebrows. The way she bit her lower lip in focus.
“My mother,” she said softly, as she took a fresh bandage and began winding it around his shoulder and chest. “She loved gardens. She’d sneak me out to the castle gardens at night when I was very small. She knew all the flowers, the herbs. What healed, what poisoned.” Her fingers looped the linen, taut and secure. “After she died, the gardens were locked. But one of the old herbalists, Marta, she remembered. She’d been my mother’s maid. When I was put in the attic, Marta would be sent sometimes to ‘treat’ me. She’d bring willow bark for pain. She’d show me drawings in old books she smuggled in. Teach me the names of things. It was our secret. It gave me something to hold onto that wasn’t… them.”
She tied off the bandage, her story settling over Aldric heavier than the linen. Her education had been an act of rebellion, a thread of kindness spun in the dark. It was how she knew yarrow. How she recognized the tar.
He caught her hand before she could pull away. His own hand was filthy, blood-caked along the knuckles. Hers was pale and slim, marked with dirt and small scratches. “She gave you a weapon,” he said.
Elara looked down at their joined hands. “She gave me a thread. You followed it out.”
Outside, a distant owl called. The immediate threat was gone, but the forest was never empty. They had a few hours until the gray light of pre-dawn would make them visible again.
“We have the bandages. The tar,” Rhia said, repacking their few things. “The wolves won’t be back. But that patrol heard the commotion. They’ll be converging.”
Aldric stood, testing the new bandage. It held firm. The burn of the tar was a clean, sharp pain. A good pain. “Then we walk right into the teeth of it,” he said. “We use the last of the dark to get as far north as we can. Find high ground. See what we’re facing.”
He looked at Elara. She was exhausted. She was fevered. She had just seen violence that would haunt most soldiers. She nodded, pulling her cloak tight around her shoulders.
“A thread,” she repeated, as if to herself. Then she took the lead, stepping over the threshold of the rotten door, leaving the stink of the hut and the dead wolf behind, and walking back into the waiting dark.