The path to Elder Hilda's hut wound through the outer western edges of Black Rock’s end. The huts here were smaller, meaner lean-tos and sheds cobbled together from the scraps of grander dwellings, their thatch thin and their walls pressed too close to the palisade, seeking shelter from the wind that swept down from the mountain. He had passed her hut twice already, mistaking it for a smokehouse, then a storage pen, and only found it the third time because he caught the scent of the old woman through the rain.

  It was a Spring rain, hot and sloppy like basin-water, and it did little to help the mood he was in.

  The roof of the Elder’s hut sagged in the middle, heavy with moss. A single window, no larger than a wolf-man's head, was shuttered tight, and through the cracks in the wood, a thin line of smoke leaked upward, twisting into the damp air.

  Fenris raised his hand to knock, and as he did, his gaze was drawn past the village, across the torch-lit walkway that bisected Black Rock, to the Cathedral.

  He could feel Albi within it—a cold, still knot in his mind. She was alone now, but she had not been for long. He could still smell the lingering bitter-oil of the Elders in her nostrils.

  He knocked. The sound falling into the hut rather than striking it.

  A long pause. Then, a voice from within, thin and sharp as the prick of a bone needle. “Who is it?”

  “Your Alpha,” Fenris said, his voice flat. “I would speak with you, Hilda.”

  Another pause.

  He heard a loud, weary sigh from the other side of the door, a sound of profound irritation.

  “It’s open.”

  He pushed the door and stepped inside.

  Dried herbs hung in bundles from the low rafters—rosemary, sage, mint, other things he had not the knowledge to name. He ducked beneath a long bundle of lavender over the doorway that reached down from the beam like a grasping hand. The dried flowers of it caught his shoulder, scattering across his jacket sleeve in small, brittle bursts of purple. He brushed them off and straightened.

  The walls stopped his eyes. Tapestries covered them, floor to rafter, edge to edge—not the grand decorative pieces of his Alpha’s hall but smaller gestures, each no larger than a man's chest, their colors deep and particular in the firelight. A wolf beneath a bleeding sun, coat rendered in a dozen shades of grey. A pack crossing a frozen river, the ice blue-white beneath their paws. A she-wolf with blazing red hair, her head thrown back, howling at a moon so thin it was naught but a sliver of light above her, the last of it or the first.

  He was still looking when Hilda's voice reached him from beside the hearth.

  "Not many of us left."

  He turned. She sat in a high-backed chair by the small, tidy hearth, her eyes on her work and nowhere else. Her fingers moved in a swift and practiced rhythm, the needles never pausing.

  "Elder?"

  "Weaver-women." She lifted her chin fractionally toward the walls, the tapestries upon them. "There are not many of us left who still possess the knowledge of how to make them. Most of it is done by hand now."

  On her bowed lap, a bundle of fabric lay gathered in loose, irregular folds. She lifted it now slowly toward the firelight, turning it between her gnarled fingers this way and that, her eyes squinting along the stitching with a critical appraisal. The yarn at her feet was a fine whitish-grey, the color of wood-smoke, of hair gone silver with time. The same color, Fenris noted, as the unkempt coils pinned at the back of her head. He would not have been particularly surprised if they be one in the same.

  He remembered the book then, and drew it from under his arm. "Jorik sends this." He held it up.

  She squinted across the firelight at it. A short, satisfied grunt. Then her eyes dropped back to her work.

  "Set it on the counter. There's hot water on the stove as well. Forgive an Elder her manners, but my knees have turned to stone. I don't rise for many these days."

  Fenris set the book down and took the stool across from her. The fire popped between them, throwing shifting shadows up across her lined face.

  "It is quite fine, Hilda. I need nothing," he said.

  "Then why have you come, Alpha Fenris, when it is nothing you need?" Her eyes did not lift from her work. "To see whether I've dried up and blown away with the rest of the dust in this village? I am not an Elder that is simply missed."

  "Jorik tells me you might offer true counsel, not bent to please, " Fenris said. His voice was low, and he leaned forward on his knees, closing the distance between them without closing it entirely. "He says you know something the other Elders do not wish to hear. Or perhaps you do not wish to say, about the events taking place outside these comfortable walls.”

  “Are you cross with me, Alpha Fenris?”

  “You are our Elder who counsels in time of need. Yet you are here, when it is Albi who needs you.”

  Hilda's fingers slowed for a single stitch, the thread drawn taut between her knuckles.

  "Jorik." The name came out wrapped in a tired exasperation that had the weight of decades behind it. "That man-wolf has been obsessed with me since he was a boy. Always underfoot. He has the mind for a thousand questions and is witless to use a single answer. " The needle dipped and rose, dipped and rose. "He was a terrible slave for my father. Could not hold his tongue. I was glad when he Imprinted with Aula and left my father’s house. Glad to be rid of him."

  The last words came out softer than the rest. Not tender—could a woman like Hilda ever be?—but warm in the way a banked coal is warm and glows orange for a moment when a draft finds it.

  "Jorik has always believed I know things that I do not," she said, in finality, and gave a soft snort through her nose.

  She reached into the small basket beside her chair and sorted through the skeins within until her gnarled fingers found what they were looking for—a rich, earthy brown, the color of creek mud after rain. She drew out a length, cut it clean with the small blade tucked in the basket's rim, and threaded it through her needle's eye without so much as a squint. She began to weave again, the road of her stitch now darker, and said nothing.

  Fenris watched carefully, breathing in through his nose the way a wolf reads a trail on the hunt. Beneath the herbal perfume, beneath the woodsmoke that clung to every surface of the hut, and farther still beneath the lanolin of the wool in her lap, was the unmistakable, acrid scent of anxiety held tightly in check. Aye, she was lying.

  "Does that mean he is wrong, Elder Hilda?" Fenris asked. His gaze was steady on her, unmoving. "Does that mean you do not know what he says you might?"

  “What is it you wish to ask, Alpha? Enough about what I do or do not know. Speak your piece, that I might offer what I offer and you might leave through the door by whence you came.”

  “You have heard what happened in the longhouse. With Beeba.”

  The brown thread moved through the fabric in Hilda's lap, dip-rise, dip-rise, and Fenris let her have her idled silence for as long as it took his tongue to brush over each individual tooth. When it became clear that Hilda intended to wait him out–that she possessed the patience with which to do so—he continued.

  "You know the Old Stories better than anyone in Black Rock, Elder Hilda," he said. "If there is something in them that explains what happened in that chamber—what entered Beeba and what it wanted, true—I would hear of it now."

  Hilda's needle did not pause. “It is a question your mate has already answered, Fenris. A vision carries the scent of whoever sent it. Same as a letter carries the hand. Whatever Albi has already told you, it is the truth of it, you simply do not wish to believe it.” She took a deep breath, dry as wood, inhaling his scent now, "You have not come all this way, bearing the scowls of an Elder you have no true love for, to ask me about the Beast, Fenris. So, what is the real question you might ask of me." A gust of wind pressed on the shutters, rattling them in their frames.

  Fenris’s leg began to bounce with building unease, the wood beneath creaking in protest.

  Stop with these games, he wanted to tell her. Why could she not simply answer him, the way an Elder ought to answer her Alpha when he has asked her something.

  The irritation rose in him hot and quick against his own will. He held it. He held it because her eyes from beneath their heavy brows, now held the peculiar expression of a woman whose already been witness to this moment before—who had known, before he knocked on her door, before he crossed the clearing, before he left Jorik's hut with the book tucked under his arm, exactly what he would say and what he would not say.

  He let out his breath. Long and slow. It carried something out of him as it went. Aye, the old woman had a way of making any room unbearable in its smallness. She was right, as right as he had been about her.

  So what, then, was the question that had driven him out into this piss-rain?

  He turned it over. Examined it the way Hilda had examined her stitching—holding it up to the light. He was not here about the Beast. He was not here about Beeba. He was not even here, truly, for Albi or her vision at all.

  He was here for himself.

  The tight, raw thing in his chest cracked open a little further. He leaned forward on his knees, now to stop his legs seizing, and looked at Hilda across the fire.

  "Albi believes the vision she received from the Beast was a Prophecy," he said. His voice was quieter now, stripped of the Alpha's register. "That is the word she used. And believes it did not come from our Great Mother."

  "Why would she believe such a thing?" Hilda's voice was flat and measured. Her needle dip-rose, dip-rose.

  "The vision was …...was damning" The word tasted wrong in his mouth, but he could find no better one. "It showed a woman on the edge of a cliff, watching a great wave claim all the wolves in their long-boats below." He paused. "Albi believes the woman was the Great Mother herself; and that She was unable to stop any of it."

  Dip-rose, dip-rose, dip-rose. Whether she was listening or simply enduring him, he could not tell.

  "Of everything I know of our Great Mother," Fenris continued, "She is sovereign. If She had wanted to stop that wave—if She had wanted to pull those wolves from the water—She would have. She could have. That is….that is what bothers me." He looked at the fire. "In the Old Stories, The Great Flood was Her flood. Her punishment, sent down upon Isangrim's pack for their refusal to submit to their Alpha. The Great Mother it was who authored it; who unleashed it." He turned back to Hilda. "This was a different flood entirely. A different tale from the only one I know."

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  His jaw tightened–a deeply buried sense of righteous anger pressing into his chest with the rumble of a growl– "And if the Great Mother did not author it, Hilda, then what authority could? Aye, there is nothing. It is blasphemous to say so. It is blasphemous to think it. It is not the way things are."

  "Aye," she murmured into her moving hands, "though you misunderstand, Alpha. A Prophecy is not a vision for the way things are.” She glanced up briefly–he might have only imagined it—“A Prophecy is of the way things will be. All you wish to understand is what you already know of the past, Fenris.”

  The rain found a crack in the thatch above. A single drip struck the packed earth floor between his boots, then another. Splot. Splot. Splot. Fenris stared at the place where they fell, feeling as if he might come undone by them.

  "I cannot understand it. What could bring the Mother to Her knees?" His voice had an edge he had not intended to be directed towards her. "There is nothing, Hilda. There can be nothing. To say otherwise is—"

  "Blasphemy." The needle came down across the fabric; dip-rose, dip-rose.""What do you know about the Fates, Alpha Fenris?"

  The words felt peculiar in the closed air of their wolf-hut; wrong, somehow—a stone from a foreign river washed upon the bank of his familiar creek.

  "Nearly naught," he said. "I have heard the name. In passing, from wolves who have spent too long among humans and come back with their ideas tangled in their fur." He shook his head. "We are not men. The Great Mother holds our fate. Not Fate itself."

  Hilda looked at him. Something moved behind her eyes—cold, brief, there and gone.

  "Aye," she said only, then reached into her basket, found the small blade, and cut the brown thread with a single clean stroke. She held the severed end between her fingers for a moment, looking at it the way a woman looks at something she has been expecting—neither surprised nor pleased. Then she set it aside and drew out a new skein. White, this time. Pale as old bone. She thread it through the needle's eye, and said nothing, and let the silence do the work she had decided words could fully not.

  "My mother it was who taught me to weave." The shift was so sudden that Fenris almost spoke against it. He had not come for stories. But something in her face made him hold his tongue. "When I was small enough to sit fully upright in the cradle of her lap, I would watch her hands move above me while she worked at her loom. My mother had a true loom. A great, beautiful thing, though it is as lost to time now as she. Mama would let me choose the thread. That was the task of every babe-weaver. She would lay out her skeins—every color she had dyed and spun—and I would point to the one I wanted." A softness brushed against the hardened stone of her face, there and gone. "She would take my skein, thread the needle, and begin her silent weaving once again. I did not understand what she was making. I had no part in that. That was not the first lesson of a babe-weaver. The first lesson was to teach me that I had the power to choose. And when she was finished—and very often I would fall asleep before she would—she would wake me gently, cut the thread, and hold the work up to the light so I could see what my thread had become by the vision of her hands. A leaf. A wing. A river. A road." Hilda's voice dropped to a murmur. "Aye, it was beautiful, the vision my mother had." She spoke in rhythm with her own needlework, the words and the stitching moving together, one feeding the other. Dip-rise. Dip-rise. Dip-rise.

  "You have heard the story of my mother's disappearance. Every wolf in Black Rock has. It is one of Jorik's favorites—aye, because he loves a mystery for its questions." She glanced toward the door as if Jorik himself might be listening beyond it, or lurking in the rain outside. Then she turned back to her needling hands. "I was there when she left, Alpha Fenris. And no soul alive or dead knows that. And by the wisdom of your Elder you must take this to your grave-mound." She looked at him then, the first time she had all night, and the look was severe.

  "I will." Fenris swallowed, promising. "I swear it."

  "I heard her moving about in the night. It was well into the witching hour, and though it was not so uncommon to hear her at the loom in those small hours of the night, these be of different sounds. Careful ones." Hilda's hands stilled completely over her lap. The tremor in them was visible now, "I have always had an ear for patterns, Fenris, and there was something wrong about the way my mother’s feet were moving about the rushes, and all her quick little movings of things. So I rose from my furs. I found her at our table, packing a small satchel. Collecting things as if for a long journey. Her eyes were wild in the fire. My mother was not a wild woman. She was not given to fancies or frights. She did not see what was not there. Not unless it was a vision for her loom. And yet here she was before me in the dark of the night, moving as if she had seen a ghost scratching at the front of our door." Dip-rise, dip-rise, dip-rise. "I asked her, 'Mama, where are you going at this hour? Shall I wake Papa to go with you? What has happened?' She told me plainly a madness has taken hold of her. That an image had risen from her thread out of a pattern she was weaving, as though something had possessed her hands and wove what she had not seen herself. It was of the High Cliff at the top of Black Rock. It was of a young woman standing at its edge, looking down into her eyes—aye, and they were troubled. ‘I must go to her, Hildie. I have been summoned to help her.’ She promised she would return with haste. She told me not to wake my father. She made me swear on my life to tell no one where she had gone or what she had told me. And then she grabbed her satchel and walked out the door and into the dark, and I stood in the open door with the ghost of my mother left behind and watched the night seize her.

  "I was naught but five winters old when she left, and those ninety-two days had felt like ninety-two winters. I felt as if I had grown to be as old as an Elder and in the time she was gone." Hilda's needle paused, hovering above the fabric, her lip curled into an expression that might have wanted to be a smile, "The village legend says the Alpha Magnes had found Mama. And legends be scorned, Fenris—it was not him who found her. It was I. I found my mother standing rooted to the bank of the creek, as though she had grown through the ground and found a purchase she was refusing to give up. Alpha Magnes happened to be walking into the clearing, and the legend took shape around him, as legends will." Hilda's jaw tightened. "But I was there first. I stood before her, and she looked at me, but she did not see me. Whatever had happened in that cave, between her and the thing that called her there had taken her voice and soul and kept it. She never spoke again. Not one word, for all the rest of her life."

  The fire had burned lower, weakening and chilling the air. Hilda did not look at it. "From that day, it was me who did the threading. I would choose the color—as she had taught me—and thread the needle, and place it in her hand." Hilda's fingers moved through the motion, ghosting the memory. "Mama, do you remember? Do you remember how you would weave? Perhaps she did, in her mind. But her fingers no longer could. Whatever the loom had shown her had taken that from her too."

  She reached into her basket and drew out the small blade, turning it once in the firelight.

  "But the cutting. That she kept." She mimed the motion—a short, clean stroke through the air, decisive as a period at the end of a sentence. "Always the cutting of the thread at the end of the weaving, Alpha. Until she was too old and weak to sit beside me at the loom to do it. That was the only part that hadn’t been taken away. For all things have their end."

  "When she died, I was a young she-wolf still," Hilda said. "I had flowered, but was yet unmated, and was free in the way that only the unmated are free."

  She set the blade back at the rim of the basket.

  "I decided to go to the High Cliff while I still had this freedom. I don't know why. Guilt, perhaps, because I had let her go alone into the dark while I stood in that doorway like a coward. Or grief, as is so usually the case with our kind—we seek the places where our dead have walked before, as if we might find their paw-prints still warm in the earth. It is a weakness of the wolf-man, in no other creature the way it is in us. It is why we will never leave the forest of Skoltha." She took a slow, shaky breath. The tremor in her hands had returned, and she set her needle upon her lap, clasping her hands together to still them. "Well, Alpha Fenris," she said. "I found my mother’s cliff. I climbed the path my mother had climbed. And I found the cliff and the cave there waiting at the top, black as a missing tooth in the mountain's jaw. And do you know who I saw standing there, waiting for me?"

  Fenris said nothing. It was not a question for him to answer.

  "A girl," Hilda said. "Little. Could not have been more than four winters old, though I’ll never be certain of it. Her hair was white as the snow that sits on the mountain peaks and does not melt. And her eyes—" Hilda’s voice dropped to barely a whisper, "—her eyes were the color of amber-smoke."

  Fenris went very still. The air in the hut felt suddenly thin and insufficient, as though someone had covered the chimney above. He could feel his pulse in his throat, a heavy, deliberate thumping that seemed to drown out the rain against the shutters.

  "She did not speak," Hilda continued. "I frightened her, perhaps. No... she was not frightened. She knew I was coming. I only sometimes tell myself she was scared, but it is I who am scared of her. She was a ghost before me, one of noon-sun and not of moon-light. She did not behave like the ghosts of our stories. And she ran away from me, with bared feet slapping on the cliff’s surface, back from whence she came, deep into the dark of that cave where the light from the sun cannot reach. I followed her. Aye, I had climbed that far; I was not about to turn back for fear. But the moment my foot crossed the stone threshold—" she made a sharp, cutting gesture with her hand, "—blackness. Nothing. I woke upon the furs of my own bed, three days later, with a fever that had them ready to dig my mound." Her jaw tightened, the memory still bitter on her tongue.

  "My father told me I’d been found senseless outside the palisade wall, near the creek. That I would not say a word. My poor Papa. He must have seen the ghost of my mother in me then. A young sentry on his first dawn patrol had picked me up and carried me home. It was Blithur, of course. My husband, he would soon be. Though neither of us knew it then."

  “Did you ever try and go back?” Fenris asked in a whisper, “to the cave?”

  “Aye, many times. But the girl was no longer there, Fenris. And she wouldn’t be again. Not for a very long time.”

  “Why are you telling me this, Elder? I do not understand.”

  “Because it was not the Great Mother Wolf who sent Mama to that cave,” she said. “Nor was it the Great Mother sent that Beast to your mate’s bed.”

  Fenris’s mouth was dry. “Who then?”

  “It be the Loom. And the Weaver behind it.” The needle flashed, and a final dip-rise. “We are all of us naught but skeins in her basket—picked up when she pleases, threaded where she visions, cut when the pattern’s done. She is three made one, a maiden who chooses the thread, a mother who weaves at the loom, a crone who waits by the head, and cuts when the weaving is through.”

  “The Fates?” The word felt thin in his mouth, a thing borrowed from human tongues.

  “Aye.” Hilda’s eyes caught the firelight. “And even the Great Mother is naught but a thread upon Her loom.”

  She reached into her basket. Her hand came up with the small blade, turning it so the edge caught the flame—thin, patient, merciless as winter.

  “Every life is that, Fenris,” she said. “Naught but a thread. But thread must have weight, else the weave goes slack. You understand?”

  “The loom weight.” Fenris’s voice scraped his throat. “That….stone with the hole.”

  “A simple thing, is it not?” Hilda’s gaze did not waver. He stared at the blade. The fire popped, sending sparks upwards into the chimney. He heard the deeper meaning in her words, then; and when he searched the old Elder’s face in the fire-light that shadowed it, he saw the truth she wanted him to find all along.

  The answer to his question, true.

  “The cave.” he said.

  “Aye.” Hilda pulled the white thread tight across her lap. “The cave.”

  The blade came down. A single, clean stroke.

  "Aye, Alpha, the cave." Hilda confirmed.

  She set the blade aside. Her hands slid beneath the bunched fabric she had been working and lifted it like an offering, extending her arms to hold it out across the gap between them..

  Fenris took it. The wool was heavy, damp with the moisture of the hut, and warm from her lap. He rose from the stool and received it silently. With a long, tired exhale, he lifted its corners, and let the tapestry unfurl before them.

  The firelight danced over the image on the threads. Three figures stood upon a cliff, rendered in the fine, meticulous stitches he had watched her make all night—the brown thread for the earth, the grey for the stone, the white she had just cut for the hair that fell loose around their shoulders. A girl, slight and straight-backed. A woman, broad and steady. An old elder, bent beneath a cloak. All three wore grey cloaks. All three had hair the color of the snow. They stood shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the high precipice, looking down.

  Below them, the tapestry went black. Not the black of empty fabric, but a deep, textured black—threads upon threads worked so densely they drank the firelight and gave nothing back. A sea, or a void, or a flood waiting to rise.

  Fenris stared at it. The wool was rough against his fingertips. The image seemed to move, barely, with the flickering of the fire behind it.

  "Mind the rain," Hilda said.

  He looked up. She had already turned back to her basket, sorting the leftover skeins, her face closed and hidden.

  "There is a storm brewing," she said.

  He folded the tapestry once, twice, tucked it beneath his arm. The door groaned when he opened it.

  She called quietly from within, a clearing of her dried throat. He stopped but did not look back–his face had become a hot thing that might betray him, “Not every thread keeps the pattern it was woven for, Alpha. Some twist away from the loom and become something else entire. Aye, the Weaver must begin again. Either She loosens or cuts the threads altogether, and the weights will fall. For a loom cannot carry two tapestries at once.”