Work Text:
There were no wolves in Villefranche. There were dogs, and sometimes they strayed too far into the trees and went half-wild from it, but no wolves. Not any more.
But the forest was old and still held the shape of what had once been, and when Sabine had gone out into it for her first night alone under its boughs, she had come back carrying its gift. She could pull out the thick, shaggy coat of fur that lived hidden under her skin, and run through the woods on swift paws. She could smell the cooling trails left behind by the deer and the foxes and the voles, and the exhaust fumes from the log trucks rumbling down the access roads.
She could become a part of the forest, one of its living pieces, and she soon found that there were things that it—and she—didn’t like. The acrid smoke of burning garbage, and the bitter taste of fertilizers polluting ditches and streams.
The sawmill was a difficult thing, for the forest and doubly so for Sabine, who lived in both the forest and the village.
There had been a mill of some kind in Villefranche for a long, long time, and trees felled carefully, respectfully, were of no concern to the forest. Trees sprouted, and grew, and died, and more trees grew where they had fallen. Milling wood was something allowed between the forest and the village it surrounded. It kept Villefranche alive.
But there was a danger in the sawmill, and both the forest and Sabine could feel it growing as the years passed. It wasn’t the timber harvest itself, but it was the oil and the diesel that leaked carelessly from machines that weren’t fixed. The cigarette butts and plastic wrappers tossed to the side of the road. The talk of spraying herbicides for a better product and more profit. It was Gérald Steiner, who was careful but never respectful.
The forest had no love for Gérald, and Sabine agreed with it. She helped it as it set itself against him, slowly, one piece at a time. She kept watch with her wolf eyes and pulled together allies with her human hands. The forest exiled Gérald—how, she wasn’t sure, but there were many things that could weaken a heart, growing between the deep soil and the grey skies—but he still pulled the strings he had left behind in Villefranche, and Sabine fought hard to counter him.
She had to stretch her resources, risk some of her allies and recruit more, to try to keep him at bay. It troubled her, but there was one thing she always had on her side, should it ever come to it. She didn’t know if it started as a promise she made to the forest, or to herself, or one that it made to her, but it quickly had became all three. If Gérald meant to fight to the death, then Sabine had the wolf’s teeth the forest gave her, and for the forest, she would use them without regret.