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Kristen is ten years old, and she’s hiding in the barn.
Her parents are entertaining some priest from Fallinel. They had gotten out the good dishes for it, set the table with their finest lace tablecloth, and sent Kristen off to her room to wait to be called. Kristen knows that a good little girl would’ve sat quietly, maybe prayed or read her bible, and Kristen is a good little girl, she promises, but what a waste of a perfect fall day it would be to spend it cooped up in her room.
So she had given Bucky a honey candy she had saved from her birthday to keep him quiet, checked to make sure Bricker was still napping soundly in his crib, thrown open the shutters, and crawled out the window.
The ladder to the hayloft is solid under her fingers, worn smooth by consistent use. She reaches the top and throws herself down on a pile of hay, giggling. The air is warmer here than the outside, with all the heat trapped, but the wind blows through the cracks in the boards and Kristen can smell the crisp scent of fall.
She spends the next hour playing make-believe, only stopping when she hears her name being called from outside the house. She frantically pats her head down, remembering the braids her mother took such care on this morning. Her hands come away with hay where she brushes her fingers through, and shame fills her gut. she’s been so bad, she’ll have to pray an extra hour all week to make up for it.
Suddenly, the barn door opens, casting light on the dirt floor of the barn. An unfamiliar shadow cuts through it, an imposing broad-shouldered figure who calls out,
“Kristen? Are you in here? My name is Father Daybreak, I’ve come from Fallinel to talk to you.”
Kristen peeks her head out from behind the bale of hay, she can’t see anything more than Daybreak’s silhouette with the midday sun glaring behind him. He must spot her though, as he closes the door behind him. He crosses the barn, the hay that littered the floor softening his footsteps. When he ascends the ladder to the hayloft, he has to lean down to not hit his head on the roof of the barn. Kristen's mouth twitches at the corners at that, but she knows it would be rude to laugh. When he finally reaches her, kristen warily asks,
“You came to talk to me?”
Daybreak nods, says in a tone people usually talk to her younger brothers in,
“All the way from Fallinel. We heard Helio had a chosen one, is that you?”
Kristen furrows her brows, why was he asking? Surely her parents had already told him. Her mother tells the story every chance she gets. How Kristen had been born on the first day of August and cried like a barn owl all the way through it. How on her name day, the priest had taken Kristen from her mother’s arms and dipped her mop of strawberry blonde curls into the bowl of holy water, and the sun streamed in through the plain glass window and turned the water gold. How Kristen had opened her eyes, which had just been clear blue, and they were the golden-brown of the wheat outside. How the coming month had yielded the largest harvest in twenty years.
Kristen doesn’t remember any of that of course, but her eyes are still that golden brown, and she’s never known a bad harvest. The priest seems to be waiting for her answer, so she nods, and says,
“Mmhm.”
Daybreak seems distrustful of that, his expression turning more guarded. He takes a step back, and says lowly,
“I see.”
Kristen feels panic rise in her at the realization that he doesn’t believe her. She can already see her parents disappointed faces and the weeks of prayer to come, she has to fix this.
After a second, she gets an idea, and closes her eyes. Focuses on the feeling of the sun, and the dirt underneath her fingernails, and the tiny potted plants on the kitchen windowsill, and God with a hand in all of it. And when she opens her eyes, a ball of light rests in her open palms.
Daybreak’s eyes widen and he takes a step forward, putting his hand through it to test if it’s a trick, as so many visiting priests had done before. He looks up at her and smiles.
“That’s a neat trick! Now come on, dinner is almost ready, and a hayloft is no place for a lady such as yourself.”
He has a hand outstretched that Kristen doesn’t take. She corrects, tentative,
“I’m not a lady. Ladies live in castles and stuff.”
Daybreak gives her another secret smile, and says,
“Well, maybe you could live in a castle. Would you like that?”
Kristen furrows her brows. A castle would probably have lots of space, lots of people. Endless hallways to run around in and endless playmates to share the day with. The church there might even have stained glass, and no one would ever go hungry, with no baron to pay a tithe of their crop to. But Kristen would miss the fields, the smell of the herbs drying in the attic, the way the entire world was one open window away.
In the end, Kristen doesn’t get a choice in the matter. She and her family are on a ship to Fallinel by winter.
____
Kristen is thirteen when she meets Tracker O’Shaughnessy for the first time.
She’s waiting for a horse in the royal stables. The smell of hay, oats, and even manure are a comfort still, reminding her of her ‘humble origins’ as Daybreak would put it.
It wasn’t so long ago that all she would have to do to go on a ride was let her father know she’d be gone for a couple of hours and sprint to the barn, her horse saddled and bolting across the landscape before he could get a word in. She’d stop a second at the edge of the fields, and breathe in the air there. Now she had to get permission from Daybreak, ask the stablemaster, and wait for the stableboy to saddle her horse instead of doing it herself.
At least the late summer air isn’t as oppressive here. Summer in Solace had meant sweating through the back of her dress, meant long days sitting in church, warmth trapped between its wooden walls that could be only temporarily subsided with a fan. It meant the heat only breaking in the middle of the night with relief or the middle of the day with a crack of thunder and the fear of a ruined harvest. But it was cooler in Fallinel, the fog rolling in at dawn and lingering till midmorning, washed away by the sea breeze.
Bucky, Bricker, and Cork loved it, loved the mist in the mornings and the constant rain, the veridian green cliffsides and the grey stony beaches. Youth was a boundless land that stretched in front of them, and it took the shape of Fallinel. Kristen smiles at the memory of the feeling, a twinge of homesickness for the freedom of childhood going through her. Fallinel isn’t (and never would be) boundless for her. She left her freedom back at the edges of those fields.
There are so many rules here, what colors to wear and how to address people and which pursuits are godly and which are not. These rules largely pass her brothers by, but Kristen always feels as if she’s breaking them
Which is the exact feeling she gets as she watches the stableboy adjust the straps of the saddle.
He’s cast in shadow, the horse’s pen out of the way of any direct sunlight pouring in from the open bay doors at the front of the stables. He’s human, a sight she’s becoming unused to, but with a litheness and power in his movements, that makes Kristen think-
Again, there are rules at court. Things not to talk about, the stories that Kristen had grown up with that are always met with a scoff. But the hair on her arms stands on end underneath her dress, and her legs are locked in place. It’s just short of fear, of the time she caught a coyote in the henhouse, of the look in Lady Penelope’s eyes as she tied her favor to Dayne Blade’s lance at the joust.
The stableboy finishes the last buckle, runs a hand haphazardly through his hair, and meets Kristen’s eyes. The stableboy’s eyes are a rich dark brown, and he looks at her with something that Kristen doesn’t have a name for yet, before whatever it was retreats, and he asks,
“You all set?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer, leading the horse by its reins out to the open bay doors and the gated trampled field beyond it. Kristen half sprints to catch up, her shoes catching on the uneven dirt the way her boots never would.
The stableboy is waiting at the gate with a hand outstretched to help her up, and she knows she shouldn’t take it, for so many reasons. Another stableboy is looking at them out of the corner of his eye, delaying leading a horse back to the stable proper to see how this plays out, and she knows after one too many brushes with court politics that nothing stays a secret here. Kristen is more than capable of mounting a horse by herself.
But the stableboy has that look in his eye again as he keeps his hand outstretched, and he looks so tentatively confident that she’ll take it, and Kristen has never felt anything like this in her entire life-
She takes the hand.
And then she puts too much spring in her right foot and nearly overbalances to the other side, the only thing keeping her from falling the fact that she’s ridden more horses than she can count and the stableboy’s hand, who’s strong grip nearly pulls her arm out of her socket in the panic of the moment.
When she’s settled, the stableboy seems afraid to move, before realizing that their hands are still interconnected and jumping back, nearly startling the horse, who whinnies. Kristen gives an assuring sound back to calm it, before turning to the stableboy, and, not nearly as confidently as she had spoken to the horse, says,
“Thank you, um. Do you have a name?”
Kristen grimaces the second it comes out of her mouth, Of course he has a name! , and the stableboy seems as befuddled by this as he has a right to be, furrowing his brows and casting his eyes to the horse (possibly trying to ascertain if Kristen wants to know the horse’s name, which would have been an actual normal question, even if she already knew it. It’s Elaine.) and then finally answering,
“Do I- Yes, I have a name.”
Kristen blushes at the sound of his voice, higher pitched and smoother than it had been previously, maybe due to him being caught off guard. She tries to redeem herself,
“Yes, I mean, obviously you have a name. Everybody has a name, mine is Kristen, uh, Applebees. Sorry, Lady Kristen Applebees, sorry, the title is um, new.”
The stableboy takes a good ten seconds to simply look at her in awe before seemingly deciding that he thinks what’s just happened is funny. (It is, but that doesn’t make Kristen any less frustrated or confused or whatever emotion is roiling in the pit of her chest right now.)
He at least has the decency to try and fight a smile, but he loses, and a wild toothy grin spreads across his face. His mouth stretches at the corners, and Kristen can see that he has dimples. Something unravels in her chest, and for a second, all Kristen wants is to keep that smile there as long as possible.
And a single coherent thought rings through her, clear as a church bell,
This is going to ruin me.
The stableboy shakes his head in disbelief as he looks up at her. He undoes the latch on the gate without breaking eye contact, and the gate swings open, the road to inner Fallinel and the grassy hills that were just enough like home for Kristen to ache with it suddenly open and waiting for her. Kristen doesn’t break the gaze of the stableboy, who looks up at her through long eyelashes before saying,
“Well, Lady Kristen Applebees, I hope you have a lovely ride.”
Kristen’s breath hitches, and before she can recover enough to say anything he starts to head back to the stables. His gait is a slow one, as if he’s expecting Kristen to stop him. Indignance spikes in Kristen’s chest as she realizes she’s going to prove him right, calling out,
“Wait! Your name!”
He turns around and walks backward as he brings a hand to amplify his shout, an unnecessary gesture that just brings more attention to his mouth, his full lips with just a hint of a curl of a smile showing a flash of sharp teeth, a younger Kristen would call them fangs and a wiser one would call them dangerous-
“My name’s Tracker! Tracker O’Shaughnessy!”
Kristen does not, in fact, have a lovely ride. She does have a not-so-lovely crisis.
______
Kristen is fourteen, and she promises that this time, she didn’t mean to hide in the barn.
The stables had become a place of comfort to her. The smell of the leather in the tack room and the hay in the hayloft were familiar, and the ritual of bridling and saddling her own horse (once she finally convinced the stableboy she knew what she was doing) was relaxing. The stable was constantly in flux, some days so busy Kristen didn’t get a stray glance her way, and some days so slow Kristen could sit on the gate, legs swinging with her skirts, and talk to Tracker while he swept.
Kristen didn’t rightly know how to feel about Tracker. He was the stablemaster’s nephew, his uncle had taken him in after things “turned south” with his parents, and Kristen wasn’t so insensitive as to ask for specifics. He didn’t offer much in the way of conversation, but he was an active listener, and he always remembered little things.
For instance, three months ago Kristen had been mourning for the farm cat the Applebees had had to leave behind in Solace;
“He was so lazy, he didn't catch any mice, he layed in the sun all day and we let him because he was just so cute, Tracker I swear you’ve never seen such a cute cat, he was tabby with white paws and a white belly and the greenest eyes, we called him Pumpkin. Ugh, I miss him so much.”
Tracker gives her a teasing grin,
“What happened to him?”
Kristen tries to fight a wave of grief that would be unbecoming, Riz lost his father, Zayn Darkshadow is an orphan, and here she is grieving for a cat that may be perfectly fine. But she misses Pumpkin, his deep purr, and the way he'd let her stick her face into his soft belly when she was sad. She answers sullenly,
“We had to give him to the neighbors. No cats on the ship,” she looks around, suddenly realizing something, “You know, I don't think I’ve seen a cat since I got here. Don't you guys have stable cats? To keep the mice away from the hay?”
Tracker suddenly tenses where he’s resting his weight on his broomstick. He averts his eyes and clears his throat before saying,
“Oh definitely, yes, absolutely we have stable cats. How else would we keep the mice out? Haha.”
Tracker less laughs and more just says haha. Kristen chooses not to question it, perking up at the idea of there being cats,
“How many? Where are they? Do they have names?”
Tracker opens his mouth to answer, before tilting his head, seemingly hearing something Kristen doesn’t. He smiles apologetically,
“That’s Jawbone, I’ve got to get a horse ready for Lady Figueroth-”
Kristen interrupts him, a habit she’s trying to break because his voice is calming and she so rarely gets to hear it, but she simply can’t in the face of an obvious misdirection,
“Tracker! Tracker did you not NAME them?”
Tracker is already walking away, a hand raised in a goodbye.
Now all this was a fairly mundane and forgettable conversation, but Tracker had pulled her aside last week, held her hand to lead her up to the hayloft, and tiptoed over to a large woven basket, in which was a raggedy knit quilt, and six kittens.
One of the kittens opens its eyes, catches sight of them. The fur on the back of its neck stands up, and it scrunches up its face and hisses, looking not unlike Riz when he hasn’t slept in a couple of days.
Tracker looks sheepish, explains,
“Cats don’t like me very much. But,” He picks up an orange one by the scruff of its neck and places it into Kristen’s arms, “I was thinking… We could call this one Pumpkin?”
And so of course Kristen took it upon herself to visit the kittens every day. If she had to pray for an extra hour every night to make up for the lessons she missed, then that was perfectly acceptable to her.
And if she fell asleep in the hayloft while watching them, then that was… less acceptable. But the hay had been soft and the sun had cast such pretty lights through the slotted boards on the kittens. It had felt like a dream world up there, like any second she would wake up back in Solace, the rooster crowing and the moon setting out her window.
Kristen wakes up of course, not to that, but to the sound of the kittens’ mother, whom she had named Gwen, curled around them protectively. It’s a low warning growl Kristen hasn’t heard Gwen use before, though she knows it from Pumpkin.
It’s almost completely dark, the only light the full moon coming in through the bay doors. Kristen curses, it must be really late, or possibly very early. The stables are otherwise abandoned, and Kristen stalls a second at the open doors. Shouldn’t those be closed? A montage of every time Tracker has walked her back to her quarters goes through Kristen’s head, the act of her and Tracker closing the large wooden doors to meet in the middle a fixture in every one.
And Tracker checks the kittens at the end of every shift, he should have seen Kristen and woken her up. Even if he hadn’t checked the kittens for some reason, she’s never known him to be anything but militantly diligent about his work, what had happened that he made such an obvious oversight?
Unless he didn’t. Unless he closed the doors and someone (or something) broke in.
Dread settles over Kristen and takes root in her stomach. She swallows and shrinks into herself, clutching the gold pendant at the end of her necklace, she opens her mouth to start praying before abruptly closing it. Any sound made in the stillness would be as good as a scream, and Kristen can’t risk it.
Kristen stays there, shrunk in the corner of the hayloft, for an amount of time she wouldn’t be able to tell if her life was on the line. Seconds definitely, minutes probably, hours maybe. The moon is her only company, almost disappearing on the horizon as Kristen can see the hints of blue creep in to replace the midnight black.
After an eternity, Kristen convinces herself that she’s being paranoid, and begins the slow crawl to the top of the ladder. She hikes up her skirts, tying them into a bundle with a pin from her pocket, before descending. she grips each rung with white knuckles and she cringes at every soft brush her leather shoes make against the wood. She reaches the base with a sigh of relief that doesn’t last. Kristen sees the horse to her left back up in its pen, and whinnies with nerves that it should never have in only Kristen’s presence. With trembling resignation, she steels herself, and turns around.
There in the middle of the bay doors, its back to the moon, is a large dark brown wolf.
Kristen swallows. She’s going to die here, on the floor of this stable, her guts ripped out by this wolf, and oh god, Tracker is the first in in the morning, he’s going to find her body-
Mac Applebees’s voice fills her mind,
Kristen is seven years old, and a coyote is in the hen house, a chicken’s neck snapped between its jaws. Kristen freezes, and her father, to her side, clenches the hand placed on her shoulder,
“Don’t run. Don’t turn your back. He’ll attack.”
Kristen digs her heels into the ground. Her father is beside her with a hand on her shoulder and God is behind her with a hand in the earth, the fields, this is his domain and she is his champion. She will not run. She will not turn her back.
Kristen is fourteen years old in a stable just before dawn, and no one has a hand on her shoulder. This part Fallinel is unharvestable, God’s fingers blocked by the jagged rocks and the sea ever coming to crash up against them. This is not his domain and she has failed as his champion, sought the company of heretics, abandoned her homeland. She clutches her necklace. She’s alone, and God is less behind her than he has ever been.
“Make yourself look bigger. Make a whole lotta noise, and if that doesn’t scare him off, throw your basket. You’re not tryna hurt him, just scare him off.”
Kristen straightens her back, digs her heels in, and screams.
The wolf pounces on her in a second, and Kristen goes down kicking to high hell, if she’s going down she’s not going down without a fight. The air in her lungs suddenly leaves her as she hits the hard-packed earth, and she snaps her jaw shut, cutting her scream short. She lashes out with her arms, trying to hold the wolf’s teeth at bay, the same way she held the farm dogs at bay when they tried to lick her face, but now it’s her life on the line instead of her dignity-
It takes her a couple of seconds to notice the wolf isn’t snapping at her. She realizes as the wolf carefully avoids landing on her windpipe as it pushes back against her, it was trying to shut her up. Its fur is silky where she fists in it, and she feels the bones under it shift, which gives her a surge of hope and disgust, Did I do that? , before the wolf seems to notice as well, and abruptly stops, skittering back.
She looks up to face it, only for horror to settle in as she watches its skin ripple, bones audibly cracking and shifting under it. It seems to bite back a howl, instead electing to whimper in pain. She rises to her hands and knees, spits blood on the ground, she had bitten her tongue on the way down. Kristen casts her eyes to the ladder, not a foot from her, and then to the wolf, writhing on the ground.
She crawls towards the wolf.
Kristen tries to find her faith somewhere in her shaking hands as she lays them on the wolf, sighs in relief as a soft light emanates from them, the bones continuing to break and shift but the wolf’s whimpers slowing. Kristen holds her breath as its spine cracks, elongating, and its jaw shortens, showing an eerily familiar flash of teeth before they’re swallowed by full lips. The fur Kristen had carded through in her attempt to heal it retreats, leaving tan skin dotted with freckles and moles, and Kristen doesn’t have the presence of mind to let go, she instinctively rubs the figure’s back as its- Their shoulderblades slot into the right place with a nauseating ripping sound.
The whimpers turn to wheezes, and then ravenous intakes of breath. The figure manages to prop themselves up on an elbow, and as the last of the fur disappears along the trail of the nape of their neck, they turn, and Kristen meets familiar dark eyes. Tracker O’Shaughnessy lays broken at her feet.
Kristen’s breath catches in her throat as she suddenly realizes Tracker is naked. She quickly unties one of her petticoats to lay over him. And then shock comes over her as she realizes what she just saw, looks at Tracker wide-eyed,
“You’re a girl?!”
Tracker looks at her incredulously,
“I’m a wolf.”
Tracker’s ears twitch off to the side, their eyes widening. They quickly grab Kristen’s hand and haul her up to standing, whispering under their breath so that only Kristen can hear,
“Someone must have heard you screaming, I’ve gotta hide, if we get caught together like this we’re as good as dead.”
Kristen blinks, everything catching up to her, she had thought her blood would be soaking the ground by now, and that Tracker would be on their knees cradling her body in their arms. But Tracker was a wolf in human skin, a monster, everything Kristen’s father had ever warned her of as he tucked her into bed in the shape of a kindhearted stableboy. And yet Kristen trusts them.
She squeezes Tracker’s hand in hers once before nodding, and opens her mouth,
“Go.”
Tracker bolts towards the tack room, slamming the door shut as quietly as they can, just in time for one of the guards to come running in with a lit lantern.
He scans the room before his eyes fall upon her,
“Lady Kristen, are you alright? I heard a scream.”
Kristen keeps her eyes firmly away from the tack room, puts a little embarrassment in her voice as she says,
“I- I fell asleep in the hayloft and I fell off, I’m so sorry for the trouble. Could I get an escort to my quarters?”
The guard sighs, in annoyance or relief Kristen doesn’t know. He leisurely strolls up to her and offers her an arm, which Kristen takes, and then leads her towards the open doors, the moon tucked somewhere below the horizon, the sun having taken its place, and out of the stables.
_____
Kristen doesn’t see Tracker O’Shaughnessy for almost two months.
It’s not that she’s trying to avoid Tracker, it’s just that every time she starts heading towards the stables, she instead goes to church.
She spends long nights kneeling in front of the dais, trying to find god somewhere in the hollow of her stomach.
On her fifteenth birthday, she takes her vows.
Daybreak looks down at her expression, solemn and pious, and smiles.
(And when she utters the words, I take the vow of chastity, I vow to marry only at god’s command, I vow to remain uninfringed upon until such time, I vow that I shalt not love any as I love him, she means them. She promises that she means them.)
Her mother has tears of joy running down her face, and her father has the tight jaw he has when he’s trying not to show emotion, and Cork tugs on her new cloak with wide eyes, and Riz gives her a small smile when his mother comes to congratulate her, and she’s fine. This is all she ever wanted.
Riz knocks on the window to her quarters three days later with a note.
“You’re a bit old to be a page. And I do have a door.”
Riz rolls his eyes and climbs in the window, handing her a folded piece of parchment with the name “Kristen” scrawled in neat letters, and the stablemaster’s wax seal unbroken on the fold. His voice is defensive as he says,
“I’m not giving your parents another reason to try and execute me. Your stableboy wants to talk to you.”
Kristen ignores the comment about Tracker,
“And your way of avoiding that is to climb in through the window in the dead of night?”
He’s already halfway out the window, and he has to crane his neck towards her as he replies,
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Lady Kristen.”
The note had said to meet Tracker at the edge of the grasslands that start to creep up the farther you get from the sea, on the main road out of the capitol, at sunset, which was annoyingly vague. The sky is overcast and when Kristen crests the top of the first hill she can see the dale below is obscured by thick fog.
Tracker is waiting for her at the bottom of it. They stand awkwardly with their hands in their pockets, their dark blue tunic billowing in the wind, and when they see her they give her a relieved smile. Kristen reflexively returns it, and the movement feels foreign on her lips.
Tracker opens their mouth to say something, and Kristen doesn’t let them, blurts out,
“Is Tracker O’Shaughnessy your real name?”
Tracker goes through a few different expressions, deliberates before saying,
“Does it matter? Everybody who matters knows me by that name. Jawbone wasn’t born with the name Jawbone, and everyone still calls him that-”
Kristen’s eyes widen slightly before she manages to school her expression into a neutral one. Tracker catches it though, as they always do, and their mouth twitches up at the corners just a bit before they say,
“Did you- Did you think the name my uncle was born with was Jawbone?”
Kristen looks down, grumbles,
“I don’t know, maybe your family just has weird naming traditions-”
Tracker throws their head back and laughs, a rough and unreserved thing that almost gets lost on the wind. Kristen can’t help but smile at it. Tracker slowly calms down and shakes their head at Kristen fondly, before saying,
“Tracker was a childhood nickname, and now it’s my name. It might not be in the O’Shaughnessy family bible, but it’s my name.”
Kristen slowly nods. She forces herself to meet Tracker’s eyes as she asks,
“Can you just. Start at the beginning? Were you… always like this?”
Tracker’s face turns solemn and they take a breath before saying,
“I... was not always like this, no.”
Tracker looks off into the distance, runs a hand through their hair and continues when Kristen doesn’t interrupt,
“I mean, you know a lot of it. I was born in Solace. I was a good kid, you know. I was… I was a lot like you. I made friends easily, I was pretty, I was devout. Not Helio’s chosen level devout, but I could quote scripture. I wanted to be a nun, actually.”
Kristen looks at Tracker as if for the first time, tries to slot them into her childhood. Tracker behind her in the pews on sunday, Tracker with unruly limbs knocking against hers as they played in the hayloft, Tracker’s faint freckles across their nose turning vibrant from the long days in the sun. Kristen almost aches for it in a way, to have known them in childhood, when every feeling was unnamable and when you finally found a name for it, clumsy on the tongue, it sounded like a blessing instead of a curse.
Tracker’s expression is wistful and nostalgic, and if Kristen didn’t know them so well she wouldn’t be able to see the dull sorrow behind it as they continue,
“And then I got bit.”
Tracker rolls up their pant leg and rolls down their stocking, revealing a muscled calf with a gnarly scar. It’s stretched where Tracker’s grown with it, with white indentations where teeth had rent flesh from bone. Kristen takes a sharp breath and Tracker quickly pulls their stocking back up and their pant leg down, tucking it into their boot. Their face is guarded, but their voice wavers a bit as they say,
“No one thought I'd live. They’d have cut off the leg if they had thought I’d survive the infection.” Tracker laughs defeatedly, “But, you know, I did. They called it a miracle. At least until the full moon came around and I ripped all the goats’ throats out.”
Kristen lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding, an imperceptible reaction that Tracker, of course, perceives,
“I know. I was eleven. At the time, It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and now-” Tracker looks her in the eyes, “I’m so fucking glad I didn’t kill anyone.”
Kristen stuffs her hands in her pockets, tries for a light tone,
“You didn’t kill me.”
Tracker gives her that look again, the nameless one, with a shade of resignation,
“You’re different.”
(Somewhere behind the walls Kristen has spent her entire life putting up, she’s brought to knees by this. Kristen wants to dig her fingers into Trackers back as she sobs into their shoulder, wants to know why, why every long late-night walk with them back to Kristen’s quarters feels like a dance she knows all the steps to, why the roughness of Tracker’s voice sounds like home, why Tracker looks at her like that and Why am i different?)
Tracker breaks the moment, putting the hand that had been in their hair back in their pocket and continuing,
“They locked me up, obviously. I don’t know if they would’ve killed me, but I didn’t want to find out. I knew Jawbone was here, and that he was like me. So I hitchhiked to the coast. but when I got there, It’s- I didn’t have any money to book passage. So I cut my hair, and joined a crew that was going to Fallinel.” Tracker shrugs, “It was the easiest decision of my life. And then I got here, and if I was Jawbone's niece, there were going to be questions. But if I was a boy? I could get a job. I could take over the stables when he got old. I wouldn’t have to worry about marriage. It wasn’t even a question, and it’s not like I was ever really-”
Tracker sighs, pulling their arms out of their pockets and crossing them. Kristen asks, tentative,
“So... Are you? A girl? Or are you a man now?”
Tracker chews on their bottom lip the way they do when they’re contemplating,
“It’s complicated. When I was little I felt like a girl, but I don’t think I knew how to feel like anything else. I’m not a man, I know that. I can talk like one and move like one and wear their clothes, but that’s- I don’t really know how to explain it except that those things feel like mine in a way that manhood doesn’t. And I don’t think-” Tracker sighs again, kicks a clump of grass frustratedly, “I don’t know that I’m really a woman either. I don’t talk like a woman or move like one and I don’t want the things women are supposed to want. I don’t know if there’s some intrinsic womanhood feeling. I don’t think I have it if there is.”
Tracker quiets for a moment, as if realizing something. They smile and there’s almost a laugh in their voice as they say,
“Like I said in the stables. I’m not a woman, and I’m not a man, but I am a wolf.”
Kristen cracks a smile at that, says softly,
“Okay.”
Tracker’s eyes widen at this, tentative excitement coming over their face. Kristen feels the last vestiges of summer in her chest as she watches them, warm and intangible, as they say,
“Wait, really? That makes sense to you?”
Kristen furrows her brows, waits a moment before saying,
“No, but neither does anything else. Do you still want me to call you- when I talk to Jawbone about you, ‘she’? or ‘they’? or ‘he’?”
Tracker has their toothy smile back in full, and shrugs as they answer,
“As long as you keep using he around people who don’t know, ‘they’ is fine. Jawbone uses ‘they’ when we’re alone, but he’s a really good liar and you-”
Tracker stops themself before accidentally insulting Kristen, but Kristen smiles something teasing and says,
“And I what?”
Tracker looks pained,
“Are an amazing friend? Are too devout to ever utter a lie?”
Kristen rolls her eyes and sweeps Tracker up in a hug. They’re solid and inhumanly warm where Kristen presses her forehead into the crook of their neck. Tracker freezes, and then brings their arms up around Kristen’s back, exhaling. And late tonight, when she remembers this moment, the sting of Tracker’s last words is all but lost, and the only thing she can recall is Tracker’s heartbeat, beating in tandem with her own.
_____
Kristen was never very good at school.
She isn’t dumb. She was never good at quoting scripture, but she could understand the meaning behind the meaning, and where others were stopped by unnecessary flowery language, she understood.
School in Fallinel had been frustrating, but ultimately worth it in the end, no matter how much she begged her parents to let her stay home. She had only had one teacher from five until the time she left, a kind woman with long hair the color of butterscotch candy named Miss Mallory. Kristen remembers a time when she struggling with math, near tears because the numbers didn’t make sense, why did she even need to learn numbers, she was just going to grow up and be a farmer- and Miss Mallory had knelt near her desk, and calmly tried to explain, until Kristen finally got it. When Kristen left for Fallinel at ten, Miss Mallory had held her close in a hug, and whispered to Kristen, stay curious.
Lessons in Fallinel were different. Kristen often had different teachers for different subjects, and despite the small class size, none of them ever deigned to get to know her. The other girls in her lessons shared this prerogative. They were not unkind, just distant. At first, Kristen had wanted so badly to connect with them, their elusive rituals and secret smiles, but as hard as she tried, there was a gap between them that Kristen could never quite cross. Now, years later, all Kristen wants is to get through the day. This was exceptionally hard when the rest of the girls seemed to make it their personal mission to keep her from doing this.
The teacher had left the room, instructing the girls to study quietly. So, of course, the girls were instead gossipping about anything and everything. The coming party from Leviathan and Lady Penelope’s new betrothal to Dayne Blade had morphed into a general discussion on boys, a topic Kristen had never been inclined to comment on.
Lady Ilsevel giggles, then asks the room,
“Who do you think is the most handsome boy at court?”
A chorus of noise erupts from this. Kristen resigns herself to the fact that the next half hour is lost, and listens to a number of arguments. A variety of candidates are fought for (Lady Aerith is staunchly for Riz for the first couple of minutes, which brings an amused smile to Kristen's face) and by the end of it, there’s a split tie between Zayn Darkshadow and Jem Peppercorn. Kristen is honestly almost having fun until a wave of dread comes over her as she realizes that she’s the tiebreaker.
All the girls are staring at her expectantly, and Kristen smiles and awkwardly starts to say,
“My vows don’t really permit me-”
Lady Penelope rolls her eyes, taunts,
“Oh, and your stableboy is conveniently left out of those vows?”
Kristen reels from this, taken aback. Guilt with no home floods her voice, turns it small and quiet,
“I don’t know what you’re implying, Lady Penelope.”
Lady Penelope leans slightly forward, narrowing her eyes. Kristen tries to keep a casual air about her, but she knows what she must look like. Her chest rising and falling just a bit too quickly with her shaky breaths, her hands white-knuckled where they grip the gilded edges of her bible, her eyes cast down to her shoes, worn from all the mud she’s cleaned off them. Lady Penelope’s voice is laced awe as she asks,
“By God, did you actually break your vows?”
Kristen tightens her jaw. She’s overcome with anger, how dare she? Kristen had never so much as looked at a man in an unholy way, has never been overcome the lust that plagued the others, in her fifteen years she has kept every vow, and now Lady Penelope chooses to accuse her of fornication?
Kristen’s honor is spared from whatever half-thought out verbal assault Kristen would have launched at Penelope, by Lady Figueroth, whose expression is one of quiet seething anger as she bites more than says,
“That’s enough, Lady Penelope.”
Lady Penelope raises her eyebrows. The rest of the girls chatter nervously, waiting to see if Lady Penelope will rise to challenge this. Lady Penelope simply waits a moment before smiling the fake congenial smile that paints most ladies at court, seventeen and already a sorrowfully perfect fit for the role, and says,
“Oh I am so glad that the bastard and the whore have found each other. What a fitting friendship.”
This time, it’s Kristen who holds Lady Figueroth back, grabbing her arm so that she can’t reach Lady Penelope when she charges her, and by the red wisps of magic wrapping around Lady Figueroth’s fingers, whatever Lady Figueroth’s plan was, it wouldn’t have ended well.
Kristen pulls Lady Figueroth to her side, whispers in her ear,
“It’s not worth it. Let’s just go.”
Lady Figueroth gives one last snarl at Lady Penelope, whose face is still masked with that eerie smile. Lady Figueroth whips around to start walking towards the door. Kristen's hand on her arm falls, and Lady Figueroth dexterously catches it and intertwines their fingers. She leads them out of the room without a look back in Kristen’s direction.
They only make it to a random hallway before Kristen realizes she’s crying. She falters, backs up against a stone wall and slides down it. Lady Figueroth turns around, having noticed Kristen's hand slipping out of hers, and her face turns from that quiet rage to one of awkward sympathy. She looks from side to side as if searching for someone else to handle the situation before kneeling in front of Kristen, tries for a soothing tone that’s somewhat lessened by the grimace on her face, and says,
“Hey... it’s alright. Fuck Penelope, Penelope doesn’t even matter. In a year she’ll be married, and we won’t have to deal with her anymore. Nobody actually thinks you broke your vows.”
Kristen's heart beats hard in her chest, and she feels so painfully alive in this moment. It was impossible, what Penelope had implied. Tracker wasn’t a man, and Kristen was not a whore. Yes, there were moments where Tracker’s hand lingered in Kristen's when they guided her onto a horse or up into the hayloft. Yes, Kristen's dreams were plagued by the solid feeling of Tracker’s chest against her own, the phantom remnants of the hug they shared. But still, nothing had come of it. She had held fast, and Tracker had never touched her in a way that felt anything less than holy.
She’s almost calmed down, the stone on the back of her head cool and reassuring, when she remembers;
You made a vow against that too.
She feels the same as she had at thirteen. A copper church bell rings through her, shatters the stained glass windows and knocks her off her feet and makes her grit her teeth till she can taste the metal reverb in her mouth. A ghost of her kneeling at the dais is blown away in the wake of it with one last whisper in Kristen’s ear,
I shalt not love any as I love him.
Lady Figueroth doesn’t seem to notice, or if she does, she’s kind enough not to show it. She clumsily helps Kristen to her feet and links their arms. She starts talking as they walk down the hallway, slowing her pace so Kristen can get herself together,
“Penelope says a bunch of shit that isn’t true, people will always say a bunch of shit that isn’t true. You gotta not let it get to you. Even if it is true, like, what does it matter? Is it really such an attack on Penelope’s delicate sensibilities if you broke your dumb vows or my dad’s not my actual dad? I swear, one day I'll run away. Oooh, maybe I'll join those pirates as their bard. I'm Fig, by the way. Just Fig, none of the lady stuff. Like, how are you going to call me a bastard and still use my title? How do I still have a title if it comes from my dad who clearly-” Fig gestures to her horns poking through her hairstyle, “-isn’t my dad? That doesn’t make any sense.”
Fig spends the rest of the day filling the spaces where Kristen is supposed to speak, and Kristen can almost hear her new friend’s monologue through the still ringing truth in her mind;
I broke my vows.
_____
Kristen is fifteen years old, and she’s hiding in the barn.
Tracker has that wolfish smile that they get this time of the month, mostly teeth and a shade of feral that makes Kristen shiver. The harvest moon is almost full and Tracker is basking in the light it gives, coming in through the second-floor window, not yet shuttered for the night. They so rarely get to be like this, Kristen knows, unburdened, themself without consequence.
Kristen wishes Tracker could always be this way. That she could stave off the phases of the moon and keep the sun at bay, that the court would stay sleeping and she and Tracker could build a life in this single night. But that’s a fantasy, and Kristen isn’t a child anymore. She knows what she can’t have.
Eventually Kristen will marry, or be sent away to some foreign land to spread the word of a god she doesn’t even know if she still believes in. Eventually someone will catch Tracker’s eye.
Maybe someone already has.
Kristen remembers Ragh Barkrock’s arm around Tracker after Fig’s concert at the pub, the casual interconnectedness of their limbs in their drunkenness, how they had seemed like puppets controlled by the same puppetmaster, this casual easy kinship Kristen could never emulate no matter how hard she tried. She tries to keep the bitterness out of her voice as she says,
“Ragh Barkrock seems quite taken with you.”
Tracker shifts to look at her, eyes wide, and Kristen can’t meet them as she continues,
“It would be a good marriage. You could be yourself- not a boy or a girl, I mean. I hear pirates care less for that sort of thing. I could see you as a pirate.”
Kristen takes a swig of her apple cider, a bit of foam catching on her lip. She licks it away and laughs, with a brokenness she can’t place the origin of,
“Will you tell him what you are? Do wolves like the sea?”
When she turns to hear Tracker’s answer, Tracker simply stares at her. There’s that look in their eyes that even after two years, Kristen can’t name. Tracker parts their lips, says softly,
“My Lady Kristen, Ragh isn’t- he knows what I am.”
They look so quietly confused, as if the idea of Ragh and them hasn’t ever crossed their mind. Who knows, maybe it hasn’t. It took two years for Kristen to realize the depths of her own feelings. Tracker continues,
“And he knows that I am not of that persuasion. I thought you did as well.”
The term is familiar, has been whispered around her in the past months more times than she can count. Kristen had never asked, the word always seeming to mean something hidden. It calls to mind the raised eyebrows in the church as the crown princess dubbed her first knight, the sympathetic looks Lady Aerith gets whenever she mentions Riz, all the whispers whenever word of Adaine’s marriage comes around.
Kristen nods her head from side to side, gives a soft,
“No.”
Tracker smiles sadly, and Kristen waits with bated breath as Tracker lifts their hand, slowly, to cup Kristen’s chin. Kristen has the thought that Tracker can probably hear her heartbeat right now. She waits a moment, watches Tracker watch her and-
Kristen worships the god of the harvest. She worships the way the fields turn gold in september, of the sun that streams through stained glass windows as the priest reads scripture. She knows this, even though she has faltered. That this has what had chosen her as a child. But the sound of the night hums around her like no words she’s heard from a priest in a long time.
Helio had chosen Kristen as a child, but Kristen isn’t a child anymore. Tracker holds Kristen’s chin like water in their hands, like they can see the moon reflected in Kristen’s wide eyes. Tracker holds Kristen like they’ve seen god, and they’re choosing Kristen instead.
And then, without hesitation, they kiss her.
Tracker’s lips taste of sharp apples, and it’s over before it’s even really begun, Tracker scooting back with a fiery blush across their nose, hanging their head in shame as they say,
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, that was wrong of me, just because you’re fine with my persuasion doesn’t mean you feel the same, I’m sorry-”
Kristen’s struck by the memory of the Applebees’ farm dog with a bird between its teeth, Kristen's mother chiding it for it’s nature. Kristen looks at Tracker, who is still apologizing, and vows, maybe the only true one she’s ever taken, that she will never do the same.
Kristen reaches a hand to the back of Tracker’s neck, who falls silent, dark eyes flicking to Kristen's lips, which quirk in a smile. She finally has a name for the look in them. She pulls Tracker in and kisses them again.
Kristen is fifteen years old, and she’s done hiding.