The Book Of Lost Things

The new king! The reminder of what he had come to do brought the Crooked Man to his senses, even as more wolves and Loups appeared behind Leroi and a patrol of whites began to creep in from the south. For a moment, all was still as the wolves regarded their most despised foe standing over the dying she-wolf. Then, with a cry of triumph, the Crooked Man waved his bloody blade in the air and ran. Instantly, the wolves followed, pouring through the trees, their eyes bright with the thrill of the chase. One white wolf, sleeker and faster than the rest, separated itself from the pack, trying to cut off the Crooked Man’s escape. The ground sloped down to where the Crooked Man was running, so that the wolf was about ten feet above him when its hind legs bent and it catapulted itself into the air, its fangs bared to tear out its quarry’s throat. But the Crooked Man was too wily for it, and as it jumped he spun in a neat circle, his blade held high above his head, and sliced open the wolf from below. It fell dead at his feet, and the Crooked Man ran on. Thirty feet, now twenty, now ten. Ahead of him he could see the tunnel entrance, marked by earth and dirty snow. He was almost upon it when he saw a flash of red to his left and heard the swish of a sword slicing through the air. He raised his own blade just in time to block Leroi’s saber, but the Loup was stronger than he had expected and the Crooked Man stumbled slightly, almost falling upon the ground. Had he done so all would have ended quickly, for Leroi was already preparing to deliver the death blow. Instead, the blade cut through the Crooked Man’s garments, barely missing the arm beneath, but the Crooked Man pretended that a grave injury had been inflicted. He dropped his blade and staggered backward, his left hand clutched to the imaginary wound on his right arm. The wolves surrounded him now, watching the two combatants, howling their support for Leroi, willing him to finish the job. Leroi raised his head and snarled once, and all of the wolves fell quiet.

“You have made a fatal error,” said Leroi. “You should have stayed behind the castle walls. We will breach them, in time, but you might have lived a little longer had you remained within their confines.”

The Crooked Man laughed in Leroi’s face, which was now, except for some unruly hairs and a slight snout, almost human in appearance.

“No, it is you who are mistaken,” he said. “Look at you. You are neither man nor beast, but some pathetic creature who is less than both. You hate what you are and want to be what you cannot truly become. Your appearance may change, and you may wear all the fine clothes that you can steal from the bodies of your victims, but you will still be a wolf inside. Even then, what do you think will happen once your outer transformation is complete, when you start to resemble fully what once you hunted? You will look like a man, and the pack will no longer recognize you as its own. What you most desire is the very thing that will doom you, for they will tear you apart and you will die in their jaws as others have died in yours. Until then, half-breed, I bid you…farewell!”

And with that, he disappeared feet first into the mouth of the tunnel and was gone. It took Leroi a second or two to realize what had happened. He opened his mouth to howl in rage, but the sound that emerged was a kind of strangled cough. It was as the Crooked Man had said: Leroi’s transformation was almost complete, and his wolf voice was now being replaced by the voice of a man. To hide his surprise at the loss of his howl, Leroi gestured at two of his scouts, indicating that they should proceed toward the tunnel mouth. They sniffed warily at the disturbed earth, then one swiftly poked its head inside, quickly pulling it back out in case the Crooked Man was waiting below. When nothing happened, it tried again, lingering longer. It sniffed the air in the tunnel. The Crooked Man’s scent was present, but it was already growing fainter. He was running away from them.