Toad Words (4 page)

He lifted his axe over his head.

“Fool,” said Grandmother under the bed, with the finality of a death sentence.

The wolf erupted from the quilt.
 

For Turtle, watching through the keyhole, there was only a blur of grey and a flash of the orange quilt and a horrible yell that turned into a gurgle that turned into nothing at all. The woodsman’s body came crashing down. The wolf gave a muffled yelp and a snarl and the metal axe-blade clattered across the floor.
 

And then there was no sound at all.
 

Turtle flung the wardrobe door open, heedless of the very strict orders, and saw the wolf crouched atop the woodsman’s chest, his teeth still buried in the man’s throat. The orange quilt was splashed with blood, sodden with it, a color that matched the orange rather regrettably well.
 

“Well,” said Grandmother, surveying the scene, “that quilt’s had it.”
 

Turtle nodded.

The wolf let go. Turtle very deliberately did not look at what he had done to the woodsman’s neck.
 

“Are you hurt, my friend?” asked Grandmother.

The wolf licked at his shoulder briefly. “Hardly at all. He dropped his axe on me. It will heal.”
 

Grandmother pulled the quilt the rest of the way off the bed. “Well. I suppose…I suppose we should…”
 

She put her hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. “I am sorry, my friend,” she said. “I do not seem to be able to think right now.”

The wolf nodded. “Help me roll him onto the quilt,” he said. “The cub and I will see to the body. You should rest.”
 

“And have more tea,” said Turtle firmly.

“Yes,” said Grandmother after a moment. “Yes. You are both right.” She spread the quilt next to the dead man and grabbed his shoulder. Her eyes were averted and stared at a blank spot on the wall.
 

The wolf, with dexterous teeth, grabbed the woodsman’s clothing, and they rolled him face down onto the quilt. Grandmother pulled the far end over the top of him.

“I think that is all that I can do,” she said. Her lips were very white.
 

“It is all that needs to be done,” said the wolf. “Rest. When you are done resting, clean your den.”

“You’ll have to stain the boards,” said Turtle practically. “With walnut juice or something. You’ll never get all this blood up. When Father killed the white rooster and it got inside the back door without its head, we had to stain with walnut.”

The wolf made a noise that in a human might have been a cough.

“Thank you, Turtle,” said Grandmother dryly. “I will take that under advisement.” A little bit of color crept back into her face, and she swung the tea kettle back over the fire.
 

“Come with me, cub,” said the wolf. He grabbed the end of the quilt and lifted it, and proceeded to drag the body toward the door.
 

Turtle felt odd. She felt a bit like crying, but there did not seem to be any time to do so, and the wolf was clearly expecting her to open the door.
 

The body went down the steps in a series of damp thuds. Turtle wasn’t quite sure that she wanted to go with the wolf, but while she stood on the porch, undecided, he reached the gate in the fence, and Turtle had to run to open it, and after that, it seemed that the time when she might protest was gone.
 

It was an odd journey. The wolf hauled the dead man, wrapped in his crazy-quilt shroud, and Turtle held low tree branches aside and shoved the woodsman’s arm back into the cocoon when it flopped out. She wrapped the end of her hooded cloak around her hand so she didn’t have to actually touch him.
 

They followed some kind of deer path. The wolf set his burden down occasionally to turn his head and look up it.
 

They did not speak. They travelled in silence, the three of them, the wolf, the girl, and the dead man. There was only the girl’s footsteps and the wolf’s breathing and the scrape of the body over the ground.
 

Once, across a rough patch of knobbled tree roots, the dead man was jarred partway out of the quilt. The wolf stopped, and Turtle had to grab the woodsman’s pant leg and help roll him back into the quilt.
 

The wolf pushed his nose briefly against her arm. His nose was cold. Blood had dried in stiff red spikes across his muzzle, but Turtle felt better for it anyway.

“Here,” said the wolf, what seemed like a long time later. “This is far enough.”
 

It was twilight. Turtle was amazed that it was only twilight. It seemed like several ages must have passed, like it should be twilight of the day after.
 

They stood in a little clearing. Turtle shook herself and looked around. Night was gathering under the trees, and there were eyes in it, and a suggestion of teeth.

A growling began somewhere behind Turtle, and ran around the ring of trees. It was very soft and very hungry.
 

“It would be wise,” said the wolf, “if you would lay your hand on my shoulder now. And I will see you home.”

Turtle set her hand on the wolf’s shoulder. He was hot as fire under his fur, and his ribs heaved as he panted.
 

They walked away from the clearing. The wolves under the trees slunk out of their way, heads low, their eyes gleaming like frozen moons.
 

She thought about looking back, but the wolf said “I wouldn’t,” so she didn’t.
 

It was not a long walk. She cried a little. There seemed to be time now. The wolf didn’t say anything. When she stopped, she tangled her fingers in the wolf’s fur, and felt better.
 

They reached the path home twenty minutes later. Turtle expected it to take longer, but then again, it went much faster when one of you was not walking backward and hauling a dead man’s weight in his jaws.

They stood on the edge of the path, where the spurge grew thick and choked out the ferns and daggers of grass stabbed up through them.
 

“Well?” said the wolf finally.

Turtle thought about it, scuffing her foot in the dry pine needles of the path. “I’m sorry he had to be killed. But he shouldn’t have killed the goat.”
 

The wolf bowed his head, accepting this judgment.
 

“Will Grandmother be okay?”

The wolf shrugged. His fur rippled under Turtle’s hand when he did so. “She is strong. She would not be a friend to wolves if she were not. Give her a day or two to re-make her den around her and howl, and then visit her again.”
 

“Will you be here?” asked Turtle. “I mean…if I come into the woods, some time…”

“It is very likely,” the wolf said.
 

“Would you talk to me?”
 

“Quite possibly,” said the wolf. “If you are not too foolish, and will be silent sometimes. You do not smell like a foolish child, but there is often no way to be sure.”

“I promise to be silent sometimes,” said Turtle solemnly.

“Then I will be here,” said the wolf, and turned like a cat on the path and vanished into the wood.
 

No, that’s not the end of the story. Hush. I’ll tell you the rest. There isn’t much.
 

Turtle went home. The yelling was mostly over, although Turtle’s mother said a few things about the state of her clothes and the stained hood.

“Grandma’s goat got killed,” said Turtle, and that was enough explanation for everything, although Turtle’s mother then muttered a few more things, mostly related to letting a child gad out in the woods so late.
 

“It wasn’t late when I
started,
” said Turtle, much aggrieved, and that, too, was enough explanation for everything.
 

Nobody asked about the woodsman, then or ever. He probably had a name, but Turtle never learned it and did not ask. Her grandmother continued on the same as ever, except that she stopped hiring anyone to cut her firewood, and Turtle’s brother came home sweaty and full of splinters and complaints.
 

Her next batch of brownies came out chewy and if they were overly wet in the middle and burnt to a brick-like crust around the edges, everyone agreed that it was still a great improvement.

She really hadn’t known.

No one believed her, of course. The more sympathetic among her friends said “Oh, poor Althea, you must have been terrified, of course you couldn’t tell anyone.” Her detractors—her sisters foremost among them—all said “Of course she knew. She just didn’t care. Those poor women.”

No one had actually suggested that she might be involved in the murders, of course. Once the bodies had been identified, it was obvious that she had still been in the nursery for most of them. The youngest of the lot had been dead for several years before Lord Bluebeard moved into the neighborhood, so no one could imply that she was a murderess herself.

Still, she’d kept silent, went the whispers, and that made her an accomplice, didn’t it?
 

She caught herself wishing that her husband were still alive, so that she could talk to him about it.
 

“And that is very nearly insane,” Althea told the mirror in her bedroom, “since he was the one who killed all those poor women in the first place.”
 

She still couldn’t believe it. She knew that it was true, of course, she’d been the one to go into that awful charnel room in the first place.
 

Still.

Whatever his other faults—ha—he’d been easy to talk to. She had never exactly been in love with him, but they’d been good friends. His offer of marriage had gotten her away from her house and the prying of her sisters.
 

She set the hairbrush down and went to the window. Trees looked back at her. She was living in the hunting lodge, now, many miles away from the accursed manor house.
 

She wanted to go home. Even knowing that awful room was there, even knowing what was in it. The manor had been her home for twenty-seven years. She was the mistress of it. She knew every inch of it, except for the room at the top of the tallest tower, and….well.

“Well,” she said aloud. “Well. Here we are.”

They asked the same question, all of them, friends and foes alike. “How could you
not
look? How could you live with that room there and never look into it?”

The answer was simple enough. She’d never looked because she had believed that she already knew what was inside.

Her father had a room that his daughters were not allowed to look into, and her sisters, prying and spying as they always did, had jimmied the lock one day and snuck in. Althea had peeped around the doorframe, half-curious, half-terrified.

It wasn’t much. A dusty room with big chairs leaking stuffing and taxidermy on the walls. Glassy-eyed deer stared down at her. There was a side table with some etchings of naked nymphs doing improbable things with goat-legged men. Her sisters thought this was hysterical. She just felt sick.

Her sisters had always been like that. She had never been allowed a diary, a corner of the room, even a single box that was not opened and pawed through. Her sisters wanted to make sure that she had no secrets, so she kept them all behind her eyes and committed nothing to paper.
 

When Bluebeard had brought her home from the honeymoon and handed her the great iron ring of keys, he had singled out the smallest one and said “This opens the door at the top of the tower. That is my room. Never, ever open it.”

Aha,
she thought
, another room of overstuffed furniture and pornographic etchings. Probably bad taxidermy as well. Well, everyone is allowed their privacy.
 

She pried the key off the ring and handed it back to him. “You should keep this, then.”
 

He stared at her, his eyes absolutely blank. She did not know him well enough yet to read his moods, and so she laughed a little and said “My dear, don’t you think I know how men are? Everyone needs a room to put their feet up. Take the key.”

The key was very small in his large hand, and gleamed as golden as her wedding ring. “But—”

“Really, I can’t think why I’d want the key,” she said. “I’m not giving you the key to my diary. I hope that doesn’t bother you.”

“Ah—no, of course not—I—” He took a step back. “But—ah—if I should lose
my
key, I will want to know that there is another one—”

“Oh, well, quite sensible,” she said. She plucked the key from his hands, looked around the room—they were in the library—and saw a bookend on a high shelf, in the shape of a woman holding an urn. “There, that will do.” She pulled out a chair, climbed onto it—Bluebeard hurried to grab the chair back and steady her—and dropped the key into the urn. “There. If you lose yours, you know where it is now, and none of the maids will bother to dust it up there.” She brushed her hands together.

“You are a marvel,” said Bluebeard, lifting her down from the chair, and kissed her forehead.

He had not been a bad husband, truly he hadn’t. He had even been concerned with her relationship with her sisters. When he left on travel, which he sometimes did, he always suggested that she invite her sisters to stay with her.

“Most certainly not,” she said, sitting in the library again, in her favorite chair. Her husband grasped the back of the chair and looked down at her, and she tilted her head back to look up at him. She smiled upside down into his eyes. “My sisters are appalling people, and I have no desire to have them here, prying into everything and telling me how to do everything better and leaving me no scrap of home to call my own.”

“Family is important,” he said, looking down at her. He sounded sad, and she remembered that he had no family of his own.

“We’re each other’s family,” Althea said firmly, putting her hand over his on the back of the chair.
 

He turned his hand under hers and squeezed her fingers. “Still, your sisters—I hate to think of you isolated—”