A Wolf With One Silver Ear

The wolf had taken Azriel nine nights to carve, and on the tenth he ruined it with a single wrong cut to the ear. He sat for a while on the edge of his bed in the House of Wind, the knife in one hand and the little wooden animal in the other, and looked at the place where the ear had split away along the grain. It was such a small thing. A sliver of pale wood no bigger than a fingernail, lying on the floorboards between his boots. His shadows curled around his wrists and murmured, the way they did when he went too still for too long, a sound like dry leaves skittering over stone. *Fix it,* they whispered. *Fix it, fix it.* "I can't fix it," he told them. "That's not how wood works." They did not care how wood worked. They coiled up his forearm and poked at the broken ear as if they could knit it back together by insistence. He let them. It was easier than arguing. Nyx's birthday was in two days. The baby would turn one, and there would be a party at the river house that Feyre was pretending would be small and that Mor was quietly making enormous, and every member of the inner circle had been told, in no uncertain terms, that a gift was required. Cassian had bought a set of tiny wooden practice swords, which Feyre had confiscated on sight. Amren had announced she would give the child "the gift of my continued tolerance" and then, Azriel happened to know, spent an afternoon in a jeweler's in the Palace of Thread and Jewels choosing a silver rattle with a moonstone set in the handle. Mor had bought out half of a toy shop. Azriel had wanted to make something. He set the wolf on the nightstand and looked at his hands. In the lamplight the scars were the color of candle wax, ridged and shining, and the fingers did not move quite the way fingers were supposed to. He could hold a blade. He could hold Truth-Teller steady at a man's throat for an hour without a tremor. But carving was different. Carving asked for small, fine turns of the wrist, for a feel in the fingertips that his half-brothers had burned out of him when he was a boy. Nine nights it had taken. A carpenter in the city would have done it in one. The shadows sensed the shape of his thought before he did, and went quiet. He picked up the wolf again and turned it in the light. The broken ear left the head lopsided, one ear sharp and alert, the other a jagged stub. It made the animal look like it was listening hard for something on one side only. Like it had been in a fight. Azriel looked at it for a long time. Then he put on his jacket and went down into Velaris. The Rainbow at dusk was all noise and color, which was precisely why he usually avoided it. Painters dragged their easels in from the street. Someone in a second-floor window was practicing scales on a violin, getting the same three notes wrong over and over. The houses were painted in shades that should not have worked side by side, rose and saffron and a green like new leaves, and the lamps were coming on in the windows one by one so that the whole quarter glowed as if lit from inside. Children ran past him chasing a hoop. One of them glanced up at his wings, then at the shadows trailing off his shoulders like smoke from a snuffed wick, and ran faster. He was used to that. The paint shop was at the far end of a crooked lane, with a door painted blue and a bell that rang flat when he pushed it open. Feyre had mentioned it once, months ago, in passing; he had not known at the time that he was filing it away. Inside, it smelled of linseed oil and turpentine and something sweet, like crushed berries. Shelves ran floor to ceiling, crowded with jars of ground pigment in every color he knew and several he didn't. The female behind the counter was old for a faerie, which meant very old, with silver hair cropped close and spectacles pushed up onto her forehead. She looked at him over the rims, then at the shadows, then at his wings, and her expression did not change at all. "Shadowsinger," she said. "I'm looking for paint," Azriel said, which was obvious and made him feel foolish. "For wood. Something that won't come off if it gets chewed." Her eyebrows rose. "Chewed?" He took the wolf out of his pocket and set it on the counter. She picked it up without asking. Turned it over, ran a thumb along the line of its back where he had worked hardest to get the fur right, the little ridges and furrows, and then over the split ear. He waited for her to say something about it. He did not know what he expected. That it was a shame, maybe. That a little glue would hide it. "Who's it for?" she asked. "My nephew." The word still felt strange in his mouth, too large and too warm. "He'll be one." "Ah." She set the wolf down gently. "Then he'll chew it. They chew everything at that age. I've a beeswax and milk paint, safe if they put it in their mouths, and it holds well." She was already reaching for a shelf behind her. "What color?" He had not thought about color. He stood in the middle of that shop, surrounded by a hundred jars of it, and could not choose. The shadows chose for him. They slid off his shoulder and drifted across the counter, curious, and wound themselves around a jar on the lowest shelf, a deep blue so dark it was nearly black. Night Court blue. The color of the sky over the Sidra an hour after sunset, before the stars came all the way out. The shopkeeper followed them with her eyes. She did not seem alarmed. She seemed, if anything, faintly amused. "They have good taste," she said. "They have opinions," Azriel said. "I'm not sure that's the same thing." She laughed, a short dry sound, and pulled the jar down. Then she added a second, much smaller jar, a soft silver-white. "For the eyes," she said. "And the ear, if you like. Silver along the break. My grandmother used to do it with bowls. Mend them with metal so you could see where they'd been broken. She said a bowl that had been dropped and survived was worth more than one that had never been dropped at all." Azriel looked at the wolf's lopsided head. "I'll take both," he said. He did not go back up to the House of Wind. He went instead to the roof of the townhouse, which was empty, the family all at the river house now, and sat with his back against the chimney in the last of the light and painted. It went slowly. His fingers would not hold the brush the way a painter's would; he gripped it like a knife, and the strokes came out uneven. The dark blue went on thick in places and thin in others. He did not mind. The fur was textured anyway, the little grooves he had carved over nine nights catching the paint unevenly so that the wolf seemed to ripple when he turned it, light and dark, like a pelt moving over muscle. When he came to the ear, he stopped. His shadows gathered close. They did not whisper now. They watched. He dipped the finest brush in the silver and drew it along the broken edge, carefully, the way you'd trace a scar on someone's face. The split caught the color and held it. When he lifted the brush away, the jagged stub of the ear had a bright line running along it, thin as thread, shining against the deep blue. Now the wolf looked like it had been somewhere and come back. Eleven years in a cell beneath his father's keep, with no window and no light, nothing but the dark and the voices in it. Then his half-brothers, and the oil, and the fire. Then Windhaven. He had come out of that cell unable to fly, unable to hold a cup without his hands shaking, unable to meet anyone's eyes until a bastard-born brawler and a half-Illyrian prince decided, without asking him, that he was theirs. He had come out with shadows that would not leave him and scars that would not fade, even with High Fae healing, even after five centuries. He had come out. He sat on the roof of the townhouse with the city lighting up below him, the Sidra turning violet and then black, and held the little wolf up against the sky. The silver ear caught the first starlight. He thought of Nyx's face, crumpled and furious and wonderful, the way it had been the first time Azriel held him. How the baby's tiny hand had closed around one of his scarred fingers and held on as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. His shadows curled up in his lap, around the wolf, around his hands. *Good,* they whispered. Only that. *Good.* Two days later, at the river house, in a room so crowded with Mor's paper lanterns and garlands that Cassian kept snagging his wings on them, Nyx tore the paper off a small, lopsided, dark blue wolf with one silver ear. He studied it with grave attention for several seconds while the whole room watched. Then he put the ear in his mouth and chewed it. "Az," Feyre said, picking it up later while the baby slept against Rhys's chest. She turned it in the firelight, her thumb finding the line of silver without having to look. "Did you make this?" He nodded. She did not ask about the ear. She held it a moment longer, and then she set it down on the shelf above the cradle, beside the moonstone rattle and the confiscated practice swords, where Nyx would be able to see it when he woke up.