I remember walking with her at the edge of the forest. She held my tiny hand and sang the names of all that I saw. It was autumn. The leaves splashed with yellows and reds and browns turned the forest into a painted playground.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “A caterpillar,” she sang and crawled her fingers lightly over my skin, tickling me as if with a hundred legs.

  “What’s that?”

  “A falcon,” she sang, throwing her arms out to the side and flapping them as she circled me. Her movements smooth and effortless, like a dance. Her muscles taut giving shape to her muscled limbs.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “A fallen leaf.”

  “Why?”

  She knelt before me and picked up the leaf, held it out to me. Her brown eyes drew me in. “When the world grows cold, the trees shake off their leaves and drop them to the ground. Then comes the cold season. The wind howls like the gods of old. The trees stand naked in the cold. But all those leaves they dropped become food for them. They eat up their leaves and the suns and the rain so they can grow beautiful again in spring, when the suns rise together and dance around the edge of the world.”

  “Why?”

  She smiled and picked me up, “Because the suns love us. They want us to be warm. More than anything, they long to be with us so once a year they rise together. Their colors blend and blur, purpling the sky when they hold hands. Then they dance for us, so we dance for them. Every other spring the suns call to us here for the entire season. They sing and ask that we sing and dance with them. By singing with the suns in the Twilit Days, we turn the world green again. The leaves come back and the grass gets bright.”

  I knit my forehead and scowled at the leaf in my hands. Fragile and dry and red. “Why don’t the leaves stay?”

  My mother laughed. “Because even leaves long to be free.” Then she carried me back on her shoulders to my fathers who prepared dinner with my brothers.

  Her hair puffed before me and I held on to it, digging my arms in deep, pressing my face into her hair. The smell of her sweat and the oils of her skin—it was home.

  From her shoulders I looked back towards the MotherTree at the center of the rolling hills. The communal fires of the clan’s shared meals surrounding the MotherTree.

  So much went through my head as I stared at the long distance between the clan and us. I was so young then. Perhaps two Bauruken years. Maybe a little older. Ten or so seasons old. But that distance seemed so great at the time. In my memory, we had always been at the edge, finding only tension in the central circles.

  My LoPa’s delicate hands were under my arms as he lifted me from my mother’s shoulders. His eyebrows bent low and his face long, “They’ll invite us back, little moon. All things are temporary.”

  “Put me down, LoPa.”

  Medis and Akmuo sat at the otherside of the fire. Medis whittled a stick to a point, his forehead knit in frustration. He said, “I don’t want to be one of them.”

  Akmuo crossed his arms, “We listened to them at the Meadow today.”

  Medis clenched his fists round the flint knife and stick and Akmuo shrank away.

  My HoPa scowled while tending the pot where dinner stewed. Before he opened his mouth my mother was behind my brothers, a hand on each of their shoulders.

  Akmuo shrugged her off and stood to face her, “They say you’re a witch. You lay with a wolf!”

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  My mother smiled in amusement and touched his face. “I know.”

  I couldn’t see his face but I heard the tears in his eyes as he said, “They said we share a face because of your wolf magic. They called us shadowboys and said we’d never be whole till one of us died.”

  She pulled him close but Akmuo kept his fist clenched at his sides. “You are whole. You’re not a curse but a blessing. You are two boys so close that you were born as one, holding hands.”

  Medis threw down the stick he was whittling and stomped off towards the forest.

  My LoPa sighed and HoPa walked after him.

  “Don’t, Kalna” LoPa said. “Give him his space.”

  HoPa paused for a moment, his wide shoulders rising and falling, before turning back to us with a smile more severe than happy. He stirred the pot and inhaled deeply through his nose. “Needs to simmer a bit longer.”

  I walked to his side and took his hand. So smooth and soft and wide, still caked with bits of clay he threw earlier that day. Leaning over the pot, a reddish stew bubbled. The aroma of paprika, rabbit, and carrots filled me. “HoPa, can we share with the clan?”

  He didn’t turn to me. His profile still severe, caught between pain and rage, but his voice was calm and deep, like the belly of a mountain. “They do not want our food, little moon.”

  “But it’s so good!” I tugged at his hand.

  “They want us here at the edge of the forest.”

  “Why?”

  HoPa opened his mouth but mother spoke, “They believe I’m a witch.” She was sitting now with Akmuo on her lap, his eyes still red from tears. He flinched when she said the word.

  “What’s witch?”

  LoPa began speaking but my mother quieted him with a look. She said, “When I was a girl like you, I spent days in the forest. While the rest of the clan worked and played together, I ran away from the Meadow and my sisters and brothers to run through the trees. Even before my Meadow days, I wandered alone through the forest.”

  I gasped at that. Afraid but not having the words to describe how or why. I turned in the direction Medis walked.

  “Your brother will be fine. He won’t go through the trees alone.” My mother smiled at me, “There was a music there when I was a girl. It lived in the trees. A music older than humans and even the gods. It’s ancient and delicate but carrying the memories of the forest that is the world. From when the forest covered all of Saol. Back before there were gods or humans, there was the forest. Every tree bound together through its roots. Their roots wove together like hands holding one another. Each tree became connected to the next, knitting the entire skin of Saol together. They sang. A single song but with countless voices. The voices of the trees themselves. The trees who live for countless seasons, always growing. Bearing fruit and giving shape to the land. They sang and they sing still. With every gust of wind, with every drop of rain, with every leaf changing color. You can feel it against your skin. It’s like a gentle breeze but it comes from nowhere. Like you’re being kissed by a thousand thousand butterflies. I fell in love with that sensation and it changed me. I fell into it. My days and nights centered around the song. I gave up on my brothers and sisters. Becoming quiet and isolated. The song of the forest pulsing always in my head. I grew separate from the clan. I spent days away. Days in the forest, at the heart of the song. I wandered after the many voices. Touching my hand to the trees, feeling the life and energy flowing through them.

  “Then I met the wolf.”

  LoPa sucked in his breath and visibly tensed. The air round the fire thickened with tension. My fingers went to my mouth where I chewed them. Akmuo’s jaw was clenched. HoPa shook his head, “Vilka—”

  She laughed at their reaction, breaking the tension. Her laughter was like dawn and a smile came to my own face. She said, “Your fathers are afraid that by admitting that I met the wolf we’ll never be brought back into the clan, but they’re wrong. We’re the Wolf Clan, after all. Who but us should meet a wolf?”

  Akmuo’s voice was soft, “All the wolves are dead. Everyone says so.”

  Mother leaned back, “Maybe I met the last one in the world.” Her smile faded and her gaze stretched beyond us, deep into the forest. “It’s difficult to explain. The wolf came to me, so real it made all my life seem like a dream. Like I had made it all up in a story. It was so…alive. So powerful. The air seemed to ripple around it, like when you throw a stone in still water. When the wolf looked at me, the air shivered. I saw it like it was a physical thing. Like I could touch the air. But I couldn’t.

  “It was lonely. All the gods seem lonely. Sometimes I wonder if that was the song the forest sang all those seasons I wandered through it. A lament or a dirge. It was beautiful but it’s so sorrowful in my memory now. It overwhelmed me. When I saw the wolf it was like having my heart pulled from me and watching it beat in the chest of that great beast. It howled and I thought I died. The very sky cracked in front of my eyes and I fell into blackness. I dreamt I was dead, being eaten by wolves. Then they gave me their skin and I became one, howling at the moons. When I woke, I was alone and the forest was silent. It still is.”

  The only sound for the space of ten breaths was the bubbling of the stew. HoPa coughed and said, “Dinner’s ready.”

  We ate in silence. Halfway through the meal, Medis returned and filled a bowl. He sat between my fathers and leaned into HoPa who put an arm round him.

  I remember it all, young as I was. Every word of that meal.

  It transformed the way I saw our clan.

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