Chapter 28 — Taming the Wolf King

A year and a season after the Blood Moon, I woke to the smell of something burning and the very specific sound of two boys trying very hard not to be heard, which in my experience meant they had already been caught and simply hadn't realized it yet.

"Dai Bao. Nhi Bao." I didn't even open my eyes fully. "What's on fire?"

A guilty silence. Then, from Nhi Bao, in the tone of someone offering a technical correction rather than a confession: "Nothing is on fire. Something was briefly extremely warm."

"Nhi Bao tried to cook the fish himself," Dai Bao clarified, with the particular satisfaction of an older brother who has weighed the benefits of loyalty against the benefits of not being blamed for something and settled firmly on the second option. "He used his hands instead of the fire pit."

I opened my eyes to find both boys standing at the cave mouth, one of them radiating faint, sheepish embarrassment and a very slightly singed fish, the other radiating the smug innocence of a wolf pup who had, once again, escaped consequences by the simple expedient of not being the one holding the evidence.

"We talked about this," I said, sitting up, doing my best impression of stern despite the fact that I was, privately, delighted that this was the scale of crisis my life produced these days. "Practicing on purpose, in a controlled way, with supervision. Not 'sneaking off to impress your brother by cooking breakfast with your bare hands.'"

"It worked, though," Nhi Bao pointed out, entirely reasonably. "The fish is cooked. Mostly."

I could not, in good conscience, argue with results. I did, however, insist on a full accounting of exactly which parts of the technique had involved open flame versus which had merely involved a great deal of overconfidence, a distinction Nhi Bao found deeply unfair to have to make first thing in the morning.

"You know," I told him, only half stern, "there was a time, not so very long ago, when your mother would have been in genuine, screaming danger just standing this close to you while you were startled. Now I'm mostly just annoyed about the fish."

"That seems like progress," Nhi Bao said, entirely serious.

"That is the single greatest progress of my entire life," I agreed, and ruffled his hair before he could duck away from the indignity of it.

Thuong Diem, emerging from the back of the cave with the particular rumpled dignity of a Wolf King who had clearly heard the entire exchange and chosen strategic silence, took one look at the singed fish and one look at both boys' faces and made the mistake of laughing before he'd fully composed himself into the disapproving co-parent I'd been hoping for.

"You're supposed to back me up," I told him.

"I am backing you up," he said, entirely unrepentant. "I'm backing up my deep, private admiration for a fish that has clearly survived being cooked by an eleven-year-old's bare hands and lived to be eaten anyway."

The boys had grown, over the past year and a season, in every way that mattered. Taller, sturdier, more confident in the small deliberate flickers of shadow and flame that no longer frightened anyone in the tribe, having become, over time, about as remarkable to our neighbors as any other child's particular talent — some pups were fast, some were clever with a spear, ours occasionally set breakfast on fire out of overconfidence rather than malice. Dai Bao had taken, with startling enthusiasm, to Vu Vinh's scouting lessons, tracking prey through the forest with an instinct that made the old scout beam with something close to paternal pride. Nhi Bao had attached himself to Cot Nhan's workshop instead, learning the patient, careful art of binding and carving, though his teacher complained, fondly, that the boy's control over open flame made certain traditional heating methods "considerably more exciting than strictly necessary."

Of Doc Nha, no further word ever reached us, which suited me fine. Wherever the old viper had settled, I hoped only that he'd found the quiet, unremarkable survival he'd told Bach Linh he wanted, far from any queen who might ask more of him than competence alone.

Bach Linh's name came up rarely these days, though not never. A trader passing through some months back had mentioned, in passing, a fox-shifter healer working out of a small settlement two territories south, sharp-tongued and skilled and, by all accounts, well regarded by people who had no idea what she'd once been. I hadn't gone to find her. I didn't think I needed to. Some doors were better left simply ajar, rather than either slammed shut or thrown fully open, and I found I could hold both my anger and my hope for her at once without needing either one to win outright.

Tuyet Phong visited twice a year now, formally for trade and informally, I suspected, because she'd developed a genuine fondness for our particular brand of loud, chaotic hospitality that her own more measured mountain rarely offered her. She and Vu Vinh had struck up an unlikely friendship built entirely on trading increasingly elaborate stories about the swamp battle, each version growing more implausible with each telling until neither of them could keep a straight face through their own exaggerations.

The priest, older now but lighter somehow, spent most of his days these days simply sitting near the fire, watching the boys train, occasionally offering some piece of old wisdom that had finally, after sixty years, stopped tasting like a warning and started sounding like plain contentment instead.

As for me — I had become, somewhere in the space of two years, the thing the priest had once called an uncrowned king, and the thing Tuyet Phong had once called, with dry professional respect, a woman worth allying with rather than testing again. I still ran the council's practical business, still settled disputes with soup and stubbornness rather than teeth, still occasionally reduced a proud elder to grudging admiration by handing them a shovel and letting them discover the dignity in useful work.

I still carried the reforged club everywhere, though these days it saw more use cracking open particularly stubborn nuts than fending off ancient serpent queens, which suited me perfectly well.

Thuong Diem, for his part, had never quite lost the bald patch that started this whole story, though the fur around it had long since grown thick and unremarkable, and only the oldest members of the tribe still remembered it well enough to tease him about it. He ruled now the way he had, slowly, learned to across our first year together — firm when firmness mattered, patient the rest of the time, and entirely, cheerfully willing to be ordered around his own den by a wife who had first announced her presence in this world by knocking him flat with a bone club and a wild chicken.

We still, on certain evenings, when the boys were occupied elsewhere and the fire burned low, found ourselves laughing about that very first night — Thuong Diem's dignity in ruins, the whole tribe's collective disbelief, Bach Linh's furious insistence that I didn't know how high the sky and earth stood. He liked to claim, these days, that he'd known from the very beginning I would be worth every ounce of humiliation that first encounter cost him. I liked to remind him, just as often, that he had in fact spent that first week plucking chicken feathers under direct orders and wearing an extremely undignified green hat, and that whatever he'd known or hadn't known at the time, it had taken him considerably longer than "the very beginning" to admit any of it out loud.

"I knew," he insisted, every single time, with the same wounded, wolfish dignity. "I simply chose not to say so while my scalp was still recovering."

"Sure you did," I told him, every single time, and kissed him anyway, because some arguments were more fun to keep having than to actually win.

That morning, once the singed fish had been eaten — surprisingly good, if I was being honest, Nhi Bao's improvised method having produced a smokiness no traditional fire pit quite achieved — Thuong Diem found me at the cave mouth, watching the two boys race each other down toward the creek, shadow and flame flickering harmlessly at their heels like matched, playful shadows of themselves.

"Regrets?" he asked, echoing the same question from our bonding night, settling his arm around my shoulders.

"Not one," I said, exactly as I had then, and meant it just as completely. "Though I do think, looking back, that a priest warning a terrified new arrival not to hit two children was possibly the single strangest piece of advice I've ever received in either of my two lives."

"And yet here we are."

"Here we are," I agreed. "Tamed one Wolf King. Raised two apocalypses into decent, occasionally fire-breathing children. Built an alliance out of a riddle and a shared cup of terrible wine. Turned a rival's revenge plot into a lesson about second chances." I leaned into him, watching the sun climb fully over the ridge, warm and ordinary and entirely, wonderfully mine. "I'd say that's a fairly good use of one accidental trip into an animal world."

"The best use I can imagine," Thuong Diem said, and kissed the top of my head, unhurried and certain, exactly the way he had every single morning since the night we swore, in front of the whole tribe, to face whatever came next together.

Down at the creek, Nhi Bao's laughter rang out, bright and unguarded, followed immediately by Dai Bao's indignant protest that some game's rules had, once again, been changed mid-play in his brother's favor. Two ordinary, extraordinary boys, exactly as loved and exactly as free to become themselves as any child had ever been allowed to be.

It was, all things considered, a very good morning, in a very good life, that I would not have traded for anything in either world I'd ever called home.

I thought, sometimes, about the woman I'd been on that very first day, standing frozen at a cave entrance while a priest warned her not to strike two children no matter how fiercely their father bared his teeth. She had been so certain, that day, that survival was the only thing worth hoping for. She could not have imagined, not in her most generous dreams, the particular, chaotic, singed-fish, fire-breathing, entirely wonderful shape that survival would eventually grow into. I was glad, watching my sons race each other toward the creek and my husband smile at me like he still couldn't quite believe his own good fortune, that I had never once had to find out what would have happened if I'd let fear make a single one of my decisions for me instead.

Some mornings, taming a Wolf King turns out to be the easiest part of the whole story. The rest — the staying, the choosing, the loving something too large and too dangerous to ever fully control — that part, I understood now, was the actual work. And I would not have traded a single difficult, ridiculous, precious day of it for anything at all.