There were six of them, and they were all looking at me, and none of them had eaten in what I would later understand was a very long time.
I want to say I noticed the important thing first -- how thin they were, ribs showing through fur gone dull and patchy in places, the specific way a starving animal holds its head low and still, like lowering it any further would cost more strength than it had left to spend. I want to say I noticed that first because it's the detail that matters, the one that tells you these weren't monsters, just hungry things doing what hungry things do. But if I'm honest -- and Eremos has always said I'm too honest for my own good, which I've decided to take as a compliment even though I don't think he entirely means it that way -- the first thing I actually noticed was that there was blood already on some of them. Not mine. Not yet. Whatever they'd found before they found me hadn't been enough.
I stood very still in the middle of a garden I was supposed to be protecting, six sets of eyes fixed on me with the patient, terrible attention of things that have finally, after days of nothing, found something that might not get away, and I thought, with the strange calm that apparently arrives right before the part of you that should be panicking gets around to it: how did I end up here instead of the crystal castle.
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Because that's where I'd been that morning. Somewhere warm, and safe, and full of other women laughing at nothing in particular. And now there were wolves.
I should back up.
I've never been very good at telling a story in the order it happened. Eremos says this is because I think in seasons instead of days -- an old joke of his, from back when I still had trouble remembering that time moved differently now than it had on my hill, back when a season was the only unit I understood. He might be right. I don't mind that he's right about that one.
So let me back up properly, the way I should have started, instead of dropping you straight into a garden full of wolves and expecting you to just believe me that it made sense at the time.
It started with breakfast. Or something breakfast-shaped, anyway, since none of us really need breakfast the way we once did, back when we had stomachs that complained on a schedule. It started with Iris.