The markets crowd her senses, busy with sound and bustle and smells. Tundra needs to escape the sensory overload—she needs to run.
That means sneaking away from her mother, of course. Tricky, but not impossible.
And what she finds? Something that promises all her dreams come true—if she doesn’t kill them out of misguided love first.
A tale of freedom and a love of wild things that proves that if we love something, we must let it go.
But For Snow
The market is too bright—too many people shouting, laughing, singing—and Tundra cringes, shrugging her shoulders up around her ears. The place is raucous; it makes her head hurt. The smell of cinnamon and hot oil smothers her nose from the food vendors’ stalls, and the sunshine is fierce, making the damp ground humid and suffocating everyone with a hot, sapping afternoon.
Tundra wanders away a few steps, carefully eyeing her mother as she busies herself at a stall full of twisted metal jewellery. Tundra creeps a few steps more, the soft grass tussocks compressing under her feet as though they too are trying to be quiet in the hubub of the crowd.
She reaches the corner unnoticed, peeks back to see only her mother’s fuchsia silk headscarf through the crush and bustle.
Tundra runs. If she runs fast enough, the people blur and even though it’s noisy still, it’s nearly as good as being alone. The rumble of the crowd is like the wind that whips her long hair and tickles her ears, and she laughs from deep in her belly because if she can just run fast enough, it’s almost like flying.
Tundra pauses in the liminal space of a side-alley where the evening sun doesn’t reach. She sobers; others give the alley a wide berth. Dark shadows clutch cages against the walls and the breeze that gusts from the bowels of the alley is cold and full of night, and the smell of old, dry things. Tundra peers warily, curiosity piqued by the multitude of eyes that reflect the dim light. She has always liked animals.
Tundra glances over her shoulder as goosebumps prickle her skin. Her heart hammers, not in fear of the inhuman night, but that someone might see her, might tell her she shouldn’t be here. People are always telling her she shouldn’t be in the places she wants to go.
The wind stirs her hair into wisps, ghost fingers teasing in the dark. Tundra tucks her hair firmly behind her ears and enters the alley, lungs filling with the dry-fur smell as she breathes deeply.
Iron-barred cages skulk in corners, and smaller wicker cages dance on ropes crisscrossing overhead, knocking hollowly in the breeze.
“Hello, pretty thing,” Tundra says softly as she approaches the nearest cage, stretching out her fingers for its occupant to sniff.
The creature backs away and shivers, fur softly silver in the dim light, eyes wide and yellow.
Tundra holds the bars of the cage and wants to cry. Animal thoughts are not like human thoughts—they lack the words—but she can feel that the creature does not like its cage; it remembers skies, and treetops, and rain.
Something shrieks. Tundra whips around, adrenalin pulsing through her.
Perched on a cage above her head is a large, velvety black bird with snowy white chest feathers. Tundra moves closer, standing on tiptoes to see. The bird’s beak is huge and it’s so brightly coloured that Tundra wonders if someone has painted it. Then she sees the chain binding the bird’s leg and her chest knots up again.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers to the bird, bundling up her pity and sending it in a way the bird will understand. “My mother tries to keep me caged up too.”
It isn’t fair.
Something shifts in the crate below the bird and Tundra crouches. The crate is deep in shadow, and her eyes tell her it’s empty, but she knows her eyes are wrong. She can feel the thoughts of the creature inside and watches carefully, waiting for the moment when it will reveal itself. “It’s all right,” she croons. “I won’t hurt you.”
There. A shadow darker than the rest, a hint of fur, a paw.
Tundra smiles. “See? That wasn’t so hard.” She kneels on the smooth-worn cobbles, waiting for the creature to throw off its shadow cloak entirely.
White fur catches the faint light. It is a wolf, half-grown, curled tightly nose to tail.
He opens his eyes, piercing Tundra with his ice-blue gaze.
She gasps, because deep within that gaze lies recognition.
He knows who she is.
She knows who he is.
And yet, of course, she doesn’t.
He’s only a wolf, with strange blue eyes and a cloak woven of darkness. But he feels… he feels like her dreams, the strange ones of ice and snow she’s had as long as she can recall, the ones with a sense of something missing so strong it takes her breath away just remembering it.
The wolf cub looks like he would enjoy those dreams, Tundra thinks.
It’s a simple enough matter to pick the cold iron lock with some splinters of wood and piece of wire off the ground, and although her heart hammers and her palms grow sweaty, no one approaches, no one asks her business.
After a minute or two, the door creaks open. The gangly cub stretches, undulating his back and ending with a shake of his tail. He yawns, twitches his black-tipped ears and stares up at her.
Her breath catches in her throat at the gaze of an apex predator—but he will not harm her, she thinks. He…
She swallows. He feels like the thing that has been missing from her dreams.
His tail wafts and his mouth opens in a grin.
Does he feel it too, the sense that this is a meeting long foretold? Only one way to know. Tundra walks away, glancing back at the cub.
He follows. Tundra breaks into a trot, then a run as she leaves the alley behind for the bright sunlight and warm smells of the streets. The cub keeps pace and together they run right to the edge of town, out to the plains of warm, sweet-smelling grasses—and somehow, this is how it’s always been. But for want of snow, this could be her dreams come true.
The moon, full to bursting as it dips toward the horizon, reminds Tundra that her mother will be looking for her. She glances down at the wolf, unable to bear the thought of going home tonight without him. She’s only just found him, the missing piece of her dreams.
And besides, she hates the house. It’s not a special loathing, just discomfort born of a preference for solitude, for cold, for wide-open spaces.
The wolf stares up at Tundra and her breath catches in her throat. She reaches out and touches him for the first time. His fur, white but for his silvery-grey back and black-tipped ears, is cold. Tundra’s heart leaps and she grins, half mad with the thought of her own cold wolf. His fur burns her fingertips like ice and she luxuriates, sinking her fingers right down to his skin.
The cub snaps playfully at the air and Tundra laughs, pouncing on him. They wrestle, growing careless, and Tundra suddenly feels his teeth. She freezes, stunned.
The cub whines and backs away, ears and tail low.
Tundra shakes her head. “It’s okay,” she murmurs, reaching out to him with her good hand—because the one he bit is not a good hand any longer: it’s marked with a perfect row of round tooth-punctures, each one filled with ice. She rubs at them, but the ice will not melt. They look like a string of diamonds over the side of her hand.
The cub whines again and Tundra tussles his ears fiercely. “I like it,” she insists, and he nuzzles his face against her as though he would lick her if he could.
Worn out, Tundra lies back in the grass and stares at stars that sparkle bright and brittle, promising winter. The cub curls up at her side and falls asleep, and although her mother will be furious, Tundra cannot bear to wake him.
Wrapped in cold and frost and the smell of fur, she falls asleep, and together they dream of ice and snow, and games played in the chilly breeze of death.