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Bane’s rock, as they were tracking prey and not lost or wandering or falling asleep and waking up somewhere else every other evening. And all the strength and all the stamina Harvest had been absorbing from the moon and the wolf and the Wood suddenly left her. She stretched her arms up until she felt her shoulders pop, pulled her husband’s fiddle down from the rock, and collapsed. The tears she shed over the mahogany fell in the same places as the tears he had shed over her, before he had transformed into a beast that did not keep promises because he no longer knew what promises were.
    Grief and fear and sadness overtook Harvest, seizing her body in violent spasms, and the babe—rightfully so—decided he wanted no part of it. Harvest screamed into the empty daylight. The wolf snapped at the air in frustration. The ground beneath her, already damp with her tears, now muddied with the babe’s rushing preamble. “Come back to me,” she whispered to no one. “Sweetheart, come back to me.”
    The old wolf was gone even before she finished speaking, leaving Harvest alone with only the wind and the air and what courage she was able to summon between bouts of racking pain. Her baby was tearing her body apart, her husband had shattered her heart, and she had clearly lost her mind. She wondered how much of her soul had to be torn away before even the gods didn’t recognize her anymore. She wondered about the color of the sky, and exactly how much grass she could pull up with one handful. She thought about her own mother, and Bane’s. She thought about the tune they played to sing down the sun, the tune that called the wolves. The fiddle reminded her of the melody, but she couldn’t remember the words through the pain, so she made up her own.
    I’m missing my sweetheart
    My sweet heart does miss
    The sound of his voice and
    The feel of his kiss
    The wind it blows colder
    The day’s light grows dim
    But damned if I’m having
    This babe without him!
    Harvest laughed loud, giddy, hysterical, frantic, and on the next wave that lifted her back off the ground, she saw the wolf pack surrounding her. There was too much love and too much hate and too much of every other emotion warring inside Harvest for her to pick one. As there was only a half moon peeking through the twilight clouds, the female who spoke to her changed only her face so that her words might be understood. She sat neatly, with her long tail wrapped around her paws like a canine sphinx with a mouthful of knives.
    For a moment, the pain was so sharp Harvest could not feel her legs. She broke a sweat maintaining a level voice. “Let him go.”
    “Our cousin runs with us by choice,” said the face.
    Harvest bit the inside of her lip until she tasted blood. She refused to lose her courage in the face of her adversary. As the pain tore through her in deeper, more frequent bursts, she repeated the only words left to her.
    “Come back to me,” she asked the sky, for she knew not which wolf in the pack was her husband and that pain dwarfed the babe’s like a tear in a rainstorm. The charcoal wolf—her wolf—nudged one beast forward and she saw that its eyes were blue-green, not yet the bile amber-yellow of the rest of the pack.
    “Come back to me,” she said to him. Her husband recognized her with those still-human eyes—eyes that had traveled just as hard a road as she—but she could tell he did not understand her words.
    “Come back to me,” she whispered once more. It didn’t matter that he had left her. It didn’t matter that he now wore a skin of fur and walked on four legs. It didn’t matter that she had been forced to walk leagues to track him down. He was here and the babe wasn’t born yet; there was still time to keep his promise.
    “If he returns to you,” said the sphinx, “he will forsake every part of his wolf blood.” The bitch had the nerve to preen after her statement. Had she been within arm’s reach, Harvest was sure she could have