A day passed, and Gregor found a rather sturdy stick. It flopped flaccid with a few quick runes and he stretched it straight and bent one end into a handle, then the runes were scraped away and Gregor gained a makeshift cane.

  They then walked and they camped and Gregor didn’t get better, which was no surprise, because recuperation requires proper rest, and rest is not something available to the wicked, being that they are always too busy with dire business to ever really be settled. Their business made them do silly things, like walking all day after being shot and drained of blood.

  The pair slept, then walked some more, and night then found them again in a field.

  More specifically, in a shack in a field, competing for space with ploughs and tackle and tedders stowed for the winter, together sharing Gregor’s enchanted cloak for warmth. Contrary to the norm, Mildred took first watch.

  Sitting up against the wall of the shack while Gregor lay down, with her thick coat and scarf drawn tight against the winter and her legs under the cloak, Mildred gazed about in the dark, thinking. Ruminating. She now had tasks aplenty beyond mere survival.

  Gregor was a pincushion man, all punched full of holes, and with nothing in his future except being poked full of more. Worse, this life of horror happened to be a life that he liked. Thus, there was to be no escape. Herefrom came her new labours – somebody needed to protect the protector.

  And so, she very sneakily planned to let him sleep for much longer than he would like.

  The bright light of a full moon streaked in through the gaps between the planks of the wall, casting everything in long, regular lines where the dust hung aglow, marred by the occasional shadow of a snowflake. The wind blew, but calmly, and little made it in.

  In distraction, it struck her that the wind was somehow different down here, where the land was low and generally flat. The gusts weren’t quite like they were in the mountains. More mellow, perhaps. Less intrusive. She’d been a mountain girl all her life, but mountains had done her a bad turn these past few months, and so this was a pleasant development. Her life needed a change of venue, most definitely.

  Already, Mildred was looking forward to not needing to contend with elevation in the near future of her journey, which was distressingly the kind of thought an adventurous sort of person might have. Was that what she was now? It couldn’t be. She’d always been clever, not… wayward. Was that still true, or was she now somebody whose primary occupation and pursuit was to journey from place to place, guided only by the idea of some hypothetical endpoint?

  That didn’t sound like her. Not at all. She was far too sensible to become an adventurous vagrant.

  But then, what was she? Because she certainly wasn’t the same as she’d always been. She was no longer that mountain girl, and she didn’t want to be.

  …

  What did she hope to become?

  It was a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

  Gregor was a wizard, no doubt about that, and he liked it very much. He did wizard things and dressed in wizard clothes and enjoyed being terrifying. What did Mildred do? What was notable about her? Nothing so obvious, not compared to him.

  She couldn’t think of much, except that circumstances had infected her with adventure-adjacent thoughts, and that that simply couldn’t be the full extent of her new nature.

  Yet more to ponder…

  Mildred gave a jolt when a thin, jittering finger pressed itself to her lips. Glancing, she saw that it belonged to Gregor, who bore no discernible expression in the low light and offered no explanation.

  Retracting the finger, he moved it slowly and steadily to point at the wall behind them, to a larger-than-average gap between the planks. She intuited this to mean that there was something there, something that had ears. After a bit more gesturing, she gathered that he expected her to peer out from the gap.

  Giving Gregor a long look of raised-brow caution, she turned slowly to the slit, pressing her head to the scratchy roughsawn planks.

  At first, there were no obvious enemies and no cause for alarm. Nothing immediately appeared to be amiss. But then, very distantly, she spied a silhouette on a moon-silvered hill.

  It was tall and dark, with great swinging ape-arms that made the beast seem like it should be lumbering dumbly around, perhaps dragging its knuckles, but that was not the case. Instead, it crept quickly along, moving all its bulky bits with graceful rapidity.

  It paused on occasion, standing and stretching up to absurd bipedal height, sniffing at the air, looking, listening. Hunting.

  Undoubtedly, this was the moonlit form of a werewolf – a thing for which no extremity of description felt absurd. It was a creature that made the superlative sensible.

  Mildred found herself gripped by an unaccountable terror. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think.

  There was only the wolf. Nothing else.

  She’d met many terrifying things on this journey, both in her imaginings and in reality. They’d all tried themselves against her mind, some truly shaking her, and some being shaken off, and so she was by now well-inoculated against many of the different varieties and sources of fear, and thereby numb to most others.

  And even prior to the advent of her unpleasant circumstances, she’d never been prone to fear, being always big and strong and never without the close protection of an insurmountable ally, which really deprives a growing girl the healthy opportunity to feel scared. And now, matured by circumstance and wizardly accompaniment, Mildred thought herself primed to weather the chilling hazards of terror posed by all manner of beasts and spectres and cruelties and abominations of mind and matter.

  But she wasn’t.

  This was different, not anything like the undead pricolici, which had been fearsome insofar as it meant real and immediate harm to Gregor and herself. The feeling was insane and inexplicable, like nothing in the world could be so terrible as discovery by the beast. It was the apex of fear, paralytic and solid in her veins.

  A living werewolf was entirely different and terrible compared to everything else she’d ever seen, and she would have pissed herself if Gregor hadn’t turned her away from the sight, his hand clamped to her mouth.

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  In the instant her eye left the beast, all returned to normal. She could move and think and breathe, and regained presence of mind enough to do it quietly. She heaved and shivered, but took desperate care to make no sound.

  Gregor looked on.

  Once certain that Mildred wouldn’t soon be screaming, he brought his finger back up to his own mouth, reinforcing his instruction to remain silent. Mildred had no trouble with complying.

  The beast had been very distant, with details only visible at a squint. She wouldn’t have imagined that it could hear any sound that it was possible for them to make, but Gregor clearly knew better, and no amount of caution would have then seemed excessive.

  They sat there in silence, with Gregor peering unperturbed through the gap at the beast and with Mildred restlessly resting her hand on a pistol, palming it as a comfort, but not daring to really grasp it in fear that it might rattle.

  Like this, ten minutes passed before Gregor cast his eye back to Mildred.

  “It was upwind,” he rasped. “We are lucky.”

  Mildred just looked at him pensively, hand still glued to her gun and hesitant to speak.

  “It is gone,” he assured her.

  She rubbed her nose and nodded, eyes still wide and leery of sound.

  “Mildred, the fear you felt was magical. Pay it little mind, the wolf really is gone.”

  This was only the third or fourth time Gregor had called her by name, not that she’d ever confess to noticing. Finding strange courage in this fact and in his claim of arcane intimidation, she asked question, voice unavoidably quiet.

  “…Why wasn’t the pricolici like that?”

  “Because it was dead.”

  She didn’t understand how that made any difference at all, but accepted the answer nonetheless.

  “If there are… werewolves… roaming, does that mean we made it into the republic?”

  He shrugged. “It isn’t as if they live only here, or that they can’t move around.” He paused to think, then shrugged again. “But yes, we are likely in the republic.”

  ***

  The light of the following morning led them to the first road they’d seen in a while.

  It was a high mound snaking between the irregular fields, probably built up by refuse from the digging of irrigation trenches and packed hard by lack of anywhere else to drive horses and men, and fed traffic like a river by the little tributary footpaths and tracks which wormed around the edges of the plots.

  West, they followed it, insofar as the twists and turns looked to be heading west, and eventually they came upon grazing land.

  There, they found a farmhouse, squat and ramshackle, covered in scabs of haphazard expansion and with small, squashed windows that looked like little beady eyes.

  Protruding tumorously from the side of the house was a small shearing shed, and there, beside the rather messy corpse of what was formerly a sheep, stood the presumed farmer and two younger others. All three were thin and wiry and with heads of copper hair.

  A large door lay on the dirt, several meters from the open space in the shed where it was likely meant to hang.

  Evidently, the animals had been corralled inside for the occasion of the full moon, and it hadn’t helped.

  While Gregor and Mildred approached, one lad got to hammering new hinges into the doorframe so that the door might be reattached, while the other stood beside him with a rod, prodding and threatening the sheep to remain inside. This seemed to be unnecessary, for the sheep now had a healthy fear of whatever might lurk beyond their sanctuary. Meanwhile, the spindly old farmer (and father, presumably) gazed with pensive eyes out to faraway fields and pastures, cradling a beat fowling piece in the crook of his arm and with a grimace on his lips.

  At some point, one of the three spotted the approaching pair, and the timorous father came cautiously out to meet them.

  The thin fellow muttered his bonjour, then began a stammering account of the night and the horrible loup garou, pleading, it seemed, for the wizard to do something about it, or so Mildred thought. She understood enough of the language to struggle through most conversations, but details beyond the basic sometimes escaped her.

  Gregor replied, fluent as always, that he had neither time nor inclination, and that the farmer could help himself by treating the wolf like a taxman who came to collect every month, which wasn’t too far from the reality of the situation.

  "How many did you lose?"

  "Only one, sir, but we've few as it is."

  "Then leave one out as tithe. Let him take what he wants, and he should ignore the rest of the flock.”

  “But-”

  “And your family. With a sheep in his belly, he won’t have room for any of them.”

  “…”

  “You have horses, I assume?” Gregor continued. “We will buy them.”

  Naturally, the farmer was unwilling. Every horse he owned was a horse he used, but who was he before the menace of a wizard? The requests of such an evil person might as well be commands contingent on the threat of execution.

  “Might ye see mercy sir? I’ve three, so I can spare ye just one, lest we starve.”

  One was enough, and so away trotted Mildred and Gregor atop an old mare with a saddle of woollen felt.

  “Wizard!” Called one of the lads, door now hung. “There’re queer folk down th' road, ‘clan of ‘em, and not a good soul in the world’d mind if there were a few less!”

  This earned the boy a whack, and an oath from the father about ‘feudin’ and rumourin’ and speakin’ lightly to yer betters’ as he was lead inside and away from the view of the departing pair.

  The outburst was slightly strange to Mildred, but not to Gregor, for wizards were often solicited as weapons in vendettas and feuds, and isolated rustic families had generations to build a rich lore of grudges and to foster animosity with their few neighbours.

  “Should that concern us?” Mildred asked, looking back.

  “Doubtful.”

  “I suppose the train brought us to the Republic after all.”

  “Likely.”

  “By the way,” she began, recalling his proficiency with the local tongue, “how many other languages can you speak?”

  “How many?” He repeated in a thoughtful tone.

  Mildred frowned. She sensed the approach of absurdity. “Yes, Gregor. How many.”

  “Most of them, I suppose.”

  It was one thing for Gregor to not know his own age. That particular oddity was understandable because he didn’t know when he was born. It was strange, but reasonable. It made sense.

  This was entirely different.

  “…Most of them?”

  “Likely.”

  “How do you know most of the languages?”

  “Well, I don’t know them all yet. That will take a while, even for me. Kaius knew them all, and it took him seventy years.”

  Mildred leaned back in the saddle with her arms crossed, directing a look of consternation at the back of Gregor’s head as if to see inside and find whichever little kernel of him was responsible for this.

  It took her a while, but eventually, a response was forthcoming.

  “…No.”

  “No?”

  “No. Gregor, you have finally found the limit of my credulity. You can neither know most of the languages, nor all of them. These are impossibilities. They are impossible. And you may not know this, but impossible things cannot be done.”

  "Really?" He mused. "I was unaware."