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When Harriet Vane shifted she was painfully conscious of her humanity. She was a woman in a frumpy, ill-fitting wolf suit, and both the cut and the fabric of the thing were unfashionable. Harriet looked, in her altered state, far more like a wolf than a woman, but with good light and a trained eye, you wouldn’t mistake her for one.

Members of the general public capable of transformation managed the matter somewhat haphazardly. Members of the English nobility, however, by definition shared ancestors who’d been ennobled for their martial prowess in the first place. Their traits, safe-guarded as they were within restricted stock, largely bred true. Nobles transformed into creatures identical to natural wolves—a touch larger, but otherwise indistinguishable, with all wolves’ strength, endurance, sensory acuity and murderous ferocity. When the moon took them, peers didn’t know they were men or that they ever had been. If they chose to transform at another time they retained an awareness of themselves, but Harriet suspected this did not bother them as it did her—that their conscious comfort in their lunar bodies was perfect, in proportion to the perfection of those bodies.

Lord Peter Wimsey was careful, urbane, and gentle. He moved his long, elegant hands just as though they were never paws. If anything, his face always looked a degree off to her in its human form. Harriet had grown to know his human features, and even to experience a small, round, soothed feeling when she saw them, but she could never help knowing that Peter’s pale visage ought to be a muzzle—that his sharp eyes would look better huge and yellow, and that shifting must drain all the calculated vagueness out of him. She could never help knowing that as a man, all he did was hide himself (in good clothes and off-hand, careless manners, under endless jokes and quotes—always what someone else thought, never what Peter did), and that he’d be so much the better for it if he couldn’t.

Sometimes Peter made Harriet want to scream, or shake him, because he was old enough to know he’d be ever so much more bearable if he stopped playing at being half a gentleman and half a clown. But then she did see why he did it. At some point someone had told Peter that the core of him was too much. Too raw, too quiveringly vulnerable. It was even possible that they’d done this to protect him, and that in a sense they had been right. Peter had taken it to heart: so much so that he at times pretended not to have one.

***

Tradition lingered past all use. The military still tended to use ‘full wolves’ as front-line officers, and quite apart from questions of class equality Harriet thought that was stupid. Just stupid. As though a wolf’s senses didn’t scream in rebellion at a hint of mustard gas on the field, at the charnel riot of rotting horse and human flesh and disease; as though the brutal loyalties which pushed the wolves on despite that sensory overload rendered that torture irrelevant, somehow. As though a machine gun couldn’t be loaded with silver-leaf bullets, cheap as chips, and a no man’s land patrol couldn’t finish officers off with silver bayonets: an efficient mix of old methods and new. How many had perished, slaved to that chivalric ideal? One no longer saw the flower of English manhood in the clubs, out on the town. Papers wouldn’t publish figures—still, rumours swirled. Some thought the full-wolf strain might die off entirely in Britain, and Harriet was torn between thinking that a mercy, in the face of future wars, and possibly overdue, in political terms, and terribly, terribly sad. She resented the rot of nostalgia in her heart even as she thought nuance and pity worth the having, and believed herself and the world ever so much richer for them.   

Not everyone was fit for it, either. Peter was efficient. Peter was loyal, Peter was brave, and Lord Peter’s hands shook now when the moon waxed. He set his teeth when he heard a howl on the street. Putting bits of evidence together without much considering it, as Harriet did by nature and as a professional habit, Harriet thought Peter never shifted except when he hadn’t any choice. He never said as much, but she had observed that not only did he avoid showing it off (rare, in men of his class—rarer still, in ones that wanted to impress a lesser-shifter), he never did it for pleasure, or even if he could possibly help it. To gather evidence or defend himself she’d known him to, though she’d never seen it herself. It was highly unusual for someone of his class, to say the least. Most full wolves enjoyed or even seemed to need extensive periods in a form as natural to them as, or perhaps even more comfortable than, a human body. Some eccentric old peers had to be coaxed into man-shape to vote Tory in the House of Lords, only to promptly return to wolf form and their traditional, withdrawn forest lodges afterwards.

Harriet had been tempted to ask someone about Peter’s evident aversion, but there was no one appropriate to direct the question to. Besides, it was invasive. She knew it was. She cared as a person who owed Lord Peter a great debt of gratitude, and as a friend. But in enquiring about this she would be asking for the allowances granted a partner, and while she refused the office Harriet supposed she must perforce refuse its rights and duties. Still, she wondered whether it was because Peter was terrified of hurting anyone, like that.

***

There weren’t a great many morganatic marriages. As a general rule, full-shifters, part-shifters and non-shifters preferred their own, at least as far as permanent unions went. Though there was, naturally, a goodly line in salacious ‘wild wolves ripping bodices with their teeth’ that made one of Harriet’s happy hack friends a good deal of money on the paperback market—just as in previous centuries erotic paintings of soft, vulnerable Little Red Riding Hoods had hung in every other nobleman’s closet. The problem, for her and Peter, was not precisely this. Or rather it was, but not in the way anyone thought. Harriet didn’t slavishly believe his Lordship was too far above her. She was not some warbling shepherdess in a vaudeville production. She had a sense of her own worth.

It was more a matter of what Beatrice had said to Don Pedro’s proposal. “No, my lord, unless I might have another for working-days: your grace is too costly to wear every day.” Harriet had had a lover before, and didn’t believe Peter would or could truly forgive and forget that. She had been shamed for it before the world, and had found herself suspected of murder. Harriet had no wish to be Peter’s pet scandal or his albatross, no wish to be or to become either amusing or something he resented. Besides, the distance between them had a certain materiality to it. It was one thing to say love ought to conquer all and another to think what it would be to live with that love, and thus with one another: to lie in a bed of your conquered objections, which would pop up again to surprise one, like dragon’s teeth planted in the ground springing forth as full-grown, armed warriors.

Peter had so much money he'd never thought of not having it. He’d always been someone. He had no notion of the strange shame of being poor and the choices this forced you to make. The person one was made to become. The questions as to the nature and point of her work that could make Harriet turn, restless and irritable, in the night. She didn’t believe Peter had ever asked the point of himself. Were they to marry, everyone would hate or pity her. He would, given time. And if the world despised her, if people thought her above herself, a snide grasping little pretender, Harriet’s pride couldn’t stand it. She’d never had those dreams, thank you. Yes, Peter had helped her a great deal in a time of need. Yes, she was grateful, and no, she had not always made choices she was proud of, that she felt did her credit. But in a general way, Harriet could take care of herself.

Peter’s well-established pack would run at foxes on hunt moons, and Harriet would what, lurch into the tea tent, awkward and bestial in her imperfect form? Perfectly conscious that she was where she’d no right to be, and making an arse of herself? Trying not to break the china, wondering whether she'd any right to be irritated if he fucked one of his own set in that state?

***

Lord Peter’s man, Bunter, was by any measure a class lower than Harriet. The line, however, was blurrier than she suspected either of them liked. Harriet was not so snobbish as Bunter, but for her part she was uneasy with the idea that by rights she ought to have been Peter’s servant, and their relations even more unbalanced than they were at present.

Bunter became somewhat ill-tempered and hirsute monthly. Harriet, as wolf and woman, could sympathise. Once upon a time a gentleman dallied, and Bunter was the likely result of a Harvest Moon and an adventurous lady. Of course Bunter was also the discreet companion of Peter’s war years, who knew and kept his master’s secrets. He was privy to more than Harriet was, because Harriet did not invite Lord Peter to rely on her more than was good for him. She did not see herself as someone much to be relied upon. Harriet wondered what poor old Bunter must think of her—of his master’s ridiculous quest to win her over, of her past and her character—and then stubbornly did not. It was nothing good, she suspected that much.

***

He pressed—never making a beast of himself, which was something, because most men didn't know how not to. But he did press. Harriet wondered whether it was down to persistence, duty, passion or an inability to accept being told ‘no’. Because she told him no, a hundred times. Harriet didn’t really wonder what it would be to tell him ‘yes’, or ask herself whether he could make her happy. That was not, in her mind, the question. She had not been happy, or really been anything, for a long while, and such a thing did not come much into her expectations for herself. She did not know what her future would be. More of the same, probably. Small pleasures, and small measures of contentment. Earned moments of stillness. Endurance. What does one do but endure?

***

Rushing crisp autumnal air singing around her, pushing against her cheeks. Out of breath, panting, chest heavy with the pump of her lungs, limbs kindling with low aching fire, the sound of the leaves crunching under her muffled into a pattern, a background against which she is listening for something else—for changes. A low howl, far off yet, and she starts, careening away, reeling drunkenly, running anywhere, anywhere. She slams into him because he’s running too, but he catches her and holds her upright and they still together, breath stretching out, bodies hammering in place, his gloved hands at her elbows, not letting her go just yet. She is glad he has found her in the wood.

“Peter,” she murmurs, tracing his thickening eyebrow, furring under a decorous coral-painted fingertip which is manicured as neatly as Harriet can manage at home. “Tell me how much you love me?”

He wraps his long fingers—the ones he inherited from the family portraits, the most classically beautiful thing about him—around the pale column of her neck and gently chokes her, harder and harder, pressure, blackness rushing in like water, and snap, he has killed her. Neat as that.

The wolf Peter noses and nudges her limp body. Harriet sees (it does not matter how she does) that he has arranged her into a sweet, curled position, as though he were making one of those primly gruesome Victorian taxidermied animal tableaux. He tucks her tail against her, just so. It is as plush and red as his jacket, and her spirit trembles with a pride that somehow hurts when she sees that she has become a full-shifter: a perfect fox.

Harriet woke up, just as out of breath as though she had been running. She found she was too nervy to sleep. Instead she made a cup of coffee, set her jaw and wrote a version of her dream into her latest, giving it a lurid, obvious psychosexual spin. She put on a brave face, because she knew she mustn’t let it bother her. In the book the dream meant something, but as far as Harriet herself went, its meaning was either too obvious or too subtle—as the Freudian lark usually had it.

The high-summer moon had begun to wax. Soon it would hang full and ripe.

***

He actually came to her rather than inviting her out via a letter. Rolled up to her door (the Daimler idling outside as well, she shouldn’t wonder). Peter bounced on his heels at the threshold, looking sharp and restless. He apologised for the intrusion—was she busy? She was, rather, but the ways his eyes shifted made her say she wasn’t, made her shrug on a jacket and come with him for the offered spot of lunch.

Harriet was anticipating another of his half-jocular, half-sad proposals, delivered either in his brisk mood (which she associated with his melancholy) or his jovial one (Or was that sadness, too? Sometimes Harriet wasn’t sure.). But no: this was something else altogether.

Peter was carefully dressed. A good suit, probably his best, and that was certainly saying something. The exquisite, moddish summer-weight fur-lined coat she’d seen him photographed in of late was nowhere in evidence—quite right. It would have been too much, too masterly. Full wolves had their tailors cut those out of what they’d killed hunting. Or perhaps that was old-fashioned? She didn’t know much about men’s clothing.

Peter was white around the lips and firm about it. Harriet sat awkwardly, stirring her bisque, unsure how to eat if he couldn’t.

“Yes,” Harriet said slowly in response to his disclosure. “Yes, I do see the problem.”

Peter swallowed and gave her a feeble smile. “That I should live to hear it called such! Still, I can’t say I find your doing so all that objectionable, under the circumstances, which are not quite so propitious as I’d wish. Oh, damn it all, I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

Harriet gave him an amused look, and Peter exhaled, continuing in a moment at a less bracing pace. “Harriet. Darling Harriet. I’ll need someone, and I’d very much like it to be you. You needn’t oblige me—of course you needn’t. I wouldn’t have you do it out of a sense of obligation for all the world. So unromantic, what? Not to mention brutish of me. I’m only asking it as a favour because the thought of going through all this with anyone but you upsets me terribly. I couldn’t live with myself, if I didn’t ask. I can hardly manage it having done, but on balance—” He shrugged.

He’d be lost, without some friend there with him. No shame accrued to a man or woman who helped a noble through a moon-heat—those rare concurrences the pre-Christian Britons used to hold so sacred. Saints and pure knights had even done the office, and retained their technical chastity, too. Should anyone get to hear of it, well, Harriet supposed they’d heard worse of her. It might even count in her favor.

It wouldn’t have to be a marriage, though she knew he’d think of it as one—falling on Beltane, for god’s sake. No, not quite a union, though Harriet knew full well there were certain legal implications: it was a bond. This would render her, in the eyes of custom and the law, something like Peter’s wife, with certain rights of him. It made Harriet uneasy, even as she suspected Peter might already plan to leave her something, with or without her permission, in the unfortunate event of his demise.

She’d been thinking too long, because she started when Peter said, “I don’t want to do this with anyone but you,” a little more sharply than she suspected he intended to. He wasn’t commanding her, he was simply honest and afraid. ‘So please don’t make me’ must have followed, in his mind. The edge in his voice reminded Harriet that having been a soldier, Peter had done violence as well as had it enacted upon him. It impressed her, briefly, that normally she did not see this in him.

Helping him would be—awkward. And simple, really. And perhaps a pleasure, though she didn’t let herself consider that much.

“All right,” Harriet said, making her voice firm and steady with an effort. Peter closed his eyes, pressing her hand with gratitude, and Harriet felt powerful and compassionate and fond of him, even as she felt a little resentful because really, what else could she say?

“I won’t make it beastly, I swear,” Peter said, decorously releasing her hand when she could see he’d have liked to keep hold of it, this close to a heat (fierce, ugly red pinpricks of blood stood in his pale cheeks, not that she was looking for them, and his perfectly coiffed hair was fluffier than it was wont to be) and relieved as he seemed. “And I won’t insult you by pretending it’s business to me. I don't love anyone as I do you, and I never will. That’s the reason I want you there, you know, but I promise I won't be an arse about it.”

What was there to say to that?

“Your family’s run, I presume?” She knew Peter went down to his family seat for full moons. When there was nothing for it.

“The old den, naturally. Bunter can drive you up in the Daimler.”

Harriet blinked. “How will you—”

Peter coughed. “I’ll—run up, with some friends. My brother will make a point of it. It’s traditional, you see.”

“What, all that way?”

“It ain’t such a distance, when you’re low to the ground and all that.” Clearly he had more experience of moving in his wolf-form than Harriet did in her own.

She was reflexively uncomfortable, though trying not to show it. Clearly it didn’t work.

“I won’t insult you by offering to lop off parts of myself,” he said. “Avoiding involving you in lupine affairs, threatening to shed my titles or any of that rubbish. Keeping this from you, that sort of thing. It’d be pathetic, and it wouldn’t please you. You’d feel the lie between us. You know perfectly well what I am, and I wouldn’t want you to change a hair of your head or your pelt for me, either.”

“I know,” Harriet said kindly, because she did.

***

Night was falling. The glade was lit like a Romantic painting. Someone had made a good fire before they arrived. Peter, now naked before her but businesslike about it, breathed hard as his limbs stretched and contracted. Her own transformations were shaking and extended, fits and starts; his was brisk, ripping and complete. It was as strange as finding it aesthetically appealing to watch some poor woman give birth, but for all that, Peter’s transformation truly was beautiful. Harriet suspected she’d find it erotic, if she were more used to it. As it was, it was startling and unnerving and hauntingly gorgeous.

At first the wolf was cringing and aggressive, bearing his teeth at the darkness beyond their circle and then shrinking back at once. Frightened. Not of her, she understood with a start, but of the change. Of himself.

“It’s all right, Peter,” she said, her always-low voice pitched to soothe. His ears perked, he swung his head around on hearing her.

Harriet had half-suspected there would be some humiliating incident where, after all this, his wolf wouldn’t even accept her and he’d run off into the forest. But no such luck. Peter knew her. He padded up to her, easier for her being there—his tail cautiously beginning to swish. Harriet had never been greeted as a mate before, and though she’d not been much inclined to feeling of late, she’d have to have been made of stone not to find that unhesitating welcome affecting.

It was very brave to love someone. Harriet knew that. You had to be capable of the feeling, and you had to be willing, and you had to persist in it. Not everyone was, not everyone could. It demanded labour and vulnerability, just as any other art did. You could hang the most glittering bits of human sympathy and experience on the quotidian frame of quite a commonplace love. The couple arguing over whether to have potatoes for supper could ascend the very heights of passion and know the deepest tenderness. Harriet supposed you had to support these qualities with just such a workaday structure—they’d need something sturdy to hold them, after all. Cheap art, ordinary relations, quite average people: how else did anything grand ever come into the world and stay there?

Peter had smelled a thousand and a thousand still bodies, and had held his nerve until it had broken him. He had given out, body and soul, before his will and duty had. Harriet thought him brave for it but would not have respected him less if he had been overpowered, if he had questioned that duty earlier in the course of its execution. The bravery of him was not in violence so much as in this: the way his hands could cradle delicate things, and reach to her for reassurance. The way his heart extended to her, licking life into the wounded meat of her own. The way his soft muzzle pressed now against her outstretched hand, rubbing a scent-claim onto it, seeking the stroking arch of her fingers. Hunting proof of her affection, and her willingness to do for him what she understood he wanted to do for her. Again and again, Peter tried for her.

Harriet undressed briskly, the wolf’s eyes on her, and pushed herself through her own transformation. While very aware that she wasn’t a full-shifter and inconveniently conscious during her lupine periods, Harriet seldom felt ashamed of her wolf-form in and of itself. It was what it was, and it served. But Peter’s perfect white body embarrassed her brown speckled fur, and when the thing was done Harriet fought not to put a paw over her eyes, to cringe in this form. But the wolf simply jumped around her, puppyish, knowing her still and delighted to find her thus altered. There didn’t seem much point in feeling hideous when it was only the two of them here, and when Peter quite evidently didn’t think her so. It would be something like an irritating piece of false modesty.

Peter was deeply affectionate, either due to his altered state or because he always wished to be, and his current lack of self-awareness had finally given him license. He nuzzled her thoroughly, and the influence of the moon and his fungible heat hormones, smacking thick against her palate when she breathed, made Harriet risingly eager to see the business through. It was always a little queer scenting people right after they’d transformed. Most well-kept humans smelled rather wan and blank, or perfumed, and a wolf that smelled of nothing, or worse, a wolf that sneezed and choked on its own lingering manufactured scent, struck Harriet as comic. Peter, however, smelled not unpleasantly of his run—of having been in the woods for some hours and having only changed into a man again briefly for her benefit, that he might say a few words to her before they began (perhaps he’d thought her skittish—well, it was possible, and she tried not to understand his politeness or concern as an insult). He was cedar and exertion and earth, and he was urgent reeking need. Heat hormones reached rudely into you and gripped. Harriet felt herself throbbing under their influence, her heart beating like a drum, her muscles trembling, all of her rendered restless and ready.

She didn’t know how Peter could bear, when she impatiently presented herself, to simply lick at her, when he must have been far worse off than she was. She whined and twitched and tried to roll over, and he huffed a laugh and rolled with her. Irritably, Harriet brushed his ear down with her paw. It sprang back and he touched his nose to hers, then rubbed his face against her belly, which she’d only belatedly realised, with due embarrassment, that she had exposed to him. Then Peter went right back to his original plan, and Harriet growled low at how ludicrously stubborn he could be. But she kicked and whimpered and took it. Impatient as she was it was still delicious to feel the soft earth under her and the warm night wrapping around them, to hear the low, safe noises of the forest and to feel the scritch scritch scritch of Peter’s heavy, rough tongue against her core. His tail swished quickly like a metronome, and she thought ‘you utter smug bastard’ without great resentment.

Eventually either Peter tired of it or Harriet’s whines reached an appropriately pathetic pitch, because he sat back on his haunches and waited for her to turn over. His tail thwacked the ground insistently as she did so, giving away that he wasn’t half so collected as he might seem. Good, Harriet thought with some self-satisfaction. When she’d managed it Peter surged over her, catching her neck gently in his teeth. Harriet closed her eyes, afraid of his jaw but safe in this, submitting to it. Though well-prepared for it she yipped when he rushed in. She knew that as a man he’d have done this with more finesse—he was boyish as a wolf, though Harriet suspected that the night made him so. She’d wager that normally Peter had a sly, canny capering manner in this form that gave way to gravitas. That would be like him. It was only rendered helpless and unthinking, as he apparently could only bear to be before her, that Peter was so unmannered and unconcerned.  

Harriet spread herself, arching her back, letting Peter rock into her (each push feeling solid, expansive, achingly fine) until he spent with a desperate sharp howl and locked. She let her legs drop and they lay together, his heart slowing against her back. On successive occasions (for this was to be the first of many), Harriet knew he’d have her coming for him, have her yelping and quivering. But this first time especially was an answer to Peter’s heated, feverish need, banked up and now expressed as kindly as he could manage it. My poor darling, Harriet caught herself thinking, full of him, locked against him, human contraceptive measures fighting against her own instinct not to spill a drop of what he’d given her. Dear Peter, she thought, feeling herself warm at the prospect of enjoying him again, and then again, because he would need it, and she would want it, until dawn broke, and with it this present accord.

***

The rising sun crisped the dew off the grass. Their backs were to one another, and Harriet was disoriented by the muffled dullness of her human hearing. Peter wasn’t far away, but now that she could hardly make out the various sounds of him dressing he seemed it. He had turned to give her privacy in which to gather up her functional tweed skirt, like a gentleman, and now she suspected he would gallantly offer her the use of a discreet lodge to shower and change, to sleep if she fancied it. Then he’d propose a ride home, or lunch with his mother at the nearby dower house, as she liked.

“You’re very beautiful as a wolf,” she told him as she buckled her belt. His plush white coat had felt so very thick and soft against her hand, and then against her fur. His great yellow eyes had been quick and surprisingly wise. “Not to imply any dislike of your appearance in the normal way, but it struck me, and it seemed rude not to say, after all this.”

Peter hesitated, waiting until she’d finished and turning when she responded to his “all right?” with a yes.

“I think you’re stunning, transformed.” She made a face; he bristled. “I wish you wouldn't sneer at that, as if you thought it was rather funny. Don’t you dare think I’m mocking you—that I would, especially so soon after—” he swallowed, and Harriet softened.

“I do,” he said again, “but then, I think you’re a ravishing woman. It was the first time I’d ever seen you transformed.”

“Peter,” she said, very gently now, “I know very well that I’m fair enough, as these things go. There are lovelier women—you’re photographed in company with them regularly. The society pages are so good as to ensure I know you’re well acquainted with the breed.” She winced at her own word choice, that telling ‘breed’, but pressed on. “That sort of thing doesn’t matter, when one is absorbed with the beloved object, I suppose. I do believe you, now. But it matters to others, you see, and you know how that can wear on a person with time, and how one’s own feelings—”

“Please don’t do this to me just now,” Peter said, clenching and unclenching his great hand. “I’m in no shape to bear it, when you won’t listen to a thing I have to say in your praise or my own defense, and my heart’s still right up in my throat.”

“Fine,” Harriet said, annoyed with him and embarrassed, feeling she was being a heel and angry he’d made her know it.

He gestured; they walked. In the distance she could make out just the sort of lodge she’d predicted. The Wimseys were an old family, and they did this sort of thing properly. How many girls like her had there been, over the centuries? For Peter himself? How many perfectly polite breakfasts?

“People say all sorts of romantic nonsense about the wolf,” Peter said as he stepped lightly, still thinking like a predator in the woods. “They talk as though it’s some primeval savage core, as though the wolf hasn’t any personality of its own, or any relation to you. It’s all hogwash. Sentimental, pompous posturing. I’m certainly myself as a wolf, even when I’m fully ‘lost’ in the form, and of course it’s just as governed by social expectation as anything else. It’s simply a different set of expectations. A wolf naps and raises cubs and explores, just as much as it hunts. If we absolutely must lower ourselves to speak of drives, why not those drives, too? Harriet,” he stopped, leaning against a birch as lean and tender as himself, “as a wolf, I do love you. Differently than I do as a human, of course, but no less potently for that.” He swallowed, which on his lean throat looked dramatic and final, like a boa constrictor consuming prey. “Moon-shifted, I didn’t realise you weren’t mine. That you wouldn’t be after.”

Peter looked away from her. “Now I’m—I’m rather—well, I’m rather in a hole just now, don’t you know, and too raw not to tell you. That was the first time I’ve been at peace in that state since the front. The first time I’ve enjoyed it.” Peter shook his head, his still-too-thick corn-tassel hair falling across his face. “I’m sorry I’m too weak to keep this from you, and sorry I’ve bullied you, when you’ve said, fair as anything, that you weren’t ready to talk about any of it. Tell me to let go of the whole thing and I will. I’ll wait as long as it takes, as long as you need, but if I’m only making the course of things that much rougher for you, say. I’ll—”

He didn’t continue.

“You could never be the kind of man who made a woman uncomfortable like that, Peter,” Harriet said firmly. “I’m sorry I’ve felt rotten, and sorry I’ve been rotten to you, but you’ve only ever been kind to me, and you’ve done everything you could to make my load sit lighter—to give me whatever help you hoped I’d take.”

In the brightening morning the birds were singing, and at the edge of the ancient forest the English countryside was coming alive. A cow lowed, and Harriet was stirred by wolfish hunger and soothed by human discipline and contentment. Insects hummed, birds chittered, and someone was singing as she went—the milkmaid, perhaps. At the liminal line between the forest and the field that held the lodge, at the boundary that bestrode the things they were, all the reasons Harriet had held hard against Peter and herself seemed to steam away with the fog. The world was being reborn, as simply and surely as if was every morning, and dimly and deeply, so was Harriet Deborah Vane, who had endured a thousand days of hardship to protect what was still good and quick in her. She was ready for herself, and for him.

She told him all the reasons, those she’d previously intimated and those she’d held back. Her voice was low and strong. When she’d finished, she said “Peter, all the same, I think we ought to try.”

“Do you mean it?” he asked after a moment.

She nodded. Pursed her lips. Resolved herself to begin—to work once more the muscle of her heart, and nerve herself to bravery. Over the top again, for her sake and for his, in the belief that good could come of it, and that they were deserving of good things if they did come. “Yes. Yes, I think we ought to.”

Gently, Peter took Harriet’s face in his hand and kissed it. His awkward features were perfect, just as soon as she let them be. He nuzzled her cheek with his human nose and licked her mouth, still half a wolf in his mind. Harriet made a sound of thrumming contentment.

“Marry me,” he asked for the thousandth time.

“Soon,” she answered for the first.

Together they walked into the cottage.