wayside-parliament

Author's Note: There is an audio version of this story available on The Voice of Dog as part of their Pride 2024 series.

Triumph Public Lending Library The Year of Our Lady 482

There were so many places Sofia would rather be than the library. Like out at the park on hir bicycle. It was a lovely spring day, perfect for riding across town, or even up the road and along the edge of the Forest, practicing telling the bird songs apart and wondering what lay beyond where the road disappeared into the trees. Sie could even be doing something that didn’t make hir parents worry, like weeding the vegetable garden behind the synagogue. Sie was almost willing to wash dishes at this point if it meant sie wasn't stuck here staring at a book of short stories, unable to come up with a single thing to say tomorrow when hir teacher asked what sie thought about it.

But sie couldn't leave now. Esther would notice, and tell the librarian, and it would make it back to Sofia's parents somehow. Even though Esther and Yakov were off at the corner table, completely focused on that same page Sofia was struggling with, probably having the whole discussion by themselves.

Maybe Miriam would have some sympathy. Sofia looked around for her. Nope, Miriam was curled up in an armchair, her beak deep in some book that didn’t look like homework at all. Of course she was. Her mother was the librarian. She probably had all her questions written out before the rest of them even got there.

Why was Sofia the only one this was difficult for?

It took hir a moment to realize that someone had sat down at hir table. And it wasn't someone sie knew. They were grown up, sie thought. Their skin was so pale, they looked like they'd never been outside in their life—and that wasn't possible, was it, not even Miriam’s parents lived in the library. Their hair was braided all the way down their back, and there was something odd about their ears.

“Hi,” the stranger said, and Sofia realized sie was staring and quickly looked away. “I'm Ariel. What's your name?”

“I'm Sofia,” sie said, suddenly nervous. Why had they chosen hir to talk to?

“It's lovely to meet you, Sofia,” Ariel said. “I was wondering if you could help me with something I'm reading.” They set a book down on the table. It was a comic book, with a cover like the one Miriam was reading. They opened it to a bookmark near the end and pointed at a panel. “I've never seen anyone make that face before. Can you help me figure out what they're feeling?”

Sofia knelt on hir seat to get a closer look. “Hmmm...They look scared and angry, and maybe surprised?” Context clues, sie remembered hir teacher saying. Sie read through the rest of the page, then pointed to a line in another panel. “They've just figured out the bad guy used to be their friend. I think the word for that is betrayed. Like he broke a promise.”

“Hey, you're from the Forest, aren't you?” Esther had come up behind Sofia to watch. Now that sie mentioned it, that could be why the stranger looked strange. Miriam’s gran had told them all once that the trees grew so close together deep in the Forest that you could barely see the sun most of the time, so everyone who lived there and didn’t have fur or feathers had almost ghostly pale skin.

What else was so different about the Forest, that they'd come here with questions about faces?

Ariel didn't seem bothered by Esther’s question. “Yes, I'm from the commune. Do you agree with your friend?”

Esther scanned the whole page in what felt like half the time Sofia had taken. “Yeah, betrayed sounds right.”

“Thank you so much,” Ariel said. They turned the page; the next one had To Be Continued splashed across it. “I suppose I'll have to find the next one to see what happens.”

“I know where they are!” Miriam appeared in a shimmer of red and blue feathers. She looked so excited it hurt.

“Wonderful.” Ariel pushed back their chair and stood up. “Can you show me?”

“This way.” She fluttered off into the shelves, and Ariel followed.

“Wow,” Esther whispered. “A real elf from the Forest. Wonder what they're doing here.”

Sofia shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe Forest books are boring.” Maybe sie'd like reading better too if sie could read comics without having to finish hir homework first.

“Do they even have books in the Forest?” Esther wondered. “Mama says elves just remember everything and don't have to write it down.”

“You could ask, Sofia.” Yakov was watching them from the corner table. “It looked like they like you.”

But sie couldn't ask. It just didn't seem right somehow. And so Sofia watched silently as Ariel emerged from the shelves, a stack of books in hand; brought them to the desk for Miriam’s mother to check out; then paused in the doorway to pack them into a satchel and lift it onto one shoulder.

Ariel left the library, and Sofia and hir friends followed at a curious distance. When Ariel reached the sidewalk, they turned back to wave goodbye, then knelt on the pavement with their fingertips pressed to the ground. In the space of a blink, they changed, and a majestic white wolf rose from that spot, satchel still around its neck, stretched its legs, and set off along the road out of town.

All at once, there was so much Sofia wanted to know—about Ariel, about their home, about the magic that let them transform, about everything. “Wait!” sie called, running down the steps after the wolf. Sie hit the sidewalk, heart pounding, and suddenly felt like sie could run all the way to the Forest to catch up and ask all hir questions. Ariel was out of sight, but sie could smell which way they went, and sie thought sie could follow them faster if sie ran on all fours, maybe—

Someone called hir name. Sie stopped and looked back, and found hirself halfway down the block, and Esther and Yakov running after hir. Standing up, sie realized hir arms were covered in shaggy fur, a dusty brown nothing like Ariel’s glossy white coat. The ground was farther away than it should be, and when Esther reached hir, Sofia found sie was nearly a head taller.

“Sofia, what did you do?” Yakov hung back, eyes wide. Was he scared? Of hir? What had sie done?

“Don't be like that, Yakov.” Esther scrambled right up to Sofia and gave hir a hug. “Sie’s just a werewolf, like my zayde and my big sister.” “You’re okay,” sie whispered. “Don't worry about what he thinks. You've been very brave, and you're okay.”

Sofia began to relax into the hug, and felt hirself almost falling as the adrenaline drained away, falling back onto her feet somehow and feeling more and more herself every moment. Sie closed hir eyes to shake off the dizziness, and when sie opened them, the ground was slightly closer, the scents on the breeze had faded, and Esther was no longer craning hir neck to look hir in the eye.

“Yeah. I'm okay,” sie said, and mostly believed it.

“Told you so. Now let's go talk to Zayde.”

22 years later

The sun moseyed up and out of the kitchen window on its uneasy slide toward noon. Sofia banged on the side of the old dish-washer to try to settle its pulleys back into alignment. Something in there was resisting, and had taken the rest of the inner workings with it. Maybe it was finally time for a new gear train. Well, that was nothing new. She'd been tinkering with the idea of a dish-washing machine for almost two decades, since long before she'd made its predecessor as a courtship gift for Esther, and installed this one as the first labor saving device in their new home. Every device needed upkeep, and any system could be improved on.

And not just machines. In fact, it had been a while since Sofia last surprised her wife with lunch at work. And she could stop by her own workshop afterward and maybe fix someone else's appliances for a change.

She packed up her toolbox and headed out.

Main Street wasn't all that busy today. The last ship in from North Metropolis was at least five days ago, and if anything, Triumph’s shopkeepers were laying low to prepare for the next one. Still, when Sofia left the deli with the usual sandwiches and a box of fresh-baked cinnamon rugelach, she found herself in a small crowd marveling at something approaching down the Forest road.

That something, she found out as she stepped off the curb, was an improbably large wolf with glossy white fur, carrying something she couldn’t quite make out on its back. The one was unusual—Deep Foresters rarely left the Lady’s shadow—and the other utterly unprecedented outside the Solstice market, which was nearly two months gone. What were they doing here with cargo?

The wolf’s ears pricked forward. It looked about cautiously, then focused straight ahead. Sofia couldn’t escape the notion that it was looking at her specifically.

Well, she’d best find out what it wanted. Sofia shifted lunch to under one arm, and made the hand sign Esther’s zayde, may he rest in peace, had taught her long ago, and mouthed the prayer that went with it, praise to the Lady, who sustains the world and lets all things grow. It was no longer a shock that her arms bristled with fur; no longer terrifying, the rush of strength and of scent; and come to think of it, the strange wolf smelled familiar.

The crowd parted around her, muttering uncertainly. Odds were she wasn't the only werewolf there, but she was clearly the only one with the presence of mind to try this. She strode up the street and met the wolf halfway.

The cargo turned out to be a passenger, sprawled unconscious across the wolf’s back and secured there with what looked like braided strands of Forest magic. Sofia knelt to check their pulse—faint, but not gone. “Doctor?” she asked. The wolf nodded, she thought. “All right. Follow me.”

The crowd had retreated to the sidewalks by the time they passed. Sofia didn't know what they'd expected, but it sure wasn't this.

***

Esther was none too happy to have an emergency patient brought in during her lunch break. The food, she appreciated, and promised she'd eat as soon as she was sure the man was stable. The best thing Sofia could do now was give Esther and her apprentice some space, so she retreated to the clinic’s sunny front steps to eat her own sandwich.

The wolf sat waiting on the stairs. Sofia unwrapped her sandwich and offered it half. “Want some corned beef?”

The wolf shifted, and became that elegant elf Sofia remembered from the library all those years ago. “No thanks, I'll eat when I get home. Is he okay?”

“The doctor didn't seem worried.” Sofia let go of her own wolfshape in sympathy—the same prayer, a slightly different gesture—and took a bite of sandwich with teeth no longer grossly overpowered for cold cuts.

“That's probably a good thing. Are you okay?”

“Huh?”

“I haven’t seen you in ages,” Ariel said (now it absolutely had to be Ariel). “I wasn’t even sure you were the same person at first. Your friends always seemed to be at the library when I went, but you were gone.”

“Yeah, I didn’t go back much after that. Honestly, I don’t think I wanted to be there in the first place. And after that, I guess I just had apprenticeships keeping me busy.” The first had been to Esther’s zayde, may he rest in peace, spending her afternoons learning to befriend the wolf in her soul and keep it from running away with her again, to follow a scent and hunt and keep Esther safe and find her way home without fail, and along the way, enough tricks of rhetoric and memory to carry her through school to her b’mitzvah. And after that, to Ori’s mother the blacksmith, shoeing horses and fixing imported Onumbrican farm equipment until she earned her own workshop across the street from Ori’s and began building her own machines to make the work of living a little easier for the people of Triumph.

“They started you young,” Ariel observed.

“Yeah, you kinda helped with that.”

“How do you mean?”

Sofia looked down at the steps. What would be least wrong to say, now that she’d started? How about the truth? said a memory of Esther’s zayde.

“The day I met you...was the day I shifted for the first time. I wanted to go with you so badly, to see what life was like in the Forest.”

“So they kept you away after that?” Ariel said sharply. Sofia looked up. Their expression hadn’t changed, but she could sense something burning behind their eyes.

“No, almost the opposite. They found me a mentor, a relative of Esther’s, who taught me how to shift on purpose. They did keep a close eye on me for the first few years. But once I knew what I was doing…” She smiled, remembering long summer evenings out past the back fields. “Esther and I used to walk all the way to the treeline sometimes. I got to see a lot more of her while I was studying with her zayde.”

“And it smells like you’ve kept seeing her. I’m so glad that’s worked out so well.”

Sofia wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. “Yeah. Me too. Um. I’m almost afraid to ask, but what were you so angry about just now?”

Ariel sighed with the sort of world-weariness Sofia had only ever heard from the elders at synagogue. “Did you ever read those comics from across the sea, and really think about how they talked about werewolves?”

“Uh, not really…”

“Those stories are real over there, mostly. I’ve met folks whose parents disowned them, just for being werewolves.”

Come to think of it, hadn’t Yakov been afraid of her that day?

“In Onumbrica there are places werewolves aren't allowed to live. Subjects we can't study. Whole professions that won't hire us.”

Imagine an entire town, as scared and judgemental as Yakov had been that day. No, an entire continent. “...That sounds terrifying.”

“It was.” Ariel wrung their hands; Sofia almost thought she recognized some of the Shapes between their fingers. “The thing is, it wasn’t awful everywhere. I met some wonderful people there, and so many of them were werewolves working to change the laws and make people less scared of each other.” They glanced up toward the Forest. “Imagine your family and mine doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Being less scared of each other.”

Sofia had never really been all that aware of the comings and goings of Forest folk in Triumph. It occurred to her that maybe that wasn’t because she’d always been too busy to notice.

She’d spent her whole childhood being warned away from the Forest. What had Ariel’s parents taught them about leaving it?

She looked down at the rest of her sandwich, and realized she’d lost her appetite. “Do you think they could?” she asked.

“I think they could. But it’ll take more than just you or me arguing with them. I need to know more about how things are changing in Onumbrica first.”

“So you’re going back.”

“Yeah. And I’m not sure anybody at home has really gotten their head around that yet. Right now, I just need them to understand that I’m gonna come home again.”

“Well.” Sofia couldn’t think of anything helpful to say. “Good luck.”

“Thanks.” Ariel stepped down off the porch and knelt on the sidewalk. They started to lean into their transformation Shape...then pulled themself out of it and looked back up at Sofia. “You know, I never really got to thank you,” they said.

“For what?”

“When we first met, I was just starting to learn to read your people’s body language. My cousin had brought me out here in secret, and got me a library card, but they couldn’t help me with faces. I had to ask around, and you were one of a very few people who took me seriously. I wouldn't have survived long in Onumbrica without that knowledge. So, I guess, thanks for helping me get started.”

They relaxed back into their wolfshape, and were gone before Sofia could gather her wits enough to say “you're welcome.”

She sat on the steps a while longer, staring at the road and trying to make sense of things.

She supposed she’d better talk it over with Esther. Over the rest of lunch, if she wasn’t too preoccupied with her new patient.