The Wolf Queen & The Alpha Brat

(Rhydian)

I found the wood in the same shed as the crib.

Not cedar this time — a smaller piece, darker grain, something that had been sitting in the corner under a canvas cloth. The smith’s assistant said it had been there since before he started working the settlement, which put it at somewhere between eight and fifteen years, which meant nobody had claimed it and it was mine to use.

I took it back to the room.

The crib was finished. I’d done the right side joint four days ago, finally, with the angle adjustment I’d been thinking about since the infirmary. It sat against the far wall of our room now, and every morning when I woke up I could see it in the peripheral of my vision and something in my chest did a specific thing that I still didn’t have a word for.

Satisfaction wasn’t quite right. More like — recognition. Like seeing something become the thing it was always supposed to be.

The rocking wolf started as an idea I couldn’t locate the source of.

I’d been sitting in the evening after the supply review, Elena asleep earlier than usual because the weight of the last week had finally collected its debt, and I’d had the piece of wood in my hands and the knife and I’d started working without deciding to.

An hour in, it was clearly a wolf.

Small. Curved base, the kind that would rock. Four legs that were more suggestion than precision — I was not a trained carver, I was a person who had learned to make do, and the wolf’s legs showed that, but they were legs. The head was the part I spent the most time on. The angle of it, the way it sat, whether it looked like something or just a piece of wood with ambitions.

I worked on it for three nights before I told anyone what I was doing.

The first person I told was Cade.

Not intentionally — he came to find me about a drill question at the end of the second night and found me at the table in the corridor outside the room because Elena had been sleeping and I hadn’t wanted to wake her with the scraping sound.

He looked at the piece of wood in my hands.

"Is that a wolf," he said.

"It’s going to be a wolf," I said.

He pulled up the other chair and sat in it without being asked, which was something he’d started doing and which I’d decided I didn’t mind. He looked at the wolf taking shape in my hands.

"For the baby," he said.

"Yes," I said.

He was quiet for a moment. His arms went across the chest the way they did when he was thinking about something he wasn’t sure he was going to say.

"My mother made me a wooden rabbit when I was little," he said. "I don’t know if she carved it or had someone carve it but it was mine. She painted the ears." He paused. "I still have it somewhere."

I kept working.

"What color were the ears," I said.

"Brown," he said. "With a white tip on the left one." He looked at the wall for a moment. "I don’t know why I remember that specifically."

"Because it was yours," I said.

He looked at the wolf.

"What color is the wolf going to be," he said.

"I don’t know yet," I said.

He sat with me for another twenty minutes without speaking, which was the comfortable kind of silence I’d gotten used to with Cade, and then he went to bed.

---

I finished the wolf on the fourth night.

The base rocked cleanly — I’d tested it on the table, two fingers pushing lightly, the gentle back and forth that was the whole point of it. The legs were what they were. The head was right. The tail was a small curve that I’d done last, after everything else, that ended up being the best part of the whole thing.

I set it in the crib.

Then I looked at it there. Small dark wood wolf in a cedar crib. The rocking base fitting the space well enough.

I thought about what Cade had said about the rabbit.

*Because it was yours.*

That was it, I thought. That was the whole thing. The crib had taken me weeks because I needed it to be mine — not bought, not commissioned, not handed to us as a gift from the settlement’s stores. Mine. Because this child was going to grow up in a Pack that had fought for her, that had howled for her before she was born, that had held three days of siege with her in it.

She deserved something from my hands specifically.

Something that said: *your father was here. Your father made this. Whatever he was before, wherever he came from, he sat in the dark and he made you this because it was the most honest thing he knew how to do.*

I left the wolf in the crib.

---

Elena saw it on a Saturday.

She’d been to the morning briefing — shorter than usual, Brennan was getting good at cutting things down to what was essential, and she came back to the room mid-morning with the particular combination of exhausted and functional that she moved through most days now.

She stopped at the door.

She saw the wolf.

She didn’t say anything. She crossed the room and she picked it up and she held it in both hands and she looked at it.

I was at the desk with the afternoon reports. I watched her from the desk without making anything obvious of watching.

She turned it over in her hands. The rocking base. The legs. The tail. The head with the specific angle I’d spent the most time on.

She set it back in the crib.

Very gently. The specific gentleness of putting something somewhere it belongs.

Then she stood there with her back to me and her hand on the edge of the crib and I could see the set of her shoulders and I knew what those shoulders were doing.

"Elena," I said.

"I’m fine," she said.

"I know," I said.

I pushed the chair back and I crossed the room and I stood behind her and I put both arms around her from behind, careful of everything that needed care, and she let me.

Her hands came to mine. Both of them, crossing over my arms the way she does when she’s accepting something she didn’t know she needed.

She was crying.

Not the loud kind, not the kind that needed managing. Just — quiet tears, the kind that arrive when you’re not expecting them, when something catches the specific place you weren’t protecting.

"It’s not—" She stopped. "It’s not that good," she said. "The carving. The legs are—"

"I know," I said. "I know what the legs are."

"It doesn’t matter," she said. "That’s not—" She pressed her mouth together. "That’s not why I’m—"

"I know," I said.

She turned her head toward the wolf in the crib.

"My father built me something once," she said. Quiet. "A small box. For keeping things in. It wasn’t very good either. The lid didn’t close perfectly." She paused. "I kept it for twenty years."

I held her.

"He sat with it for weeks," she said. "I remember watching him. In the evenings after council. Just sitting with the wood and working at it. He never told me what it was going to be." She stopped. "He just kept making it."

"Like this," I said.

"Like this," she said.

We stayed like that. The wolf in the crib. The room quiet. The settlement doing its morning outside the window.

After a while she turned around in my arms. She looked up at me with her grey eyes that were wet at the edges and completely present and doing that thing they did when she’d decided to say something true.

"You’re going to be a good father," she said.

I held her gaze.

The words landed in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Not because they were unexpected — I’d been hoping for them, some version of them, somewhere underneath everything else. But the specific way she said it. Not *you’ll be a good father* as reassurance or as something you say. As fact. As a conclusion she’d reached from evidence.

"How do you know," I said.

"The crib took you six weeks," she said. "The wolf took you four nights. You sat in the corridor outside the room so the sound wouldn’t wake me." She held my gaze. "You’ve been thinking about her since before you knew she was a she."

"We still don’t know—"

"She’s a she," Elena said. The complete certainty of someone who had decided. "I know."

I looked at the wolf.

"The legs aren’t good," I said.

"The legs are fine," she said.

"The front right one is shorter than the others."

"She won’t notice," she said.

"She’ll notice eventually."

"And she’ll ask you about it," Elena said, "and you’ll tell her that you made it in the corridor at two in the morning while she was still figuring out how to exist, and she’ll think that’s exactly right."

I looked at her face.

"You’re very certain about things you can’t actually know," I said.

"I’m very certain about things I’ve already figured out," she said. "There’s a difference."

I looked at the wolf again. The dark wood, the rocking base, the tail that had come out better than anything else. The head at the angle I’d spent the most time on.

"The ears," I said. "I didn’t do ears."

"You did," she said. "Look."

I looked closer. The head had two small raised sections that I’d thought were just variation in the grain.

They were ears.

I hadn’t noticed.

"You did it without knowing you were doing it," she said.

I stared at the wolf.

"That counts," she said.

Something moved in my chest that I didn’t have a word for. The same thing the crib did in the mornings. The recognition of something becoming what it was supposed to be.

"Four months ago," I said, "I was eating cold rabbit in a cave."

"I know," she said.

"I had nothing," I said. "I wasn’t— I didn’t have any of this."

"I know," she said. She put her hand on my chest. Over the heartbeat. "And now?"

I looked at the crib. At the wolf. At the room that was ours and the window that showed the settlement and the ring on my hand and the woman in front of me with her eyes still wet at the edges.

"Now," I said.

I didn’t finish the sentence.

She didn’t need me to.

She put her head against my chest and I wrapped my arms around her and we stood in front of the crib with the small imperfect wolf in it and I pressed my lips to the top of her head and I held on.

After a while she said, "Brennan needs you in the afternoon briefing."

"I know," I said.

"The Ferris review—"

"I know," I said.

"And Marta wants to talk about the charter succession clauses—"

"Elena," I said.

"What."

"Five minutes," I said.

She was quiet.

"Five minutes," she agreed.

We didn’t move for seven.

And then Cade knocked on the door, because Cade always knocked on the door at the worst possible moment, and his voice came through the wood:

"Rhydian? Brennan says— is this a bad time?"

I looked at Elena.

She looked at me.

"Yes," I called. "Give us two minutes."

"Okay," Cade said. Then, in a lower voice, clearly not realizing I could hear him: "That means five. At least."

Elena made the almost-laugh sound.

I pulled her closer.

"Two minutes," I said.

"Two minutes," she said.

We stood there.

The wolf rocked slightly in the crib from some current of air from the window.

Just once.

Then went still.

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