I guess, though, I did have a wicked stepmother.
Maybe I was Cinderella in the end, but if I was, Iwondered where my castle and my riches and my army of servants was.
Funny thing about Angela, she and my dad actually got divorced, and it might have been my fault, in a way. She and my dad came out to the farmhouse, after I had my first baby, ostensibly to help out, but I didn’t think she’d be much help. And, uh, spoiler alert, she was not.
She spent all her time wistfully walking around the place, touching things, staring at my mates, looking like someone had punched her in the face.
After that, she and my dad separated about three months later. She ended up with a werewolf out west, I think, in one of the collectives, places where older wolves who didn’t want to mate a young tithe were converging, and where aging tithes would sometimes go.
I didn’t keep in touch with her. I don’t know if Angela ended up happy, but I have spent far too much time thinking about what sort of person she was, how attention-starved and insecure she was, and how no matter how much my father gave her, it was never enough.
It bothers me, I guess, because I don’t like the implications. Does it mean that all tithes are needy little brats who can’t be satisfied unless they’re living in some heightened relationship with a hairy beastman (or three) who is entirely subservient to their whims?
Paladin would say no. He would say that I wasn’t even a little bit bratty, and that I didn’t have whims, but needs. “People, all people, need to be loved and appreciated,” he would say. “We need connection. We need meaningful things to do. And the most meaningful things tend to be the things we do for others, and especially for the people we love.”
I agreed with him.
Further, I thought that a person couldn’t really do a selfless act unless she didn’t need anything back from the other person, or else it was a transaction. Which meant, to truly give to others, the first thing that you needed was for your needs to be met. Which… wow, that was a tangle of confusion. You needed people, and they needed you, but you couldn’t truly give until you got from them and vice versa. Did you start with giving or did you start with receiving? Maybe it didn’t matter.
But all of that didn’t happen until after the walls came down.
I like to think we had something to do with that.
I never got my law degree. I didn’t have time. I became the leader of what was essentially a small government, and it consumed me. This didn’t feel like a sacrifice at the time, either. It felt like, before, living that life in the cities and wanting to go to school, that it had been some other existence, life in black and white. I remembered that girl, and I remembered the things she wanted, but I was a different person now, and I wanted different things. Now, I wanted life in color.
Color was love and my mates and my connections to others. Color was meaning.
I took to leadership pretty easily, which sort of surprised me. I’d never been someone who went after those sorts of roles, but I wondered if it was because I’d spent my whole life fighting for shreds of attention, and I’d somehow gotten the message that I wasn’t important and that I should try to make myself small, since the worldwantedme to be small.
Life in our small region changed drastically in some ways and it remained mostly the same in others. The biggest change was in the subdivision which had once been the hub of Griff’s crew. That place was no longer the central part of leadership, instead, it was concentrated on our farmhouse. In the subdivision, we left things as Paladin had decided, with the women owning houses and being able to decide who lived there with them. Most of these women eventually mated to one or more wolves, and then these houses became a lot like houses in any part of the world, each housing a family with parents and children. The mating process was more versatile than we seemed to have thought. It didn’t have to happen on a full moon. It didn’t have to happen during the first six months after a tithe began to transform.
It turned out that tithes were on cycles. They’d go into what we started to term “heat” for lack of a better way to describe it, which would occur on consecutive full moons. After this six-to-eight-month process, if a tithe hadn’t mated, she’d go into a remission period.
The whole world had assumed the remission period was permanent, but it turned out that it wasn’t, that a tithe could go into another cycle again. If she didn’t mate that time, she could keep cycling until she did. We weren’t sure why tithes in the cities didn’t, or why unmated tithes on this side of the wall didn’t always either. It may have been because of anxiety or depression, something interfering with the body’s natural tendencies.
Or it could have been only that the first cycle was the only involuntary cycle, and that, to get the cycle to start again, you had to want it. It seemed, however, that if tithes tried to find mates, they did.
We weren’t clear on the biology of it, either. It seemed unlikely that we all had destined mates, that there was only one person (or three) in the entire world that we could mate to, but it was also clear we couldn’t mate to just anybody. There was some important concoction of pheromones or emotional draw or sexual attraction… no one knew. Maybe it was just like normal love and mating in the end, only with an extra element of intensity.
But our little region started mating tithes left and right.
And when the tithes got here, they had places to go. We started working on a project to both rehabilitate old, abandoned houses and to work on building new ones, so that once a tithe mated, she had a house. The rule was that the tithe was the head of household, just as default. Whether that really meant that the tithes were in charge… well, that was really up to the tithe and her mate or mates. They could organize themselves in whatever way felt good to them.
I’m not saying this went well all the time. There were a lot of heated debates, with wolves angrily going on about sexism and how it wasn’t equal and that no one should be given status just because of their gender. Some of the tithes,too, to be fair. They’d talk about how this was just misogyny in reverse. I got called misandrist more times than I can count, and I think they only learned that word from Paladin, because he was the one who trotted it out defensively at some point.
But I always pointed out that there was already an inequality between us, put there by nature, that none of us could erase. There was no reasoning with a shifted wolf. Every time I submitted to my mates on a full moon, I was putting my life in their hands (paws?). Sure, my body was resilient and I healed and it was tough to damage me permanently, but the fact was, we were all two swipes away from an accident where someone caught a tithe’s femoral artery with his teeth and she bled out before she could heal. It had happened. It did happen. Tithes died.
Not on my watch, I’d like to say, but I can’t really take credit for it, even if sometimes I’d like to. Tragedy is like that. It wouldn’tbetragedy if it were entirely preventable. It’d just be stupidity.
I would say, “You want someone to submit to you sexually and trust you with their life, every single full moon, and you have to accept something has to balance that or there can never be equality.” I would say, “If you don’t like what your mate thinks or says, how likely is it that she can physically beat you into submission? How likely is it that you’re terrified of disagreeing with her?”
Anyway, we didn’t dictate that anyone ruled over anyone, only that the tithes were the representatives of the houses, and that all negotiation of conflicts between houses would be conducted between tithes. There were reasons for this, too, and they were also mostly biological.
Whatever had happened to the wolves, they were territorial and prone to violence amongst each other. It had always been likely, in all of the other permutations of leadership out on this side of the wall, that a conflict would revert to a physical fight. This had the effect of meaning that the person who won conflicts was the strongest or the most vicious, not the one who was the most reasoned or the mostcorrect.
It wasn’t that the tithes couldn’t be downright vicious with each other when they got angry, but they didn’t tend to descend into fistfights nearly as often.
But eventually, none of this mattered, because the walls came down, and then we were all back under the rule of the human government and everything changedagain.
