THREE full moons after his fated mate came to his village, she had learned his tongue well enough to speak simple conversations with his family and slightly more complex ones with his aunt, who was patient and would keep her language simple with her student. His entire family had moved back into the longhouse, spending their sleeping hours in human form on the benches that lined his walls as humans and not in the snow as wolves.

And soon did he have a notion his own family liked his queen more than the Fenris himself. He had this notion because they told him as much around the table, full of belly as they were with the flavorful meals she oversaw. After her first day in the cooking area, directing the servants to where the herbs and spices she could distinguish by smell might go, and speaking as best she could what should go in the cooking pot, the servants set forth a stew so pleasurable to their mouths, his family gave his mate great cheer. She was well-thanked by all, and henceforth, they all endeavored to also help her with their tongue because the more herbs and spice and food stuffs his queen was able to identify, the better their own meals became. It would seem her talent for cooking made her as popular with his family as it had in her own land. And she gave glad smiles and words best she could to everyone who thanked her for the privilege of her food. To his surprise, she had come to hold his family dear in a very short time.

But his fated mate had yet to say more than three words to him, and those three words were always the same: No, thank you.

“No, thank you,” when he offered her a jeweled women’s dagger, more splendid than any he had ever seen.

“No, thank you,” she said, when he presented her with a silk dress more befitting a queen. She continued to wash and clean his mother’s simple tunic and silk hangerok every wash day herself, wearing them over the dress she had brought with her from Colorado.

“No, thank you,” she said when he brought up the matter of her sitting in her rightful place at the dinner table.

Yea, it was better than the ghost of a she-wolf into which she had turned for those three moons before she began her Norse study, but in some ways it had become harder. Harder of both mind and body. Lying in bed next to a corpse had not excited his manhood in the least. Lying in bed next to a vibrant beauty such as his queen, without having leave to touch her was akin to torture. And he again found himself heavy of foot, because though he willed his prick to go flaccid in her presence, it rose like a battering ram at the mere sight of her removing her tunic dress and hangerok in the eve, before settling into their bed. And in this manner he was kept awake by his desire for her, while she slept on, uncaring of the state he was in.

Thus, did he find himself back in the meadow with his aunt soon after the time of the year when the sun grew lazy and chose to stay rested in the sky.

“Your remedy has not met with success,” he informed her.

“She has come to love your family and she does talk and eat again,” his aunt answered without question of his subject. “Verily, your pup shall at least be happy with her progress if not yourself.”

“Yea, but she refuses to mind-talk with me still, save for when she wishes to say nay to one of my gifts.”

“Mayhap you do not come to her bearing the right gifts. Not every woman can be happily claimed with objects that be pleasing to the eye. But they can oft be brought around if the gift be of right sort.”

“She is a queen. She can avail herself of the riches in my coffers and will never want for food or clothing. What more would a she-wolf hold dear?”

“Ah, ‘tis oft the short thinking of males which have brought about the most tragic endings in the love stories told around our fires.”

“I tire of your riddles, aunt,” he said, his voice growing hard. “Tell me plainly what I should do to resolve this matter.”

“I have already told you this plainly. You should put your mind toward giving her the right gifts,” his aunt said. “Once you do, all shall be well between you two.”

And thus did his aunt end this conversation, picking up her basket with the claim that she must search for a certain spell plant that could only be found during the time of the resting sun. “If I do not find it before the sun does travel across the sky again, it will be buried under snow, making for a long winter indeed for any wolf who should have need of it.”

Somehow he knew this to be a statement about the urgency of his own travails with Chloe. If he did not find a way to mend what was torn between them before their pup came, it would be a very long marriage indeed.

* * *

Other than being mated with a pompous asshole, Chloe found herself really liking the Viking Age. Communal living took getting used to, but as someone who had been sadly solo for most of her life, the intimacy of always having people around almost made up for the complete lack of privacy. She also loved that everything here was made from scratch and mostly do-it-yourself. It was like living in an amusement park made up entirely of things that interested her.

The only drawback was Old Norse was super-hard to learn without the benefit of a textbook, dictionary, or a teacher who also spoke the same language as you did. Fenris’s aunt was doing a great job of teaching her under the circumstances, but the questions were piling up in Chloe’s mind, and even when she could figure out how to ask them, she still didn’t always have the vocabulary to understand the answer. This was more than frustrating.

For example, cooking with spices was easy enough, but hadn’t been able to incorporate many herbs because she didn’t know the names for the ones not made obvious by the way they smelled. And she wanted so badly to learn how to make the unleavened bread they ate with dinner, but there was only so much that could be taught with gestures.

And she didn’t even want to talk about all the questions she had about their lifestyle in general. She’d managed to figure out that the longhouse had no windows in order to keep out the cold in the winter and, at this time of the year, the light of the sun, which didn’t fully set. She’d also gleaned that the wolves in this place were opposite the ones in Colorado. While they definitely weren’t as civilized as Rafe and his crew in their human forms, they could almost be called fully domesticated in their wolf forms. They had full control of themselves when they shifted and they didn’t go on animal killing rampages or attack humans after changing. Back in Colorado, pregnant wolves had been giving strict warnings never to risk leaving their house on full moon nights. Here, she could freely walk around the village without fear and in fact, she had done just that the last two moons, missing the presence of her new family at night. During the last full moon she had even fallen asleep in their wolf pile, warmed by the ever-present sun and their sleeping bodies. She would have stayed out there all night if Fenris hadn’t come to get her.

But she didn’t understand how they trained themselves to be this way in animal form or how they dealt with childbirth. There didn’t seem to be any place set up for human medicine in the village, and the few times she had seen a wolf get hurt, they had immediately shifted into wolf form, not coming out until they were fully healed.

She did, however, manage to finally string enough words together to figure out how to ask Aunt Bera about the carving on the bed closet’s ceiling.

“Tis the story of the mother and father, from whence Fenris did come,” his aunt answered. “They were as you and Fenris are. Fated mates.”

She wanted to ask what the fighting wolves meant, but couldn’t because she didn’t know any words that meant fight. Then she wanted to ask if the carving of his parents with wolves circled round them was from their wedding, but realized she didn’t have the word for wedding.

Finally she settled for, “Where are his mother and father now?”

Aunt Bera cackled in that teasing way of hers. “Mayhap, you should ask Fenris.”

Chloe let out a frustrated breath. “I cannot ask him.”

“You will not ask him. These words, you turn around.” His aunt made a gesture with her fingers for turn around, so Chloe could understand her meaning.

Instead of answering this accusation, she used a feather dipped in charcoal from the nearby fire pit to write down the words for “turn around” in her notebook that she’d sewn together from sheets of leftover fabric. The discovery that she knew how to write her own language was met with great awe by the others in the longhouse, and questions about her father’s wealth soon followed. Apparently, most women and men were illiterate in this time period with only the wealthy knowing how to read and write. From what she could see, Fenris and his aunt were two of the only people in the village who could fully understand the runic alphabet. Eventually Chloe would learn to read and write runic letters herself, but that was also slow-going at this point.

“My queen, your language would grow faster if you did but mind-talk with your mate,” Aunt Bera said now. “That is how foreign wolves who come to our land do learn.”

Chloe shook her head. “You do not understand, and I do not have the words to give you knowledge of what is between us.”

Aunt Bera covered her hand. “If you mind-talk with him, you could then have the words you need to make me understand. Then mayhap—“

Aunt Bera broke off when Fenris appeared in the doorway of the longhouse, as if summoned by their conversation about him. His eyes soon found her sitting with Aunt Bera, and he came over to them. But he held out his hand to Chloe alone, pushing a thought into her head. “You will come with me, now.”

She ignored his hand, but again rose to follow him out of the house as she had the night he had shown her his family’s wolf pile. She wondered what he would show her this time. Maybe two bunnies copulating, followed by a command to resume having sex with him again at the evening tide.

That seemed to be his M.O., and she knew he’d been suffering. She had woken up a few times in the middle of the night, somehow enfolded inside his arms, with a rather obvious erection pressed into her backside. And maybe she had lingered there for a moment or two, enjoying the warmth of his arms around her before moving out of them—but only because she hadn’t had much affection growing up. At least that was what she told herself. Obviously, she was hard up for hugs and didn’t care where she got them or who she got them from.

But if he planned to command her to resume having sex with him again, that’s where she drew the line. And even better, she now had enough Norse under her belt to tell him “No, thank you” but good.

However, she didn’t have long to ruminate on these thoughts, because this time he actually talked with her while they walked, unlike the other trips they’d taken together.

“This row of longhouses belongs to our traders. They shall return nigh harvest time with the spoils of our trades and stories of lands from afar. Then will we have a large celebration and feast to which all the alpha chieftains in the wolf lands will be invited.”

She bit back all of her questions. Like how do wolves manage to travel by boat for so many full moons? Was that why they had trained themselves to be gentle in wolf form? And was it possible to put in a request for spices they didn’t have on hand the next time his traders left for market? And what did they trade for anyway?

“After the next full moon, I will dispatch Randulfr and a hunting party to the Northern Ice to hunt the great white bear, so we may have provisions with which to barter and sell when the traders sail again this summer next.”

Again, so many questions popped off in her head, but she refused to ask them.

“Ah, here we are at the smith’s house.”

They walked into a dark room, which Chloe figured out was actually a free-standing, one-room structure, behind which sat the smith’s longhouse. The two wolves inside the workshop, one father and one son, judging by the similar look of them, both stood up when they entered. And it seemed they were expecting Chloe and Fenris to stop by because the older one immediately waved a hand toward a square stone, with a glowing red rectangle on top of it.

She didn’t understand.

“My queen, the smith has agreed to show you how he makes the woman’s dagger and at the end of your lesson, you will have a simple dagger of your own to use at meal time and for cutting materials and also for defending yourself against wild animals if you should meet them in the forest.”

Her eyes widened, and she once again had to squelch her follow-up questions, including whether a dagger could be used to do stuff like shave, and um, what wild animals in the forest? Though, she kind of didn’t want to know the answer to that second question.

“I will translate any questions you might have for the smith and his son, but you will have need to talk to me do so.”

Before she could even think to say, “No, thank you,” her butt was on the stool in front of the anvil and she was asking, “Is there more than one cast for making these? If so, may I choose mine? And I see he’s already heated the iron. Is there any way to ask him to back up and start from the beginning without being rude?”

Fenris said a few words and the two men scrambled to start gathering what appeared to be a large set of blackened tongs and a number of oddly shaped hammers.

“What did you say?” she asked him.

“Your queen wishes for you to start from the beginning.”

“I said without being rude!”

“He is your subject. In this relationship there is no such thing as rude.”

“Yeah, actually there is. You kings and queens just haven’t figured that out yet,” she answered. “Just be happy you’re not French. That lesson is going to get learned like a mofo in France several hundred years from now.”

“I did forget how baffling you could be.” He smiled and came to stand behind her stool.

She wanted to tell him if he really wanted to understand baffling, he should try learning Old Norse from scratch.

But then the two smiths started pouring molten ore into the cauldron and she became too interested in what they were doing to give him a good comeback.

* * *

The next day Fenris showed up after her lessons again. This time he took her to the iron fields to see where “much of our metal” came from. That one was a little less hands on, since unlike women of this age, she knew better than to handle anything with questionable chemical content while pregnant. But it was still thrilling to see how people who had no formal classes, internet, or books to guide them, made things day in and day out.

The day after that, he woke her early in the morning to take her to the farm hamlet just a little ways down the coast to show her where all of their grain came from. The hamlet was relatively nearby, but it was still about an hour away in the small fishing boat he’d procured for the trip, and when Fenris started to tell her stories about the mostly unpopulated lands they passed along the way, she forgot herself and started asking him questions about where the humans lived and how much interaction they had with them. And somehow they ended up talking about the differences between wolf and human interactions in both their times all the way there.

Then on the way back from the hamlet when Fenris asked her if they had the resting sun for a time in her land, that led to a conversation about how she knew a little about a lot of things due to at first to these things called “books” and then later on to a more recent invention called “the internet,” which was how so many people all around the world were able to know about what they called “the midnight sun” even if they had never seen it in real life with their own eyes.

He kept asking her questions about “these matters that could be read in books” and “the internet,” until eventually she told him the story of how Professor Henley had figured out he was a Viking back in Colorado, and found a picture of his sword at a museum in a city called Oslo, which might have not yet been founded in his time but was the capital or the main city of Norway in her own. And that led to a discussion about what year they were in, and that never fully got figured out, since the Norse wolves used a calendar that was a mix of moons, summers, and winters, and eras of rule, as in “The time of the second Fenris” and the time of the “third Fenris.” Fenris was the sixth in his own line of kings, but there was another Fenris line before that, which would take “many boat trips for which to account” according to Fenris.

The day after that, he took her to the beekeeper’s longhouse to see how the honey that sweetened their food and provided the base for their mead was made. And so on and so forth until before she knew it, another full moon was just a day away.

To Chloe, it felt much like what she’d seen and read about in human mating rituals. Wolves didn’t date and in many cases, they didn’t even bother with getting to know each other. A she-wolf went into heat and then proceeded to have crazy wolf sex day and night with whatever guy she either wanted or had agreed to mate with until she got pregnant. Then if they were lucky she went into heat maybe one or two more times within her lifetime, giving her two more pups before they grew old and died together.

Everything romantic that happened between wolves tended to come before their actual heat night. And even then, it wasn’t so much dating, as hanging out and deciding if they wanted to be together on their heat night. Not exactly the stuff of romance novels.

Cases like hers and Rafe’s, where two wolves got to know each other as adults before the she-wolf went into heat, were rare and Wolf Springs was full of mates for life, who grumbled in their later years that they didn’t have anything in common and wished they had chosen more wisely.

But nearly every day, the Viking took her somewhere for at least an hour or two to let her see how something was done or made. And soon the conversations they had on the trips to and from these dates started to spill over into the rest of her life. They’d mind-chat over breakfast about what each of them had planned for the day, then he’d come get her for their “date” after her lesson with Aunt Bera, then he’d go off and do something else on his never-ending list of kingly duties. And she soon began to miss him when he was away to the point where it felt like the midnight sun inside her chest when he came back through the door for dinner, during which they’d mind chat about both their days just like couples had apparently been doing throughout the centuries in both her and his times.

It kind of felt like Stockholm syndrome considering she had vowed to stay mad at him forever just four months ago. But who else did she have to talk to about the differences between her time and his? And the Viking seemed just as in interested in hearing about the engineering feats of her time as she was in learning about the DIY features of his.

“You’re a bit of a sci-fi nut, aren’t you?” she asked the day before the full moon as they walked along the river which ran east from the lake, through a valley bordered by mountains on each side. Their destination was unknown to her. She liked the surprise of finding out, and maybe he liked surprising her, because he never volunteered the information when he picked her up from her Old Norse lessons—which were going much better now she could take an extra five minutes to ask Fenris the Old Norse equivalent for all the missing words that came up in that day’s session with Aunt Bera.

“I once again do not comprehend your meaning,” he said now, but his voice held teasing, not censure, when he said it.

“In my time, there are all these stories set in the future. Like we have a bunch of, um... I guess you’d call them ‘tales’ set on these things called ‘space ships,’ which are basically boats that ride through the stars. And a lot of people just love them, love imagining what the future will be like.”

“But you do not?”

“I mean I’ll go to a summer movie, but I don’t read it or seek it out. I’m more of a historical fiction person myself, though it’s hard to find historical novels about black people that aren’t set in the time of slavery.”

They had already had a long conversation on the subject of slaves versus what Fenris called thralls. In both histories, this was fully a human practice, and to her surprise, in both histories this had been one of things that diversified the werewolf population. He’d explained to her all the wolves of Norway sported red hair like he, but when human Vikings started bringing back thralls from far-off lands, that had meant more accidental turnings. In the time before the Vikings took to boat to raid and trade, and before the Norse werewolves taught themselves to remain calm in wolf form in order to be able to do so themselves, the humans who lived in communities nearby knew not to go wandering about on the night of the full moon. But thralls, thinking their new masters superstitious, used this as their one opportunity to escape. Some of them made it out. But many more of them ended up werewolves. That is, if they survived the initial attack.

This was also how black wolves came to reside in the United States, she told him. Africa, or Blaland as he referred to it, didn’t have wolves, and many of the first black werewolves were runaway slaves attempting to gain their freedom in the north.

“Yes,” he said, answering her original question. “Mayhap I would have great fondness of this ‘sci-fi’ you do speak. All Viking stories are about the past and told over and over again. Your stories of new things are very welcome to me.”

Before she could question herself too closely about the warm feeling that rose up inside of her when he said this, he stopped.

“We have reached our destination.”

Laid out before them was a sparkling reservoir of clear water with steam rising up from it.

Chloe clapped her hands together. “I know what this is!” She winced then, realizing this meant their date was pretty much ruined, since she already knew how hot springs worked. “This is awesome, but we actually have hot springs where I’m from, too. There’s a resort you didn’t get to see right down the road that’s situated around a spring kind of like this. Except that one’s all sectioned off with rocks and people have to pay to use it. But that’s why our town is called Wolf Springs.”

To her surprise, he responded to her confession with a grin. “Good, then we will not have to bother this day with lengthy explanations.”

And with that he began stripping off his clothes.