She didn't have the courage to show up for dinner, nor did anyone bother to send for her. Noon passed and life went on without her.
Her resolve had not changed and Joan had known from the very start just how challenging learning about love would be. Had it been easy, wolves would have long grasped that knowledge like any other.
She could not give up on violence!
And she could reason about it all she wanted, but to learn meant to abandon hold she held dear.
She had betrayed her nature once already. To do it again was nothing. Her pride could stand it, to lower herself endlessly until the mud choked her but how? To live without violence was utterly foreign to her.
And so she squirmed like a worm on her bed, thinking and thinking again about a way she could learn while clinging to it.
"I am pathetic." She chastised herself. "I fear being soft like humans fear being naked. Is that all? Rip your flesh already you coward!"
And with those very words she was failing.
But nobody wanted to be weak.
This went against the very realm, the most basic instinct of every living being to stand tall and firm. If love required a creature to be weak, love was abominable.
The instrument lay in the corner, untouched. A lute she had thought was given to her as a distraction or duty, to make her more worthy. But now she remembered how Abelard had wanted for her music to be slower.
Peace.
Down to their clothes, the whole time the twins had screamed peace and just as they turned a blind eye to her nature, she could not conceive of rulers for whom conquest was tiring.
Joan really looked like a mere brat to them, she admitted.
"Think. Think!" She muttered on the bed and with that again she was failing.
But once a tinge of hunger reached her human body it brought up another memory and she rose, still agitated, took moments to calm her breath.
And when she felt ready, which would never arrive, she left her room and went to lady Mirabelle.
Here was the lady, quiet at her spinning wheel, not sparing her a glance.
"Milady."
Joan had approached but her bold steps died down, replaced with anguish. Was this violence? Should she be shy? Every motion felt wrong no matter what she did.
"Milady," she forced herself, "I need your help."
The lord's wife was ignored her.
"Tell the mistresses to grow flowers for three days. To pour their whole into it. I will be able to use those petals and make them beautiful."
"You are a witch now." Lady Mirabelle smirked.
"I am a mistress. Your sons have been neglecting them and that... I can't stand it. If beauty is all they lack I will give them beauty until men sigh for their touch."
"A feral witch."
"Aren't you angry as well, at the way they are treated?! No, rather, didn't you want them to be loving wives?"
The wheel stopped. Lady Mirabelle turned and took a long look at that fierce, slender face still scarred by anguish. The looks of a desperate beast.
The lady herself had a dry and solemn look only broken by faint curiosity.
"What did you say?"
"When I first woke up here you heckled them and I thought it was just a power struggle. When I saw the old scarlet dress I thought you longed for better concubines. But that's not how you and your sons see it."
That was the only way to see it as far as Joan was concerned, but she had seen enough by now to piece it together.
"You believed in love. And when it failed you you wished your sons would experience it. You hoped for Adele and Ophelie to fulfill them, only to relive the same cycle! Aren't you angry, dejected, aren't you screaming at your wheel?!"
Joan had started to tremble. Every single word she said sounded so stupid. She was ashamed and humiliated.
Lady Mirabelle's stern looks had started to crack.
She turned before they faltered, but the wheel stayed silent.
"I made that scarlet skirtle myself." She sighed. "When I realized they were content to be dolls I sewed it out of spite. To make them look the part."
"Why only one?"
"Because everyone loved it." She almost smiled. "Adele, Abelard, even Mercier. They wished the next would be more seductive."
Her tired hand rubbed the wooden wheel, followed the wool as if a string.
"Three days is not enough for a flower to bud."
"They can pick fresh ones, any flower, it doesn't matter. I will make a cream for them and then..." Joan faltered. "Will beauty lead to love?"
"No. No it won't. Let that be your next lesson. Make them bloom and see what happens."
So the lord's wife would get nothing out of it. And it made it all the stranger to Joan that she would agree to her scheme. To each their reasons, she thought, but she couldn't help it: what would that woman do instead?
She was retiring, almost to the door when lady Mirabelle stopped her.
"Joan." And then, dryly: "Have you found out how my sons feel?"
"Milady, they long for peace. But this realm knows only war and so their hardened hearts endure. They will claim whoever can make them forget their duties."
Their mother answered nothing, motioned for Joan to leave and returned to her labor.
Tired of her room, the werewolf preferred to go downstairs, all the way to the ground floor and toward the bailey. No guard was stopping her. Servants hardly noticed. Only the dogs growled at her passage.
She stopped before the chapel.
No one occupied it at this hour and yet Joan was reticent to push that door. It bore the sign of the saintess.
The human legend was that their saintess had banished the wolves from this realm. Wolves knew that to be false and yet even they respected this omen under which a civilization had flourished. As if, truly, the strongest had pushed them aside.
She could not help but remember how the hunter had warned of the coming wedding. What power threatened her, she could get a glimpse of it here.
That could cost her her cover, she decided, and cowardly turned away.
When supper came, with the lord raiding the family convened as quietly as during the day. It was only them, with Adele and Ophelie describing their new garden.
Joan joined them, wearing the scarlet dress and black surcoat. She approached them, declined to eat and showed a wooden flute she had carved during the day. Where she had found the wood, what tool she had used, they could not tell.
But it looked savage just like her.
All she wished was to be let playing for them and so she sat at the end of the bench, on a cushion they brought.
Daylight still lingered outside, bathing the room in its low, tempestuous shade. She had spent her remaining time watching the clouds roll by and used them to compromise a tune for that family. So her notes flowed slow and far, in long ebbs that lingered.
The resigned sigh of a realm where birds flew low.