From the story shelf
The Knight in the Wolf's Coat
In the old days in Brittany there lived a baron who was as good a knight as any in that country. He was handsome and open-handed, his neighbors liked him, and the king counted him a friend. He had a wife of great beauty and good family, and they were fond of one another. There was only one shadow on the house. For three days in every week the baron was gone, and no one, not his steward, not his wife, knew where.
She bore it for a long while. At last, one evening when he had come home glad and easy, she said, "My lord, there is a thing I am afraid to ask you."
"Ask," he said. "There is nothing I would refuse you."
"Those three days. I lie awake the whole of them. I think you have another love, or some danger you are hiding from me. Tell me where you go."
He went white. "For pity's sake, do not ask that. If I tell you, I shall lose you, and likely lose myself."
But she asked again, with tears and with sweetness, until he could hold out no longer.
"Then here is the truth," he said. "I become a wolf. I go into the great forest, into the thickest part, and I live on what I catch."
She was silent. Then she asked, quite steadily, whether he went clothed.
"No. I go as a wolf goes."
"And your clothes?"
"That I must not tell. If I lost them, or were seen putting them off, I would be a wolf forever. I could not come back until they were returned to me."
"My lord, I love you better than the whole world. You must not hide a thing from me. What have I done, that you should doubt me?"
And so he told her that too: the old chapel by the wood, the hollow stone under the bush beside it, where he laid his clothes until it was time to come home.
The lady did not sleep that night, and it was not for love. She could not bear to lie down again beside such a thing. There was a knight of that country who had long courted her and had never had a kind word for it. She sent for him now, and gave him the kind word, and told him where the stone was.
So the baron's clothes were taken. He did not come home that week, nor the next. His people searched, and found nothing, and at length gave him up. The lady married the knight who had done her errand.
A year went by. The king came hunting in that forest, and his hounds started a wolf and ran it all day, until it was torn and nearly spent. But when the wolf saw the king, it ran straight to him, and took his stirrup in its paws, and kissed his foot.
The king was afraid at first, and then he was astonished. "Come here, my lords," he called. "Look at this wonder. This beast is asking mercy of me. It has the understanding of a man. Call off the dogs, and let no one touch it. I shall hunt no more today."
He rode home, and the wolf kept beside him and would not be parted from him. The king was delighted with it. He gave orders that it should be well treated for love of him, and it lay among the knights by day and slept near the king at night. Everyone made much of it, for it was so gentle and well mannered that it never did a thing amiss.
Now hear what followed. The king held a great court, and all his barons came, and among them, richly dressed, the knight who had married the baron's wife. The moment he came into the hall the wolf flew at him, seized him in its teeth and dragged him down, and would have done him great harm if the king had not shouted and threatened it with a stick. Twice more that day it went for him. The household wondered at it. It had never behaved so to any man. There was a general opinion that it must have its reasons.
Not long after, the king went again to that forest and lodged nearby, and the lady came to pay her respects with a rich present. When the wolf saw her, no one could hold it. It sprang at her, and what it did was cruel: it bit the nose from her face.
The men would have cut it to pieces then. But a wise counselor spoke to the king. "Sire, hear me. This beast has lived close to you, and every one of us has handled it, and it has never offered harm to anyone but this lady and her husband. And she was wife to the baron you loved, who has been lost so long. Put her to the question. I think she can tell you why the wolf hates her."
The king had the lady and her knight taken and questioned closely, and from distress and fear she told all of it: how she had betrayed her lord, and taken his clothes, and what he had told her of his going and coming. She had no doubt, she said, that the wolf was he.
The king demanded the clothes, and they were brought and laid before the wolf. It took no notice of them at all.
"Sire," said the counselor, "you are going about this wrongly. He will never put them on in front of you, nor change his shape before all these eyes. You do not know how much shame is in it for him. Have him taken to your own chamber, and the clothes with him, and let us leave him there a good while. Then we shall see whether he becomes a man."
The king himself led the wolf in, and shut every door on him. After a time he went back, with two barons only. And there on the king's own bed lay the knight, asleep.
The king ran and took him in his arms, and kissed him a hundred times. As soon as it could be done he gave him back all his lands, and more besides. The lady and her husband were sent out of the country. And the baron lived long in honor, and was never the worse a knight, or the worse a friend, for the three days in every week when he wore another coat.
This story was made long ago to be remembered. It was true in the telling, they say, and it is still worth telling: that a man may be a wolf and keep his faith, and another may keep her shape and lose it.
Pieces in the stacks are written under pen names. Personal pieces are composite accounts that gather experiences commonly described by therians and otherkin, and are offered as illustration, not as testimony about any one person. See the editorial principles.