Gils is lonely and small

“Wulf!” Gils called as loudly as he could whisper. “Wulf! Are you awake?”

Clearly Wulf was not. Wulf, like their father, had the wonderful ability to sleep through anything.

Gils was not so lucky. He could not even sleep through the night. He usually fell asleep straight away, but after a few hours he would wake – and by that time everyone else was in bed.

Sometimes the flame would still be burning in his little bedside lamp, and then he would watch the quivering shadows of his room until he was rigid with terror. Sometimes it would be out, and he would stare deeply into the blackness, certain that his eyes could just make out some crouching enemy that his ears could not hear. Such waking nightmares as he had then!

Gils threw off the blankets and sat up.

The sudden cold stung his skin, reminding him that it would be a dreadful night to be wandering out of doors. The earth would be crunchy with frost, and overhead there would be the blue darkness of the sky with its silent stars, so many and so far away that they made him shiver with cold even in the summer, and made him ache with lonely smallness all the year.

“Wulf!” he called desperately, almost aloud. “I can’t sleep!”

Wulf grunted and turned onto his other side, facing him.

Relief blew over Gils like a warm breeze. “I can’t sleep,” he whispered, giggling. “Why don’t we get up and do something? Play something?”

He waited for Wulf to groan and protest that he was too sleepy, as he always did, but tonight he did not even do that. His brother was sound asleep – unless he was simply ignoring him.

After all, Wulf was not truly his brother. Even the dog knew it.

Gils swung his legs out of the bed and silently dropped to the floor.

He and Wulf had always had that in common: their uncanny ability to sneak, their grace and strength surpassing that of the other boys their age, their pointed ears…

Suddenly it did not seem so very much. As soon as he had seen Finn, he had understood that Finn and Wulf had more in common than Gils ever would with either of them.

He wandered out into the hall, but even his dog was gone: his old dog that he had had when he was a baby, who was now granted the great canine honor of sleeping indoors at night before the smoldering logs, had nevertheless preferred to sleep in Finn’s fireless room. Even the dog knew Gils was not truly part of the family.

Gils did not think he would have long. Lili’s baby was supposed to come in November, and it was already October. She had said they would make room for Finn, but he knew better than to think that the new baby would be put aside. It too would be his father’s real son or daughter.

No. If anyone had to go, it would be Gils. There was already a six-​​year-​​old boy in the family. They did not need a second.

Gils wandered silently as far as his parents’ bedroom door, but he dared go no farther. He had no excuse for being out of bed. He briefly thought he would pretend to be ill, but then he would be forced to swallow one of Lili’s vile German concoctions.

Anyway, it would change nothing, and a sick boy might simply appear to be more trouble than he was worth, even before the baby came.

In truth, he did feel a little sick, but he had cried often enough in the last weeks to know that he was only sick from swallowing tears.

He leaned against the doorframe and let the tears spill out of his eyes instead. He cried softly, for he dared not wake his father or Lili, but he still cherished a desperate hope that his father would somehow hear anyway and come to comfort him – even come to yell at him.

But his father – like Wulf, like Jehanne, and doubtlessly like Finn as well – had the wonderful ability to sleep through anything.

Gils was not so lucky. How could he be? He was not his father’s son.