Abomination (40 page)

“Good,” said Wulfric. “Let them come.”

Indra just gaped at him. “What?”

“If you will not grant my simple request, I am quite certain they will. Let them chain me up and kill the damned thing and me with it,” he said, neatly arranging the folds of his tatty cloak across his knees. “I always avoided the Order, as I thought the beast unkillable and that any contact with them would only result in more needless slaughter. Now I have cause to believe otherwise.”

Indra threw up her hands and shook her head at him. “You’re impossible. I swear it, you’re beyond help!”

“I have been trying to convince you of that for some time.”

“What reason do you have to believe that killing the beast would even work, beyond a scar that passed from it to you?” said Indra. “What does that prove?”

“For me, it is proof enough,” Wulfric said, still a calm sea against Indra’s raging storm. “If you had lived my life these past fifteen years, you would take any sliver of hope that was offered, however thin it might be. God works in ways mysterious, but now I understand, and I thank him for sending you to me.”

Indra blinked. “You think God sent me.”

“I believe that you were his way of showing me that I have suffered enough for my sins. That it is time for my punishment to end.”

Indra put her hands to her face and pulled on her skin, utterly exasperated. “You were cursed by the magick of an evil madman as you risked your own life trying to stop him, and you believe that this is all somehow a punishment from God.”

“Yes,” he said. “Punishment for a life spent killing, and for betraying my father and my mother.”

She sank to one knee before him. She seemed calmer now, more levelheaded. “Wulfric. Explain this to me, so I can understand it, and I swear I will bother you no longer. I will leave you be, to whatever fate you believe you deserve. Just, please, help me understand.”

Wulfric sighed. What difference did it make what he told the girl now? He would be dead soon enough, and perhaps if he satisfied her curiosity, she might actually stay true to her word and allow him to spend his final hours in some kind of peace.

“My father hoped that I would be a farmer, my mother, an artisan of some kind. Instead, I became a soldier and gave my life to war, where I discovered that I had a great talent for violence. Some thought it a gift. I did not. But I allowed it to flourish all the same. I nurtured and fed the killer in me with each life I took in battle, until it became all that I was.

“I tell you now what I believe. That this monster within me has always been there, from the day that I was born. It is within every man, and every man must conquer it, or else it conquers him. I lost that battle long before I ever met Aethelred. And so God used him to punish me by showing me what I had become. He sent him and his curse to draw the murderous thing inside of me outward, to give it form.

“But that was not the end of it. The curse, as I have come to realize, was only part punishment. It was also part test. God was offering me one final chance to redeem myself, to prove to him that I was not beyond salvation. When I returned home, and the beast was born for the first time, he challenged me to find it within myself to conquer it. I failed. It ran wild and slaughtered every man, woman, and child in my village, including my own beloved wife and newborn daughter. Both of them cut to pieces, butchered beyond recognition, because I had not the strength to stop it, even to protect those I loved most. The life that I had led so diminished the man, all that remained was the monster.

“This is why I know it is God who punishes me. Because only he could have conceived a justice so poetic.”

Indra stared at Wulfric in a kind of stupefied shock. For a moment Wulfric felt guilty for burdening her with the full horror of his story, but then again, he had done all he could to keep it from her, until she insisted upon hearing it.

“Now, I hope that you will understand,” he said. “And that you will keep your promise, and leave me to my end.”

Indra did not respond, or even acknowledge that he had spoken. Still paralyzed, she had a distant look that suggested thoughts racing through her mind faster than she could marshal them. She leapt to her feet, paced up and down, more agitated now than she had seemed when she had first appeared to warn him.

She stopped, looked at him. “This was fifteen years ago. When the beast killed your wife and daughter, destroyed your village.”

“Yes,” said Wulfric.

Indra shook her head. “No, it’s not possible,” she said. “You are too young. You would have been little older than I am. Too young for a wife and child.”

“I was born forty-four years ago,” said Wulfric. “But since the time I was cursed, I have not aged a day. Part of my punishment, I suppose, that I should not find relief even in death by decrepitude.”

Wulfric paused. “Child, what is wrong with you?” Indra’s expression had become entirely ashen. Not for the first time, she looked at Wulfric as though he were a dead man risen from the grave.

“I was told that my parents were killed by an abomination,” she said. “Along with their entire village. That is what I was raised to believe.”

Wulfric was confused. “You said your father commanded—”

“He is my father in name only. He took me from my crib when he found my village in ruins. Fifteen years ago. He tried to raise me as his own, but I always suspected that something was amiss, and when at last I demanded to know the truth, he told me that my real
father was a man named Wulfric, a peasant who had died with my mother in the massacre on my home. I thought little of it when you told me your name, as it is not so uncommon, but . . .”

Now Wulfric’s heart was racing as well. Now he, like Indra, tried to make sense of the seemingly impossible.

His wife and daughter were both dead. He had seen it for himself. Cwen had been torn to pieces, of that there could be no doubt. And the infant? Though he had looked for only a moment, his memory of the horror he had seen in his daughter’s crib was seared indelibly into his mind, as vivid today as fifteen years ago. Nothing but bloody, unrecognizable scraps of torn flesh and splintered bone. But whose?

Turning the image over and over in his mind, he realized now that, amidst such carnage, he could not be sure. He could not—

“No,” he said, hitting upon a detail that undermined the possibility of it being true. “You are too old. You are eighteen, that is what you said. You said—”

“I lied so that you would not dismiss me,” she admitted. “I will be sixteen in October.”

October
. The month his daughter had been born.

“Your mother, what was her name?” he asked Indra.

“Cwen,” she answered, and Wulfric flushed from head to toe and felt his heart quicken. He opened his mouth to speak, but found that now he barely had the strength. His voice was little more than a whisper, but he was close enough for Indra to hear.

“My wife.”

Venator flew into the grove and glided to a landing close to where they stood, carrying a fat white-bellied salmon in his beak, the spoils of his morning hunt. Neither Wulfric nor Indra noticed, for at that moment nothing in the world existed save the two of them.

Wulfric rose slowly to his feet. He looked at Indra, as she looked at him. Both afraid to move, or speak, for fear of shattering this moment. The truth seemed beyond doubt, and yet so fragile
that the slightest thing might undo it. In the end, it was Wulfric who dared first, taking a tentative step toward Indra, his hand leaving his side as he began to reach for hers. Then she did the same, the distance closing between them—

“Hold!”

They froze, but a few feet from one another, as twenty men of the Order emerged from the woods on horseback, swords and bows drawn, surrounding the two of them. Then followed Edgard, his jaw set sternly, Cuthbert riding just behind him, head down and forlorn.

Though it had been fifteen years, Wulfric recognized his old friend and comrade immediately. Edgard’s hair was thinning, and he had grown fatter, but he had that same unmistakably overbearing look about him. It was a look that he had worn far better as a younger man. Back then it had seemed a well-earned surplus of confidence. Now it looked more like arrogance.

Edgard appeared not to recognize Wulfric so readily; or rather, he seemed disconcerted by the sight of him, and he turned his attention quickly to Indra.

“I told you that you would lead us to this beast,” he said with a self-satisfied smile. “One way or the other.”

“Venator, to me.”

The hawk seemed at first conflicted, then flew onto Edgard’s arm as commanded. Edgard removed the leather glove from his right hand and, carefully, unfastened the copper message ring from around Venator’s leg, opening it at its hinge and holding it so that Indra could see. On its inner surface a miniature fine-cut emerald had been embedded, so small and so carefully hidden that she had failed to notice it when Venator had returned from Canterbury.

“An enchanted gem,” said Edgard with a pronounced air of satisfaction. “Just one of the minor miracles we have wrought from our study of Aethelred’s works over the years. I don’t pretend to understand how the magick works, but the emerald is traceable, by those with the expertise, across any distance to wherever in the world it might be. I had planned to use them to tag any abominations we might capture and bring to Canterbury for study, should they escape, but it seems they work just as well for finding errant children who betray their father’s trust.”

Wulfric glowered at Edgard. “This is the man who found you, who raised you as his own?” he asked Indra in a low, restrained voice.

Indra was astonished. “You
know
him?”

“He was once my friend.”

Edgard pocketed the emerald, seeming disappointed that his ingenuity and cunning had not been better appreciated. He pulled his glove back on. “Separate them.”

His men responded, dismounting to take Wulfric and Indra by the arms and pull them apart. Wulfric did not resist, but the first man who tried to lay a hand on Indra was greeted with an elbow to the face and crashed to the ground with a bloody mouth. She struck the second man in the shin with the sole of her boot, and he limped away, cursing. Then, as she reached for her swords, three men grabbed her all at once, pinning her arms behind her, and there was nothing more she could do. They dragged her away from Wulfric while she struggled and kicked uselessly.

“Gently, please,” Edgard said to the men who held her. “Treacherous as she is, she is still my daughter.”

Indra stopped struggling and focused on Edgard, the whole of her filled with a loathing that went down to the bone. “I am not your daughter!” she growled, then looked over to where Edgard’s men were holding Wulfric. “I am
his
! And you always knew, didn’t you? You knew when you found me that his body was not among the dead, that he was out there somewhere, alive. You lying pig!”

Edgard flinched, unable to hide how Indra’s words stung him. Then he swung his leg lazily over his saddle and dismounted. Indra stiffened at his approach; it was difficult to tell if, were she not held firmly by three men, she would run away from him or right at him, swords drawn.

He stood before her, all trace of conceit gone. Now there was only sincerity. Or, to Indra’s eyes, an effort to create the illusion of it.

“Indra, my child,” he said. “You must understand that what I did, I did only to protect you. I hid the truth from you because I knew it could bring you nothing but grief. You deserved better than that. You deserved a real father, not this . . .” He glanced over at Wulfric, careful not to meet his eye. “This pitiful creature.”

Indra’s anger was not lessened; it burned brighter. “It wasn’t your choice to make but mine, and you robbed me of it,” she hissed between gritted teeth. “All my life I knew that something was out of place, but not what, or why. Because you were too spineless, too selfish, to tell me the truth.”

The reddening of Edgard’s face as his temper began to fray should have warned Indra to go no further, but her anger had taken hold and consequences were no longer a part of her thinking. She would have her say no matter what.

“I always imagined there might be some other lie beyond those you had admitted to. I never imagined anything so low as this,” she said. “Do you know how, even as a young girl, I suspected that you were not my real father, no matter how much you would insist? It wasn’t just the whisperings of your men behind my back. It was because I recognized you for what you were, in your bones, and I knew that I could never be the natural-born child of such a fucking coward.”

The words hung in the air. Several of Edgard’s men exchanged nervous looks. Edgard himself clenched his jaw, his own anger now welling up within him. The wound Indra had dealt him was grievous, and he knew only one way to respond. He drew back his hand to strike her—

“Edgard.”

He froze. Wulfric stood several yards away, watching intently. “Lay one hand on that girl and I will show you how a father protects his daughter.”

Edgard knew that look in Wulfric’s eyes; it was no idle threat. Still, three men had him under close guard.

He slapped Indra hard across the face with the back of his hand, leaving a stinging welt on her cheek.

The three men guarding Wulfric had perhaps been lulled by his lack of resistance when they first took him, and by his disheveled appearance. Now he gave each of them cause to reconsider. Before Edgard’s blow had even completed its arc, one man was on
the ground clutching his throat, his windpipe crushed. The second and third went down in short order after that, one wailing as he collapsed to his knees at the sight of the splintered bone protruding from his right arm, the other splayed out, unconscious, blood streaming from his nose. Free, Wulfric bolted toward Edgard. He made it halfway before the first arrow struck him in the shoulder and was still running when the next three hit him in the chest and the right knee. Indra let out a scream as Wulfric stumbled and pitched forward, crashing face-first to the ground, his outstretched arm just inches from where Edgard stood.