Wolfbreed (27 page)
Authors: S. A. Swann
He couldn’t see through the darkness, but he smelled the blood, and felt the flesh being torn from his body.
ldolf woke, sucking in breaths, feeling his heart race, and feeling the black tendrils of nightmare fade in his memory. Morning light streamed under the rocky ledge, and Uldolf had to blink a few times before he even realized he had fallen asleep.
Sweat coated his skin as if he had just spent the night working the field. He felt Lilly hug him tighter.
Lilly!
Uldolf was abruptly awake enough to realize that during the night Lilly had curled up against his naked chest. Her breasts pressed against his stomach and one naked thigh was resting on his leg. She hugged him again.
“Please,” she whispered, “d-don’t be afraid.”
It was heartbreaking to hear that from this girl—this woman—who had been so abused, so injured, so close to death. She worried about him when she was the one who had reason to fear. Those who wished her ill were real, out there, and had already done things that Uldolf didn’t want to contemplate.
What was
he
afraid of? Ghosts? Memories?
He stroked her hair with his hand and said, “Only bad dreams. That’s all.”
“You have—” She squeezed him harder as she fumbled for the words, pushing the breath out of him. “You have g-good dreams. P-please?”
“I’ll try.” The way she was pressing herself into him, he could certainly imagine better dreams he could be having. Embarrassingly, his body was starting to agree.
Does she know what she’s doing?
She gently kissed his chest and Uldolf decided that if she didn’t know, she had a pretty good idea.
What was she thinking?
What was
he
thinking?
He had come out here to save her, not to ravish her like some warlord collecting his spoils. Even if she was willing—if he took it like some entitlement, as if being Radwen Seigson’s son still meant something, it would make him little better than the German brutes who abused her.
“Lilly, get up.”
She lifted her face from his chest and looked at him. She smiled, though the smile receded as she looked at his expression. “Ulfie?”
He placed a hand on her naked shoulder and sat up, forcing her to do likewise. When he was free of her embrace, he bent over and grabbed his shirt from where it laid, on the other side of the burnt-out campfire. He held it out.
For a moment she stared at him, fully naked in the light of day, for once not covered by filth, or blood, or darkness. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, so much that it ached to look at her.
He was grateful when she took his shirt and put it on.
She smiled at him and cocked her head. When she did, she grimaced, reaching up to tug at the collar around her neck.
“Can you tell me what happened to you?”
“Ulfie?”
He reached out and touched the collar. “Can you try? I want to help you.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“No?”
She looked at him very seriously and said in a firm clear voice, “It’s bad to remember.”
Something in the way she said it made him feel as if she was talking about more than last night. He knew about bad memories. Even after eight years he still couldn’t—
A memory—less than a memory—tore through the back of his mind, making him shudder.
“Ulfie?” She reached out and touched his face. “No cry.”
Uldolf blinked and the half-felt horror sank back into the dark place it had come from, unseen and forgotten. He shook his head and said, “I’m not crying.”
“Ulfie?”
“I’m fine.” He worked to steady his breathing. “Let’s take a look at that collar.”
He took her hands away from the collar, one at a time, setting them in her lap. Then he concentrated on the damage she had done to the collar and her neck. Fortunately, all the cuts appeared superficial. His mother would have a more expert opinion, but the fact that none seemed deep, inflamed, or weeping was a good sign as far as Uldolf was concerned.
He looked around the circumference of the collar, and found the latch in front. It needed a key to open, if it still could open; Lilly had already done considerable damage to the lock. That part of the collar bore the most extensive damage from her attack with the dagger.
Unfortunately, the damage to the collar was as superficial as the damage she had done to herself. Uldolf looked around, brushing her hair out of the way, to look at the back of her neck.
“If there’s a weakness to this …” He found the hinge. The two halves were wrapped around a thick pin, which was held in place by two small tongues of metal—one on top, one on the bottom—that had been bent over and hammered in place.
If the collar had been iron, he would have had no hope of removing it. But now that he had light, he could see that it, like the dagger, was made of silver.
“Why?”
He suddenly revised his thoughts about where she had come from. Beautiful and untouched, she could be a noblewoman, someone’s betrothed. But she could also be someone’s slave. Not all slaves were for heavy labor, and if her owner kept her for beauty or pleasure, wouldn’t he want her bonds to be decorative as well?
He had a sick feeling in his stomach when he realized that Lilly might not be lost. She might have
escaped
from her real home—the home that Uldolf had been planning to return her to.
“Lilly,” he whispered, “is that why you won’t talk about your past?”
She turned around to look at him, wincing at the collar.
“I promise I will never give you back to anyone who would hurt you.” He took out his hunting knife. “Now, you stay still. I don’t want to scratch you any more than what you’ve already done to yourself.”
He began working on the hinge.
InterludeAnno Domini 1231
andkomtur Erhard von Stendal, as Brother Semyon had said, was adept in the more subtle arts of warfare. Semyon might have trained his beast children to respect their Christian masters, but Erhard had taught Lilly how to fight.
She had the brain of an eight-year-old child, but even an eight-year-old could grasp some strategy. The wolfbreed were not invulnerable, but Erhard drilled into his charge simple principles that would maximize her strengths against her pagan foes.
Three were primary. First was surprise, to strike quickly and without warning when and where the enemy did not expect. Second was to choose the battlefield. Humans were most effective when they had space to move, light to see, so she should choose to fight them in confined spaces where they could not wield their weapons effectively, and meet them in darkness. Third was numbers. She needed to limit her combat to one to three men at a time.
Lilly was the first, and Erhard was not disappointed.
She learned well, and Erhard used her well. The first season he slipped her near enemy camps, and she made good on her promise to kill everyone she found there. While he treated her with the suspicion required to handle a wild animal, she never acted contrary to his direction. While he was careful to remove her shackles only when he was the sole Christian in immediate danger, she never once moved to escape or attack him. Instead, she looked at him with a devotion that was uncomfortably intense.
In the last months of that summer, he had her slip inside a village just ahead of the Order’s army. She was pulled inside the walls with the other villagers fleeing before the Christian forces. It was a significant test. She had to remain out of contact for days, waiting for Erhard’s signal, blasted on a hunting horn nearly a week after the siege began.
It was a successful test. Within one night, most of the armed defenders had died or attempted to flee, and the Order’s army lost not one man. When they overtook the village, Lilly was waiting in the stables by the central fortress, sitting by the half-eaten carcass of an ox.
“Are you pleased with me?” she asked him.
Not the words Erhard would have chosen.
The next summer, Erhard decided to use her against the troublesome village of Mejdân.
idsummer of the year 1231, Erhard traveled to the frontier by Mejdân, a fortnight ahead of the Order’s troops. He was not dressed as a knight now, and the horse and cart he led were those of a tradesman, not a warrior. The two men with him were no more than would be expected for someone attempting to transport goods across the Prûsan frontier.
Even the girl, not quite ten years old, had the appearance of
a Prûsan slave, her shackles plain, painted black to obscure the precious metal with which they were constructed. The small party traveled the woods without incident. Once, a petty Prûsan warlord demanded a tribute of amber for their safe passage, but Erhard reacted as any tradesman would, paying the pagan strongman for his safety. That ensured Erhard and his party stayed no longer in the Prûsan’s memory than his last meal.
A few miles from Mejdân, Erhard stopped his small procession and took Lilly off the wagon. He instructed his men to wait, then he led the shackled beast-child off into the woods, toward the eastern side of Mejdân. When he felt he had moved a safe distance from his men, he reached down and removed Lilly’s restraints. She idly rubbed her wrists, but otherwise watched him, unmoving.
“Do you understand what you are to do?” he asked her.
“I am to wait, unobserved, until I hear your call.”
“And when you hear my trump?”
“When I hear three long blasts, followed by two short blasts, I will enter the village. By the gate if I can find a crowd to be lost in, or if I can’t, I climb the wall in darkness.”
“Then?”
“When I hear the call again, I go to the big building on the hill.” She looked up at him and smiled. “Everyone will die, master.”
ldolf stood in the bedchamber’s doorway and called out to his sleeping parents, “Mama, Papa?”
He hugged himself, shivering, naked feet cold against the wooden floor. Papa muttered something that might be a curse. Mama sat up in bed and extended her arms. “Come over here, Uldolf.”
Uldolf ran to his mother, wrapping both arms around her neck.
“What’s wrong, son?”
“He needs to grow a spine,” Papa muttered from the other side of the bed, “and some common sense.”
“You be quiet,” Mama said.
“I heard her singing again,” Uldolf told his mother.
Papa snorted.
“Radwen!” Mama snapped at him. She stood, taking Uldolf’s hand. “Forgive your father. There are many things that worry him right now.”
From under the covers, Papa mumbled, “And phantom little girls are not one of them.”
Mama held Uldolf’s hand all the way back to his room. “Now, what was she singing?”
“I never heard it before,” Uldolf said. “It was pretty, and sad.”
Mama opened the shutters on his window and looked outside. Uldolf’s room was on the eastern side of the stronghold, opposite the village, so there were no streets or houses below. Below Uldolf’s window was only a small patch of grass before the stronghold’s inner wall, the massive timbers painted in a serpentine pattern that was bright even in the moonlight. Past the wall, the ground dropped away for a few hundred paces until it met Mejdân’s dark outer wall—a much rougher structure of tree-sized logs, concealing the woods beyond.
She leaned out. “I don’t see anyone now, Uldolf.”
Uldolf sat on his bed. “I
heard
her.”
“I’m sure you did, son.” She tucked him back in, pulling the covers over him. “But on warm nights like this, sound can travel far. I do not think she was as close as you thought.”
“She sounds so lonely.”
Mama kissed his brow. “You need to sleep, Uldolf.”
“Yes, Mama.”
She stood and turned to the window.
“Mama?”
“Yes?”
“Can you leave the shutters open tonight?”
She frowned slightly, then turned to look outside. “I suppose it’s warm enough.” She turned away from the window and rustled his hair. “Now, you sleep. No more annoying your father.”
“Yes, Mama.”
Mama left him alone, closing the door, shutting out the light from the hallway. The unshuttered window let moonlight stream in. On the warm air he smelled horses, cook fires, and outhouses. He heard dogs barking, and the boots of guardsmen walking the inner wall.
And, soon, he heard her voice again. Low and sad, he knew that it was out there, whatever his mama said.
Fear not the cloak of slumber, When the sky has lost its sun, Mother will protect her child
,
“Should any nightmares come,” Uldolf whispered back into the darkness.