Beast (2 page)

“It is.” There was no sense in denying it further. The knight should have recognized him, after all. “Wilhelm. You look well.”

“You see only the armor,” the knight replied grimly. Philipe remembered Wilhelm, the serious, studious son of Köneig, the twin who had survived the fire. He was older now; fifteen years would make a man older. Blond hair fell into his eyes behind the visor. He’d donned his armor sloppily. Did that mean…

“Wilhelm, is Hazelhurn deserted?” It seemed impossible to Philipe. When he’d visited all those years ago, Hazelhurn had been the largest keep in the north. There had been a market full of wonderful, impossible things, mummers and jugglers and exotic animals had prowled the feasting hall, and the girls…

His feeling of dread intensified tenfold. “My god. Is she…”

“My sister and I live here, alone.” Wilhelm took the reins of Philipe’s horse and let the animal forward a few steps. “She will not be pleased to see you.”

“I would not expect that she would.” The roiling in his stomach threatened to spill onto the ground. “You will aid me, then?”

“For now. When you are well, you must leave. Johanna is very fragile, and I would not have her upset, at least, not for long. As soon as you are fit to travel, you must.” Wilhelm’s generosity was a mark of his northern blood, another area where Albart and Köneig had clashed. In the northern culture, a man’s duty was to his fellow man first, himself second. Albart had seen the simple kindness as weakness.

I should tell him.
The guilt nagged at Philipe as Wilhelm led the horse up the rocky road to the castle keep. Philipe could not chance telling Wilhelm that he was a fugitive prince. Philipe would not survive the wintry night or his wound, and if Wilhelm rescinded his offer of help, he would face both.
You are selfish. You have always been selfish, and you have returned here to treat these people selfishly once more
. It was horrible, but horribly true, too. By allowing Wilhelm to help him, Philipe made him a traitor to the crown, as well.
He would do it anyway. His northern hospitality would demand it
.
The horse stumbled, and Philipe clung to the animal’s neck for balance. “I do not recall the road being so rough before.”

He heard himself say the words, and could only listen as they rolled carelessly from his mouth. Before he could stammer an apology, Wilhelm said, without emotion, “The grain store exploded, in the fire. The paving stones cracked in the heat, and we did not have a means of fixing them before they became… treacherous.”

“I am sorry to hear of your difficulty.”

“You heard of it fifteen years ago,” Wilhelm said curtly. “You did not extend those condolences then.”

Philipe said nothing. His head hurt, his stomach protested, and pain lanced through his body. He had no inclination of salving Wilhelm’s wounds. He’d been foolish to try so halfheartedly.

They went through another gate, into a small castle yard with naught but a cistern and a few stacked burlap bags. When Philipe recognized his surroundings, he could scarce believe what he saw. The long, low great hall of Hazelhurn was naught but a single wall and the skeleton of a collapsed roof that lay propped against the stonework. The fanciful glass scenes of hunting stag and marauding ancestors had left behind gaping pointed arches that painted the shadow of a carnivore’s teeth on the snow. A haphazardly erected staircase reached to the balcony on the side of one of the castle’s three towers. His head reeling, Philipe looked up the tall columns that had once stood proudly over Hazelhurn like three sentinels. Only one still had a roof.

“Life is different here now,” Wilhelm warned. He reached up to help Philipe from his horse, and staggered backward under his weight as his legs refused to stand.

“Wilhelm?”

The feminine voice stopped Philipe’s feet scrabbling for purchase against the icy ground. He sagged against Wilhelm, almost certain he would black out.

“I am in the courtyard,” Wilhelm called out. “Johanna, go to your bed and stay there until I speak with you.”

“Do not order me around, brother! I will go where I please!”

Something in Philipe’s heart smiled, for but a second. Then, reality cruelly intruded, and he felt as though he were that younger man again, that boy, really, reading the letter through tear-glazed eyes, as his entire world crumbled around him.

It couldn’t have been different
, he told himself. Though it had been fifteen years, he had not seen Johanna, the girl he’d promised to marry, the girl he’d kissed breathless in the soft grass beneath an impossibly blue sky. That trip had been the last time he’d seen her. But a month after they were parted, the ink barely dry on the marriage contract, the villagers of Hazelhurn had rebelled, and tried to burn the entire Köneig family line in their beds. Lord Köneig had angered his people when he’d agreed to the King’s terms and remained unified with the kingdom of Chevudon. A prince’s simple offer of marriage to a noble subject’s daughter had been the spark that had started the fire in Hazelhurn castle. His childish love for Johanna had cost the lives of Lord Köneig, his son Jacob, the very castle of Hazelhurn itself, and Johanna…

When Philipe had learned the extent of her injuries, laid out in gruesome detail by King Albart’s own surgeon, he’d panicked. He’d thought he’d loved her, but he’d feared facing her. With her beauty gone, he found it impossible to think of anything else.

It was better that he ended it then, for the both of them. He did not regret his choice. He would not have been able to keep up the pretext of marriage to a woman so scarred that her own servants cringed to look upon her.

Wilhelm, breathing hard under the weight Philipe could not support for himself, negotiated him up the stairs, which swayed alarmingly. When the firm stone of the balcony steadied the world, Philipe noted his surroundings. The tower room they had entered was simple. A scorched wooden bed served as storage for a few burlap sacks. On a long wooden table, a few meager root vegetables had been abandoned. A pot over the fire simmered violently, splattering sizzling bursts of liquid onto the coals.

“Your kitchen girl has run off,” Philipe slurred, forcing his eyes to come into focus.

Wilhelm leaned Philipe against the wall and set to clearing the sacks from the bed. A thin feather mattress gave up puffs of dust as Wilhelm wrestled the bags away. “We do not have a kitchen girl. It is just myself, and my sister, as I have said.”

“Sorry. I was preoccupied.” Philipe tried to lift his arm, but the pain stopped him. He staggered to the bed, not waiting for further invitation, and collapsed upon it.

Footsteps echoed outside the door as Johanna made her way down the stairs.

“Don’t let her see me,” Philipe begged, summoning the strength to grip Wilhelm’s arm.

Wilhelm shrugged off his hold. “She must see you. She is the only one who can help with your wound.”

“See who?”

Philipe turned his head, his vision swimming. He caught sight of a woman, clad like Death in a black shroud. Ghastly pink hands flew to her veiled face, and Philipe tried to rise. The movement made the edges of his vision flicker, and he slumped back, fighting for consciousness. Even as Johanna ran from the room, Wilhelm just steps behind her, Philipe tried to speak. He managed a ragged, “I’m sorry,” before darkness overtook him.

Chapter Two

“Why is he here?”

When her brother did not immediately answer her, she stalked from the window over the courtyard to the other side of the tower, near the hearth. But not too near. If she felt too much of the heat upon her face, old burns protested in memory. She slipped a hand beneath her veil to feel the stiff scars. Every whorl had been etched there in fire and blood and pain. She had traced their edges so many times, physically and in her memory, in a sick ceremony to keep her heart hard. Concentrating on the pain of the burns had kept that other pain at bay for years.

Now, that pain had ridden to her door, and it begged for shelter.

Wilhelm stepped behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder. “He is wounded, sister. Would you refuse him aid?”

“I would.” The answer took no thought, no examination of conscience. She had begged for aid, all those years ago. Her letters had gone unanswered, her maiden’s heart had aged in weeks, then years, leaving behind something far more like a wounded animal. It was not a matter of conscience to turn on him, but a matter of survival.

Wilhelm’s footsteps retreated, to the other side of the small room they had shared since the harsh winter following the summer of the fire. When everyone had been dying of the cold, he’d huddled them all in this room, covered the windows, filled every space with available firewood and saved them from the harsh winds and snows. There had been eight of them, then, Wilhelm, herself, Nurse, and a few servants who had remained loyal to them.

Now, only she and her brother remained. She could imagine the look on his face, as he struggled with his once sweet sister’s reply. She had seen it enough, and had tried to make him understand. The fire had touched him, too, turning his strong sword arm to a mass of raw red. But he had been spared the worst of it, rushing out to defend against the mob while the fire raged inside.

The fire had robbed him of his brother, his Jacob, who had shared their mother’s womb with him. The two had never been separated for even a day, until Jacob had willingly surrendered that last, gasping breath in the darkness of his sick room. Yet neither of these things had hardened Wilhelm as they had Johanna. Long ago she had reconciled herself to her brother’s unfailing belief in justice and right. The flames had baptized her in hatred, but they had not given Wilhelm that same rebirth. Sometimes, she feared that made this all the harder for him to bear.

For him, to uphold his fantasy of a world in which right and wrong still mattered, she turned and gave him her bravest face. She let her eyes shine with tears she did not feel, so that he could believe his sweet sister still lived in the monster who stood before him. “I am sorry, brother. Old wounds are long in healing, and I fear his return has opened some of mine.”

Wilhelm came to her with his arms open, to enfold her against his chest. He kissed her scarred pate through her veil. “I cannot imagine what you must feel with him here. But father would have wanted us to offer him aid. He was ever loyal to King Albart.”

And his loyalty finds us living in eternal smoke and blackness
. Her father’s loyalty had caused the revolt among people who longed to be free from Albart’s taxes, Albart’s laws, that had been tailored for his southern lords. The people had loved Lord Köneig, but that love had been cast aside when he’d proved loyal to the king they had despised.

They were gone now, all of them, cut down by Albart’s soldiers and then starvation. It had been the very last favor the southern king had lent the Köneig holdings. After that, no aid had come. And no letters, from his council or his son.

The thought of Philipe, all those years ago, his fine strong arms around her as they rolled in the grass, the way his blue eyes had sparkled when he stole a kiss, all the memories that had once been beautiful now turned against her, brought her back to the long days waiting in her bed for some word that he loved her still. Word that had never arrived.

She wasn’t sure when she’d given up all hope, but it had not been quick, nor clean. It had been another fire ruining her, where she would have preferred a headman’s axe.

The words came from numb lips. “I will find Nurse’s chest of salves. Perhaps there is something inside that will help me tend to his wounds.”

Wilhelm kissed her again, his arms tightening around her. When he hugged her, he often did so as though the pressure of his embrace could soften her into the sister he remembered. Sometimes, she would allow him to think so, but not today. Not when he already asked so much. She pushed from his arms and said, “If you care so much for him, you should attend him, while I gather Nurse’s things.”

She watched her brother go, feeling a twinge of guilt. It did her heart grievous injury to keep him at a distance, but it would be better for him. Let the lesson, that love does nothing but harm, come from someone who did truly love him. Would that the world had done her such a courtesy.

She found Nurse’s chest beneath the bed in the little pantry the old woman had taken to living in during the last stages of her illness. It had been easier to keep warm there, she had insisted. Easier to keep warm, and to keep the shadows away. In her dementia, Nurse had confided to Johanna her fear of shadows. They reminded her too much of the space between flames.

“I found you in the shadows, sweet girl. Your hair all burned off. I wished for a light, to see how bad it was, and then when I saw it, I wished you had just died. I wished it.”

Nurse had not said those words to hurt her, Johanna knew, but they had shocked another part of her soul to stone, all the same. She banished the old woman’s voice from her mind, and opened the chest. Most of the potions and poultices had gone to rot, but there were strips of linen and a jar of liniment made from honey that would still be sound. She closed the lid and hefted the heavy chest in her arms. There would be time later to sort through it, and to record what she had thrown away. There was little hope of discerning what Nurse had made the numerous medicines from, but if she could, it would be worth the effort. Someday, someone worthy might have need of them.

Philipe lay on a pallet of furs atop the bed in the tower room. She would not look at him, more than to check that he still breathed. It had been here, on a fire-scorched feather mattress, that her father had died. Wilhelm said they’d had to burn the mattress, so soaked it had been with pink-tinged fluids from Lord Köneig’s wounds. Such morbid thoughts came to her often, from the many reminders left in the castle.