Something Red (32 page)

But his first step wobbled and he could not take a second and he seemed unable to feel where his fingers were on the hilt. The knife
slipped from his hand to plunge itself into the wooden floor, where it stuck, upright and vibrating softly.

And now the corridor rang with sound, the reverberations overlapping, the air pulsing with a ghastly energy. Down the hall the Beast that was Jack had halted, uncertain. Through watering eyes Hob saw that Nemain had doubled over; she held with one hand to the lip of the deep-set window.

Only Molly seemed unaffected. Suddenly her bell-deep voice rang out in Irish, something repeated thrice, and she stepped briskly to Vytautas’s side and slapped him across the mouth.

At once his drone ceased. He stood with that one hand stretched out toward Jack, and his mouth open, but his voice had failed, locked within him. He struggled to make a sound, his face empurpling, his eyes bulging, but only a thin croak came from his throat. Molly stepped back away from him.

Hob, released from the incantation’s fell power, dropped to hands and knees, his stomach heaving, his ears filled with a sound as of a rushing stream. His tear-blurred vision was narrowed to the wide planks between his hands, and the thin stream of drool that came from his mouth, and the butt of his knife hilt, still shivering in the wood. After a moment that seemed to last forever, his vision expanded, sounds resumed, and he became aware that the floorboards beneath his palms were jumping to a slow rhythm. He raised his head. The Beast had renewed its advance toward Vytautas, its heavy limbs making the planks of the floor tremble with each step.

It began to gallop along, and again gave voice to that blaring bass outcry, and Hob felt his bones turn to water, although surely, he thought, surely, Jack would not harm his own, no matter how deeply he had been submerged in the Beast. He snatched up the flagon again and pressed himself against the inner wall; the lid rattled on the flagon and he clapped his palm on it to keep it secure.

Vytautas plainly could not even turn his head. He stood immobile as the statue of a prophet, while his doom roared down upon him. At the last moment he rolled his eyes toward Molly, a frantic glance, in which hatred and despair mingled in equal parts. His lips trembled, his teeth shone through his beard in a bright grin. Hob felt that Vytautas strove to curse Molly; but her spell held, and all the sinister doctor could manage was a thin throttled whine.

The Beast came bounding down the corridor, flashing in and out of the bars of moonlight, its speed and size and roar enough to paralyze any man, even without Molly’s binding cantrip. It was upon them in two breaths. Its last galloping leap ended with a looping overhand blow from the giant fist, and Vytautas crumpled, hammered down like a sheep in a shambles.

There was the briefest of pauses, and then the Beast seized the corpse by its head and arm and bent swiftly toward the doctor’s neck. The huge canines tore out Vytautas’s throat in one appalling wrench. Hob turned hastily away, but still, still, he could hear the grunts, the obscure moist smacking sounds, a grinding of tooth upon bone, rapid gulps, snarling.

Molly came slowly toward the Beast, where it crouched over the broken husk of the Lietuvan. She began singing, with something of the rhythm of a chant but more douce and delicate, and yet not quite full song. In her right hand was the amulet pouch on its leather thong. As she passed Hob she reached out toward him for the widemouthed flagon; he uncovered it and gave it to her. She took it by one handle, holding it in her left hand. He swung about, much against his will, to see what would come.

He saw the Beast that was Jack look up from its awful business. Hob’s eyes skittered away from the thing on the floor. He watched as Molly drew nearer. The Beast reached down. There was a terrible wet rending noise, and it brandished aloft the long bone from one of Vytautas’s
thighs, meat and gristle still adhering to the knobby terminus. The Beast came forward a pace or so on three limbs, the left fist knuckle-down on the blood-soaked planks. It glared at Molly and raised the thighbone; from the broad hairless chest came a bass rumble so menacing that, dazed as he was, Hob must take a quick step backward. The Beast smote the floor once, twice, four times with the scarlet-stained baton, the floorboards thundering like a war drum, and all the while the red eyes staring into Molly’s face. Speech could not have been plainer:
See what blows I will give you, if you come nigh.

Yet Molly’s song, so pleasant, did not falter, nor was there the merest quiver in her deep sweet contralto, though she had halted her advance for a moment when the first blows were struck. Now she moved forward singing, as one sings a lullaby to a tiny-fisted newborn, and she came up to the Beast that was Jack, and she dropped the loop of thong about the short neck where it met the huge back, and she dipped her right hand in the flagon and smeared a bit of the liquid on the fearsome bloodstained jaws. The thing’s tongue came out and licked it up, and Molly, still singing, held the flagon to the Beast’s lips, and Jack the Beast drank, gulping noisily, and then sank back against the wall beneath a deep narrow window recess where the moonlight slanted in through the arrow slits, and thrust bowed short legs of astounding girth out before him, and sighed.

Molly knelt quickly beside Jack the Beast, gathered a handful of fabric from her skirt and began to wipe the brutal face. In between her ministrations she gave him more sips from the flagon. The torches nearest them sputtered, casting a fitful light on Jack, making shadows move across his face, making his features hard to discern clearly.

Hob blinked. Already Jack’s face had assumed subtly different proportions, and—did he seem smaller as well? Hob decided that he did; then thought he did not. All at once he was sure that the great body was smaller, and less hirsute.

Jack lost substance, but slowly, slowly. Hob remembered lying awake in the wagon, watching the moon move through the topmost branches in the forest, a motion just perceptible every so many breaths: at just such a speed did Jack become smaller, become more Jack.

His head lolled back again and rolled weakly against the stone wall. Pale naked skin shone here and there through the pelt upon his shoulders; the black leathery breast began to lighten and soften. Jack made a visible attempt to focus his eyes. His head rolled to the side again and again, as though there was no strength in his neck. But he kept turning back to Molly’s face, looking at her as though trying to read a sign, an uncertain but growing comprehension glimmering in his eye, like a newlit candlewick that sputters and flickers before the wax that nourishes it begins to melt, and the flame begins to steady.

Sooner than Hob would have expected, Jack Brown appeared completely human—his powerful frame, bleeding here and there from cuts and bites inflicted by the Fox, seemed almost boyish against Hob’s memory of what he had been as a Beast—but his features were still slack. And now he gazed with desperate attention at Molly’s face, and did not look away again, and at last his eyes sharpened, and awareness came into his features, like a drowsy man suddenly coming fully awake, or a drunken man suddenly sobering, and he knew her.

“Maygh,” said the dark man. Maeve.

“Mo mhíle stór,”
she said, stroking the hair back from his forehead, her face very close to his face, her eyes smiling into his eyes, as she called him “my thousand treasures” in the language she used for her inmost thoughts.

CHAPTER 22

A
LONG THE CORRIDOR A KIND
of numb peace reigned for perhaps a dozen heartbeats. Four lived; four were dead. At the far end, the corpses of the women were hidden by the bulk of the dead Fox; at this end, the body of Vytautas lay in ruin just beyond Jack and his three attendants.

Molly stroked Jack’s face a short while. She roused herself with an effort and said to Hob, “Run and fetch some men—we’ll be needing to carry him down; then go tell Sir Balthasar that we have triumphed.” Hob turned, stiff as an old man, and went through the curtain to the turret stair, looking at Vytautas as little as possible.

But in the event he had not descended more than a level and a half before he met Sir Balthasar with a squad of men, one of them Roger, on the hunt for any
of the Lietuvans who might remain. Hob led them back to the bloody corridor.

The soldiers bunched in a little knot just inside the curtain, transfixed at first by the huge russet carcass of the Fox blocking the far end of the corridor. Then: “Precious Christ!” cried Sir Balthasar, looking down at what had been Doctor Vytautas. “Has he been torn by demons?”

“He sought to do that to you and yours. Let him be,” said Molly. “The dead to the soil, the living to the loaf: my man here needs aid, and he cannot walk to his bed.”

Sir Balthasar knelt by Jack a moment, then gave orders that the curtain should be torn down and fastened to pikestaffs to make a litter for the wounded man. While this was being done he walked cautiously down the corridor with a few others of the squad to the wreck of the giant canid. The bodies of the two women were discovered, to cries of dismay. Sir Balthasar told off another detail, and the two corpses were quickly and carefully borne off by four soldiers.

Sir Balthasar stood a moment contemplating the Fox. Its half-open eyes held a sheen from reflected torchlight; fangs still gleamed from under the partially retracted lips. But the limbs held stiffly out to the side, the utter immobility, spoke only of death. After a moment the knight turned away, motioned his remaining soldiers back.

Sir Balthasar returned along the corridor to where the litter was almost ready. Molly stood up from her ministrations. The grim knight stood looking down at her a moment, then sank to one knee, took her right hand, and kissed it gravely. He stood up and stepped back, and at once Roger came forward and did the same, and then all the men present, one by one. Molly accepted all this calmly.

Behind her the four bearers had finished their improvised field litter. A man-at-arms reached to take Jack’s arm, to move him onto the curtain preparatory to lifting, but Jack tensed and turned swiftly toward
the man. Jack’s face was turned away from Hob but something in it made the soldier shrink back. Nemain put a soothing hand to the side of Jack’s neck, and he subsided; Molly came up and coaxed the dark man to slide onto the litter himself.

Just as the four bearers were about to stoop and lift Jack, a settling or exhalation from the far end of the corridor brought everyone whipping around, palms slapping against hilts. “God’s wounds!” said Sir Balthasar.

The Fox was no longer there: in its place was a short and slender young woman, naked and broken-bodied. Nemain stayed with Jack, but Molly and Hob and the men of the castle went up to the corpse and gathered in a silent ring, looking down. Despite the splintered bone protruding here and there, the terrible gashes that Jack the Beast had inflicted, Hob recognized the strong nose, the tilted gray eyes, of Lady Svajone. But this was a woman of perhaps twenty, with long fine white-butter–blond hair and the suave skin of youth, and even now possessed of an eerie beauty.

“She was young for a time each night, or each night that she killed,” said Molly. “It is a way they have, and they live long, long. Herself wandering the land over with these three men as her husbands, and this body one more strand of her mastery over them. That itself is another form of sorcery, and not the youngest in the world.”

Hob tried to speak, but at first could accomplish only a croak. He swallowed and tried again. “Will she stay this way now, Mistress?”

Molly made a dusting-off gesture with her hands. “When the sun rises, she’ll be an old woman again, and a dead old woman at that, and soon thereafter ’twill be the usual road of the flesh.”

“We will burn them all before that, and throw their ashes into the river,” said the mareschal savagely.

I
N SHORT ORDER
they had conveyed Jack back down to Molly’s quarters and settled him in the great bed in the inner chamber, Molly and Nemain bustling to and fro. Jack was already half-asleep; he lay very still on his back.

Hob looked down at him: despite his burly limbs, Jack seemed somehow frail, for the first time since Hob had known him. His skin held an underlying pallor that Hob had not seen before. He lay on a pillow with a pattern of chevrons, but there was a linen head sheet, a white cloth draped over the pillow, and he was almost as pale as the linen.

Sir Balthasar and his four litter-bearers stood about awkwardly, filling the room, looking at Jack. One of the men-at-arms, after a private assessment of Jack’s chances, asked, “Shall I run now for the priest, my lord?”

“No priest!” said Molly sharply.

The soldier looked dubiously at Jack. “But, my la—”

At that Sir Balthasar turned and fixed his basilisk glare on the wretched man. The castellan spoke in a quiet poisonous tone. “No summoning of priests, and no carrying of tales.” He swept his glance around the four men-at-arms, and they nodded almost as one.

“There will be guards and runners outside your door, madam,” he said to Molly. “Summon me if you need aught, be it day or night.” He bowed, and left with his retinue, and Molly was not troubled by priests thereafter.

T
HERE FOLLOWED A PERIOD
of administering various potions to the barely conscious Jack, Molly feeding him with a spoon. She bound up those wounds that the Fox had inflicted and rubbed embrocation into Jack’s powerful limbs, while Nemain wiped his brow with a wet cloth redolent of the
uisce beatha.
After a while she sent Nemain to sit with Hob while she continued to work on her lover.

At last Molly turned from Jack’s bedside. She stretched, her hands to her lower back. She rubbed her eyes, looked around wearily. Hob and Nemain were sitting side by side on a bench, exhausted, slumped back against the wall. She considered the two young ones briefly.

“One more thing,” she said to them. “You must take Sir Jehan a draft I shall give you; it’s in pain that he’ll wake tonight, and this will provide some succor.”