Wolf's Cross (32 page)

The ground that had been cleared before the skirts of Gród Narew was designed to withhold concealment from an army, not an individual. Even in human skin, he could come close to the wall unobserved just by keeping to the opposite side of the stone fences that defined the surrounding pasture. The closer he came, the less the guards’ gaze drifted toward him. They believed they would see any threat as it emerged from the distant woods, paying little thought to the ground at their feet.

He approached on the side of the fortress opposite the moon and the main gate, and by the time he had reached the closest of the stone fences, he was deep in the shadow cast by the outer wall. Between him and the bottom of the wall were about thirty paces of bare grass.

He cleared it in fifteen, with no alert from the guards above.

He listened, and even with his dull human ears, he could hear the men walking the wall above. The log-and-earthwork wall towered above him, seven or eight times the height of a man.

He flexed his fingers and reached up.

This would be easier in his true body, but that was what they watched for. Besides, he wore Maria’s cross.

So he hooked fleshy human fingers into the flaws in the log skin of the wall and pulled himself up. He scaled it, jamming into gaps so small that his fingers bled. With the silver cross so close to his skin, the wounds were slow to heal, but Darien accepted the pain. He welcomed it. He hated this body that was so like his
enemies’, so it felt right that it should suffer like he would make them suffer.

His fingers continued to slide across rough wood and bark, and he forced them into the cracks, pushing deeper and harder. By the time he reached the top of the wall, he had lost most of his fingernails.

He hung on the edge, in the last of the moon-cast shadow, listening to the movements of the guards. Their steps were slow and lazy, and after a few moments one passed in front of Darien, oblivious to his presence.

He could tear this place apart.

But that wasn’t why he was here.

He waited until the guard’s heavy footfalls left him to join another, farther down the wall. Darien heard the beginnings of a whispered conversation and took the chance to chin himself up enough to look over the edge of the wall. Forty paces away, two guards talked while looking out over the vista commanded by Gród Narew. In the other direction, thirty paces away, a third guard walked away from Darien, equally intent on looking for threats coming from his quarter of the woods.

Darien pulled himself up silently and alighted briefly on the walkway between the two sets of guards. He flexed his aching hands until the joints creaked, pausing just long enough to see if he was being observed.

No alarm came; he vaulted off the inner edge of the walkway and into the darkness below.

D
arien slipped through the darkened alleys of the human stronghold, choking on the smell of men that filled the air. He slipped past oblivious guards, weaving his way around until he found the stables.

The smell of equine prey was a relief after the stench of humanity. It also reminded him dimly of the man who had attacked Maria; he remembered his smell better than his face.

Horses shuffled and nickered as he slipped inside, but none panicked. They might feel uneasy at a stranger’s presence, but, wrapped in a man’s skin, he wasn’t a subject of fear. He might have ridden one had he chosen to.

Instead, he walked through the sawdust in the darkened stables, passing the rumps of a dozen horses. The moonlight reached in just enough to show the floor and the outline of the nervous horses.

At dawn, this end of the aisle would still be wrapped in darkness. He looked up into the rafters, which were nothing more than an ink-black smear of shadow. He climbed up into the darkness.

He found a perch on a long timber that was broader than he was. He felt his way along until he was above the aisleway. Below, the dim moonlight through the doorway seemed to glow like a spectral bonfire in contrast to the dark where he crouched. He removed his clothes by touch, laying them neatly on the timber next to him, until he was barefoot and naked.

Last he removed Maria’s cross, setting it on the timber on his left, opposite the clothes. In response, his fingers started itching. “You will see what men are, Maria.”

Then he sucked the blood off his fingertips as his fingernails grew back.

J
osef woke to birds chirping. He yawned and blinked a few times. Above him, leafy branches framed a threatening red-gray predawn sky. Dampness coated the skin on his upper body, chilling him. For a moment he was unclear about where he was or what had happened. He had gone to find Maria, talked to her, and started their return to Gród Narew.

Had he fallen asleep?

He raised his hand to wipe the fatigue from his eyes and stopped. Blood streaked his hand, and the image raised so many horrific possibilities that his mind recoiled.

He started to sit up but felt a weight holding him down.

He looked down at himself and saw one of those horrific possibilities made flesh. Maria was draped against him, her hands on his stomach, her head by his thighs. Her arms were coated with blood, and blood stained the bandages around his wounds.

Had the worst happened? Had the false pagan god called its vengeance on its servant?

Then he saw that she breathed.

The memory of the night returned to him slowly. The sudden fatigue, his near collapse, Maria shredding his clothes.

“Christ have mercy,” he whispered, and said a short prayer of
thanksgiving that the beast had not found them asleep in the night.

He was naked from the waist up, and what didn’t serve as a new dressing on his wound had been shoved under his head as a pillow. She hadn’t made any such provision for herself. She slept with her cheek resting against his thigh, her black hair obscuring her face except for her half-open mouth. He could feel her breath, even through his breeches.

He remembered kissing her.

Her hands were still tangled in the dressing covering the wound in his belly. Even now, where gore didn’t streak her skin, her knuckles were a bloodless white. He reached out and touched her hand, and she jerked, lifting her head, shaking the hair out of her eyes. She blurted something in Polish, and Josef told her, “I seem to have survived.”

“God forgive me, I fell asleep—”

“No one can stay awake forever.” He squeezed her hands.

“No, he’s still out there.”

“Maria, we’re fine.”

She looked down and shook her head. “You are far from fine. You almost spilled your life out for lack of attention.”

“I am blessed, then, that you cared to mind me.” He let go of her hands. “And perhaps you might unclench your grip and see if the wound has sealed itself again.”

She looked down at her hands, still holding down the bandage at his stomach. She nodded and grunted a little, and Josef could swear he heard the sounds of bones creaking, as she unclenched her hands and pulled them apart. For a moment it looked as if she had hurt her hands, the skin bruised, the fingers dislocated and swollen. But it must have been a trick of the light, because she shook them both once and Josef saw no more sign of injury other than his own blood crusting the skin.

She felt around the place she had been holding down and,
after some investigation, told him the bleeding seemed to have ceased.

“Good,” he said, pushing himself up from the ground. “We can return to the fortress.”

She placed a hand on his shoulder; it was distractingly warm against his chilled skin. “You shouldn’t be walking around.”

“And the alternative? Remain here?”

“You could pull that wound open again.”

“I appreciate your concern.” He bent over to push himself upright, and Maria grabbed his arm and draped it over her shoulders.

“If you won’t rest,” she said, “let me help you.” She hooked her arm behind him, holding his back as she lifted. She moved slowly, gently, and with a reserve of strength he didn’t expect. He reached his feet and felt a wave of disorientation that made his knees wobble underneath him. But she kept him upright.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I will not let you kill yourself.”

He tried to lift his arm off her shoulders, but she grabbed his wrist with her free hand.

“I can walk by myself,” he said.

“And you can walk with my assistance.”

He didn’t have the energy to debate her on the point.

T
he sky remained threatening, but the rain held off as they approached Gród Narew. Since it was still before dawn, the gates hadn’t been opened for the day. However, there were guards emplaced who saw them slowly climbing the main road up the hillside, and by the time they reached the walls, the gates were opened for them to enter.

A half dozen men grouped themselves around Josef and
Maria, and as they asked question after question in a language Josef couldn’t understand, he began to realize how awful he must have looked—shirtless, stomach bound by gory bandages, bloodstained breeches, skin pale as death, supported by a woman half a head shorter than he was.

Maria answered their questions, and a pair of the guards ran off while another pair led the two of them deeper into Gród Narew.

“They’re fetching the doctor for you,” Maria told him.

“Do I need a doctor?” He felt his stomach tighten for reasons quite aside from his wound.

“You cannot think otherwise.”

“No,” Josef said. “But I have seen too much of their ministries to think gladly of the prospect.”

“Think of it what you will. Your wounds will be tended to.”

Josef closed his eyes and allowed her to lead him. In his mind, Nürnberg was too close—the smell of death, the cries of the lost, and the physicians who calmly advised abandonment of the afflicted before they themselves fled to the countryside.

A
cloudy dawn came slowly over Gród Narew, the sky boiling red and gray. The overcast light in the stables barely exceeded the moonlight from the previous night. Darien was still crouched in the rafters, waiting. He licked his lips when his prey arrived. A young stable hand, sandy-haired, maybe sixteen, carried a pair of large sloshing buckets into the aisleway.

The boy did not look up. And when Darien was certain that the boy’s gaze was turned in the right direction, he gently pushed the cross and chain off the timber with his foot. It fell glittering to the aisleway in front of the boy.

The boy’s eyes widened in surprise, and he set down the
buckets as he walked to where the treasure had fallen upon a pile of manure. He picked the cross out of the pile, holding it up by the chain to catch the weak dawn light.

Above him, Darien’s bones stretched and creaked, and his muscles writhed, and his teeth became sharp and long in his growing muzzle. The horses, until now dim to the danger in their midst, began rearing and stomping in a cacophony that sent the stableboy spinning around to see the source of their terror.

Drool slid from Darien’s slavering mouth, dripping from his tongue to land on the boy’s left shoulder. The boy looked up to see Darien falling down upon him, and if he had time to scream, it was lost beneath the cries of the terrified horses.