The Mad Wolf's Daughter

by Diane Magras

  The old man leaned toward her. “I’m going to the castle and I’ve room in my wagon for all three of you, as long as you don’t mind the hay I’m bringing them.”

  “Hay?” Drest could think of nothing better than burrowing in soft, dry hay.

  Bales and bales were packed beneath blankets, protected by the wagon’s solid roof. The farmer helped Drest carve out a spot and then drew Emerick up into the prickly, dry nest. It was tight. Tig scrambled up beside him, but there wasn’t room for Drest. The farmer tucked blankets over Tig and Emerick, folding the corners against the hay, then shrouded Drest in another blanket.

  “I’m sure you’d like the hay too,” the farmer said, “but you’ll have to sit with me up front.”

  “Nay, that you’re giving us a ride means the world to me, and—wait.” She had just felt Borawyn against her hip. It occurred to her that she might attract notice with the sword at her side. “This is my friend’s sword. I was carrying it for him. Let me give it back.”

  Drest unbuckled her sword-belt and slid Borawyn with its scabbard into the hay.

  “Don’t do that,” murmured Tig.

  “Nay, it’s safer here,” she whispered. “I’ll just be in the front. Keep an eye on Emerick and call me if he needs help.”

  Tig’s face was grave. “Drest, a warrior should never be without her weapon.”

  “Aye, but now I won’t draw notice.”

  Yet as Drest pulled the blanket back over her head and took her place on the front bench, Tig’s warning resounded in her heart.

  29

  FAINTREE CASTLE

  A gust of wind sharp with the scent of salt water whipped against the wet blanket that shielded Drest. The smell was as familiar as home. She bared her face to the biting cold.

  The farmer and his passengers were not alone upon the road. More carts, mules, and horsemen had joined them, forming a procession in the dwindling rain. The farmer told her the reason why: They had all come to feast and then watch the Mad Wolf and his sons hang.

  Drest cringed at the bloodlust of the villagers around her. Had every one of them suffered from the war-band’s ways? Or were they faithful to Lord Faintree beyond all reason? She thought of Arnulf and the villagers of Phearsham Ridge and how loathsome the spectacle would seem to them. She also thought of what Tig had said about the goodness and kindness in her. Was there truly so little of it in others?

  She was kind, Tig had said. But kindness would not help her battle knights by herself, nor slip into the prison and break all the chains. She could only follow Emerick inside and hope that no one would notice as she crept off to find her family.

  Drest wished she had come up with a better plan.

  And she wished that even more when the farmer pointed to the four stone peaks of Faintree Castle’s keep rising in the distance.

  The packed dirt road transformed into a magnificent earthen bridge over the sea. As the procession rattled along, Drest looked down at the crashing waves below.

  Ahead of her, the castle walls rose on the edge of an island, propped upon a crown of steep cliffs. It was a brilliant defense.

  The first gatehouse was a solid block of a tower on the outer curtain wall. As they neared it in the line of other carts, Drest noted with a shudder the throng of crossbowmen along the crenulated battlements. Each man wore a helm, a chain mail hauberk, and a white surcoat with a brilliant blue tree—just like the surcoats that Emerick and the red-faced knight had worn.

  They drew nearer, and nearer, Drest’s stomach tightening all the while. At last the farmer faced the pair of waiting guards.

  “I have one of your men in my wagon,” the farmer told them. “I picked him up at the crossroads with his lad here and his lad in the back.”

  “He’s badly wounded,” Drest told the guards, climbing down from her seat. Be brave, she told herself. “I’ve done all I can to save him, and he’s alive, but he’ll need more help than I can give.”

  “How was he wounded?” a guard asked, walking with her to the back.

  “He fell—on rocks in the sea.” Drest tried not to wince. She wished Tig were at her side explaining.

  The guard looked in the wagon while Drest waited and moved from foot to foot. What if Emerick had died and Tig had not told her?

  But the guard emerged and told the farmer to go on, and go on quickly. A fellow guard sprang up to Drest’s spot on the wagon’s bench, and the wagon rattled past.

  “I’m supposed to go with him.” Drest watched the wagon disappear beyond the castle’s first wall of defense. Tig’s alarmed face appeared in the back. “He’s going to ask where I am.”

  “He’s not going to ask anything in the state he’s in.” The guard took Drest’s arm none too gently and pulled her through the gate and up to the wall to give the next cart room to approach. “What’s your name?”

  Drest looked down the road, which ran between two stone walls toward the next gatehouse, another tower between another curtain wall. Battlements topped the passageway. There had to be over fifty knights at the tops of those walls; she’d never imagined there would ever be so many in one place.

  “Did you hear me?”

  She turned back to the guard. “My name is Drest. My—my father is the miller of Phearsham Ridge. Emerick took me along when he stopped by. I’m to go with him if I am to do what my father promised.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Take care of him.”

  “He’s being taken care of now.” The guard glanced at the next cart passing by. “Do you want to see the executions?”

  “Aye, but Emerick—”

  “Then go along with you. See if you can find someone who will share his tent and you may watch from the grass.”

  “I promised Emerick—”

  “No one calls him that here, and you shouldn’t, either. Are you going to find a tent to share or not?”

  Drest opened her mouth to argue one last time—and remembered the talisman in her pouch. “If you don’t believe that he wants me, then look at this.” She fumbled past her steel and stone until she found the wooden token. Drest held it out, her heart pounding.

  The guard’s eyes widened. He looked again at Drest, and all at once, his eyes changed.

  “I know who you are,” the guard said. “They say he’d been chasing the youngest of Grimbol’s sons. You are he.”

  Drest stood very still. “I’m not one of Grimbol’s sons. My father’s the miller from Phearsham Ridge, like I said.”

  But it was too late. Before she knew what was happening, Drest had been struck in the stomach with a blow that knocked her to the ground. She began to rise, but a second blow kept her down. Before she could twist away, the guard took her hands and wrenched them back. A burning rope dug into her flesh as he bound her wrists.

  “You little beast.” The guard pulled her roughly to her feet. “You may go to the devil with the rest of your vicious family. This talisman tells us the truth: It tells us not to trust the one who carries it.”

  “Wait,” Drest snapped. “Emerick told me to give that to you. You need to talk to him. He’s not going to be happy about this.”

  Drest ducked in time to miss the guard’s blow. But he got her with his next, on her cheek.

  “Didn’t you me hear the first time? Don’t call him that. He’s not that name to you.”

  Then the guard jerked the Mad Wolf’s daughter to her feet and dragged her down the shadowed passageway toward the inner gatehouse.

  30

  THE PRISON

  Darkness surrounded Drest as the guard thrust her head and then her bound hands down through a trapdoor. His fingers were quick: He tied her ropes to the iron ring bolted to the wall beneath the opening, then grabbed the scruff of her tunic and shoved her through.

  She was falling, her legs up and over, before they slammed against the wall, ech
oing with pain. Her wrists burned and her arms ached at the sudden weight on them.

  “Here’s your final cub,” the guard shouted, his ugly voice resounding over the damp stones. He banged the wooden trapdoor shut above her head. A bar slid into place outside, metal into metal.

  Drest had not made a sound when the guard had beaten her, and she made no sound now. Her shock had swept away any instinct to struggle and fight.

  “Is that you, Drest, my lass?” Grimbol called, his voice strong from the other end of the prison. “Blast. We’d thought you’d escaped.”

  Drest looked up, blinking. She could barely see in the gloom but could just make out her brothers hanging on rings beside her.

  A deep murmur came from voices along the wall.

  “We were sure you were still out there,” Thorkill said mournfully.

  “We thought you’d hide on the cliffs or in the ravine,” murmured Wulfric, “and slip up any man fool enough to chase you.”

  “Ah, my lass, my lass,” said Grimbol. “This is a true defeat.”

  A sob rose in Drest’s throat. “I tried, Da,” she said, her voice breaking. “I tried to trick them. I got all this way.”

  “You came all this way?” said Gobin, who was hanging closest to her. “Not captured at the headland, then? How did you get all this way, lass?”

  “I walked. How else would I have come?”

  “I’ve never heard you sound like that before,” said Nutkin from beside his twin.

  Gobin leaned as close as his ring would allow. “There’s a bruise on your cheek. Did they strike you? What do they think they’re doing, hammering away at a wee lass?”

  A chorus of voices called out from down the wall:

  “Are you hurt, Drest?”

  “We’ll take care of you. No one’s going to lay a finger on you again.”

  “Ah lass, I’ll break the hands that beat you.”

  “And they call us brutes.”

  Drest looked down the prison at her brothers and last her father, their backs against the slimy stone wall. Their voices were clear, sharp, and, for the first time in days, real. They buffeted her like sea winds, tearing away her numbing despair until she was fully with her family, and only with them, in the sea-scented prison.

  Something splashed beneath her in the darkness. It took Drest a few seconds to recognize that it was the sea and not a floor and to realize how this prison had been built: a series of rings suspended on the wall above the open water. Even if a prisoner got free, there was only deep water below without any place to hold.

  “Of course they beat on our Drest; there are knaves ruling this castle.” Grimbol’s face gleamed in the gloom. “Knaves who hunger for the suffering of others, blind to courage and loyalty.”

  Like Emerick, Drest thought.

  “Listen to me, my sons and daughter,” called Grimbol from down the prison wall. “We have one more chance to prove ourselves. They’re hanging us at dawn tomorrow. They’ll bind our hands and will bind our throats but this I tell you: If you use all your strength, we may win this battle yet. Strike them. Kick them hard. You’ll get blows, you’ll get stabbed, but don’t go down without your fiercest fight. We’ll knock them into the sea, we will, or trample them under our boots. If we must die, we’ll take two men with each of us. Faintree Castle will never forget this day. And if any of my children should escape, remember your family and your duty to spill the blood lost from us—to spill it tenfold.”

  Grimbol’s voice droned on like a story, just as it had over the fire on the headland when Drest had leaned against her father and felt his arm around her.

  She bit her lip to keep from crying.

  “For you, my lads, are no ordinary men: You are Wulfric the Strong, Thorkill the Ready, Gobin the Sly, Nutkin the Swift, Uwen the Wild, and Drest—Drest, you are the youngest and you’ve had no chance to fight. What name will you have?”

  All her brothers’ heads turned and looked at her.

  Drest swallowed. “Sorry, Da?”

  “You’re one of us, my girl. What name shall I give you? Drest the Quick? Drest the Brave?”

  “I’m not brave, Da. Nor quick enough.”

  The prison was quiet with only the faint slosh of the waves beneath their feet.

  “You’re clever,” Grimbol’s voice came from deep in the gloom.

  “Not clever enough, either.” Drest hung from her ropes, her ears tingling. She had come so far, so close, and failed at the final moment—but only through the betrayal of a man who had pretended to be her friend. “I’m Drest the Foolish.”

  “Nay, lass,” Grimbol said. “That you came all this way past dangers on the road and entered this castle shows your courage. What shall I name you?”

  “Drest the Fearless,” called Wulfric in his great booming voice. “Call her that.”

  “Nay, call her Drest the Bold,” said Gobin.

  Uwen stuck his heels against the wall and leaned forward on his ring so that he could see her. “Drest the Daring. We can be Wild and Daring together.”

  “If you want a sneaky edge to it, Drest the Cunning,” said Nutkin.

  On the wall past Nutkin, Thorkill sighed. “I just think of her as our own dear Drest. Can we call her Drest the Dear?”

  A sob caught in the girl’s throat. Drest the Weak. Drest the Feeble-Minded. Drest the Trusting.

  Drest the Kind.

  She stiffened her jaw. “I was only caught because I was tricked at the end.”

  The prison was silent.

  The girl closed her eyes and swung her feet back in an attempt to curl up. Her boots stuck against the stone wall behind her.

  And remained stuck.

  Drest blinked. It couldn’t be. No one could have made a prison wall like that.

  She slid her boots up. They stuck again on the ledge made by the stones and their mortar. There was not just one ledge: The wall was full of them.

  Drest grabbed the rope that bound her hands and, her toes holding her place in the mortar, rose enough to release the pressure around her wrists. Slowly, careful not to lose her ledge, she twisted until she was facing the wall. With her boots still firm in place, her fingers found a crack. Without a sound, Drest gripped the wet wall and, crack by crack, climbed. In seconds, she had reached the iron ring.

  “Who tricked you, Drest?” Gobin’s voice was quiet beside her, as if he’d been thinking.

  Drest closed her fingers around the cold iron ring and pulled herself up. Her arms were sore, but a ledge beneath her feet held her steady. “One of the knights. I found him after they invaded.” She leaned against the slimy wall and closed her eyes.

  “Was he the one missing when the ship took us away?” asked Gobin.

  “Aye,” said Drest. “I was going to trade him. I was taking him wounded, see, all the way to this castle.” She faltered. “I’d trade him for one of you and then we’d attack and set the rest of you free.”

  “All this time, you had the missing knight in your power?” Wulfric asked.

  A laugh erupted from across the prison. “Drest, my lass,” Grimbol called, “you are cleverer than we ever gave you credit for. Do you know who that was? The man you caught?”

  Drest paused. “He claimed his name was Emerick.”

  “Aye,” said Grimbol, “Emerick Faintree, young Lord Faintree himself. The old lord’s son.”

  Drest nearly lost her grip on the iron ring.

  That explained why the guard’s face had changed when he had seen who lay in the wagon, and the haste to get him inside. That explained the talisman. And that explained the false friendship. It had been nothing but a careful ruse; he’d needed her to help him reach the castle. His castle.

  And it had been his order to capture her family from the beginning. His order to have them hanged.

  “Drest is the cleverest of us a
ll.” Grimbol’s voice came deep from the far end of the prison. “She took Lord Faintree himself. You are truly Drest the Clever, my lass, and no one can deny it.”

  There was a chorus of “Aye” from all her brothers.

  They’ve always been good to me, Drest thought. Even if they pillage towns. They’ve always loved me. Unlike some people.

  Drest locked her fingers on the ring and vowed never to let go. She would not allow the thought of some lily-faced, slime-headed eel to make her lose the small advantage she had gained.

  Her brothers had gone from “Aye” to gruesome descriptions of what they’d do to the young Lord Faintree if and when they caught him.

  “He’s a monster like his father,” Grimbol muttered from the other side of the prison. “He wants to see our wee lass hang with the rest of us.

  “Not if I can help it,” muttered Drest. She began to pick at the knots. They were tight and it was hard to peel back the fibers.

  Gobin whistled. “Would you look at our wee lass now. When did you get up there, Drest? Can you untie yourself?”

  All the iron rings creaked as her brothers leaned out to see.

  “I don’t know,” Drest said. “They’re good, strong knots. But I’m trying.”

  “I wish I had my dagger to lend you,” Gobin said.

  “Aye, a dagger would help, but none of us have—” Drest stopped. The knight who had beaten her had searched only her boots for a weapon. The dagger she had stolen from Emerick was still strapped on her belt beneath her tunic.

  Clenching the fingers of one of her bound hands on the iron ring, Drest crawled farther up the wall with the other, step by tiny step.

  “What are you doing?” called Uwen. “Do you have a plan?”

  “Shut it, you rot-headed prickle fish,” snapped Drest.

  Her hand brushed against her tunic and then the belt itself. One more fold. She stretched her fingers, forcing out the numbness, and touched the soft leather sheath. Then it was in her hand. With the twisting rope burning at her wrists, Drest traced her fingers up until she felt the dagger and its metal grip.