He would have been expecting Aurelia, ready to fall into his arms. Henry smiled at his friend and shrugged helplessly. Raf had often said there was nothing quite so satisfying as coming home to an eager wife after a long full moon run, and that was what he had obviously looked forward to that night. “I fear I bring you…a problem.”
With a sigh that told Henry his friend had resigned himself to wait to bed his wife later, Raf sat down beside him, arranging his clumsy iron leg. “I am always glad to see you in my home, Henry, but not if you bring disaster in your wake. Tell me now, straight away, so that I might sleep easy tonight.”
“I brought a serving girl from your father’s castle. She is with child. It is…wolf.” Henry watched the gravity of the pronouncement transform Raf’s face.
All his humor gone, Raf nodded and reached for the pitcher and goblet set out on the table. He poured into the cup and passed it to Henry, then drank directly from the vessel. Wiping his mouth, he fixed Henry with a stern eye. “Yours?”
“You know me better than that.” Henry could not pretend he didn’t feel a little shame at the admission. He’d realized long ago that no wolf-woman would lie with him, and no good could come of lying with a human. Men his age were fathers already, and he had not so much as kissed a woman before.
“Do you know who it belongs to?” Raf took another long drink, some of the wine trickling onto his shirt. He was already drunk, on moonlight.
“Lucas Tanner. At least, he thinks he is the father of the child. The girl could not say.” A tight knot of rage clenched Henry’s stomach at the thought. Had she been so abused, by so many of Lord Canis’ dogs, that she truly could not tell?
“I assume you did not tell my father before you left with her?” Raf did not wait for a reply. “What would you have me do with her?”
“Keep her.” There, the favor was asked, monumental as it was. “She could be of use about the manor, and when the child comes—”
“When the child comes, Aurelia will have a distraction,” Raf finished, though it was not what Henry had thought.
He shifted on the bench, uncomfortable at the mention of the couple’s private pain. “I meant that you might…foster the babe. Teach him how to be a wolf.”
Raf nodded thoughtfully. “He could learn that better from my father and his men at Blackens Gate, but you know already what kind of an education it would be.”
“You don’t need to answer tonight. Only, keep her here. If she returns, she will only be treated badly, if not culled with the rest of the servants should your father take to the idea.” Henry thought of the poor souls in the cell below the castle, and wondered if any of them, man, woman, or child, still lived.
Raf lay one large hand on Henry’s shoulder. “I would not turn her out. You know me better than that. Though I’m not sure we couldn’t find something better for her. The free-wolves of York, perhaps, or Callais—”
“For now, though, let her stay. She is exhausted and half-starved.” Henry stopped himself. “I am sorry, you already relented, and yet I continue to argue her case.”
Raf contemplated Henry silently for a moment. “I know you regret what happened to your mother at the hands of my father, and you don’t wish it for this girl. But is there something more that makes you wish so fervently to protect her?”
Henry would not admit that he had grown fond of watching the girl about the castle. It sounded too much as though he’d developed a real fondness of her. “I barely know her. But I could not leave her there.”
Satisfied with the answer, Raf called for Robin, who came running down the stairs, eager to serve her master. She ladled out two portions of a thick stew onto trenchers and set them before Henry and Raf, before running off with a third.
“The girl is awake, then?” Henry asked, before the servant could disappear completely. “She is. Milady asked me to bring her food.”
“Aurelia is still awake?” Raf asked, hopefully, only to be struck down again when Robin replied, “She says you’re not to come up, neither of you.”
Henry turned meekly back to his trencher, and ignored his friend’s angry glare.
Chapter Six
“There, you’ve got some color back.” The lady of the house, who had introduced herself as Aurelia and insisted Ursula call her thus, beamed with pride as Ursula finished the stew. It had taken all of her willpower not to scoop it into her mouth with her hands, hungry as she was. When she finished, her stomach growled for more, but she pushed the trencher aside on the coverlet.
The serving girl dove for the discarded heel of bread before any droplet of stew soiled the bedclothes, and Ursula’s face burned in shame. She had never been in a bed so fine, or in a place so well-kept. The fresh rushes on the floor might have been a breeze off a spring meadow, so different were they from the horrible stench of the cell and the reeking halls of Blackens Gate.
She shuddered at the memory. Had it really been only yesterday that she had lived as a captive there?
“Are you cold?” Aurelia asked, misinterpreting Ursula’s shiver as a chill. “I did not wish to make the room too warm and uncomfortable for you. But if you would like a fire—”
“You have been far too kind to me already.” Was that ungrateful? Ursula was not, though she did not know how to express her gratitude.
Aurelia dismissed her with a wave of her hand. “I have been to Blackens Gate. I hope never to see its walls again. The way you’ve been treated is appalling.”
Such good your words do me, Ursula thought, then silently chastised herself for her meanness. “But you have treated me with kindness. Thank you.”
Aurelia’s expression brightened some at that. “Do you know when the babe will come?”
The stew in her belly seemed like to flow upward at the reminder. “By the winter, I think. Milady, I know nothing about carrying children. I don’t know when it was that he…”
“Let’s not speak of that, now,” Aurelia hurried to soothe her. “You mustn’t think of unpleasant things, lest the babe come deformed.” She crossed herself daintily. “You are so thin; there is barely any sign of it at all. When I was—”
Ursula looked up. There had been no indication of children in the household, no clumsy wooden toys lying about, no peals of childish laughter ringing from the walls. “Is your babe very young, then?”
The other woman’s eyes filled, and she blinked at tears even as she forced herself to laugh. “Forgive me. I should not even speak of it in your presence. Ill luck.”
The flame of hope burned brighter in Ursula’s mind. “Your child…”
“Born dead. And far too soon.” Aurelia wiped at her cheeks with her palms. “But we shouldn’t talk of that, now. Not in the presence of so much joy.”
“And what joy is that?” Ursula knew she should not argue, but she could not see the thing growing in her belly as anything more than a curse. “You were to have a child with your husband. The father of this child would have me dead, so that he could raise it into a monster. I don’t want that for him, I—”
Her breath seemed to run away from her, and prickles of cold stood out on her arms. In all her wishing that it would die, that she would die, that something would change the course that would inevitably trap her, she had forgotten to think of the child as it was: her child, growing in her womb. For a brief moment, she dared to imagine holding the babe in her arms, cradling that tiny body to her breast. It was sweet, and gone far too soon, for she remembered the truth of it. The child would be a wolf, and taken from her as easily as it had been forced upon her.
For her part, Aurelia did not rebuke her for her words. She reached across the coverlet and gripped Ursula’s hand. “There is joy, now, for you are safe. We will not turn you out.”
Daring to hope that her words might be true, Ursula squeezed her hand back.
There was a soft knock at the door, and both women looked up sharply. Ursula felt a strange pang when the man who entered was not Henry; she had hoped she would have a c
hance to thank him, before he’d gone.
“Wife,” the man in the door addressed Aurelia. He took a few clumsy steps in, and Ursula’s gaze fell to the length of iron protruding below his thigh, where a leg should have been. He lingered beside the open door uncomfortably. “We should leave our guest to sleep. Henry said the journey was a hardship.”
Turning back to Ursula, Aurelia asked, “Will you be all right?”
Summoning up as much of a smile as she could, Ursula nodded. Only then did the other woman rise and go to her husband, taking his hand as they left the room and softly closed the door.
Though the journey had indeed been long, and her legs still ached, sleep would not come easily in so nice a bed, in so warm a room. Used to only the cold of the cells and before that, scratchy, thin blankets on a pallet on the hard-packed ground, she found herself, strange as it seemed, too comfortable to sleep. She rose and padded across the rushes, pushing the door open carefully. Across the short, open corridor, a door was slightly ajar. She heard the soft sounds of conversation, and did not wish to disturb her hosts. Peering over the thick wooden rail, she saw Henry, still wrapped in the ridiculous blanket, lying back on a bench he’d pulled up beside the hearth. His eyes came open, and there was no doubt that he saw her, though she shrank back. Caught, she went down the stairs.
When she was close enough to speak in a low voice, she said, “Thank you…for taking me from there.”
He sat up, holding the blanket around his waist carefully. “You do not have to thank me. I could not have left you there.”
She should go, and hope never to see him, or any other wolf again. But she could not walk away. “You left the others there. You said they would be culled.”
“Lucas…the father of your child…he woke, after I hit him. If he remembered it, I cannot say, but he did not single me out to Lord Canis. He blamed a servant.” Henry paused, his eyes flicking away from hers for a guilty moment. “If the human slaves become too rebellious, he often lets the wolves take care of it, on the night of the full moon. I cannot know for certain if it happened, until I returned.”
“What will happen to you, when you return?” Did he trust Lord Canis not to punish him? It seemed foolish, when the leader of the wolves was a man who would cruelly murder many to atone for the sins of one. Then, he might treat his wolves differently.
“It is difficult to say.” Seemingly resigned to honesty, Henry ran a hand over his close-cropped hair, then let his head rest in his hands for a moment before continuing. “Lord Canis doesn’t care for me, particularly, but then, he doesn’t concern himself with me overmuch, either. I am good in combat, and I’m well-liked among some of the men. I do not think he would do anything…final, were he inclined to punish me at all.”
As he spoke, Ursula noticed the red rimming his eyes and the way his words dragged out just a little too far. He shifted his foot and there was a dull metallic thud as a goblet tipped over on the rushes.
She drew back, though she was not so close that he could have grabbed her if he’d tried. The movement did not go unnoticed, and he lifted his gaze from her feet, up her legs, over her entire body, it seemed. It should have unsettled her, to be so close to one of Lord Canis’ wolves, one obviously inebriated and looking over her with the hungry look she’d seen on too many bad men. When his eyes met hers, his expression did not change, but he barely whispered, “I would never harm you.”
“I know,” she assured him, and strangely, she did know that. She knew that this man was no danger to her, half-wolf or no, as surely as she knew the wolves of Blackens Gate were a danger.
He watched her, swaying slightly, as though he might fall over. Then, with a sigh, he lay back on the bench again. “Raf’s wine is…strong.”
“I can see that.” An entirely inappropriate laugh welled in her throat, and it felt strange when it emerged. She had not laughed in longer than she could remember. Perhaps she should not have, but she knelt beside the bench, confident that in his state he would not be troubled by her words. “I thought…I would leave the babe with them. Your friends. They could…have it.”
Henry’s eyes flickered open. “And what of you?”
She had not given her own future a thought since the day she’d arrived into Lord Canis’ service. “I…”
“They would let you stay, you know.” Henry sat up again, so sudden in his movements that he startled her. “Then the child would not be without a mother.”
“He wouldn’t be without a mother.” Her hands balled to fists in her lap. “He would have Aurelia to mother him. She so longs for a child, and—”
“And you do not long for this child?”
A man could not understand, she reasoned. A man could sire as many bastards as he liked, but for the women who bore them, life was much different. She was not so sheltered from the world that she had not learned that in her time before Blackens Gate. “I cannot. If I did long for him, I might make a foolish choice. I might choose to keep him with me in a life that would not be kind. Here, he could be the son of a knight. He could be with his kind.”
“He could be with his kind here. Raf has agreed to foster him, to teach him what he must know to be a wolf. And should you bear a daughter, wouldn’t it be lovely for you and Aurelia to make her dresses and play with her hair?” Henry’s smile grew slowly as he spoke, until he beamed at her with drunken hope. “Perhaps I could be a beloved uncle. I could bring dolls or…wooden swords.”
For the moment, her heart swelled at the thought of the babe in her belly growing up with such love all around him. But the picture Henry had painted would have been just as sweet were she not a part of it, and truth split through her like an ugly, festering wound. Still, she could not dishearten him, not when he wasn’t in a state to see reason. “I will…think on it.”
As she turned to go, he caught her hand in his, holding her back. She turned, but could not jerk her fingers from his grasp. His touch was like fire, like the other wolves, so hot it nearly burned her. His eyes burned her, too, pleading with her. “Do not mention this to Aurelia. Not for a while. She cannot bear another disappointment.”
“I will not.” It was a promise she would keep. She did not wish to cause these people pain, when already she’d intruded into their home. Keenly aware of her hand still caught in Henry’s, she pulled gently away. “Go to sleep, and I shall do the same.”
He released his hold slowly, and the moment his fingertips left her skin, she felt a pang she could not explain. She went back up the stairs, ignoring the soft sounds of rustling bedclothes and muffled sighs that escaped the barely closed door at the end of the corridor, and slipped into the room she would sleep in. She closed the door and leaned against it, catching her breath when there was no call to do so.
It was then that she felt it, the very first quickening in her womb, a flutter she might have missed had it happened only moments before. Thoughtlessly, she dropped her hand to her belly, covering the small movement as though she could protect it and deny it all in the same breath.
She moved toward the bed, chiding herself silently for her slowness. She was not injured. Nothing had changed from a moment before. And yet, everything had. The child was no longer a faceless dread. It lived, and made itself known. There would be no ignoring it now, no moment of peace when she could imagine it did not exist. Her child lived within her. Though the realization should have crushed her, she could not bring herself to despair.
Climbing beneath the bedclothes, she held her breath, hoping to feel it again, but it did not come. She wanted to share it, the giddy excitement she felt in spite of her circumstance, but she forced herself to sleep. When the morning light and the sounds of the household woke her, Henry was already gone.
Chapter Seven
With every visit to Fallow Manor, Blackens Gate became more and more unbearable. Henry watched the wolves training in the castle yard and found himself hating each one of them.
None more than Lucas. Upon his return a fortnight ago, Hen
ry had found himself the target of the wolf’s suspicions. He seemed to remember sparring with Henry during the full moon, but he did not voice his concerns. Yet, for some reason, he was always there. Watching Henry, as if waiting for some key that would remind him of the insult that had been perpetrated against him. A few months ago, it might have mattered, but the long winter had sapped Henry of his will to fight with these creatures. Watching the way the tide had turned against Roderick after his injury had robbed him of his standing in the clan, just as it had turned against Raf, Henry realized the sad impermanence of their world. No matter how they might feel toward him now, that could all change. When it did, Henry no longer wanted to be at Blackens Gate. That choice was up to Lord Canis, and the fine line that kept Henry a free-wolf, rather than a slave.
If Lord Canis had been troubled by Henry’s absence during the full moon, Henry could not have guessed so from his response to it. When he’d shown up to the castle the next morning, Lord Canis had been in the castle yard, recovering from his own long night run. He’d looked up and barked, “Where have you been?”, and when Henry responded with a half-truth about meeting Raf in the woods and running to Fallow Manor with him, Canis did not appear to see through the lie.
Nor had he denied Henry when he asked to return to Fallow Manor at the next full moon. Henry did not know entirely why he had asked to go, but that he did wish to look in on Ursula, to see how she got along in her new home. He did hope it remained her home; the thought of her staggering from one unkind Lord’s service to another left him bitterly cold. It was not a rational response, he knew, to care for the well-being of another person when he barely knew her, but she was like an injured bird he’d rescued. He could not leave her in the wild with a broken wing.
Across the courtyard, Brujon caught his eye and waved. Henry looked away quickly. The French wolf was affable enough, and, aside from his offer to help restrain Ursula by the well, he did not seem to take advantage of his position over the servants. If he, like Henry, was tired of the animalistic ways of their fellow wolves, he did not wish to know. It would be too tempting to confide in a person like that, to make another friend among a pack of ravenous beasts. It would make it more difficult to leave, if Henry ever discovered what it was he should do outside of the pack.
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