Wolf's Cross

by S. A. Swann

  He had become an adult.

  Ever since, his bones ached for the change, and his tongue was hungry for the taste of the blood hot from the animal’s neck. Even though they were still eating from the carcass he had taken, Darien wanted to take another.

  That was why he had slipped away from his parents on a cold spring evening only three days afterward. He had shed his human skin to revel in his fresh, fully lupine form. He didn’t understand why his parents were so reluctant to do this more often, or in the light. The freedom he felt was indescribable, the power over every creature in this forest. He could take any creature he wished and taste its lifeblood.

  He ran free as evening grew deeper, losing himself in the woods. He ran beyond the limits of his scent without quite realizing it. He was too intent on snapping at stray rabbits, taking the small bodies apart in a deadly snap of fangs and a spray of blood and fur.

  The shadows were long, and his muzzle slick with the blood of small animals, before he realized that he was lost. The thought struck him suddenly when he stumbled on an unfamiliar path heavy with strange scents. He stopped with the sudden realization that his disobedience had passed far beyond what his parents might forgive. He had no chance of returning before dark, before he would be missed.

  He looked desperately back and forth along the strange path, searching for any sign of familiarity, sucking in the air and hoping for the scent of his mother, his father, anyone from the village.

  He would never be taken on a hunt again …

  And with the growing terror in his breast, he would accept that as a worthwhile price for finding his way home.

  Panic and immaturity kept him from doing what his parents had told him to always do if he found himself in unfamiliar territory; he didn’t change back. He couldn’t. The woods were cold and dangerous, and he couldn’t face them clad naked in his weak human form. Fear made him pull himself into the halfway skin, the one he felt safest in while facing whatever terror the forest held.

  He was unprepared when the forest finally revealed its terror.

  It smelled strange, and stood astride the path ahead of him. Darien stopped, frozen at the sight of the creature. He couldn’t make immediate sense of the sight. It was huge, four-legged, and the last rays of sunlight glinted off parts of its body. Something shaped vaguely like a person seemed to grow out of its back.

  He had never seen an armored knight before, and it took a moment before his brain recognized that someone was riding on a horse’s back—something his people never did. The rider bellowed and pointed an object at Darien. Darien was too confused to recognize the threat as the knight’s crossbow fired.

  He was saved only by distance and the panic of the rider. The bolt tore past him, grazing his side between his forearm and his shoulder. It stung like nothing he had ever felt before. He took off deep into the woods, where the rider and his beast couldn’t follow.

  As he ran through the darkening woods, he thought of the stories his parents had told him, about the men who lived beyond the dark woods. There was an especially dangerous type of man—the ones who had killed all the people who had worshipped their ancestors, the ones who had emptied the pagan village and left it abandoned, the ones who were the reason his pack followed the forms of serving Christ. The men of the German Order, whose symbol was the black cross, who ruled all the lands beyond their little village.

  As he ran into the night, he tried several times to tell himself that the man on the horse hadn’t worn a tabard bearing the black cross of the Order. He had been mistaken. It had been the shadow of a branch, a fold in the fabric, not a black cross.

  Anything but a black cross.

  The fear grew as he realized that the wound in his side where the crossbow bolt had grazed him was not healing. His fur was slick with his own blood, and it hurt for him to breathe. That wasn’t supposed to happen. A cut in the flesh like that should heal in a matter of moments, and even faster when he wore this form.

  But the cut from the knight’s bolt burned as he bled. His lungs burned as he panted. His eyes burned as he wept.

  As fatigue gripped him, he dropped to all fours, letting the energy of the full wolf push him forward. But even the wolf had limits, and he couldn’t run forever. Deep in the midnight-black woods, his legs gave out and he curled up under a tree, panting and sobbing, and half-hoping that the knight of the black cross would find him and finish him off, so that he would no longer have to be afraid.

  The knight didn’t find him, and Darien woke in his naked human form, shivering and tacky with his own blood. He wandered the woods for two days, losing hope until he finally found a familiar scent, and a game trail that he knew. His heart swelled once he was back on familiar ground. He ran along the path as fast as he could in the fading evening light, the branches and briars on the path tearing at his feet and leaving scratches that healed almost as quickly as they were made.

  He slowed only as he began smelling other things. Blood. Smoke. Roasting meat.

  And a scent that he remembered. A smell he knew belonged to the knight and his horse.

  Darien stopped on the path, shaking his head. He tried to deny it, just as he had tried to deny the black cross on the knight’s tabard.

  Fear rooted him to the spot for what felt like hours. Slowly, inevitably, he pulled his feet free from his paralysis. He stepped slowly at first, moving toward his home as if in a dream. The awful smells wrapped around him, almost choking him, and before he realized it, he was running as if the knight were on his heels, chasing him.

  He reached his village before he was ready. Even so, the smells had already told him what he would find.

  The fires had died, but the smoke hung over the village like an evil fog, burning his eyes and imperfectly hiding the damage. Every building had burned, leaving nothing more than haphazard piles of broken timbers. The damage was so complete that, once he had taken a few steps into the remains of the village, he could no longer tell whose homes they used to be.

  He walked naked through the haze, too stunned to be afraid anymore. He called out, “Mother? Father?” But no one responded.

  The smell of horses was almost as rank as the smell of smoke and blood. And when he rounded a smoldering pile of wood that had once been someone’s home, he saw one. The animal was sprawled in a muddy track that was a soup of hoofprints, mud, shit, and blood. Its head had been torn nearly free of the rest of it, so that its dead eyes could stare at him over its shoulder.

  It could have been the knight’s horse. It wore metal plates on its head, and a mail skirt, and draped across it was a torn sheet that, under the mud, soot, and blood, bore the black cross of the Order.

  I didn’t bring them here.

  He kept repeating that to himself, as if thinking something often enough would make it true.

  “Mother? Father?” He no longer shouted at the ruins around him. He no longer feared that he wouldn’t find his family. Now he feared that he would.

  He encountered two other dead horses, left where they had fallen. Darien passed other remnants of battle, stray bits of armor, fragments of a tabard. Human clothing shredded by someone during a change. A severed hand. A broken sword. Crossbow bolts sticking in a tree that had burned into a skeletal hand reaching for the sky.

  No bodies.

  Not until he reached the church.

  Like the rest of the village, the scene was too surreal for him to make immediate sense of it. It was the smell that brought him to his knees, retching into the blood-soaked mud, before he could even acknowledge what it was he saw.

  The German Order had taken away their dead and wounded.

  Their victims, the inhabitants of Darien’s village, had been dragged into the church that their ancestors had built to appease the followers of Christ. Living or dead, everyone had been sealed inside; and then the building had been set afire.

  Mixed with the blackened timbers, in what seemed equal numbers, were the bones of everyone Darien had ever known. Some of the fla
me-blackened skulls were human, some were lupine, and all seemed to stare at him with empty sockets, accusing him.

  He shook, on his knees, and said, “I didn’t do this.”

  The sickening smell of his burnt family argued against him.

  “I didn’t do this!” he screamed at the dead.

  But the dead refused to acknowledge him.

  For three years, he abandoned his human form. He even abandoned his halfway skin, whose hands were too much a reminder of what he had lost. He became nothing but a large wolf, hiding in the woods the way his ancestors hid in their human forms.

  Guilt and despair drove the wolf into an endless hunt. He slept in caves, drank from rivers. He gradually tried to forget things like language, and tools, and clothing.

  And thinking.

  After three years, the only thing that reminded him of his early life was the healed wound in his side. It had left a thin scar that tended to ache when the weather became cold. The pain wasn’t bad, but the ache always brought tears.

  He would have remained in those dark woods for the rest of his life if he hadn’t found the dying hart. He was hunting and took the creature without a thought, springing onto its back from the darkness, and twisting its neck in his jaws so it was dead before it fell.

  The thought came after it died and struck the forest ground. It had never known that Darien was there, but it had been running in a panic, its pulse under his tongue so rapid that its heart might have burst from the effort. It bled from wounds Darien had had no part in making.

  He looked down at the animal’s body.

  Long sticks pointed up out of the beast’s chest, jammed into the creature’s lungs, their bases slick with frothy blood. He saw the fletching and pulled the word out of his memory.

  Arrows.

  Men were here?

  He stood over the dead animal, forepaws resting on its side, and felt something shift in his heart. For three years he’d had no focus for his anger beyond himself and his own guilt. For three years he had forced himself not to remember anything beyond his feral existence in the forest. Living far beyond anything that might remind him of what he once had, and what he had lost because of what he had done.

  What men had done.

  A low growl rumbled in his chest. Standing over his kill, his thoughts a clumsy tumble of half-remembered shame and fury, he felt something slam into his chest. He fell backward, more in surprise than in pain. Looking down, he saw an arrow the length of his foreleg sticking out of the left side of his chest.

  Above him, the archer was readying another arrow in his bow. The man didn’t wear the cross or the armor of the knights who had slaughtered Darien’s village, but he smelled of man—a scent Darien would never forget.

  Almost without thought, his body realigned itself, the spine twisting, muscles rippling, and his forepaws creaking and snapping as they grew into strong, clawed hands. The flesh wrenched itself painfully into its new form, leaving an aching relief in its wake.

  He had nearly forgotten his other skin, but his body hadn’t. And something within him knew that this was the form in which to fight men.

  The second arrow plunged into the ground as he stood upright for the first time in three years, wobbly from the violence the change had wrought to his balance and his center of gravity.

  He reached up and pulled the arrow out of his chest. It came free with a tug and a flare of pain, but that was all. Unlike the knight’s bolt, this arrow left no lasting scar. The wound was sealed before the third arrow passed completely through his left shoulder. Darien clenched his fist on the arrow he had pulled from his chest, and the thick shaft splintered in half.

  He ran toward the archer as a fourth arrow flew by, completely missing him. As he closed on the man, he smelled something else. It was unfamiliar, but it was a smell he would soon learn to savor.

  Fear.

  He dragged the body to a nearby river so he could wash the blood off the man’s clothes. He’d need them, if he was going to walk among men. He licked the blood off his claws and fur, and pulled the archer’s corpse into the shallow part of the river. He fumbled with the clothes before he realized that they were designed for human hands.

  While the body rested on the riverbed, water washing over it and his legs, Darien tried to pull the old human skin back around himself. For a long time it felt as if he had forgotten how. Perhaps he had never had a form like the dead thing in the water at his feet. Perhaps it was a nightmare. Maybe the wolf thing was all he was.

  But as it had with the halfway skin, his body remembered that he had once had a human shape. The change came, like a long-cramped muscle finally relaxing. His flesh poured into the man form suddenly, and with a shuddering relief that caused him to collapse into the river, next to the corpse. Cold water washed over skin that was suddenly naked; his newly flat teeth chattered and his whole body broke into gooseflesh.

  He got unsteadily to his feet and stared at his hands, white and hairless, with impotent nails.

  As weak as they seemed, it had been hands like this that had destroyed everything he had ever cared about. Hands like these could kill just as easily as tooth and claw.

  He bent over the archer’s body and clumsily removed its clothes. The river had already diluted the blood, until all that was left were unremarkable stains on the already mottled brown tunic. He tossed the dead man’s possessions—belt, tunic, breeches, boots—up onto the shore, until the corpse was as naked as he was. After that, he pushed the body to the deep center of the river to let the current take it where it wished.

  Darien watched it go and had the last twinge of doubt about what he would do next. He could return to the woods now …

  But somewhere beyond these woods were more men—men who deserved to lose what he had lost. Feel what he had felt. Darien knew, now that the rage in him had awakened, that there would be no release from it except in a tide of human fear.

  He dressed himself in a dead man’s clothes and started walking toward the world of men.

  PART TWO

  Anno Domini 1353

  IX

  After two days’ travel, Rycerz Telek Rydz herbu Bojcza and a trio of his best men rode into Warsaw. The city was imposing after their ride through the countryside. It could easily fit a dozen copies of Gród Narew within the embrace of its walls. As he entered the city, he thought that his uncle Bolesław would be relieved that no sign of war was abroad. The people did their business, men ran their shops, and farmers tended their fields. If they chose to glance at the approaching knight bearing the Bojcza standard, it was only with respect and mild curiosity, not the fear that tainted the common man’s face in wartime.

  Telek was relieved as well. As tense as dealings with the Teutonic State were, the tension was preferable to open conflict. There had been plenty of that over the years, and Telek prayed that the latest treaty with the Polish Kingdom was to spell the end of it.

  But it did add an additional level of urgency to his mission. For, if there was war, the presence of German hostages in Gród Narew would be troublesome, but unlikely to cause any great consequences for Masovia as a whole. In peace, however, the Germans became a much more delicate proposition. They needed to move with extreme care lest they give the Order some pretext to resume hostilities.

  For today, however, the land was at peace, the stores were full, and Telek’s party was greeted by the court of Siemowit III as honored guests. The Duke himself met all of them personally and insisted that they take their supper with him and his court. It was a grand affair, with musicians, and jugglers, and an entire boar roasted for them. But since their presence was unexpected, Telek was left to assume that this was how the Duke took most of his meals.

  It wasn’t until late evening, when the Duke received him in private, that Telek was able to discuss the reason he was here.

  The evening was clear and cool, and the Duke chose to talk to him outside, as they walked along the twilit gardens. “Tell me, my son, how fares your uncle?�
�

  “He does well, my lord. He is, however, troubled by the German Order.”

  “I fear that will be the case as long as his jaw aches to remind him of the last war.”

  “I am afraid that this time he has more reason.”

  The Duke stopped on the path before Telek, folding his arms behind him as he bent to examine a rosebush that was overwhelming the stony remnants of a prior wall. Nothing changed in his demeanor, other than his voice. “Tell me,” he said, his voice carrying an edge that hadn’t been present before. “What reason would that be?”

  “He’s received a convent of knights of the German Order at Gród Narew—fresh from battle, given their dead and wounded. He had them disarmed, and they are now being held as our guests.”

  “Hostages,” the Duke said. “What mischief were they up to within my duchy?”

  “They refuse to speak of it.”

  The Duke froze, and turned his head to look at Telek. Given the intensity of the Duke’s gaze, Telek was glad not to be the focus of his ire. “They refuse? Knights of the Teutonic Order shed blood upon my lands, retreat to one of my forts, and refuse to inform my deputy of their business here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Should I go to Marienwerder and demand satisfaction from the grand master himself? Must I have an audience with the pope?”

  “My lord, their captain has told us that they will speak to a bishop.”

  “A bishop? Which bishop?”

  “They did not specify.”

  “They did not … Am I to understand that they will speak to any bishop provided to them?”

  “That is my uncle’s understanding.”

  “I presume, then, that you have come here to fetch one for your uncle?”

  “The name my uncle gave me—”