Wolf's Cross

by S. A. Swann

  Many times she stood, in her red cloak, next to some beast she had taken. She attacked larger and larger prey, as if Karl might be enticed back—bucks, a bull elk, a mountain cat, a bear.

  As the months passed, her heart shrank, and her belly grew.

  And as summer became verdant, and Karl’s seed grew large within her, her heart grew black and cold. She had been cast aside in worse isolation than the loneliness she had thought to escape. As gravid as she was, she found it impossible to change, to run as a wolf does. Hunting became difficult, and she grew gaunt.

  When she gave birth, it was with blood and screams and the rending of flesh. However, she survived, as she could bear far more injury and insult than any human woman. Three children she had, all girls. And as she licked the blood off Karl’s daughters, she decided that Karl would have to come help care for them. And that meant she had to take away any reasons he had for staying away.

  She found Karl’s farm in the midst of a horrible storm at the end of harvest season. Ice fell like needles from a sky boiling and black as ink. The wind howled and bit with a force that felt as if it could tear flesh from bone.

  Her howls were louder than the storm, louder than the thunder. Karl heard her cries as he huddled with his family around the fire in their cottage. At first he didn’t want to admit to himself that he knew what made those terrible, terrifying sounds.

  But he knew.

  Even though he had never seen his dreamlike winter lover in other than her human guise, he knew. Just as he knew that his trysts were no dream, and the wood where they had happened no fairyland.

  He had bought more than meat, and at a much dearer price.

  Karl took an axe and told his wife to protect their young son, to bar the door and the shutters and let no one in before morning—not even him. Then he left the cottage to face the beast that cried for him in the storm.

  She stood in front of the cottage, waiting for him. She was naked, but no longer human. Lips that had borne his kisses were curled in the lupine snarl of a feral she-wolf. The hands that had caressed him were now dark-furred and long-fingered, ending in hooked claws. The legs that had straddled his body were now the crooked legs of a wolf.

  He didn’t want to know her. He wanted this apparition to be something new and strange to him. But he looked into her eyes, and he knew whom he faced, and what.

  “You left me.” Her voice, always rough from lack of use, came out of her lupine throat as little more than a growl.

  “I had to tend the harvest.” The words were empty in Karl’s mouth. She had come to him, true. She had been the one to place her lips on his—but he had never pulled away. He had never said that he had a family, a wife, a son. He had pretended, because the situation was unreal, that it wasn’t real. That because she wasn’t human, it didn’t matter.

  And the horror he felt was more for what he had done than for the monster standing in front of him. She panted, steam rising from her muzzle as lightning carved highlights from black ice-matted fur.

  “You left me alone, with child.” She growled and took a step toward him. His axe dangled impotently from his hands and he shook his head, trying to deny the truth of the allegation.

  “I didn’t know,” he said finally, as knives made of falling ice scoured the tears from his cheeks.

  “I birthed your whelps, alone in a cave, and swaddled them in the skin of a bear I had killed … for you.” She stood before him, barely taller than he and starvation-thin, but still seemed to loom over him. He felt her breath on his face as she growled.

  “I didn’t know,” he said again, as if those were the only words he knew anymore.

  “You will care for our children.”

  As she stared into his face, he saw the head of a starved she-wolf, ice matting her fur into spikes, muzzle wrinkled into a snarl. But the eyes were hers, and in them he saw the pain, the loneliness.

  “Yes,” he said.

  The creature before him froze, as if she couldn’t quite understand the word. Her muzzle lost its snarl as she pulled back from him. “You will come back with me. To your daughters.”

  “I will go with you,” Karl said. He thought of his wife and child, barricaded in the cottage. He couldn’t leave them to the anger of this beast. Better that the she-wolf received what she wanted, what he’d implicitly promised her.

  “You will come back? With me?” The voice softened in her inhuman mouth, and her eyes shone from more than melted ice. In a flash of lightning, Karl thought he saw one side of her mouth pull up in a melancholy smile. “Our children are beautiful.”

  “Take me to them,” he said, all the time thinking of his wife and son, in the cabin.

  And, in a moment of fear and weakness, he glanced back. He knew it was a mistake as soon as he turned his head, because he could hear Lucina growl.

  “Liar.”

  He turned back. “No, I—”

  She backhanded him in the chest—a blow that knocked him rolling into the icy mud of the path.

  “Liar!” she shrieked at him, jaws snapping at air. When the lightning lit her face, he saw nothing but fury.

  He raised a hand, hoping to pull back the thread of hope he had seen in her eyes a moment ago. “No, I will—”

  She pounced on him, knocking him down, pressing his shoulders to the ground with her massive clawed hands. “You will tire of me, like you did before. You will come back with me, but you will leave. Like you always have. You will always come back here.”

  “No, not this time.”

  In another flash of lightning, he saw her lupine mouth smiling again, but this time it was the rictus grin of death staring down at him, dripping saliva that burned a cheek that was frozen from the icy needles of the storm. She bent down so her muzzle was next to his ear, lips brushing him as they had the first time they met. “No,” she whispered. “Not this time.”

  She leapt off him, growling words that had lost their meaning in her fury. To his horror, she ran to his cottage.

  His wife. His son.

  The sudden threat drove all thought of his own guilt away. The woman Lucina had been was wiped from his mind as he saw this atavistic shadow bearing down on his family. As she attacked the door, slamming herself against the splintering wood, he pulled his axe out of the mud and ran after her.

  Strong as she was, she had been weakened by her troubled childbirth and months of hunger. Were she the same Lucina that had greeted Karl in the woods, naked under her red cloak, the door would have given way with a single blow. But now she splintered one board at a time, reaching in with a furred arm to cast aside the bar sealing the door.

  Karl came upon her as her shoulder pressed against the hole she had smashed between the planks of the door. She turned her head to see him, and as the axe came down on her neck, he saw resignation in her eyes.

  The first blow was grave—an awful wound tearing through her neck, spilling her life out over frozen black fur. Had she run then, she might have survived, healed from even such a massive insult. But she didn’t run. Instead, she used all her strength to say two words to Karl through her damaged throat—words that came in a froth of blood.

  “Our children.”

  The second blow landed before Lucina’s weakened body could begin to seal the damage from the first. The third took Lucina’s life. The fourth was just the formality that completely removed her head from her body.

  Karl left his wife and son, and his dead lover, to find his daughters. He slogged through the ice storm, deep into the dark woods, to the clearing where he had made his trysts with the wolf. As he searched he raged and cried—cursed himself, and Lucina, and God. As he stumbled in the dark, he selfishly hoped for the peace death would bring him.

  Then he heard an infant’s cry.

  He found them in a shallow hollow in a hillside, wrapped in the raw hide of a bear that smelled foul with decay. For two infants, it was already too late. Their bodies were blue and cold. But the last child was pink and healthy, and screamed
as the ice bit her skin.

  He brought all three home, the tiny corpses slung across his back in their rotting bearskin. His one living daughter he carried tightly inside his shirt, so that she would have his body for warmth. When he reached home, the storm had broken, and a cold dawn had begun chasing clouds from the sky.

  PART THREE

  Anno Domini 1353

  XX

  Maria stayed silent throughout the story. Her heart ached for Lucina, and she could see her fate written even as Hanna described Lucina’s first meeting with Karl. Maria’s mother had been doomed from the start, and it was all the more heartbreaking because Lucina didn’t even understand why.

  Her stepmother wiped her cheeks and said, “We had lost a daughter, less than a month before. She would have been barely older than you. You took her place at my breast. I know where you came from, what gave birth to you. But you were my husband’s child, and you became mine.”

  “I had sisters,” Maria whispered.

  Her stepmother gave her a long look and said, “Come with me.”

  She led Maria along the stone fence marking the edge of the field, to a trail into the woods. The trail ended in a clearing marked on opposite sides by two piles of stone, one somewhat smaller than the other. The rocks were weedshot and reflected bone-white in the moonlight.

  “This is where we placed them to rest.” She pointed to the larger of the piles and said, “Lucina is here.”

  Maria walked up to the rocky pile and tried to picture what Lucina had looked like, what her voice might have sounded like, what she might have told her about what she was.

  And as she did, she felt twin stabs of shame. The first came from not having spared the time to think about her mother before now, before she’d had cause to question what she was. But worse than that was the shame of having doubted her stepmother. The woman who’d raised her had shown her more grace, more loving forgiveness, than Maria had thought the human heart was capable of.

  She knelt by Lucina’s cairn and said, “Thank you.”

  “You’re right. You deserve to know your own history, whatever it is.”

  Maria turned to face her stepmother. “Thank you for being my mother.”

  “How could I do anything else?”

  “When I hurt Władysław, you could have let my father take me away.”

  “I—” Her stepmother sucked in a breath and turned her face away. Maria realized that Władysław had told the truth when he’d said that their parents never knew he had overheard them.

  “And you gave me this.” She touched her cross.

  “It was to keep you safe. We weren’t trying to imprison you. We didn’t want …” Her shoulders shook as she wept, and Maria stood to place an arm around her.

  “You didn’t want me to end as she did,” Maria said, holding her still. “I understand it now.”

  Her stepmother hugged her, and Maria realized that sometime in the last few years, she had grown taller than her.

  “Don’t hate your father,” Hanna sobbed into Maria’s shoulder. “He made mistakes, bad ones. But he loved his family, and all his children.”

  “I know.”

  “Please, whatever happens, always remember that you have a family, and that we love you.”

  “I know,” she whispered quietly, as her own tears came.

  She returned to her own bed, with her stepmother and her brothers. And for the first time since her father had died, it felt like home to her. Yet through some evil sleight of hand, the feeling made her situation all the worse. Could she hang on to this, knowing what she did about herself? Knowing that the Order hunted her kind?

  Curled up on her bed, in the loft above her brothers, she lay without sleep. Her nerves strung themselves tight beneath her skin, her muscles tense with unexpended energy. She felt as if she could jump out of bed and run into the woods, and keep running and running, away from all of this.

  She ran her fingers over the dagger she had set next to the bed, the inscription rough and cold against her skin.

  Josef …

  What about Josef? She could explain things to her mother. All children leave home in the end, and she was no different in that respect. But could she explain things to Josef so that he understood?

  Why had he given her this? Why had he kissed her so tenderly? Why did he incite the evil hope that there could be something more between them?

  He belonged to the Order, and she was the demon they hunted. By all sane measure, he was her enemy—and a deadly one. So why did she care what happened to him?

  And, as far as he knew, she was a lowborn bastard servant. Why should he care what happened to her?

  I’m defying everything I’ve trained to be to tell you this.

  She thought of him saying that, and her heart ached. He had no idea he was trying to aid the very thing he fought. Should he do anything else to help her, he might lose everything. She couldn’t let him sacrifice himself for a lie.

  If she truly cared for him, she had to tell him what she was.

  By the time she left, it was after dawn. When Władysław chose to escort her, she didn’t object. They walked for several minutes in silence, as birds sang under a cold, overcast sky. After a long time, Maria stopped and said, “I am sorry I hurt you.”

  “What?”

  “When we were children.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t serious—”

  Maria placed a hand on his shoulder. “No, Władysław, it was. I love that you care enough for me to pretend, even to yourself, but I might have killed you.”

  Władysław chuckled uneasily. “You were only three years old.”

  Maria looked at him and said, “Would it be so remarkable for a three-year-old wolf to kill a five-year-old child?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Mother explained things to me.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  Maria squeezed his shoulder. “Just remember, whatever happens to me, I love you and I’ll never do anything to hurt you or our family.”

  “I know that—”

  “I swear it, Władysław,” she said. “I swear on the graves of both my parents that I would give my own life before that happened.”

  He stared into her eyes and asked, “What did Mother say to you?”

  “She said I take after Father’s mistress.”

  Then she told him what she was.

  Władysław, of course, didn’t believe her. “Do not make such jokes, not on our father’s grave.”

  “Here,” she said, and handed him the silver dagger.

  “What is this?”

  “You are the head of the household; you need to protect our home. There may come a time when you need this. I don’t think I will.”

  They reached the edge of the woods and stepped into the shadow of Gród Narew. He still seemed half angry, half confused. “Why do you spin such a tale? And give me this?”

  “Tell Mother that I am doing what I can to keep our family safe.”

  And she left before he could ask her more questions.

  When she came with Josef’s meal, he was dressed and standing by the window, staring out over the stables. She set down his breakfast and said, “You are looking well.”

  He nodded, his expression grave. “I am healing, and I wish to be able-bodied when we ride forth again. You should stop coming here, even in daylight.”

  “Josef—”

  “The Wojewoda Bolesław led a band of men out yesterday, looking for signs of the beast. The Duke has sent more men to search for them. They haven’t yet returned.” He looked at her, and the concern she saw there made her want to weep. “I need to know you’re safe.”

  “What do you know of these beasts you hunt?”

  Josef frowned, as if her words confused him for a moment.

  “You know what kills them. You know they can look like men.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever spoken to one?”

  “What?”

&n
bsp; “If they become human, then they can talk, explain themselves …”

  “Don’t speak such nonsense.”

  “Nonsense?”

  “These are demonic monsters that have no conception of—”

  “This is not nonsense!”

  Josef’s expression froze.

  “How is it you know that these creatures are demonic?” Maria asked, “What makes them so much more horrid than any wolf in these woods?”

  “Have you not seen what it has done? To me, my brothers? You haven’t seen the ones it has killed—”

  “Worse than men have done?”

  He opened his mouth to answer her, but a shadow played across his expression.

  “What you hunt, Josef—is it because of what it has done, or because of what it is?”

  Josef grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “What do you mean by this? Why do you speak of such things?”

  She looked at the growing terror in his face and felt her heart sink. “I pray to the same God you do,” she said. “Doesn’t Christ offer forgiveness to all who follow him?”

  He stopped, as if she had struck him.

  “Is it what this creature has done, or what it is?”

  He let her go. “It is different. This thing is not human.”

  “But it walks abroad in human skin.”

  “Maria, you don’t understand—”

  “Is there such a difference between a wolf who becomes a man and a man who becomes a wolf? Does a man lose his soul because of such a thing?”

  Josef shook his head and said, “Such things have no souls.”

  Maria had to restrain the impulse to strike him. Instead, she backed away from him. “So you know God’s mind on this?”

  “It is a demon, a spawn from the fiery pit—”

  “And you beat upon it with swords? Where are your priests, your rites of exorcism?”

  “I shouldn’t have told you. You don’t underst—”