by S. A. Swann
He was interrupted by calls from outside. “Make way! Make way!”
Josef turned toward the window and looked out. He took a step back and muttered something in Latin, his face draining of color.
Maria stepped to the side so she could see past him. She opened her mouth, but no words came out. She reached up and clutched her cross so hard her hand hurt.
Past the stables, she could see the inner wall and the main entry gate. Rolling through the gate were a pair of wagons drawn by shaggy plow horses. In the carts she saw indistinct lumps covered by rust-spotted canvas. But the spots weren’t rust. Even at this distance, the scent of blood stabbed through the earthy smell of the horses below them.
She saw Bolesław’s nephew, Telek, run out to the lead cart and jump on board with an urgency that belied his girth. He reached down and cast aside one end of the canvas to view what was beneath.
Bolesław, she thought. It is Bolesław himself.
Even at this distance, she could see the expression freeze on Telek’s face. Her own breath seized as she watched him stare down at his uncle’s body. Time stopped as neither she nor Telek moved.
The men who had gathered the bodies had been respectful enough to place the lord’s head back in proximity to his body, but there was no hiding the fact that there was no connection between the two anymore. There was only an awful dark hollow where Bolesław’s throat should have been.
A hush had fallen across everyone in the courtyard. Even the horses fell silent enough that Maria could hear Telek speak. The words came quietly, almost as if he were conversing with his uncle: “This shall not stand.”
“Reinhart,” Josef muttered. He whipped around toward her. “There! Do you see? This is the work of the Devil himself. Can it be anything else?”
Maria backed up, unable to find the anger that had been driving her just a few moments ago.
“Eight men. Eight men …” His legs wobbled slightly, and he pressed his fist into the bridge of his nose. “I should have been able to kill it.”
“Kill it?”
“If only I had more strength—”
“Josef? What did you do?”
“I stabbed it in the eye with a crossbow bolt,” he said. “A mortal wound to any other creature, but for this—”
She was suddenly aware of an awful knowledge she had been harboring, unwilling to articulate, even to herself.
“Which eye?” Maria demanded, though she didn’t want to know.
“What?”
“Left or right?”
“Are you mad? What point is there to—”
She grabbed his shirt. “Left or right?”
“Left, but—”
She ran out of the room, leaving him with his question. Only one word filled her thoughts.
Darien.
XXI
Maria ran into the woods, abandoning Gród Narew. No one paid her any mind; the entire population had become an impromptu funerary procession. She pushed through crowds that pressed into the streets to follow Bolesław’s body to the main stronghold, led by Telek.
Wojewoda Telek.
The world was disintegrating around her, but none of it mattered anymore. What mattered was what she was, and what Darien was. She ran off the path and into the trees.
“Darien!” she called out, frightening birds into flight above her. She screamed, her fear and anger pressing against the cross hanging over her heart. She felt the beast clawing against its confines within her.
“Darien!” She thought of the dismembered men being wheeled into Gród Narew, and of the horrible wound that Josef himself had suffered. How could she think that the thing he’d faced was anything but the Devil himself?
“Darien!” She ran through the woods, ducking under dappled shadows, searching for some sign of him.
“Maria?” The voice was low, calm, and behind her. She stopped running and turned around to see Darien walking out from behind a tree. His golden hair spilled to his shoulders, and he stared at her with eyes of piercing blue, the scarred eye paler than the other. “I asked for a calm heart.”
“You ask too much, after what you’ve done. What kind of monster are you?”
He smiled at her. “What kind of monster are you?”
“You slaughtered eight people—”
“And what would they have done to me?” He walked up to her, and Maria felt her pulse race as he touched her cheek. “What do you think they’d do to you if they knew what was hiding behind that cross you wear?”
She covered her cross with her hand and stepped away from his touch. “Do not touch that again.”
“Do you love your chains so much?”
“You’re evil.”
Darien’s laugh echoed through the woods around them. “By whose account?”
“I’ve seen what you’ve done.”
“Have you seen what they’ve done?” he countered. “How many of our kind they have slaughtered in sacrifice to their own bloodthirsty God?”
She shook her head and said, “Do not blaspheme.”
“Maria.” He stepped forward and cradled her chin. “Do not blind yourself to what they are. Am I the first of us you have seen? Have you asked yourself why?”
Maria remembered the tale of her mother, how she was alone of her kind.
“I had a family,” he said. “Mother, father, uncles, sisters, brothers, cousins. Then one day the Order came and slaughtered every last one of my kin. They herded them into a church and set it to fire.”
Maria felt her breath catch.
“I have been alone for more than twenty years, hunted by them. Hunting them. I never thought I would find you.”
Maria looked up into his face and wondered how her mother’s fate might have been different if she had found one of her own to share her life with. Her heart pounded against the cross on her chest, and her breath felt so hot it burned her nose. She stared at the outline of his face, framed by a halo of backlit golden hair.
He lowered his head and she felt his lips touch hers. But she backed away from the contact, and he didn’t resist her movement.
“No,” she said.
“No?” Darien’s scar-bisected eyebrow gave a sharper edge to the word than found a way into his voice. “Is that why you came into the woods? Why you called to me? To say no?”
“I need to know what I am,” she said. “What you are.”
“We are the same, my dear Maria.”
She stood for a long time as her tongue slowly dried in her mouth. A bead of sweat rolled down her back, firing tiny tremors along her spine. She was suddenly very much aware of the smells of the woods around her—the sharp scent of the pine, the rich smells of the earth, and the almost intoxicating scent of Darien in front of her. She licked her lips and said, “Show me.”
“Show you?”
“Show me what it is we are.”
“Are you ready for this?” He took a step back and held out his hand. “We are not like them, Maria.”
She reached out and took his hand, “Show me. I’m ready to know.”
“Remember that.” He clasped her hand and led her through the sun-dappled woods until they came to a sunlit clearing. The grass here was high, and naked trunks pointed gray fingers at the sky, testifying to a long-ago fire. “This seems a good place,” he said.
He let go of her hand and took a few steps away before pulling his shirt off over his head. His back was turned mostly toward her, and she saw the ripples of muscle under pale bronze skin, marred only by a white scar along his side.
“What are you doing?” she said, when she caught herself staring.
He folded his shirt and placed it on the log of a fallen tree. He turned to her. “I do not wish to damage my clothes.” He reached down and pulled the boots off his feet and sighed. He flexed his toes and curled them into the grass. “What purpose do they serve?”
He bent down to remove his breeches and Maria forced herself to turn away, feeling the flesh burn on her face and her pulse
throbbing in the back of her throat.
“You said you were ready for this.”
Maria nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“Then face me.”
She turned to look at him and couldn’t breathe. He stood naked before her in the clearing, brazen and unashamed, and without even a shadow for modesty’s sake. She found herself staring at his manhood, which even dormant was the size of both her fists, one on top of the other.
“You want to see what I am?” he asked.
She raised her gaze to his face and said, “Yes.”
Darien took a deep breath and spread his arms. He clenched his fists and his jaw, and every muscle in his body pulled tight. Tiny shudders crawled across his flesh—trembles that were echoed in her stomach. Even as he froze, unmoving, his muscles took on a life of their own, writhing under his naked flesh.
As his skin rippled, its surface darkened, softening with a downy golden pelt that grew and roughened while she watched. The movement under his flesh became more violent, and more directed, as the flesh appeared to pull bones after it. His arms lengthened, and his fists spread open as his fingers did likewise, sprouting curved claws at their tips.
Maria heard a groan; she didn’t know if it was Darien’s voice or his body that had made the sound.
He tilted his head as his tensed jaw muscles pulled the bones of his face forward, a lupine muzzle pushing out from within, and his golden hair coarsened and spread itself to become a furry ruff around his neck. His shoulders broadened, his chest swelled, and his hips twisted to accommodate the wolflike legs that supported him. And between those legs, his member was an engorged fleshy red that began to subside only as he let loose a triumphant howl.
Maria stepped back from the thing Darien had become.
The giant wolf’s head tilted as he licked the length of his muzzle. His eyes were still the same—the left one paler than the other, marked by a white slash in the golden fur of his face.
He crouched, so his face was the same height as her own.
“Do I frighten you?”
Maria opened her mouth, but speech was beyond her. She just nodded.
“Why?”
“Why?” Maria repeated. She stared at the muscles rippling under Darien’s fur, at the way his muzzle wrinkled in a near grin, revealing sharp canine teeth. “Why shouldn’t I be frightened?”
“Can you not protect yourself?”
She thought briefly of the silver dagger she had left with her brother, but that wasn’t what Darien meant.
“You know we’re of a kind.” His nose wrinkled. “The smell of the wolf is so rich upon you. Join me. Let me show you.”
“You want me to …”
“You wish to see? To know?” He reached out. Maria was surprised by his touch, but she didn’t pull away as a claw traced the curve of her arm. “You cannot by pretending that this is all you are.”
Maria hugged herself.
What was she?
Woman, Christian, Pole, servant, daughter, sister, virgin, bastard …
Wolf?
She bit her lip and pulled off her surcote. Under Darien’s gaze, she pulled off her shoes, her chemise, everything. She stood before him, naked, skin burning with embarrassment, but forcing herself to leave her arms at her sides, as brazen as he had been.
He reached out a clawed finger, brushing shudderingly across her breast, to tap on her chest, next to her cross.
“You still wear that.”
He didn’t try to remove it, and she stood there while the wolf touched the naked flesh between her breasts. She could no longer admonish herself, protest that she was not wicked.
She reached up and removed the cross, then let it slip through her fingers to fall on the ground next to her clothes.
She closed her eyes and breathed deep his scent, which was earthy, strong, and male and hinted at every forbidden thought she had ever had. It filled her with a shudder that refused to stop. She bit her lip hard enough that blood trailed across her tongue and dripped down her throat. Her flesh moved and flowed around her, tearing and reknitting, stretching her skin in a cascade of agony where the only fixed point within her was her heart trying to hammer its way out of her body.
Every pulse of her spasming heart sent bolts of agony along her arms, her legs, every muscle in her body. With her eyes closed, she felt as if every part of her body was bursting open, to spill her life on the ground.
And mixed in with the incredible pain was the throb of something deeper; something in the core of her that writhed with pleasure at every twist of a knotted muscle, every thrust of malleable bone; a thing that moaned on the brink of ecstasy as her skin pulled against itself to the breaking point and beyond.
I am wicked, came her single coherent thought. I want this!
When the pain stopped, her climax slammed her like a blow. She howled, the lupine wail vibrato from the waves crashing within her body. She fell to her knees, but did not topple over. She opened her eyes while the aftershocks still shook her body. She heard a growl and realized it was her.
She was nearly overwhelmed by different sensations, as every part of her body reminded her that she was no longer what she had been. The points of her teeth rubbed against her lolling tongue as she panted. A light breeze tickled the fur on her back. In her crouch, her backside, muscular and narrow, rested on heels far more pointed and knobby than those of a human foot. The balls of her feet, now great splayed paws, dug clawed toes into the cool earth.
Power filled every joint and muscle—an intoxicating energy that made her feel that she could leap beyond the tops of the dead gray trees that surrounded them. She felt as if she could leap to embrace the sun itself.
Her muzzle wrinkled as she breathed in the now-overwhelming scent around her. It was as if her nose had been packed with linen that had suddenly been removed. She could pick out the scent of moss, the different types of grass, the woody scent of a hundred slowly decaying trees, the vapors from an unseen nearby marsh, and over all she smelled him.
Darien faced her, staring at her as if her transformation had racked him as much as it had her. “Are you still frightened?”
She licked her muzzle, feeling her new canine lips and the cool leather of her nose. “Of course I am,” she said. She stood, slightly unsteady on her new legs, turning to let the breeze caress her new black-furred body. She took a deep breath and added, “But that doesn’t matter, does it?”
He stepped around to face her, moving with a lithe grace that showed none of the clumsiness she felt balancing on a pair of oversized wolf paws. As he moved, she saw that he had a tail, and seeing it move made her aware that she now had her own. She felt it twitch, and the feel of the base of it brushing against her backside was perhaps the strangest sensation she had experienced yet. Just thinking of it made it swing faster, caressing the backs of her thighs.
“You are beautiful,” he growled at her, his voice lowering in tone so much that she doubted the human Maria would have understood him.
“I am a monster,” she said. The words came out as low as his, and it seemed that it was someone else talking—something else talking. As much as fear gripped her, for the moment she couldn’t find shame in the statement. She repeated, more to herself than to him, “I am a monster.”
The words held more revelation than horror.
He reached out and touched her cheek, stroking the side of her face. “You want to see what we are?”
“Yes.”
“Then follow me.”
Darien turned and ran, becoming little more than a golden shadow disappearing into the woods.
XXII
Maria hesitated for only a moment before running after him. She was clumsy and uncertain of her own strength. Her first leap carried her nearly ten paces over a deadfall, slamming her shoulder into a tree. But the pain was nothing compared to her transformation, and she rolled and was back chasing his scent before she realized she had fallen.
He ran so fast.
> The faster she went, the more her body pushed her forward, wanting to use her arms to grab the ground before her. It was awkward, and she could barely keep up with the golden shadow rushing ahead of her. In glimpses, she saw him through the trees and realized why he was so fast.
He ran on four legs now, completely a wolf—a massive gold-furred creature running though the woods, tongue lolling.
The sight shook her for a moment. She’d been half-prepared for the monster she was, but to become fully an animal? It didn’t seem possible.
She was losing him in the forest.
Could she do that? Did she want to so completely change?
I want to know what I am …
She focused on the golden wolf ahead of her as she reached for the ground beneath her. She leaned into her arms as if they were forelegs, holding her head up as if she was meant to run this way. She pulled against some form of internal resistance, a barrier within her between what she was and what she was becoming. But she forced herself through it, pushing her new self through her skin as if she was giving birth to herself.
The internal resistance gave way with a shuddering wrench. Another transformation rippled through her body, tearing spasms of pain and ecstasy—and she threw herself into it unreservedly.
But she never stopped running.
Even without looking at herself, she knew that she was now fully a wolf. Black-furred, smaller than Darien perhaps …
But now she was faster.
And she caught up with him.
She could see—in his panting, his strides, the scent of his exertion—that if he had been holding back for her sake, he was no longer. She was catching up, and on four legs she had lost all trace of clumsiness.
He darted around trees, leaping over fallen logs, plowing through underbrush, sending twigs and leaves flying. And she chased after him, on his heels, close enough that she tasted the dirt he kicked up as he ran. Close enough that she could have snapped and grabbed his tail. She let out a low growl—one that let him know she was right behind him.
He had been holding back, a little. He sprang forward, throwing a clod of dirt that exploded against her face. She licked the aromatic mulch off the fur of her cheek and realized that a wolf could smile. She bounded after him, barely winded, and saw her chance as he scrambled down a nearly treeless hillside that sloped down to a shallow brook.
