Wolf's Cross

by S. A. Swann

  “No, I wasn’t!” She brought the bolt up over her head, and his eyes widened as she brought it down with all the strength she had left, impaling his pale blue eye. It hit some resistance as his body spasmed in shock; then it tore free from her hand as he pulled his head away.

  The sounds from him were incoherent—half howl, half scream: the growling voice of Hell itself. With a jerk, he tore the bolt out of his face, leaving a dark crater hemorrhaging blood. And unlike the wound she had bitten in his jugular, it didn’t heal.

  “You. A-are. M-mine.” His voice slurred and growled, so much the wolf now that she may have imagined the words. He trembled oddly, and his right arm dangled limp at his side. But his left hand wrapped itself around her throat, crushing her windpipe, stealing her breath.

  “You. Are. Mine.” Blood poured from his ruined face, and his muscles twitched asymmetrically. And as her consciousness faded, she prayed that she had spent the last of her life giving him a mortal wound.

  XXXIII

  As the monster ran for the woods, Josef got to his feet in time to see one of the surviving knights of the Order take aim with a crossbow.

  “No,” he called out. “You might hit—”

  The man didn’t listen, and Josef’s fears were confirmed when he saw the bolt sprout from Maria’s thigh before the pair of them disappeared into the forest.

  Behind him, Maria’s mother sobbed, “My daughter!”

  Władysław cradled his mother and looked at Josef with an accusing stare more cutting than any words.

  “I will do what I can to save her,” Josef whispered.

  He ran toward the road. As he passed the front of the cottage, a mailed hand grabbed his shoulder. “What fool thing are you doing?”

  He turned to faced the barrel chest of Wojewoda Telek Rydz.

  “My duty.”

  Telek hooked his head back toward the road. “To him?” A few of the uninjured Polish guardsmen were tending to the Komtur’s wounds. He lived, but appeared unconscious. Josef looked about and saw that half the men had fallen injured, and half who had fallen were unquestionably dead. He was one of only four men of the Order still breathing.

  “To God,” he said carefully. “I made a vow to protect the innocent.”

  “There’s no honor in suicide, lad.”

  “Is there honor in blocking my way?”

  Telek lowered his hand and said, “Take some men with you, so you have some chance.”

  “No,” Josef said. “You cannot leave the wounded here alone. Take them into the cottage, where it’s defensible.” Then he ran, before Telek could delay him any longer.

  From behind him, he heard the Polish knight say, “Godspeed.”

  God help us all, Josef thought.

  He ran through the forest, following gouges the beast had left in the forest floor as it ran. The woods were silent except for an occasional demonic howl that seemed to echo from everywhere at once. He passed a horrid scene where blood and fur and bits of flesh were smeared thick on the ground and the trees.

  From there he followed an unmistakable trail of blood, and the howls became louder, more urgent, more horrible.

  But worst was when he heard a human voice—Maria’s voice—screaming, “No!” Followed by what had to be the voice of Satan come to earth—a pained, manic howl that sounded as if it should rend the very flesh from its throat.

  He came upon the hellish scene and nearly howled himself.

  The beast’s fur was red and black with clotted gore across the whole of its body. It snarled, the left side of the face toward Josef, dominated by an empty, bleeding eye socket. It cared nothing for Josef. Blind to him, it was focused on the tiny white form underneath it.

  It was crouched over Maria’s limp human body, horribly violating her as it kept one hand wrapped around her neck. It choked her, slamming her head into the ground.

  Josef couldn’t find the breath to scream. He ran, swinging his silvered sword, bringing it down on the beast’s neck.

  But he didn’t have the strength or the momentum to sever the monster’s neck. He managed only to tear a gaping wound, exposing the monster’s spine but not severing it. The creature reared, dropping Maria’s body, and turned to face him.

  It made a predatory sound deep in its throat, dragging its right leg as it turned and raising its left hand toward him. Half its face was ruined, and it stared at him with a single, hideously human eye. The left half of its face, under the ruined eye, turned up in a fang-bearing smile that could chill death itself.

  Then it sprang at him—faster than a man, even in its horribly crippled state. It was all Josef could do to lift the point of his sword, only to have the hilt jerk free with a wrist-snapping force.

  The fetid jaws opened to tear out his throat as they fell upon him. He felt the teeth against his skin, and the hot outrush of breath, the slither of its tongue against his Adam’s apple.

  But the jaws did not close.

  He looked up, pain flaring in his wrist and arm as the full weight of the thing pressed him into the ground. He stared up into the bloody crater that had been its left eye. No breath, no motion. Dead.

  He sucked in a breath, calling out, “Maria!”

  Please, God, do not let her be gone. Please …

  “Maria!”

  He heard someone grunt, and the corpse pinning him shifted. For a panicked moment he thought the monster was coming back to life; then it rolled off him. It landed on its back next to him, a silvered sword impaling it through the neck upward, burying itself deep inside the monster’s skull.

  Above him, Maria stood gasping for breath, sweating, covered in blood. She wobbled on her wounded leg and fell to her knees next to him. “Josef,” she whispered, placing her hand on his chest. “I’m glad it’s you.”

  He reached up with his uninjured hand and grasped hers.

  She closed her eyes and lowered her head. “Please be quick.”

  He sat up, wincing at the pain in his stomach and his wrist. “Be quick?”

  “You came to kill us, didn’t you?”

  He touched the side of her face and said quietly, “Him. Not you.”

  Her eyes opened and she looked at him almost as if he had offended her. “I am a monster, just as he was. A soulless demon. You said so.”

  “I was wrong.”

  “Do you mean to torment me now? Do you know what I could have done—”

  “What have you done?”

  “I could—”

  “Maria?” She looked at him, her eyes moist with tears, skin pale from loss of blood. “What have you done? How many lives have you taken? How many men have you left crippled or dying?”

  She shook her head. “None yet. You have to stop me before I do. Before I become like him.”

  “You aren’t going to become like him.”

  “How can you say that? You’ve seen what I am.”

  “I can say that because I’ve seen who you are.”

  Her lip trembled and she half-leaned, half-collapsed into his arms. He held her with his good arm as she sobbed into his shoulder, “I don’t want this.”

  “It’s over,” Josef said. “The monster is dead.”

  “I’m a monster, too. The Devil has taken me.”

  “Have you killed innocents? Have you renounced Christ?”

  “No, but I—I—gave myself to Darien. He took me and I wanted it.”

  He held her tighter. “Are those worse than the sins of any man?”

  “I’m a servant of the Devil.”

  “I am unarmed.”

  “What?”

  “A true servant of Satan would finish me in my weakness. If you believe you are evil, if you are a monster, why don’t you kill me?”

  She let him go and stared at him in horror. “Josef, I couldn’t.”

  He smiled. He placed his fingers on her lips and said, “Do you wish God to forgive you?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Then He will.”

  Maria’s heart race
d as Josef led her back through the forest. He had explained how this was necessary, but still the fear grew thicker inside her even as the fog burned off around them. She told herself that fear—any sort of fear—was ridiculous now. She had been prepared to die.

  But the fact that she hadn’t died made each moment afterward precious, and she clung to each one as tightly as she clung to Josef’s good arm.

  He was, again, naked to the waist. This time his shirt had gone to bind her wounds, and she wore his cross-bearing surcote to cover herself. The embroidered head of a black wolf rested over her left breast, defaced by Darien’s blood. She kept glancing at it, feeling as if it meant something but unsure of what.

  Josef couldn’t carry anything in his right hand. The wrist wasn’t broken, but it had been severely dislocated, and it had swollen black and purple. Since he supported her with his good arm, she had to carry the skin.

  Darien’s skin. Not all of it, but enough from his head and face to show that the beast was dead. It clung to her fingers in a way that made her wish that she was horrified at the violence done to him, but she couldn’t even bring herself to feel regret at his demise.

  Josef led her out of the woods in front of her cottage. For a moment, the scene almost seemed normal, before she smelled blood and heard shouts from inside her home, and saw the glint of a crossbow from between two slightly open shutters. She tensed, waiting for the shot, but someone called out, “Hold!”

  She stood there with Josef, her feet sinking into the mud of the road, the black soup of it squeezing through her toes. And as they waited, Josef whispered, “Forgive me for what I’m about to do.”

  I’ve already forgiven you for trying to kill me.

  Still, the tension made her tighten her fists. Her free hand dug into the greasy underside of Darien’s pelt, and the one across Josef’s shoulder clutched the broken head of the crossbow bolt until it cut into her hand.

  Let this work, she prayed, hoping that Josef was right and God still cared for her.

  The cottage door opened, and Wojewoda Telek stepped out, his sword drawn. He walked forward, stopping a few paces from them.

  “It’s over,” Josef called out. “The monster is dead.” He nudged Maria and she tossed Darien’s skin at Telek’s feet.

  Telek prodded the skin with his sword, then lifted it so that the outline of the giant wolf’s face was recognizable drooping from the point. Maria bit her lip, because she recognized Darien in the sagging, empty skin.

  Telek held the skin up so that the people in the cottage could see. Maria thought she heard a muted cheer from someone inside. Still holding up the skin, Telek turned back toward them and said, “Step away from her.”

  Maria swallowed. She wanted to tell Josef not to sacrifice anything more for her, but before she could speak, he flatly said, “No.”

  “There were two beasts,” Telek said. “One blond, one black. You hold the other.”

  “You’re wrong,” Josef said. He spoke loudly, as much to the men inside the cottage as to Telek. “This woman is an innocent in all of this.”

  “Innocent? These things can pose as human, even as a woman. Her cross was found in a slaughtered boy’s hand.”

  “Yes, Wojewoda Telek, and where was she when that boy was killed? You and Brother Heinrich are yourselves witnesses to her blamelessness in that death.”

  Telek opened his mouth to speak, but he obviously had not had a chance to think about the matter. He shook his head and said, “Explain, then, how it came to be there.”

  “Lost when she was caring for my wounds in the woods or bringing me back to Gród Narew. The boy found it during his duties. And I ask you this: Why would a disciple of evil, a demon cloaked as a man, spend her life wearing a cross made of silver? Would the Devil bind himself like that? Would this monster stand mute and powerless before these accusations while I stand here unarmed, and you stand holding only steel?”

  Telek lowered his sword and looked at Josef. “Perhaps—”

  “Lies!” The door slammed open, and Heinrich stumbled out of the cottage holding a long silvered sword. Half of his face was covered in bandages, and his chest was bound tightly, but he ran toward them as if in full health. “Lies and deception!” he cried.

  Telek stepped into his path and leveled his skin-draped sword at him. “You will stop and lower that weapon.”

  Heinrich pulled up short, but he didn’t lower his sword. “That woman is a vile temptress, an agent of Satan. You saw yourself how she healed. You saw her change—”

  “Did anyone see this girl grow into a slavering monster?” Josef countered.

  Maria tensed, expecting someone to call out, to say they had watched her transform into the black-furred beast. But no one did.

  Heinrich looked up into Telek’s face. “You grabbed her. You must have.”

  “Brother Heinrich,” Josef said, “before God, can you bear witness against this woman? Can you say that you saw her become this demon?”

  The sword lowered slightly and he looked around, and for the first time she could see something like uncertainty in the half of his face that was not covered by bandages. “Someone must have seen this,” he said. No one answered him. “She jumped, naked and wounded, on this monster—”

  “A monster that was threatening her family. And you mention that in testimony to her evil?”

  “I saw her heal!” Heinrich said finally—the only unarguable evidence he had left.

  “Wojewoda Telek?” Josef asked. “Do you have a plain dagger to lend me?”

  Telek looked back over his shoulder, frowning and furrowing his brow.

  “Please?” Josef added.

  Telek pulled a steel dagger out of a sheath on his belt. He held the hilt up to Josef. Josef looked down at his wounded wrist and said, “Perhaps you would be good enough to do this for me?”

  “Do what?”

  “Cut her.”

  “What?”

  “Take her arm and draw blood,” Josef said. “You claim she is this demonic beast. Cut her with anything but silver and she will heal, as Brother Heinrich says.”

  Telek shook his head.

  Maria held out her naked left arm, shaking slightly because of the wound in her shoulder.

  “Are you afraid she is not what you think she is?” Josef asked.

  Telek flipped the dagger around in his left hand, still holding the sword in his right. He hesitated a moment, then quickly drew it across Maria’s forearm. The blade was sharp, and she barely felt the cut, but it quickly welled up with blood. It began to sting as the blood dripped slowly down the skin of her arm.

  Maria squeezed the crossbow bolt with her good hand, the silver point digging into her flesh.

  Telek stared at the cut; it refused to heal.

  Heinrich lowered his sword at last.

  “Satan has been deceiving us,” Josef said. “He has deceived us with blood, chaos, and confusion. He deceived you, Brother Heinrich, with your own anger. You saw this woman, whom I love, as leading me astray—so much that you did not see how your own wrath led you astray. Satan would have you kill an innocent woman and believe your duty done.”

  Heinrich’s sword pointed at the ground. He looked at Maria, and she could tell that he did not truly believe Josef’s words. But his expression said he was beaten, as if he couldn’t quite understand how to fight them. She could see the weight of his wounds bearing upon him, and she felt a strange sympathy for this old man, understanding what he had lost here.

  Telek sheathed his dagger and walked up to Heinrich, slapping the flat of his sword, and what remained of Darien’s face, into the monk’s chest. “Take your prize and leave my lands.” There was little trace of sympathy in Telek’s voice.

  “The black one is still—”

  “Brother Heinrich, that black-haired beast did not trouble us before you arrived. I suspect much the same will continue after you leave. You came here hunting your wolf, and you have your wolf.”

  “We have a duty to hu
nt all—”

  “As I see it, you can return to your master with one of two tales. You can tell how, after great sacrifice, you found your quarry and defeated it, or you can return telling how you’ve annoyed the Masovian court, broken the peace, and allowed the secrets of Brother Semyon to be known to all the szlachta in Poland.” He withdrew his sword, leaving the gory prize in Heinrich’s hands. “I will let you pray for guidance, but I expect you to quit Gród Narew at the next sunrise.”

  Coda

  Wagons came from Gród Narew to carry away the dead and wounded. It was evening before all the men left Maria to her home, her family, and Josef. Her mother dressed her wounds—all but the cut on her arm, which healed by itself as soon as she let go of the silver head of the crossbow bolt she had clutched in her hand.

  She fell into an uneasy, feverish sleep on one of her brothers’ beds. Over the next few days, her body fought the infection of the silver-inflicted wounds. She faded in and out of awareness, but Josef was always there, next to her bed, holding her hand, wiping her brow, caring for her the way she had cared for him.

  In her fever, she found the symmetry of it comforting.

  They weren’t that different, she thought. They had both been chained, hiding themselves—he behind the black cross of the Order, she behind the silver cross of her father. Yet now that they were free, they had lost their proper places in the world.

  But when she tried to tell Josef of her epiphany, her German was not quite up to the task. His response was to gently brush the hair from her face and say, “My place is by your side.”

  In her more lucid moments, she came close to hating herself for what he had given up for her sake, but she couldn’t bring herself to regret the fact that he had. During one point of clarity she said to him, “You’re not going back.”

  “I told you, I’ve left the Order.”

  She looked up at him and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  He squeezed her hand and said, as he had before he knew what she was, “If God had wanted me to remain a monk, He would not have placed you in my path.”