Another wolf jumped up into the nearly empty back seat, where it came at Lucrezia before the brothers could turn around. She twirled with her dagger. The blade caught the wolf on the shoulder, and when Marco came at it with the sword, it leaped down into the snow. A third wolf jumped from the right, but couldn’t get its paws up and fell back.
Wolves leaping, biting, leaping back off again. The prior screamed for someone to get him free. He was trapped beneath the dying wolf and Tullia at its throat. But the others were fighting for their lives. Kicking at wolves. Slashing with blades at those who made it up. Only Simon, ahead on the perch, and driving the horses ever forward, was not under attack.
A wolf howled. The pack fell back.
Lucrezia risked a look behind the sleigh to see the wolves stopped, gathering on the road behind with their tongues lolling. The big wolf lifted his head and howled, and the others joined in with a ghostly wail that made her shiver with dread.
Montguillon had gotten himself out from under the dead wolf. He pushed Tullia aside. “Almost there,” he said with a gasp. “Two more miles.”
That was too long. The wolves were regrouping, they’d be coming up again, and this time—
No, she realized with a flood of relief. They’d stopped. They were howling their rage but made no motion to continue the assault.
“We did it,” Marco said, voice shaking. “We drove them off.”
“My lady,” Lorenzo said. “Are you injured?”
She inspected her arms. She was shaking. “No, nothing. Are you? Any of you?”
Marco and Lorenzo were helping Martin get the dead wolf up. They heaved with a grunt and rolled the wolf off the sleigh. It fell and landed in the snow. The oppressive odor lifted as they left it behind.
“I’m fine,” Marco said.
“Me, too,” Lorenzo said. “Only a scratch, nothing serious.”
“What kind of scratch?” Lucrezia asked in a sharp voice. “Show me.”
“It’s nothing. Look to the prior, I think he was bit.”
“Oh, sweet virgin—him too? First, show me yours. Quickly.”
Lorenzo held out his forearm. A claw or tooth had caught his flesh and opened a gash from his wrist halfway up his forearm. It wasn’t deep and shouldn’t have required much attention. But the blood was turning black, and the flesh surrounding the wound was already turning gray. Lucrezia’s heart pounded. She pressed the wound.
He gasped. “Don’t touch it!”
“Martin,” she said. “The box. Hurry. Does anyone have any wine?”
“Help the prior first,” Lorenzo said through clenched teeth.
Montguillon was groaning and moving around up there, but if his wounds were life-threatening there was little she could do for him. She was not a barber or anatomist.
Simon handed back a flask of wine. Lucrezia pulled the stopper and dribbled some over Lorenzo’s scratch. He gasped in pain, then looked embarrassed at his reaction.
“Blood of the saints,” he cursed. “It’s not much of a wound, why does it hurt so much?”
“It’s plenty serious,” she said. “That will keep it from spreading. Now drink this.”
She broke the wax seal on one of the vials from the small wooden box that Martin handed back.
“What is it?” Marco said as his younger brother took it with a skeptical look.
“Tincture of poppy and monkshood from Wallachia.”
“Monkshood?” Lorenzo said. “That’s a poison.”
“It’s steeped in ginger. It will slow your heart, let you fight off the contamination.”
“But with the poppy, I’ll go to sleep. What if they attack again?”
“Drink it, please.”
He obeyed. “Now help the prior.”
The prior be damned, she thought. It was Montguillon’s stubbornness that had kept them moving into the night with wolves abroad in the land. These beasts could be driven off; if they’d been indoors, in even the simplest mud and stick house, they could have defended themselves until morning. Now Luc Fournier lay dead, and two men suffered the most deadly kind of injuries. Montguillon could rot for all she cared.
Lucrezia banished these uncharitable thoughts and climbed up to the next seat. She gave Tullia a quick inspection to verify that the mastiff was not injured, then turned her attention to the prior.
He had a scratch across one cheek, blackening down the center and inflamed and red along the sides, already looking more like an ugly scar than a fresh, shallow scratch. She tried to pull back his cowl and look at his neck, but he struggled.
“I don’t want a woman touching me.”
“Be quiet and let her do her work,” Martin growled.
Lucrezia got the robe back. She winced when she saw what it hid. The wolf had gone for Montguillon’s throat. It hadn’t got its jaws around the man’s neck, but in the biting and snapping had torn through the prior’s habit and shredded the flesh along the upper-left collarbone. She probed at the wound to see if his bone was broken. She couldn’t tell, it was so swollen up already.
“Could one of you hand up the box and the wine?”
“Leave me alone,” Montguillon said. “I won’t have your witchcraft.”
“It’s not witchcraft. Look, it’s just a little wine. Sacramental, it’s holy.”
“It’s not consecrated yet, so it’s nothing but fermented grape juice.”
“These wolves are diseased,” she said. “Their spittle is purulent and will spread contamination. The wine will cleanse the wound.”
“Fine,” he said through clenched teeth. “Be quick about it.”
He hissed when the wine splashed across the wound. She splashed more on his cheek. Another hiss, but he didn’t cry out.
“Good,” she said. “Now drink this.” She took out another vial of the tincture of monkshood and poppy.
“I will not.”
“It might save your life.”
“Bloody woman, keep your witch’s potions away from me.”
“Maybe you’d rather die,” Martin snapped.
Montguillon sent him a withering look, and he turned quickly away.
“The poppy will ease the pain,” she said. “Please, Father.”
“I don’t care about pain,” Montguillon said. “It’s nothing.”
“One sip. Please.”
“No. Go away.”
She kept at it, but no matter how she pleaded, Montguillon would not relent and drink the tincture. At last she gave up and returned to Lorenzo’s side.
The ground lifted into a series of rolling hillocks and when they came down from the second of these, Simon let out a cry from the front of the sleigh. Yellow lights flickered from the darkness ahead of them.
Montguillon lifted himself. His face was gray. “That is it, Lord Nemours’s chatelet.” He paused, swallowed hard as if trying to keep from vomiting, then added, “Soon.”
Chapter Eleven
Lorenzo began shivering violently as Lord Nemours’s chatelet came into view. Lucrezia wrapped him in a blanket and enveloped him in her cloak. His face was gray, and his hands as cold as the blade of her dagger. Keeping them under the cloak where the others couldn’t see, she wrapped them around her waist, and put his head against her bare neck. He was so cold. It frightened her.
Lorenzo’s eyes flickered open. They rolled back in their sockets, showing jaundiced eyeballs almost yellow under the moonlight. He groaned and arched his back.
“What is it, what’s wrong with him?” Marco asked, his mouth pinched with worry. “Some kind of poison?”
“Witchcraft,” Montguillon groaned from the front seat. “These beasts are in the service of the devil.”
“And why is he still alert?” Marco asked. “His wounds are deeper than Lorenzo’s.”
“Because I am a man of God, not given over to pleasure and intellectual sophistry like your brother. Get thee hence, Satan. I rebuke thee, oh Father of Lies. Thou shalt not—”
“By the saints!” Marco said. �
��That’s enough of the devil talk. Martin, if he won’t be quiet, gag him.” He turned back to Lucrezia with a questioning look. “Well?”
“I don’t know,” Lucrezia admitted. “Lorenzo is younger—he should be stronger.”
“He’s not that strong—believe me, I know. Maybe it’s the poppy. Did you give him too much?”
“I don’t think so. It should help him sleep. And sleep is his best ally.”
Squat towers with conical roofs like fairy hats guarded either side of the drawbridge. The bridge crossed a moat, perhaps thirty feet wide, to a center island dominated by Nemours’s chatelet.
The horses were stumbling when they reached the drawbridge. Any farther and they would have collapsed. Marco stared behind them into the night, looking worried that the wolves would make one final charge. As if in answer, a howl sounded in the distance.
“Let pass the Lady d’Lisle!” Martin shouted when they were still only halfway across the drawbridge. “And for God’s sake, raise the bridge!”
Faces stared down from the embrasures on the crenelated walls. Men with helmets and breastplates aimed crossbows, but didn’t fire.
Simon took up the call from the perch. “Enemies behind us! Raise the bridge!”
As soon as they were over, the chains on the bridge clanked and the wood groaned as men from within the gatehouse towers winched up the heavy wooden plank bridge. It lifted in place and sealed the entrance to the moated island.
The chatelet wasn’t quite a castle, but neither was it a Tuscan-style palazzo. More like a massive manor house, with a stone foundation some ten feet tall, and thickening at the base. A raised portcullis led beneath an archway into a central courtyard. There was a cupola on one side for a chapel, and a French-style hexagonal tower at the center of the chatelet, a final refuge if the moat were breached and the portcullis penetrated.
Lucrezia stroked Lorenzo’s cheek as the sleigh clattered to a stop on the flagstone path that led to the arched entrance of the chatelet. So cold, so limp. His breathing came fast and shallow. She bit her lip.
“Fight it,” she whispered. “Do not give in to it.”
Inside Lorenzo’s veins, poppy and monkshood battled against the spreading contamination for control of his body. When he woke, he would either be on the pathway to recovery, or in the grips of a hideous transformation.
A loup-garou. Wolf man. Half man, half beast. Body and soul enslaved to some evil purpose.
✛
Lorenzo woke as they carried him from the sleigh. Strong hands seized his arms and legs.
He heard, or thought he heard, the distant howls of a wolf. An answering snarl came to his lips and in his fever he wanted to lash out, to bite and scratch at these people carrying him. Enemies. He thrashed in their arms.
“No,” a woman’s gentle voice said. “It’s me, I’m here to help. Don’t struggle, don’t—look, just get him into the bed,” she said to someone else. “I’ll take care of him from there.”
“Damn you, Lorenzo,” a man’s voice said. “Keep still.”
Later, in something that was too real to be a nightmare, Lorenzo found himself running through the woods. He wore no clothes, but he wasn’t cold, even though snow lay in drifts almost as high as his chest.
It was almost to his chest, he realized, because he was running on all fours. A scent caught his attention off to the right, so thick in the air it almost formed a picture in his mind. A red scent that filled him with shivering excitement. At the same time, a ravenous hunger poured through him. A hunger like nothing he’d ever known. He needed to kill, to tear. Devour alive.
It was then that he noticed he was not running alone. Several others were in the woods around him. He didn’t see them so much as hear their pants, their snarls. And smell. Each one had a distinct odor. One of them cut in toward him. It was a huge wolf with ruddy fur and an insatiable hunger that permeated his scent.
Courtaud.
That was the other wolf’s name. Somehow he knew this without being told. Courtaud was the lord of the pack. Obey him or be killed.
Courtaud ran beside him, growling his orders. Follow us. There’s a child on the road. We shall tear out its throat and feast on its flesh.c
A child? No, he thought. No, we can’t kill a child.
Lorenzo woke in a soft bed. He was burning up, sweat on his forehead. He felt weak, almost helpless, but his stomach no longer churned with nausea. Heavy wool blankets weighed down on his chest and the goose down pillows around his head threatened to suffocate him if he couldn’t get up. He struggled to sit.
A figure moved from a chair near the fireplace.
“No, go back to sleep,” a woman’s voice said.
“My lady,” he whispered. His throat was dry. He could barely form the words.
Lucrezia sat next to him on the bed. “Shh, I’m here.”
“Something . . . drink.”
“I have wine.”
“Water?”
“The water here isn’t clean. Should I send for a hot herbal drink?”
“Don’t leave me alone,” he said.
The dream lingered in his mind, falling away like dust shaking from the rafters in a heavy thunderstorm. He’d been a wolf, running with a pack, following—what was his name? Courtaud. The red wolf with the bobbed tail.
There’s a child on the road. We shall tear out its throat and feast on its flesh.
Dear God, what kind of horror was that?
She poured wine into a crystal goblet. It was a light wine, thankfully, and helped quench his thirst, but he would have preferred the hot drink. Not so much that he wanted to send her away, though.
Lucrezia stroked his cheek. Her hand was soft and cool and he closed his eyes and sighed. Her touch pushed the dream into hidden cupboards of his mind, nearly forgotten already, but he kept repeating the name of the lead wolf— Courtaud, Courtaud, Courtaud—so it wouldn’t slip away.
“You were so cold before,” she said. “But now you’re feverish.”
“Pull back the blankets, please.”
“The sweat will draw out the poison.”
“No,” he insisted. “I think it’s passing already. Please, the blankets.”
Lucrezia pulled them back. A sudden, terrible itch passed down his forearm, where the wolf had scratched him. Lucrezia caught his wrist.
“No, don’t pick at it.”
“It’s unbearable. Just a little scratch, please.” He tried to pull away, but lacked the strength.
“No,” she said, more firmly this time.
She tucked his injured arm beneath the blankets and kept hold of his other wrist. Lorenzo looked up at her face, caught in shadow and reflected firelight. He couldn’t see her very well—it was only a curve of her cheek and a hint of eyes, nose, and lips. But her voice was soft and kind, and he had a dim memory of being held in her arms in the sleigh as he’d slipped in and out of a delirious sleep.
She leaned her head on one of the pillows and lay down next to him. Her breath was against his neck. The grip relaxed on his wrist.
“My lady?” he said.
“Yes?” she said, voice heavy.
“Never mind. Go ahead, sleep.”
She lifted up. “What is it, Lorenzo?”
He felt stronger now and his mind was like a hive of bees, buzzing with questions. What did this gentle touch mean? Did she feel something for him, or was it simple kindness? And if she did feel something, what about Marco? Did she have feelings for him, too?
But there was something more pressing on his mind.
“You know something about these wolves, don’t you?”
Her breath caught. “Only by rumor, Lorenzo,” she said after a moment of hesitation.
“I don’t believe that.”
“Why not?”
“My father and mother taught me to be alert. Know when a man is trying to swindle you, when he has shorted a bolt of cloth or adulterated a measure of peppercorns with bits of blackened clay.
“And I�
��ve been growing increasingly alert since we met you on the road,” he continued. “You have a mastiff, not much different from the dead one they gibbeted over the river. You were riding, somewhat desperately, to Lord Nemours’s chatelet when we caught you. Except the king’s provost is not here, he’s back in Paris. Only servants remain. And our captured agent, who Montguillon suspects is one of these wolf men. Incidentally, we were attacked by the brutes on the road. One coincidence piled on top of another. Doubts are circling in my head.”
“What are you saying?”
“Maybe nothing. I’m not as clever or as suspicious as the prior.”
“You’re a learned man, Lorenzo. Your pen is beautiful, your Latin is superb. I read your Virgil translation—did you know that?”
“You did? I mean, I was barely involved,” he said modestly, but feeling a glow of pride.
He was feeling stronger by the minute, almost well, except for that damnable itch on his forearm. It took all his willpower not to tear it open with his fingernails, and he couldn’t resist a quick, blessed dig before she caught him and took his wrist again.
“You hired the man who found the lost manuscript,” she said, “and you read it and noted its significance. The actual translation was pro forma at that point.”
“About the wolves,” he said, more firmly. “Is Montguillon going to die?”
“How would I know that?”
“Lucrezia, please.”
She fell silent. Her hand slipped from his wrist and she shifted on the bed. There was no more contact between them.
“Perhaps if you forgot what you know, or think you know,” she said at last.
“Then what?”
“Then you’d be happier with me. Your respect for me wouldn’t wither and die.”
“Did you do something?” he asked.
“A bit of foolishness. Like when you charged my carriage in Lucca and they had to drag you away.” There was a smile in her voice.
“Yes, that was stupid. I’m sure you’ve done nothing like that.”
“Unfortunately, my folly had more serious consequences. People have died.”
The Wolves of Paris Page 9
