by S. A. Swann
Wolfbreed
S. A. Swann
Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prelude: Anno Domini 1221
Part 1 – Lauds
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Interlude: Anno Domini 1229
Part 2 – Prime
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Interlude: Anno Domini 1229
Part 3 – Terce
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Interlude: Anno Domini 1231
Part 4 – Sext
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Interlude: Anno Domini 1231
Part 5 – None
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Interlude: Anno Domini 1231
Part 6 – Vespers
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Interlude: Anno Domini 1231
Part 7 – Compline
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Coda: Anno Domini 1239
About the Author
Praise for Wolfbreed
“Lilly lives in a world so strange that even werewolves have to fight for survival, and I found myself rooting for her from the very start. Before long, I was falling for her, too! Wolfbreed is a thrilling yet deeply moving journey that I never wanted to end.”
—ROBERT MASELLO, author of Blood and Ice
“A mesmerizing story that entertained me thoroughly and moved me deeply. Wolfbreed is an exciting nonstop action-adventure involving the supernatural. More than that, though, it demonstrates how the human spirit, even when in a not-entirely-human body, can be transformed and redeemed by the power of love. I adored this book.”
—MARY BALOGH, New York Times bestselling author of First Comes Love
“S.A. Swann has written a spellbinding fantasy of the Teutonic knights and the great Northern Crusade, set in a little-known period of history amidst the gloomy forests of Prussia and Lithuania. Vivid and visceral, dark and delicious, this one kept me turning pages from start to finish.”
—GEORGE R.R. MARTIN, New York Times bestselling author of A Feast for Crows
Dedication
This book is dedicated
to my wife, Michelle, for putting up
with me and this book.
Acknowledgments
Lots of research goes into a book like this, and while I can't note every source, I would like to mention The Northern Crusades, by Eric Christiansen, which is probably the best English-language reference on this time that I had access to. I would also like to mention the Web site The ORB: On-line Reference Book for Medieval Studies (http://the-orb.net), which provided a number of translated primary sources, including the rules and statutes of the Teutonic Knights. Google Books was also a major help with finding various out-of-print resources from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including The History of Prussia (vols. 1 and 2), by Captain W. J. Wyatt, and Die altpreuβischen Personennamen, by Reinhold Trautmann. I would also like to thank my critique group, the Cajun Sushi Hamsters, whose members read parts of this before it had a real setting. I would like to thank my agent, Eleanor, for representing this and giving me a bunch of good suggestions, and my editor, Anne, for buying this and giving a bunch more good suggestions.
Last, and most important, I want to give credit to Lynn Oka-moto, author of the manga and anime Elfen Lied, which provided the initial inspiration for this novel.
Prelude
Anno Domini 1221
In the darkest woods in Burzenland, south of the Carpathian Mountains, a knight of the Order of the Hospital of St. Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem, Brother Semyon von Kassel, ran as if he were in pursuit of the devil himself.
Mud smeared his mail, leaves and stray twigs poked out from tangles in his hair and beard, soot darkened his skin, and crusted blood smeared his face. His lips cracked and bled as he whispered a Pater Noster over and over. The scabbard for his longsword dangled empty at his hip, and in his hand he clutched a shiny dagger too ornate for one of his order.
He stared out at the dark woods with eyes wide, shiny, and hard.
Drag marks in the loam of the forest floor marked the trail he followed. Occasionally, tarlike smears of old blood marked a tree or an errant part of someone's armor. He had passed half a dozen remnants of his brother knights; helmets, gauntlets, boots, all marred by their knights' blood and occasional shreds of flesh or hair.
Half a dozen signs of his dead brethren Semyon had passed since he had burned a respect for the Lord God into the pagan priest who had bequeathed him the dagger in his hand. Semyon prayed that in the excruciation of the pagan's punishment, the man's lips had been compelled to speak the truth.
The beast he followed showed no impulse to hide its trail. Why would it? What fool would brave these woods against it? To confront a creature that hunted men the way a man would hunt a hare?
Eleven men it had killed. Eleven men armed with sword, shield, and the grace of God; eleven that would have been twelve if the master of his priory had not sent Semyon away alone to meditate on his sins.
Semyon's late master had chastised him for showing an impulse toward cruelty. Now Brother Semyon knew that the hand of God moved with him, because by meditating on his own cruelty he had been spared the cruel fate of his brothers.
He had left his decimated camp and hunted down the priest of the false pagan religion that infected this region. That priest had perished in his own sacred fire, but not before telling Semyon of the beast that had taken his brother knights.
Again, Semyon prayed that the pagan's last agonized breaths had whispered truth.
He followed the trail over a deadfall. Bone-gray branches clawed at him, tearing at his armor and his uncovered skin as he climbed past. On the other side he faced a clearing about fifty paces wide.
Past the clearing, opposite the deadfall, a dark hole sat at the base of a rocky mound projecting from the forest floor. The ground in front had been swept clean by travel in and out of the den. Semyon saw a human skull, cast aside a few paces away and half buried in a pile of dead leaves.
He clutched the dagger so tightly that his knuckles ached.
A growl resonated through the clearing, and every bird in the trees around him took flight at once, the beating of a thousand wings overpowering the beast's growl. Semyon braced himself and stared into the abyss of the burrow. A pair of eyes glinted back at him—
A nightmare of black fur and muscle erupted from the burrow. The monster was shaped in broad outline like a wolf, but a wolf that had aspirations to become a man. Even in the flashes as it attacked, Semyon saw perverse echoes of the human form in the way its head was attached to the torso, in the way its forelimbs ended in something like deformed hands, and in the way it was almost upright as it leapt at him. Its fangs glistened in its lupine muzzle and its near-human eyes burned with hate.
Semyon felt God's hand move his own as he brought the priest's ceremonial dagger up. The silver blade sank into the creature's throat, and Semyon pulled it across, tearing open windpipe, tendons, and arteries. Its muzzle snapped shut short of Semyon's own throat as hot blood gushed over his arm and face.
>
For a few moments, they stared at each other, the brother knight and the demon wolf. In its too-human eyes, Semyon thought he saw surprise. It shuddered, breath frothing from the wound in its neck.
Then it fell to the side, still.
Brother Semyon von Kassel, last survivor of his convent, had survived again. In Brother Semyon's mind, there was now no question of God's providence.
Not even when he heard the cry of a human infant coming from the dark hole of the dead creature's burrow.
Lauds
Anno Domini 1239
Os iusti meditabitur sapientiam,
et lingua eius loquetur iudicium.
The mouth of the righteous speaketh wisdom,
and his tongue talketh of judgment.
—Psalms 37:30
Chapter 1
“Please?”
Manfried Hartmann did his best to ignore the voice that came from behind the heavy oak door. He stood at attention, on the opposite end of the corridor, shivering slightly. Even with his mail shirt and the padding underneath, he was still chilled by the damp, mildew-thick air.
But maybe chilled even more by the pathetic weakness of the woman's voice coming from the cell he was guarding.
It was hard not to see this guard duty as anything more than a punishment detail. Perhaps, in a more charitable moment, he could think of it as a form of mortification, his Teutonic masters seeing to it that his soul was purified through labor and obedience. Still, despite what the sergeant might say about “prisoners of a certain status,” there was little about this that Manfried could see as particularly elevating. He certainly didn't feel any closer to God in this hole.
If he brought up the subject with one of the priests, or—Lord help him— one of the knights of the Order, Manfried knew from long and onerous experience that the answer he would get would involve prayer, penitence, and probably a long meditation on their Lord's suffering on the cross.
But, by God, if he wanted to say that many Pater Nosters he would have stayed in Liibeck and joined a monastery.
This wasn't to say that he hadn't spent five nights down here as a heathen, his back to God. But expecting a soldier to spend the entire night from Compline to Prime in silent contemplation of Christ was expecting a bit much.
A bit much, especially with a young woman's voice pleading with him. And thanks to this woman's keeper—province commander of the Teutonic Order, Landkomtur Erhard von Stendal—and his commandments not to talk to, or even look at, the prisoner, the boredom was maddening.
“Sir? Just a word? Some water?”
Perhaps the knights of the Order thought their soldiers would fear Hell more if they allowed them a foretaste.
This was not why Manfried had made the trek north. As the third son of a minor landgrave—very minor—he had only martial skills to trade upon. He had come to the wilds of Prûsa as a soldier of Christendom, to defend the church and win new lands and peoples to the way of Christ.
He told his mother that he would bring home honor for his family name, and possibly gain his own estate in the newly Christian lands of Prûsa. He had not thought his crusade might end in this dank corridor, breathing niter and mold, listening to the echoed pleas of some pagan prisoner. However, by the grace of God, here he was, standing in the bowels of a keep in a town that had honored the cross for eight years now, guarding a woman who barely had the energy to speak.
He wondered at what point he had annoyed God so much as to deserve this fate.
“Sir?” Her voice was weaker this time.
Even though he had been left here, grating under the command of the Prûsan converts left to man this keep, Manfried did know enough to remain obedient. While he had not taken the oaths of a religious order, and was absolved—by law if not by circumstance—from the binds of chastity and poverty, he was still bound by the tenet of obedience. Fealty was expected of all in service to the Order; priest and knight, serf and slave, religious and secular.
He was not to converse with the prisoner or approach the door.
Why this was so was none of his concern. He knew nothing of the prisoner other than rumors. All he really knew of her was her voice. He was never present to see anyone else approach the cell door to see that the prisoner was fed, or exercised, or questioned. He simply changed places with one man at Compline and with another upon leaving at Prime.
Her voice was quite young, just barely a woman's. It was also painfully dry, cracked, and becoming weaker with each passing day.
Manfried thought of his own sister, barely two years his junior.
The prisoner is probably her age ...
Just the thought—comparing the unknown, unnamed woman to his younger sister—made him feel a sickness in his soul as black as the mold growing on the stone floor.
What has she done to place her here? Someone's sister? Someone's daughter?
This seemed unnecessary, even for a pagan. If the woman did not accept baptism, she should be granted death, or sold to some estate where she might be put to useful work. Abandoning her here seemed cruel and pointless.
There were the rumors, of course. Even though the Order frowned on gossip, some sins were just too minor to expend the effort to expunge.
Manfried had heard from several men who claimed to have talked to members of Landkomtur Erhard's retinue. The provincial commander had been en route northeast, toward Balga, pausing here in the fortified town of Johannisburg to leave this woman in the care of this garrison. Everyone agreed that this was not originally Erhard's intent, as he was supposedly joining forces that were massing for a spring assault in the wilds north of Warmia.
The general belief was that Landkomtur Erhard had been called back to Marienwerder to meet with the Landmeister of Prûsa.
As to the girl he had left, theories abounded. Many thought that she was some barbarian princess, taken as hostage to assure that some pagan duke or captain took his baptism seriously. Others thought that she was being taken as some bribe to encourage one tribe against another—since, unlike the Infidel in the Holy Land, the pagan tribes inflicted wars as savage on each other as they did upon the lands of Christendom. Yet others thought that she was a reward for some great landed knight who had donated land or men to the Order's mission.
Erhard's command not to speak to or approach the girl inspired other rumors: she was such a beauty that any man who viewed her would be instantly seduced and forced to free her; she was so hideous that she might strike a man dead with a look; perhaps she was rich enough to offer bribes or other favors.
The last one, Manfried thought, would be high on Landkomtur Erhard's list of concerns. The knights of the Order were as concerned for the virtue of their servants as they were for their own. And while they did not force secular soldiers to emulate their brothers and sleep in common rooms that were perpetually lit to prevent the concealment of sin, they did pay close attention to their conduct.
Many of the men left in this garrison were converts, only a few years Christian, and probably more than likely to accept, or simply take by force, such inappropriate favors.
Such men did not take boredom well.
After a moment, Manfried reproached himself for feeling such concerns. This woman was some unchristian pagan, serf or slave, unbaptized and unworthy of such worries.
Also, these thoughts only served to increase his sense of unease. Developing sympathy for his prisoner was akin to showing mercy on the battlefield. He was a soldier. He had a duty. He had come here to serve God and the Order.
But down here, he didn't feel very close to God at all. He could be righteous facing a pagan army that slaughtered priests and burned churches —but a single girl?
He whispered a Pater Noster for strength of spirit.
When he finished, the words sed libera nos a Malo died in the still, fetid air, leaving silence behind.
The silence continued.
“What?” he whispered, instead of “Amen.”
There was no answer; not even a whim
per from behind the banded oak door that he was not permitted to approach.
His unease deepened. No one had told him what crimes this prisoner may have committed, or why she was so important. Only that, according to Landkomtur Erhard and Manfried's Prûsan sergeant, this was the most important post he would ever fill.
Still, she did not speak.
For four nights, her voice had been his constant companion down here, echoing off the damp gray stone; asking for water, asking his name, sometimes singing in a low voice he could barely hear. Sometimes in Prûsan, sometimes in German, never answered, but always talking.
Always.
It crossed his mind that if she died down here, his awful, tedious job would come to an end and they would have to find him something else to do. That thought, and the brief flash of cruel optimism it brought, made the sick feeling in his soul even blacker.
How horrible to die down here.
Several long minutes of silence passed, perhaps as long as a quarter hour, before he violated his first order.
“Hello?” he called out in Prûsan. He didn't know that language beyond a few words, so he asked in German, “Are you well in there?”
What a preposterous thing to ask, he thought as his query went unanswered. He wasn't well down here, and he was the guard.
But what if there was something wrong with the prisoner? If she was so important, shouldn't he do something?
He was within reach of the alarm cord, which would ring the bells for the watch. That's what he should do. He should sound the alarm.
But what if she's just sleeping?
Manfried was already looked down on by his barbarous comrades, his German blood a liability in the midst of the near-pagan community of this garrison. His duty here was intolerable as it was. Giving them an actual reason to look down on him? That would be positively excruciating.
And calling an alarm in error wouldn't only be embarrassing, it might result in a reprimand. Such a mistake might not concern his soul, but the Order was a military organization as well, possibly the best in Christendom, and they did not get to be so by tolerating such error, however well intentioned. He could lose the chance to serve as a proper soldier, and be trapped the whole season as a glorified prison guard.
