by S. A. Swann
But clearly her preference was to help Uldolf.
And right now, that meant sowing, scattering barley seed evenly across the new-turned earth.
The two of them worked down the furrows, Lilly ahead of him with a basket of barley, scattering the seed. Behind her, Uldolf harrowed the row by hand with a wooden rake. They had a horse-drawn harrow, but his father was still turning earth in some of the more reluctant parts of the field.
Hilde was watching them from on top of one of the stone walls closest to the cottage. While she spoke quietly to her dolly at the moment, she had her own job that would occupy her for much of the spring. She scattered the birds that would come to try and pick at the new-sown seed. Every once in a while, Uldolf heard her calling, “Shoo bird, shoo bird,” accompanied by the fluttering of wings.
It was good that Lilly was here. Even before their ox had died, the sowing often came late simply because they had too few people to work the farm. And sowing was a two-person job, at least. Because of the birds, they couldn't leave a sown field unharrowed with the seed exposed for very long. With the crop uncovered, a flock of crows could strip an acre bare in an hour, and a farm this small didn't have enough days or bushels of seed to undo that kind of damage.
Even with Lilly's help, Uldolf mourned their ox. Dragging the heavy rake across the earth, breaking clods of dirt and covering the barley seed would be exhausting with two arms. The day was two-thirds over, and they should
have an acre sown at least, but they had barely finished half an acre. It was frustrating, because Uldolf knew it was his work that was slowing them down. Even with the deliberately self-conscious way that Lilly was scattering the seed, she could have easily covered two acres by now if she hadn't needed to wait for him to catch up every few minutes.
Worse, the sky was darkening with rolling clouds, and he felt a few cold drops hit the back of his neck.
They might not even get a full day's work done.
Uldolf reached his arm out, bending and extending the rake to pull another foot or so of barley under a blanket of earth.
“Damn.” Uldolf cursed as a spasm went down the length of his back. As the muscles tensed up along the length of his body, he thought, Blasted idiot. So you worked slower than you wanted. When was the last rest you took?
Uldolf called himself a fool three times as the rake fell from his hand. He tried to straighten up, reaching for the knot in his back, and gasped, losing his balance. By the time he was windmilling his arm and falling into the freshly seeded loam, the embarrassment hurt worse than his back.
“Ulfie!”
“Oh, no,” he muttered, spitting dirt and barley out of his mouth.
Lilly was on her knees, pulling him out of the furrow. He hoped to all the gods that his father and his sister weren't watching him being pulled out of the muck by a woman half his size.
“I'm all right,” Uldolf protested.
Lilly clutched him to her chest, embracing him so hard it fired the pain in his back again.
“Please,” Uldolf gasped.
She buried her face in his neck.
“I'm fine, Lilly. Really, it was just a knotted muscle.”
She mumbled something into his shoulder. It sounded like, “N-no hurt.”
“What?”
She let him go and leaned back so he could see her face. Her eyes were red and puffy, and there was a black streak on her cheek where her tears had washed some of the dye from her hair. She grabbed his shoulders, and with a very serious expression, said, “No hurt, Ulfie. No hurt!”
“I told you, I'm fine.”
She shook him. “No hurt!”
“Lilly, I'm fine.” He was beginning to wonder if she actually heard him. She looked into his face, but he didn't know if she was actually seeing him. He tried to sound reassuring. “Stop this, before my family sees us. It's embarrassing.”
She stopped shaking him, hands on his shoulders. Her lip was quivering, and he reached up and wiped one of the tears away.
“There's nothing wrong. I don't even feel it anymore.” He leaned forward, caressing her cheek. “So, please stop.”
Lilly closed her eyes, and abruptly pushed him away with all her might. Uldolf flew backward into the neighboring furrow. “What?”
“No!” Lilly screamed. She stood up, hands balled into fists. “No!”
“Lilly?” Uldolf tried to get upright, but his hand slid in the dirt, refusing to give him purchase.
She shook her head violently, her hair flying into a disordered cloud around her face. She struck her legs with her fists, still screaming, but if there were words in it, Uldolf couldn't make them out.
“What's wrong?” Uldolf heard the first trace of fear in his own voice.
***
The same two words ran over and over through Lilly's mind. Ulfie's hurt. Ulfie's hurt.
She ran to him, terror clutching at her heart, her stomach sick with every bloody memory she'd tried to forget. She clutched at him as if she could pull him out of the mud like he pulled her out of the frigid water.
No hurt. No hurt No hurt.
Everything became mixed up in her head. Her master, her sister Rose, Hilde, Ulfie, Uldolf...
She pulled Ulfie up off the ground. He was the only thing left that made sense. The only thing in the maelstrom that was her world that she was sure of. She shook him, trying to tell him.
No hurt.
Then she heard him say, “Please, stop.”
Her thoughts froze. She couldn't think, couldn't speak. All she could do was feel.
In her head she saw the blood. Smelled it. She heard the screams.
And she knew what she had let the other one do, in the name of her master's god. And it terrified her.
***
Gedim was rocking the plow back, trying to dislodge it from a stubborn patch of clayey earth, when he heard Lilly scream.
He whipped around at the sound, instantly convinced that something had happened to Uldolf. Looking across the field, he didn't see his son at first. Gedim's pulse raced and his tongue became heavy with the copper taste of fear. Lilly was hunched over, screaming, shaking her head back and forth.
Below her, he finally saw his son sprawled in the fresh soil.
“Uldolf!” Gedim didn't know what had happened, but he started running toward them.
***
“Mama!” Hilde cried, jumping down from her place on the wall overlooking the rear field.
Burthe had been planting herbs in the small garden by the side of the cottage. For once, she heard the problem at the same time as her daughter. Lilly sounded terrified, in agony, like every mother's worst fear compressed into a single hysterical wail.
Burthe dropped the spade she'd been using and turned around toward the field. She saw Gedim already running from the other field and she saw Lilly wailing, but her heart froze when she saw no sign of her son.
***
Uldolf backed up, pushing himself along the furrow with his legs. “Lilly, you're scaring me.”
At the sound of his voice, she turned around and glared. Tears still streaked her cheeks, but her eyes were wide, and her lip was curled in something that was almost a snarl.
What had come over her?
“It's me, Uldolf. Don't you recognize me anymore?” The snarling expression receded a fraction, replaced by confusion.
“Please, stop it.”
She shook her head violently.
“Uldolf?” She blinked as if she was suddenly surprised to see him. Her expression had changed, too, the terror and the inexplicable snarl replaced by something else.
Sadness.
She spoke again, and her voice carried none of her earlier hesitancy. “I am so sorry.”
Lilly looked down at him, and he saw the same deep sadness in her eyes. She no longer cried, as if what she felt had passed beyond tears.
“I am so sorry,” she repeated, the depth in her eyes now reflected in her voice. “I can't—”
Her voice br
oke, and she turned and ran for the far wall.
“What?” Uldolf finally got his arm purchase to help him get to his feet. “Lilly!” He called after her. “Wait!”
She ran in a headlong sprint for the edge of the field. When she reached the stone wall around it, she vaulted it without slowing. He ran after her, but by the time he reached the wall, she had vanished into the woods.
Uldolf leaned against the wall, staring uncomprehending as the clouds began to unleash their rain in earnest.
Gedim reached his side, panting. “What happened there?”
Uldolf shook his head. He didn't have an answer. “I have to go after her.”
“There's a storm coming.”
He turned and grabbed his father's shirt. “I have to go after her!”
Chapter 14
Sir Karl Lindberg rode his horse through driving rain. He was cold and damp, and wanted to be somewhere else. Drinking by a campfire, bedding a woman, setting fire to some pagan village—anything but this pointless search for nothing.
Perhaps he should have killed his brother. If his father only had one heir, the old fat wretch might not have been so free vowing his family's service to the Church. The old man was not quite as free to promise the service of his firstborn—but number two, Karl, let's send him to the Holy Land. And if that is not enough, let's send him to the pagan wastes north.
Perhaps Karl should have killed his brother and the old man.
Instead, he killed dark-skinned infidels and light-skinned pagans. And while that was not quite as satisfactory as roasting his treacherous family on a pyre, it did allow him a few moments of pleasure in the midst of long months of excruciating boredom.
Boredom like he suffered now, under the command of the Teutonic Order.
One of the few things Karl regularly thanked God for was the fact that his father's political ambitions, and his need for the Church's favor, had not yet forced his second son into taking religious vows. Karl would sooner slit his own throat than be forced into the privations of a monastic order.
Men were not meant to live like that. To love God so much as to give up all worldly pleasures? Better to dive into battle, sword swinging. You would meet Him soon enough.
It seemed that this year Karl would be denied even that much. He was trapped in the midst of Christendom, where it would be unseemly to raise his voice to the peasantry, much less his weapon.
When this had all begun, and Landkomtur Erhard von Stendal had told Karl and his fellows what it was they hunted, Karl had felt a measure of excitement. Here was something exotic, something more interesting than a simple squad of rough swordsmen. Something that might put up more of a fight. Anything that could take on nearly a score of soldiers, Prûsan brutes or not, was something to be respected.
It was excitement that quickly waned.
It was clear that had this creature the sense of a senile mule, it would have long since escaped to the remote wilderness miles from here. Every day spent retracing their steps was another day for the creature to get farther away.
Karl sneezed and his mount's ears twitched.
Eight years late, he thought. If he had been here before this place had become part of Christendom, this would be all different. None of this
deferential treatment to these barbarian “Christians.” He would walk where he wanted, go in as he wished, and Christ would weep for whoever got in his way.
He thought back to earlier today, before the rain began, on a farm they must have searched for the third time. There was a blond woman shepherding five children. If this place wasn't under the rule of the Order ...
He smiled when he thought of what he could do with her, had he leave and some time.
“Sir!” called out one of the foot soldiers accompanying him.
“Hold!” Karl called out, so the half-dozen men with him might wait for the current interruption. What now? Karl wondered. Another miserable little farm? Some kid cutting trees in the Order's woodland? One of his men found a burrow with his boot and broke an ankle?
Karl looked around. If it was another farm, it wasn't visible from the muddy gash in the woods that passed for a road. Trees pressed close on both sides, leaning in over them. The soldier who had called to him came up to hold the bridle of his horse.
“Rutger found something,” he told Karl.
Karl dismounted. His boots splashed in the brown river the rain had carved down the center of the track they followed. He called out “Wait” to let everyone know that they would be stopped for a while. Those who needed to had time to piss.
He reached into one of his saddlebags and removed the silver collar that the Landkomtur had given him along with the admonition, Only use this if she is completely subdued. While I wish to question her, she is to be put to death. So if there is any doubt about your own safety, kill her.
If Karl had been optimistic enough to think he had a chance of finding their quarry, he might have found the time to wish that the Order had more silver weapons to distribute. But of course that wasn't going to happen. The beast had been long gone before Karl ever arrived, and he was slogging through the rain and mud now for no good purpose.
***
Rutger heard the distant call behind him.
“Hold.”
Then, moments later, “Wait.”
The woman still hadn't noticed his presence. Possibly the rattle of the rain through the branches above him covered his call for help, though she may have been sobbing too hard to hear him. She was still a good twenty yards away, huddled against the trunk of a massive fallen tree, whose gnarled roots towered over the saplings that sprouted in the clearing its collapse had made. Her clothes were so mud-spattered and wet that he had little idea what their original color might have been. She hugged her knees to her chest, and he could see her long black hair shaking as she cried, face buried in her knees.
Lost, Rutger thought. Wandered into the woods and lost herself in the storm.
As if in response to his thought, the sky opened up with a flash of lightning, punctuated almost immediately by a chest-aching echo of thunder. The woman looked up at the sound with an expression of grief on her face. She stared up into the rain, either asking pity from God, or cursing Him.
Rutger walked forward.
The woman didn't even look in his direction. She stared open-eyed into the descending rain, sucking in shuddering breaths.
“Need? Help?” he asked in broken Prûsan.
She looked down at him with striking green eyes. Rutger sucked in a breath, but the woman they were looking for had red hair.
“No worry,” he said. “We help.”
The woman shook her head. He didn't know if she was contradicting him, or if she just couldn't understand his accent. With her back to the trunk of the fallen tree, she pushed herself upright with her legs. Her eyes widened as she looked at him.
Rutger had never thought he was particularly intimidating, even in full mail. He was small, and had a face ten years younger than it should be. But this woman shook and stared at him as if he were some wild animal.
Rutger undid the strap to his helmet and removed it. He hoped that looking into his unobstructed face might reassure her. The rain was cold against his close-cropped scalp. He kept smiling, and took another step forward.
“Your name?”
The woman ran.
Rutger dropped his helmet and ran after her. Fortunately, he didn't need to run far. She had run back toward the road and straight into the arms of his knight, Karl Lindberg.
Karl grabbed the fleeing woman and turned to face Rutger. “What do we have here?”
“She was lost, crying.” Rutger was relieved to be speaking German again, but he suddenly realized he'd dropped his helmet back by the clearing. He swallowed, knowing that that would mean several very long nights. Karl was far from forgiving to his men. A small lapse in discipline meant days of hard labor.
Large lapses ...
The woman tried to squirm out of Karl's arm
s. “She's a wild one.” Karl chuckled, almost as if he was enjoying the struggle. “Do you know who she belongs to?”
“No, sir. She hasn't spoken to me. She just ran away.”
“God's teeth, you can't catch one fleeing woman?”
Rutger felt better. Karl was in sudden good humor, and either hadn't noticed Rutger's lapse with the helmet, or had decided he didn't care. “Sir,” he said, “I was chasing her toward the road.”
Karl laughed. “Aren't you selfless? Forcing this handful into the hands of your fellow squires.”
The woman still struggled, pounding on Karl's chest, shaking her head. It was all Karl could do to hang onto her. He looked down at her and started to speak in Prûsan much better than Rutger's. “Calm down and—”
In the woman's struggles, one of her hands managed to strike under Karl's helmet and bloody his lip. From Rutger's vantage it looked like a panicked accident, but he felt his gut tighten as Karl's expression turned into a red-tinted snarl.
“Bitch!”
Karl balled a fist and struck the woman across the face. She sprawled at Karl's feet, barely moving.
“Sir ...” The expression of fury on Karl's face kept Rutger from completing the objection.
Karl rubbed his face, smearing the blood from his lip. “You useless bitch!” he shouted in German she probably couldn't understand. “If we weren't in Christian Prûsa, I'd teach you a proper lesson. If you weren't ...” He trailed off, staring at his hand.
“Sir?”
A cruel red smile cut into Karl's face. He spat a gobbet of blood and phlegm on the woman's skirt then he bent down and twisted his hand in her hair, pulling the dazed woman's head up out of the mud. Rutger saw now an angry red scar, barely healed, on the woman's temple.
Karl's hand was turning black.
“The bitch dyed her hair.”
Karl pulled a silver tore from his belt and slapped it around the woman's neck.
Rutger stammered, “S-she's the—”
“Ha. And you're the hero who found her.” He knotted his hand tighter in her hair, and her eyes opened. She gasped, reaching for the silver collar now encircling her neck. “Quick, her wrists.”
