The Wicked

by Douglas Nicholas

  Sir Jehan had recently replaced the Irish wolfhounds he had lost, on the selfsame night that he had lost much of his hand, with two litters sent from Ireland. A wolfhound pup, wheat-colored, black-muzzled, a bit plump but already beginning to show length of leg, got up from the heap of its fellows dozing by the fire. It ambled over and sat down on Sir Jehan’s foot.

  “A handsome young fellow; he will be huge,” said Sir Odinell.

  “He will that,” said Sir Jehan. He reached down and thumped its side with his good hand. “Rollo,” he said absently. The puppy was named after the giant Orkney Norseman who had founded Normandy. Sir Jehan turned back to his guest. “I have a male and a female for you, Odinell, one from each litter, that you may breed a tribe of your own.”

  Sir Odinell gave a little seated half bow. “My thanks.” He smiled politely, but Hob thought to see a shadow about his eyes; Sir Odinell’s heart seemed so troubled that he was not fully aware of his surroundings.

  There followed a period of idle chatter, mostly on the part of Sir Jehan: courtesy dictated that he at least give the travelers the opportunity to recover somewhat from the dust and fatigue of the trail. Hob noticed that it was not long, though, before the bronze hand began to tap gently upon the lion’s head that terminated Sir Jehan’s chair arm. A short while thereafter the knight rose, excused himself, gathered up Sir Odinell and Molly and her party, and led the way from the hall, leaving Lady Isabeau and Dame Aline to preside at table.

  CHAPTER 2

  UP THE ECHOING, WINDING turret stair with its slice-of-pie stair treads, the puppy scrabbling on the stone, determined to keep up. The party entered a solar that had been prepared for them: three rectangular rooms, not overlarge, with whitewashed walls; a small fireplace with a merry blaze against the cool evenings here in the mountains; a floor carpeted with the ubiquitous rushes, here mingled with lavender and hyssop. A table was set with brightly colored cloths, and on the sideboards was a simple meal, less ornate than that about to be enjoyed by Lady Isabeau and the others at the high table in the hall below. The food was adequate—pigeon stewed in garlic and herbs, bread, flagons of bragget and of barley beer, of wine and of apple wine, and so on—but not likely to be a distraction.

  Pages waited to serve, but Sir Jehan shooed them out and bolted the door, saying, “Squire Robert, pray serve as page to all this night, that we may speak without fear of little ears and wagging tongues.” Hob, who had served as one of the Blanchefontaine pages not so long ago, rose quickly and began to serve, placing trenchers of hardened bread to serve as plates; napkins; ewers of rosewater to rinse the fingers; a tureen heaped with satire, a mixture of beef and vegetables and dried apples. He began with Molly, then went on to Nemain, then Sir Odinell as a guest in the castle, then Sir Jehan. Lastly he set a trencher for Jack and one for himself, and thereafter was up and down, attentive to each diner, replenishing empty plates or drained goblets, pouring water over a diner’s hands and providing a towel to dry them, bringing fresh supplies of food and drink from the sideboard.

  Sir Jehan waited a bit out of consideration for his guest, but the subject to be discussed hung in the air, and at any rate, despite his long journey, Sir Odinell did not seem hungry, and ate some of his food and pushed more of it about on his plate. The Sieur de Blanchefontaine nodded at Hob, and said, “Our young man will gain—” Here he paused: it was his habit to pause in odd places, as his restless thoughts crowded in upon him, and he lost his thread for a moment, and then gathered it up again. “—gain his spurs, in perhaps three years. He has already slain a swordsman—” He fell silent; he looked at the graven bronze ghost of his own sword hand; then: “—a swordsman, one of two murderous gallants who were loose in the castle. This one had killed several of my best men; Sir Balthasar dealt with the other.”

  But Hob could not let this pass. “By your leave, my lord, ’twas not I. ’Twas Nem—, um, Queen Nemain who slew him.”

  Sir Odinell was looking from Hob to Nemain—small and pretty, with her mass of red hair and vivid green eyes—with an expression of mild confusion.

  Nemain said fiercely, loyally: “But ’twas Hob who attacked that murdering anmhas first, and he trying to protect me; didn’t he say to me, ‘Run,’ and he’s giving me a wee push toward the stair, and then flying at that killer like a falcon, and Hob with only a torch in his hand and that grown man with a sword, and ’tis true I stabbed that míolachán, but wasn’t I safe behind Hob the while, and myself leaning around him to strike.”

  Here she stopped, slightly out of breath. The three adults looked at her, and at Hob: Molly and Sir Jehan amused, proud, and striving to conceal both, while Sir Odinell’s confusion slid toward bewilderment.

  Slowly a blush began to bloom on Nemain’s pale face, and then Hob reddened as well. Hob resumed serving with a certain intensity, while Nemain became interested in her trencher.

  “They are betrothed,” said Molly quietly.

  Sir Odinell looked back and forth again. “She is a queen, and he but a squire?” he asked, very gently.

  “Things are different in Erin,” said Molly, “and he himself fated to be a great man, and to be her man as well.”

  Sir Jehan’s hand began to tap against a silver ewer of wine, producing a dull tunk, tunk that he seemed not to hear, although the rest of the party looked to see its source. He cleared his throat.

  “Odinell, brother,” he began, but at that moment there were two thuds upon the solar door, heavy as doom, and without pause the door opened and Sir Balthasar entered. The company saw a tall and thick-built man, heavy-boned, dense with muscle: Hob had never encountered a man more powerful in body, except Jack. But where Jack Brown—so called for his dark hair and eyes—was calm, agreeable in pleasant circumstances and stolid in difficulty, Sir Balthasar was harsh and warlike, irascible, stern in demeanor. He was one of the foremost killers of the North, and Scottish raiders avoided Blanchefontaine lands on the strength of his name.

  Sir Balthasar served Sir Jehan not only as castellan, but as mareschal, acquiring and training and maintaining the stable of mounts for the castle’s knights. The castle’s men-at-arms regarded him with great respect, admixed with a small tincture of fear. Nonetheless, Hob had seen little Dame Aline tease him mercilessly, and seen him soften in her presence. The forbidding castellan had become one of Molly’s fiercest partisans on Fox Night, and had sworn to see Hob raised to knighthood. Hob had found him a fair if ferociously exacting teacher, and desired ardently to become such a man. Had he paused to think of it, or had someone asked, Hob would have surprised himself to realize that he was fond of Sir Balthasar.

  Now the castellan, clad in his usual somber garb of green and pale gray and dark gray, and gray that was darker yet, almost black, took a seat at the table. He lowered his bulk carefully into a chair as though afraid it would break, which Hob thought entirely possible, and hitched his dagger in its green leather sheath forward to a more comfortable position. This was a war dagger, its pommel an iron sphere, rough-surfaced, gray-black, its hilt plain and wrapped in sweat-stained leather—like the knight himself, it was grim and heavy and perfect at destruction.

  Sir Jehan turned to his castellan. “I was about to tell Sir Odinell of Fox Night.”

  Sir Balthasar nodded and said to Sir Odinell, “You may find it hard to credit; ’twas a night stranger than any I have seen, or even heard tale of.” He looked back at Sir Jehan. “We do not speak of it often,” he said pointedly.

  “True enough,” said Sir Jehan, “and we would ask that you speak with no one else concerning this: it is why we meet privily today.”

  Sir Odinell bowed slightly in his seat. “I will speak with no one else.”

  Sir Jehan regarded him with the utmost seriousness. “Swear to it, brother Odinell, swear to it.”

  Sir Odinell looked startled. Then: “By my honor, I will speak of it with no one else, so aid me Christ and His saints.” He drew his dagger, held it hilt upward so that the weapon made a crude cross, and kissed i
t at the juncture of quillons and hilt.

  Sir Jehan cleared his throat again, tapped the wine ewer absently, looked into the distance somewhere, and began.

  “We were confined in the castle by a snowstorm, and one other, trapped there with us by the gale, was a turnskin, and changed into a Fox. You must not think of a little thing, brother. This was an unholy being: a fox the size of a small horse.” Sir Jehan spoke lightly, with his usual slightly mocking tone, but Hob saw that he had gone very white, and his good hand cradled his other wrist.

  Sir Odinell, who might have been expected to laugh, or leave, at this juncture, surprised Hob by merely nodding, although he crossed himself a moment later. It was as though Sir Odinell had in some way become inured to monstrosity. Hob wondered as to the nature of his predicament, which Sir Jehan had not seen fit to describe, preferring to let the Sieur de Chantemerle explain it himself.

  Sir Jehan resumed. “This Fox was strong even beyond its great size, strong beyond nature, and fast—you will recall I was accounted a fast hand, Odinell?”

  “None faster,” said the stocky knight. “In Ireland—” Molly’s head came up, and he stopped, aware of the thinning ice before his feet. “Well, we were on several campaigns together, in many places, and Sir Jehan here known throughout the camps as a paragon of speed: out with his sword, take your head from your shoulders, back with his sword, and sitting down to his meat and you not yet fallen to the ground.”

  “I would not have credited the speed of this—” Sir Jehan looked down at the tablecloth and his jaw tightened. Hob saw, like wind passing over a field of ripe barley, the feather-headed stalks bowing and straightening again, an expression of absolute rage sweep over Sir Jehan’s features, and then vanish in a moment from the mercurial lord’s face. The knight looked up again. “—this abomination, had I not fought it myself,” said Sir Jehan. “I was accounted swift—I was famed for my speed—but, Christ for my refuge, it was swift beyond believing: you see the result.” He lifted the bronze hand till it gleamed in the torchlight, a beautiful thing, the thick-and-thin strokes of the green-gold lettering catching the eye. He let his hand fall with a crack on the table, making the nearest dishes bounce a little and the wine slosh forward and back in the goblets.

  He drew a deep breath and continued in a more measured fashion. “There was an attack: two swordsmen, and the monster. The swordsmen were excellent men of their hands, but their skills did not avail them; they perished as I have told you: these two young people did for the one, and the other—well, the other had the misfortune to encounter Balthasar.

  “The monster went into a corridor with these four”—he indicated Molly, Nemain, Jack, and Hob—“and was destroyed. I may not tell you more of what happened, brother, for I too have sworn oaths, but it was utterly destroyed.”

  The Sieur de Chantemerle made no comment, but Hob could read Sir Odinell’s features, his doubts as plain as rabbit tracks across a field of new-fallen snow. There was no question of doubting the honesty of his old comrade, but Sir Jehan might himself have been deceived in some way. Yet, if Sir Odinell had been told everything, Hob thought, he might not have stayed the night.

  HOB WAS AN ORPHAN, raised by an old village priest, and Molly had taken him as an apprentice a year and a half before Fox Night, and till that night Hob had not fully realized the truth about his acquired family: that Molly and Nemain were queens away in the west of Ireland, although dispossessed at the moment; that they worshipped the Old Gods of Erin, and had surprising skill with weapon and spellcraft. Strangest of all, Jack Brown, plain sturdy pikeman Jack Brown, had been attacked when on pilgrimage to the Holy Land by some exotic Beast, for which none had a name, and had contracted a fever from the bite, and now was much more, and in a way much less, than he seemed.

  The Beast, for so Molly called it, the creature being unknown in lands so far to the west of the Holy Land, so far to the north of the hot lands below Egypt, was manlike, but hugely made, with black-furred limbs and a naked leathery breast; it had great fangs, and moved at speed upon four limbs, the knuckles of its hands used as feet. It crushed Jack’s ankle, so that he still limped, and it bit his throat so badly that he could barely speak today. It was destroyed almost by accident, trampled beneath the hooves of Templar warhorses. Jack lived, but found himself transforming into such a Beast, at ever smaller intervals; in this form he was driven to kill, and to eat of human flesh.

  He sought out Molly at St. Audrey’s Fair, the great fair held each year at Ely, and she was able to curb his changes, and to restore him to full humanity.

  After Sir Jehan had been bitten, but not killed, by the Fox, he was himself susceptible to such change, and relied on Molly, with her knowledge of ways to control the change as she controlled it in Jack, for treatment—herbs, spells, amulets—to preserve him from losing his humanity, from shifting into a murderous Fox. He feared the loss of his soul: Hob had heard him say as much to Molly. The knight dared not even confess his plight to Father Baudoin, for fear the Church would burn him. Molly had shown him what herbs to take, and had said spells over him, and given him an amulet to wear such as Jack wore, and eased his physical pain and his worry at the same time. Molly and her family thus had a haven at Blanchefontaine, and promise of help when she went back to Ireland, to recover her position.

  THE BRIEF SILENCE that had settled over the table was now broken: Hob became aware that Sir Jehan had begun to speak again. “But tell these good people, Odinell, what it is that troubles you; as we are old comrades, so would I have you think of them.”

  Sir Odinell glanced once around the table, and then began.

  “There is a castle, some miles down the coast from my own. There, somewhat less than a year ago, came to dwell a certain Sir Tarquin with his household. He was awarded this stronghold—Duncarlin; the name is older than the castle built there—when the former owner, who had been at court, offended the king in some wise, so badly that his lands and dwellings were stripped from him, and he imprisoned—what the exact tale may be, I know not, save that the king has settled this strange, this very strange, lord in his stead.

  “He and his people are secretive; they are barely civil; none of us has had invitation to their hall, and though Sir Tarquin has accepted my own invitation, one that I now regret, so far he has not called upon us. This would be no great matter, save that, soon after their arrival, affairs began to go awry, in ways I hardly know how to describe, evil ways.

  “This is how it first affected my household: two of my knights set out on the coast road, a simple errand down to Durham. They did not return in time; they were overdue a sennight, a fortnight. One night they came up to the gate after it was closed, and blew the horn. They declared themselves. The gatehouse guards looked through the postern wicket, but were uncertain; then they called the chief porter.”

  Sir Odinell stopped, drank wine. He looked at the table, not at the others, and Hob could see a slight sheen to his forehead, which might have been the wine. When he resumed, his voice was more quiet; he spoke more slowly: yet Hob thought he was if anything becoming more distressed. One hand gripped the goblet tightly; the other was in his lap, balled into a fist.

  “The porter, the guards, could see these knights they had dwelt beside for years, yet could not decide if it were Sir Hugh and Sir Gilles, or no. The knights seemed the same in their features, or at any road similar, but with some . . . difference that the guards could not put tongue to. In the event they let them pass, but escorted them to the hall.”

  He drank again. A drop lingered in the corner of his mouth; he licked at it absently, then, as one coming awake, seized a hand-cloth from the table and scrubbed savagely at his lips.

  “And I was no better! They stood before me in the torchlight, the firelight, and I wavered backward and forward, thinking Surely it is they, thinking Surely it is not. They were pale as wraiths or bogles, low-voiced, somber—they who had been among my merriest knights. You have knelt by a pond and seen yourself in the water? They
were like that, shadowy, unstable: almost their features seemed to ripple, as when you trouble the water in which you regard yourself. When I asked them where they had abided so long, they seemed uncertain, and said something about the road being difficult, and the forest very dark, and it all ended in mumbles, and, Jesus and Mary be witness, I did not want to speak with them further.”

  Sir Jehan stirred, made as if to speak, but Molly shot him a look and he subsided.

  “And then there was the wife,” said Sir Odinell. “One was married, the other not, and the married knight, Sir Hugh, went to his quarters with his wife after the two travelers had eaten. They spent the night together, and the next morning she went to her sister, and they left the castle by midday—they spoke of gathering herbs—and went straight to the convent at Whitby and sought asylum. Their cousin said that Dame Constance—she that is Sir Hugh’s wife—told her that it was not her husband in her arms, but an evil spirit, and that she would not stay one more day with him. Sir Hugh did not seem distressed by this; indeed, he did not seem to notice. The two sat about the hall; they were courteous; but they were uncanny, and everyone heavy in spirit when they were near.”

  He made as if to drink, but then paused, the goblet held as if forgotten, halfway to his lips. He coughed a little. The six listeners sat very still: Molly with her usual calm, the quiet of a large and dangerous cat at ease; Nemain taut and intense, her green eyes fastened upon the knight’s face; Jack and Sir Balthasar with the stolidity of old soldiers used to night watches, though the knight’s large hand was clenching and unclenching about his dagger hilt. Hob himself was tense and uncomfortable, but afire with curiosity. Even the restless Sir Jehan was immobile for once.

  “I gave them gold and freed them of their oaths of fealty; I said I could not have those near me who could not account for themselves. They made no objection, nor even scowled, but turned and went slowly from the hall. Of course I had them watched. They went quietly to the stables, saddled their mounts and led their spares, and rode out and away. Five years the one was in my service, and seven years and some months the other, and they did not so much as go to their quarters for their possessions. Nor did Sir Hugh seek out his wife at the convent. In time Dame Constance returned, she and her sister, for we are kindred, but she heard from him no more.”