by S. A. Swann
“Stop,” she moaned. “Don't want to remember.”
We must.
“No. Happy. Don't need you.”
You need me more than ever.
“Please don't.”
I have to. Go to sleep, child.
So, Lilly slept ...
... and woke.
Interlude
Anno Domini 1229
Master often had the guards take them, one at a time, to be trained, or to be punished. Lilly never knew who they would take, except at night. If the guards came to take someone at night, they always took Rose.
It was never very long, and most times Lilly was awakened when they brought her back. This time wasn't different. Lilly woke up hearing the boots of the guards and the creak of the door opening. She squeezed her eyes shut even as she sensed the light of their lanterns falling across her eyelids. She froze in place, barely allowing herself to breathe. Always, the best way to avoid punishment was to avoid being noticed in the first place.
She smelled them next; the sour sweat of the guards; the blood, piss, and fear from Rose; and the sour, musky smell that Lilly associated with her master.
She heard the door to Rose's cell creak open, and she heard the rattle of chains. She could hear Rose quietly crying, and Lilly winced. With tears came beatings. They all needed to accept whatever master gave them. They were the animals, and if they couldn't serve men properly, they were no use for man or God.
And when their master decided that one of them was useless, he removed them. Lilly's sister Dahlia had tried to run away, and master had cut her with silver, many times, and the wounds did not heal. It took a very long time before she had stopped moving. Worse was her brother Ash, who one day simply stopped talking or moving. Master beat him, but Ash didn't move or react. Eventually, master just had the guards take Ash away.
From listening to the guards, and the bits of their language she could understand, she knew that she had once had two other siblings she didn't even remember. It was one of the few things she allowed herself to feel sad about. She couldn't contradict her master, even in her mind, but she could feel regret at forgetting an unknown brother or sister.
She didn't want to lose another sister. She tried to will Rose to stop crying. Please, not in front of the guards.
She risked cracking an eye open, and saw one of the guards standing in front of Rose's cell, watching her cry. At first Lilly's heart sank, until the guard knelt down and she recognized him.
Lilly felt the tension ease, because of all the men who kept them at the mercy of their master, there was one who took no joy in correcting them. One who offered them, especially Rose, some small comfort.
Once he was alone with them, he started singing to Rose.
***
The first week he was at Brother Semyon's monastery, Erhard von Stendal, province commander without a province, still nursed doubts. He had never once questioned his vocation, but what he had seen here had brought him too close to that point. Even after seeing the charter for his new mission, bearing the seals of the pope and the Hochmeister, it was difficult for him to see these creatures as the work of God ...
In the end, though, it was not for him to say. Duty, fealty, and obedience demanded he follow the path set before him. His reservations amounted to nothing. His actions were constrained by vows more powerful than any unease he might have felt.
The church had declared Semyon's wolfbreed monstrosities of earthly origin. Fallen, like all terrestrial matter, but—as Brother Semyon had said— no different than Erhard's horse.
However, my horse cannot speak, and my horse cannot change into a slavering monster and dismember a group of armed men.
Earthly they might be, but the half-lupine creatures Semyon had imprisoned here were surely born of some primeval wood on the borders of Hell itself.
Only a few hours ago he had seen, for the third time, an eight-year-old child turn into a twisted demonic wolf and kill full-grown, armed Prûsan warriors.
The last demonstration was only with two Prûsans, and it made Erhard wonder if it was due to the relative skill the last child had at killing, or if it was because Brother Semyon only had a limited number of Prûsans on hand.
I must stop thinking of them as children. They are not human.
“You speak of using these creatures against the pagans,” Erhard asked him. “How, exactly? These creatures must be caged under guard, bound by silver manacles. You train them to show their prowess in combat, but how can we be sure that prowess is not used against us?”
Brother Semyon paused. He had been leading Erhard on a path through a series of gardens to the abbot's house where Erhard had been taking his residence, having yet no proper convent to attend to.
The house stood near the crumbling monastery where the guards lived, along with the false children they guarded. The house stood on a bluff overlooking the River Drweca, and seemed to have avoided the violence inflicted on the monastery. Or, more likely, it had been more carefully rebuilt.
The path to the house wound through exotic flowering plants. The perfume of the flowers was as thick as syrup, forcing Erhard's stomach into slow, uneasy rolls.
Brother Semyon turned to Erhard, his expression showing an unseemly joy at such a brutish business. He tapped his forehead. “With any wild animal, Brother Erhard, the most important restraints are the ones that cannot be seen.”
“Wild animals with the wits of men?” Erhard asked.
“Is breaking a man any different than breaking an animal?” Brother Semyon walked up to one twisted bush that grew in an unnatural spiral. “Or breaking one of these creatures?” He traced the outline of the topiary with a black-gloved hand. “Especially if you begin with an immature specimen.”
He reached up and touched a budding flower that rose out of the surface of the twisted bush. “You bend it where you want it to grow.” He pinched the bud between his fingers, crushing it and releasing a small trail of fluid, red in the glow from the setting sun. “And cut away the things that you don't need.”
“But those things kill.”
Brother Semyon broke off the crushed flower. “So do men. So do well-trained dogs.”
“Those things are not dogs.”
Brother Semyon turned to face the crimson sunset. “It is simple, my brother; punishment and reward, dominance and submission. If every small sin is punished with an iron fist, they will no longer even conceive of large ones.” He tossed the crushed flower into the wind. It fragmented, the wind tearing the immature petals apart as they drifted down toward the river. “Their masters dominate their every waking thought. They obey us not to avoid pain, but because our approval is the only light and pleasure they are allowed in this world.”
“Brother ...”
“They exist to serve us,” Brother Semyon said. “That is all. They serve, or they die.”
***
The guard who sang to Rose treated them all with something like kindness. The few months he had been here marked the first time Lilly knew that humans could share anything but cruel discipline. He seemed to care for Rose most of all, especially when he brought her back from their master in the deep of the night.
His attention seemed to make Rose stronger. She didn't cry as much. And when the guard sang to her, Lilly didn't need to pretend to be asleep. Sometimes she would even quietly sing along.
But, in time, their master found out.
He burst in, radiating such fury that the sharp smell of fresh piss came from several cells at once. The fear was suffocating. However, this time the rage was not focused on Lilly, or Rose, or Holly, or Timothy, or Sage, or Ivy—
For the first time Lilly saw her master's rage focused on another human being. He shouted fast, and loud, and in the other language the humans spoke among themselves, not the pagan language they used to speak to her. Even so, the syllables burned into her ears so deeply that she remembered them long enough for the sense to follow. “How dare you interfere with the Order's work here!
”
The guard spoke slower, and was easier for Lilly to understand. “Interfere? I thought Christ called on us to show compassion.”
“Do not presume to speak to me of our Lord. These are animals. Your service here is at an end.”
“Isn't that for the new Landkomtur to say, Brother Semyon?”
“I am your superior. Do not test me!”
The guard nodded and started walking to the door. Lilly held her breath, because she knew her master's expression, and posture, and the smell of his anger. He would not leave until someone was corrected.
Severely corrected.
At first, Lilly thought it would be her or her siblings who would suffer. But then the guard said, “Does your master know how you correct the blond one? Or do animals fall outside your vows of chastity?”
Lilly's master stood mute as the guard laughed and turned to go.
She saw her master grab an iron rod from a rack on the wall, a rod he used many times to discipline his charges. He turned and struck the guard across the back. Lilly could hear Rose gasp in the cage next to her.
Her master brought the bar down on the guard five times.
Lilly had quickly healed from receiving twice as many blows. But she wasn't human.
The guard was.
***
Rose cried herself to sleep that night, and wouldn't stop, no matter how many times Lilly sang to her.
***
Two days later, they took Rose away in the night, and she didn't come back. The following morning, her master had a fresh scar on his face, and beat all of them more severely than Lilly could ever remember. His heaviest blows were reserved for Lilly and her sisters.
Rose never returned, and a week later, the guards came and took Lilly away to see her master in the middle of the night. In a dark room, he bound her with silver chains and showed her what he did to make Rose cry.
***
Lilly kept herself from crying, mostly by pretending to be someone else when she needed to be. It was easier to sing to comfort someone else than it was to comfort herself. Though the other person Lilly made for herself was stronger, and colder, and didn't need to be comforted.
It was after being with her master one night, when she was talking to her other self in her head, that she understood how she could leave this place.
You know your master has his own master. If you work to please him, above all others, then maybe he will take you for himself.
***
It took nearly a year before Erhard finally chose one of Semyon's wolfbreed to use in battle. He had followed the brother's path of disciplining the creatures, teaching them to view him as much their master as Semyon. At times—especially when Semyon had Rose destroyed for attacking him—Erhard had thought his duties here would come to naught. That despite Semyon's assertions, the creatures were untrainable.
However, over time, he decided that one of the five remaining wolfbreed was trainable. Lilly seemed more intelligent, easier to instruct, than the others. It had been several months since he had taken over her discipline completely from Brother Semyon, and now, if anything, she showed him more deference than she had to her original master.
Her keepers had washed her, dressed her in a simple peasant smock, and placed a silver shackle on her left ankle. They led her outside and she blinked in the daylight.
“You will come with me now,” Erhard told her.
She looked down so he couldn't see her face under her hair.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Look at me.”
Lilly looked up into his face. He searched for something in those burning green eyes, but he saw nothing, no emotion at all. “You will obey me.”
“Yes.”
“I will tell you to wait, and you will wait. When you wait, you shall do nothing. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“I will tell you the time at which you will stop waiting. You will kill only then—only then. Understand?”
“I understand.”
He looked for understanding in her face, and saw only blankness. He wondered if this creature understood death. What was he speaking to, the child or the animal?
Did it matter?
“Master?”
“Yes?”
“Will it make you happy if many die?”
“At the place I will take you? Yes, it will.”
“Then I will kill everyone I find there.” She smiled at him, and even under the beating sun, he could feel the depths of his gut turn icy.
Terce
Anno Domini 1239
Si occideris, Deus, peccatores,
viri sanguinum, declinate a me.
Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God:
depart from me therefore, ye bloody men.
—Psalms 139:19
Chapter 11
Dawn came and Uldolf blinked the sleep from his eyes. He was still acclimating to waking up in the full glare of daylight. The nights had only recently become warm enough to leave the shutters open. Hilde's bed was away from any windows and the drafts they let in, but that meant they were directly across from the southeast window that let in the full ruddy glare of sunrise.
Hilde was snuggled against his right side, between him and the wall. He always put her there, because if she slept on the left, where his arm was, he was more likely to knock her out of bed. She would also use his arm as a pillow and the pins and needles of his arm going to sleep would wake him up halfway through the night. Last, it just made it simpler to get in and out of bed without waking her.
He edged away from Hilde and sat up, stretching.
Uldolf jumped to his feet, knocking his head against a low-hanging rafter. He didn't notice the pain even as he half stumbled into the middle of the cottage. “Mother? Father?” He bent over his empty bed. “Wake up, she's gone!”
The covers had been thrown aside, and on the pillow were the scraps of a bandage, clotted with blood and strands of red hair. Uldolf grabbed the pillow, heart racing. It was cold.
“Mother?”
Hilde sat up in her bed. “Ulfie? What's wrong? What's happening?”
“She—” Uldolf spun around. “Lilly. She's gone.”
Hilde looked at him wide-eyed. “No, she wouldn't go.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “She wouldn't!”
Uldolf shook his head. Lilly—he thought of her using Hilde's name now— wasn't in her right senses. She could have walked off anywhere during the night.
“Father?” he called.
Worry started to slip into panic as he realized his parents' bed was also empty.
“Mother? Father?”
Then he heard his father from outside. “Out here, son.”
“Ulfie?” Hilde's face was streaked with tears. “Ulfie, she's not mad at me, is she?”
Uldolf walked over and hugged his sister. “No, little chipmunk. She's just confused.”
Hilde nodded into Uldolfs shoulder and sniffed. She muttered, “I shouldn't have told her.”
“Told her what?”
“Son.” Burthe's voice came from outside. “I think you need to come out here.”
***
Uldolf walked out of the cottage and hugged himself against the sharp morning air. His breath fogged a little as he followed his parents' voices around to the back, where the main field was. He rounded the corner and saw both of them standing by one of the low stone walls that separated the front field from the back.
They were both staring into the field.
Uldolf walked up next to them. “What's going on? Lilly's gone ...” He trailed off.
“She's right there,” his father said, unnecessarily.
About twenty yards away from them, standing ankle deep in the black fresh-turned earth, stood Lilly. Her borrowed bedclothes were torn and dirty, flapping in the early morning breeze. The bandage was gone from her head, and her red hair hung down past her shoulders. Where Burthe had cut it—above the red scar of her wound—h
er hair had grown back a stark white. The wound on her temple was bleeding, and she held her bloody hands in front of her face, as if she wasn't sure where the blood had come from. She stared at the blood a long time.
“Thank the gods she didn't go far. Is she ...” Uldolf didn't finish the question. He had just looked down to see the other thing out there in the middle of the field.
The carcass of a young bull elk—antlers barely sprouted for the spring— was sprawled another ten yards from Lilly. The elk had been in full health, standing nearly as tall as Uldolf at the shoulders and probably close to a hundred stone in weight.
And the elk had been savaged. Claw marks had cut deep grooves in the side of its chest, and ragged bite marks had torn across large sections of its neck. The elk's head was turned at an unnatural angle and stared at Uldolf with dead black eyes, the hide on its brow glistening with the morning dew.
“Did you see what killed it?” Uldolf asked.
“No,” his father said. “But I think she saw whatever it was.”
“Lilly?” Uldolf called out trying to get her attention. “Lilly?”
***
All she could see was the blood.
She could try to hide, to close her eyes, to forget.
It would always be there.
What did we do?
A voice, colder, older, answered her, We did what had to be done.
I don't want this anymore.
You never wanted it That is why I am here.
I don't want you!
She clutched her hands, shaking, remembering—
Ulfie's voice.
She turned her head, away from the blood, and saw him standing by the low wall around the field. He stood there unscathed, next to his parents, staring at her.
Lilly thought her heart would burst from relief.