by S. A. Swann
“Would a just God let you live?” she said.
She held a loaded crossbow braced against a crate.
Don't let her surprise you, he thought as a bolt ripped through his chest. He dropped his crossbow as his whole body spasmed with the pain of the impact. He wheezed and his mouth filled with blood.
Erhard looked up and saw her limping toward him. She was hemorrhaging from the two massive wounds in her torso. Half her body shone slick with her own blood. She dropped the spent crossbow as she approached, kneeling unsteadily in front of him.
He tried to speak, but his throat filled with blood.
“We both serve cruel masters,” she whispered, placing a hand on his cheek. “But, at least I can punish mine.”
She grabbed the other side of his head and twisted until his neck snapped.
***
Master...
She stared at Erhard's face as it went slack between her hands. She stared into his eyes until she felt the light go out of them, then she let him go, allowing his body to crumple on the floor.
She coughed, sending pain shooting out from the wounds in her torso. Her leg shook, and she felt light-headed. She didn't know if it was from blood loss or from the toxic black smoke rolling from the center of the storeroom.
She clutched the wound above her left hip. The bolt had passed clean through, leaving a crater in her gut next to her navel. That one was the worst. She could feel her life pulsing out through the hole. In seconds, her clenched fist was coated with her own blood.
That would be the wound that killed her, and she wondered idly if Erhard had fired the bolt that caused it. Somehow, it would be fitting if he had.
But she couldn't die yet.
“Hilde!” she yelled, tasting her own blood on her lips. She heard nothing but crackling and hissing flames. “Hilde!”
She could feel the skin peeling off her throat and started coughing.
Then, when her own wheezing subsided, she heard someone crying. She looked around, moving her head, trying to focus on the sound. It took her a few moments before she realized where it was coming from.
The sound came from above her.
Lilly looked around and saw it dimly through the smoke, leaning against a pillar.
A ladder.
***
Mama. Papa. Ulfie. Lilly.
The four names repeated through Hilde's head over and over. Even with her eyes screwed shut, she still saw the men tossing the torches. And it was all her fault. If she hadn't talked to the man, hadn't told them Lilly's name ...
She had been crying and screaming when the fat man grabbed her and dragged her into the castle, so she wasn't sure what was going on. When he shouted at the other men, he spoke words she didn't recognize.
The fat man half carried, and half dragged her up one twisting stairway.
“Why did you hurt Mama?” she yelled, beating at his pudgy arm with her fists. “Papa, Ulfie! Why?”
But by now she had run out of breath and her screams were mere wheezes. She was so tired that she couldn't even make him notice her fists.
They passed through a room of boxes and the other men started doing soldierly things by the walls, lighting the torches. The fat man spoke with one of the soldiers, and pointed to a ladder leading to a small hole in the ceiling. He gave Hilde to the soldier and climbed up the ladder.
When the soldier pushed her up the ladder after the fat man, she was too tired to resist. She climbed up, the soldier's rough hands pushing on her backside, until she tumbled out under the sky on top of the tower.
Once she was clear of the trapdoor, the fat man slammed a wooden door in place. He barred it, sighed, and smiled. Hilde hated that expression and, anger surging, ran up to pound on the fat man's back.
“I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”
The man reached up and placed a hand on her chest, pushing her away from him. He said something she didn't understand. She sobbed, swinging and kicking, but he easily held her out of reach.
“Child. Stop,” he finally said in real words.
She shook her head violently and managed to bite his thumb.
He shouted and pushed her away. She tumbled down on the roof and lay there sobbing. What was the use? There was nothing left of her family. “Mama,” she wheezed. “Papa. Ulfie. Lilly ...”
The man walked up to her and placed a hand gently on her head. She shrunk away, but he spoke softly. “Keep. Safe,” he said.
She shook her head. The fat man was an awful creature. Why would he care about her?
He pulled a chain from around his neck, made a gesture across his chest, and kissed it. Then he dropped it around her neck. The chain was gold and heavy, and long enough that the cross on it fell onto her lap.
“Keep. Safe,” he repeated, and then he took her hands and held them together in his. “Save. You.”
Then he began muttering in a language she didn't understand.
She tried to back away, but the man held her too tightly. He wasn't even speaking to her anymore, he was almost chanting. His hands were clammy on hers, and sweat dripped from his brow.
He was afraid, and that scared Hilde.
She began hearing things from below. People talking, people yelling, and then people screaming. The fat man stopped chanting, scooped her up, and dragged her away from the trapdoor. She screamed, but he clamped a fat, smelly hand over her mouth. His rings bit into her lips.
She heard shouts in German, clanging, wood breaking. After a few moments someone screamed in agony. Then the screaming abruptly stopped.
Under the smell of sweat from the fat man's hand, she could smell smoke. Nasty, sticky, burning meat mixed with something evil.
She watched, wide-eyed, as wisps of smoke trailed up from the trapdoor.
They were going to burn her, too.
She renewed struggling, trying to get away from the fat man.
Then, below her, she heard someone yelling, “Hilde?”
It was Lilly's voice, but different—harsher, deeper. In her mind, Hilde could picture Lilly walking from the pyre, following her, still burning.
“Hilde?”
Hilde screamed against the fat man's hand, but all that came out were muffled sobs. She tried to bite him, but his hand was too big and he was able to hold her jaw shut.
She didn't hear Lilly's voice again and, for a few moments, Hilde thought that she had left. Then something slammed into the trapdoor.
The fat man scrambled back, all the way to the wall marking the edge of the roof.
The trapdoor vibrated with another impact, and Hilde saw splinters break from the top of the thin wooden bar holding the door shut. The fat man was chanting again.
Then the bar splintered, and the trapdoor flew open, releasing a rolling cloud of smoke.
The fat man sucked in a breath and Hilde stared, terrified, as a monster climbed out of the smoke. It had matted fur covered with blood and soot. It walked on wolf legs thicker than a man's. It had a sunken belly and a broad chest. Hilde could almost count its ribs. Its forelimbs ended in long-clawed hands, and it had the head of a starved she-wolf.
But it had Lilly's green eyes.
Lilly pulled herself out of the hole. She had nothing left; she could barely hold her cadaverous wolf form upright. The only thing that kept her pulling forward was the sight of Hilde in the bishop's arms.
The man shouted something at her.
“Give her to me,” she snarled at him in German.
“No!” The bishop held up a golden cross that dangled from Hilde's neck. “You can't have this child's soul.”
Hilde stared at her with terrified eyes, and in her face Lilly saw Uldolf, eight years ago. She looked down at Hilde and said in Prûsan, “Don't be afraid.”
Hilde shook her head violently.
“Your mother, your father, Uldolf. They're alive, waiting for you.”
Lilly continued walking while the bishop shouted things in Latin, backing up until he was on top of the wall itself.
When she was within reach, she took both his wrists and slowly, painfully, peeled his hands off of Hilde.
When Hilde fell from his grasp, she screamed at Lilly, jumped off the wall, and ran away across the tower roof.
The bishop spat at Lilly. “The child sees you for what you are, fiend!”
Lilly snarled.
The bishop stiffened. “I am not afraid to see God.”
“Are you sure that's who's waiting for you?” She turned toward Hilde, and the bishop grabbed for her uninjured arm. She pushed him away from her, and he stumbled, falling backward over the wall.
He screamed something unintelligible on the way down.
A column of flame erupted from the trapdoor. She could feel the floor warming under her feet. It was only a matter of time before the heat from the fire cracked the stone supports and the roof caved in.
If it was only her up here, that wouldn't matter ...
“Hilde.”
“No,” Hilde sobbed. “Go away.”
“Please, I won't hurt you.” Lilly heard a crack, and something shifted enough to make the floor vibrate. She limped around to where Hilde huddled against the wall. She reached down and stroked her back.
“No.” Hilde shook. “I'm frightened.”
“Shh,” Lilly said as gently as the wolf could manage. “Close your eyes and listen to my voice.”
“Lilly?”
“Yes.”
Hilde curled into a tight little ball under Lilly's clawed half-human hand. “W-why are you so scary now?”
Another cracking and a few stones by the trapdoor caved in, blowing out sparks and flame.
“It's the only way I could save you.” Lilly reached down and picked Hilde up, firing severe pain in her shoulder. She hugged the child to her chest.
“You're bleeding.”
“Don't worry.”
Lilly stepped up on the wall, above the bailey. Wind whipped by her, and trails of smoke bit at her eyes and nose. Hilde curled tighter as Lilly turned her back toward the drop. “I'm frightened,” Hilde sobbed.
So am I.
Lilly bent her legs, tucking her chin down over Hilde's body. She started singing softly.
Fear not the cloak of slumber,
When the sky has lost its sun,
Mother will protect her child
Should any nightmares come.
Slowly, under her arms, she felt Hilde's body relax as the fear drained away.
When the roof started collapsing in front of her, she wrapped herself tightly around Hilde's body and pushed back, falling backward into the night.
Chapter 35
First Günter saw Sir Johann take seven men up the stairs toward the armory. Then he heard the screams, and Erhard took the last four knights of the Order upstairs.
Twelve men were left to guard the door against a breach, however improbable—four Prûsans and seven Germans. Günter stood by his countrymen, because he could feel the situation crumbling.
The collapse began sooner than he expected. The knights had barely vanished up the stairwell when one of the Germans walked up to Günter and the three men with him.
“Why didn't you come to defend the bishop?” He was one of the men who had run to the stairs as the screaming started. Blood ran down his face from a cut above his eye, and crusted the left side of his beard and mustache.
“This is the Order's castle. I follow their commands.”
“How convenient.” The knight placed a hand on the pommel of his sword.
You bastards have no idea what that thing is. What it can do.
“Nothing to say, Sergeant?”
“I don't answer to you,” Günter said.
The man looked back at the mass of men behind him. The others started stepping up to face the quartet of Prûsans.
“From what I've seen here, the Prûsans don't answer to anyone.”
Günter shook his head. “You don't want to do this.”
“Was that a threat?” The man slid his weapon out of its sheath. Suddenly the air rang with the sound of liberated steel as everyone, German and Prûsan, drew his weapon.
The man smiled at the four Prûsans who faced him. “Sergeant, you should back down. We outnumber you two to one.”
“That's almost even,” Günter said.
The air resonated with a crash as their blades met.
***
“Smoke!” someone yelled. Uldolf looked up from his father. Wisps were trailing from the arrow slits at the top of the tower, the smoke gray-black against a deep purple sky, underlit by the diminishing pyre. Under the walls, where the murder holes were still open, the light was different—redder, fiercer, more unstable.
Lankut muttered, “The stores are burning.” Uldolf nodded.
“What's happening up there?” Lankut asked.
Uldolf suspected what was happening. He had seen it before. Lilly, or the monstrous thing Lilly became, was loose in the keep with the Germans. She was doing to them what she had done to the stronghold of Mejdân, rending her former masters the way she had destroyed the pagans.
The way she had destroyed his family.
Uldolf felt his shoulder and stared at the keep. It was too easy for him to picture what was happening in there. He had seen it, and the freshly returned memory festered in his mind's eye as if it had just happened.
She had killed everything he had ever loved.
But now ...
Suddenly, a pillar of smoke curled up from the roof of the tower. The base of the column was bright, as if the fire had found its way out. Then a shadow moved on top of the wall, in front of the column of smoke.
“The bishop!” Lankut whispered.
The shadow tipped over the wall and tumbled out into space. Uldolf watched the long fur-lined robes flap in the wind like ineffective wings. The man slammed solidly into the ground.
Back above the tower, the smoke column was now rooted in a plainly visible tongue of flame. The whole keep now had the appearance of a gigantic candle.
On the edge of the roof, a figure climbed onto the top of the wall. Lilly.
The thing that was Lilly.
Even from this distance, the silhouette was obviously inhuman, with wolf legs, a tail, and a lupine profile. In its semihuman arms it carried a small bundle ...
Oh, no ...
“Hilde!” his mother shouted before he could think it. “It has Hilde!” His mother's voice sliced through him. Uldolf was running for the tower before it became clear what Lilly was doing.
More sparks and flame erupted from the top of the tower as he ran, and Lilly turned around to face the conflagration.
Just as Uldolf reached the edge of the keep below them, the top of the tower belched a crashing roar of smoke and fire. Stone crumbled above with such force that Uldolf could feel the impact in the ground beneath him.
And, above him, Lilly fell backward.
Uldolf stared straight up and saw the monster's fur-covered back topple toward him. He screamed up at them. “Hilde! Lilly!”
Then Lankut was pushing him aside, barely in time. Lilly's back slammed into the ground right where he had been standing. Uldolf felt something warm and wet splash his face.
He shoved Lankut away and ran up to Lilly's body.
Blood poured from her ears, nose, and mouth. Her legs and neck were horribly twisted, and as he watched, her body seemed to shrivel in on itself, face collapsing inward, limbs shortening, fur fading. In seconds, the body was human.
Her bony arms fell away, revealing a form curled on her chest in a fetal position. Uldolf reached for Hilde and heard her sobbing.
“You're alive!” He pulled Hilde off Lilly's body and held her.
Hilde buried her face in his neck. “Ulfie!”
Uldolf looked down at the broken body at his feet. “She saved you,” he whispered.
You killed everything I loved ...
You saved everything I love ...
“Lilly's hurt,” Hilde said into his neck.
He pa
tted her back and whispered, “I know.”
A cheer went up in the crowd about a hundred paces away. Uldolf looked in that direction and saw the doors of the keep opening. Standing in the entry, Uldolf thought he saw Sergeant Günter.
“I guess he took sides,” Lankut said.
Uldolf nodded and looked down at Lilly's unmoving body. So did she.
Coda
Anno Domini 1239
Six months later, during the fall harvest, Uldolf returned to the newly renamed town of Mejdân, carrying elk hides from a tannery outside town. The tannery's stink still hung on the hides, in Uldolfs nose, and probably his clothes as well. The putrid combination of urine, dung, and rotting flesh was the primary reason retrieving the freshly tanned skins was work for the leatherworker's apprentice.
The old man he was apprenticed to was a Prûsan who claimed to have known his father, Radwen. It was an increasingly common claim. As more Prûsans moved in, retreating from more recently Christianized areas, it was becoming fashionable to acknowledge the past.
Uldolf reached the city gate and Lankut called from his post, “So, Uldolf, what do you have there?”
One thing hasn't changed ...
“Fresh tanned hides for Master Ryliko.” Uldolf hefted his bundle. “Care to inspect them?”
Lankut walked over, coughed, and shook his head. “I doubt Chief Sejod cares for tribute from you, of all people.” He wrinkled his nose. “And you stink to high heaven.”
“If you think that, you should meet the tanners themselves.”
“Thank you, no.”
“And what do you mean, 'you of all people'?”
“You're still Radwen Seigson's son.” Uldolf sighed.
“Look, don't forget that. There are plenty of people, old-timers, who think you should be running things.”
“Günter is doing a fine job without Radwen Seigson's son.”
Ever since the Germans were driven out of the town, once-Sergeant Günter Sejod had managed to hold things together, largely based on the fact that he was the highest ranking Prûsan under the Christian occupation. The chain of command among the Prûsan soldiers remained intact.