Awaiting the Moon (33 page)

Though she wouldn’t; if she retreated now she would wonder forever after what Nikolas’s midnight venture was about. Living with doubt was tearing her heart out; answers would calm her again, for better or for worse. She could see his path; it was clear and even in the forest, with the moon full, she could find it.

She would follow. Five minutes. She would go in, venture forward five minutes, and then retreat if she could not catch a glimpse of him. “Surely I am the greatest fool God ever put on the earth,” she muttered, hiking up her cloak and feeling the cold snow drift into the tops of her boots. Her cheeks and ears stung with the bitter cold, and tears froze on her cheeks.

Though the woods were eerily beautiful, with silvery branches stretched up like lacy fingertips to the pregnant moon above, she still shivered with cold and nerves as she plunged through the drifted snow in Nikolas’s path, not daring to call out for fear of alerting someone

—or
something
— to her presence.

And then she heard a rustling; she stopped and waited and heard it again, but not ahead of her

—to the side—and then it stopped. She took two steps and it started again, but when she stopped, it silenced. She swallowed past a lump, her heart beating so hard she thought her breastbone would rip open.

Forward or back? Or not to move at all?

Off to her left she caught sight of a movement, but it was low, slinking through the wooded underbrush. Moonglow caught it, and the figure was gray and black, low to the ground.

“Wolf,” she whimpered. A sob caught in her throat. This was ludicrous. She must leave; her decision made, she backed away, stumbled on a rut but righted herself, her feet numb with the cold and feeling like icy stumps.
Flee,
her terror shrieked;
don’t,
her common sense whispered.
Don’t alert anyone to your presence.

In the distance, beyond where she thought she saw the wolf, another figure moved, a slim figure in a gray cloak. Human! A woman? She squinted and could see the hood; as the figure moved, the hood fell back to reveal hair that streamed down across the gray of the cloak—silvery hair rippling in glorious waves.

She whimpered again, torn between her raging curiosity and her terror. Another sight of the wolf made her decision, and she ran away, her breath catching in great gasps as reason fled to be replaced by primal fear. Wolf! She ran and ran, the taste of fear like blood in her mouth, bitter and metallic, but then she saw that there was ahead of her no path, no great footsteps left by Nikolas, nor even her own. She had gone wrong and was off his path. Where?

She turned and turned, her cloak flinging snow up in a shower, but the only footsteps she could see were her own, back the way she had come. If she followed it, perhaps she could see where she had gone wrong. She tried, but soon terror gripped her as she realized it was leading her into deeper wood; bile backed into her throat, the bitter taste choking her. She didn’t remember where she had gone wrong, didn’t know what to do. A branch cracked somewhere. Human or beast? ,

“Nikolas!” she screamed. He was there, somewhere. Nikolas would know what to do.

“Nikolas!”

Just as her fear threatened to overwhelm her and her heart’s thumping was the only sound she could hear, she heard another noise, and there he was, a dark figure, moonlight glinting from his raven hair. “Nikolas!” she cried, running to him.

“Elizabeth,” he cried, clutching her shoulders and shaking her. “What are you doing out here?”

“I… I saw you leave… I wanted to know—”

“Never mind,” he said, roughly turning her and guiding her forward. “You must go back.” He pushed her ahead of him and soon she was at the edge of the forest; she could see that she was just a hundred feet along the forest’s edge from where she had entered.

“Go! Back to the house.”

“Come with me,” she said, turning back to him.

He stood on the edge of the forest, his bulky figure a dark blot against the silvery gray and deep green trees. “No. Go, now!”

She obeyed, afraid to do anything else, but when she turned back to look, she saw his figure melting back into the woods. Scared, cold, and bewildered, she raced back to the house, up the stairs, and to his room, where she stirred the fire, adding another log, then waited in the window seat, her wet feet becoming warmer, though still soggy.

There, across the white snow, she saw him carrying the woman. Who was it? She couldn’t see, couldn’t tell. She raced out to the landing, but he never appeared in the great hall, nor did he come down the passage. Where was he? She thought to descend, then hesitated, trying to imagine which way he had entered. She would go back to his room and use the secret passage, she thought finally. Maybe that would be where he was. She entered his room and there he was, flinging aside his cloak and pulling his wet boots from his feet. He had indeed come in through his secret passage.

“Who is she?” she whispered.

He looked up, his face haggard and harsh in the firelight. “It is not your business, Elizabeth.”

“Nikolas,” she said, striding across the room to him. “I—”

“No! Do not ask again,” he thundered, standing. “I warn you, stay out of this, or—”

“Or what?” she asked, standing before him.

He slumped down in his chair and buried his face in his hands. “Just go. Leave me.”

“No,” she whispered, refusing to be driven away. She squeezed into the chair beside him and took him in her arms, cradling him against her breast while she watched the fire burn merrily.

He was cold but gradually warmed, nuzzling her neck but not attempting to kiss or caress her.

When she looked down at him, the weariness had eased from his face and he was asleep, his stubble-darkened cheek resting on her breast. She stayed where she was, cradling him until early morn when he awoke enough to stumble to his bed.

SHE had come to some conclusions. The woman he rescued from her nighttime wandering had to be Countess Gerta; it fit with her madness, or weakness, or whatever it was. But why would Nikolas not just trust Elizabeth enough to tell her? He couldn’t think she would betray that trust, after everything they meant to each other. Though perhaps that intimate connection emanated more from her than him. Was it all an illusion, then?

She stayed away from him that morning, which was not difficult, since he did not join the family for breakfast, nor for luncheon. Countess Gerta was in her own room, “ill” it was said, which bolstered Elizabeth’s conviction that it was she who slipped out at night. But was it madness that sent her out into the cold and the danger of the woods, or did she slip out to meet a lover? And yet Count Delacroix was right there, inside the castle, and they could be together whenever discretion allowed.

Did she have another lover, then? If that was her the first night Elizabeth had arrived in the castle, that would explain her nakedness, but not why Nikolas was chasing her as if she were a deer. The mystery was infuriatingly obscure.

That afternoon as Elizabeth sat in the lady’s library, reading a new book that had just arrived, she heard the sound of male voices shouting. She raced out and down to the great hall, and there, again, was a group of villagers. This time she could understand every word they said as they confronted Nikolas.

“This is the skin of a wolf we caught last night on the edge of your property, Count von Wolfram,” the eldest man said, tossing down a bloody silver fur pelt that left a streak of dark red as it skidded across the marble floor to Nikolas’s feet.

Elizabeth gasped; was that the skin of the wolf she had seen the night before? She hid by a pillar, listening and watching.

“What were you doing in my woods?” Nikolas thundered. “I told you truly, if I caught any one of you there I would flay you alive and nail your hide to the church door.”

“But you did not catch us, we caught the wolf!” That was the mayor, Elizabeth now knew, an older man with gray hair beneath his knitted cap. He had not even removed his hat as he should have before his liege. His sneer was insolent and bitter. “We told you, if you do not let us patrol, we will do it anyway! Our dogs will be with us, and we will do what we must to protect our women and children from the awful teeth of these beasts.”

A terrifying thought occurred to Elizabeth: when Gerta slipped out at night, Nikolas was afraid she would be caught by wolves, or perhaps even worse, caught or killed accidentally by the terrified townspeople. Pity overwhelmed her and she slumped down by the pillar. Poor Nikolas, caught between his loyalty to his sister and the terror of his subjects. No wonder he looked haunted.

All day she pondered; she had heard that the full moon exacerbated some people’s madness.

Perhaps that was behind the tension in the house that she now knew to associate with the cycle of the monthly full moon. How little she knew, though. Was the moon truly full for more than one night? And why did it act as such an irritant?

And who else in the castle knew about Gerta’s affliction, that the entire household should become so filled with unease? Did some of the serving staff know? And how much of the family was aware of the countess’s nocturnal ramblings? Not Charlotte, she thought, though she could not be certain.

Questions plagued her, wretched curiosity blended with a real concern for the poor woman she had initially disliked but now pitied from the bottom of her heart. If madness was her curse, why could they not manage to keep her confined, since escaping was such a problem and such a danger? One person to watch her was all it would take, for she was slim and frail.

If any of Elizabeth’s musings held the truth, then she glimpsed it only faintly, like an image seen beyond smoky glass.

After the men left, she did not see Nikolas all day. Whether he was avoiding her, or if he was just taken up with his troubles and busy, she did not know. But how could she demand of him when he so clearly had deep troubles? The responsibility of those tribulations was wearing him down, she had felt it in his anxious restlessness, had seen it in the grooves that were beginning to band his high forehead. She was beginning to wonder if perhaps she had discovered the real reasons behind his refusal to marry. His deep sense of duty had taught him that there was no room in his life for more than he already tended.

Night fell, and the rhythm of the household slowed. The drawing room had been sparse, populated by only Count Delacroix, Bartol Liebner, and the Countess Adele, all of whom had retired early with murmured excuses of exhaustion. Elizabeth, restive and worried, had spent some time in the yellow parlor, wondering if she was accomplishing anything with Charlotte or if it was all just a futile exercise.

Finally, though, she decided to retire and quietly slipped along the corridor toward the great hall and up the stairs up to her room. But as she entered, she heard footsteps; she hesitated by the pillar and saw Gerta von Holtzen, silvery blond hair exposed, slip out the front door.

Nikolas
, Elizabeth thought immediately—
he should be told
. But if she stopped to find him, Gerta might be lost in the woods forever. Undecided, she glanced around her but saw no one, nor was there a single sound. If she screamed or yelled, people would come running, but then… men the secret of Countess Gerta’s odd nighttime perambulations would be known, and Nikolas had worked so hard to conceal her weakness. She raced after the countess to the front door, tore open the huge oak portal, and gazed out. “Countess Gerta,” she shouted into the wintry night as the figure retreated. The woman stopped for one second, and then she ran.

Shivering but determined, Elizabeth could not risk losing her and ran after her. She was fast; she would catch her before she got to the woods and stop her. Then she would know the answer to the mystery: madness or intrigue? No time for a cloak, no time even to tell anyone or to get word to Nikolas…

She raced across the snowy lawn, down the slope, slipping and freezing, and across the gravel lane. Gerta was swift, certainly, but still, if Elizabeth could just get to her before she entered the forest… and yet the race was a losing one. The woman ahead of her was truly fleet of foot, like a doe, dancing through the feathery mounds of moonlit snow to the dark edge of the forest, and then she plunged in and disappeared.

ELIZABETH ALLOWED herself one moment to curse, roundly, in language she had learned but never used, but then gathered her courage like a mantle around her and plunged in after the countess. The twists and turns of the countess’s flight were like the twists and turns of her life lately, Elizabeth thought briefly, her breath becoming ragged and the wet cold numbing her feet. “Curse these impractical shoes,” she muttered, gasping, flexing her frigid toes.

If it were not for the fact that she had seen the bloody pelt of the forest’s wolf with her own eyes, she would have sworn that she could see the animal following her. She stopped and stared through the dusky thicket of naked gray trunks, her breath puffing in clouds of fog.

There could only be one hunting animal in a forest, couldn’t there? Wouldn’t the dead beast have run off any others? Predators were by their very nature solitary creatures.

She moved on, trying to find the path. Damn and damn again! She had lost sight of the woman. Elizabeth stopped and realized her ragged gasps for air were echoed by a rustling close at hand. Was it the countess? She twisted and turned around, trying to see in the dim reaches of the wood, but she was at a spot in a fringe of conifers where moonlight, even as brilliant as it was on this snowy night, did not penetrate easily. It was dark and dank, the smell of snow and bark and pine filling her nostrils. Where was she?

A rush of air, and something brushed her cloak, falling at her feet. She cried out and jumped, but it was just a clump of snow fallen from one of the fir trees. Whimpering, she fell to her knees. What was she going to do?

A howl reached Elizabeth’s ears and she sobbed, terror replacing worry. Wolf? How was that possible? And yet… she listened, stuffing down the fear and trying to be rational. The sound was not like the wolf howl she had heard the first night. It was… it was higher, and with a keening edge like… like a woman’s wail of pain.