Wolfbreed (23 page)

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!”

ir 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.

utger 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 arms. “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 torc 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.”

Rutger grabbed what little rope he had and ran up, seizing the woman’s wrists. She cried, kicked, and screamed, but Karl struck her again, knocking her senseless enough for Rutger to bind her wrists together.

Rutger looked into her half-dazed eyes and she muttered something that sounded something like, “No, Ulfie.”

Now, this close, Rutger could see that the rain rolling down from her forehead had turned a dirty gray. Red highlights were just visible where the black was washing away.

“It
is
her.” Rutger backed away. “She killed how many …”

“Relax,” Karl told him. “I’ve collared the murderous bitch. She’s helpless now.”

“Why didn’t she attack us?”

Karl spat another gobbet of blood on the ground. “She dyed
her hair, obviously in the hope of avoiding our notice. She knew full well that if she did anything, everyone in these woods would descend on her.”

Rutger wondered at that. There were six of them, and this monster had supposedly killed easily twice that many. And he had come upon her sobbing …

He was glad that it was not his duty to deal with her.

“Let’s get her back to the Landkomtur, quickly.” Rutger turned to shout to the others.

“Rutger!” Karl yelled at him. “Did I order you to do anything?”