Wolfbreed (47 page)

His procession stopped at the end of the corridor to Lilly’s cell. Erhard stood and took a few deep breaths. He was not going to allow any more mistakes. Restrained or not, Erhard knew how deadly Lilly was.

The deference she had once shown him would be gone. Even with eight men, there was no room for any sort of complacency.

“You two”—he pointed at two crossbowmen—”take your aim.”

The two men nodded and knelt, bracing one on either corner of the short corridor. The silver heads of their crossbows glinted in the lamplight. They were the best marksmen present at Johannisburg Castle, and Erhard didn’t doubt that if they fired, each bolt would find its mark.

Halfway to the door, he told the other men, “Draw swords and hold here for a moment.” He advanced on the door alone, carrying a lantern. He would be the only person in immediate reach when he opened the window and looked into the cell.

He felt his heart pulsing in his throat as he reached up and opened the iron shutter. Nothing emerged to menace him from the dark portal other than the smell of urine-soaked straw.

He raised the lantern to the opening and saw her.

She rested on her side on the floor, arms behind her. Leather
straps wrapped her legs, and from her neck Erhard could still see a glint of silver that was not nearly as reassuring as it should have been. She made no threatening moves. All she did was blink up at the lantern.

He turned toward the other men and said, “Come here.” He pointed at a spot of the corridor a step beyond the grooves the door had worn in the floor. They lined up—three in front, two behind—silver blades glinting in the lantern light.

With his men in position, Erhard opened the latch and pulled the heavy door open. It moved slowly, screeching in protest. When Erhard had pushed it all the way against the corridor wall, he shone the lantern back into the room.

She hadn’t moved. She didn’t even look at him. Her eyes were closed and she had turned her head down, tucking her chin against her chest. He wished that she had been clothed when that boy Uldolf had bound her. She was dressed in nothing but leather bindings. However, he had come prepared to protect his men’s modesty, if not hers.

He walked into the room and pointed at two of the men in the hallway, waving them forward. One carried a bundle in addition to his sword.

“Cover her,” Erhard ordered. The man nodded and sheathed his weapon. The other man stood guard as the first unrolled a long burlap sheet. He draped the rough cloth over Lilly’s nakedness. She offered no resistance as the man rolled her up in it. She still refused to look at them—head bent, eyes closed.

Erhard waved another man forward and handed him the lantern.

This was his sin, and he would be the one to bear it to the surface. He thanked God for the fact that Lilly remained silent as he bent and picked her up. Only her head was exposed, and as he cradled her in his arms, she curled into a tight ball, burying her face in the burlap covering her body.

She’s trying to keep from facing God
, he thought, and accompanying that thought was the painfully blasphemous question:
My God, or hers?

He looked at the three men in the cell with him. “You stay ready for attack. Should I call out, or if she drops from my arms, dispatch her without concern for me.”

“Yes, sir,” the trio said in unison.

He walked to the doorway and looked at the men ahead of him. Two swordsmen stood just outside the swing of the cell door, and the two crossbowmen at the end of the corridor.

His men arranged themselves as he had told them earlier, the swordsmen surrounding him a pace out of arm’s reach. One crossbow moved ahead of him twenty paces, the other to the rear at twenty paces.

They knew that if they had to shoot, they would have no time to reload. He had warned them before the descent. “Shoot only when you see her head, and put the bolt in the brain if you can, the throat if you must, and try for the heart only if you have no other choice.”

Not one showed a hint of a question in his face. He had picked each one of these men because they all had personal experience of what the girl in his arms was capable of, either from his decade of using her as a weapon for Christendom, or from knowing and working with the more recent victims of her bloodlust.

None of these men would be deceived by the image of a pathetic child wrapped in rough burlap. Each man was armed with a proper weapon against her. They would not panic if they were suddenly faced with fang or claw.

Should she somehow attack, escape the bonds of silver on her neck, she might take Erhard’s life, but she would not live to take any more.

Fortunately, God was with them, and she made no hostile moves. In fact, she barely moved at all. As Erhard walked up out of the
bowels of the keep, surrounded by guards bearing silver weapons, Lilly began to tremble.

However, when he carried her outside, Erhard swallowed a growing unease when he realized that she wasn’t trembling.

Very quietly, almost inaudibly, Lilly was singing.

hey came for Uldolf before he was ready.

Then again, he never would be ready for this.

Even though he had been living on borrowed time since his arm had been torn from its socket, he didn’t want it to end this way. When the men came for him, he rushed the guards. It was a hopeless attempt. It only took one of them striking his already swollen face to drop him to the ground.

However, it would have been worse to go with them meekly, without at least trying.

The men roughly bound his arm to his side and yanked him upright. He screamed something obscene and one of them shoved a block of wood in his mouth, binding it fast with a strap of leather. Two more of them half dragged, half carried him through the stone corridors, up the stairs, and out into the bailey in front of the keep.

The sun had set, and the courtyard was lit by ranks of torches carried by narrow-faced German soldiers. The Prûsan prisoners formed an audience behind the torch-bearing soldiers.

The focus of the audience was the pyre.

In the torchlight, the wood structure loomed even larger than Uldolf remembered. The space under the platform had been piled high with wood and tinder. The quartet of closely grouped stakes pointed at the sky, fingers of some giant sinking back into the earth.

Even with so many people, the air was deathly still and quiet. No one in the audience spoke above a whisper. The loudest sound was the combined crackle of the burning torches.

Uldolf stared at the pyre, and it finally sank in.

Four stakes …

No. They can’t be so brutal …

The soldiers dragged him up on the platform, throwing him up against the stake nearest the keep’s entrance. He struggled as they pulled a rope around, binding his chest and upper body to the stake. As he thrashed against the bonds he saw past the guards.

He tried to scream
“Mother,”
but the wooden gag in his mouth prevented anything but a weak grunt.

Still, Burthe heard him and turned her head. Uldolf saw her eyes widen, and if it weren’t for the ropes binding him, he would have fallen to his knees in shame.

Worse than seeing his mother bound and gagged, worse than seeing her face bruised and bloody, was seeing the loss of hope in her eyes and knowing it was his fault she would now see
both
her children die.

The men who had bound him left to drag her up to the platform. They pulled her out of sight to the stake directly behind him. He whipped around to try and see what they were doing, but he could only turn his head enough to see the stakes on either side of him, to the front and back of the platform.

Then they brought out his father. If he hadn’t known it was Gedim, he might not have recognized him, the beating was so severe. Gedim’s face was a swollen patchwork of red and purple. Blood caked his mouth, which apparently was too swollen and
broken to fit a gag. His nose was a bloody mass of flesh, and there was a fist-sized lump where his left ear should be. The way the two soldiers carried him, he didn’t appear conscious. His body flapped like a rag doll as they tied him to the stake to Uldolf’s left, facing the wall of the keep.

Uldolf’s hand balled into a fist. His heart raced. They were going to bring out Hilde and tie her to the stake facing the crowd. The sight would break him.

But pride of place wasn’t going to go to his sister.

The entourage that emerged now from the keep was much larger than the one that had escorted Uldolf or his parents, and they moved as if they were in the midst of a military campaign. First came a man with a crossbow, who walked out past the pyre and took up a spot in front of the torch-wielding soldiers. He knelt and aimed back where he had come.

Next came two soldiers, swords drawn and glinting silver in the torchlight.

Following them walked a knight of the Hospital of St. Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem. He wore a white surcoat bearing the black cross of the Teutonic Order, and in his arms he carried a burlap-wrapped body.

Lilly had curled into a ball, her face buried in the filthy bindings. Her hair hung free, and much of the black had sweated away, so that her hair glinted red in the torchlight.

The knight bore his burden to the foremost stake, to tie her facing the crowd. As he mounted the platform, Uldolf heard something. Singing. An old lullaby that Uldolf recognized.

“Fear not the road before you …”

Uldolf swallowed, unprepared for the series of emotions slamming into his gut.

The first thought on seeing Lilly was that this was justice. She
should
burn in place of Hilde, payment for his first sister’s death, the death of his whole first family.

But the singing …

The girl he had known in the woods as a child; the woman he found in the same woods, the one who called him Ulfie; the one he had made love to, who had warned him not to remember.

illy sang to calm herself.

It would have been so easy to snap, to reach up and taste the flesh of Erhard’s throat, to punish her cold and unforgiving God. But what purpose would that serve? She knew she could take lives.

But could she
save
any?

She knew that her master was afraid. She felt it in the tenseness of the arms bearing her. She heard it in the way he breathed and in the thudding of the pulse in his chest. She smelled it in his sweat, even over the scent of mildew in the burlap that wrapped her. The rough cloth itched, but it also covered her, hiding the way she gradually moved her legs and arms apart, keeping the now-loose leather bindings taut.

They had been waiting for her. During their ascent from her cell, she had been aware of all of them; the two crossbowmen, the five men with silvered swords. They had expected her to fight. They had been waiting for it. One or two, she sensed, might have even been eager for it.