Wolfbreed (7 page)

“Can you stand? It would be awkward for me to carry you home.”

It seemed a long time that he stood with his hand outstretched. Uldolf was convinced, at this point, that she understood what he wanted. He felt, somehow, that she was deciding if that was what
she
wanted.

After a few minutes lost in thought, she reached up with her good hand and grabbed his. Her skin was cold and clammy from the water, but her grip was much firmer than he expected. He didn’t have a chance to help her up; she pulled herself up using him as leverage. He might as well have been the tree.

Unfortunately, she had not clasped his cloak, and it slid off as she stood. Even though she was still injured and filthy, her nakedness was much more distracting now than it had been when she was helpless, huddled on the ground. She was a striking beauty, with the kind of curves and proportions that Uldolf had never seen exposed before.

She let go of his arm and reached up, frowning, realizing that the cloak had slid off. Her lack of modesty made her nakedness even more distracting.

Uldolf stepped around her and retrieved the cloak from the ground, shook out some leaves, and tried to replace it on her shoulders. However, now that she was standing, it was more difficult than it looked. He placed it on one shoulder, and as he moved his arm around to place it over her other shoulder, the cloak’s weight
would make it slide off. He did it twice before he stopped, realizing that it wasn’t working.

He tried to never become frustrated over his missing arm. Like his past, it was a fact that would never go away. Cursing it, obsessing over it, led to places he didn’t want to go. But he couldn’t help the futile rage that built up inside him now. What kind of rescuer was he? He couldn’t even properly drape a cloak around a woman’s shoulders.

She looked over her naked shoulder at him, and Uldolf felt his face burn as he tried to keep his hand from shaking. He forced a smile he didn’t feel and said, “I’m sorry. I just need to think about this for a moment.”

She cocked her head at him, and he saw her hand reaching around, over her wounded shoulder.

He stared at her hand a moment before realizing what she wanted. “Thank you,” he said with mixed gratitude and embarrassment. He handed her one end of the cloak. While she held that end, he draped the other around her good shoulder.

He walked around her so he could show her the clasp. Holding it up so she could see, he threaded the long carved bone through the hole in the opposite side. “See? That’s how it stays on.”

She looked up, and he felt embarrassment again.

“Forgive me if I’m treating you like a child, but you don’t seem to understand me.”

She reached up and fumbled with the bone. She frowned. It had probably looked a bit easier to do one-handed when Uldolf had done it.

“Look, if you do that—”

Before he had finished talking, she had the cloak undone and it fell off her right shoulder again, exposing her wound, the fullness of her right breast, and most of a smooth muscular thigh.

Uldolf swallowed and stepped forward to grab the edge of the cloak again, but he had to stop when she held up her right hand
between them. The hand trembled slightly, and Uldolf thought of how painful that arm must be to move, even a little bit.

“You shouldn’t strain …”

He trailed off, because even if she did understand him, she wasn’t listening. She had taken a step back and had pulled the cloak completely off. Holding it before her, she stared at it, then changed her grip and deftly pulled it up over her own shoulders. With both hands, she closed the cloak herself, refastening it.

She looked down at the cloak with an expression of satisfaction, then looked up at Uldolf and smiled.

“I understand.” Uldolf smiled back. “You aren’t helpless.”

She took a step forward, and Uldolf saw the strength go out of her legs a moment before she realized it. Just as she swung her good arm out for some sort of support, Uldolf grabbed her. She fell into him, wrapping her arm and half the cloak around his chest. He found himself with his arm under the cloak, holding her to him. He felt his face flush for reasons completely apart from frustration at his missing arm.

She sucked in a sob, and looked up at him. He looked into her face and saw something there trying to push back the tears and the frustration.

He patted her on the back, careful to avoid her right shoulder. “I know how you feel. But I think if we are going to get anywhere, you’ll have to lean on me.”

She sniffed and nodded, as if she might be able to understand him.

other? What’s that sound?” Burthe looked over at her suddenly wakeful daughter. Hilde had sat up in bed, her nightshirt hanging loosely on her too-thin frame. Burthe set down the trousers she was mending and hurried over to Hilde’s bed. She felt the side of Hilde’s face for signs of fever, and was gratified to find that it hadn’t come back since breaking during the night. Still, she put her hand on Hilde’s shoulder to keep her from sitting up any farther.

“Be still, child. You’ve been too ill to be jumping around.”

“It’s Ulfie, Mama. Don’t you hear him?”

Burthe grunted. Her daughter had always had keener ears than she did. Age, and an infection that had savaged her after Hilde was born, had left her half deaf.

“Do you think he brought something for me?” She tried to toss her blanket aside, and swayed a little. “Oh …”

Burthe put her hands on Hilde’s shoulders and firmly guided her back into bed. “If your brother’s home, he’ll be here soon enough. The more you rest, the sooner you’ll be able to get up.” It took all of Burthe’s considerable will to keep the heaviness she felt out of
her voice. Over the last month, she had exhausted what herbal lore she knew trying to break Hilde’s infection. She had not told Uldolf or her husband, but she had begun to doubt that Hilde would get better.

Because of that fear, she found it hard to give into the same relief Uldolf had shown this morning. She held onto the worry, perhaps fearing that to let it go too soon would be to invite the evil back into her child’s body.

So even though part of her wanted to encourage her to jump on the bed like any other six-year-old, she only gave Hilde a stern stare as she drew the blanket up to her chin. “You rest, child.”

“I’ve been resting
forever
.”

She bent down and kissed her forehead, thinking,
I mustn’t cry
. “Don’t talk like that. You have not been resting forever, and you know it.”

“I’m sorry, Mama.”

The words echoed in Burthe’s head.
Resting forever
. Hilde had two siblings the child had never known about. They would have been ten and eight, had either lived. Her older brother, Masnyke, had died of a fever before he was one year old. Hilde’s sister had never had a chance to have a name, as the Christians had come when Burthe had been five months with child. She had fallen in the panicked rush to city gates ahead of the invaders. The fall had torn something inside her, and she had lost the child during the too-short siege that followed.

After the city fell, she and her husband, Gedim, had taken in the orphaned Uldolf. They thought she had been left barren and he would be their only child. And after so many losses, he was a blessing.

But two years later she had Hilde. And as difficult as the pregnancy was, as painful the birth, her daughter was a miracle. Like the adopted brother she worshiped, Hilde had reserves of strength that left Burthe humbled and a little bit in awe. As a midwife, she
saw boys years older succumb to illnesses not half as vicious as those she’d seen grip Hilde.

Yet now she was smiling, had a good color, and was chatting away as if she’d just woken up from a nap. “Mama, Ulfie sounds like he needs help.”

Burthe kissed her again, then stood up and listened. Muffled, outside, she heard someone calling, “Mother!”

It
was
Uldolf.

She stepped toward the door, casting a warning glance at Hilde. “You stay there, understand?”

“Yes, Mama.”

Burthe pushed the door to the cottage open and stepped out into the front field—the one that largely went to grow the taxes and the tithes that allowed their family to remain here unmolested. The week’s thaw had stripped the black earth naked, but when she stepped outside, her footsteps crunched; the ground was still stiff with frost.

The field between the cottage and the road was framed by a rough stone wall that testified to the rocky nature of the soil. Every stone had been clawed out of the mud years ago by Uldolf and her husband. Similar walls marked off the other fields they tilled and the pasture where they kept the livestock, when they had livestock. Since midwinter, the pasture only served their one horse, which was absent at the moment, having taken Gedim and the wagon to Johannisburg.

Uldolf was just now walking along the outermost wall, by the road. He stopped at the waist-high gate that led in to the field.

From inside the cottage, Burthe heard Hilde ask, “Did he bring something?”

That he had.

Uldolf saw her and called, “Mother, help!”

It took a moment for Burthe to respond to her son’s plea, because she was unable immediately to make sense of what she saw.
Uldolf cradled his cloak in his arm, half draped across his shoulder like a sack of grain.

“Oh, by the gods!” She ran across the field, realizing that Uldolf was doing his best to carry a human body one-handed. As she reached him, she amended the thought.

A woman’s body
.

Burthe could see the bloody temple and scalp resting against her son’s shoulder. She didn’t bother to open the waist-high gate. She just extended her arms over it. “Hand her to me.”

With a grunt and an audible sigh of relief, Uldolf unloaded his burden into her arms. The woman was small, but dead weight, completely unconscious. Even though Uldolf was wearing just a linen shirt in air that fogged the breath, he was coated with sweat and deeply flushed.

“How. Is. She?” He was so out of breath he could barely speak.

Burthe looked at the woman.

Not a woman
, she thought.
Only a girl
.

The girl in her arms was taking breaths that were even and deep, and her skin was of good color. “Despite the wound, she looks better than you.” She stepped back so Uldolf could open the gate and come in. “How far did you carry her?”

“Not far. I found her in the woods by Johannisburg’s eastern wall, I think bandits—”

“By Johannisburg? That’s five miles at least.”

“She was able to walk herself, at first.”

Burthe looked back at the girl’s head. The damage was awful, and were it not for the fact that this girl was flush and breathing, she might have thought it mortal.

“And how far did she walk, with such a grievous injury?”

“A quarter mile, maybe.”

Burthe shook her head. “No wonder you’re late.”

ama, who’s that?” Despite Burthe’s instructions, Hilde was sitting up on the edge of her narrow little bed.

“A guest,” Burthe told her. “And she’s hurt, so don’t you be bothering her.”

She laid the girl down in Uldolf’s bed. The girl sighed slightly and seemed to relax, but she didn’t regain consciousness. The bottom of Uldolf’s cloak slid open, revealing a filthy naked leg.