Wolf's Cross (5 page)

She tried to feed him, but he didn’t respond to her attempts. She had to satisfy herself with squeezing water into his mouth from a damp cloth.

She left the shutters on the small window open, to let out the air of disease. They were above the stables, but the smell of horses and manure was preferable to the smell of sickness that was rank in this room. And the night air might help cool his fever.

Outside, the sun was long gone, and a fat moon hung over the trees at the foot of the fortress’s hill. She needed to go home.

T
he two-mile walk seemed longer than usual, the woods darker, the shadows longer. She glanced around every time the wind creaked a branch, every time something rustled in the leaves. The woods loomed to either side, shadowed and impenetrable.

Somewhere out there was whatever had attacked the knights of the Order, whatever had wounded Josef. It was something she should fear to meet. But Maria was more afraid that Josef would die from his wounds. More than anything else right now, Maria prayed that her charge would live.

She told herself it was because she had been given responsibility for him. It was because of the wrongness of such a fine young man meeting such an undignified end. She had seen many men take up sword for their household or their God, and all accepted death as a camp follower, but they expected to meet death quickly in the heat of battle, not to succumb to fever and infection, delirious in their own filth.

Few men deserved that end—not Josef, and not her father.

That’s what she told herself.

But she still felt his breath against her ear and the accidental brush of his lips against her cheek.

W
hen she reached the edge of her family’s farm, she sucked in a breath. Hanna, her stepmother, was going to require an explanation for her lateness, and there was little reason for Maria to believe that it wouldn’t be a long and unpleasant questioning. Her father and her stepmother always wanted a strict accounting of her activities beyond their sight.

She paused at the gate and looked at her family’s cottage. She could see the yellow flicker of a lantern shining from between cracks in the shutters. The dim light shone on the flanks of an unfamiliar horse tied up by the side of the house.

Who’s here?

Suddenly, she thought of her father. Had he …

“Papa!” she called out. She ran to her house, afraid that the horse belonged to a priest come to administer last rites or console her stepmother. “Papa!” she called again, and the door to the cottage burst open.

For a moment she felt a near-disabling relief as she saw her father push through the doorway. But it soon gave way to alarm
at the expression of rage and terror contorting his face. He ran to her, clad only in a nightshirt, bellowing, “Maria!”

Maria couldn’t find her voice. He was ill. He shouldn’t be out of bed. His hair was wild in the moonlight, his eyes gleamed with some preternatural terror, and the skin of his face had flushed almost purple. He grabbed her shoulders, shaking her. “You took it off! You took it off!”

“Papa?” Maria cried.

“What did you do?” He stared into her face. “Why did you take it off?”

“I don’t understand.” She hugged herself as her father shook her. “Papa, you’re hurting me.”

What frightened her most was the fact that her father was crying. “It was to keep you safe. Why did you take it off?”

Keep me safe?
Her father was delirious. He must be talking about her cross. She reached up and pulled it from under her chemise. “No, Papa, I didn’t take it off.”

Her father backhanded her. She fell to her knees in front of him, clutching her face and sobbing.

“Don’t lie to me!” he screamed.

“I-I d-didn’t,” Maria sobbed into the ground.

“If you didn’t—” He sucked in a shuddering breath and stumbled backward. “If you—”

“P-papa?”

She got to her feet as her father stumbled backward again, gasping for breath and shaking his head. Her stepmother ran from the doorway, calling to him: “Karl?”

He shook his head, his voice no more than a breathless wheeze, and fell backward into her arms.

Maria held the cross between her breasts and said, “I didn’t take it off.”

Her father kept shaking his head and slid down as if his legs
couldn’t support his weight anymore. Her stepmother’s voice cracked as she said his name. “Karl. You can’t leave me alone with this! Not now.” She turned back toward the door, where Maria’s three brothers stood. “Come, help me bring your father inside.”

Maria stepped forward, but her stepmother turned to face her. “Please. Not now. He’s too upset.”

“B-but …” Maria stood transfixed in front of the cottage as her brothers ran out, toward their father. As they helped carry him inside, her stepmother watched her, eyes shiny with tears and an emotion Maria didn’t want to understand.

What have I done?

The confusion and fear in her parents’ eyes confused and frightened her. Worse was the sudden unfocused guilt that consumed her.

For the first time in years, she was too keenly aware of the fact that she was a bastard child. Her father’s blood ran in her veins, but not his wife’s. Did Hanna hate her for that?

Maria followed them to the doorway, and every labored breath her father took made her shudder and left her feeling as weak as if she were the one who couldn’t breathe.

She stood in the doorway, suddenly a stranger in her own house.

Hanna and Maria’s older brother, Władysław, eased her father back into his bed; the covers were still thrust aside, as if he had sprung from his sickbed in a delirium. Her two younger brothers stepped back. The youngest, Wojciech, cried silently, while Piotr, her middle brother, held his shoulders.

Near where Maria hung back, next to the doorway, a young man tried uncomfortably to stay out of the way. Maria recognized the curly hair and the patches of stubble on his chin that had yet to make a beard. He was one of the younger sons from a neighboring farm, and he held his hat in his hand, crushing the brim in his nervousness.

“Shall I fetch a doctor—” he began.

Maria’s stepmother didn’t even glance at the boy. “And a priest. Move!”

The boy ran for the door before Maria could collect herself to remember his name. As he shoved his way by her he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how he’d react.”

He didn’t even look back to see Maria’s bewildered expression as he untied his horse and mounted to gallop the two miles back to Gròd Narew.

“Maria,” her stepmother called, “fetch your father some water.”

“Yes!” She scrambled to bring it. Her father had stopped struggling and lay still on the bed. When Maria reached his side, his eyes showed no rage or fear, only resignation. Something made her look to her stepmother for approval before raising the cup to her father’s lips. Maria couldn’t help thinking that her stepmother’s approving nod was tentative, as if some unforgiven transgression still weighed against her bastard stepdaughter.

Her father took only a few sips, then shook his head. Maria removed the cup, and he looked up at her. As she bent over him, the cross fell free of her chemise and dangled down from her neck.

He stared at it, then up at her. Then he reached with an unsteady hand and pressed it back up, against her chest.

“I didn’t take it off, Papa.”

He nodded as if he finally believed her, and let his hand fall to his side. “Karl,” Maria’s stepmother said. “Hang on. We’ve sent for the doctor.”

He looked up at his wife and very slightly shook his head: no.

“It’s not time. Please, it’s not your time.”

He took his wife’s hand and sucked in a ragged breath. “Keep her safe.”

In the end, it was the priest they needed, not the doctor.

F
or Maria, the next few days passed in a haze. Even though the months of illness should have prepared her for it, she had somehow never expected her father to die. But worse than the loss, which was a sucking wound in her soul, was the sense that somehow it was her fault. For some reason she had prompted his last fatal exertion, and she didn’t know why.

Now every look from her stepmother or her brothers seemed to carry a cold accusation. Several times after her father was buried she had been tempted to ask if they blamed her, if this was truly her fault, but each time the fear had stopped her. What would she do if they confirmed it? What could she do?

What if the only reason she could still live in her home was because she eased the burden on the farm by serving in Gròd Narew? It was an unbearable thought that, with his death, she had somehow unknowingly pushed the rest of her family away as well.

So she avoided the question by waking early and doing her few chores on the farm before anyone else was up. A happy side effect was that she arrived at Gròd Narew before dawn, and before Lukasz and his fellow stable hands were out with the horses.

And, while two more Germans died over the next three days,
her German, Josef, hung on to his life. At first, returning to care for him after her father’s death, she’d resented his survival. Why did he still live while her father had died?

The flash of irrational fury at him was frightening in its intensity. The shame and horror it left in its wake proved much more persistent. Paradoxically, in the days before he regained consciousness, she treated him much more tenderly—knowing that, had she the means, she could have easily killed him for the sin of surviving her father.

On the fourth day of caring for him, while she washed his chest with cold water to help temper his fever, he spoke to her.

“Who are you?” he said, blinking against the evening light.

She froze. Again, the act of his speech fundamentally changed the nature of what she had been doing. Moments ago, she had been cooling the flesh of an invalid, and suddenly she was caressing a young man’s naked chest. This was no delirium, though; his eyes had opened and looked upon her with puzzlement and loss.

She stared deep into those eyes and felt, instinctively, that he somehow shared her grief. He had suffered a loss just as deep, and as—

“Who are you?” he repeated, shattering her reverie. She pulled her hands from his skin, silently chiding herself for feeling embarrassment. This was no different from caring for her invalid father.

It
shouldn’t
be any different.

But this man wasn’t her father.

“I am Maria.” She spoke slowly, her stepmother’s German uncomfortable in her mouth.

He blinked and stared at her as if she had spoken gibberish.
Probably can’t understand my speech
, she thought.

Then he looked away from her to glance about the room. “Where am I?”

“Gród Narew, under the protection of the Wojewoda Bolesław.”

“Bolesław?” he repeated. He leaned back and closed his eyes. “That is not a Prussian name.”

“You are in the Duchy of Masovia.”

He nodded, wincing as he started to sit up.

“Don’t. You’re badly injured.” She placed her hands on his shoulders and pushed him down. His skin was warm but no longer feverish, and while he had broad shoulders and a warrior’s build, his wounds had left him little strength to resist her.

He stared up at her and muttered, “My brother knights?”

“They’re here,” she told him. “But you need to rest.”

He nodded, and in his eyes she saw the weight of his efforts. Fatigue drew on every muscle of his face.

“What happened to you?” she asked him.

But his eyes had already closed and sleep had claimed him before the question left her lips. She let her hands fall off his shoulders and stared down at his sleeping face. It had a different character now than when he’d been unconscious from his wounds and infection. His color was better, and there was a new sense of a person behind the sleeping mask.

“I prayed for you, Josef,” she whispered, brushing the back of her hand against his cheek. “Now I think God has seen fit to answer.”

Though he still slept, she heard him softly whisper, “
Sarah …
”

She pulled her hand away and took a step back, suddenly feeling an intruder on something very private.