XIX
Władysław had been sitting on a log at the edge of the woods, waiting for her.
She stopped when he saw him.
He stood, bending to pick up his axe.
“You came back,” she said.
“You’re my sister.”
She ran to him, tears welling up in her eyes, and threw her arms around him. “I’m sorry.”
He patted her back. “I forgive you.” He coughed and added, “Now let me go, so I can breathe.”
She released her embrace and said, “I thought …”
Władysław laughed. “It’d take more than a little yelling for me to stay angry at you. But who was the man with you at the gate?”
Maria froze, uncertain about how to respond. When she saw the true inquiry in her brother’s eyes, she turned away to hide her flush.
“Josef,” she said. “His name is Josef.”
“What trinket did he give you that was so shiny?”
“He gave me a dagger, to protect myself. Like you, he is overly concerned.”
“Such interest must be flattering,” he said, but there was a kernel of hard suspicion in the statement. It felt worse because she knew, for her part, that it might be merited.
She tried to answer the unspoken question. “Josef’s taking holy orders. He was wounded and I’ve been tending to him—”
“You mean he’s one of the Germans?”
“—and I think he meant to repay my service,” Maria finished, ignoring Władysław’s increasing alarm.
“Maria, do I need to remind you—”
“No, you do not,” she snapped.
There had been a point in her life when her brother’s concern for her chastity might have made her collapse in shame or embarrassment. Today, after what she had seen of herself in the woods, his alarm about Josef’s attentions was less than trivial, and she had to strain to keep her frustration from igniting into true anger at someone far from deserving it.
He opened his mouth, but when she looked into his face something in her expression kept him from pursuing the topic. They walked a few more moments in silence; then he finally asked, “May I see it?”
Maria handed him the hilt of the dagger, and Władysław held it up before him. The polished surface glinted in the evening light. Now she could see the scrollwork and the German script engraved on the sides. It seemed more an item of jewelry than a weapon.
Władysław grunted, obviously gripped by his own frustration. “And this toy is supposed to protect you from what, exactly?”
The same Devil as the cross around my neck.
Maria couldn’t bring herself to speak. She couldn’t repeat Josef’s words—not after having learned that she was what the Germans hunted. She also couldn’t give voice to yet another lie.
“Maria?”
“Władysław,” she said finally, “did you know my mother?”
“What do you mean? Mother is—” He paused for a moment, and all the tension drained out of him. The frustration in his face turned to melancholy as he said quietly, “Oh.”
Maria loved him dearly for that moment of confusion.
“Do you know anything of her?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, but I was two years old.”
“Father never spoke of her?”
“Not to me.” He handed the dagger back to her. “I’m sorry.”
Maria nodded and took the dagger. When she did, he reached out and touched her hand. “Please, if you speak to Mother about this, be kind with her. Anything that happened was not her doing.”
“I promise.” She looked across at her brother, who stared steadfastly down the path ahead. The evening dusk had faded into night, and his face was cloaked in shadows that made it hard to read his expression. “Is there something you’re not saying?”
“I truly know nothing about your mother …”
“But you know something about me?”
Władysław was silent for a long time before he said, “I might have been five, and you were just three, when you first put that cross around your neck. Do you remember what happened?”
Maria shook her head. “I thought I always had this.” She reached up and touched the chain around her neck.
He craned his neck and echoed her gesture with his free hand, tracing the ghost of a scar on his neck. “It wasn’t really your fault. For some reason I thought that yanking your hair was great fun.”
“I did that?”
“Only after I made you burst into tears.” He lowered his hand. “I don’t remember much of anything after you stopped crying. But you certainly put me in my place.”
Maria’s heart thundered in her chest. Ever since Darien had loosed this thing in her, her greatest fear was that she might strike out at her family. It had never occurred to her that she might have already done so. “I hurt you?”
“Nothing serious. Cuts and bruises, a black eye, a bite on my neck.”
“God have mercy.”
“Please, don’t be upset. It was sixteen years ago.”
His reassurances did nothing to calm her. If she had changed, bitten his neck, she could have killed him.
“He gave me the cross after that, didn’t he?”
“It was Mother, actually.” He stopped and sighed. “I was feverish, bedridden, and they thought I was asleep. I never told them otherwise. For a while I thought I’d dreamed it …”
“Dreamed what?”
Władysław was silent for a long time, and his silence allowed her dread to grow unchecked. Something small and still told her that she didn’t want to know what her brother might have dreamed.
“What?” she asked.
“I shouldn’t—”
She grabbed his arm, stopping him, and pulled him around to face her. “Tell me!”
“Father wanted to get rid of you,” Władysław said finally.
Maria dropped his arm and backed away as his words came spilling out.
“Mother and Father argued. They screamed. He was horrified about what had happened. He kept saying that if I died, it would be his fault for bringing you into the house. Mother finally convinced him not to abandon you in the woods. She left that night, making him pledge that he would keep us both safe. She was gone for two months. When she came back, she had your cross with her.”
He paused, probably expecting her to argue, to yell again, to insist that Father would have done no such thing to her, say no such thing. Yesterday, she might have.
“She brought this cross?”
“Yes. I don’t know how or where she found it. I never asked about the night she left. I don’t think Mother or Father knew what I had heard.”
“You never told me.”
“If he was alive now, I still wouldn’t.” He shook his head. “What purpose does this story serve? Father spent the rest of his life trying to earn forgiveness for that night.”
And his last day on earth, he believed it was all for nothing.
She probably should have felt anger at her father, for ever considering abandoning her to die in the woods. She couldn’t. She understood what her father feared, even if her brother didn’t. She could see how, in his telling or in his memory, he had considerably lightened the injury she had given him. He didn’t remember the attack itself, and the wounds she had given him had sent him to bed with infection.
What kind of horror was it to face the fact that one of your children had almost killed the other? How much heavier the guilt when the violence came from a bastard child you’d brought into the house?
Maria could barely conceive of what he must have gone through.
“Thank you for telling me this.” She started walking down the darkened path again.
“You are going to talk to Mother about this,” he said.
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Please remember,” Władysław said, “that anything she did, anything she’s kept from you, was all done because she loves you as her own.”
“I know,” Maria whispered, holding the cross to her heart.
Her stepmother met them at the gate, the worry in her face obvious. “Władysław, you left hours ago. Does it take so long to bring your sister home?”
“It isn’t his fault,” Maria said. “I was late leaving, and I made him stop and talk.”
Hanna kept talking to Władysław. “After last night, why would you let her—”
“I said it wasn’t his fault!” Maria snapped.
Maria’s stepmother looked at her, and even her brother seemed a bit shocked at her outburst.
“Don’t raise your voice to me,” her stepmother said. Even as she spoke, Maria could see a hint of fear in her eyes. She could almost smell it in the air around her.
Had that fear always been there?
“We need to talk about my mother,” Maria said.
“I am your mother.”
Maria saw Hanna’s eyes search her face for something. “You know what I want to talk about.”
“You …” Hanna turned to Władysław and said, “Please go into the house. I need to talk to your sister.”
“Remember what I said,” Władysław told her as he walked toward the cottage. He left Maria and her stepmother outside, under the night sky. Around them, leaves rustled in the breeze, and somewhere an owl hooted.
“Maria,” her stepmother said, “there are reasons we never talk about your mother, some things we’re best off not knowing.”
“What if I know those things already?” Maria reached into her chemise and lifted the cross’s chain up from around her neck.
“What are you doing?” Hanna reached out a hand to stop her, grabbing her wrist. Even though Maria knew she could easily break the grasp, she just ducked her head down out of the encircling chain.
“What if I know why I should wear this?”
“Please, put it back on. You don’t know—”
“You’re afraid I’m going to hurt someone, like I hurt Władysław?” Maria saw the panic growing in her stepmother’s eyes, and she wanted to reassure her that she hadn’t hurt anyone—but it would have been a lie. She had hurt Lukasz, had broken his cheekbone, and she had hurt Darien, clawing through his back. The fear was real, and it was justified.
She dropped the cross back around her neck and told her stepmother, “I walked out into the woods today and took it off.”
“No, please tell me you didn’t—”
“What am I?” Maria asked her stepmother. “What am I, and where did I come from to be your daughter? Why would you take something like me under your roof?”
“You are my daughter,” her stepmother said.
“I’m not of your blood. I’ve known at least that much all my life. After what I became in the woods, I wonder if I bear any of your husband’s, either.”
Her stepmother slapped her face, the impact ringing through the woods around her. Maria’s cheek stung with the impact. “Do not say that! You are Karl’s daughter—never doubt that, or him. He was a flawed man, but to him you were the one thing that granted him some grace.” Her stepmother sniffed, and Maria realized she was crying.
Quietly, Maria said, “Do I not deserve to know?”
“Yes, you do. But we didn’t want to lose you.”
“Even after what happened to Władysław?”
“You were barely a child. How could we hold you responsible?”
“Please, Mother, tell me where I came from.”
Interlude
Anno Domini 1333
Her name was Lucina, but she didn’t remember who had named her. She lived in the deepest woods east of Gród Narew, mostly ignorant of the humans dwelling there. The people who lived on the fringes of these woods—especially those whose families had spent generations in its shadow—knew of her and her kind. Lucina’s ancestors haunted the tales that had been spoken of in hushed tones ever since the land had become Christian.
However, it had been a long time since Lucina had had family. And a long time since her kind had haunted these woods in any numbers. She was alone, and the old folks’ tales about wolves clothed in human skin had become less urgent, less of a deterrent for hungry men who needed to stock their families’ larders.
Lucina would watch these men as they made their pitiful attempts at hunting. Sometimes she would watch with the eyes of a wolf, sometimes with the eyes of a raven-haired maiden. She would watch them come into her wood and, more often than not, return empty-handed.
She watched not out of any malice but out of curiosity and a deep loneliness. She was the last of her kind in these woods and, she thought, perhaps the last of her kind anywhere. These men who came to find game, they all had a home to go to.
Home was as alien a concept to Lucina as having to trap her prey or shoot it with an arrow.
Each winter, her despair grew deeper. She would always be alone, and she envied these human women who sent their men out to parade in front of her. Why? What could these frail human women give that she could not? She was stronger then they were, faster, and a better hunter than these poor men …
It was not long before she decided that there was no reason she couldn’t have what they had. Once she resolved this, Lucina studied these men with a new eye, looking for someone she could love, and who could love her back. She watched how they moved, how they hunted, and how they carried their kill.
And only days into the winter, when the snow barely dusted the needle floor of her woods, she saw the man who would become her mate. This man had broad shoulders and seemed to stand above all the others who braved her forest. He also had a masculine scent that made Lucina lick her lips in anticipation.
This was the man who would free her from her solitude.
When Karl met her, a light snow was falling. Lucina stood in a clearing, white dusting a red cloak she had stolen from a cottage close to the woods. She smiled at him from under the hood—smelling him, watching him.
She stood between him and a dead hart. The freshly killed animal lay sprawled in the snow, slowly leaking blood from the wound Lucina had torn in its neck.
“What is this?” he asked. “Who are you, and why are you alone in the woods?”
“My name is Lucina,” she said, her voice hoarse from so long without speech. “These woods are where I live.”
“It is dangerous. The animal that killed that deer may still be about.”
She walked up to him and placed a hand on his chest. When the cloak parted, it became obvious that it was the only thing she wore. His breath caught, and in his scent Lucina could tell that he did not dislike what he saw. She leaned forward and whispered, lips brushing his ear, “The kill is mine.” He didn’t move, didn’t speak, as her hand found its way under his shirt. “Do you wish some of it?”
“That is your kill?”
“I smelled it, tracked it, and tore its lifeblood free with my teeth.” She licked his ear, tasting his sweat, smelling the first hint of fear.
“What are you?” he asked.
“You know,” she said. “These are my woods.” She caressed him, running her hand down the side of his chest. “Do you want a share of my kill?”
“What are you asking?”
“A leg perhaps? The meat would feed several mouths.”
“You would give that to me?”
She brought her face around in front of his, their lips a finger’s breadth apart. “In return for something.”
“What?”
Her hand traveled lower, into his breeches.
“Respite from my loneliness,” she said, before she kissed him.
It may have been fear, or shock, or the thought of a hungry family, or simply the heat of Lucina’s skin so close to his own. It may have been the fact that her loneliness was manifest in every word she spoke. It may have just been the fact that Karl was a man, and men are weak.
Whatever the reason, any or all, Karl did not pull away from Lucina when he could have. He tasted her mouth, and let her place his hand on her naked bosom. Her cloak fell away and she led him down to the snow-covered earth and buried him under the weight of her solitude.
He came to her many times that winter, and each time her heart grew fuller at his presence. To him, she was a secret vice, a spirit that lived in another world, one of trees and bloody carcasses and lovemaking in the snow. To her, he was a reason to live, a joy, a lover and a husband in what sense she could understand the term. They spoke little—he walking in his dream, she drinking in obsession beyond words.
There was no doubt in Lucina’s growing heart that the next time Karl came to embrace her, he would tell her that he would stay. It was that hope that carried her through the depth of winter. And it was that hope that slowly died in the spring.
As the snow melted and the ground softened, the men who braved these woods stayed upon their plots of land to till the soil and grow the harvest that would keep them and their people through the next winter. There was no one to explain this to Lucina; for all her watching of the men in the forest, for all her listening to their language, she didn’t understand. All she knew was that as the first buds grew, her Karl did not return to her.
Many times she stood, in her red cloak, next to some beast she had taken. She attacked larger and larger prey, as if Karl might be enticed back—bucks, a bull elk, a mountain cat, a bear.
As the months passed, her heart shrank, and her belly grew.
And as summer became verdant, and Karl’s seed grew large within her, her heart grew black and cold. She had been cast aside in worse isolation than the loneliness she had thought to escape. As gravid as she was, she found it impossible to change, to run as a wolf does. Hunting became difficult, and she grew gaunt.
When she gave birth, it was with blood and screams and the rending of flesh. However, she survived, as she could bear far more injury and insult than any human woman. Three children she had, all girls. And as she licked the blood off Karl’s daughters, she decided that Karl would have to come help care for them. And that meant she had to take away any reasons he had for staying away.
She found Karl’s farm in the midst of a horrible storm at the end of harvest season. Ice fell like needles from a sky boiling and black as ink. The wind howled and bit with a force that felt as if it could tear flesh from bone.
Her howls were louder than the storm, louder than the thunder. Karl heard her cries as he huddled with his family around the fire in their cottage. At first he didn’t want to admit to himself that he knew what made those terrible, terrifying sounds.
But he knew.
Even though he had never seen his dreamlike winter lover in other than her human guise, he knew. Just as he knew that his trysts were no dream, and the wood where they had happened no fairyland.
He had bought more than meat, and at a much dearer price.
Karl took an axe and told his wife to protect their young son, to bar the door and the shutters and let no one in before morning—not even him. Then he left the cottage to face the beast that cried for him in the storm.
She stood in front of the cottage, waiting for him. She was naked, but no longer human. Lips that had borne his kisses were curled in the lupine snarl of a feral she-wolf. The hands that had caressed him were now dark-furred and long-fingered, ending in hooked claws. The legs that had straddled his body were now the crooked legs of a wolf.
He didn’t want to know her. He wanted this apparition to be something new and strange to him. But he looked into her eyes, and he knew whom he faced, and what.
“You left me.” Her voice, always rough from lack of use, came out of her lupine throat as little more than a growl.
“I had to tend the harvest.” The words were empty in Karl’s mouth. She had come to him, true. She had been the one to place her lips on his—but he had never pulled away. He had never said that he had a family, a wife, a son. He had pretended, because the situation was unreal, that it wasn’t real. That because she wasn’t human, it didn’t matter.
And the horror he felt was more for what he had done than for the monster standing in front of him. She panted, steam rising from her muzzle as lightning carved highlights from black ice-matted fur.
“You left me alone, with child.” She growled and took a step toward him. His axe dangled impotently from his hands and he shook his head, trying to deny the truth of the allegation.
“I didn’t know,” he said finally, as knives made of falling ice scoured the tears from his cheeks.
“I birthed your whelps, alone in a cave, and swaddled them in the skin of a bear I had killed … for you.” She stood before him, barely taller than he and starvation-thin, but still seemed to loom over him. He felt her breath on his face as she growled.
“I didn’t know,” he said again, as if those were the only words he knew anymore.
“You will care for our children.”
As she stared into his face, he saw the head of a starved she-wolf, ice matting her fur into spikes, muzzle wrinkled into a snarl. But the eyes were hers, and in them he saw the pain, the loneliness.
“Yes,” he said.
The creature before him froze, as if she couldn’t quite understand the word. Her muzzle lost its snarl as she pulled back from him. “You will come back with me. To your daughters.”
“I will go with you,” Karl said. He thought of his wife and child, barricaded in the cottage. He couldn’t leave them to the anger of this beast. Better that the she-wolf received what she wanted, what he’d implicitly promised her.
“You will come back? With me?” The voice softened in her inhuman mouth, and her eyes shone from more than melted ice. In a flash of lightning, Karl thought he saw one side of her mouth pull up in a melancholy smile. “Our children are beautiful.”
“Take me to them,” he said, all the time thinking of his wife and son, in the cabin.
And, in a moment of fear and weakness, he glanced back. He knew it was a mistake as soon as he turned his head, because he could hear Lucina growl.
“Liar.”
He turned back. “No, I—”
She backhanded him in the chest—a blow that knocked him rolling into the icy mud of the path.
“Liar!” she shrieked at him, jaws snapping at air. When the lightning lit her face, he saw nothing but fury.
He raised a hand, hoping to pull back the thread of hope he had seen in her eyes a moment ago. “No, I will—”
She pounced on him, knocking him down, pressing his shoulders to the ground with her massive clawed hands. “You will tire of me, like you did before. You will come back with me, but you will leave. Like you always have. You will always come back here.”
“No, not this time.”
In another flash of lightning, he saw her lupine mouth smiling again, but this time it was the rictus grin of death staring down at him, dripping saliva that burned a cheek that was frozen from the icy needles of the storm. She bent down so her muzzle was next to his ear, lips brushing him as they had the first time they met. “No,” she whispered. “Not this time.”
She leapt off him, growling words that had lost their meaning in her fury. To his horror, she ran to his cottage.
His wife. His son.
The sudden threat drove all thought of his own guilt away. The woman Lucina had been was wiped from his mind as he saw this atavistic shadow bearing down on his family. As she attacked the door, slamming herself against the splintering wood, he pulled his axe out of the mud and ran after her.
Strong as she was, she had been weakened by her troubled childbirth and months of hunger. Were she the same Lucina that had greeted Karl in the woods, naked under her red cloak, the door would have given way with a single blow. But now she splintered one board at a time, reaching in with a furred arm to cast aside the bar sealing the door.
Karl came upon her as her shoulder pressed against the hole she had smashed between the planks of the door. She turned her head to see him, and as the axe came down on her neck, he saw resignation in her eyes.
The first blow was grave—an awful wound tearing through her neck, spilling her life out over frozen black fur. Had she run then, she might have survived, healed from even such a massive insult. But she didn’t run. Instead, she used all her strength to say two words to Karl through her damaged throat—words that came in a froth of blood.
“Our children.”
The second blow landed before Lucina’s weakened body could begin to seal the damage from the first. The third took Lucina’s life. The fourth was just the formality that completely removed her head from her body.
Karl left his wife and son, and his dead lover, to find his daughters. He slogged through the ice storm, deep into the dark woods, to the clearing where he had made his trysts with the wolf. As he searched he raged and cried—cursed himself, and Lucina, and God. As he stumbled in the dark, he selfishly hoped for the peace death would bring him.
Then he heard an infant’s cry.
He found them in a shallow hollow in a hillside, wrapped in the raw hide of a bear that smelled foul with decay. For two infants, it was already too late. Their bodies were blue and cold. But the last child was pink and healthy, and screamed as the ice bit her skin.
He brought all three home, the tiny corpses slung across his back in their rotting bearskin. His one living daughter he carried tightly inside his shirt, so that she would have his body for warmth. When he reached home, the storm had broken, and a cold dawn had begun chasing clouds from the sky.