VIII
Darien stood in the center of the wooded path, still disbelieving. It had been decades since he had entertained even the hope of finding someone else. He had been resigned to being singular, unique.
“Maria,” he whispered, savoring the taste of the name in his mouth. He drew in a deep breath and let the remnants of her scent fill his lungs. There was no mistaking it—not her scent, not the taste of her skin.
She had even invited him to do more than taste.
Maria was unquestionably one of his kind. If he had believed in God, he would have thought it providence that had placed her in his path. And, for once, it gave him something more than vengeance to look forward to.
Then he heard a weak groan from the woods.
First things first.
Darien slipped back into the woods and stood above the semiconscious man who had assaulted Maria. He had already forgotten the oaf’s name. Not that any name was necessary; he was simply meat that, at the moment, had earned slightly more of Darien’s hatred than most men.
The man groaned on the forest floor, not quite recovered from striking the tree whose roots now supported him. A fractured bone protruded from his arm, and the side of his face was swollen and bloody.
Had it only been Darien, he might have left this sack of meat to live or die as it saw fit. If not for his actions, this pathetic man would be beneath Darien’s notice. But Darien had told Maria that this man would learn discretion.
He laughed silently at his own joke as he reached down and threw the unconscious man over his shoulder. Almost completely over; he had forgotten how light men were when they wore no armor. He grabbed the man’s ankle just in time to keep him from sliding all the way down his back, then pulled as he stood so that his burden was draped properly across his shoulder.
At some point during the process, his burden had awoken and started bellowing at him through a broken jaw, pounding on his back with his good arm. Darien ignored both as he slipped deeper into the woods.
Maria stopped in front of her family’s cottage. She had run all the way here after her meeting with Darien. She thought she should be out of breath, but she only felt a little flushed.
Her exhilaration, she told herself, was from the brisk run and the release of her fear upon coming home. She had better sense than to think it had anything to do with Darien. He might have helped her, but he was unquestionably dangerous. More dangerous than her perennial nemesis Lukasz could ever hope to be. Lukasz was young, strong, and armed, and Darien had tossed him aside like a sack of grain, disarming him simply with his bare hands.
He was clearly an outlaw, and the only thing that had saved her from a fate worse than Lukasz was that outlaw’s momentary good graces. Such a liaison belonged safely in a ballad, with knights and maids who needn’t worry over consequences beyond the last stanza.
She thanked God that her evening’s adventure had spawned no such consequences. Lukasz was spineless in the face of actual power, and she suspected that Darien could buy the wretch’s silence with only a few well-chosen words. And even if Lukasz should bring a grievance to the Wojewoda Bolesław, Maria doubted that her name would arise in the complaint.
And even if it did, she would much rather face Lukasz’s words than his hands.
The door to the darkened cottage opened. Maria’s stepmother stood in the doorway. “Maria?”
“Yes, Mama?” she said quietly, realizing that she had been standing outside for a long time. She looked up; the insects and the frogs had renewed their nighttime singing.
“It is very late.”
“I’m sorry, Mama. I had work—”
“Your face.” Her stepmother drew a sharp breath and ran to her side, lifting Maria’s chin toward the moonlight. “You’re hurt.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You’re bleeding. We have to wash it, at least. What happened?”
“I—” She almost choked on her words, remembering her promise to Darien nearly too late. “I fell, in the dark.” She felt the heat of the lie on her face, and the shame of it nearly brought her to tears. The deception was pointless. Whatever her promise, she was certain that the lie was obvious, drawn across her face for anyone to see.
Especially for the woman who was the only mother she had ever known.
But Maria’s stepmother didn’t seem to notice the clumsy lie. She kept staring at the bruise where Lukasz had struck her, blinking a couple of times. She stayed like that for a long time, until Maria said, “You said we should wash it?”
Her stepmother broke from her reverie and let go of Maria’s chin. “Yes. Come in and relight your lantern. I’ll fetch water and some linens.”
Maria followed her stepmother into the cottage, thinking how preoccupied she seemed. Then she scolded herself. Whatever her stepmother felt about Maria, she had lost her husband. She had the same right to grieve as Maria did.
In the dark, her stepmother surprised Maria by reaching out and touching her shoulder. Almost as if she knew what Maria had been thinking, she whispered, “I know your father was mistaken. God protects you still.”
Maria reached up and touched her cross and wondered if her mother knew about Darien.
The man Darien carried had exhausted his voice after the first mile. He made a token struggle when Darien crossed the river, but after that came only the occasional hoarse plea, which Darien ignored.
Even at the healthy pace that Darien traveled, it was over half an hour carrying his burden back to his current homestead. The cave was hidden on three sides by impenetrably dense woods, the only approach to it a game trail that led up a rise and appeared to dead-end in a solid wall of twisted growth and deadfalls. It wasn’t unless one stood on top of the rise itself and looked down the sheer drop that faced the wall of trees that the cave mouth could be seen.
Darien stood at the crest of the rise above the cave and unceremoniously unloaded his burden. The man tumbled out of his arms and down the rise to land screaming in the small clearing in front of the cave mouth.
Darien watched the man struggle below, rolling back and forth while cursing. “Who are you?” the man finally said, comprehensibly. He panted, cradling his broken arm, then struggled to his feet on the uneven footing of dead leaves and gravel. He had to lean against the trunk of a tree, because his left foot now bent at an odd angle. “Who the hell are you? And what do you want?”
Darien took the man’s knife and tossed it casually down. It fell with a clatter against a helmet transfixed by a spear of cold moonlight, near where Maria’s oaf supported himself. The man looked down at the knife, and at the helmet.
Then he gagged and screamed when he saw the prior owner’s head rotting inside it.
“God have mercy! What fiend are you?”
As Darien removed his shirt, the man babbled on, his words increasing in speed and volume as he looked around the clearing, finally seeing the remnants of men, armor, and horses scattered before the mouth of Darien’s lair.
Darien didn’t say anything to the man. It was more amusing to allow him to come to his own conclusions. As Darien stripped off his belt and removed his breeches, his prey had the presence of mind to channel his panic. He fell to his knees and scrambled toward a sword that had fallen just a few feet away, shoving aside a bloody gauntlet and the partly gnawed skull of a horse.
The man brought the sword up to point in Darien’s direction. The point shook, the silvered edge catching fragments of moonlight.
Darien stood naked above his prey and laughed.
“Are you insane? Say something, monster!”
Darien spread his arms and let free the mental chains that held his flesh in check. His bones creaked as they thickened and grew, and he felt his muscles tear and reknit as they spasmed and writhed under skin that darkened and grew a pelt of golden hair.
He had been injured by every weapon known to man, he had broken every bone in his body, he had even felt a silver crossbow bolt pierce his brow, sending bony splinters into his left eye—but no pain matched the feeling of the wolf tearing free from within his flesh. Every nerve fired a welcome agony, a red-hot knife ripping through his body, bringing an ecstatic release in its wake.
He howled and looked down at the cowering man below him. He wrinkled his nose and licked his muzzle with a long, lolling tongue. He crouched on lupine legs, so that his hands, long-clawed and still vaguely human, rested on the edge of the bluff in front of him.
He caught the scent of the man below voiding himself, and his face twisted into a lupine version of a smile.
“Monster,” he whispered, too low for his terrified prey to hear. “You call me monster after everything men have taken from me? And for less reason?”
Then he leapt down.
Maria lay on her bed and stared into the shadows. Below the loft that held her bed, her brothers snored. She was the only one awake in the cottage now, and the night was half over already. In a few hours she would have to get up, draw water for her family, and start the walk down to Gród Narew.
She would have to walk the same path.
It had never concerned her before. She had known these woods all her life. They had never felt threatening to her. But now she had to face them again, and her hands still shook when she thought about what had happened. What had almost happened.
She should have told her stepmother, whatever she had promised Darien. Not just because the lie was a sin that weighed on her soul, but because the lie pushed Hanna away. The lie made sure that Maria was alone in her own home.
She held her cross and allowed tears to come.
Who was Darien to ask this of her?
He did save me from Lukasz, she thought, and asked only for my silence when he could have asked for much more …
It might have been better if he had.
She bit her lip, feeling a flush across her body as she remembered the touch of Darien’s lips on her hand, his hand caressing her face. She remembered the look and feel of Josef’s chest, and wondered if Darien’s would be as strong, as warm …
I am not a wicked person.
She couldn’t keep herself from imagining his lips on hers, and his hand touching other parts of her body, her hand touching his body. But in her wicked fantasy she was unsure if it was Darien who took her or Josef.
She prayed to God to settle her thoughts; the prayer’s answer was long in coming.
But in time, she did sleep.
Interlude
Anno Domini 1331
Twenty-two years ago, when he was a child, Darien hadn’t hated anyone at all. His family—his pack—had even adopted human ways in the face of ever-expanding human claims to the dark woods of the Baltic. They lived away from men, but any travelers who had the misfortune to find themselves in the haunted wood where Darien’s pack made their home would be well-treated as guests. And, later on, would have a guide to take them back to the normal trade paths.
The village, hidden deep in those woods, had once housed a pagan community that treated Darien’s ancestors as gods. But, long ago, the Germans had come and killed those who hadn’t converted and carried away those who had. The village had not remained empty for long. The pack of Darien’s great-grandfather had decided that it was wise, with human warriors trampling through their lands every season, to add to the camouflage of their human skins.
When the Order came again, they found a Christian village, including a church built upon the ashes of a pagan shrine. Human gods meant nothing to the pack, so pledging fealty to the Order’s was of no consequence. For something over a century, from that generation to Darien’s, the village endured.
During his childhood years, Darien knew little of the outside world, other than the fact that there were these creatures called “men” who lived beyond the woods. He was taught, very carefully, that he would wear only a human skin in front of anyone not of the village.
The village was remote enough that, for the first nine years of his life, he saw no one who wasn’t of the village. By his tenth year, he had come to doubt the existence of such creatures as men. He’d started to think that he’d been told mere tales, to scare him and keep him from hunting without his parents.
He knew he was old enough to hunt on his own. He had taken down a bull elk all by himself the last moonless night his family had gone hunting. And he had done so in the skin of a full wolf, which was not as hard as he’d thought it would be. Hunting before, he had always taken the halfway skin, which left him hands to grip and tear at his prey, as well as a muzzle to bite the neck. But his parents had told him that to be an adult, he would have to learn to use all the wolf he had within him.
So, despite his reluctance, he’d done so, and the experience had changed him. Everything human became slow, pale, and bland in comparison. Even the power of the halfway skin couldn’t compare with the freedom he’d felt when he’d leapt at the animal’s neck.
He had become an adult.
Ever since, his bones ached for the change, and his tongue was hungry for the taste of the blood hot from the animal’s neck. Even though they were still eating from the carcass he had taken, Darien wanted to take another.
That was why he had slipped away from his parents on a cold spring evening only three days afterward. He had shed his human skin to revel in his fresh, fully lupine form. He didn’t understand why his parents were so reluctant to do this more often, or in the light. The freedom he felt was indescribable, the power over every creature in this forest. He could take any creature he wished and taste its lifeblood.
He ran free as evening grew deeper, losing himself in the woods. He ran beyond the limits of his scent without quite realizing it. He was too intent on snapping at stray rabbits, taking the small bodies apart in a deadly snap of fangs and a spray of blood and fur.
The shadows were long, and his muzzle slick with the blood of small animals, before he realized that he was lost. The thought struck him suddenly when he stumbled on an unfamiliar path heavy with strange scents. He stopped with the sudden realization that his disobedience had passed far beyond what his parents might forgive. He had no chance of returning before dark, before he would be missed.
He looked desperately back and forth along the strange path, searching for any sign of familiarity, sucking in the air and hoping for the scent of his mother, his father, anyone from the village.
He would never be taken on a hunt again …
And with the growing terror in his breast, he would accept that as a worthwhile price for finding his way home.
Panic and immaturity kept him from doing what his parents had told him to always do if he found himself in unfamiliar territory; he didn’t change back. He couldn’t. The woods were cold and dangerous, and he couldn’t face them clad naked in his weak human form. Fear made him pull himself into the halfway skin, the one he felt safest in while facing whatever terror the forest held.
He was unprepared when the forest finally revealed its terror.
It smelled strange, and stood astride the path ahead of him. Darien stopped, frozen at the sight of the creature. He couldn’t make immediate sense of the sight. It was huge, four-legged, and the last rays of sunlight glinted off parts of its body. Something shaped vaguely like a person seemed to grow out of its back.
He had never seen an armored knight before, and it took a moment before his brain recognized that someone was riding on a horse’s back—something his people never did. The rider bellowed and pointed an object at Darien. Darien was too confused to recognize the threat as the knight’s crossbow fired.
He was saved only by distance and the panic of the rider. The bolt tore past him, grazing his side between his forearm and his shoulder. It stung like nothing he had ever felt before. He took off deep into the woods, where the rider and his beast couldn’t follow.
As he ran through the darkening woods, he thought of the stories his parents had told him, about the men who lived beyond the dark woods. There was an especially dangerous type of man—the ones who had killed all the people who had worshipped their ancestors, the ones who had emptied the pagan village and left it abandoned, the ones who were the reason his pack followed the forms of serving Christ. The men of the German Order, whose symbol was the black cross, who ruled all the lands beyond their little village.
As he ran into the night, he tried several times to tell himself that the man on the horse hadn’t worn a tabard bearing the black cross of the Order. He had been mistaken. It had been the shadow of a branch, a fold in the fabric, not a black cross.
Anything but a black cross.
The fear grew as he realized that the wound in his side where the crossbow bolt had grazed him was not healing. His fur was slick with his own blood, and it hurt for him to breathe. That wasn’t supposed to happen. A cut in the flesh like that should heal in a matter of moments, and even faster when he wore this form.
But the cut from the knight’s bolt burned as he bled. His lungs burned as he panted. His eyes burned as he wept.
As fatigue gripped him, he dropped to all fours, letting the energy of the full wolf push him forward. But even the wolf had limits, and he couldn’t run forever. Deep in the midnight-black woods, his legs gave out and he curled up under a tree, panting and sobbing, and half-hoping that the knight of the black cross would find him and finish him off, so that he would no longer have to be afraid.
The knight didn’t find him, and Darien woke in his naked human form, shivering and tacky with his own blood. He wandered the woods for two days, losing hope until he finally found a familiar scent, and a game trail that he knew. His heart swelled once he was back on familiar ground. He ran along the path as fast as he could in the fading evening light, the branches and briars on the path tearing at his feet and leaving scratches that healed almost as quickly as they were made.
He slowed only as he began smelling other things. Blood. Smoke. Roasting meat.
And a scent that he remembered. A smell he knew belonged to the knight and his horse.
Darien stopped on the path, shaking his head. He tried to deny it, just as he had tried to deny the black cross on the knight’s tabard.
Fear rooted him to the spot for what felt like hours. Slowly, inevitably, he pulled his feet free from his paralysis. He stepped slowly at first, moving toward his home as if in a dream. The awful smells wrapped around him, almost choking him, and before he realized it, he was running as if the knight were on his heels, chasing him.
He reached his village before he was ready. Even so, the smells had already told him what he would find.
The fires had died, but the smoke hung over the village like an evil fog, burning his eyes and imperfectly hiding the damage. Every building had burned, leaving nothing more than haphazard piles of broken timbers. The damage was so complete that, once he had taken a few steps into the remains of the village, he could no longer tell whose homes they used to be.
He walked naked through the haze, too stunned to be afraid anymore. He called out, “Mother? Father?” But no one responded.
The smell of horses was almost as rank as the smell of smoke and blood. And when he rounded a smoldering pile of wood that had once been someone’s home, he saw one. The animal was sprawled in a muddy track that was a soup of hoofprints, mud, shit, and blood. Its head had been torn nearly free of the rest of it, so that its dead eyes could stare at him over its shoulder.
It could have been the knight’s horse. It wore metal plates on its head, and a mail skirt, and draped across it was a torn sheet that, under the mud, soot, and blood, bore the black cross of the Order.
I didn’t bring them here.
He kept repeating that to himself, as if thinking something often enough would make it true.
“Mother? Father?” He no longer shouted at the ruins around him. He no longer feared that he wouldn’t find his family. Now he feared that he would.
He encountered two other dead horses, left where they had fallen. Darien passed other remnants of battle, stray bits of armor, fragments of a tabard. Human clothing shredded by someone during a change. A severed hand. A broken sword. Crossbow bolts sticking in a tree that had burned into a skeletal hand reaching for the sky.
No bodies.
Not until he reached the church.
Like the rest of the village, the scene was too surreal for him to make immediate sense of it. It was the smell that brought him to his knees, retching into the blood-soaked mud, before he could even acknowledge what it was he saw.
The German Order had taken away their dead and wounded.
Their victims, the inhabitants of Darien’s village, had been dragged into the church that their ancestors had built to appease the followers of Christ. Living or dead, everyone had been sealed inside; and then the building had been set afire.
Mixed with the blackened timbers, in what seemed equal numbers, were the bones of everyone Darien had ever known. Some of the flame-blackened skulls were human, some were lupine, and all seemed to stare at him with empty sockets, accusing him.
He shook, on his knees, and said, “I didn’t do this.”
The sickening smell of his burnt family argued against him.
“I didn’t do this!” he screamed at the dead.
But the dead refused to acknowledge him.
For three years, he abandoned his human form. He even abandoned his halfway skin, whose hands were too much a reminder of what he had lost. He became nothing but a large wolf, hiding in the woods the way his ancestors hid in their human forms.
Guilt and despair drove the wolf into an endless hunt. He slept in caves, drank from rivers. He gradually tried to forget things like language, and tools, and clothing.
And thinking.
After three years, the only thing that reminded him of his early life was the healed wound in his side. It had left a thin scar that tended to ache when the weather became cold. The pain wasn’t bad, but the ache always brought tears.
He would have remained in those dark woods for the rest of his life if he hadn’t found the dying hart. He was hunting and took the creature without a thought, springing onto its back from the darkness, and twisting its neck in his jaws so it was dead before it fell.
The thought came after it died and struck the forest ground. It had never known that Darien was there, but it had been running in a panic, its pulse under his tongue so rapid that its heart might have burst from the effort. It bled from wounds Darien had had no part in making.
He looked down at the animal’s body.
Long sticks pointed up out of the beast’s chest, jammed into the creature’s lungs, their bases slick with frothy blood. He saw the fletching and pulled the word out of his memory.
Arrows.
Men were here?
He stood over the dead animal, forepaws resting on its side, and felt something shift in his heart. For three years he’d had no focus for his anger beyond himself and his own guilt. For three years he had forced himself not to remember anything beyond his feral existence in the forest. Living far beyond anything that might remind him of what he once had, and what he had lost because of what he had done.
What men had done.
A low growl rumbled in his chest. Standing over his kill, his thoughts a clumsy tumble of half-remembered shame and fury, he felt something slam into his chest. He fell backward, more in surprise than in pain. Looking down, he saw an arrow the length of his foreleg sticking out of the left side of his chest.
Above him, the archer was readying another arrow in his bow. The man didn’t wear the cross or the armor of the knights who had slaughtered Darien’s village, but he smelled of man—a scent Darien would never forget.
Almost without thought, his body realigned itself, the spine twisting, muscles rippling, and his forepaws creaking and snapping as they grew into strong, clawed hands. The flesh wrenched itself painfully into its new form, leaving an aching relief in its wake.
He had nearly forgotten his other skin, but his body hadn’t. And something within him knew that this was the form in which to fight men.
The second arrow plunged into the ground as he stood upright for the first time in three years, wobbly from the violence the change had wrought to his balance and his center of gravity.
He reached up and pulled the arrow out of his chest. It came free with a tug and a flare of pain, but that was all. Unlike the knight’s bolt, this arrow left no lasting scar. The wound was sealed before the third arrow passed completely through his left shoulder. Darien clenched his fist on the arrow he had pulled from his chest, and the thick shaft splintered in half.
He ran toward the archer as a fourth arrow flew by, completely missing him. As he closed on the man, he smelled something else. It was unfamiliar, but it was a smell he would soon learn to savor.
Fear.
He dragged the body to a nearby river so he could wash the blood off the man’s clothes. He’d need them, if he was going to walk among men. He licked the blood off his claws and fur, and pulled the archer’s corpse into the shallow part of the river. He fumbled with the clothes before he realized that they were designed for human hands.
While the body rested on the riverbed, water washing over it and his legs, Darien tried to pull the old human skin back around himself. For a long time it felt as if he had forgotten how. Perhaps he had never had a form like the dead thing in the water at his feet. Perhaps it was a nightmare. Maybe the wolf thing was all he was.
But as it had with the halfway skin, his body remembered that he had once had a human shape. The change came, like a long-cramped muscle finally relaxing. His flesh poured into the man form suddenly, and with a shuddering relief that caused him to collapse into the river, next to the corpse. Cold water washed over skin that was suddenly naked; his newly flat teeth chattered and his whole body broke into gooseflesh.
He got unsteadily to his feet and stared at his hands, white and hairless, with impotent nails.
As weak as they seemed, it had been hands like this that had destroyed everything he had ever cared about. Hands like these could kill just as easily as tooth and claw.
He bent over the archer’s body and clumsily removed its clothes. The river had already diluted the blood, until all that was left were unremarkable stains on the already mottled brown tunic. He tossed the dead man’s possessions—belt, tunic, breeches, boots—up onto the shore, until the corpse was as naked as he was. After that, he pushed the body to the deep center of the river to let the current take it where it wished.
Darien watched it go and had the last twinge of doubt about what he would do next. He could return to the woods now …
But somewhere beyond these woods were more men—men who deserved to lose what he had lost. Feel what he had felt. Darien knew, now that the rage in him had awakened, that there would be no release from it except in a tide of human fear.
He dressed himself in a dead man’s clothes and started walking toward the world of men.