She did not speak, nor move an inch. She simply stood, perfectly still, staring at him as though he were a ghost.
For the longest while, there was only the sound of a gentle breeze whispering through the treetops. Wulfric was as surprised to see Indra as she clearly was to see him. How could she have survived the beast? There was no scenario he could imagine in which it was possible. She could not have fought it off, nor escaped it; no one who had been so close ever had.
Slowly, Wulfric rose from his crouch, and that spurred Indra from the spot where she was rooted. She bolted to her left, to where one of her swords rested in the patchy grass, grabbed it up and held it defensively outward at Wulfric, though he was unarmed and thirty feet away.
Wulfric raised his palms slightly to stay her and indicate that he was not a threat, but Indra did not seem at all reassured. As Wulfric studied her more closely, he noticed that her sword arm was trembling. Another moment passed before she gulped down a breath and broke the silence between them.
“How are you alive?”
Wulfric hesitated, unsure what to say. The girl had seen him beheaded right in front of her, he realized. In all the chaos and confusion of the night, he had forgotten that small detail. Now he understood why she was looking at him so. To her, he was a ghost, a dead man somehow still walking the earth. It demanded an explanation, and he had none to give.
“Why would I not be?” he said, feigning confusion.
Indra shook the sword at him angrily. “You were killed last night! I saw it with my own eyes!”
Wulfric made a show of finding that amusing, a half laugh. “I think your eyes must have deceived you. If I had been killed, I am sure I would remember it.” Deceit was his only option. The girl seemed sensible enough; perhaps she could be persuaded that what she saw now was more reliable than her memory of last night, since the alternative defied all reason.
“I know what I saw!” Indra said. “It happened not five feet from where I stood! I saw you beheaded, and then one of them dragged your body into the trees over there.
How are you alive?”
Wulfric had no choice but to play this out. “All evidence to the contrary, as here I stand,” he said calmly. “In the chaos and confusion of battle, the truth of events can easily be lost. What we saw is often not what we think we saw.” Wulfric noticed the patch of dried, matted blood in Indra’s hair and saw an opportunity to bolster his lie. “Did you by any chance take a blow to the head last night?”
That gave Indra pause. For the first time, her eyes left Wulfric, glancing away. Perhaps she was beginning to question herself. Wulfric saw the opening and pressed. “Which is the more rational explanation? That I was killed and have miraculously risen from the dead? Or that you are simply confused?”
Her eyes returned to Wulfric, now tempered by a hint of doubt. “All right then,” she said. “You tell me. What did happen?”
“As I recall, I, too, took a blow to the head,” he said, making up the tale as he went. “I was coming to your aid, then I was hit from behind and all went black. That is the last thing I remember. I woke up over there, in the trees, surrounded by the bodies of the men we killed. You are gifted with a sword, by the way. Truly, I was impressed.” If there was one thing that Wulfric remembered from his former life, it was that flattery was often a useful tactic when in trouble with a woman.
Indra lowered the point of her sword from chest to waist height—still on her guard, just not quite so much as before. Wulfric saw her struggle to reconcile what her senses and her memory were telling her, both equally clear and yet at odds with one another. It pained him to use her own sense of reason against her, but he could not tell her the truth. He needed her to believe the lie so that he could be rid of her, for both their sakes.
“I am relieved to see you alive,” he said, only the second true thing he had told her this morning. “But it will take some time for you to recover from what happened last night. Not just physically—I have seen this many times. The fog of war plays tricks with our emotions and our memory. But in time your mind will clear and you will remember things as they were.”
Though still unsettled, Indra composed herself. “I remember the abomination clearly enough,” she said. “And I have the scars to prove it. You are lucky it didn’t tear you to pieces as it did the others.”
Wulfric realized there was an opportunity now to get answers of his own, but carefully.
“An abomination was here?” he asked, feigning disbelief as best he could.
Indra nodded. “The one I have been hunting. It came from the trees over there and killed two of those men,” she said, pointing. “See there, what remains of them.”
“And what did you do?” asked Wulfric. He knew part of it, of course—that she had foolhardily approached and challenged the beast—but he desperately needed to know the rest. How could she possibly have survived? To him, seeing her alive defied any rational explanation—much as seeing Wulfric alive had done to Indra.
“I did battle with it,” she said. “It almost killed me, but I wounded it and it fled, back into the forest.”
This time Wulfric did not have to feign disbelief. It wrote itself all over his face, and Indra saw it.
“What?” she said, indignant.
“Forgive me, but I have never heard of anyone surviving such an encounter,” he said.
“You forget, sir, that I am not
anyone
. I am an initiate of the Order, trained to fight and kill abominations.”
It was true that she could fight, and fight well. Wulfric had seen that for himself. But still, that she could have survived alone against a beast that Wulfric had seen kill so many was impossible. He stepped forward, looking at her hard. “What really happened? How did you get away? Tell me the truth, girl.”
His tone, now gravely serious, perhaps betrayed too much of Wulfric’s own interest in the matter, but Indra did not notice. All she heard was the insult, and to her, none could be worse. Her nostrils flared, and now she took a marching stride toward Wulfric. “
Get away?
You think I
fled
from it? How dare you! Do you think I’m a coward?”
“I think you are not telling the whole truth. It is not possible that you could have fought such a beast as that and survived.”
“And what makes you such an expert?” she spat back, and because he could not tell her the truth, Wulfric had no answer.
Not content with having silenced him, Indra was determined to prove herself. She lifted up her jerkin on her right side, exposing her bare ribs. Her flesh looked painfully bruised, an ugly mottle of purple and brown. “See here, where it charged at me and nearly broke my ribs!”
“You could have sustained that in the battle with those thugs,” said Wulfric, which only made Indra more determined. She scanned the ground around her. When she saw what she was looking for, she marched over and picked it up.
“See here, where the thing wrapped its vile tongue around my wrist!” She handed Wulfric the rotted leather gauntlet, which still smelled vaguely of sulfur. “If you know anything of abominations, as you claim to, then you know that their spittle is like acid. I had to tear this off before it burned through to my skin.” Indra left Wulfric to study the ruined gauntlet and turned around again,
looking for something else. She spotted it a few yards away and went hurriedly to retrieve it.
“Here!” She bent over to pick the thing up from the grass and Wulfric saw that it was her other sword, stained with a thick, oily substance that he recognized as the beast’s blood. Indra held up the blade to show him. “The black blood of an abomination! Do you smell the sulfur? There is no mistaking it. And over there, the trail it left as it fled, bleeding from the wound I gave it!”
Wulfric did not need to look; it was the same trail that had led him back here. In fact, the realization finally dawned on him that she was telling the truth. She really had fought the beast and survived, and more than that, she had actually hurt it, wounded it. Wounded
him
.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” said Indra, no doubt unnerved by Wulfric’s suddenly dumbfounded expression. For his mind reeled with the repercussions of something that he had thought impossible. And with the seed of an idea—for the first time in so many years, a glimmer of hope, so faint he dare not nurture it, and yet he did so all the same, for the promise of what might, just might, be possible was so alluring he could not resist.
Peace. Freedom
. Things that felt so distant, so ancient, that he barely remembered them, had long ago given up any thought of ever reclaiming them.
But now . . . what if it were possible? What if he could—
“Hello?”
Indra’s voice snapped Wulfric from his reverie. “I’m sorry,” he said, returning to the moment. “What?”
“You were looking at me strangely,” said Indra, regarding him warily. Wulfric noticed that her grip had tightened around the hilt of her sword, stained with the beast’s blood. His blood.
“You wounded the beast,” he said, his tone hushed, as though the truth of it were so fragile he dared not speak it aloud. “Made it bleed.”
Indra relaxed a little. “I’m glad we have that settled. I don’t like to be thought a liar, worse still a coward.” She wiped the blood from her blade with a rag from her pocket then returned both swords to the scabbards crossed against her back.
Wulfric so wanted to believe, but he would not gamble his hopes, nascent though they were, on anything less than surety. “Where exactly did you cut the beast?” he asked.
“It charged at me, tried to trample me,” said Indra. “I slid beneath it and raised up my sword as it passed over me, cutting it along its belly.” Dramatically, she mimed the act of raising the sword overhead. Wulfric’s hand instinctively began to move toward his own stomach, to the long scar there beneath his cloak. His wound and the beast’s were one and the same. He was not yet certain that it meant what he hoped it did, but . . .
He needed this girl.
“I would advise you not to stay here,” Indra said as she scanned the trees watchfully. “Wounded, the beast will not have fled far and is likely still about. Go back to town. You’ll be safer there.”
“And you?” said Wulfric. Moments ago he’d been anxious to be rid of her. Now more than anything he needed her to stay. All his new hopes depended on it.
“I mean to finish what I began. I will return home when the beast is slain, and not before. But you must be on your way. I bid you well.”
She turned and headed toward the trees, leaving Wulfric to think. This would not do. Yes, the girl was skilled, and she had fought the beast and made it bleed, but her partial victory was surely a fluke, and one that would likely not be repeated. He needed the odds at their next encounter to be far better. He did not relish what he would have to do but could think of no better option.
“Wait!”
She stopped and looked back, her brow furrowing at the sight of him following along behind her. “I said, you must—”
“Is it wise to go after the beast again so soon?” said Wulfric, in a cautionary tone.
Indra’s expression suggested that she did not appreciate her tactics being called into question. “Wiser than allowing it time to rest and lick its wounds. My best chance is to follow its trail now, while it is still bleeding and hurt.”
Wulfric could not tell her—not yet—that setting out by day would be useless, that the blood trail would lead her nowhere, as the beast she sought was slumbering invisibly within him. Or that by the time it emerged again tonight, its wound would most likely be gone, and it reborn whole again and back to its full strength. He would need another tack to delay her, at least for the moment. Because though it would need to be dealt out carefully, his best course now was the truth.
“What of your wounds?” he said. “Your ribs are bruised and will slow you in a battle, and you cannot hope to fight effectively until you have full use of that shoulder you dislocated.” He pointed. “You made a good job of setting it, but it will not be as it was for at least another day.”
Indra’s hand went to her shoulder. The hitch in her movement was barely perceptible, yet Wulfric had noticed that she had had some small difficulty extending her arm over her back to replace her sword in its scabbard.
“I cannot afford a day,” she said.
“A few hours, then,” he said. “Stay awhile and allow me to thank you.”
“For what?”
“For my rudeness at the fireside last night, and for your kindness back at the crossroads. And if I was unconscious when the beast came, then you surely saved my life by driving it away.”
“That is my job. I require no thanks for doing it.”
“My honor demands otherwise,” Wulfric said. “Please, take pity on an old man and lend him some company.”
It seemed to Indra an odd thing to say. He did not look that old to her, although it was difficult to be sure behind the matted beard and caked-on grime that covered his face. But then, everything about him was odd, this strange, disheveled man who spoke of honor and wielded a sword more skillfully even than her father, a master knight. Who seemed to know so much about so many things, and who carried a heavy iron chain for reasons that still eluded her. There was nothing about him that did not baffle or intrigue her in some way.
And he was right about her shoulder. It was not yet fully mended and did not have as much ease and freedom of motion as she would need when next she faced the beast. Relenting, she let out a sigh. “One hour, no more. On one condition.”
Wulfric smiled, and Indra realized it was the first time she had seen him do so.
“Name it,” he said.
She glanced over to the coil of heavy iron on the ground behind Wulfric. “You must tell me why you carry the chain,” she said, wondering how he would react. The last time she had asked about it, he had suddenly grown angry and ordered her away.
Wulfric hesitated for a moment before agreeing with a nod. He motioned for her to sit and began gathering wood for a fire. Indra watched him as he went back and forth, seemingly deep in thought, and wondered what was occupying him so.