The wolves closed steadily. There were eight of them now, some fifty yards back, still single file, but bunching closer now. No howls or snarls—running in silence.
The two trailing horses with the cut ropes kept running behind the sleigh until the wolves were within twenty yards, then they panicked. Struggling through the deeper snow ahead of the sleigh, they lost the road and galloped at an angle into the meadow to the left.
“Oh, don’t do that,” Lucrezia said.
Sure enough, they plunged into drifts up to their hocks and struggled to continue forward. One of them stumbled and fell behind the other. The sleigh passed them to the right. The floundering, exhausted horses must have presented an almost irresistible target for the wolf pack. But the wolves paid them no attention.
“For God’s sake, why don’t they go after the horses?” Lorenzo asked.
“These are no ordinary wolves,” Montguillon said.
“Prepare yourselves!” Marco cried.
The pack had broken into a sprint, bounding faster through the snow than Lucrezia would have thought possible. They fanned across the width of the road, with two wolves coming up on either side of the sleigh.
Tullia rose to her feet and leaned over the edge. She barked in a deep, booming voice. The brothers and Martin drew swords, and the prior gripped his stave. Lucrezia had her dagger. Tullia roared her challenge.
The big wolf with the bob tail was off to the right side. He leaped for the sleigh and got his paws up. An enormous head filled with snapping teeth was suddenly over the edge, with the rest of the wolf about to make it inside as well. Montguillon swung with his staff. It struck the wolf across the muzzle and it fell off with a yelp.
“My lady!” Lorenzo yelled.
She turned as a second wolf leaped on the other side of the sleigh. She slashed at the air with her dagger, and Lorenzo thrust past her with his sword. The wolf fell off. Tullia drew back to spring down and fight them, and Lucrezia wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck with a cry. The dog would land in the middle of the pack. They’d tear her apart.
Wolves were all around them now. Leaping for the back of the sleigh, racing up along the sides. Biting and snarling at the horses, who were out of their minds with fear. As they reared and brayed, the sleigh jerked to one side, then the other.
Montguillon screamed. A wolf had gotten itself inside the sleigh. It was on top of him, snapping at his neck. He had his arms up and tried to push away the animal with his knees, but it was too big.
Lucrezia released Tullia. The dog threw herself over the back seat into the front row, where she fell on top of the wolf. Dog and wolf rolled over the prior, while Martin tried to get free and bring his sword to bear at the same time. There was little room for longer blades in the close confines of the sled.
Lorenzo and Marco came over the seat after the dog. They thrust with their swords. The wolf howled. It tried to get free, to escape, but Tullia was at its throat and the brothers were slashing and stabbing.
Another wolf jumped up into the nearly empty back seat, where it came at Lucrezia before the brothers could turn around. She twirled with her dagger. The blade caught the wolf on the shoulder, and when Marco came at it with the sword, it leaped down into the snow. A third wolf jumped from the right, but couldn’t get its paws up and fell back.
Wolves leaping, biting, leaping back off again. The prior screamed for someone to get him free. He was trapped beneath the dying wolf and Tullia at its throat. But the others were fighting for their lives. Kicking at wolves. Slashing with blades at those who made it up. Only Simon, ahead on the perch, and driving the horses ever forward, was not under attack.
A wolf howled. The pack fell back.
Lucrezia risked a look behind the sleigh to see the wolves stopped, gathering on the road behind with their tongues lolling. The big wolf lifted his head and howled, and the others joined in with a ghostly wail that made her shiver with dread.
Montguillon had gotten himself out from under the dead wolf. He pushed Tullia aside. “Almost there,” he said with a gasp. “Two more miles.”
That was too long. The wolves were regrouping, they’d be coming up again, and this time—
No, she realized with a flood of relief. They’d stopped. They were howling their rage but made no motion to continue the assault.
“We did it,” Marco said, voice shaking. “We drove them off.”
“My lady,” Lorenzo said. “Are you injured?”
She inspected her arms. She was shaking. “No, nothing. Are you? Any of you?”
Marco and Lorenzo were helping Martin get the dead wolf up. They heaved with a grunt and rolled the wolf off the sleigh. It fell and landed in the snow. The oppressive odor lifted as they left it behind.
“I’m fine,” Marco said.
“Me, too,” Lorenzo said. “Only a scratch, nothing serious.”
“What kind of scratch?” Lucrezia asked in a sharp voice. “Show me.”
“It’s nothing. Look to the prior, I think he was bit.”
“Oh, sweet virgin—him too? First, show me yours. Quickly.”
Lorenzo held out his forearm. A claw or tooth had caught his flesh and opened a gash from his wrist halfway up his forearm. It wasn’t deep and shouldn’t have required much attention. But the blood was turning black, and the flesh surrounding the wound was already turning gray. Lucrezia’s heart pounded. She pressed the wound.
He gasped. “Don’t touch it!”
“Martin,” she said. “The box. Hurry. Does anyone have any wine?”
“Help the prior first,” Lorenzo said through clenched teeth.
Montguillon was groaning and moving around up there, but if his wounds were life-threatening there was little she could do for him. She was not a barber or anatomist.
Simon handed back a flask of wine. Lucrezia pulled the stopper and dribbled some over Lorenzo’s scratch. He gasped in pain, then looked embarrassed at his reaction.
“Blood of the saints,” he cursed. “It’s not much of a wound, why does it hurt so much?”
“It’s plenty serious,” she said. “That will keep it from spreading. Now drink this.”
She broke the wax seal on one of the vials from the small wooden box that Martin handed back.
“What is it?” Marco said as his younger brother took it with a skeptical look.
“Tincture of poppy and monkshood from Wallachia.”
“Monkshood?” Lorenzo said. “That’s a poison.”
“It’s steeped in ginger. It will slow your heart, let you fight off the contamination.”
“But with the poppy, I’ll go to sleep. What if they attack again?”
“Drink it, please.”
He obeyed. “Now help the prior.”
The prior be damned, she thought. It was Montguillon’s stubbornness that had kept them moving into the night with wolves abroad in the land. These beasts could be driven off; if they’d been indoors, in even the simplest mud and stick house, they could have defended themselves until morning. Now Luc Fournier lay dead, and two men suffered the most deadly kind of injuries. Montguillon could rot for all she cared.
Lucrezia banished these uncharitable thoughts and climbed up to the next seat. She gave Tullia a quick inspection to verify that the mastiff was not injured, then turned her attention to the prior.
He had a scratch across one cheek, blackening down the center and inflamed and red along the sides, already looking more like an ugly scar than a fresh, shallow scratch. She tried to pull back his cowl and look at his neck, but he struggled.
“I don’t want a woman touching me.”
“Be quiet and let her do her work,” Martin growled.
Lucrezia got the robe back. She winced when she saw what it hid. The wolf had gone for Montguillon’s throat. It hadn’t got its jaws around the man’s neck, but in the biting and snapping had torn through the prior’s habit and shredded the flesh along the upper-left collarbone. She probed at the wound to see if his bone was broken. She couldn’t tell, it was so swollen up already.
“Could one of you hand up the box and the wine?”
“Leave me alone,” Montguillon said. “I won’t have your witchcraft.”
“It’s not witchcraft. Look, it’s just a little wine. Sacramental, it’s holy.”
“It’s not consecrated yet, so it’s nothing but fermented grape juice.”
“These wolves are diseased,” she said. “Their spittle is purulent and will spread contamination. The wine will cleanse the wound.”
“Fine,” he said through clenched teeth. “Be quick about it.”
He hissed when the wine splashed across the wound. She splashed more on his cheek. Another hiss, but he didn’t cry out.
“Good,” she said. “Now drink this.” She took out another vial of the tincture of monkshood and poppy.
“I will not.”
“It might save your life.”
“Bloody woman, keep your witch’s potions away from me.”
“Maybe you’d rather die,” Martin snapped.
Montguillon sent him a withering look, and he turned quickly away.
“The poppy will ease the pain,” she said. “Please, Father.”
“I don’t care about pain,” Montguillon said. “It’s nothing.”
“One sip. Please.”
“No. Go away.”
She kept at it, but no matter how she pleaded, Montguillon would not relent and drink the tincture. At last she gave up and returned to Lorenzo’s side.
The ground lifted into a series of rolling hillocks and when they came down from the second of these, Simon let out a cry from the front of the sleigh. Yellow lights flickered from the darkness ahead of them.
Montguillon lifted himself. His face was gray. “That is it, Lord Nemours’s chatelet.” He paused, swallowed hard as if trying to keep from vomiting, then added, “Soon.”
Chapter Eleven
Lorenzo began shivering violently as Lord Nemours’s chatelet came into view. Lucrezia wrapped him in a blanket and enveloped him in her cloak. His face was gray, and his hands as cold as the blade of her dagger. Keeping them under the cloak where the others couldn’t see, she wrapped them around her waist, and put his head against her bare neck. He was so cold. It frightened her.
Lorenzo’s eyes flickered open. They rolled back in their sockets, showing jaundiced eyeballs almost yellow under the moonlight. He groaned and arched his back.
“What is it, what’s wrong with him?” Marco asked, his mouth pinched with worry. “Some kind of poison?”
“Witchcraft,” Montguillon groaned from the front seat. “These beasts are in the service of the devil.”
“And why is
he
still alert?” Marco asked. “His wounds are deeper than Lorenzo’s.”
“Because I am a man of God, not given over to pleasure and intellectual sophistry like your brother. Get thee hence, Satan. I rebuke thee, oh Father of Lies. Thou shalt not—”
“By the saints!” Marco said. “That’s enough of the devil talk. Martin, if he won’t be quiet, gag him.” He turned back to Lucrezia with a questioning look. “Well?”
“I don’t know,” Lucrezia admitted. “Lorenzo is younger—he should be stronger.”
“He’s not that strong—believe me, I know. Maybe it’s the poppy. Did you give him too much?”
“I don’t think so. It should help him sleep. And sleep is his best ally.”
Squat towers with conical roofs like fairy hats guarded either side of the drawbridge. The bridge crossed a moat, perhaps thirty feet wide, to a center island dominated by Nemours’s chatelet.
The horses were stumbling when they reached the drawbridge. Any farther and they would have collapsed. Marco stared behind them into the night, looking worried that the wolves would make one final charge. As if in answer, a howl sounded in the distance.
“Let pass the Lady d’Lisle!” Martin shouted when they were still only halfway across the drawbridge. “And for God’s sake, raise the bridge!”
Faces stared down from the embrasures on the crenelated walls. Men with helmets and breastplates aimed crossbows, but didn’t fire.
Simon took up the call from the perch. “Enemies behind us! Raise the bridge!”
As soon as they were over, the chains on the bridge clanked and the wood groaned as men from within the gatehouse towers winched up the heavy wooden plank bridge. It lifted in place and sealed the entrance to the moated island.
The chatelet wasn’t quite a castle, but neither was it a Tuscan-style palazzo. More like a massive manor house, with a stone foundation some ten feet tall, and thickening at the base. A raised portcullis led beneath an archway into a central courtyard. There was a cupola on one side for a chapel, and a French-style hexagonal tower at the center of the chatelet, a final refuge if the moat were breached and the portcullis penetrated.
Lucrezia stroked Lorenzo’s cheek as the sleigh clattered to a stop on the flagstone path that led to the arched entrance of the chatelet. So cold, so limp. His breathing came fast and shallow. She bit her lip.
“Fight it,” she whispered. “Do not give in to it.”
Inside Lorenzo’s veins, poppy and monkshood battled against the spreading contamination for control of his body. When he woke, he would either be on the pathway to recovery, or in the grips of a hideous transformation.
A
loup-garou.
Wolf man. Half man, half beast. Body and soul enslaved to some evil purpose.
✛
Lorenzo woke as they carried him from the sleigh. Strong hands seized his arms and legs.
He heard, or thought he heard, the distant howls of a wolf. An answering snarl came to his lips and in his fever he wanted to lash out, to bite and scratch at these people carrying him. Enemies. He thrashed in their arms.
“No,” a woman’s gentle voice said. “It’s me, I’m here to help. Don’t struggle, don’t—look, just get him into the bed,” she said to someone else. “I’ll take care of him from there.”
“Damn you, Lorenzo,” a man’s voice said. “Keep still.”
Later, in something that was too real to be a nightmare, Lorenzo found himself running through the woods. He wore no clothes, but he wasn’t cold, even though snow lay in drifts almost as high as his chest.
It was almost to his chest, he realized, because he was running on all fours. A scent caught his attention off to the right, so thick in the air it almost formed a picture in his mind. A red scent that filled him with shivering excitement. At the same time, a ravenous hunger poured through him. A hunger like nothing he’d ever known. He needed to kill, to tear. Devour alive.