And then, two weeks later, three wolves had broken down her door and attacked her in her own room.
✛
By the wolf attack Lucrezia had already begun to hear troubling rumors of wolves on the road to Troyes. Two children went missing. A woodcutter drove off a wolf with an ax, and the man insisted the beast had spoken to him with a human voice. People started to talk of a
loup-garou
terrorizing the roads.
And the Inquisition began to make inquiries. Parish priests in two separate villages had accused old women of witchcraft, and the prior of Saint-Jacques, Henri Montguillon, ventured out of Paris to investigate. It did not escape Lucrezia’s notice that this was the same monastery where she’d sent the passage from Rigord’s book for translation into Slavonic. She had put the idea in Montguillon’s head in the first place.
The prior discovered Rigord’s first wife hiding on one of the d’Lisle estates near Troyes, and arrested her and her maidservant as witches when they found her in possession of strange books and potions. Nobody recognized her—she’d been so altered by Rigord’s incantations—and Lucrezia didn’t understand what was happening until they’d already staked her and were stoking the fires.
Of course Lucrezia blamed herself. She’d been terrified that she would be discovered as the one behind the letter to Saint-Jacques, yet she would have confessed had she heard the news in time to save their lives. She hadn’t.
Lucrezia poured through every book in Rigord’s library looking for an answer. She found tantalizing hints—a tincture for curing bites and scratches left by the beasts, the suggestion that if untreated, these wounds turned victims into wolves themselves. But nothing about how to defeat the creatures.
One night she woke to the sound of scratching in the hallways. Toenails on stone. Half-asleep, she first thought that one of the dogs was coming up the staircase to scratch at her door until she relented and let it in.
“My lady, you must wake up,” a voice said outside the door. One of the servants, she thought through her sleep-muddled head. “There’s smoke in the kitchen. There might be a fire.”
Few things brought more terror than the thought of a fire burning away in the bowels of the house while you slept above. Hesitate a moment and you might roast in your bed. And so she wasn’t thinking about the dimly-remembered toenails scratching as she leaped out of bed and grabbed her night robe. She slipped it on as she unlatched the door.
There was no servant at the door. Only wolves. Two lean, gray animals, and one enormous beast with reddish brown fur. She guessed at once that it was Courtaud, the red-headed Occitanian. Rigord must have tracked the man down and changed him.
They forced her back, snarling and snapping. She cried out, but her quarters were high in the manor, up where the air was cleaner, removed from the stench of the city and the river. She had her own hearths, wardrobes, even a private garderobe that emptied into the Seine.
They backed her against the bed, then stopped as the big wolf stepped forward.
Courtaud.
Its lips bared and she felt its rage. It was almost a physical thing, pouring out from its thoughts.
The urge to cower hit her like a blow. She wanted to throw herself to the ground, to roll over and expose her belly in submission. The wolf’s thoughts radiated outward.
Fall. Bend. Cower.
Lucrezia fought it off. “No, I’ll never submit.”
Yes. You will.
Lucrezia kept thinking. Her cries had done nothing, but could she break for the hallway? No? Then could she reach one of the iron pokers by the hearth? How would she fight off three wolves by herself?
How did they get inside? They must have tricked their way in. Like they’d fooled her into opening the door. Courtaud was well known to her husband’s servants and few of them knew what had happened. So the wolves had bluffed their way past a servant at the door, killed him before he could cry a warning, then made their way down the hallway, past the kitchen, and up the stairs. Their scent must be all through the house. Where were her dogs? Why didn’t they come to help?
“Where is Rigord?” she asked.
Courtaud lifted his head and howled. Hatred and rage flooded over her and she staggered backward.
Changed us. Hate. Destroy.
“What?” she said. “Isn’t that what you wanted all along, to change? Didn’t you want that?”
Trapped. Cannot go back. Kill him.
Understanding bubbled up and some of her fear fell away. “You can’t return to human form, can you?” A high laugh started in her throat and burst out.
Enemy. Betrayer.
“When I corrupted his transformation, he must have passed it along to you. That fool changed you into wolves without warning. And now you’re trapped. Did you kill him, is that what happened?”
No. Enemy. Betrayer.
“You are trapped in a wolf’s body,” she said with some satisfaction. “You can’t change back.”
He snarled. Growls sounded deep in the other wolves’ chests.
“And so you killed him?” she asked. “Or did he escape?”
The three wolves fell into snarling. One of the smaller ones howled and Courtaud turned on it, shoving his snout in, biting and snapping until it fell back with a whimper. For a moment she thought there would be a fight between the three. Through it, she heard their howling thoughts.
Escaped.
Hate, kill.
Betrayer.
But through it came other thoughts. Hunger. The taste of human flesh. The joy of burying a muzzle into someone’s belly and coming out with jaws filled with steaming guts, even as the victim screamed and thrashed, still alive. Lucrezia clamped her hands over her ears, trying to get the awful thoughts out.
“Leave me alone! I’m a highborn lady—Lord Nemours will hunt you to the ends of the earth.”
Let him try,
came Courtaud’s thoughts. They came through clearly now. The fighting among the wolves had stopped.
We fear nothing.
“What do you want?” she said.
Rigord claims you for himself. I shall cheat him of his revenge. You are mine. Then I will hunt him down and kill him, too.
The wolf tensed, as if to spring. The other two snarled, and the hair rose on their backs. Lucrezia saw her death in their eyes.
“Wait!” she said. The words tumbled out. “I can help you. I know how to cure it.”
It was pure bluff. She’d poured through every book in Rigord’s library. There was nothing. The only cure she knew was death. A spear through its heart. A knife, a sword, a blow to the head.
Courtaud stopped.
Lies.
“No, I swear it. I can turn you back into a man.”
No man. No wolf. Wolf and man.
“A wolf man, I mean. To change back and forth when you want.”
Courtaud hesitated.
“It is true! I have the books. I know the incantations.”
Something flashed in his eyes. He didn’t believe her lie, and he was going to kill her. Slowly, painfully. Then the two smaller wolves turned their heads. Courtaud growled a question.
The other two cast their thoughts in a howling jumble. No words came through, but Lucrezia understood enough. They had picked up the scent of dogs.
At that moment Cicero and Tullia burst into the room. They hurled themselves at Courtaud. The other two wolves joined the fight. Lucrezia grabbed a poker from where it hung next to the stone hearth and came around swinging. She struck one of the wolves across the foreleg and was lifting the poker for another blow when Martin burst in, panting.
“By God, what has possessed those curs?” he said, then he saw the wolves. He cried out and waded in, boots kicking.
Fly!
At Courtaud’s warning, the wolves broke from the fight. One fell behind, limping. One foreleg bent funny and wouldn’t carry his weight—it was the one Lucrezia had struck with the poker. Tullia went for its throat. Cicero tore after the other two, his thunderous bark echoing down the corridor. Lucrezia wanted to call him back, but she needed to help Tullia, who had everything she could handle with the injured wolf. Lucrezia jabbed with the poker while Martin went in with his fists and boots.
The blows distracted the wolf. Tullia got up under its defenses and clamped her massive jaws on its throat. The injured wolf thrashed and struggled. Tullia shook her head viciously back and forth. The wolf shuddered twice and lay still.
Martin whistled and Lucrezia cried out, but Cicero didn’t return. They ran through the house, rousing any servants who had slept through the ruckus. They reached the front doors to find a terrified chambermaid in her nightgown, who said two wolves had shot past her into the night, pursued by the mastiff. A dead footman lay by the door with his stomach torn open.
Lucrezia was barefoot, undressed, but she snatched the maid’s torch and was ready to run into the night after her dog when Martin stopped her.
“There’s nothing you can do, my lady. You’ll never catch them.”
“But Cicero—”
“He’ll be back. He’s a smart one, he’ll run them off, chase them into the river maybe. They’ll drown in the icy waters.”
She bit her lip and stared into the darkened alley outside her front door, hoping he was right. But Cicero never did come back.
Chapter Twenty-six
Lorenzo listened to Lucrezia’s story in silence as she guided him through the streets of the Paris. They’d left the exhausted horses at the priory and continued on foot toward the Petit Pont where it crossed the Seine, on their way to Lord Nemours’s manor.
He didn’t blame her—why would she think that? She was fighting them the best way she knew. Everything she’d done had been to stop the violence, not to spread it. Nevertheless, she seemed anguished at every new detail she shared. He wanted to embrace her when she told how the guard opened the gibbet to release the body of her brave and loyal dog into her arms.
“So you think,” Lorenzo began after she’d fallen silent, “that Courtaud and your husband are enemies? Could they have patched up their differences?”
“My husband had dark hair and a black beard. He turned into a huge, black wolf. I’ve seen gray wolves, brown wolves, even smaller, blackish wolves, and of course Courtaud and his ruddy pelt—but no wolf so big or dark as Rigord the night he changed.”
“Maybe he’s dead,” Lorenzo said, grasping.
“No. I think there are two separate wolf packs.”
Two wolf packs—it was a horrifying conclusion. Not least because of the rapid spread of these devils. There must be twenty already. If they weren’t stopped soon, it would take an army to beat them back.
“I don’t think Courtaud was lying,” she continued. “He was enraged—that part was real. And they were going to murder me that night. They had no reason to lie.”
Most of the traffic that clogged the bridge was leaving the Cité, not entering. People fleeing the island, and perhaps Paris altogether. There were mule-drawn carts loaded with possessions, together with dozens of people on foot, baskets strapped to their shoulders. People clutched handkerchiefs to their mouths against the bad air said to be circling through the dank winter vapors, spreading the pox. Old women carried crucifixes in their thin, bent fingers, and a procession of twenty or thirty Benedictine monks chanted in Latin.
Whispers followed Lorenzo and Lucrezia as they fought their way against the current.
“Where is
she
going?”
“It’s Lady d’Lisle.”
“Look, Mama! Look at the beautiful lady.”
“My lady,” a man said. “Do you need passage out of the city?”
He was a finely dressed nobleman with his wife and two sons, sitting in the back of a carriage drawn by two skittish horses.
“Lord Trousseau, Lady Trousseau,” she acknowledged. “Thank you, but I’ve made my own arrangements.”
“Very well,” he said. “We shall be at our castle in Étampes, should you need accommodations close to the city.”
“Maybe you should have accepted his offer,” Lorenzo said, as they passed through the gatehouse and onto the island. “You might be safer behind castle walls.”
“It didn’t help us at Lord Nemours’s, and anyway, it wouldn’t be right to put that man and his family at risk. I’m marked, remember? Wherever I go, the wolves follow.”
“But if you give me the tip of Courtaud’s tail, and the dagger you used on Rigord, they’ll follow me instead.”
Lucrezia stopped. “Lorenzo, having you by my side means more than I can say. You give me courage. No, I can’t face this alone, but I
will
face it. I’m responsible for the bloodshed, and I shall do what is necessary to stop it.”
Impulsively, he took her hands, not caring that they stood in the middle of the street, with people staring. Lucrezia’s eyes widened slightly and this gave him the courage to blurt the thought that had been in his mind since he and Marco crossed the Alps several weeks earlier.
“Come back with me to Italy.”
“Lorenzo . . . ”
“We will face these wolves together—I won’t leave you. But when we’re done, when they’re destroyed, we’ll go home to Tuscany. Lucca if you would prefer, or my own Florence. We’ll start a trading firm, and what we don’t use for capital, we’ll put into the most beautiful library in all of Italy. And we’ll have children together, and we’ll read to them from the greatest literature of the ancients.”
He was caught up in this vision and encouraged by the wistful smile that came over her face.
“And that’s not all. I’ll build you a tower over the Arno, where you can look at the Duomo for inspiration. People will remember you in the same way they speak of Porcia Catonis. A true philosopher.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Porcia was forced to swallow coals after her husband killed Caesar.”
“Hortensia then, a great writer and orator. You can compose your own verse.”
“My own verse?” There was wonder in her voice.
“With your mind, your knowledge of the great writers, why not? What would stop you?”
She squeezed his hands. “Oh, Lorenzo.”
“Does this mean yes? Will you be my wife?”