Wolfbreed (26 page)

“You’re hurt.”

She lowered the blade, staring at him through the wet strings of her hair. “Uldolf?”

Given the enormity of the scene, it barely registered that she called him by his full name.

Uldolf sheathed his hunting knife and walked over to brush the hair out of her face and away from around her neck. “What happened?” he repeated.

“Y-you came?” Her voice sounded low, husky, almost as if she was talking to someone else.

Maybe she’s hoarse from crying
.

Uldolf lifted her chin to look at the wounds on her neck. There was something else, too, smeared with blood, some sort of metal collar. It was in two parts, and appeared locked in place. He saw rings that might have fit a chain. He hadn’t seen anything like it before, but it was obviously some sort of restraint.

Uldolf felt sick when he realized that she had done all this damage to herself. He saw the scratches in the metal, in line with the cuts in her flesh. He looked down at the dagger in her hand. Obviously
from one of the guardsmen, it wasn’t a tool for this kind of work. It was thin, long, and double-edged—not much use aside from putting a hole in someone.

“Let me have that,” he said, reaching down. “You’ll cut your own head off before you get that collar off with this.”

“I …”

He took the bloody weapon from her hand.

She stepped back and hugged herself. She shook her head. “This isn’t right.”

“Lilly?” He looked at her, and felt something odd about her manner, her expression. She was talking without difficulty, but the person speaking felt different. “What isn’t right?”

She lowered her head and turned away from him. “I can’t.”

He reached over and placed a hand on her shoulder. Her skin was cold and damp, and she trembled. “Don’t worry, I’ll get that off.”

“I … I …” He couldn’t make out all of what she was saying through the rain. After a moment, she turned around and buried her face in his chest.

“Whatever happened back there,” he said, “I found you. That’s what’s important.”

She looked back up at him, her green eyes wide and lost. “I’m sorry, Ulfie.” It might have been his nickname, but Uldolf thought he heard her voice regain the tone it had when she had first called to him across his father’s field.

He stroked her hair and told her, “I forgive you.”

“Ulfie!” She embraced him in a rib-bruising hug.

ldolf led them along the creek, into a ravine. He stopped at the first reasonable shelter he saw—a long shelf of rock projecting over both them and the bottom of the ravine. Several trees
had fallen from the wall of the ravine to pile against the rock, providing better cover from the storm than he had a right to expect.

Lilly shivered in his cloak while he crawled under the projection and checked to make sure it was safe. The big rock above seemed stable, even supporting the weight of several dead trees. The ground was clean dry slate that seemed high enough not to be flooded. There was the stale musk from an old animal den, but Uldolf heard nothing moving back here. The prior occupants seemed long gone.

Uldolf backed out of the dark and looked up at Lilly. She was smiling at him, despite the angry red scratches on her neck. At least she seemed to have stopped bleeding.

He waved her under the rock with him. “Come on, we can wait out the storm in here.”

She crawled in after him, and he backed up as far as he could into the cavern to give her a dry place to sit. She crept forward, little more than a silhouette against the gray storm outside. Even the lightning flashes didn’t seem to reach in here.

She fumbled blindly for a moment until he felt her hand on his leg. Once she found where he was, she crawled up and huddled against him.

She shivered, and he placed his arm around her shoulders. “We just have to get through the night.”

Lilly huddled closer and rested her cheek on his chest. She reached up and stroked his cheek.

“Lilly?” He took her hand down. “Why did you stop talking to me?”

“Ulfie?”

Uldolf sighed in frustration. “You were almost speaking in full sentences back there. Why won’t you talk to me now?”

He felt her pull away. “Y—You don’t like me?”

What the hell?
“Of course I like you. But why are you having trouble talking now?”

“H-hard remembering.”

Uldolf cursed himself for being too hard on her. She was still recovering from the head wound. The blow had taken something away from her, even if it wasn’t as obvious as his missing arm. Even now, he still had to deal with the frustrations his own injury had caused, and those didn’t even compare to how it was when the memory of having both arms was fresh in his mind. The pain of losing his arm had only started with the injury—

“Ulfie?”

The concern in her voice made him realize how tense he had suddenly become. He was breathing hard, his heart was racing, and he could barely feel why.
Hard remembering …

“I’m sorry, Lilly. It isn’t your fault you have trouble speaking.”

“I—I try,” she whispered.

“I know you do. But don’t force yourself on my account.” Uldolf shook his head. They were too tired, cold, and wet to work out her language problems anyway. He opened his pack and hoped his tinder was still dry.

He felt her hand on his wrist. He looked up at her, barely a darker shadow in the darkness. “I—I—”

“Lilly, it’s really all right—”

“I like you, too.”

e found some dry wood wedged in the back of the cavern, enough to get a small fire going. He worried a little about the soldiers, but they were far away in the storm, hunting in unfamiliar woods. There was a good chance the Germans had more sense than he did, calling off their search once the dark and the storm became dangerously impenetrable.

All in all, a far more immediate threat was the cold and wet—especially for Lilly.

By the time Uldolf had a small fire going, she was asleep. She had unfolded the cloak underneath her and had curled herself up into a little ball on top of the sheepskin lining. There was no way he could cover her up with the cloak without waking her, so he removed his shirt, which had mostly dried out, and draped it over her.

“This is becoming a habit,” he muttered, shivering.

He kept watch for soldiers, expecting them to find their little shelter at any moment. When he didn’t worry about the Germans, he worried about his family. He hoped they had enough confidence in him not to worry.

Outside, the storm picked up, lightning and thunder rolling on top of each other in a near-continuous rumbling. The rain eventually became so heavy that someone would have to be right in front of their shelter even to see Uldolf’s small fire.

“What happened to you back there?” he whispered to Lilly.

He pulled the dagger out of his belt. It was certainly German, not only from the design, but from the script engraved upon it. He recognized the style, if not the words. The blade itself glinted whiter than steel, and Uldolf frowned at it.

Silver?

“This isn’t a weapon. It’s a piece of jewelry.” Despite the heft and the wicked edge, it wasn’t a very good blade. He could see several scratches and dents in the edge where Lilly had tried to pry her collar loose.

There had been two dead soldiers on the ground back there …

He looked at Lilly sleeping peacefully next to him. He tried to picture her hurting someone, killing someone, even in self-defense. He couldn’t—especially with this excuse for a dagger.

He looked down at the bloodstained metal collar still wrapping her neck. There was no question that the Germans had taken her captive, though. She had one of their daggers, and they had
stripped her clothes. They had her, and meant to rape her—or worse.

So how did it end with two dead soldiers, and Lilly deep in the woods chopping at her neck with an ornamental dagger?

“That man was savaged by some sort of beast,” Uldolf muttered into the fire. “Wolf, wildcat, maybe even a bear.” He nodded and slid the silver weapon back into his belt. “They would have been distracted by the attack. You could have grabbed the dagger and escaped.”

He brushed the hair away from her cheek, and saw another wound, a very thin cut down the length of her cheek. “Father is right,” he whispered. “Those bastards are the ones responsible for hurting you. I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner.”

She mumbled, sighing, and pulled his shirt tighter around her shoulders.

“Sleep.” He pulled his hand away. “When I have better light, I’ll see if I can get that thing off of your neck.”

ldolf dreamed in fragments, single images, torn from a larger, more painful whole. Each image—Radwen Seigson laughing, his mother smiling, his sister Jawgede running through the halls of the stronghold—every one was outlined in blood and faded into a dark abyss.