“I’ll stay here awhile. It’s too hot indoors.”
Full of love for him, she watched his dignified figure stalk indoors.
She got up, sent the bucket down the well-she always liked that echoing, faraway splash-and cranked it up again. The water was chilled, and she drank some, pouring the rest down her front.
Shutters were flung back and, looking up, she saw Hilda’s face staring bad-temperedly down at her. The well chain’s rattle had woken the landlady.
Deliberately, Adelia took up the sword, holding it by its blackened pommel, and stared back.
The shutters slammed closed.
Good, Adelia thought.
There was a quick movement behind her, and she was enveloped in a familiar smell of sweat and stale clothing as somebody seized her from behind and began carrying her away.
She lashed out with the flat of the sword and felt it connect with a shin. “Will you stop doing this.”
Will dropped her in order to rub his leg. “Where’d you get that bloody thing?”
“I found it.”
“Bring it, you might be needin’ it.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” She was shaken and angry.
“Thought you wanted to know ’bout your friend.”
Adelia’s eyes went wide. “Truly? Tell me now. What’s happened to Emma?”
“Keep your bloody voice down, will you?” He pulled her across to the entrance. As they went, Adelia heard the shutters open again.
She tried to get her arm free. “I must tell my people where I’m going.”
He wouldn’t stop. “You just told ’em. Told the whole bloody county. Come on. We ain’t got time for messages.”
Out in the road the tithing were mounted on their donkeys, holding the reins of another, ready to ride, edgy. “Hurry up, can’t you?”
There were only three of them this time: Will, Toki, and Ollie, the one who rarely spoke. “Where’s Alf?” she asked.
“Waitin’ for us. Get on that bloody moke.” Still clutching the sword, she was hoisted up behind Toki; Will got onto his own donkey and led the way up the high road.
“Where are we going?”
“You listen to me now,” Will called over his shoulder, his voice rough with the importance of what he was telling her. “You want to know what happened to your friend? Well, you’re a-goin’ to, but one cheep and this time we all gets our throats cut. You hear me? Never mind Glastonbury nor Wells, it’s his forest an’ his road. He’s king of ’ em both. He ’s doing us a favor, and he don’t do many.”
“Who? Who’s doing us a favor?”
“He’s given us three hours, but he’s chancy-sweet Jesus, he’s chancy. Iffen he changes his mind, we’re bleeding meat.”
“Who?”
“Never you mind. We calls him Wolf.”
“And he’ll tell me what happened?”
“He told us. He’s a-lettin’ us show you.”
At the top of the hill, they took the Wells road.
Clinging on to Toki’s back, Adelia said quietly into his ear, “Did Wolf kill them?”
Toki murmured back, “He’s told us he’ll be raidin’ over Pennard way tonight, but you can’t trust him, he’s chancy, terrible chancy, is Wolf.”
“Are my friends still alive?”
But they had turned onto a track leading into the forest and Will had slowed to look back. “You startin’ to listen’, Toki?”
“I’m listenin’, Will.”
The donkeys were reined in to a walk so that their hooves trod the ground’s leaf mold almost without sound. An enormous yellow moon shining through branches in dapples obviated the need for a lantern, but Adelia guessed Will wouldn’t have allowed one to be lit in any case; holding on to Toki’s back, she could feel a vibration in his body.
He was afraid, all the men were afraid; they exhaled fear.
There was a clearing ahead with a charcoal burner’s hut in the middle of it-Adelia could smell ashes. She was lifted down. The donkeys were led into the hut and shut in.
“Now we walk,” Will whispered.
They walked. If the men were silent, the forest was not. It rustled with unseen life: A nightjar gave its long churring call; somewhere an animal screamed. A badger lumbered onto the path ahead and disappeared.
At one point, Toki was hoisted to the lower branches of a tree and climbed to its top. Those at the bottom stood completely still until, after several minutes, he came down.
“Sounds like there’s a to-do over to Pennard, Will. I heard screamin’. Reckon as he’s kept his word and we’m clear.”
“Fucking hope so.” Will crossed himself. He was still afraid.
Adelia was afraid with him. She knew little of these men except that they weren’t frightened easily. She didn’t know where they came from; she’d begun to think that probably they’d been dispossessed of their employment by the Glastonbury fire and were surviving however they could, nibbling at the edges of criminality while trying, for the most part, to aspire to normal, law-respecting life-hadn’t they gone to extraordinary lengths to prove Eustace, and therefore themselves, innocent of arson?
But here, in the forest, they were in the kingdom of Wolf, somebody who terrified them, someone who had broken away from society and recognized no law, a wolf’s head, a creature-Emma, oh, Emma-who pounced on travelers on the Wells road, taking their goods and lives.
The tithing knew him well enough to be granted this favor, knew him well enough, too, to be scared to death of him.
Chancy, she thought, the description of an unstable mind.
The wonder was that in order to keep the bargain they’d made with her, they had actually approached Wolf and were risking this foray into his lair. Thieves they might be, but there was honor here-more honor than in a Christian abbey.
Moonlight took color from foxgloves, bellflowers, and yellow archangel that in daylight would have patched the June forest. The branches of a dying tree threw shadows across the track that resembled stripes on a girl’s back.
Toki stopped again; this time all of them heard a distant howling. Real wolves? Hounds? Maniacs? Whatever it was, Will urged them to a stream and they waded down it so that their scent would be untrackable. The water was cool to Adelia’s tired feet, but she felt none of the joy of avoiding the hunt that she’d experienced on the Tor; that wouldn’t have killed her. Besides, its end had been to prove these men innocent. This time, she knew, she was being taken to see dead bodies.
Little Pippy. How could she bear to look on that small corpse? On Emma’s?
I can’t uncover terrible things. My ears are filled with the cries of the dead.
But she was what she was; she must travel on to face what she had to.
It was in a clearing. Alf’s voice greeted them, shaking with nerves. “You took your bloody time.”
There was a mound of earth beside him, and he stood on the edge of a long and shallow grave. “He threw ’em in the pit all higgledy-piggledy,” he said. “I been straightenin’ ’em out a bit.”
Will lit a lantern. Then, in a move that both touched her and added to her grief, he and the others swept off their caps.
All of them dead weeks ago. Attacked on the road as they went, having been turned away from Wolvercote Manor. Armed, two-legged animals springing at them from the surrounding trees, tearing, bludgeoning. A screaming end for those dear lives.
Will was holding the lantern out to her.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t.”
“Better you do,” he told her.
As she took the lantern from him, she realized she was still holding the dead warrior’s sword. She was reluctant to let it go; it provided some comfort in this death-stricken place.
With the lantern in one hand and the sword dragging in the other, she began to walk along a grave that seemed to stretch forever. Alf had laid the bodies side by side, all facing upward, with their hands crossed on their breasts. The earthy mold of the pit into which Wolf had thrown them had preserved some flesh, but insects and mammals had taken their portions, turning the faces into unrecognizable distortions that clamored to her, echoing the shrieks and cries of the skirmish with Wolf and his robbers on the road that had been their last experience.
Father Septimus, his gnawed hands laid on the wooden cross that hung from his neck.
Emma’s two grooms, so kind to Allie-it seemed terrible to Adelia that at this moment she couldn’t remember their names-both had been stripped down to their hose, their leather jerkins too valuable to be left to rot. Impossible now to tell which was which.
Master Roetger’s squire, Alberic, far from his native Swabia, another whose jerkin had been taken, leaving his bones to display the hacking to his rib cage.
Adelia stopped for a moment; it was unbearable to go on. Will gave her a small push. “We ain’t got all night, missus.”
She was approaching the women-oh, God, the women. The one with fair hair would be Alys, Emma’s maid. She was naked.
The thought of what might have been done to the girl before she died made Adelia shut her eyes tight.
“Get on, missus.”
Next to Alys was Mary, young Pippy’s elderly nurse, the half-chewed face showing none of the patience and kindness it had borne in life. Her corpse, too, was naked.
“Did he rape them?” Adelia kept her voice low and steady.
Nobody answered her-an answer in itself.
She took another reluctant pace. Her lantern shone on an edge in the earth that rose like a step and led to a continuance of the twigs and weeds that made up the forest floor. She’d come to the end of the grave.
She turned on Will. “Is this all of them?”
He nodded.
“There are only six here.” Her voice yelled shockingly through the silence, and she lowered it. “There were nine. Where’s Emma? Where’s her child? Where’s her knight?” She let the lantern and sword drop so that she could grab the man’s tunic and shake him. “You devil, what’s he done with them?”
There was an exhalation of relief from the men around her. “We did wonder,” Alf said.
She wheeled round to face him. “Wonder what?”
“As maybe it was your friend got away. She might’ve been one of these deaders, for all we knew.”
“Got away? Emma got away?”
“It was like this, see.” Will sat her down on a fallen tree trunk, picked up her sword, and gave it back to her like a mother restoring a toy to a baby to calm it. He squatted beside her while Alf
