The Wolf King by Alice Borchardt Read Free Book Online Page A

when he was seized from behind by something composed only of blackened bone with a few tattered remnants of flesh and cloth.
    The head was half covered by a hooded cape. With a courage she didn’t know she had in her, Regeane slammed her fist into its skull. The thing struck the floor and the Saxon stamped it to bits with his boots. Then he sliced the oncoming corpse into three pieces with his sword.
    A second later, Regeane screamed.
    The abbot’s head, shoulder, and one arm were still together. Glaring malevolently, he seized Regeane’s instep with his teeth and bit down hard.
    The thing among the flames consuming the altar laughed loudly. “There is still some life in my creature and much malice.”
    “Stand still,” the Saxon commanded Regeane. Then he sliced the top half of the abbot’s skull off. “Not any longer,” the Saxon said as the remains rolled across the floor.
    “We must,” Regeane whispered through stiff, pale lips, “find some strategy for dealing with these things.”
    “Yes,” the Saxon answered.
    And so they did.
    Above, the fire was slowly consuming the beamed ceiling. Flaming brands and embers were filling the air around them. The choir stalls caught with a flash and a roar, incinerating the dead too decomposed to be of any use to the evil thing at the altar.
    Regeane and the Saxon were forced backward into the hall. By now it was clear all that remained of the monastery was burning down.
    “I’ll cut,” the Saxon said. “You burn.”
    “Yes,” Regeane said, and kicked two torches out of the crumbling door frame as they moved away from the inferno through the ancient, doomed structure.
    Everything in the ruin not exposed to the elements was tinder dry. He mowed down the horrors surrounding them. She set afire sheets of mummified flesh, rags of cloth, and dry bone.
    The Saxon was an iron man, and his “Courage, woman, courage” kept Regeane going through the long night of pain, terror, disgust, and exhaustion.
    The worst moments were when the thing from the bed in the first room to which Regeane had been taken rose and attacked them. The putrefying corpse was too wet to take fire from Regeane’s torches, so she tore down the bed hangings, threw them over the foul thing, and set them ablaze, then added the ticks and linens. By then the whole building was engulfed, the roof of the chapel fallen in.
    Regeane and the Saxon fled past the gate and out into the snow-covered countryside. To their surprise, there was light in the east and it was morning. They paused across from the gate, taking deep breaths of the clean, cold air. The Saxon sagged against a stone pillar set before the abbey, but then started up when he saw three wolves coming toward them at a dead run.
    He wasn’t terribly afraid. He’d fought wolves before and knew these three who looked full fed and in good condition would probably run from two adults, one of them an armed man.
    “No,” Regeane said. “Don’t attack them. That’s my husband and two of his friends.”
    “I told you,” she said, clutching his wrist. “I told you I have always been an outcast.”
    ----
III
    “I suppose…” the Saxon said later as Antonius was freeing his neck from the iron collar. “I suppose I am not dead?”
    Antonius’s eyebrows rose. “Indeed, did you believe this?”
    “Yes,” the Saxon answered hesitantly. “I did for a time last night. Are you a priest?”
    Antonius’s eyebrows rose rather higher. “No,” he said. “Though my stepfather was a pope.”
    The Saxon said, “Unla?”
    Antonius took pity on what he saw as a rather bewildered barbarian. “I am my lady’s chamberlain. Her lord rules a duchy here in the mountains. He would not call it a duchy, but in size, prestige, wealth, and power it is.”
    Then the Saxon asked the question that had been burning in his mind ever since Regeane greeted a huge mountain wolf with a sloppy kiss and a hug. “Am I captured again?”
    Antonius knew well enough what the