The dagger’s keen edge sliced through it easily. Erde gathered up the shorn dark mass of her hair and threw it on the dying embers. The sudden flare seared her eyes, and her nose wrinkled at the odor. The new lightness of her head, with the hair just short of her earlobes, made every motion feel unhinged.
Well past midnight, and outside, the wind still howled. In the cooling room, she stripped to her shift by dim firelight, tucked the hem into the woolen men’s leggings. Rainer had let her try on his leggings once, when they were much younger, and Erde had never forgotten the sense of freedom and power such clothing provided. She was grateful that this first time of her bleeding had been short. She needed no womanly inconveniences now.
The linen shirt, worn soft and patched at the elbows, went over her shift and hung past her knees. Erde cinched it up with the dagger belt and sheathed the knife. After all, any boy might wear his older brother’s cast-off shirt.
She laced up the leather tunic, then slid on the boots and walked around in them a bit, amazed that Alla could have fit her so well simply by guesswork. She emptied Fricca’s latest hopeful offering of bread, cheese, and apples into the satchel, then added her own thick cloak. It made the pack uncomfortably bulky, but strapping it to her back the way Alla had always done on their herb-gathering forays made the burden manageable.
She thought of the nighttime forest, and felt only relief. She pulled the gray prentice cap over her shorn hair, settled the dagger more comfortably on her hip and stood gazing about the darkening room, at the old tapestries billowing in the draft, with their tales of dragons woven in faded hues, the minor cousins of those her father and the priest had burned. She’d no doubt these would be next. She peered into the shadows beneath her costly bed dressings, at the firelit marble mantle carved in the shapes of two trees meeting in an arch, into the recesses of the vaulting above her head where bats sometimes slept off the daylight hours.
There was nothing here that she would miss. No one left that she cared about or did not fear.
Erde took a quick breath and went to drag the dead guard out from under the bed. She was glad for darkness and tried to look at him as little as possible. He was beginning to smell a bit, and she hoped he would forgive her for postponing his last rites for so long. She prayed the poor man wouldn’t burn in hell as long as she probably would.
She heard metal scrape as she yanked him by his boot heels, and saw a faint glimmer in the shadows beneath the bed. Reluctantly, she took a closer look. His jerkin was snagged with the blade of a sword.
Rainer’s sword! The one her father had tossed away in the heat of his madness. Erde pounced on it, hugging it to her chest as if it were Rainer himself. If she’d had any tears left, she would have shed them then. Instead, she floated in numbness. Something inside her, some gear or mainspring, had broken. She could not feel, she could only act. But action at least offered some sense of forward motion, of being still alive. So she grasped the sword by its hilt and tried to level the blade in front of her. The strain of its weight pulled on her untrained wrist. She could not carry it, but she could not leave it behind. She tore one of her sheets into strips, bound up the sword to blunt its razor edge, and tied it to her own body with more of the sheeting, so that it nestled against her back like a steel spine.
She laid the guard out in the middle of the room, where he would be most visible from the doorway. She drew the bed curtains shut, opened the high casement window and knotted the torn sheet around the handle, draping it artfully over the sill. She took the pitcher, the washbasin, the kettle, anything that would break or make noise. She had planned to scream and tried, but could not. She prayed there was only the one man guarding her chamber so late at night. She stationed herself against the wall just to the side of the door and began flinging things to the floor.
The door cracked open. The young duty-guard peered in cautiously, not wishing to follow his captain’s fate with regard to the baron’s daughter. He saw a large body sprawled in the darkened room, then the open casement with the sheet ruffled by the draft. Shouting, he shoved the door wide and sprang in.
When he had bent over the corpse and his back was to her, Erde ducked silently around the doorjamb and ran for her life.
* * *
She used all the old back stairs, the narrowest unlit corridors learned in her childhood, where the wind whistled through the chinks in the stone and the people who worked the longest days slept the hardest. The sword at her back set her posture unnaturally straight, the way Fricca had always nagged her to stand. With no clear idea of where she was heading other than somewhere down the mountain toward the villages, she slipped through the dark warmth of the kitchens, past the yawning bakers already beginning their day. The herbal talisman that always hung over the bread ovens to bless the rising had been replaced by a large wooden crucifix. Erde let herself out the scullery entrance. The wind and damp cold hit her full in the face.
How can it really be August, she wondered, wrapping her arms about her against the chill. Surely I have slept, and in my daze, it has become November.
The thin dogs sleeping in the lee of the wood yard raised their heads with interest as she approached, but Erde spoke to them in the language of hands and put their minds at rest. She unpacked her cloak and wrapped it shawllike about her head and shoulders, as she’d seen the prentice boys do, then struck out boldly across the cobbled rear court toward the inner gate.
The guards there were throwing dice and arguing. A mere passing prentice was hardly worth their notice when a month’s salary hung on the toss. Erde descended into the mud and ruts of the armory yard, head bent, her walk purposeful. Escape was beginning to seem ridiculously easy, when she rounded the corner of the forge and came face-to-face with the chicken-crone, hauling her basket of corn to the bird pen. The ragged ancient peered at her and waved her irritably out of the path. Erde drew her cloak closer and stepped aside to pass. Suddenly the crone snatched at the cloak, spilling corn into the icy mud and raising a piercing squawk as if wolves were in the hen coop.
“Witch! Witch! Witch!” Her mad shriek echoed off the armory walls like a call to battle.
Erde jerked herself free and ran, doubling back toward the stables. She still had a few moments of grace before anyone thought to take the cries of the chicken-crone seriously. She let herself into the long wooden shed nestled against the middle ring wall. Most times, she knew, the horse gate leading from the stables into the outer ring was left unguarded, the animals themselves being touchy enough to give alarm. But the great shadowy forms flared their velvet nostrils and let Erde pass. She found her own horse Micha, bade him farewell, and hurried on.
Now there were the beginnings of commotion in the inner yard, and one gate left to pass, the massive Dragon Gate with its iron portcullis that was lowered every day at dusk. The wheel crank that raised it was inside the guardhouse, windowless but for an arrow slit that looked out on the gate. Its low entrance was barred by a door of rough planks. Erde put her eye to a crack.
Three men on duty: two fast asleep, the third huddled by the smoking firepit, drinking and staring into the coals. Erde knew this one—Georg, a lank and flat-faced fellow who was often on duty when she took an early walk. He’d stall the morning raising of the portcullis in order to hold her in conversation, going on about the long night and his sad lot and the abuses of his superiors. He smiled at Erde a lot, though this did not tell her whether he was her friend.
Back in the inner court, the dogs were barking. Soon the search would be on. Erde had no choice but to try and bluff it out. She gathered the cloak around her head, leaving as much of her boy’s clothing showing as seemed reasonable, then rapped manfully on the planks and stood back waiting by the gate.
Inside, Georg fumbled about, rose, and looked out the door. Erde gestured to him casually to open up. He nodded grumpily and turned back inside. The crank rope groaned as the gate inched up. Past the folds of her hood, Erde could see George squinting at her through the arrow slit. A foot off the ground, the iron grille stopped.
“Hey, boy, where you headed in this devil’s weather?”
Erde was unsure whether it was better or worse that she could not answer him. She waved.
He left the crank and came out toward her. “You might have a civil reply for your elder!”
Erde shrugged, trying to look shy, even when he reached and grabbed a fold of her cloak. He frowned, rubbing the soft fabric between his fingers. “Who’d you steal this from, eh?” He snatched her hood back, stared a moment, then recognition came. “Well, well. If it ain’t the captain’s high-born whore. You don’t look so good without your hair.”
He might as well have slapped her. Erde blinked back tears and set her jaw. She inclined her head proudly at the gate.
Georg snorted. “You want out, your little ladyship? Little late for a walk isn’t it? What is it, a lovers’ tryst? The captain ain’t dead half a day and you’re lifting your skirts for another? Got used to getting a little, did you? My, I like a girl with spirit.”
Erde scowled at him indignantly and put her finger to her lips.
“Ssh, ssh, I know, don’t wake the castle!” He grinned, then seemed to get an idea, and moved closer. “Tell you what, missy. I’m happy to accommodate you if you do the same for me.”
Erde made the mistake of letting hope show in her eyes.
“Oh, that priest may say you’re hell-bait, but I ain’t afraid. I’ve always thought it’d be just fine to have a hot little witch-girl to snuggle up into when I come home. What d’ya say? You just give me some of what you gave the captain, and I’ll let you go wherever you want.” Georg folded his arms and smiled. “What d’ya say? It’s cold out here, so cold, and I got a joint needs warming.”
Erde finally understood. She shrank back instinctively and tried to bolt. Georg lunged and pinned her against the iron gate. His heavy wine-breath reminded Erde sickeningly of her father. The alarm raised in the inner yard had moved on to the stables. Horses neighed and stomped, and guardsmen shouted orders. But Georg was too intent on pressing his hips into her and working his hands through the layers of her clothing. Erde had no voice to reason with him. She tried to shove him away.
“Oh, like it rough, do you?” He grunted nastily, sucking at her neck and tearing at her breeches. “Is this how the captain gave it to you? Did he give it to you hard?”
As his fingers groped for parts of her body that no man had ever touched, Erde knew another game had turned deadly serious. She hadn’t a chance of fighting him off. His weight pushing at her outlined the chill of Rainer’s sword against her back, and the shape of Alla’s dagger against her side. The reminder of Alla and what Alla had done to save her calmed Erde and told her what to do.
She forced herself to relax against Georg’s body, to let his rough hands find her skin and thrust themselves impatiently between her legs. While he sighed and groaned and fumbled to loose his own ties, she eased the dagger out of its sheath, slid her arms up as if to embrace him, and rammed the slim blade into him as hard as she could.
She felt the blood spurt, hot and reeking, and was glad it was too dark to see his face as he reeled back from her, clutching his neck, his thick hose sagging around his naked thighs. She held tight to the dagger until his spasms jerked it free, then shrugged her own clothes up around her and dropped to the ground to wedge herself into the cold mud until she could roll through the narrow space beneath the gate.
Free of the mud and iron spikes, she stood shaking, fighting nausea but determined not to give up an ounce of precious nourishment. She could not flee to the villages now. She had just murdered one of their own.
The wind tore up the mountain to stiffen her sodden clothing and hurl razor-edged sleet in her face. But to Erde, stumbling up the rocky path toward the uncertain shelter of the forest, it seemed only fitting that her body should be as numb as her heart.