“THE VILLAGE GATES are still open,” I said.
I was lying between Karl and Piotr (who was in naked-human form, which couldn’t have been comfortable belly-down in the prickly undergrowth), on a low hill overlooking Zarozje. Off to our left, the lake sparkled in the light of the setting sun. To our right rose the towering cliff face from which Karl had been abducted by giant vampire bats, right after he’d pushed me off of the switchback path into a handy tree, and the fact that sequence of events was not even close to the most unusual of my recent experiences said a lot about what my life had become.
“They will close soon,” Karl said. “The sun is almost down. If you wish to enter, you must approach now.” He turned his head to look at me. “Are you still set on this course of action?”
He’d asked me variations of that question several times that day, which was beginning to make me think he didn’t fully support my decision. But I’d never wavered. (Okay, that wasn’t completely true, I’d wavered internally several times, but I’d never wavered externally, where he could see it.)
“I’m sure,” I said. And partly to not give myself one more opportunity to back out, I scrambled to my feet and started down the slope.
Behind me, I heard a scuffling sound, which I knew (because we had discussed it ahead of time) was Piotr sliding back down from the ridge and turning into a wolf, to patrol outside the village while we were inside it. I turned to look at Karl, still lying there. “Coming?”
He sighed heavily, then got to his feet, brushing leaves and twigs from his front. I did the same as he came down toward me, then together, we turned and picked our way downhill toward the village. Very shortly thereafter, urgent shouts provided auditory evidence that someone had taken notice of us.
Visual evidence followed in extremely short order as armed men appeared in the gate, watching us approach. “Hi!” I called out brightly. “I came back! Can I see Father Thomas, please?”
The biggest of the armed men, who boasted a bushy red beard, turned and said something to the man next to him, who happened to be the smallest of them. The little guy nodded and trotted back into the village. Then bearded-giant guy came out to greet us.
I remembered seeing him during my perambulations around the village during my one day there. He carried a cocked and loaded crossbow, aimed in our general direction. (My own crossbow, stolen from the dead rogue, was slung innocuously over my back.) “We thought you dead . . . or changed,” he rumbled. Definitely a basso profundo. “The latter may still be true. You must be tested—again—before the sun sets.”
“Back to the church?” I said.
“No. Outside the gate. Father Thomas will emerge momentarily.”
I glanced west. The sun was almost to the mountains. “I hope he hurries.”
Big bearded guy said nothing. I watched the sun slip lower. Even after it went out of sight I’d have a few minutes, because it was “true” sunset, below the horizon if we were on the sea or some other flat landscape—southern Saskatchewan, maybe—that controlled the werewolves’ and vampires’ ability to change.
Just half the sun still showed above the peaks when Father Thomas finally appeared in the gate. He wore ordinary clothes—brown trousers, brown vest, a white shirt—the only indication of his holy orders the silver cross around his neck. He strode toward us, grim-faced, carrying a flask, accompanied by the smaller man who had been sent to fetch him. Without a word—or a warning—he unstoppered the flask and, rattling off a hurried bit of Latin, hurled holy—presumably—water into my face and Karl’s in turn. The water was bracingly cold. I gasped, and heard Karl do the same.
Then Father Thomas gripped the cross around his neck and pressed it first to my forehead, then to Karl’s. He pulled it back, studied us for a moment, and dropped the cross onto its chain. He handed the flask to the little guy, then took a silver pin from his pocket. He grabbed my hand and scratched the back of it, then did the same to Karl, who scowled but didn’t flinch.
Father Thomas looked from me to Karl and back again, and then snapped at big bearded guy, “Bring them to the church, Simeon. And get those gates closed.”
Father Thomas turned and strode away again. Big bearded guy—Simeon—didn’t lower the crossbow, despite the fact we literally dripped with holy water and clearly weren’t creatures of the night. He gestured with it, though. “In!”
“Thanks,” I said. “Zarozje, hospitality capital of the Lands Between, that’s what I always say.” I strode forward. Karl followed me. I couldn’t see it, yet somehow, I could feel his disapproving frown.
Through the gates we went, Simeon and the other guard behind us. “Close them,” Simeon snapped to more guards just inside, and as we continued into the twilit village, where yellow light now gleamed through cracks in shuttered windows, we heard the gates creak shut behind us and close with a resounding boom.
Karl stepped up beside me. “They seem very happy to see you,” he said. “I am sure this Father Thomas will fully embrace your request for assistance and supply you with whatever you require.”
“Nobody likes a smart aleck,” I said without looking at him.
We reached the square. The front door of the church stood open, and candlelight glowed within. Simeon prodded us up the steps and inside. Father Thomas awaited us in front of the altar, as though about to perform a marriage ceremony.
Not with Karl! I thought. I turned to Simeon. “Thank you so much. You’ve been a lovely escort,” I said, even though I’d just told Karl nobody liked a smart aleck.
Simeon looked at me uncomprehending, then glanced past me at Father Thomas.
“You may go, Simeon.” The priest’s voice boomed in the empty church.
Simeon grunted, lowered his crossbow, and disappeared back into the square.
I walked down the aisle toward Father Thomas, my footsteps echoing, Karl’s slightly out of sync behind me. Father Thomas did not move. Nor did he smile.
I stopped in front of him. “Hello, Father,” I said. Karl came up beside me, and I indicated him. “This is my companion, Karl Yatsar. The one who was taken by vampires.”
“And yet he lives,” Father Thomas said. “As do you, and you were taken by werewolves. Neither of you has been devoured or changed. I am most interested in hearing your explanation for this otherwise inexplicable state of affairs.” From the tone of his voice, he was already predisposed either to doubt our account or deeply dislike it.
“In a minute,” I said. And then, surprising even myself—I hadn’t known I was going to do it until that moment—I got down on one knee before him, bowed my head, and said, “Father Thomas, I came here to beg your forgiveness.”
I heard a very slight intake of startled breath from Karl.
If I had likewise startled Father Thomas, he gave no indication of it. “An interesting request. For what am I supposed to forgive you?”
My own intake of breath before my answer was considerably larger than the one I had just heard from Karl. I raised my head to look at him. “For my part in what happened to Eric.”
The priest had a great poker face, but that elicited something: a blink, a slight compression of the lips. “And what part was that?”
I seemed to need yet another big breath before continuing. “It was because of me he was in the street that night. It was because of me the werewolves captured him. If he had not been with me, he would have been safely asleep in his bed.”
Now the priest’s eyes narrowed, and his poker face slipped into a frown. “Explain.” He made an irritable gesture. “And, please, stand.”
I got back to my feet and, with Karl standing rigidly beside me, told him the truth: how I had felt I had to get out of the village to find Karl; how I had played on Eric’s guilt at having slain Elena to get him to help me; how he had told me about the sunken door at the end of Tailor Street; how Jakob and Maigrat had gained access through that same door after crossing the supposed barrier of the lake, surprising us; how Maigrat had learned the truth from Eric of who had slain her sister, and given him the change-bite.
“There was no need for you to try to sneak out of the village.” Thomas looked and sounded angry now. “I would have let you go. I told you, you were never our prisoner.”
“I . . . wasn’t sure,” I said. “I’m . . . this is not my world, remember?”
“That much you make clear in very many ways.” Thomas closed his eyes. “Eric knocked me down and went with the werewolves,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. “What has become of him?”
“This,” said a new voice, from the open church door, and I spun, Karl with me.
Eric stood there, naked in the candlelight.
“Oh, Eric,” Thomas said, his voice a choked mixture of grief and fear and anger. “My poor boy. You have been damned!”
Eric crossed the threshold. He crossed it as if he were pushing his way through a thick hedge of brambles, but he crossed it, and then came down the aisle toward us. “I have not, Father,” he said. “Look. I am here in the church, where you said no werewolf could enter. Here, where I have spent so many hours praying and studying. Here, and not harmed.” Then his face crumpled. “Or if I am damned,” he whispered, “it was because of what I did, because of your teaching. I killed an innocent girl, Father A girl my own age, whose only fault was being different. She was never a threat to Shawna, or to any of us.”
With shocking suddenness, hands grabbed me from behind, threw me hard to the stone floor. Father Thomas tugged at the crossbow I still wore across my back, trying to tear it free. Karl shoved him away, and as I rolled over, I saw the priest trip over the step up to the apse and fall onto his rear end in front of the altar. He grabbed the cross around his neck and thrust it out to the end of its chain as Eric moved past me to stand directly in front of him.
“Could you really kill me, Father?” Eric said, still in a whisper. “You raised me from childhood. I am still Eric. I’m still the same boy you knew.” He spread his arms. “I am standing here where I helped you celebrate Mass so many times.”
I clambered back to my feet. “Listen to him, Father Thomas! Queen Stephanie’s werewolves are not evil monsters. They still uphold the Pact. The creatures killing humans in the Lands Between . . . they’re rogues. They do not answer to the queen.”
“To either queen,” Karl said.
“The edicts are clear . . .” Father Thomas almost moaned. “Mother Church . . .”
“You have not heard from Mother Church in a very long time,” I said. “Not since the Pact broke . . . not since you assumed the Pact broke. But if neither Queen Stephanie’s werewolves nor Queen Patricia’s vampires are attacking humans, then the Pact still holds, at least in some fashion. And if the Pact still holds, then the werewolves and vampires who swear fealty to the queens are also under the Church’s protection, as they were under God’s protection when He led them to this valley as the Great Cataclysm engulfed all the rest of the Earth.”
“Father,” Eric said. He knelt in front of the priest and held out his hands. “It’s me. I’m me. Still me. I’ve changed in one way, but not in any way that matters.”
Father Thomas suddenly lunged forward, the cross in his hand. He pressed it to Eric’s forehead. The boy took a breath yet held firm. Thomas dropped the cross, fumbled in his vest, and pulled out the flask of holy water. Hands shaking, he unstoppered it and flung its remaining contents—just a few drops, it looked like—into Eric’s face. Another intake of breath, but still Eric did not move or cry out.
“You see, Father?” Eric whispered. “I am not a creature of evil.”
Something seemed to break inside Thomas. He drew a ragged breath and then lurched up and to his knees and almost fell forward to embrace Eric.
A deep growl sounded behind us, and I turned to see Piotr, in wolf form, fur bristling, standing behind Karl and me. Apparently, it was werewolf night at the church. I wondered if there’d been an announcement in the bulletin. “It’s all right,” I called out quickly. “Everything’s all right.”
Piotr growled again, and then flowed into boy-shape. “I followed that one,” he said, jerking his head at Eric. “He entered through an opening in the wall below the water, at a place where the lake laps against the wall. I would never have known about it.”
“He grew up here,” I said.
Thomas’ eyes, closed as he hugged Eric to him, opened. He stared at Piotr. “Another?” he said.
“I am Prince Piotr,” Piotr said. “Son of Queen Stephanie. We uphold the Pact. You have nothing to fear from me.”
“I know that now,” Thomas said. “Eric . . .” He pushed the boy away, gently, and looked into his face. Tears glistened in his eyes. “Eric proves that. I should have understood, the moment he entered the church. The Pact holds, for at least some of the creatures of the night. If it did not, Eric and . . . Piotr . . . could never have entered this holy place at night.”
I remembered him telling me that the first time he tested me, though he hadn’t mentioned then that it was contingent on the existence of the Pact, which I hadn’t known anything about at the time, so I wouldn’t have understood if he had.
He glanced at Karl and me. “Which could also mean that these two have, in fact, been changed, but also uphold the Pact . . . ?”
“No,” I said. “Still human.”
“As am I,” Karl said.
Thomas took a deep breath and actually managed a small, shaky smile as he looked from Eric to Piotr. “While I am happy to learn you are not evil monsters, being naked in a church is . . . frowned upon. Let’s go into the vestry. I’ll give you robes, and then we will go to my cottage and talk further. There is much I need to know.”
He got up and held out his hand. Eric took it, and Thomas led him toward the vestry, with me and Karl and Piotr following.
“Why should being naked in a church matter?” Piotr said behind me. “This obsession with clothing you humans have puzzles me.”
“We can’t sprout fur at a moment’s notice,” I said. “We get cold.”
That seemed to satisfy him for the moment, and in another moment, he and Eric were pulling on white, scarlet-belted robes in the vestry. Then we all went out the back door into the churchyard. The only light came from the full moon: the previous night’s clouds had blown away during the day, the wind that removed them bringing with it considerably colder weather, so that our breath puffed white in the moonlight. Surely even Piotr is happy to have clothes to wear in this, I thought.
In his cottage, Father Thomas lit a lantern, then the fire. He invited us to sit, which in practice meant two at the table and two on the bed. He poured wine for all of us. Eric looked surprised, but he took it. Piotr didn’t look at all surprised, and also took it. I definitely took it. It was a rather sweet white—a German-style Riesling, or something similar. It occurred to me I’d had a variety of wines, all of which had have come from this single valley, even though there couldn’t be that much climate variability within it. One or both Shapers must be an oenophile, I thought.
“I want to know what’s going on in the valley,” Father Thomas said without preamble. “What have you seen? What do you know?” He looked at Karl and me. “What are you trying to do?” He looked at Eric. “What are you going to do?”
Piotr, surprisingly, spoke first. “Before we say anything,” he said, “I want to know why this one is here.” He looked at Eric.
“My name is Eric,” Eric said.
“Very well,” Piotr replied. “Eric. How can you be here, without the pack?”
“Your mother ordered the pack not to pursue you.”
Piotr blinked at that. “What? Why?”
“The queen said you would soon be captured anyway, because she will rule all the valley.”
Piotr froze. “You mean . . . ?”
“Her anger at Queen Patricia, after the skirmish with the vampires that brought this one to our borders,” he nodded to Karl, and I was struck by how his use of “this one” echoed Piotr’s use of it when he was referring to Eric, “was intense.”
I looked from one to the other of the boys. “Okay, so you both know what’s going on. Care to tell the rest of us?”
“I cannot,” Eric said. “My loyalty to the pack forbids it.”
“I can,” Piotr said. He met my eyes. “My mother’s forces are moving south in force. They intend to attack Queen Patricia’s castle. They intend to end the war between us once and for all and restore the Pact.”
Karl frowned. “How will that restore the Pact?”
“Queen Patricia will be hostage,” Piotr said. “She will command her vampires to stop their attacks on werewolves. It may be a reluctant peace, but peace will reign.”
Karl shook his head. “It won’t work.”
Both Piotr and Eric glared at him. “How do you know?” they said together, then exchanged surprised looks. For his part, Father Thomas stood silently, eyes flicking from speaker to speaker. I suppose mine were, too.
“I have spoken to Queen Patricia,” Karl said. “Her fury at your mother is every bit as great as the anger your mother directs toward her. Even if you take her hostage, she will not command her forces to stand down. The war will not end. It will explode into a bloodbath that will continue until one side or the other is exterminated.”
“Her vampires won’t attack if they know their queen could be killed,” Piotr protested.
“Would the packs stand down if Queen Stephanie were taken hostage, if she did not order them to?”
Eric answered. “No. The packs obey the queen, but if she did not order them to stand down, they would continue to fight, to try to free her.”
“And if she were killed?”
Eric showed his teeth in what was definitely not a boyish grin. “They would not rest until every vampire had been torn limb from limb and their entrails steamed upon the ground.”
Oh . . . kay, I thought. I glanced at Father Thomas. That little outburst didn’t seem very helpful to the “convince-the-priest-I’m-not-an-evil-monster” effort. On the other hand, the torn limbs and theoretically steaming entrails (would they steam? Considering vampires are already dead? And I can’t believe I just thought that) in question belonged to vampires, so perhaps he saw that as a net good.
In any event, Father Thomas seemed unfazed. He looked from the boys to me. “This quest you say you are on. What exactly do you need to do?”
“I just need to get close enough to each queen to touch her,” I said.
“To take their hokhmah,” Piotr said. I glanced at him, surprised. I kept forgetting he knew all the details of how this world had come into being—that he was, in fact, half-Shaper himself.
The word meant nothing to Eric, though. “The what?”
Father Thomas frowned. “I know that word. It is Hebrew. It means . . . wisdom.” He looked at me with narrowed eyes. “How can you take ‘wisdom’ from someone merely by touching them?”
I hesitated. I looked at Karl. He shrugged. Clearly it was up to me to figure out how to explain what was going on. Part of me wanted to simply tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and let the chips fall where they may. Except . . . Father Thomas was a man of faith, and to tell him that his Mother Church was imaginary, put in place by two women crafting a place where they could play at being werewolves and vampires, might destroy him. Nor could Eric hear the truth.
“It is a power I have by virtue of being from another world,” I said, and winced a little as I said it, because I immediately saw myself as a wizened alien with a glowing finger touching Elliot’s cut and making it vanish. But it fit the tale I had already more-or-less convinced Thomas was true. “The wisdom I need to gather is . . . a deep understanding. If I can fully understand both of the queens, I believe I can mediate a peace between them.”
“It sounds like witchcraft,” Father Thomas said, and I remembered him telling me the last witch had been executed two hundred years ago.
“Only because it comes from another world,” I said. “Any sufficiently advanced . . . knowledge and practice . . . is . . . indistinguishable from witchcraft.” With apologies to Arthur C. Clarke. It was the second time his law had sprung to mind since I’d been in this world.
The priest’s fingers tightened on his mug of wine, but when he spoke, it was not to denounce me. “You have convinced me already that my view of good and evil is . . . simplistic.” He looked at Eric. “You have led Eric back to me when I thought he was lost to evil forever, and he himself has proved to me he is not a monster.” He closed his eyes and bowed his head. “And may God have mercy on the soul of that poor child who died because I believed otherwise.” He murmured something, a prayer, no doubt, crossed himself, then lifted his gaze to me again. “If you say you need to get close enough to Queen Patricia to touch her, so that you can bring peace to our world once more, then I am willing to accept that, even if I don’t fully understand it.” He smiled a little. “‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.’”
“Your faith does you credit,” Karl said, “but you need not rely merely on belief.”
I shot him a surprised look.
“If you help us get Shawna to Queen Patricia, she either will, or will not, take the queen’s hokhmah. Once she has it, she can . . . call it ‘influence’ . . . this world, at least in some fashion. Exactly how much she will be able to do, I am not certain. But she will be able to do something, and if she is able to do anything, that will be proof that she tells you the truth now.”
Not bad, I thought. And absolutely true. Well, maybe. Because would I be able to Shape—“influence”—this world in “some fashion,” with only half the hokhmah, drawn from only one of the Shapers? I had no idea, and I was willing to bet Karl didn’t, either. But if it helped me get close enough to Queen Patricia to try, maybe the slight fib was worth it.
Oh, I thought. Situation ethics. What would your Sunday School teacher have had to say about that?
Well, that bird had flown. I’d been situationally ethical all over two worlds now, and while I had clung to my principles enough to apologize to Father Thomas for my role in getting Eric captured by werewolves, I still had to survive. I still had to complete my quest. I could not go backward, only forward. And to go forward, I needed all the help I—we—could get.
And then I remembered something else. “We may also have a better idea of why the Pact failed—which might help restore it,” I told Father Thomas. “Have you ever heard of someone or something called the Protector?”
He raised an eyebrow. “No,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
I told him about the rogue we had encountered. “He said he served the Protector, not either of the queens. At first, we though he was a werewolf, but Piotr thought he . . .” (I decided to avoid the word “tasted”) “ . . . seemed odd. And he had an ability that surprised all of us.”
Father Thomas looked intrigued. “What sort of ability?”
“Just before he died, he took on the appearance of someone else.”
“My mother,” Piotr said.
Eric looked startled. “What?”
“Did he literally change, or was it an illusion?” Father Thomas said intently.
“Illusion,” I said. “First his appearance changed, but not his voice; then his voice changed, too; then, instantly, he was himself again.”
“It sounds like you know something of this,” Karl said.
“Not this specific ability,” the priest said, “but the ability to throw what is called a glamor is native to vampires. There are vampires who can project fear, others who can make themselves hard to see, not invisible, but difficult to focus on. Some authorities believe there are even vampires who can engender lust in their victims, so that they willingly open themselves to the vampire’s fangs. There may be other glamors we don’t know about.”
“But he looked nothing like a vampire,” I said, giving Karl a puzzled look; he’d turned away suddenly and gone to poke at the not-particularly-in-need-of-poking fire while the priest spoke. I turned back to Father Thomas. “He looked like a werewolf . . . and then he looked like Queen Stephanie. And the sun was not yet set.”
“I cannot explain it,” Father Thomas said. “Do you think this rogue and others of his kind had something to do with the collapse of the Pact?”
“Without a doubt,” Karl said, returning from his strangely flustered poking of the fire. “Queen Patricia told me that Queen Stephanie in person led an attack on vampires. That attack, as she saw it, precipitated the outbreak of hostilities between the two kingdoms.”
“And Queen Stephanie,” I said, “told me that Queen Patricia personally led the attack that killed her husband, which she saw as the reason for the Pact’s collapse.”
“The face-changing glamor of this rogue you killed—and probably others—at work,” Father Thomas said. His face lit up. “Then, you might not even need this otherworldly power of yours to restore the Pact! If we can prove to the queens that they have been duped, that they are the victims of someone else trying to sow dissent and destruction, they will surely join forces once more to root out this ‘Protector’ and make him pay for his crimes!”
Pretty big if, I thought. I forbore pointing out that restoring the Pact wasn’t actually my goal at all—I still had to use my “otherworldly power” on each of the queens if Karl and I were going to fulfill our questly responsibility. As far as the Protector went . . . not my problem.
Thomas turned his back on us, gazing into the fire while he sipped his wine. I looked at Karl again, but his eyes were locked on Thomas. So were Eric’s. Only Piotr met my gaze. He gave me a small, knowing smile. I smiled back, though the smile fled as I looked back at Thomas and reflected on the fact that Piotr thought he could follow me into the next world . . . and I was not at all sure he could, or that he should.
Sufficient unto the day is the ethical dilemma thereof, I thought.
Father Thomas took a final sip of wine, straightened his shoulders, and turned to face us. “I will help you,” he said. “I will provide supplies and weapons.”
“Thank you,” Karl said.
“But more than that . . .” His gaze flicked to each of us in turn. “ . . . I am coming with you.”