Wolf's Cross by S. A. Swann Page A

fragments of a tabard. Human clothing shredded by someone during a change. A severed hand. A broken sword. Crossbow bolts sticking in a tree that had burned into a skeletal hand reaching for the sky.
    No bodies.
    Not until he reached the church.
    Like the rest of the village, the scene was too surreal for him to make immediate sense of it. It was the smell that brought him to his knees, retching into the blood-soaked mud, before he could even acknowledge what it was he saw.
    The German Order had taken away their dead and wounded.
    Their victims, the inhabitants of Darien’s village, had been dragged into the church that their ancestors had built to appease the followers of Christ. Living or dead, everyone had been sealed inside; and then the building had been set afire.
    Mixed with the blackened timbers, in what seemed equal numbers, were the bones of everyone Darien had ever known. Some of the flame-blackened skulls were human, some were lupine, and all seemed to stare at him with empty sockets, accusing him.
    He shook, on his knees, and said, “I didn’t do this.”
    The sickening smell of his burnt family argued against him.
    “I didn’t do this!” he screamed at the dead.
    But the dead refused to acknowledge him.

    F or three years, he abandoned his human form. He even abandoned his halfway skin, whose hands were too much a reminder of what he had lost. He became nothing but a large wolf, hiding in the woods the way his ancestors hid in their human forms.
    Guilt and despair drove the wolf into an endless hunt. He slept in caves, drank from rivers. He gradually tried to forget things like language, and tools, and clothing.
    And thinking.
    After three years, the only thing that reminded him of hisearly life was the healed wound in his side. It had left a thin scar that tended to ache when the weather became cold. The pain wasn’t bad, but the ache always brought tears.
    He would have remained in those dark woods for the rest of his life if he hadn’t found the dying hart. He was hunting and took the creature without a thought, springing onto its back from the darkness, and twisting its neck in his jaws so it was dead before it fell.
    The thought came after it died and struck the forest ground. It had never known that Darien was there, but it had been running in a panic, its pulse under his tongue so rapid that its heart might have burst from the effort. It bled from wounds Darien had had no part in making.
    He looked down at the animal’s body.
    Long sticks pointed up out of the beast’s chest, jammed into the creature’s lungs, their bases slick with frothy blood. He saw the fletching and pulled the word out of his memory.
    Arrows
.
    Men were here?
    He stood over the dead animal, forepaws resting on its side, and felt something shift in his heart. For three years he’d had no focus for his anger beyond himself and his own guilt. For three years he had forced himself not to remember anything beyond his feral existence in the forest. Living far beyond anything that might remind him of what he once had, and what he had lost because of what he had done.
    What men had done
.
    A low growl rumbled in his chest. Standing over his kill, his thoughts a clumsy tumble of half-remembered shame and fury, he felt something slam into his chest. He fell backward, more in surprise than in pain. Looking down, he saw an arrow the length of his foreleg sticking out of the left side of his chest.
    Above him, the archer was readying another arrow in his bow.The man didn’t wear the cross or the armor of the knights who had slaughtered Darien’s village, but he smelled of man—a scent Darien would never forget.
    Almost without thought, his body realigned itself, the spine twisting, muscles rippling, and his forepaws creaking and snapping as they grew into strong, clawed hands. The flesh wrenched itself painfully into its new form, leaving an aching relief in its wake.
    He had nearly forgotten his other skin, but his body hadn’t.