Chapter 23 Him
Him
Three days.
He was gone for three days. His memories of the time spent wolfing are blurred, fragmented into smells and feelings. He doesn’t remember hunting the deer, or crossing the boundary that demarcates his woods from the king’s forest. He hunted, and he has no memory of doing so, and that terrifies him.
Unless, of course, there’s another wolf in the forest. But he would know. He would know. Which means it must have been him.
When he first shifted back, he kept vomiting, as though his body was trying to purge itself of poison.
A human stomach isn’t made for raw meat, and the venison must have been sitting heavily in his belly.
Now he’s weak and hollowed out, but the thought of food makes bile rise in his throat again.
It’ll be a while before his appetite returns.
He’s never allowed himself to hunt like that. He was going to sleep, to rest, to wait it out – and he failed. How did he fail so badly? Was it because of her touch that he lost his mind as well as his body? Did he leave that crucial part of himself in their bed?
It feels like a punishment for all the risks he has taken, all he’s dared to hope for.
He doesn’t go to the physician. There’s nothing they can tell him that he doesn’t already know, and no cure they might offer will balance the humours of the wolf that wears his skin.
He’s on his way to the armoury instead, in search of boots and a warm cloak to keep out the chill for the journey home, when he finds himself crossing paths with the king’s scribe.
‘I heard you’d been ill, Bisclavret, but you look more as though you’ve crawled out of your grave.’ He clasps Bisclavret’s shoulder, his good humour not hiding his concern. ‘Are you well?’
Bisclavret gives him a stoic grimace. ‘Well enough, and mending,’ he says.
‘Hmm. Your wife is here, you know. She came in search of you.’
His wife. He thought at least he would have the ride home to think up some excuse. ‘She’s here?’
The scrivener gestures vaguely. ‘In the chapel.’
His heart sinks. ‘Thank you. I should go to her.’
‘Like enough you should,’ the scribe agrees. ‘It’s always dangerous when they start praying for you.’ His smile is light and irreverent, but there’s an edge to his expression as he gives Bisclavret one last clap on the shoulder and then disappears.
Dry-mouthed, Bisclavret makes his way to the chapel. With luck, the chaplain will be there to mediate, to offer intercession between Bisclavret and his lies and his wife – but when he lets himself in, there’s only one figure kneeling in front of the altar.
His footsteps are too loud on the flagstones. She looks up, and at the sight of him she drops her psalter and pushes herself to her feet. ‘You,’ she says, and he can’t tell if it’s relief or anger that makes her voice shake. ‘You’re here.’
He swallows. ‘I’m here. I’m sorry.’
She seems unsure whether she would prefer to slap him or to embrace him. ‘You ran from me.’
‘Not from you,’ he says, pleading. ‘From myself.’ He cannot look at the altar without remembering the vigil he should never have kept and the oaths he should never have sworn.
He isn’t made for knighthood. He isn’t made for marriage.
But in the eyes of God he is bound to both, and cannot abandon them. ‘I came back.’
She reaches out her hand, brushes his tangled hair away from his eyes.
He can see the questions in her face, and the pain they bring.
He would kiss away those soft creases in her brow if he could, and take from her the worry; he would have her fear nothing.
But it would be a peace made of lies, and it already tastes bitter on his tongue.
In the end, she doesn’t ask. She looks him in the eyes and says, ‘You came back,’ in a voice that’s soft and doubtful and full of gratitude. ‘But you came here instead of home.’
‘Perhaps I knew I’d find you here,’ he says.
Her small, sad smile shatters his bravado and flirtation: she knows the thought never crossed his mind.
‘I came here to pray for your soul when I thought you must be dead,’ she says.
‘I kept a vigil for you last night, in case you lay unshriven somewhere in the forest with nobody to find you. I stayed until the candles burned out.’
Of all the ideas she might have come up with to explain his absence, he didn’t expect his death to be among them. A lump rises in his throat at the thought of her on her knees on the cold stone for his sake. ‘You truly believed me dead?’
‘I believed you loved me,’ she begins.
‘I do,’ he interrupts.
‘And so,’ she continues pointedly, ‘I believed if you were alive, you would have come back.’
She has faith in him. She looks at him, still, in that way of hers – seeing the whole of Bisclavret-the-man, and none of Bisclavret-the-wolf, the way he has always wanted to be seen. She raises his hand to press a kiss to the inside of his wrist.
That should be his part to play. But he has a mind to let her court him, run ragged and exhausted as he is. ‘I would not have left if I felt I had any choice,’ he tells her, which is as honest as he can be. ‘And I will always come back.’
She kisses his wrist again, and his hand, and finally his lips, and if she notices the sour smell of sickness that haunts him or the iron tang of the blood spilled by the wolf, she doesn’t comment on it. ‘Then let us go home,’ she says.
Bisclavret smiles. ‘I have no horse and I’m not dressed for the weather. Let me rectify those faults and then we’ll go.’
‘I promised the servants I would be home by Nones,’ she says; Sext is long past, the winter sun already weakening, and she will be pressed to keep her word. ‘Follow after me, then. You ride faster than I do, and might well overtake me on the road.’
He’s not ready to be parted from her – he owes her penance, atonement for his failures as a husband. But it will be easier, if he can travel alone and have time to fashion his thoughts into human patterns. ‘Very well.’
‘And don’t tarry,’ she says. ‘You’ve been gone long enough.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
But when she’s gone, he takes a moment, leaning against the wall and waiting for the dizziness to recede.
It must be days since he ate a proper meal, food meant for human consumption, and exhaustion thrums in every shaking muscle.
Blackness stains the edges of his vision, and he tries to blink it away, but the fatigue is not easily banished.
He’s not paying attention to the footsteps approaching him, but he notices when a figure in travel-stained court garb stops in front of him. ‘I’m well, I’ll be gone in a—’ He looks up. His cousin. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I was summoned by the king to answer to your condition,’ says his cousin stiffly, and Bisclavret feels sick. ‘Don’t look at me with such alarm. Of course I didn’t tell him. Nor have I told your wife, and that, I confess, needles my conscience more.’
‘The king summoned you?’
‘That is what I said, is it not? Though in any case I might have come to accompany your wife back home in your absence. The roads grow ever more dangerous, and the woods more so. After all, they say there are wolves hunting there these days.’ His tone has sharpened.
Bisclavret doesn’t know how to respond to this. ‘What did you say to the king?’
‘That the secrets of my kinsman were not mine to disclose. And that you would be as loyal to him as any man could be, within the limits of your ability.’ It ought to be a relief, but it feels like the sort of statement that comes with a sting in its tail.
When his cousin speaks again, the barb makes itself known.
‘I am beginning, however, to think I overestimated those abilities. How long were you gone this time, Bisclavret?’
Bisclavret is silent, and his cousin crouches down and grips his chin so that he has to meet his eyes. He forces out the words: ‘Three days. I was gone for three days.’
‘And I suppose you told your wife where it is you went, didn’t you? That must be why you are here in the chapel, why I saw her with the chaplain this morning.’
‘She thought I was dead. She went to pray for me. She doesn’t – I haven’t told her – I . . .’
His cousin lets go of him and pushes upright in disgust. ‘Then she is deceived as well as despairing. She deserves better than this, Bisclavret.’
Better than you. ‘I know that,’ he snaps back. ‘Do you think the thought doesn’t haunt me?’
‘And yet you’re not here to seek an annulment, are you? It cannot, then, haunt you so very much.’
‘An annulment?’ echoes Bisclavret.
‘I’m assuming you did not manage a consummation before .
. . this.’ The word is accompanied by a gesture – an attempt, it seems, to encompass the whole of Bisclavret’s being and all of his failures.
‘It would not be without shame for either of you, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be for the best.’
Coldly, fighting down the wave of dread that threatens to swamp him, Bisclavret says, ‘You assume wrong.’
His cousin closes his eyes and takes three slow breaths. ‘So she is bound to you,’ he says finally, opening them again. ‘She might have had her pick of knights, but she chose you, and now she is trapped. In the name of God, Bisclavret, have you considered what might become of your children?’
‘How can I not have considered that?’ cries Bisclavret in response. ‘Of course I have thought of that! I have scarcely stopped thinking of it since she first expressed her willingness to be my wife.’
‘And yet that consideration did not change your actions! I have thought you many things, but selfish was never one of them. But in this you have done wrong – you have been selfish and unkind, and you have hurt her. I have failed you and I have failed her by not doing more to stop this. I—’