Wolf's Cross Read Online Free PDF Page B

invaded the room. But there was nothing.
    She laid the back of her hand against his cheek, and it felt like his flesh was burning from the inside out. Her own embarrassment at tending to him seemed small and petty, and she felt ashamed.
    “You poor man,” she whispered. He didn’t know where he was, or who was with him. She made a silent vow not to abandon him, and lightly kissed his forehead. “I’ll pray for you, so you can wake up and know that your nightmare is over.”
    She tried to feed him, but he didn’t respond to her attempts. She had to satisfy herself with squeezing water into his mouth from a damp cloth.
    She left the shutters on the small window open, to let out the air of disease. They were above the stables, but the smell of horses and manure was preferable to the smell of sickness that was rank in this room. And the night air might help cool his fever.
    Outside, the sun was long gone, and a fat moon hung over the trees at the foot of the fortress’s hill. She needed to go home.

    T he two-mile walk seemed longer than usual, the woods darker, the shadows longer. She glanced around every time the wind creaked a branch, every time something rustled in the leaves. The woods loomed to either side, shadowed and impenetrable.
    Somewhere out there was whatever had attacked the knights of the Order, whatever had wounded Josef. It was something she should fear to meet. But Maria was more afraid that Josef would die from his wounds. More than anything else right now, Maria prayed that her charge would live.
    She told herself it was because she had been given responsibility for him. It was because of the wrongness of such a fine young man meeting such an undignified end. She had seen many men take up sword for their household or their God, and all accepted death as a camp follower, but they expected to meet death quickly in the heat of battle, not to succumb to fever and infection, delirious in their own filth.
    Few men deserved that end—not Josef, and not her father.
    That’s what she told herself.
    But she still felt his breath against her ear and the accidental brush of his lips against her cheek.

    W hen she reached the edge of her family’s farm, she sucked in a breath. Hanna, her stepmother, was going to require an explanation for her lateness, and there was little reason for Maria to believe that it wouldn’t be a long and unpleasant questioning. Her father and her stepmother always wanted a strict accounting of her activities beyond their sight.
    She paused at the gate and looked at her family’s cottage. She could see the yellow flicker of a lantern shining from between cracks in the shutters. The dim light shone on the flanks of an unfamiliar horse tied up by the side of the house.
    Who’s here?
    Suddenly, she thought of her father. Had he …
    “Papa!” she called out. She ran to her house, afraid that the horse belonged to a priest come to administer last rites or console her stepmother. “Papa!” she called again, and the door to the cottage burst open.
    For a moment she felt a near-disabling relief as she saw her father push through the doorway. But it soon gave way to alarmat the expression of rage and terror contorting his face. He ran to her, clad only in a nightshirt, bellowing, “Maria!”
    Maria couldn’t find her voice. He was ill. He shouldn’t be out of bed. His hair was wild in the moonlight, his eyes gleamed with some preternatural terror, and the skin of his face had flushed almost purple. He grabbed her shoulders, shaking her. “You took it off! You took it off!”
    “Papa?” Maria cried.
    “What did you do?” He stared into her face. “Why did you take it off?”
    “I don’t understand.” She hugged herself as her father shook her. “Papa, you’re hurting me.”
    What frightened her most was the fact that her father was crying. “It was to keep you safe. Why did you take it off?”
    Keep me safe?
Her father was delirious. He must be talking about her cross. She