Abomination. Gary Whitta

      Cuthbert could hear his own heartbeat pounding in his ears like a drum, and darkness seemed to be creeping in from the corners of his vision. His knees felt weak. His stomach tightened. His mouth was suddenly so dry he could barely speak, but his keen sense of self-preservation somehow compelled the words to come forth.

      “My lord,” he offered meekly, voice cracking. “With respect, I am a scholar, not a soldier.”

      Wulfric clapped his hand heartily upon Cuthbert’s shoulder, and the cleric’s legs almost gave way beneath him.

      “My friend,” Wulfric said, “as of today, you are both.”

      Cuthbert was dismissed, and as the priest scurried off in the direction of the nearest outhouse, Wulfric and Alfred walked back from the chapel to the courtyard where Wulfric’s horse was stabled. For a while, neither man spoke. But the pall of unspoken words hung over them both until Alfred was forced to say something. Anything.

      “Where will you start?” he asked.

      “I will find Edgard,” said Wulfric, with no hesitation. He had already thought that far ahead. “There is no battle, no campaign I can conceive of, that I would fight without him at my side. Once he is with me, the others I need will follow.”

      Alfred nodded his approval, and they walked several more steps without a word. Wulfric gazed at the stones between his feet, deep in sober contemplation. “Of course, first I must give the news to Cwen,” he observed, his voice lower now, as though speaking to himself.

      “How will she take it?”

      “Truth be told, I do not know which I fear more—Aethelred’s army of abominations or her reaction,” replied Wulfric, only partly in jest. “I promised her I would never go to war again. That was her one and only condition when she agreed to marry me.”

      “You are not going to war,” offered Alfred. “This is a singular mission on behalf of your King—and frankly, your God. Cwen is a woman of faith, is she not? Surely she will understand that.”

      Wulfric gave it thought. “A crusade,” he said, finally.

      “Just a small one,” suggested Alfred wryly, with a smile that he noticed Wulfric did not return. Alfred knew his friend well enough to see that there was something more on his mind, something even he was reluctant to voice.

      “Is there anything else you would ask of me?” he said. And that was enough to stop Wulfric in his tracks. The knight turned and looked at Alfred hard, with something as close to anger as the King had ever seen directed at him.

      “I have only one question to ask,” said Wulfric. “How could you have been so blind as to not see where this madness, this . . . heresy, would lead you?”

      Alfred looked about him as though searching for an answer. And Wulfric saw now in his face things he had seen many times in other men, but never in his King. Remorse. Guilt. Shame.

      “I have asked myself that question many times. I have also asked God. So far, neither of us have an answer. All I can offer is this: Everything I have done in my life, including this horrifically misguided venture, has been compelled by a single aspiration—to protect and defend this kingdom. So it pains me more than you can understand to know that my actions may have now put it in greater peril than any Norseman ever did. But that is why I ask you now, not as your King, but as your friend, to help me this one last time. To help unmake the wrong that I myself have made.”

      Wulfric looked at his King. Alfred found his expression impossible to read, and he waited, for some gesture of understanding or, dare he hope, absolution. But all Wulfric gave was a single nod before he turned and walked away toward the stable where his horse was waiting.

      “It will be done,” he said, without looking back.

      When Wulfric arrived home, it was worse than he had feared. Cwen bawled and cursed and threw everything at him that her heavily pregnant state would allow. Alfred had been wrong, of course—not about Cwen being a woman of faith, but in suggesting that it would help her understand why Wulfric had to leave her when her belly was ripe and she needed him most.

      Wulfric knew that Cwen would never have believed a story of monsters and magick, so he told her instead a tale of a dangerous band of heretics led by a deranged priest who was spreading blasphemies and had to be dealt with—it was, after all, still true, in a manner of speaking. But invoking duty even to both God and King carried little weight with Cwen, whose priorities now began and ended with the gift she carried inside her. Tell Alfred he can stick his little crusade up his arse! she had screamed at him between bouts of hurling copper pots from across the kitchen. God does not want you chasing mad priests a hundred miles away—he wants you here with me and your unborn child! How can you do this to us now?

      This is why warriors should never marry, Wulfric later thought to himself as he packed his saddlebag and nursed a bruise on his forehead from a milk jug that Cwen had aimed particularly well. Because war is a jealous mistress. She has a way of calling us back to her, long after we thought we had bid farewell for good.

      Wulfric mounted Dolly and headed out that same evening. He had hoped to at least stay the night, but Cwen had told him in no uncertain terms that the only place he would be sleeping would be the stable. And so he rode into the night, heading east, to where he knew he would find Edgard. At the top of the hill, he stopped and looked back, hoping to catch sight of Cwen watching him from the doorway or the window. But there was no sign of her. Sadly, he turned away and spurred his horse on.

      SIX

      Wulfric sat cross-legged in the center of a grassy meadow, idly considering a curious flower he had picked, a type he had not seen before and could not identify. It was a quiet moment, among the few he had known in many a month, save for sleep—and even that was, more often than not, a breeding ground for the nightmares that now plagued him. And so he tried to find some peace in each rare moment of quiet solitude, such as this one. Although, truth be told, having little else to occupy his mind only made it more difficult to ignore the pain from which he could find no relief.

      Even now, months after that misshapen beast had attacked him in Alfred’s dungeon, Wulfric still bore the wound around his wrist—as fresh as though it had been inflicted yesterday. He had tried every salve and treatment he knew, but still he felt it burning under the bandage in which he kept it wrapped. At times it felt as though the beast’s tongue were there still, a phantom appendage encircling his wrist like a white-hot manacle, eating away at the layers of his flesh. Just another wretched aspect of Aethelred’s black magick—wounds that refused to be healed by medicine or even by time.

      Wulfric was pulled from his reverie by the sound of footsteps in the soft grass behind him.

      “The men are wondering if they are to sit here all morning, or if you plan on giving the order to attack,” said Edgard.

      Wulfric glanced up at his fellow knight. Just as Wulfric was one of the few men in Alfred’s kingdom who had earned the right to speak to his King as an equal, Edgard was among the few who enjoyed a similar privilege with Wulfric. Every other soldier in England, even the most senior officers, addressed Wulfric with a degree of reverence that made any kind of useful or honest conversation impossible. But not Edgard, a knight who, like Wulfric, had once been a common man enlisted in Alfred’s army. He had fought alongside Wulfric in almost every battle against the Norse, before Ethandun and after.

      They had liked each other instantly, from the first time they had broken bread around one of the enlisted men’s campfires. They were from the same county, they learned. Their families had bought fruit from the same local market and even knew a few of the same people. And both were men blessed—or cursed, perhaps—with an innate talent for battle. They had much in common and quickly became inseparable on the battlefield. Before long, the two