Tomas Vale was out of the chapel before the second scream ended.
Adrian saw him go. He saw his father come through the side door at a limping run, shoving past Jory Keel, and grab the hay fork that someone had left leaning against the chapel wall, and plunge out into the rain toward the western lane without a word. He did not look back. His bad knee buckled on the wet cobbles and he caught himself and kept going.
"Tomas!" His mother's voice, from inside. "Tomas, no!"
Behind Adrian, the chapel came apart into noise. Chairs scraping. Children crying. Goodwife Marsh shrieking the Abyss, the Abyss, it's come. The heavy tramp of boots, and the voice of Watch-Sergeant Harl bellowing over all of it: "Squires! On me! Guard the door! No one leaves this building!"
No one leaves. Adrian heard it. He was already outside.
He ran.
❖ ❖ ❖
The western lane was a black tunnel of hedges and rain. There was no moon. Adrian could see his father ahead of him only as a darker shape in the dark, lurching, and could hear only his father's ragged breathing and the slap of his boots in the mud and, beyond that, from the end of the lane, the screaming of the sheep.
It did not sound like sheep. It sounded like children.
Adrian's feet went out from under him in a rut and he slammed down on his hands and knees in the mud. He scrambled up. He ran again, and his feet slid again, and he nearly fell again - and some part of him that was not panicking, some cold, still part that had spent three days walking silently across a loft, said: Outside of the foot. Weight last.
He changed his stride without thinking. Edge of the foot down. Roll. Weight. It was slower for three steps, and then it wasn't. The mud stopped sliding under him. He stopped making noise. He caught up to his father at the Vale gate.
Tomas didn't even see him. Tomas was standing at the open gate with the hay fork raised, staring into the yard.
The sheepfold was on the far side of the yard, a low wattle pen against the barn wall. The screaming had stopped. In its place was a silence so complete that Adrian could hear rain dripping off the thatch of the house. And from the direction of the pen came a soft, wet, rhythmic sound, like someone drinking from a bowl.
Then a light came on in the dark.
Not a lantern. Two small, pale, round lights, close together, at the height of a tall man's chest. They were white. They gave off no glow at all. They were simply there, floating in the black above the sheepfold, and it took Adrian a long, slow, sick moment to understand that they were eyes.
The wolf lifted its head.
It was the size of a pony. Adrian's mind would not take that in. His mind kept trying to make it smaller, to make it a wolf, a big dog, a thing from the woods - and his eyes kept telling him the truth. It stood over the sheepfold with its forepaws on the wattle fence, and the fence bent under them, and its shoulders were higher than Adrian's head. Its fur was grey. Not wolf-grey. Ash-grey. The dull, dead grey of the ewe on the hillside, the grey of a cold hearth. And through the fur, as it turned its head toward them, Adrian saw lines. Thin black lines running under the skin of its muzzle and throat and chest, branching like cracks in ice, pulsing faintly.
Its breath came out of it in a long white plume, like frost on a winter morning.
In the pen beneath it, nothing moved.
"Get back," said Tomas Vale, without turning his head. His voice was very quiet and very calm. It was a voice Adrian had never heard him use. It was, he understood later, the voice of a man who had stood at a river ford in the Border War.
"Father-"
"Adrian. Get back to the village. Now."
The wolf stepped down off the fence. It did not hurry. It came across the yard toward them with its head low and its filmed white eyes fixed, not on the man with the hay fork, but past him. On the boy.
Adrian's hands went cold. Not Dissonance. Not fear. Something else. The deep, aching, bone-cold of the Sounding water, climbing up his wrists - and at the same moment, he saw the black lines under the wolf's skin pulse, all together, brighter, as if something inside them had heard something inside him.
The grey window flashed open across his vision.
[It can feel me.]
[Do not replicate anything.]
[It will make you louder.]
"Adrian, RUN!"
The wolf charged.
❖ ❖ ❖
Tomas threw the hay fork.
He threw it the way he had thrown a spear at a river ford twenty years ago, and Adrian, even in the terror of it, saw the thread - one bright poured line of [Steady Arm], shoulder to fingertip, perfectly straight. The fork flew through the rain and took the wolf in the chest.
It should have killed it. Adrian heard the tines go in. The wolf staggered sideways and let out a sound that was not a yelp and not a howl, a high, thin, keening shriek like wind through a crack. Black ichor ran down its grey fur.
And then it shook itself, and the hay fork fell out of its chest and clattered on the stones, and the wounds in its chest were already closing - the black lines crawling across them like stitches - and it came on.
Tomas had nothing left in his hands. He stood his ground anyway. He put himself square in the middle of the gate, between the wolf and his son, and raised his bare fists, and the wolf hit him.
It did not bite him at first. It simply ran into him, the way a cart runs into a fence, and Tomas went down on his back in the mud of the yard with the wolf on top of him. His bad knee buckled with a crack that Adrian heard over the rain. He got an arm up. The wolf's jaws closed on his forearm.
Tomas screamed.
Adrian was moving before he had decided to move.
He did not replicate anything. He did not reach for any seam. There was no time, and the grey window's words were still burning across his sight, and there was nothing, nothing at all, in the grey window's lists that could fight a Hollowbeast the size of a pony.
There was a lantern hanging on its hook by the barn door. His mother lit it every night at dusk and his father put it out when he went to bed, and tonight nobody had put it out, because tonight they had gone to the harvest supper. It was still burning, low and orange, behind its horn panes.
Adrian ran to the barn door and tore it off its hook, and ran back, and did not slow down. He did not throw it. He had no Trait for throwing. He simply ran straight up to the Hollowbeast - so close he could smell it, a cold, dry, dusty smell, like an old cellar - and swung the lantern with both hands, as hard as he could, into the side of its head.
The horn panes shattered. Hot oil sprayed across the wolf's grey muzzle and into its white eyes, and caught.
The wolf let go of his father's arm.
It reared back, shrieking that terrible thin shriek, and shook its burning head from side to side, spraying droplets of flame across the yard. The fur on its face was on fire. Under the fire, Adrian saw the black lines writhing. Flames caught in the straw by the sheepfold. In the barn, Barley was screaming and kicking at her stall.
The wolf turned toward Adrian.
Half of its face was burning. The other half was already healing, the black lines stitching across it. Its one good white eye fixed on him, and its lips pulled back from its teeth, and Adrian stood in the middle of his family's yard with nothing in his hands but a broken lantern handle and understood with perfect clarity that he was about to die.
The grey window was open. It was blank. It had nothing to tell him.
Adrian stared into the white eye, and for one strange, suspended heartbeat, something in it looked back at him that was not a wolf at all. Something old, and starving, and sad, like a voice calling from the bottom of a well.
Then an arrow came out of the dark and went through that white eye and out the other side of the wolf's skull.
❖ ❖ ❖
The wolf did not die.
Adrian would remember that for the rest of his life. It did not fall. It staggered, and shrieked, and clawed at its head with one huge grey forepaw, and the arrow snapped off in its eye socket. Another arrow hit it in the throat. A third in the shoulder. Each one thumped home like a fist into a sack of grain.
Jory Keel stood at the gate with his longbow drawn and his colorless eyes perfectly calm, and nocked a fourth.
The wolf turned from Adrian. It turned toward the old hunter, and took two stumbling steps, and then - as the fourth arrow took it in the chest, exactly where the hay fork had been - it wheeled around, and leapt the far wall of the yard in a single bound, burning, and was gone into the black western fields.
Its howl came back once, from much further away than it should have been able to travel in the time. Then nothing.
The rain hissed on the burning straw.
"Put that out," said Jory Keel, "before you lose the barn."
❖ ❖ ❖
Adrian did not remember putting it out. He remembered, afterward, only pieces.
The water trough, and his hands in it, and the bucket. Barley's screams in the barn, going on and on. Jory Keel on his knees in the mud beside Tomas, tearing the sleeve off his own shirt with his teeth. Lanterns in the lane - many of them, bobbing, running - and the white surcoats of the Grey Watch, and Rowan, Rowan with his short sword drawn, vaulting the gate in one leap and landing on his knees beside their father, shouting "Father! Father!" in a voice Adrian had never heard.
And his father's arm.
When Jory got the sleeve cut away, Adrian saw it by lantern light, and he stopped with the bucket in his hands and could not move.
The bite was deep. Two ragged rows of punctures, from wrist to elbow, bleeding freely. That was not what stopped him. What stopped him was the skin around the bite. It was grey. Not pale, not bruised. Grey, the dull dusty grey of the ewe on the hillside. And from the edges of each puncture, thin black lines were spreading out across his father's forearm like cracks in ice, branching, crawling, slowly, as he watched, toward the elbow.
Tomas was conscious. His face was white and running with sweat and rain. He was looking at his own arm.
"Oh," his father said, very softly. "Oh, no. No."
"Hold him," said Jory. "Rowan. Hold his shoulders."
"What do we do?" Rowan's voice cracked. "Jory, what do we do, tell me what to do-"
"Can't cut it out. Too deep." The old hunter's hands were shaking. Adrian had never thought he'd see Jory Keel's hands shake. "Burn it, maybe. I've seen it done. Sometimes it-"
"No," said a voice from the gate. "You'll only drive it deeper."
High Examiner Severin Crane came into the yard.
He was not running. He did not seem to need to. He came through the rain in his white robe with the blue stole across his shoulders and a Temple lantern held high in one hand, and his thin, clever face was completely calm. Behind him came Watch-Sergeant Harl and two more squires, and behind them - Adrian's heart lurched - his mother, with her skirts muddy to the knee, and Elsie clutched against her side.
Mara saw her husband's arm. She made no sound at all. She simply stopped where she was, as if she had walked into a wall.
Crane knelt in the mud beside Tomas. He did not ask anyone's permission. He set down the lantern, and drew from his sleeve the small glass vial of consecrated water, and a second vial of something dark gold, and a strip of white linen embroidered with circles. He looked at the black lines crawling up Tomas's forearm, and his eyes moved over them, left to right, left to right. Reading.
"Goodman Vale," Crane said quietly. "This is going to hurt more than the bite. I'm sorry."
Tomas looked at him. Tomas, who had said we don't need charity, who had stood in the doorway between the High Examiner and his son. His eyes were wild with pain and fear.
"Do it," Tomas whispered.
Crane unstoppered the consecrated water and poured it into the wound.
Black smoke boiled up from Tomas Vale's arm with a sound like fat on a griddle. Tomas screamed - a raw, animal sound - and arched his back against Rowan's hands, and Rowan held him down with the immovable strength of [Shieldbearer], weeping openly. Crane did not flinch. He poured the dark gold vial after the clear one, and pressed the white linen over the wound, and put his long, pale hand flat on top of it, and began to speak.
The words were in Temple script. The old formal language of the Canon. Adrian did not understand a single one of them. But as Crane spoke, the words did something to the air. Adrian felt them. It was like the carved script on the Sounding Mirror's pedestal - the script his eyes had slid off like water off wax. The words went past his ears and would not go in. And under the white linen, Adrian saw a faint, clean, golden light begin to glow.
And the grey window, which had been open and blank since the wolf, went out like a snuffed candle.
It went so hard and so fast that Adrian's head rang, as though someone had slammed a door beside his ear.
The golden light under the linen grew brighter. Tomas's screaming broke off into long, shuddering gasps. The black smoke thinned, and thinned, and stopped.
Crane lifted his hand. He peeled back the linen.
The bite was still there, two ragged red rows of punctures, bleeding. But the skin around it was pink. Angry, swollen, feverish pink. The grey was gone. The black lines were gone, all but a faint shadow, like a bruise, running a finger's width up from the wrist.
"There," said the High Examiner. He sat back on his heels in the mud, and for the first time Adrian saw that his face was grey with exhaustion and his hands were trembling. "It hadn't reached the blood. Not deeply. He'll have a fever for some days. He may have a scar that aches in cold weather." He looked at Tomas with an odd, tired gentleness. "But he'll keep the arm, and he'll keep himself. You were very lucky, Goodman Vale."
Tomas Vale stared up at the High Examiner who had saved his life. He tried to speak, and couldn't, and closed his eyes.
Mara came across the yard at last and knelt in the mud on the other side of her husband and took his face in both her hands. She did not look at Crane. She did not thank him. She pressed her forehead to Tomas's forehead and held it there.
"Thank you, Examiner," said Rowan, weeping. "Thank you. Thank you."
"Thank Goodman Keel," said Crane. "And your brother." He turned his head and looked across the yard at Adrian, who was still standing by the burnt straw with the empty bucket in his hands. "I understand he hit a Hollowbeast in the face with a lantern."
Every lantern in the yard seemed to turn toward Adrian.
"It was all I had," Adrian said. His voice came out very small.
"It was very brave," said Crane. "And very clever. Fire is one of the few things they fear." He rose slowly, and brushed at the mud on his robe, and did not seem to notice it would not come off. "It's strange, though."
He looked around the yard. At the sheepfold, where eleven grey, shrunken shapes lay unmoving in the straw. At the house. At the loft window, under the eaves.
"There are forty farms in this valley," said High Examiner Crane, thoughtfully, to no one in particular. "And a dozen flocks left outside the village tonight - I counted them myself, from the chapel tower, this afternoon. The Dunns'. The Marshes'. Some much closer to the wood than this one." He turned his pale eyes to Adrian. "And it came all the way down from the hills, past every one of them, to yours."
Nobody said anything.
"Watch-Sergeant Harl," said Crane. "Double the guard at the village tonight. And send a rider to Westmarch at first light. The Inquisitor is to come at once." He picked up his lantern. "Goodwife Vale. I'll call tomorrow, to see to the wound."
He walked out through the gate into the dark.
❖ ❖ ❖
They carried Tomas into the house. They put him in the bed, and Mara sat beside him and did not let anyone else touch him. Rowan was ordered back to the chapel by Harl, and went, grey-faced, looking back over his shoulder. Jory Keel sat in the kitchen with a cup of ale that he did not drink and his longbow across his knees, and said he'd stay till dawn, in case. Elsie fell asleep in the corner by the hearth, with her fists clenched and tear tracks on her face.
Adrian did not sleep. He sat on the bench with the short leg and waited for the grey window to come back.
It came back just before dawn, very faintly, the way it had after Brother Odo's bell.
[I am here.]
Is he going to be all right?
[Your father? Yes.]
The Examiner saved him.
[Yes.]
Why?
The window was quiet for a long moment.
[Because he wanted your family to owe him.]
[And because he is not a cruel man.]
[Both are true.]
Adrian put his face in his hands.
❖ ❖ ❖
At first light, when the rain had stopped and the yard was grey and cold and the burnt straw was smoking faintly in the wet, Adrian went out to look at the tracks.
He did not quite know why. Some part of him that had walked beside Jory Keel through Ashwood wanted to see them. He walked the yard slowly, the way Jory had walked the stream bank, eyes on the ground three paces ahead, weight on the outside of the foot.
[Observation: Tracking (Jory Keel) - 23%]
He found where the wolf had come over the western wall. The prints were huge and deep in the mud, with grey-rimmed edges. He found where it had stood over the sheepfold. He found where it had charged his father, and where it had wheeled, and where it had leapt the far wall and gone.
Then he found the other prints, and stood very still.
They came over the western wall too. They were the same huge grey-rimmed paws. But they did not go to the sheepfold. They went the other way - around the side of the house, slowly, carefully, close against the wall, where the eaves had kept the ground drier. They went all the way around to the back of the house.
And they stopped under the loft window.
There were a great many of them there, pressed deep into the soft earth, overlapping and overlapping, as though something huge had stood in that one spot for a very long time, shifting its weight from paw to paw. Waiting. Looking up.
Only after that did they turn, and go back around the house, and over to the sheepfold, where the screaming had started.
Adrian stood beneath his own window in the cold grey dawn, and looked at the prints, and felt his hands go cold.
It had not come for the sheep.
The sheep had simply been in the way.