The storm’s swift retreat left the streets mud slicked, with leaves driven into heaps low against the houses’ timber frames. Goodmen of the town stepped out of their homes to see to animals and sent their sons to look to the thatching, while the goodwives swept their stoops and threw out bedpans and buckets placed beneath leaking rafters, and chased their little ones out to play in the puddles, or gossiped across low fences. A yellowing sun threw hot rays against the rooftops as it drew to setting, promising a clear night after the chill day of sleet and rain. A peaceful night, apart from the woman screaming in the street.
She ran hither and thither, this woman, too well-bred for such carrying-on, the goodwives thought, to judge by her dress and that of the stately man who hurried after her, half entreating her to quiet herself, half begging passers by to give her ear. At first the goodwives thought to draw the poor woman in to a warm hearth and the satisfaction of their own curiosity, while the goodmen puffed through their mustaches and put a kindly, if gruff arm about the stately man’s shoulders in a genial, sensible manner as though to say “here, let’s have less of that and more action! What’s to be done about all this?” But upon hearing the woman’s tale the goodwives called to their children and tut-tutted their way indoors; the goodmen suddenly stood off and grumbled into their beards about some work that needed doing out back; so that before long the poor woman was left to kneel, sobbing, upon the cobblestones, her husband’s arms tight about her, and the street nearly empty but for the driven leaves.
Evening came on; there was nothing for it but to retreat indoors. The stately man sat beside a fire in the grate of the fine room hired in the best inn, his wife lying full upon the bed beside him, wetting the pillow with tears amid her groans. Now and again the man would venture a word of encouragement or pity, sometimes pleading with his wife to eat of the food brought in by the curious barmaid, herself gone taciturn the moment she too heard their story. So now they were alone for the night, as neither innkeep nor maid had the slightest inclination to disturb them or even to wait upon their needs longer than was strictly necessary. So the woman wept and her husband fretted until the sun was well down and the stars high, and no one disturbed them.
That is, until the door abruptly shook upon its hinges under fist blows thunderous enough to fell a portcullis. Man and wife fell perfectly silent at that, exchanging fearful and wondering looks as the hammering began again, a burst of heavy, demanding knocks. That stirred the man, who rose up and set hands to the latch and drew it back to crack open the door. In her hysteria his wife could scarcely suppress a startled scream at the enormous figure that stood looming without. Pale eyes glinted in the firelight, brows shaded by the lintel, so tall was he; and broad lips beneath a hawk beak of a nose parted when he spoke to reveal flat, white teeth and were more those of a horse than a man’s.
“You are being very loud.”
His voice was a growl that gathered itself together in the caverns and hollows of his broad chest and came rumbling and boiling up his throat with all the resonance of the storm’s anger, were it contained in a barrel. The stately man cleared his throat weakly, which found new strength in a wracking cough that shook him head to well-stockinged toes. The giant said no more until the man reached a half-choked conclusion, then intoned heavily, “You are unwell, little uncle, and you’ve been dealt with poorly today.”
Something in his tone seemed to have softened and the woman sat up upon the bed and reached out her hands, imploring.
“Come in, sir, please do come in - we are so sorry, Elrik and I, for any distress we’ve caused. Only do come in and do not turn your back on us!”
The giant looked a little puzzled at this, but obliged, bowing his great head and shouldering past the door before the alarmed Elrik could sufficiently recover himself. A giant indeed, the old man thought; their visitor was half again as tall as a man, with shoulders built to fill out a doorframe. He had no hair on his pale face or upon his head; even his brows were clean-shaven. He came to stand in the middle of the room, looking like a stone monument and as garrulous. Elrik grimaced and went to stand over his wife, placing a protective hand upon her shoulder.
“Elrik, Lord Orczy, & Lady Emmuska,” said he, then added with a wince, “and you are right, mine guest: I am not well. This infernal storm...” he trailed off, weariness and grief stifling any sense of protocol. Unperturbed, the giant bluntly filled the silence.
“The storm did not do that,” he said, pointing a heavy finger.
Milord Orczy gently touched his blacked eye and the fresh gash below it, saying, “ah, this. This came to me by a brigand’s hand.”
“We started early this morning,” Lady Orczy interrupted. “We meant to come down to Drakeswold for the spring; our son does love mountains, and my lord husband is so busy with the estates. Only, he isn’t really our son, you see; our grandson by way of a daughter, gone these eleven years, gods release her. He’s all the family we’ve left in our old age; we call him our son.”
The giant said nothing, though if it were possible for impassive statues to look tedious, his was the expression for it.
“In short, good mine guest,” Lord Orczy said hastily, “a brigand came upon us over a lonely stretch of road. Gave me this and this”—touching fingers gingerly to his face—“then as I lay in the mud he took our boy onto his saddle and rode away without having said a word.”
Lady Orczy was weeping again as her husband fell silent.
“He took the boy, but nothing else?” the giant asked. “You didn’t know him?”
“No,” Orczy answered. “Although it might well cross your mind—it has ours—that he knows us; a public figure I am, and wealthy too, traveling alone with my wife and son along a country road. But no, I cannot say I know him. He was a great brute of a man, and appeared a knight for his armor. His face I did not see; he wore a helm and war mask like a horned skull. A towering man,” he repeated.
“What did you do then?”
“We came here, called upon the watch, only...”
Lady Orczy was cut off by a loud scoff from her lord husband: “Only the Watch Master is a demmed fool! He called the knight a ghost, a wight cole up from the barrows or some such—that he’s taken our Dereck to squire, and him not the first. The Death Knight, he called him!
“There was no help from the guard after that; and when we looked elsewhere, people turned up their noses and muttered inanities about ghosts and squires until their doors shut in our faces. Ghosts! He was real enough, by my eyes. Lud! but I’ll have our boy back from him, be he madman or risen ghost.”
“Then you will die for it,” the giant interposed suddenly. “But I will not.”
Struck dumb by the promise spoken so forcefully in so voluminous a voice, Milord and Lady Orczy gazed as at a descending deva at the giant of a man, as his voice rose to shake the rafters:
“I am Lagerthof Gostaberling—and I will kill your Death Knight!”
————
