Close to the Skin

                                                                                    1119

The steel, the thing in the water tells the knight as it presses the sword into her hands, must be kept close to her skin, lest it spoil like milk and turn against her. Up to her waist in the frigid lake, she cradles the blade like a babe, its phantom heartbeat fluttering against her skin, slowing until it joins with her own. The thing in the water, which looks much as she does behind its trailing veil of pond weed, smiles, flashes peglike teeth as black as soot and slips back beneath the surface. The knight’s fingers close around the jeweled hilt.

She pushes her shaggy palfrey hard on the ride back up the country. The horse blows and wheezes under her. At night, wrapped in her cloak on the open heath, she clings to the sword’s hilt and wakes with aching fingers, her knuckles stiff and swollen. She dreams of white sludge dripping from the crotch of her hose, of metal sliding slick and cool under her skin. At noon, on her third day in the saddle, she gains the crest of a low ridge and looks out over the siege camp which surrounds the castle at Berkham on three sides, the fourth penned in by water. The flags of rebel barons hang limp in the cold rain, but their horns ring clear over the distant boom of a wheeled ram against the castle gates. Men, three or four hundred at the knight’s rough count, swarm the curtain wall with ladders, shields held overhead to catch the stones and arrows which rain down on them.

Not far from the camp’s edge her horse steps in the hole of some small burrowing thing and snaps its right foreleg with a lound, blunt report. She disentangles herself from its half-ton of thrashing meat and like a dream the sword is drawn and the palfrey’s screams are silenced, running out into the saturated earth. It’s sheathed again. She doesn’t remember how. The horse stares up at her, flank rising in a labored, bubbling inhalation. Futile. Eye dark and deep and wet. She stumbles away from it and finds her footing, sprinting through the rows of tents, ignored by the camp followers and the wounded who linger in the sodden village of worn rope and rotting cloth. Down an avenue between rough rows she spies the barons and their knights, big men ahorse, some pale with fear, others red-faced and jesting, eager to prove that the battlefield was just another firelit hall for boasts and wine and wenching.

She rushes past. No worth in crushing the snake’s head beneath her heel if the body remains coiled around her lady. Her love. Ride west, bearing a token of my favor, that rich voice had said to her. Bring me the steel that sleeps there, ‘neath the waters of a certain loch.

Those great black eyes. That silver hair. A veil of flashing stones. Damask and silk. We are in your hands, dear cousin.

Her hand finds the sword’s hilt once again as she leaves the tents behind and starts out onto open, trampled ground. The field is churned to muck, the grass pounded down into dead mats. The knight lowers her visor. Sees the world through steel filigree. Ahead the boiling anthill at the gates. Stragglers join to take up the ram’s ropes where the dead have dropped them. Her hand closes on the sword as a man at arms turns at the sound of her approaching footsteps. It wields her, wrenching her arm about with such awful speed and force that the sword rips through its scabbard, shredding leather. Tendons pop one by one as her bones strain like green branches, bending, and then splinter. She vomits in her helm. The sword whips itself into the side of a man’s helm and on through to the skin and bone beneath with a dull, wet chunk and then tears free in time to catch an arrow hissing toward her breast. The vibration of its impact travels up her arm — its arm. Another shaft flicked aside, this time so close that the sword’s edge nicks her cheek, skin piling up against the steel. A man comes at her and the sword takes his right arm off at the elbow and then flashes low and scythes his legs out from beneath him. He hits the ground a howling lump, spraying blood and snot into the dirt as he wails. Mother, mother.

The sword pulls her onward, dragging her stumbling and retching into the press at the gates. She screams for it to stop, but the wall of flesh does not so much as slow the blade. Point-first through the eye of the first man to turn toward her. It erupts from the back of his head with such force that it impales the man behind him through the throat, because he is a little taller. Her fingers meet the socket and she screams, raw-throated, as they’re crushed between hilt and bone. A flourish of her wrist — small bones snapping with a rapid pop, pop, pop as of twigs bursting in a bonfire — and the dead men fall, one with his skull split in half, the other gagging on his own dark blood. Her arm twists like a serpent and another man is dead before his spear so much as points in her direction, shaft and shoulder and the tough cord of his spine all hacked through in an instant. Blood sprays. The next man dies. The next, and by now they are trampling each other in their haste to get away. Her sword arm stretches, flesh tearing like rotten cloth, and she sees black as dull, repeated shocks of impact reverberate along her ruined limb. When she returns to herself the sword is slashing at the empty air, dragging her after it through mud dyed black with shed blood. Her elbow is a horror of splintered bone and squirming muscle bared to open air.

The assault on the gates is broken. The survivors flee back toward their lines, their ram abandoned, the gate hardly scratched. She watches as two men at arms drop their wounded comrade halfway to the tents, leaving him to drag himself feebly over the dirt a pace or two before he falls still, one hand dug clawing in the dirt. With a groan she wrestles the sword back into its ruined scabbard. It’s still hungry. A dozen men lie dead around her. Hacked apart. Her sword arm hangs limp at her side, a lifeless sleeve of torn and bloody flesh pierced here and there by nubs of crushed, protruding bone. Her mangled fingers cling wet and sticky to the hilt like leeches grimly sucking at a vein. She breathes out, blowing bile through the grille of her faceplate, and sinks to her knees among the dead.

The wide-eyed guards of the castle gate admit her to the courtyard. The defenders, battered and bloody, have gathered there to gawk as she crosses the rough-hewn stones. There are a few half-hearted cheers, but the horror of her ruined arm holds them transfixed. She can feel it still, the sluggish drip of blood from half a hundred lacerations, the grinding shifts of broken ends of bone. She should be dead or screaming on a slab while some drunken chirurgeon saws through the knotted gristle of her shoulder, but instead the pain roars through her as though from across a thaw-swollen river, kept at bay by the thundering current. Perhaps it will hurt later. Perhaps, when she releases the hilt, it will come in earnest.

A man cries “Heave!” Boots slip in mud. Backs strain. Legs stiffen. The castle gates groan shut behind her. The dead disappear between the splintered boards as the knight throws aside her helm and wipes dried vomit on her sleeve.

The courtiers are few and silent, hunched upon their benches in their finery. Some are drunk, stares bloodshot and unfocused. The lady’s dwarf sketches the knight a mocking bow as she passes him by, her arm a nerveless line of agony against her side. His eyes, protuberant and pale, follow her armored tread toward the high seat where the lady now is rising, the train of her gown whispering over the stones. She kneels and takes the lady’s proffered hand in her coarse grip. Presses bloody lips to snow-white skin.

“Show me.”

She draws the sword out from its rent and ruined scabbard, not knowing how her arm can bear the strain, and holds it out laid flat across both hands, the whole and the twisted. The lady’s fingers cup her chin, thumb moving along the cut on her cheek, pressing the half-formed red scab. The beloved hand releases her to drift toward the steel. A single oval nail traces the fuller running the length of the blade. Soft lips part in wonder. A little gasp as her hand curls around the blade, close to the hilt. She feels its heartbeat, thinks the knight, her stomach tense and queasy. The blade trembles. The lady withdraws, palm red with the gore which still slicks the sword.

“My faithful champion,” she whispers, overawed. The courtiers give unenthused applause while the laughing dwarf handsprings and somersaults about, crying out exaggerated praise. A true knight, their savior, bearer of long-dead Artorius’s mantle. A man cut from the finest cloth. A noble man, and bold as any wolf. His words ring from the walls as the lady looks down at her champion, her dark eyes inviting, the white falls of her gown shimmering with scrollwork stitched in silver thread. A man among men. A man worthy of the lady’s favor, which is pressed now to her breast by bloody fingers. She takes it in her hand, the other locked in a numb death grip on the sword, maneuvered smoothly back into its scabbard, and presses her nose into the perfumed linen, breathing deeply.

A man, a man.

She turns her face aside in shame as her member goes soft in her lady’s mouth for the second time that night. Moonlight pours through leaded glass onto the piled furs of the bed. Her arm, splinted and bandaged and beneath these things sticky with salve, burns like a fatted torch. Her lady’s lips slip from her sex. Dark hair trails over her abdomen and tickles her throat as her lover eases up her body to settle on her elbows, a slim, soft weight against the knight’s ungainly bulk. Nausea threatens. The knight tries to breathe, tries not to feel the ugly ridges of her own thick, muscular frame. Every minute shift sends barbs of agony worming deeper into the flesh of the limb the sword has taken from her, and every fresh shock draws her gaze to the blade, sheathed now in fine rosewood and oiled leather, where it rests against the wall, the topaz in its pommel shining like an animal’s eye in the dark.

“Might you be better pleased to take my cunt as dogs do?” the lady whispers in her ear. “Many of the men who meet upon the heath sire children on their wives this way at home, I’m told. Or I could have one of the maids bring in a certain root to stiffen—”

“It’s only my arm.” She cannot meet her lady’s eyes. “It pains me.”

The crooked black smile of the thing in the lake. The weight of the sword in her hands, and the beat of its hidden heart. Keep it close to the skin, lest it spoil like milk…

“Let me fetch the blade to you, then,” she says, sliding off of the knight’s chest and crawling toward the bed’s edge. Toward the gleaming stone which seems almost to narrow, to gleam brighter with some fell intent. “It will dull the pain a little.”

Tears threaten, and when she can force herself to speak her voice is thick and hoarse. “My lady,” she says, dry-mouthed. “Let me cast it off. Or place it in a casket, bound in steel, and brick it up within the crypt.” A sob escapes her. “I want it not.”

Her lady sits upon the edge of the great bed, drawing a silk robe about herself. She says nothing, and the silence is a sudden frost. The knight’s heart leaps into her throat. She has a sense as of having missed a step to plunge weightless and uncomprehending toward the ground. “I have wronged you,” she says, heaving herself up with difficulty to sit with her back against the cool stone of the chamber wall. She stares down at her hands where they rest upon her naked thighs, one bound and twisted and the other whole. Between them, a tuft of sandy hair and the dead thing growing from it.

“My enemies, sir.” She does not turn. “Year by year they multiply. The Danes, the barons jealous of my grants and titles. Wolves and bandits plague my forests. My tenants rebel and my revenues dwindle. I am beset on all sides.” her voice broke “I am only surprised to turn toward you, my champion whom I trust above all else, and find not tenderness and stalwart passion but the same meanness of spirit with which it seems the world and Christ himself, seated for eternity at the right hand of God, regards me.”

The silence returns, but soft and hot as molten wax. The knight is stammering apologies, trying to hold back the burning tide, crawling toward her weeping love though every shuffling inch is agony, and she says forgive me, though I am not worthy, forgive me, I abase myself, strike and beat me if you must, and they are kissing, and the sword is in her hand, and she is in her lady, looking up at the beloved body undulating against velvet dark, and she thinks as her body spends itself in a gray, hollowing rush that there will be a son. A boy.

A man.

                                                                                       1123

In the mornings the men of her privy chamber come to pluck the maggots from her arm. Sometimes she stares ahead at the tapestry which covers the wall opposite her seat of ease, imagining the unicorns in graceful sprint, the hunters pounding after baying hounds across vast fields of gold and dusky emerald. At other times she makes herself observe the process. With jewelers’ instruments they prod gangrenous flesh, shifting falls of loose and wrinkled skin to fish out the wriggling white things, waxy as boiled fat, which squirm in the calipers’ tapered iron jaws. One by one they are deposited in a jeweled reliquary to be spirited off she knows not where, but even while her servants work, the flies — never far from her stench — are sowing the next day’s hungry crop, cleaning their limbs with brisk efficiency as they swarm over her ruined body. The noise of their wings throbs and crinkles in her ears.

Once this is done they salve the limb with stinging ointment — a dozen formulations have been tried — and bind it tightly in clean linen before dressing her. Only her fingers are left bare, gnarled claws, nails overgrown, flesh mottled purple and green with settled blood and layers of bruises, fresh and faded. They cling to the hilt of the sword, which never leaves her hand. She can no longer tell its heartbeat from her own. When she is dressed — dark tunic and hose, chain of heavy gold medallions, she levers herself to her feet with the sheathed blade and suffers her men to belt the sword about her waist, the dark and supple leather inlaid with gold and precious stones. Sometimes the nurses bring the children to her solar, as though she might like to render judgment on the toddling thing, snot-lipped and cretinous, and its fat loaf of a sister still in swaddling cloth. She says very good, or yes, or I pray Christ you grow strong and just and the wet nurse and the nanny gush and offer thank-you-sirs and if-it-please-my-lords and then the ordeal is over and a tincture of the herbs her lady’s midwife says she must needs dose is brought to her, and sometimes she can force herself to choke it down.

The field is touched with dew and morning mist still coils about the nodding stalks of wheat. Nameless ichor oozes through her gauntlet, dripping from the saturated bandages and quilted sleeve beneath it. Flies crawl over her destrier’s proud black haunches. They seethe in the joints of her suit of plate. Her crooked fingers clench on the sword’s hilt. It has been a year and more since she last released her grip on it, and blisters cover her scarred digits, fat and full of cloudy fluid. Once burst, the leather rubs against the raw red flesh beneath until it hardens and grows tight and itchy. Sometimes the urge to claw at the infected skin keeps her awake at night, tossing and groaning in her great bed beneath dusty swags of velvet and the watchful gazes of the stewards of the body. They wash her brow with cool cloths and bring her milk infused with poppy wine. She wishes, sometimes, that she could thank them, take their hands, look them kindly in the eye, but always the sword is between them. They eye it nervously as they reach down to rub her fevered chest with salves and massage the cramps from her calves. They take pains to approach her from her unarmed side, as though that would spare them if she drew her steel.

Around her are the knights and stewards of her household. Her squire, pale and sweating, holds aloft her banner. Across the field, past the serried ranks of her own spearmen and the archers planting rows of arrows at their feet to harvest one by one, the baron’s levies order themselves on the trampled earth, crushing wheat beneath their boots. Horses stamp and snort, breath smoking in the chill. She thinks of her lady coiled beside her in the bed they share so rarely, of those smooth limbs draped over her body and those full lips whispering against the seashell ridges of her ear: we will never be safe, we will never be safe, not as long as they draw breath to plot against me, our children washed in tar and set ablaze, our gardens trampled, burned, our babies dead, drowned, cut and crushed, so kill them all, leave none alive, and pull their castle down so that the forest grows up through its wreck. In her chest the same dull, thudding panic that has driven and sustained her through a dozen battles blooms again.

Think of our sons left to rot on spikes above the gate and our daughter dashed against the wall her little body thrown upon the embers of the fire or on the midden like a pail of offal. Think of their limbs waving in impotent terror as they are lofted from the windows of the tower, of the wet pop of fresh pink skin against the courtyard’s stones. Think of how they’ll rape me, shared from man to man, passed like a skin of cheap beer and finally sold mad and toothless to the Danes for target practice, to die forgotten, name unknown.

She spurs her destrier ahead without a word. Her dead arm squirms, anticipating the red shock of impact as the baron’s knights and outriders begin their charge. No lancers here. The ground too soft. Men in mail and quilted arming jackets pound toward her as she thunders between blocks of spearmen. Her own army grinding into slow, reluctant motion. They dare not chance fighting too close to their lord and general. The demon. The devil. She hears the way they whisper of her and her rotten arm and the blade it grips unceasingly. Arrows fly, a hornet’s nest kicked into shrieking life, and the steel slithers from its scabbard to cleave through the hissing shafts. Her horse screams in terror as arrows thunk into the soil all around him. She thumps her heels against his flanks. Her sword arm burns, old wounds reopening. Dark blood seeps from the joints of her gauntlet. She can feel the flies trapped in her armor beating themselves against steel, crawling over sodden bandages, trapped panicking in sticky ointment as their wings buzz madly. The sword shivers as it cuts the air. The baron’s riders nearly on her now. Tonnes of metal and horseflesh surging across the field, grain parting against their horses’ mighty breasts.

The sword goes still. The wind sings against its edge. The knight glances down and sees her shadow streaming over soil and broken stalks of grain, sees the shadow of the thing that rides her, and then the world is screaming horses and flesh mashed against chainmail and plate and her blade carves through horse and rider and darts swift across her body to punch between huge ribs and find the charging destrier’s heart even as her elbow crunches against her breastplate and the fine bones of her forearm — she knows the innards of the limb with nauseous intimacy — shed their tendons and go floating in pure muscle, the arm stretching, squirming snakelike, and the beast tumbles head over heels and the rider smashed and dead beneath it before he understands that he’s been thrown. The blade drags itself on, snapping bone and gathering a wake of bunched and bloodied hide and fat against its edge, and emerges in a shower of gore to hack through a plunging palfrey’s skull, the long jaw hanging by red scraps of skin, the throat pumping blood in spastic bursts, and then the rider, arm lopped off at the elbow, belly opened, entrails spilling like fat snakes into the saddle as he rides on past her and dies sitting up, head tipped back and eyes staring blank and filmed at heaven.

An arrow finds the arm, punching through cold steel and tempered felt, and the sword’s heartbeat booms loud in her ears as her gauntlet tears like cheesecloth, muscle humping upon muscle, and fat tendrils of slick, oozing flesh coil tight around the trembling shaft and yank it loose, forearm flopping limp, sword thumping against the destrier’s flank as the knight heels him in a circle, delirious with agony. It happens quickly. The  bones of her forearm erupt from the wound and spread into a gory vee, her smashed elbow its anchor, a yellowed tendon stretched between them. The tendrils flip the shaft about and nock it to the dripping string. Through the forest of crashing bodies — her knights have joined the fray with a colossal shock of snapping bone and sundered flesh — she glimpses the archer who must have loosed the lucky shot, pale and young and gawking, and then his head snaps back, two feet of ashwood sprouted from his nose, and bone and sinew squirt back into her arm so that the limp sleeve of it flexes, twists, and leaps to parry a blow aimed square at her breast. The sword cleaves through the oncoming steel and plows undaunted through chin, teeth, and tongue and out the back of the man’s neck, his upper jaw and skull pinwheeling through the air in a red haze of blood.

I wish that you would kill me. Turn yourself and pierce my breast. I wish to Christ that you would open me and make a wound no surgeon’s skill could close.

She rides on, bile burning at the back of her throat, and before the sun reaches its zenith she has won the day.

“I yield,” the baron coughs. He kneels among the dead, one eye swollen shut and bruised a shiny, waxy purple, blood drying in his beard and on his mouth. His eyes can’t seem to find their focus. A mace to the head, one of her knights tell her. A glancing blow, or else his helm would have crushed his skull like matchwood. “Mercy, my lord. For my sons.”

She steps closer. Her men are all around. Her sword hand scratches at the hilt. Her squire has peeled away the ribbons of curled steel where  her arm burst her gauntlet. Broken nails slide over stained leather, claw at the worn crossguard. “Mercy,” he says, and the sword draws itself and stabs him through the heart, punching through his breastbone with as little effort as a man might push his finger into a soft cheese. He looks surprised. She totters, suddenly unsteady as her sword arm bulges horribly, fat and muscle flowing over it so that it swells to treble its mate’s size. Her men are screaming. The surrendered foe recoil, falling over one another, clawing through the bloody wheat and mud to get away.

“Help me!” she cries, but none dare to approach.

A tear appears along her squirming bicep. Its lips part with a final convulsive expansion, revealing shards of bone forced into clumsy rows of teeth. A tongue of braided muscle. Maggots spill from oozing lips. She can hardly breathe. Her body feels thin and hollow. The arm flexes and draws her forward a tentative step, unsteady on her withered, sticklike legs. Its makeshift maw roots like a suckling infant’s at the air until at last it finds the spitted baron and engulfs his head with a liquid slurp of skin on skin. Jagged teeth sink into flesh. He struggles, but not hard, and then the teeth meet with a click and it is swallowing and dragging her another step toward the corpse, the headless thing with the blade buried in its breast. Another bite, ripping at his shoulder, tearing away a red mouthful so that strings of gore trail after the pursed lips. A maiden’s sluttish smile, obscene and glutted. Flies seethe black around her.

Stop, she thinks, and beats with her frail arm against the monstrous, swollen thing. It swallows again. Its skin is pink and new, the rotten rags of the dead limb it was moments before hanging from its underside like a snake’s molted hide. It humps up upon itself, taking more of the baron into its prehensile maw, teeth stretching like fingers as its membraneous bulk engulfs his upper body. She drops to her knees, vomiting a thin stream of pink slime as she tries to drag herself away, but there is nowhere to run, and the men she crawls toward back away in wordless horror. The arm follows. Stretches fat new snakes of muscle up around her shoulder and across her chest, binding itself tighter to her frame as her sunken cheeks fill out once more and her heart settles back into a steady beat. A flush of health. The bloom of youth. The baron’s carcass dragged limp-legged through the dirt behind her.

Please, heavenly father, she prays, gagging. Let me die.

She remembers only snippets of the journey home. Lying wild with fever in the bed of a supply cart, watching chunks of the dead baron melt into the jellied mass of her sword arm, its skin stretched so thin it has become translucent. At the end of the obscene bladder, beyond the dissolving face with its smeared, ghoulish grin, the dwarfed claw of her hand lies coiled tight around the hilt of the bared sword, left fouled after the battle. Flies swarm along its length and feast in the trough of its fuller. She has become a blister, fat and taut, gravid with lymph. She remembers her men clustered close around the wagon, unhitched from its team, and the smell of fat and oil, her body slick and torches spitting and the sword digging into splintered wood to drag her toward the gate of the bed, the quivering bulk of her distorted arm putting out fat, stubby limbs to push and grip and tug, but not what happened after.

“Find him!”

The voice brings her surging back to wakefulness. At first it seems the world has twisted itself upside down, trees growing from the sky, faces staring at her from among the clouds. No. She lies on her back in a wooded glen, the swollen horror of her sword arm, at a guess five times her bulk, heaped against a splintered tree, bloated forearm slung over a low-hanging branch and the blade swinging gently back and forth from the tapered hand twitching some five yards distant from her heart, a pendulum like the one the old Greek who came to her uncle’s court once showed the children. The bodies of her men are hanging from the trees. Loops of intestine garland the newly greening boughs. A head stares at her in frank shock from the crotch of a stunted oak and higher up an arm and torso dangle, dripping. Flies and gore birds feast. The noise is terrible, a drowning whine shot through with the harsh croaks of crows and kestrels tearing at the cooling meat of what must be twoscore dead men.

A path of shattered trees and slashed and trampled undergrowth leads back to where the burned wreck of the wagon hulks, along the trail more dead lie stinking in the heat of day. A horse, its throat torn open and its skull smashed flat into the earth, still by some grisly miracle draws breath, barrel flank rising and falling even as the scavengers toil at its split and leaking belly and the ruin of its proud, arched neck. Distantly, through the din of the carrion feast, she can hear the sound of men marching through brush and old leaf litter crunching beneath armored boots.

“He must be close.” The voice, nearer now, and unmistakably disgusted. Her lady. “Spread out, and keep your torches at the ready.”

The arm squirms, dislodging itself from the tree. As the forearm collapses to the earth with an audible thump, it plants the sword’s point in the gore-sodden soil. She labors to her feet, straining to heave a blobby, jiggling segment of the sword arm with her. Her breath comes in shallow, panting gasps. The footsteps are drawing closer. She stares at the things dissolving in the arm, at the pruned and swollen palm pressed flat against the inner surface of its skin. The topaz in the pommel of the sword twitches. Blinks. A bright yellow eye stares at her from the steel. Across the clearing a line of men emerges from the woods. They move slowly, carefully. Three have arrows wrapped in oil-soaked rags nocked to the strings of hunting bows. Three others carry spitting torches, flames dancing near-transparent in the sunlight filtering through the gore-draped boughs above. They do not look up, not even as blood drips onto their helms and shoulders. Crows scream. Flies surge out of the underbrush.

Her lady follows well behind the hunters, clad in white leathers and with her hair coiled over one shoulder in a heavy braid. Her dark eyes widen as she sees the arm. The eye in the sword’s pommel narrows.

“Help me,” croaks the knight. “Please, help me. I don’t know what to do.”

“Hush, my love,” the lady says. Other searchers creep out of the wood on her left flank. One dips his arrow to a partner’s torch. His lady sees them. Jerks her head toward where the knight stands bent-backed. “Burn him, and don’t touch the blade.”

Burning arrows fly. She tries to scream a warning, but the arm is faster, limbs forming beneath it in a heartbeat and heaving its huge bulk into motion. Arrows thunk into its bulk. She feels each one as a bee’s sting, a faint jolt of burning venom. The sword flashes across the clearing at the end of the vast, blubbery serpent of her arm and buries itself with a grisly squelch in the belly of her lady’s mare. The horse screams, hooves thrashing madly as the arm heaves it up bodily into the air. Foam flecks its bridle. Its eyes roll. Her lady, falling from the saddle and she knows not from which of them the scream that rings among the trees is coming, but it comes, and the arm splits along its upper side and gapes greedily with snaggled fangs as long as daggers, raw new arms with clawing fingers reaching from the gaping mouth, and engulfs the horse and rider both before it shuts with a wet slap of flesh, a click of bone on bone.

The men are done before the knight hurls herself against the arm’s side, clawing at soft flesh with her good hand. The arm deforms under her weight. It offers no resistance, nor can she find purchase in its slick, velvety enormity. A hunter soars screaming across the clearing to smash headfirst into a tree, which cracks and topples at the impact. Another falls in two as the sword scythes swift through his guts. They are crawling. Screaming. Speared and hacked and left to drag their bloody stumps over the ground, dead already but still howling. Her hand finds her lady’s clawing fingers. She sees those dark eyes, wide with terror, swimming in the lymph, surrounded by the drifting particles of dead men, and behind her the whole thrashing bulk of the gray mare. She grips at the hand through the slippery membrane between them. A hoof pistons into the back of her lady’s head. Blood blooms in a dark cloud around her skull.

I told you. I told you to let me cast this curse away.

She throws herself back frantically, unable to bear the arm’s weight for another moment, the cables of new muscle it has laid within her straining, tearing hard at bone and organs. She screams and claws at her own face, opening bloody furrows in her cheeks, her jaw, her brow. Her dead lady stares at nothing as the lymph within the limb grows black with blood. She almost doesn’t see the sword rear like an adder at the far end of the thrashing arm, its wet eye finding her. It moves. She feels the wind of it, and then she is staggering away, gut-wrenchingly light, and some clear fluid flies in crystal droplets through the air as she goes sprawling in the briars and viscera, balance lost. She gropes at the stump of the arm she lost now years ago, blood stinging her eyes. The thing that once belonged to her is drawing back into itself, the sword retreating into its tremendous mass. For a moment it is still, a bloated womb, dark and misshapen, and then with a reeking sigh it opens like a flower and the half-formed thing within steps out, strands of mucous stretching between its new body and the sagging wreck of its fat chrysalis of skin. It passes a three-fingered hand over its face, featureless and runny as egg yolk. With small, tottering steps which grow more confident each time its feet find purchase it advances toward her. By the time it reaches her and kneels, its stride is sure and easy.

It takes her sword belt, buckling tooled leather about its naked waist, and without ceremony plunges the live steel into its scabbard. It looks at her, the blank skin stretched over its sockets coming apart stickily. Jaundiced eyes swim into focus. Lashes push through smooth, translucent flesh. It blinks. Pupils open in the sea of yellowed sclera. Irises push outward from them, dark crevasses yawning in the jelly of the organ. Another blink and they are hers — pale blue, like cornflowers. She laughs, clutching at the dead stump of her arm, and it laughs with her, a thin, gagging whistle which becomes a child’s congested cry and then, at last, a hearty chuckle which rasps on a breath or two before subsiding. It crouches down to strip her of her tunic and her arming jacket, her boots and hose and codpiece, then dresses itself clumsily, working the clothes through its sword belt. It smiles as it tugs and laces, revealing the still-forming white pulp of its mouth. An oily black tongue writhes. It frowns. Puzzlement furrows its brow. A smile again, teeth pushing through angry red gums. A fearsome scowl as conjunctival goo runs from its eyes, one stream pooling in the corner of its mouth, the other dripping from its chin.

“There,” it husks. Its voice is too high. “There. There.” Lower, now. It leans toward her, hands splayed in the dirt, and clicks its still-uneven teeth together several times. “There.” Her voice now, reproduced in perfect detail. It creeps closer, swift and sinuous down on all fours. It sniffs and something black and thick runs from its nostrils to puddle in the dirt. It licks its upper lip and smiles again. “There,” he says, his satisfaction evident, and leans forward to press his mouth to hers in something like a kiss. He strokes her cheek, a fatherly caress, and straightens to regard the carnage of the clearing. Then, without a word, he walks away.

Alone, she sits up scratched and naked in the dirt and looks down at her withered hand, the slack skin of her belly. She eases back to rest against a tree’s warm bark, settling her weight in the fork between two gnarled and thrusting roots. The birds, which fled in screaming clouds while the arm slew her hunters, return and settle once again into their banquet. She watches their black feathers catch the sun. She listens to their clamor. The ghost of her arm itches.

She lets out a long sigh and reaches down to touch the final wound it gave her, pink and clean and deep.