Bisclavret Read online

  A Leather and Tea Morning

  By K.L. Noone

  Published by JMS Books LLC

  Visit jms-books.com for more information.

  Copyright 2019 K.L. Noone

  ISBN 9781646562268

  Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com

  Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

  All rights reserved.

  WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

  This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which might be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America.

  * * * *

  For Marie de France, for the inspiration.

  Author’s Note: A version of this story can be found in the medieval Lais of Marie de France, written in the late 12th century. Bisclavret is the Breton term Marie uses for the word werewolf. And the werewolf and the king do indeed share a bed…

  Any truth to this particular tale has never been verified.

  * * * *

  Bisclavret

  By K.L. Noone

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 1

  At night, sometimes, with the salt-sweet red taste running through my mouth, I still dream of spears and the hunt with relief, not fear.

  Sometimes I dream it even when I remain human. Like the memories of blood, it never quite goes away. I have lived with both blood and dreams for a very long time.

  In the mornings, or in the depths of night, or when he notices my mood, Andreas puts arms around me and makes me laugh or offers a gift of the newest copy of a broadside Robin o’ the Green ballad. He knows me so well. Better than I once believed possible. The worst, the best, the ordinary.

  I do love the ordinary. Porridge and cream. A plunge into the lake, shedding shapes like lead for both of us: my wolf’s heritage, and his King’s crown.

  He’s still young to be a king. He’s younger than I am by a good twelve years; I’d would’ve been his bannerman in any case, the aging Lord of Marrock Wood, even if I’d never become King’s Consort and, more or less by default, Royal Librarian. Andreas’s father had not cared much for books and maps and scrolls; his son’s unrestrained pleasure in histories and romances and tales of one-eyed giants and sea-serpents and glass submersible ships has made the kingdom richer, if somewhat messy with magpie collector’s tendencies.

  I love him.

  Even after three years, saying so astounds me. Spoken. Written. Aloud. Shared. I love him, he loves me, and sometimes he rests a hand in my wolf’s fur while posed on the throne and every inch a ruler, and when in human shape I spoke my marriage-vows to him I thought I might shapeshift into a pool of gold out of sheer magical happiness.

  He says I ought to tell my own story. He says that history matters, the history of kings and werewolves and the magic of our land. He says that I’m the one who knows best what happened, since he wasn’t there for the beginning. He was, of course, but only at a distance. As my king.

  I do love him. So I said I’d try.

  The story begins with my wife, and with chickens.

  I expect I ought to explain.

  The curse or gift or blessing of the Lords of Marrock Wood has been, for time out of mind, this: for three days each month we take wolf-form involuntarily, and run in the woods, under silver moon and silver stars and silver tree-leaves, quivering with wild fierce hunger and joy. We can transform at other times, but it takes effort; the change back requires a token, a specific reminder of shape to pour oneself into.

  That will be important, in a moment.

  My father was a gentle man, and a good lord, and a friend; he taught me to run, to leap, to taste the world in a dizzying array of smells and colors and bounding muscles. He only ever hunted in the greenwood, and never harmed anything tame.

  I tried my best to do the same, in turn, and I thought I did: my villages prospered, crops were good, the country as a whole lay bright and green and prosperous around us. The new young King had only just come to the throne; we grieved the appropriate amount for the old King and attended the coronation, finely clad but a decent distance from the ceremony, as befitting a country lord who worried over the state of forest roads and did not sit on the Inner Council.

  I brought my wife. The Lady Elaine.

  Elaine…

  What can I say?

  I loved her. Andreas says it’s all right if I still do, a bit; I tell him I don’t. Not after her betrayal. It’s not a lie. It’s complicated.

  When I’d first met her, at the Summer Fair in the neighboring province—her mother and father were the Lady and Lord of Stone’s Reach—she’d been laughing, bartering with a market-woman over ribbons, pale hair sliding free from braids. I’d gazed at slender grace and obvious comfort among her people, and I’d wanted to know her.

  We were wed in spring. She’d worn green, floating with veils, matching her eyes.

  I still didn’t know her well. She had a way of charming everyone and revealing nothing; of asking questions as if gathering information, making notes, knowing secrets. It was odd, I’d thought: everyone spoke well of her, but then again no one seemed to be on intimate terms with her, and her maids averted their eyes and admitted nothing—knowing nothing, that is. My wife gathered knowledge like treasure, and hoarded it, but gave nothing away; I did not know her opinions on frumenty, on manuscript preparation techniques, on the latest of the new king’s renovation plans for the aging university buildings.

  I loved her, but I did not know how to speak to her of my family’s secret. I did not believe she’d tell anyone, but neither did I know how she’d react. I did speak to her once, briefly, about my history of desiring both women and men; there’s no shame in it, in our land—not when our own King has chosen a male Royal Consort—but I did not want to surprise her with a stray comment or a mention of a knight I’d known in that way. She nodded, and said, “I would only ask that you be loyal to me.”

  “Of course,” I told her. “Of course.”

  We had not lived together before the wedding, behaving with the decorum expected of our stations; she had kissed me, though, on a balcony, beneath the stars. She tasted of chilly sparkling wine and the night and hope for a future.

  The first month—

  Andreas just came in and peeked over my shoulder. He says, “I told you you love her. I’m sorry.”

  So am I, though perhaps not as much as I ought to be. She made her own choices. She knew what she chose to do.

  I expect I can forgive her, though. Her choices gave me this. This moment, this book-lined tapestried tower, and ultimately the man I love, who loves me.

  So, then: the first month.

  It went as it goes. I told her I would be out at my father’s hunting lodge, overseeing some required roofing repair; I even rode there in plain sight. And at moonrise I stepped out of my clothing—the symbol of humanity, the shape, the token of identity that restores us—and hid it ca
refully under a stone, and I wore wolf’s fur and blood and quick hot breaths, and I raced among the trees and tasted rabbit and deer, and slept in crinkling forest leaves.

  I had not thought this lie through well enough.

  My wife had questions, though I did not know it then. Why had I taken no servants, why did I need to spend three days away when the lodge was less than an hour’s ride, why had no craftsmen from the village come to see about those repairs?

  She did not ask, not then. She only smiled when I came home, and kissed me, and led me to a dinner of venison and blackberry pie and truffle ragout.

  She did not ask the second month, either. I said I wished to be alone, to work on preparing and scraping and stretching parchment for new maps of the updated roads and bridges.

  The third month was difficult. We had travelers passing through the forest for the Summer Fair, and I mostly trusted myself—I keep my own mind, even as the wolf’s instincts sing a siren song—but they might have dogs or arrows or hunting-spears, prepared for wolves or outlaws on the road. I locked myself in an abandoned forester’s hut at the edge of the village; I thought I’d done enough. On the first night, I had.

  On the third night, I did not like being caged; I yearned to run, to hunt, to leap under the opalescent eyes of stars. I forgot, for a moment, that I had chosen this; or I thought that I only had an hour or so; or I did not think at all, only flung myself against splintering wood until it creaked and gave, and I ran.

  I woke surrounded by feathers. Chickens. A hunt. I fled and found my clothing, that link to humanity, under a stone; ashamed, I made my way home. At least it’d been only chickens. Not worse.

  I hadn’t known worse. Not then.

  When I came home my wife was waiting in the courtyard. She stood without moving and with crossed arms, militant and pale in the dawnlight. She looked as beautiful and perfect as the day we’d met, her laughing peridot eyes beckoning me near. She was everything a great lord’s daughter should be, and everything I’d wanted.

  She watched me under the cold gaze of not-yet-risen sun, and those lovely eyes were shadowed. She said quietly, and I could hear the hurt in her voice, “Where have you been?”

  I was exhausted, and shaking with the aftermath of transformation—senses blurry and tingling and tipsy—and worrying about sending anonymous money to pay for the chickens. I couldn’t summon a lie. “I can’t tell you.”

  She looked away. “Is there someone else, Bisclavret? One of my ladies-in-waiting? One of the village girls, perhaps?”

  “No!” I said, horrified. In retrospect, I should have known she would think so. Many men and women, lords and ladies in particular, do such things; it’s understood as common practice.

  Andreas has never sought anyone else; nor have I.

  We both value loyalty. We both know this story, after all.

  “Then what?” She raised those great green eyes to examine me again. The courtyard lay still and silent as a grave. “Where do you go, when you leave me?”

  I sighed, and held out my hands to her. “Ask me later,” I told her. “Please.”

  She did not speak of it again, not while we climbed the winding stone stairs to the high bedchamber, not while I plunged hands and face into shivering water, trying futilely to erase the memories of the chickens.

  But she brought it up again, the next evening. And, when I failed to find a convincing enough answer, the next.

  After two weeks, the glow of happiness in her eyes had turned into something cool, and sad, and pensive, when she looked at me.

  I chose. I thought I could—I thought perhaps I could. If she did not mind—if she saw the gift of it, the understanding of another shape, another form—

  In bed, the newly usual reproaching space cold between us, I said to her in the dark, “I take on the shape of a wolf, and I hunt the forests at night. It’s the family secret. Or gift. Or curse. The magic of the Lords of Marrock Wood.” Each word fell into the night like a stone into a bottomless well.

  She turned to look at me, lips and eyes wide with astonishment, with a touch of fear as well, and she did not speak.

  “No,” I said, “oh, no, I would never hurt you. It’s mostly small wild creatures. Hares. Things from the forest. Please don’t—” Because she was looking at me with a kind of trembling horror, and it was the look that prey sometimes has, when it knows that it stares death in the eyes.

  She whispered, “How can I ever feel safe with you again?” The words lodged in my heart like a hunter’s barbed arrow, sticking and stinging. I had no good answer for her. I had no good answer for me.

  I still am not certain that I have an answer. But I think of Andreas and the same realization, the same moment; I think of his fearless willingness to listen, and the way he defended me even at the start.

  I loved him, I think, even then. Someone who would see not a vicious wolf to fear, but a man pleading for help. Someone who’d step between that wolf and a hunter’s bow.

  Then, I told her what I did know, anything and everything, trying to erase that look from her eyes, that terror from her voice. I told her that it was nothing, only a few nights, that the rest of the time I was exactly the man she had married. And I told her that my return to that man depended on my access to the symbols of manhood: the clothing I always carried into the forest and hid where it would not be found—except by me, as I stumbled back spent from the raging excesses of the wolf’s form.

  I even told her the hiding place I used. Anything, and everything.

  It seemed to work, at least a little. She still looked wary, but she was calmer now. Eventually, she even slept, or pretended to.

  And so did I.

  Chapter 2

  Two weeks later, I ran through the forest, tired and sated and bruised from a misjudged leap in the dark, and cursed her with all the most dire imprecations I could conjure.

  She had taken my clothes. She had come, in the night, after I had been and gone, and taken away my path home.

  I could smell her there still, the lily-of-the-valley perfume she used mingling with fear and fright and conviction, a blazing fire to my wolf’s senses. Traitoress. My love.

  Not mine anymore.

  Someone else had come with her, someone whose shared fear was leavened with a strong spice of satisfaction: greed and desire slaked, sexual and political and envious yearnings now achieved. I knew his name, too. Sir Edgar of Harford. I’d never liked him: slimy, I’d thought. Nothing I could’ve made a formal accusation about—but full of opportunist ambition, and the sort of man who’d boast about raising taxes on his farmers, and the sort of man who’d watched Elaine dance with an expression that stripped the dress from her and flung her into bed beneath him.

  Andreas, who really should be in a meeting with the weavers’ guild and not reading over my shoulder, says, “I never liked him. He used to leer at all the palace maids, any time he came as a guest. And he threw scraps of food on the floor. Disgusting. Also, I won’t read over your shoulder if you ask me not to, but I do love your uses of metaphor. And your descriptions of me.”

  He deserves a kiss for the compliment. Perhaps more than one.

  …right. He’s off to argue with the weavers about tax duties. Hopefully they won’t notice the disaster we’ve made of his hair.

  The sunlight’s warm in this office. Warm and slanting and sweet over skin, like the touch of a lover, a beloved. I’m happy. I know I am; it’s the same feeling in my bones.

  I know Andreas interrupted me to make me smile, when the story’s growing darker. He thinks that way. Impetuous and kind.

  I was telling you of my wife. My wife, and Sir Edgar…

  She had gone to him, I learned later, the first moment she could: offering whatever he wanted, herself or her money or even my lands, if he would accompany her and assist her. He agreed, of course. He could not take my lands—if I died, they’d fall to my nearest cousin, Matilda of Lune, which in fact became the case—but he could take money, and he could take
Elaine. So he did. And she went willingly.

  Fear can do so much. So can love; but fear is cruel. Fear wounds. Love heals—but that takes time. And the scars run deep. Like the dreams.

  Without my clothing—my own clothing, my totem of humanity—I will remain a wolf forever. As I’d told her. As I’ve told Andreas.

  And to be a wolf forever…

  I would slowly lose my mind. Trapped in animal shape, thinking animal thoughts, bestial and violent.

  Betrayed, and alone. It was better to be a beast, I recall thinking. I would not remember her, after a time. I would not hurt and ache and break with love. I would run wild and reckless and heedless in fur, and care for nothing.

  So: I chose, as well. I will admit as much, here on this page. I could have chosen otherwise. But for a time—I fled, and fell, and hid. I roamed the woods. I ate as I pleased, and snarled at men from a distance, and drank from forest springs and howled at the night.

  I pretended I had not been one of those men. For a time I felt as if I never had been. I only existed; I simply was.

  When I came back to myself—when I recalled, with some surprise, that I was a man—I was running.

  I’d known I was running. I knew how my body moved and darted and gathered speed. But this was not the joyous bounding of the chase, the blood-hot passion of the predator in pursuit. I was panicked, the wolf in flight, terrified and desperate. For a moment, disoriented, I had no idea of what could have called me back, catching the last vestiges of my mind with its familiar sound. Something I knew. Something human.

  I heard it again, closer. A hunting horn. The King’s hunt. What had I done?

  I ran, with the King’s hunters behind me, as I had never run before.

  The arrows flew sharp around me. They shot to kill. The faces, as much of them as I could read through distorted eyes, were set and angry. Branches and thorns and long grass whipped at my coat as I fled, leaving ragged trails of fur behind me. They’d brought dogs; I could hear the baying.

  I tumbled out into a clearing, gasping for breath, and landed under the hooves of a horse, flashing silver all around me. The horse flung itself backwards, twisting and flailing in alarm, and went down. The rider fell, hard, and the bow he carried went skittering away to land in front of me.