Page 70 of Master Wolf
“After you,” he said.
Heart racing, gut roiling, Drew set his foot on the first step. Immediately, he recoiled, overwhelmed with powerful scents of terror and despair. He almost cried out from shock but somehow managed to stay silent, realising that the spell must be keeping the scents contained somehow, so that he could only discern them when he made physical contact with some part of the cellar chamber.
“What’s wrong?” Bainbridge said behind him.
“Nothing,” Drew said and began to descend, holding his lantern high. At first the dark was so profound—and the cellar so large—that the lantern did little to illuminate the space, but as he gradually moved downwards, and Bainbridge followed him with the second lantern, he began to see the edges of the place—the walls on each side, the stone-flagged floor, the long, low shape of a trough against one wall… and finally, what looked like a mound of rags slumped against the further wall from which another of those terrible, agonised groans emerged.
Drew froze, unable to move for a moment, till Bainbridge nudged him, saying crossly, “Come on, let me down. You can stay back if you wish.”
“Sorry,” Drew muttered, and descended the last few steps, stepping aside to let Bainbridge move past him.
Bainbridge began busying himself with the familiarity of man going about a daily task. He hung his lantern up on a hook, then stuck a taper into it to borrow a flame which he used to light two separate sconces of candles on opposite walls.
“Now, now,” he said when the bundle of rags groaned again. “If you don’t stop making that noise, I’ll have to leave you as you are rather than unmuzzling you for a while. You don’t want that now, do you?”
Silence.
“That’s better,” Bainbridge said approvingly, bustling forward and taking a handhold of the fabric covering the creature. It wasn’t rags, Drew saw as he dragged the material aside, but a tattered, dirty old blanket.
Bainbridge slung the blanket aside to reveal a small naked figure, curled up on her side, her thin arms covering her head defensively.
“Up!” Bainbridge barked, prodding her buttocks with one booted foot.
Drew couldn’t breathe. His heart was racing so hard he thought it would burst out of his chest, his wolf so close to the surface he felt like he might shift any moment.
The figure did not move.
“Up!” Bainbridge snapped again, and this time he reached down, grasping one of the woman’s wrists and yanking her up into a sitting position. For a moment, her other arm flailed as she desperately tried to cover herself with it. At first she tried to cover her face, then dropped her arm to shield her breasts, bending her chin to her chest to hide her face instead.
For a moment, Drew just stared at her downbent head, trying to make sense of what he was seeing: four metal bands enclosed her skull, intersecting at the top of her head. The rear band ran from the top of her head to the nape of her neck and the side bands ran down each side of her head, covering her ears. But it was only when Bainbridge grabbed the chain attached to the contraption and wrenched her head back, that Drew saw what this was: abranks—a scold’s bridle.
The front band ran down the centre of the woman’s forehead to the middle of her eyebrows where it divided into a two-pronged “V”. Each of those two bands ran down either side of her nose where they met a horizontal band that encircled her chin and neck, joining with the side and rear bands to fully enclose her head. Her mouth was tightly covered by a thick metal plate that was riveted to the same horizontal band. There would, Drew knew, be another metal plate inside her mouth, pressing her tongue down. Muting her.
This was, after all, designed as a punishment for nagging wives—and others who spoke out of turn. Though in this case, it was something more.
Though the metal was dull and tarnished, Drew knew it was silver, not only because Bainbridge had said so but because Drew could feel its repellent power from where he stood—and because he could see what it was doing to this woman—toAlys. The silver had burned away her hair and skin, leaving inflamed red welts on either side of each tight band that crossed her head.
Her eyes were dull and hopeless, and she did not seem to recognise that Drew himself was a wolf, but then she was clearly extremely weak, her wolf imprisoned and her body poisoned by the silver.
Drew made himself breathe deeply, fighting an instinctive desire to shift and attack Bainbridge. He needed to be calm. His first priority was to get the branks off Alys, something that neither he nor Marguerite would be able to achieve with its being silver.
“So,” Bainbridge said. He was watching Drew carefully. “What do you think?”
Drew met his gaze. “I’ve never seen such a wretched creature in all my life. Do you really expect me to believethisis a werewolf?”
Bainbridge gave a short laugh. “Prepare yourself, Niven. You’re about to see this creature’s true form.”
Pushing her head forward, Bainbridge drew out a key and undid a mechanism at the back of the branks, then lifted the rear band, which was on a lever. The bottom band loosened first, then the whole contraption sagged, listing to one side, the metal plate over Alys’s mouth sliding down to reveal a livid red welt of the same rectangular shape. The tongue plate stayed where it was though, and Alys made a distressed sound—she seemed to be trying to spit out the plate without success.
“Come now,” Bainbridge said, inserting his fingers into her mouth. “You know you can’t do that with your tongue all burned away. Let me pull it out.”
Drew retched then, unable to conceal his horror any longer, but Bainbridge didn’t seem notice, or perhaps he just didn’t care. He was too busy working the tongue plate out of Alys’s mouth while she drooled blood and gagged and made heartbreakingly inhuman noises with her ruined mouth.
Then Bainbridge began the business of pulling the branks off her head roughly. It was a tight fit on her—it must have been made to measure—and the metal was stuck in places to the welts and sores the silver had made, but he tugged it free without any care for Alys’s comfort. And perhaps that was the best way because the instant Bainbridge lifted it off her—just as he had said would happen—she began to transform, slumping to her hands and knees, spine arching as her body began to crack and remake itself. Watching her, Drew realised that in her weakness, Alys’s change would be slow and painful.
“It is changing now,” Bainbridge said, his voice ripe with satisfaction. He pointed at her sobbing, twitching body. “You will see it in the limbs first. Look, here in the forearm.”
Drew became aware of a new and subtly powerful scent in the cellar. Alys’s scent. It was complex and unfamiliar and he felt a familiar desire to pull it into his lungs and hold it there, to learn it and to know it in a deep, wolfish way.