“What? What? What?” Men started to their feet. Holger waved his sword aloft. The words spilled from him. He didn’t know himself what he would say next, he was thinking aloud in a roar, but they heard him with wonder:
“Look, the one we’re after is shape-strong by birth. He doesn’t need any magical skin, like the swan-may here. But then his clothes can’t change with him, can they? So he must go forth naked. Frodoart told me, a moment before the wolf showed up, he’d just left his master full-armed in the hall. And alone. Though even with help Sir Yve couldn’t have gotten out of that armor, and back into it afterward, in the few minutes he had. So he’s not the warg.
“Gui tried to plead guilty too, to save whoever else was. But he’d already scuttled himself. He mentioned having seen me helmetless. I was for one minute, when I stopped to inquire my way here. I put the helmet back on when the racket started. The wolf couldn’t have seen that. He—no, she—she was inside a house. She broke in through the rear door and escaped out a front window, which had been shuttered. The only way Gui could have seen me bareheaded in the torchlight was from the top of the tower above his room. I noticed it sticking over the roofs. He must have gone up to watch the flocks being driven in. So he was not anywhere near the place we saw the warg.
“Lady Blancheflor—” He stopped. How on earth, on all the Earths, could he explain the germ theory of disease? “Lady Blancheflor has been sick, with an illness that the dog tribe doesn’t get. If changing into a wolf did not make her well, then she’d be too weak to dash around as I saw the animal do. If the change did make her well, the, uh, the agent causing the disease couldn’t live in her animal body. She wouldn’t have a fever and a runny nose at this moment, would she? In either case, she’s eliminated.”
Raimberge cowered back against the wall. Her father made a broken noise and twisted about, trying to reach her with his bound hands. “No, no, no,” he keened. A noise like the wolf itself lifted from the commons. They began to edge close, one mass of hands and weapons.
The girl dropped on all fours. Her face writhed and altered, horrible to watch. “Raimberge!” Holger bawled. “Don’t! I won’t let them—” Raoul’s spear stabbed for her. Holger knocked it aside and cut the shaft across with his sword.
Raimberge howled. Alianora dropped to her knees and caught the half-altered body in her arms. “Nay,” she pleaded. “Nay, my sister, come back. He swears he’ll save ye.” The jaws snapped at her. She got her forearm crosswise into the mouth, forcing lips over fangs so the wolf couldn’t bite. She wrestled the creature to a standstill. “Lassie, lassie, we mean ye well.”
Holger waded into the mob. Turmoil broke loose. But after he had knocked several down, with a fist or the flat of his blade, they quieted. They snarled and grumbled, but the man in the hauberk overawed them.
He turned to Raimberge. She had resumed her human form and lay weeping in Alianora’s embrace. “I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to. It came on me. And, and, and I was so afraid they’d burn me—Is my soul lost, Father Valdabrun? I th-think I must be in hell already. The way those babies screamed—”
Holger exchanged a look with the priest. “Sick,” said the Dane. “She’s not evil of her own will. She can’t help it.”
Yve stared like a blind man. “I had thought it might be her, “ he mumbled. “When the wolf ran’ in, past me, and I knew where Blancheflor and Gui were—I barred the door. I hoped, if this could only pass over until she departed—”
Holger squared his shoulders. “I don’t see why not,” he answered. “The idea is perfectly sound, as I understand the matter. Let her get far enough away, and the Middle World influence will be too weak to affect her. Till then, of course, you’ll have to keep her under restraint. She’s sorry now, but I don’t think that’ll last.”