Page 28 of Raven in Midwinter

“Well, certainly you and my friends. Corvus, at the moment, just wants to remain undisturbed for another two months.”

“Until Imbolc.”

“Yes, that’s right. Very good.”

He rolled his eyes, making me chuckle.

“Okay, so in this archaic version of our home, is there even a bathroom?”

“Yes, dear, it’s in the same place. But you’re going to have to mix the water from the hearth with what you pump into the tub.”

“Okay, I can do⁠—”

“That’s going to take time, and we need answers more than I need to be clean. Let me put my clothes back on so we can go talk to Giles.”

After checking my shoulder, amazed there wasn’t even a scar to mark the injury, he helped me get dressed, and visibly shaken that my T-shirt, sweater, and coat were all covered in blood, he eased me into his arms and held me close.

“You need to eat and rest.”

“Mostly rest, but I’ll be all right. Let’s go back outside.”

When we were once again breathing in the arctic air, he darted around the side of the house and returned with the iron axe that in our time was still used to chop firewood.

“What are you doing with that?”

“I refuse to be unarmed going forward.”

“Okay,” I murmured, and had to lean on him. It was slow going through the icy snow that was up to my knees. And even though I was healed, I had still lost more than a bit of blood, so I was not as strong as I normally was.

“Oh look, more tricks,” he muttered.

Lifting my head, I saw there were now two Giles Coreys buried up to their heads, no longer one man and one wolf.

“I don’t want you to—I feel like Corvus has got them, and that leaving them there to freeze to death is not a bad idea.”

“Lorne, you’re a guardian, a knight. You could never let people die.”

“But those aren’t people. Those are…other. I think we should just go back to my brother’s house.”

“I doubt we can. I don’t think we’re in the right time for the house to be there, and even if it was, there’s no way we could walk that far.”

“You know, in your grandfather’s diary he wrote that there was no one in your family, not one, who had a kind word for Giles Corey. I mean, we get it now, right?”

I smiled at him.

“What?” he rumbled.

“Even now, with all this, you’re okay.”

“I have to be. I’m your rock, aren’t I?”

“You certainly are,” I said with a long sigh.

He kissed my forehead, passed me the axe, and then bent, whipped my legs out from under me, and carried me to the two Gileses. Gingerly, he put me on my feet, took the axe from me, and charged forward. Both men screamed at the same time, the former wolf not quite as loud as the other.

“What are you doing?” I yelled at the man I loved.

“I’m going to put this axe through one of these assholes’ heads and see who is Giles Corey and who is not.”