Free Between Two Fires (9781101611616) by Christopher Buehlman

confused about whether he was dead. Perhaps not, but, like her, he would be soon. Everyone would be soon. She used her hair to clean his brow, and she stroked his face with her hand.
    “My husband is in Heaven with his first wife, but I will go to Heaven, too, and you will be my husband there. And I will be a good wife. I will show you. I will dress for bed,” she said, and took off her sickness-stained gown and one of her muddy hose. She got tired unrolling the second one and draped herself across the knight’s armored back and died there.
    And that was how the priest found the armored man and the pale, dead woman, nude but for one stocking, her back covered in plague tokens the color of eggplant, as if a little goat had danced upon her and bruised her with its hooves.
    “Where am I?” Thomas shouted from the bed, his eyes wild.
    “You’re in my home,” the priest said, looking down at him. “You’ve been hurt.”
    The priest was holding a lantern near his nose and mouth.
    It was night.
    Thomas began to remember. The creatures in his dream had not been friendly, so he took a moment trying to remember if this priest was. Frogs. Now he remembered. Frogs had come, latching onto him, feeding on him, covering his face and hands. He had been watching from outside himself as spiny little frogs ate him. He shuddered, then kept shuddering. The pains in his head and in the corner of his groin were distinct: one was leaden and dull, like an old rusty lock set at thetop of his neck, and embraced his temples; the other was hot like someone had taken a coal from a brazier and tucked it at the top of his pubis. Everything on him felt clammy and sticky. He sneezed.
    He looked up at the priest again and saw the half of his face that was brightly lit by the lantern he held close to it. Three superficial scratches jagged across his cheek.
    “What have you done with her?” Thomas said, and sat up heavily, looking at the priest with dangerous, murky eyes.
    “Nothing, friend. She’s…oh, the scratches. She gave me those when I pulled her away from you. On the shore. Really, I was pulling her away from the…There was a…a young wife, Mathilde. A good woman. With Christ now, if any of us are. You may be sick.”
    “Where is the girl?”
    “I persuaded her to sleep in the stables tonight, but she will come back when she wakes up. She sat on that little stool near you until an hour ago. She’s quite faithful.”
    Thomas looked under the threadbare sheet that covered him and saw what the thing in the river had done to him; an awful hole a few inches above the base of his
verge
wept into the hair there. All the skin around it was swollen, and a separate swelling was coming in near it, where the leg met the groin. The whole area was a misery.
    “So I have some uncleanness in me from that thing, as well as plague.”
    “It seems so.”
    “Did you give me last rites?”
    “Three hours ago.”
    “I’ll try not to sin.”
    “You’re in no condition to sin, except perhaps unclean thoughts.”
    “Not having any. Hurts too much down there.”
    “You’re safe from lust, at least. Having any temptations about gluttony?”
    Thomas shook his head.
    “And it’s hardly sloth for a sick man to rest. Don’t worry. I’ll look after your soul. As for the body, that’s in God’s hands.”
    Thomas nodded.
    “You killed it, you know.”
    Thomas made a pleased sound and his lids got heavy.
    “It floated downriver like an old empty sock, leaving its awful guts behind it. It was an awful, murderous thing, and you killed it with your own hand. It was worthy of a saint.”
    Thomas slept.
    He woke up again just before dawn, to the sound of labored breathing. Not his own. Someone was suffering, trying to breathe with pierced lungs. He hadn’t heard that sound since the catastrophe at Crécy, when he lay with a broken leg and an arrow through his face, listening to his seigneur breathe his last breaths, sucking bloody air in around the