Krueger and Nikto

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The village of Wildgutach had no founding date anyone could agree on. The oldest stones in the churchyard went back far enough that the inscriptions had worn smooth, and beyond those stones lay older markers still, rough-hewn wood rotted to stubs, and beyond those, nothing but memory and old fear.

The people who lived there now were descended from people who had made a bargain long before any of them were born, and they kept it that way: without full understanding of its origins, with the faithfulness of those who have seen what happens when the payments lapse.

Wildgutach sat in a fold of the Black Forest, a valley where the light came late in the morning and left early in the evening, where the pines stood close enough on three sides that the village felt less like a place people had built and more like a clearing the forest had consented to. The castle stood above on the ridge, as it had always stood, its old stone walls going dark with the wet of spring and pale with dust in summer, its gate sealed shut except on those nights.

Twice a year. Dark moon. Harvest moon. The village remembered.

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The current night was the dark moon of late October, and the preparations had been underway since the week prior.

The animals came first. Burkhard, who kept the largest farm on the northern edge of the village, had set aside the horse months ago, a grey gelding past its working years, well-fed through the summer as the old custom required. The sheep had come from the Metzger family's flock. Neither animal had been mistreated. That too was part of the old custom. The offering was meant to be given freely, given well, and Wildgutach's people had learned that corner-cutting had consequences.

The village elder, a woman named Ilse Kaufmann, stood in the square and watched the cart being loaded.

"The rope on the horse's halter," she said, without raising her voice. "Re-tie it. The knot is wrong."

The young man doing the tying, one of the Burkhard grandsons, glanced up at her.

"It's just an animal," he said.

Ilse did not blink. "Re-tie it."

He did.

The human offering was a newer addition, in the sense that it had only been included for the last century and a half. Before that, a smaller arrangement had sufficed for the one who dwelled higher in the castle. But need had changed, or hunger had, and when the valley had begun sickening in ways that couldn't be explained by drought or bad soil, an agreement had been renegotiated. Travellers passing through Wildgutach now occasionally did not pass through. The village took no one local. That too was part of the bargain.

The traveller this year was a young person who had come through two days prior, alone, asking about lodging. Ilse had seen to it that the lodging was comfortable, the food good, the wine stronger than it looked. She did not enjoy this part. She did not think she was supposed to enjoy it. She did it because Wildgutach had four hundred and twelve people in it, and the wasting sickness that came when the bargain was broken did not discriminate.

The young person lay on a wooden pallet now, bound at the wrists and ankles with woven cord, still unconscious, breathing slow and even. Someone had tucked a blanket around them. That had been Ilse's instruction. The old custom did not require cruelty.

"Ready," said one of the men at the cart.

Ilse looked up at the castle on the ridge, at the dark teeth of its broken battlements against the clouded sky where no stars showed.

"Then we go."

The path up to the castle gate was an old one, and walking it at night was not something the people of Wildgutach did casually. Children were told not to go near it. Adults went only when they had to. The stones were uneven and slick with moss in places, and the trees on either side of the path grew too close together to allow much moonlight through on a clear night, and on a new moon night like this one, the lanterns the procession carried threw more shadow than light.

Ilse walked at the front. She was the third Kaufmann woman to hold this position, and she had taken it after her mother, who had taken it after her grandmother. She knew the path well enough to walk it with her eyes closed. She did not close her eyes.

The castle gate was iron-bound oak, old beyond reckoning. It was always shut when they arrived. That was not unusual. What was unusual was the smell, old and animal and not entirely human.

Ilse stopped the procession at the correct distance. Not too close to the gate.

"We bring what was promised," she said, to the gate, to the dark above the gate, to whatever was listening. "Horse and sheep and the third offering. The bargain holds. Wildgutach remembers."

Nothing answered, but that too was usual. Ilse gestured. The horse and the sheep were led forward and the leads tied to the iron rings set into the stone on either side of the gate for exactly this purpose. The rings were worn smooth with use. The wooden pallet was carried forward and set on the ground before the gate.

The young person on the pallet did not stir.

Ilse looked at them for a moment. She did not say a prayer, because the things inside the castle were not things prayers had ever reached. "Hold the bargain," she said quietly, though she wasn't sure if she was speaking to the castle or to herself. "That is all we ask."

Then she turned, and the procession walked back down the path. The lanterns went with them.

The darkness settled in behind them.

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There had been a time before the bargain, though Wildgutach did not remember it clearly.

Three hundred and forty years ago, give or take a decade that no surviving record could pin down, a werewolf had come down out of the north and found a castle in a German forest with its lights out, its gate hanging open and something wrong inside it.

Nikto had not been looking for a castle. He had not been looking for anything in particular. Centuries of wandering had cured him of goals. He moved because staying anywhere too long invited questions he couldn't answer and eventually violence he could survive but found tedious. He moved because the alters in his head were easier to manage in motion, when his body had tasks, and the wolf in him had somewhere to direct its restlessness.

He had smelled the castle from two miles out. Dead, was his first assessment. Not recently dead. Old dead. The deep cold of it carried on the wind with the smell of stone and rot, something that made the wolf in him raise its head and pay attention.

He went closer, because the wolf wanted to and because the other voices in his head were curious.

The gate was open. Nikto did not go through it immediately. He stood at the threshold for a long time, pale eyes reading the dark, listening to what the night gave him. Bird silence in the trees behind the castle, which told him something. The sound of movement below in the distant village, which told him something else.

He went in.

The crypt was beneath the keep, down a stair that had been half-collapsed and then cleared again recently, the rubble pushed to the sides. The door at the bottom was off its hinges.

First he found the remains of three things Krueger had fed on, or tried to. He found the marks on the walls, long gouges in a pattern that looked less like attack and more like a creature testing the limits of a space it didn't know how to leave. He found the gnaw-marks on the old wood of the door.

Then he found Krueger in the dark, pressed into the far corner of the crypt, crouched in old burial cloth with his forearms pulled against his chest and his eyes catching the thin light from the stair with a gaze that did not belong to the living.

He was not sane. That much was clear.

He was also not fully feral. That was what made Nikto stop, rather than back out the way he'd come.

Nikto crouched down at what he judged to be a reasonable distance and stayed there.

The wolf in him was very still.

They stayed like that for a long time.

"You are not dead," Nikto said finally, in a heavily accented German. "Not all of way."

Krueger's head turned toward him. The phosphorescence in his eyes flickered.

"No," he said. His voice was very rough. It had the rough edges of something that had not been used in a long time. "I am not."

He didn't say it like it was a relief.

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It had taken months.

Nikto was a patient creature by necessity. Centuries of managing the alters inside himself, managing the wolf, managing a life lived outside of ordinary human time, had given him a thoroughness that other people sometimes mistook for slowness. He was not slow. He was deliberate.

He had stayed in the castle. He had hunted for Krueger, at first, leaving things at the crypt door like he was leaving food for an animal he was trying to befriend. He had repaired what he could of the gate and the keep roof. He had figured out the village below by patient observation, understood the sickness that had begun moving through it, understood why, understood that Krueger's starvation was the cause of it.

He had gone down into Wildgutach himself. The village had an old memory of arrangements. It remembered, dimly, what the castle had been before it went dark. The concept of a bargain was not foreign to them.

Nikto had negotiated the first version of it with a farmwife named Berta and her two sons, standing in her doorway at midnight.

"He needs to be fed," Nikto had said. "Regularly."

Berta had looked at him for a long, steady moment. "And in return?"

"We leave village alone."

"That's all?"

"That is everything," Nikto had said. "Think about what we are."

Berta had thought about it. Then she had nodded.

Coming back to full coherence had not been quick for Krueger, and not without setbacks.

There had been a winter, the second one after Nikto's arrival, where the village had been snowed in and the animals they'd sent up in autumn hadn't been enough. Nikto had known it before Krueger had said anything. The cold that always surrounded him had gotten colder, and he had started, in his sleep or what passed for it, gnawing.

Nikto had woken to the sound of it, in the room they were sharing by then, and had watched in silence for a moment before getting up.

Krueger's forearms were against his mouth, his eyes were closed. The wounds he was opening in himself were not deep but they were real, the old scarring of it already visible from previous times Nikto hadn't been there to see.

"Krueger." He said it quietly. The way one speaks to something in a bad dream. "Sebastian."

The use of his first name made Krueger's eyes open. His forearms came away from his mouth slowly, with reluctance. A compulsion interrupted rather than resolved.

"We are out," he said. His voice was flat. "I can feel it."

"We know." Nikto was already standing. "We will go."

Krueger looked at him. "There is a blizzard outside."

"Да (Yes)." Nikto said it without complaint. This was what he was here for. "We will be back."

He had gone out in the blizzard. He had found a traveller on the mountain road who had been lost since the previous afternoon and was not going to survive the night in any case.

When he returned, ice-crusted and bloody, Krueger had taken what he brought and then, afterward, had very quietly wrapped the wounds on his own forearms and had looked at Nikto in a way that didn't have a name yet, in those early years.

That had been the beginning of the other thing. Not the arrangement, not the utility of it, not the practical question of what they were to each other in terms of function and survival. The other thing.

There was a night, thirty years after Nikto's arrival, that he did not like to think about.

The castle sat on old ground, and old ground attracted people who thought that old ground was theirs to take: hunters, treasure-seekers, occasionally men who had been told the castle was abandoned and had not been told correctly. Most of them Nikto dealt with at a distance. Some of them required a closer approach.

A group of seven men had come up the path with torches and intentions that Nikto had smelled from the treeline before he could see their faces. Someone in the valley beyond had told them something, had sent them with purpose.

He had let them get to the gate.

What happened after that was not something he could fully account for, the wolf had been very present for it. The wolf's memory organized events differently than his own did, in sensory impressions rather than narrative. He remembered the smell of the torches and then the smell of fear and then the smell of blood. He remembered the sound the gate made when two of them tried to force it and the sounds they made when Nikto came over the wall behind them. He remembered the wolf's satisfaction at protecting the threshold and the bone-deep pleasure of it, which he did not feel guilty about.

He came back inside when it was done.

Krueger was in the upper hall, leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed.

"Five of them ran," Krueger said.

"Two didn't." Nikto said flatly. His voice was still rough with the wolf's edge on it. "They won't send more."

"Probably not." Krueger pushed off the doorframe. "Come here."

Nikto had three lacerations across his side where one of them had gotten a blade in before the transformation had finished, and one across his shoulder that was already closing badly, the way his wounds often did, healing over wrong and leaving more scar. Krueger sat him down in the hall, gathered the linen and the water. He worked in silence, with that same focus he used for everything he chose to bother with.

It wasn't that Krueger lacked interest in the world. It was that he had long ago narrowed his interest to the things that were worth it. The things worth it were a short list.

"You didn't need to do it alone," Krueger said, folding a bandage into place over Nikto's shoulder.

"We managed." Nikto rumbled. "We are fine."

"I know you're fine." Krueger tied off the linen. "I'm not criticizing."

A pause.

"Then what are you doing?" Nikto asked.

Krueger settled back on his heels and looked at him. "Keeping track of you," he said. "Same as always."

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The centuries between then and now had not felt like a long time from inside the castle. They had simply continued, as the village continued below them, and Wildgutach had gone through its generations. The faces in the procession had changed while the words of it stayed the same, and Nikto and Krueger had remained exactly as they were.

The castle had become their home.

There were days that were simply days. Nikto with his black tea, standing at the window that looked north toward Russia, which was very far away. Krueger taking one of his old knives and sharpening it before any moon. Two creatures who had been in each other's company for long enough that silence didn't need to be filled.

There were harder days. Nikto's rut came with its own particular hell, the need that overtook everything else, the wolf driving every other voice out of his head.

There were days when the alters shifted and Nikto was not Nikto anymore. Krueger had learned each of them, well enough to know who he was speaking to and what they needed.

They did not talk about love. Being mates went beyond that.

And so it came to the current night.

The procession had gone back down the hill an hour ago. The lanterns had been visible from the castle walls for a little while, then swallowed by the treeline, then gone.

Nikto stood at the upper window and watched until the last light disappeared. Behind him, the castle was quiet.

He smelled Krueger before he heard him.

Krueger came to stand beside him at the window.

For a moment they both looked down at the path, at the dark below the castle gate.

"They remembered this year," Krueger said. He had lifted the shroud up from his lower face.

"They always remember." Nikto's hand was at the window sill, gloved fingers resting on the stone. Below, the shapes at the gate were visible. "They are not ready to stop remembering."

Krueger made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Not yet." He tilted his head slightly. "The third one is still out. Will be for a while. The Kaufmann woman uses a heavy pour."

"She is thorough," Nikto said, which was the closest he would come to approval for someone he had never spoken to and had no intention of speaking to.

Krueger turned to look at him sidelong. "Bereit (Ready)?"

Nikto held his gaze for a moment. Three hundred and forty years of shared dark looked out of those pale eyes.

"Да (Yes)," Nikto said.

Krueger nodded once.

On the pallet before the gate, in the dark and the cold of October, a figure lay unconscious, wrists and ankles bound, breath rising slow and even in the night air—

—and the great iron-bound gate of Wildgutach castle began, very slowly, to open.

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