* * *
Sanctuary! For a moment, Kat simply gawped at the young knight. Of all the scary-looking armed and armored men who surrounded her, he was the scariest. The last one she would have expected to come to her assistance!
Thunder pealed, and she could hear a fresh squall of rain sheeting down outside in the sudden silence. Even the two terrified children seemed to realize their survival hung on this rigid man with the harshly Nordic appearance.
The young knight seemed made entirely of sharp angles and icy ridges--as if his body and face had been shaped by the same glaciers that created the Norse landscape from which he so obviously came. His hair, long enough to peek below the rim of his helmet, was so blond it was almost white. His eyes were a shade of blue so pale they were almost gray. His chin was a shield, his nose a sword--even his lips looked as if they had been shaped by a chisel. And . . .
Scariest of all: lurking beneath that superficial calm, she could sense an eruption building. Kat had been told once, by her tutor Marina, that Iceland had been forged in the earth's furnace. Not knowing why, she was suddenly certain that this man was an Icelander himself--a land as famous for its clan feuds as its volcanoes. And that he possessed the full measure of the berserk fury that slept--fretfully--just beneath an outwardly still and chilly surface.
She noticed, finally, the peculiar weapon attached to his belt. A hatchet of some kind, an oddly plain thing compared to the aristocratic sword hanging from his baldric.
* * *
Then her wits finally returned, and Kat seized the opening as a drowning man might an entire haystack.
"I claim sanctuary, in the name of--"
The knight holding her clamped a gauntleted hand across her mouth. Kat tasted blood inside her lips.
"Remove your hand, Pappenheim!"
The blond knight's command was not a shout so much as a curse--or a sneer, driven into words. A challenge so cold, so full of contempt, that an angel facing hellspawn would have envied it.
Except Kat could imagine no angel looking as purely murderous as this man. The young knight was on his toes now, as light on his feet as if he were wearing nightclothes instead of armor. He seemed to prance, almost, his whole body as springy and coiled as a lion about to pounce. And his thin lips were peeled back in a smile that was no smile at all. Teeth showing like fangs.
His hand flashed to his belt, so quick she could not follow the movement. The next she saw, the hatchet was held in his fist, in a loose and easy grasp that even Kat--no expert on such matters--could recognize as that of an expert. And she realized now that this was not really a hatchet at all. No utilitarian woodsman's tool, this--it was a cruel and savage weapon, from a cruel and savage forest. What was sometimes called a tomahawk, she remembered.
"Remove your hand, Pappenheim," the knight repeated, as coldly if not as forcefully. "As well as the hand on her shoulder."
His hand flickered, the war hatchet blurring back and forth. The lion lashing his tail. "Or I will remove them for you."
The sheer, sudden violence of the young knight's words and actions--all the more violent for that they had not yet erupted in the blood and mayhem they promised--had momentarily paralyzed everyone else in the church. Now, finally, the other knights began to react.
Kat felt the knight holding her flinch, his fingers almost trembling. She understood then that her own impression of the blond Norseman was no figment of her imagination. The knight, too, found him just as frightening. And presumably, in his case, from past experience.
The other knights shifted their feet, their hands fumbling uncertainly at their own weapons. It was clear as day that they had no idea how to handle the situation.
Suddenly, one of the knights who had been standing in the background moved forward. A very large knight, this one, built so squarely he resembled a block of granite on thick legs. Very young, also. Kat thought he was perhaps her own age.
"For God's sake, Erik!" he exclaimed. "Why are you--?"
The blond knight held out his other hand, staying the youngster with a commanding gesture.
"Be silent, Manfred. Do you think the world is nothing but a toy for your pleasure? You are nothing but an oaf. A spoiled child. Begone! This is a man's business."
The words caused the young knight's face to flush a sudden bright pink. Then, grow pale with rage. Then--
Grow paler still; and paler still. Shock, now, Kat realized. The young knight's jaw sagged loose. He stared at the one named Erik as if he were seeing him for the first time.