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Updated: May 16, 2025
Best of all, across the stairway beneath me lay dead Otho, Duke of the Wolfmark, beheaded by the Red Axe of his own Justicer. "Husband! Hugo! Are you wounded?" said a voice behind me, a voice which in a moment recalled me from my bloody imaginings and baresark fury of fighting. "Helene!" I cried. She approached, and would have thrown her arms about me. But I held out my hand to keep her off.
"Well," said I, looking the sneering tormentor in the face, "if so be that I am your Hereditary Justicer, it will be long ere a sentence so monstrous shall be carried out by me. I will not slay the innocent, nor pour out the blood of a virgin saint, for a million deaths.
Then for the first time I permitted my eyes to rest on the lithe figure of the girl in the doorway. Methought she inclined her head a little forward to catch my answer as if it had been a matter of interest to her. "I am indeed son of the Red Axe," said I, "but my own head would underlie it rather than that I should ever be Hereditary Justicer of the Mark."
I caught a torch from the nearest soldier, and let its light shine on the dead face of the fourteenth Hereditary Justicer of the Wolfmark. The men started back. The terrible countenance of the dead affected them even more than the grim figure of the Red Axe as they had seen him stalking from the Hall of Justice to the block.
Looking up, I saw the Duke Otho. He had come to make sure of his vengeance the vengeance which I knew well was not his, but that of Ysolinde, Princess of Plassenburg. "Rise, Justicer of the Wolfmark!" said Otho, smiling mockingly upon me like a fiend. I started up and gazed about bewildered as the coming terrors of the morning broke upon me.
They will have no misgivings no qualms, no noble renunciations." Then he turned to me airily and confidently. "Well, my good Justicer, will you carry out the just and merciful sentence of the law, and baptize your Red Axe with the blood of her for whose sake you chose to insult and wound a Duke of the Mark?" I turned away, sick at heart. "Give me time. God's mercy give me time!" I cried.
Once he took me to see the tallest tree in all our woods cut down with just such an axe as that only it was not red. Have you ever seen a high tree cut down?" "I have cut down some pretty tall ones myself!" said the Duke's Justicer, smiling quietly at her. "Ah, but not as tall as my father! It is beautiful to see him strip his doublet and lay to.
A spasm passed across the face of the witness, and a low sound proceeded from her mouth, which might have been an affirmative answer, but which sounded to me much more like a moan of pain. "And you confess that she consulted you concerning the best means of killing the Duke Casimir by means of a draught to be administered to him when he should, as was his custom, visit his Hereditary Justicer?"
He paused a moment and laid his hand on my shoulder impressively. "And you, Hugo Gottfried, Hereditary Justicer of the Dukedom, Red Axe of the Wolfmark, art the man who must carry out that doom!" Again he paused and the world seemed instantly to dissolve into whirling vapor at his words. I had never once thought of such a conclusion.
Without entering, she set a hand on the door-post, and stood poised against the heavy curtain, waiting for me to speak. Her face was pale, her thin nostrils dilated. Anger and scorn sat white and deadly on every feature. "So," she said, intensely, as I did not speak, "you have come back already, most noble Hereditary Justicer of the Mark! Even as I told you so it is.
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