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Updated: June 23, 2025
Men's heads showed a moment at door and window, looked furtively up and down the street, and then vanished again within. Plots were being hatched and plans laid in Thorn; yet, while there was the lowering silence in the city, up aloft the Wolfsberg hummed gayly like a hive. Once I went up that way to see if I could win any news of my father.
It was a thriving place, too, humming with burghers and trades and guilds, when our great Duke Casimir would let them alone; perilous, often also, with pikes and discontents when he swooped from the tall over-frowning Castle of the Wolfsberg upon their booths and guilderies "to scotch the pride of rascaldom," as he told them when they complained.
So I judged that these mighty terrifications could portend no great ill to one who was the son of the formidable Red Axe of the Wolfsberg. Sometimes it is a mighty comfortable thing to have a father like mine. I did not hear the question which was asked of my guide, but I heard the answer. "First in charge," said Michael Texel, "and with him one of the Wolf's litter."
"My friend," he said, suavely, "I will reply to you presently. I have a word to speak to your betters." He turned him about to Dessauer. "And what, Lord High Chancellor of Plassenburg, think you of this masquerading? Dignified, is it not? And your wondrous speech in court that was to have done such great things. Will you be pleased to abide with us here in the Wolfsberg?
But though they cheered at my words they would not cease from crying, "Show us Saint Helena, and if she bid us we will have mercy on the wolves of the Wolfsberg!" So it was necessary for Helene to be brought and to show herself to them, for the sake of the poor souls sore driven and in jeopardy 'twixt the fire and the knives.
Thereafter Helene, being lonely, climbed up and sat down beside me. I handed her the paper. "To-night will be a stormy one in Thorn and the Wolfsberg, little one," said I. "I fear you and I are not yet out of the wood." The Little Playmate read the letter and gave it back to me.
And as each passenger came down the street from the direction of the Wolfsberg they cried questions at him, so that he ran the gantlet of a dropping fire of shrill queries. "What are they doing to the sweet saint up yonder?" "Hath she been put to the Question?" "Who could be executioner in such a case? A man would be sent to hell-fire for daring to lay hand on her."
One day I was laboring at the art of learning to write, along with Friar Laurence a scrawny, ill-favored monk, who, for good deeds or misdeeds, I know not which, was warded in a cell opening out of the lower or garden court of the Wolfsberg, when I heard Helene dance down the stairs to the kitchen of the Red Tower.
And as for the children why, as far as the Baltic shore and the land of the last Ritters, mothers frightened their bairns with the Black Duke of the Wolfsberg and his Red Axe. So now the Duke and the Red Axe were to be in conference as indeed had happened nearly every day and night since I could remember.
I was venturing my life in the house of mine enemy, and, at least, it would be no harm if I put a bold face on the matter. He opened the door, and again the same curious perfume was wafted down the passages something that I had never felt either in the Wolfsberg nor yet even in the women's chambers of the Palace of Plassenburg.
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