I think I went a little mad after that.
I did not eat him. I want to be very clear on that. Sometimes the songs say that I did, but the bodies vanished into the magic without any help from me. But I went blundering out of the hall, bellowing. I rolled in mud and wiped my claws endlessly in the grass, trying to get the blood off. I tore at tree trunks, trying to scrape it off in the clean heartwood, tearing down great swaths of ivy that fell across my face and back until I could hardly move.
Eventually my claws came clean again, but I could smell his blood for days afterwards, a coppery stink that clung to my fur and stuck in the back of my throat.
It was a long time before I could go back to the hall. I don’t know that I would have, but the magic poked and pinched at me, the murderer returning to the scene of the crime.
And yet, when I did return, I was glad. The twin saplings growing on either side of the door, one a little closer to the wall than the other, were like friends. The tumbledown wing with the shattered beams and the nests of wood-doves were familiar. It was an unexpected sweetness, like tearing open a ruined tree and finding wild honey inside.
The body was gone. The bloodstains seemed old and faded. I allowed myself to hope that it would not happen again.
The second knight came in winter, and he had such frightened eyes. I would have let him go—I swear I would have—but when the magic took me by the throat and I growled “Give me meat!” he fell down and begged for mercy.
Mercy is not the same as meat. I killed him, still on his knees.
I tried to commit suicide several times after that, but the magic would not let me. Monsters do not drown easily, and I tore the hide around my throat to shreds without ever getting near the vein. When I ate poisonous mushrooms, I shook and sweated and lay in a puddle of my own vomit for three days, but I did not die. It was a cruel immortality.
There were more knights after that. Some of them attacked me at once. One or two listened to my demands, but they balked at killing their horses to feed me. I appreciated that. It was an unkind thing for the magic to ask. I bore their horses no ill-will, and when their masters were dead, I cut the traces and sent them wild-eyed back to their stables.
The magic was very particular about knights. I suppose the sorcerer had some grudge against them. I saw a woodcutter several times and while I did not show myself, the magic had no interest in him. A band of gypsies moved into the hall for three nights while it hailed outside, and I slept in a den beside the river and offered none of them violence. It was only ever knights.
One knight brought a priest who threw holy water in my face. “Begone, fiend!” he cried. I laughed like an earthquake because it was all so stupid and hopeless. I killed the knight—I had to—but the magic did not care about the priest, so I let him go.
You would think that the priest would have warned others away, but instead more knights came in a flood, ten or twenty of them, sometimes as many as three in a week. It is terrible how rapidly killing becomes banal. The murders became a horrible play that we acted out together, and I began to hate the knights for forcing me into my role. I hated their bravado and their foolish metal weapons that barely marked me. I hated their stupidity. I hated the magic that drove me, but the magic did not needle me if they stayed out of my hall, so it became easier and easier to kill them.
A philosopher would probably say something wise about becoming a monster in heart as well as form, but we did not get many philosophers in the woods.
I don’t know which knight it was that finally killed his horse. The magic drove me stomping and snarling into the hall and I uttered my lines—“Give me meat!” and instead of attacking me or begging for mercy or looking at me with total noncomprehension, he said “Very well,” and cut his horse’s throat in front of me.
I hated him more than any of the rest put together. The horse was entirely blameless, which was more than you could say of the knights. It was a gray horse, and it made a horrible choking noise as it died.
He brought the meat into the hall, and the magic lowered my head. It was still warm, and I thought with every bite that I would be violently ill, but the magic had hold of my teeth and tongue, and I swallowed and chewed and swallowed and chewed and thought that the nightmare would never end.
The only virtue of being a monster is that we take very large bites.
When the horse was nothing but bloody bones and hide, the magic took my voice again, and I demanded something to drink. “Very well,” said the knight, and threw me an entire skin of wine that had been draped across his saddlebow. I drank it. It was probably drugged, but if the mushrooms hadn’t killed me, I had little hope of this doing the job.