The Hallowed Hunt

Conscious of the glowering warden, Ingrey asked more lightly after Ijada’s day; she returned in kind a description of an amusing old book of household hints, apparently the only reading matter the house had offered up. After that the conversation fell flatly silent for a space. Not what he had hoped, but at least they were both in the same room, alive and breathing. I must raise my standards for dalliance.

  A sharp rap on the front door, the shuffle of the porter, voices; Ingrey tensed, aware he’d left his sword upstairs and bore only his belt knife, then relaxed a trifle as he recognized the new voice as Wencel’s. He rose to his feet as the earl-ordainer entered the parlor, and the warden scrambled up and curtseyed apprehensively.

  “Ingrey. Lady Ijada.” Wencel nodded to them. He was dressed in full court mourning, a little grimed, and looked weary to the point of exhaustion. The darkness within him was quiescent, as if benumbed or suppressed. His eye summed the chairs. “You may be excused,” he said to the warden. “Take your plate.”

  The woman curtseyed again and removed herself promptly. She did not need to be told, by Wencel at least, to close the door behind her.

  “Have you eaten?” Lady Ijada inquired civilly.

  “This and that.” He waved. “Just some wine, please.”

  She poured from the carafe, and he took the beaker and sat back in his chair, his legs stretched out, his head tilted back. “You are well, lady? My people are seeing to your needs?”

  “Yes, thank you. My material needs, anyway. It is news that I lack.”

  Wencel’s chin came down. “There is no news, at least of your plight. Boleso has arrived in Templetown, where his body will rest tonight. By this time tomorrow, that carnival, at least, will be over.” He grimaced.

  And Ijada’s legal one will begin? “I have been thinking, Wencel…” Succinctly, Ingrey explained his blood-price ploy once more. “If you really seek to redeem the honor of your house, cousin, this could be one way. If the Stagthornes and the Badger-banks could both be persuaded. Which you are also in a position to do, I would point out.”

  Wencel gave him a shrewd look. “I see you are not an impartial jailer.”

  “If such a jailer was what you really wanted, I’m sure you could have found one,” Ingrey returned dryly.

  Wencel lifted his beaker in an only half-mocking salute, and drank. After a moment he added, “Speaking of indirect evidence, I presume by the fact that I am not yet arrested for defilement that you have kept our secrets.”

  “I have managed to keep you out of my conversations so far, yes. I don’t know how much longer I can succeed. I’ve drawn some unfortunate attention from the Temple. Did you hear about the ice bear yet?”

  Wencel’s lips twisted. “This funeral procession today being short on piety and long on gossip, yes. The tales I heard were lurid, conflicting, and ambiguous. I was possibly the only confidant to whom the events were crystal clear. Congratulations upon your discovery. I didn’t imagine you would learn of that power for quite some time yet.”

  “My wolf never spoke like this before.”

  “The great beasts have no speech. That shaping must come from the man. The whole is a different essence from either part; they alter each other as they merge.”

  Ingrey contemplated this remark for a moment, finding it plangent but maddeningly vague. He decided to leave out mention of that other Voice.

  “And,” Wencel added, “your wolf was truly bound before. Separated from you even while trapped within. Neither the Temple nor I was mistaken on that, I promise you. It is its unbinding that remains a mystery to me.” Wencel raised his brows invitingly.

  Ingrey ignored the hint. “What else might it—might I—we—do?”

  “The weirding voice is actually a great and subtle power, nearer the heart of the matter than you know.”

  “Since I know practically nothing, that is no great observation, Wencel.”

  Wencel shrugged. “Indeed, the shamans of the forest tribes bore other powers. Visions that did not deceive. Healings, of wounds of the body or mind, of fevers, of sicknesses of the blood. Sometimes, they could follow men who had fallen into great darkness of mind and bring them back out again. Sometimes their powers were reversed; they could plunge victims into those darknesses, or thwart healing, even unto death. Darker necromancies still, consuming mortal sacrifices.”

  Casting geases? Ingrey wondered silently.

  “Great powers,” Wencel continued more lowly, “and yet—even in the days of the Old Weald’s greatest glory and heartbreak, not great enough. Outnumbered, the shamans and spirit warriors were borne down under the weight of their most implacable enemies. Let that be a lesson to you, Ingrey. We are far too alone in this. Secrecy is our only source of safety.”

  Ijada took a breath and ventured, “I have heard that great Audar overcame Wealding sorceries with swords alone, in his last push. Swords and courage.”

  Wencel snorted. “Darthacan lies. He had gathered all the Temple saints and sorcerers that Darthaca could muster in his train. It took the gods’ own betrayals to bring us down at Holytree.”

  Ingrey guessed at Ijada’s direction, and followed her lead. “Yes, what does your library at Castle Horseriver have to say about Bloodfield that the Darthacan chronicles do not?”

  Wencel’s lips curled up in a weird little smile. “Enough to know that whatever they’ve taught you of it in these degenerate days is fabrication.”

  Ingrey said, “Whatever evil rites the Wealdings were attempting, Audar won. No lie there.”

  Wencel’s shoulders jerked in aggravation. “Not evil, but a great, if desperate, deed. The Weald was sorely pressed. We had lost half our lands to the Darthacans in the past generation. The bravest of our young men were dying in droves beneath the Darthacan lances.”

  “The military accounts I have read all assert that Audar’s army was better organized, trained, and led, and its baggage train a wonder, by the standards of the day,” Ingrey observed. “They built their own roads through the forests almost as fast as they could march.”

  “Hardly that fast, but indeed, their descent on any tribal district fell as a destructive plague. With all of their own resources and half of ours in Darthacan hands, courage alone was no longer enough to stem their advance. The hallow king in that day—the last true consecrated servant of our people, and by the way one of my Horseriver ancestors—met with all the shamans of all the kin he could gather, and together they devised a great rite to make their spirit warriors invincible. Men of might, who could not be wounded or slain, to meet the Darthacans in battle and throw them back across the river Lure forever. Men whose bodies and spirits would be bound to the sacred Weald itself, renewed by its life until the victory was gained. The wisdom songs they composed to effect the bindings were to last for three days, all the voices blended together in a chant of overwhelming majesty, greater and more unified than anything attempted before. They sang up strength out of the very forest.”

  Ijada, listening with breathless attention, murmured, “So what went wrong?”

  Wencel shook his head, his lips tightening to paleness. “It would have worked, had not Audar, with the aid of his sorcerers and the gods, come upon us too soon. A forced march at unprecedented speed through the forests and hills, then, instead of waiting till dawn for the light and to rest his men, an immediate attack in the darkness. It was the night of the second day of the great rite, and we were unprepared and vulnerable, the kin shamans exhausted and drained with their labors, the king already bound but the men still partly not.”

  “You—we did fight, though?” she pressed.

  “Oh, fiercely. But Audar had concentrated three times our numbers. I—no one thought he could gather that many, that fast, and move them so far.”

  “Still, magically healing warriors must have been hard to overcome. How?”

  “When bodies are buried in one pit, and all their heads buried in a pit half a mile away, even such uncanny men die. Eventually. They slew the hallow king, the hub of th
e spell, first, though I grant not by beheading. They broke his limbs and cast him into the first pit, and piled the decapitated bodies of his comrades in upon him. He took hours to die. Suffocated—drowned in their beloved blood—at the last.” Wencel’s eyes glittered in the candlelight.

  “Audar’s men worked all night and all day,” he continued, “red to their waists and half-mad with the task. Some broke from the horror of their own deeds, sat and rocked and wept. They slew all they found within the bounds of Holytree, whether surrendered or resisting: shamans, spirit warriors, innocent camp followers, males, females, children. They were taking no more chances. They leveled every structure, killed every animal, cut down and burned the Tree of Sacrifice. The hallow king’s eldest son and holy heir they beheaded last, at the end of the next day, after he had witnessed it all. When no living thing was left within the sacred bounds except the trees, they withdrew, and forbade entry. As if to bury their own sins along with us. And the rains came, and the snows of many winters, and men died, and forgot Holytree, and all the glory that had passed there.”

  Ingrey found his breath had nearly stopped, so caught up was he in Wencel’s impassioned delivery of this old tale. What else might Wencel be prodded into revealing? “They say Audar was made furious with tribal treaty betrayals, and was sorry afterward for the massacre. He made great gifts to the Temple for the forgiveness of his soul.”

  “His Temple!” Wencel scoffed. “He received with his left hand what he gave with his right. And a forced treaty is no treaty at all, but a robbery. The Darthacan encroachment was never-ending, and their treaties, self-serving lies.”

  “I don’t know,” said Ingrey judiciously. “It’s clear enough from the chronicles that the Darthacans did not start out intending to conquer the Weald. They slid into it over two generations. Every time they set up a boundary, they found themselves with a new frontier to defend, and the unruly kin tribes picking piecemeal at their defenses, until they moved the outposts farther to defend those lines, and it started all over again.”

  “You are half a Darthacan yourself, Ingrey.” Wencel’s tone fell from impassioned back to dry once more.

  “Most of us are, these days.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “But some kin warriors escaped to the borders,” said Ijada, watching Wencel closely. Her hands were tight in her lap. “They fought on, our ancestors. We fought back. In time, we won. The Weald was renewed.”

  Wencel snorted. “Audar’s empire fell to the squabbles and stupidities of his great-grandsons, not for any virtue remaining in the Weald. What came back, a century and a half later, was a shadow and a mockery of the Old Weald, emptied of its essences and its beauties, stamped in the mold of Darthacan Quintarian orthodoxy. The men who re-created that parody of the hallow kingship thought they were restoring something, but they were too ignorant even to know what had been lost. The great free days, the forest days, were gone, netted under the roads and mills, cut down with the trees turned to towns, weighted beneath the groaning stones of Audar’s temples. A hundred and fifty years of tears and strain and blood had been spent for nothing. They congratulated themselves most smugly, the new kin lords, the grand rich earl-ordainers—and archdivine-ordainers, what a travesty!—but their vaunted throne was empty of anything but men’s buttocks. They should have been weeping in the ashes, on that day of final betrayal.”

  Wencel at last seemed to grow conscious of the wide-eyed stares of both his listeners. “Faugh! So ends the lesson, children.” He exhaled. “I grow morbid. It has been an ugly day, and too long. I should go home.” His lips compressed. “To my wife.”

  Ijada said in a constricted voice, “How is she taking it all?”

  “Not well,” Wencel conceded.

  Ingrey worried suddenly how much of a push against Ijada might come from that quarter. Princess Fara was one Stagthorne who might well want blood, not money, in order to wash her own hands of a grievous guilt. And Fara surely had not only Wencel’s ear, but her brother Biast’s.

  Wencel pushed back his chair, pinched the bridge of his nose, and rose to his feet. His eyes were dark-circled, Ingrey noticed. And too old for his face.

  Ingrey saw him out the front, then nipped back into the parlor and closed the door once more before the warden could reappear. Ijada was frowning, as he seated himself beside her.

  “I wonder,” she said slowly, “what dreams Wencel has been having?”

  “Hm?”

  She tapped two fingers on the table edge. “He did not speak of Bloodfield as one who has read or heard. He spoke as one who’d seen.”

  “As you have—do you think? Yet at a different time.”

  “My dream was in the present, I thought. Why should he dream of the past? Why should he dream of my men at all?”

  Ingrey noted her unthinking possessive. “He seems to feel they are—were—his men.” He hesitated. “His father had a reputation for a historical mania. So did his grandfather, I think, from some things my father and aunt said. He was not drawn in to his sires’ passions as a child, that I know, but perhaps some crept upon him as he studied their writings later. He must have been frantic for explanations of what had happened to him.” He added after a moment, “Have you dreamed again of the Wounded Woods since you were there?”

  She shook her head. “There was no…no need. The task, whatever it was, was done. It didn’t need to be done twice. Nothing of it has faded or changed since then.” Her eyes sought his face. “Until you came along, that is.”

  Alone as they briefly were, Ingrey was torn between desire and fear of another kiss. What else might such a caress reveal? His bandaged hand crept toward hers and closed over it, and a small grateful smile flashed at him from those dizzying lips.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Kin shaman. Spirit warrior. Banner-carrier. Holytree. Why should all these symbols of the Old Weald be resurrected here, now? We three are linked and linked again—you and Wencel by blood and old tragedy, he and I by…recent events, you and I by…” She took a breath. “We should be trying to figure it out.”

  “We should be trying to stay alive, Ijada!”

  “I am not at all sure,” she said rather quietly, “that staying alive is what this is all about.”

  His hand clutched hers on the tabletop despite the twinge of pain. “Don’t you become fey!”

  “Why not? Do you imagine feyness is only your task?” Her brows twitched up in sudden amusement. “It is most becoming upon you, I admit. Unfairly so.” She leaned toward him, and he froze between terror and joy as her lips brushed his. Only flesh on flesh this time, only a touch of warmth.

  Before he could lunge at her in a quest for holy fire, the door clicked open. The warden entered and eyed them both, unsmiling. Unwillingly, he released Ijada’s hand and eased back. He was conscious that his breath was coming too fast.

  The warden sketched a curtsey. “Begging your pardon, my lord. The earl instructed me to keep close to my lady.”

  “I am obliged for his consideration,” said Ijada, in a voice so expressionless even Ingrey could not decide if it was sincere or dry. She tipped up and drained her beaker and set it down. “Should we retire again to that dull chamber?”

  “If it please you, my lady, it was what the earl said.”

  Beneath the woman’s stodgy stubbornness Ingrey perceived a real unease. The earl-ordainer’s secular powers alone were enough to overawe his servants, Ingrey supposed, but did they sense—or had they experienced—more?

  “Perhaps it is as well to turn in early,” Ingrey conceded reluctantly. “I must attend Lord Hetwar at the funeral rites tomorrow morning.”

  Ijada nodded and rose. “I should be grateful if you would wait upon me after, and tell me of them.”

  “Certainly, Lady Ijada.”

  He watched her pass out of the parlor. It was only in his overwrought fancy that the room seemed to grow darker for her going from it.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE TEMPLE SQUARE WAS ALREADY CROWDE
D WITH COURTLY and would-be-courtly mourners when Ingrey arrived there in the midmorning. His eye picked out a few of Gesca’s men at the outer edges of the mob, indicating that Lord Hetwar was already within. Ingrey lengthened his stride and shouldered through the press. Those who recognized him gave way at once.

  The sky was a bright autumn blue, and he shrugged in relief as he stepped out of the sun into the shade of the portico. His best court dress was heavy and a trifle hot, the somber sleeveless coat swirling about his ankles and tending to tangle with his sword. The sunbeams shone down also into the open central court, where the holy fire burned high on its plinth, and he blinked at the adjustment from light to dark to light. He spotted Lady Hetwar, attended by Gesca and Hetwar’s oldest son, made his way to her side, and bowed. She gave him an acknowledging nod, her glance approving his garb, and shifted a little to make him space to loom in proper retainer’s style beside Gesca at her back. Gesca gave him a nervy sideways stare, but by no other sign revealed any aftereffects of their last tense encounter, and Ingrey began to hope Gesca had kept the eerie incident to himself.

  Beyond the plinth, Ingrey also noted Rider Ulkra and some of Prince Boleso’s higher servants; good, the exiled household had arrived in Easthome as instructed. Ulkra cast him a polite nod of greeting, though most of the retainers who had ridden escort to Boleso’s wagon with him avoided his eyes—whether conscious of his contempt or simply unnerved by him, Ingrey could not tell.

  From a stone passage, the sound of a temple choir started up, the echoing effect making the fine, blended voices sound appropriately distant and doleful. At a slow pace, the singing acolytes entered the court: five times five, a quintet for each god, robed in blue, green, red, gray, and white. The archdivine of Easthome followed solemnly. Behind him, six great lords carried the prince’s bier. Hetwar was among them, both kin Boarford brothers, and three more earl-ordainers.

  Boleso’s body was tightly wrapped in layers of herbs beneath his perfumed princely robes, Ingrey guessed, though his swollen face was exposed. The delay in his burial pushed the limits of a decomposition that would necessitate a closed coffin. But the death of one so highborn demanded witnesses, the more the better, to prevent later imposters and pretenders from troubling the realm.