“Oh. Isn’t it lonely?”
“Not at all. My dear husband brings the two older children to visit me every day. And some evenings without the children, too. I catch up on my reading and my studies—it makes the most wonderful retreat imaginable. I should be quite too inclined to repeat it, but I imagine a dozen babies would be a mistake, and anyway, I think my husband would draw the line well before then.”
The maid Hergi, who had made herself small and quiet near her mistress’s feet, giggled in a remarkably unservile fashion.
“It is not, you know, different in kind from the sort of thoughtful self-discipline any Temple sorcerer must keep. To use disorder alone, never trying to reverse the flow of its nature, but in good cause…calm, careful, never yielding to the temptation of shortcuts. That was the salvation of my calling—when a certain brilliant logician pointed out that surgery destroys to heal. And I saw how to correctly use the powers that had been granted me in the direction my heart desired. I was so overjoyed, I married him.”
Ijada laughed. “I am so happy for you! You deserve all good things.”
“Ah, what we may deserve, well, the Father alone knows that, in the balance of His justice.” The sorceress’s face grew solemn again. “So tell me, love, what truly happened out in that cold castle?”
CHAPTER FIVE
IJADA’S LAUGHTER WAS ABRUPTLY EXTINGUISHED. INGREY QUIETLY rose and sent the warden out for the meal that he had been diverted from ordering, increasing the servings. This also removed her interested ear from the proceedings. She looked disappointed, but dared not disobey.
He slipped back to his seat as quietly, so as not to distract Lady Ijada from her halting confession to her friend. Who was so obviously, at least to Ingrey’s mind, here for subtler reasons than friendship.
He was alert for discrepancies, but the tale Ijada told Learned Hallana was much the same as what she had—finally—told Ingrey, though this time all in order with nothing left out. Except that she revealed much more to Hallana of her suffocating fears. Hallana’s expression grew so intent as to be stony during Ijada’s account of her leopard dreams. Ijada brought her story up to her nearly disastrous fall at the ford, yesterday, and hesitated, glancing across at Ingrey. “I think the next part should be Lord Ingrey’s to tell.”
Ingrey jerked in his seat, flushing. For an instant it almost seemed like the red fog returning, and his hand spasmed on the edge of the sill on which he sat. He became uncomfortably aware that he had grown careless again, on some dim assumption that the sorceress could protect both herself and Ijada. But sorcerers were not proof against steel, not once it closed on them. He’d allowed himself to be alone with the women while still armed. And now his direst secrets were challenged…
He blurted, “I tried to drown her. I’ve tried three other times to kill her, that I know of. I swear it is not my desire. She thinks it is some spell or geas.”
The sorceress pursed her lips and vented a long, thoughtful stream of breath. Then she sat back and closed her eyes, her face growing very still. When she opened them again, her expression was enigmatic.
“No sorcerer has currently bespelled you. You bear no sustaining link—no spirit-threads wind to or from you. No elemental from the fifth god lies within your soul. But something else does. It seems very dark.”
He looked away. “I know. It is my wolf.”
“If that’s a wolf’s soul, I’m the queen of Darthaca.”
“It always was a strange wolf. But it is bound!”
“Huh. May I touch you?”
“I don’t know if I am…safe.”
Her brows twitched up; she looked him over, and he grew acutely conscious of his road stains and brigand’s beard stubble. “I think I shall not argue with that. Ijada, what do you see in him?”
“I don’t see anything,” she replied unhappily. “It is as though the leopard smells him, and I overhear…oversmell? Howsoever, I am lent these unfamiliar sensations. There’s the dark wolf-thing you see—at least, it smells dark, like old leaf mold and campfire ashes and forest shadows—and a third thing. Whispering around him like a rumor. It has a most strange perfume. Acrid.”
Hallana tilted her head back and forth. “I see his soul, with my soul’s eye. I see the dark thing. I do not see or hear the third thing. It is not of the Bastard in any way, not lent from the world of spirit that the gods rule. Yet—his soul has strange convolutions. A clear glass that one cannot see with the eyes, one might still touch with the fingers. I must risk a deeper touch.”
“Don’t!” said Ingrey, panicked.
“Lady, ought you…?” murmured the maid, her face crimped with alarm. “Now?”
Hallana’s lips moved on what might have been, Dratsab, dratsab, dratsab. “Let us think.”
A knock sounded at the door; the warden had returned, flanked by some inn servants with trays and the man Hallana had called Bernan, who lugged a large chest. He was a wiry, middle-aged fellow with an alert eye; his green-leather jerkin was spattered with old burn spots, like a smith’s. He inhaled with deep appreciation as the trays were borne past him. The delectable odors of vinegared beef and onions seeping from under the crockery covers forcibly reminded Ingrey that he was both ravenous and exhausted.
Hallana brightened. “Better still, let us eat, then think.”
The inn servants set the table in the little parlor, but after that the sorceress sent them away, saying she preferred to be served by her own folk. She whispered aside to Ingrey, “Actually, I make such a mess, just now, I don’t dare eat in public.” Ingrey, warily circumspect, sent the warden downstairs to eat in the common room and tarry there until called for. She cast a curious look back as she reluctantly withdrew.
The manservant Bernan reported Hallana’s horses safely stabled at the local temple’s mews, the wagon wheel repaired, and arrangements made for her night’s rest with a certain Mother’s physician in Red Dike, who was evidently a former Suttleaf student. Ingrey found himself, without having intended any such thing, joining the two women for a meal at the small table. The manservant presented the basin for hand washing, and the double-divine intoned a perfunctory blessing.
Hergi whipped a napkin the size of a tablecloth around her mistress and helped her to her food, deftly catching tilting glasses, skidding jugs, and sliding stew, often before they spilled, but sometimes not. “Drink up your wine,” the sorceress recommended. “It will go sour in half an hour. I should take myself off before the innkeeper discovers the trouble with his beer. Well, his store of fleas, lice, and bedbugs will not survive me, either, so I hope it is a fair exchange. If I linger, I may have to start in on the mice, poor things.”
Lady Ijada seemed as famished as Ingrey, and the conversation waned for a time. Hallana reopened it with a blunt inquiry of the origin of Ingrey’s wolf-affliction. His stomach knotted despite his hunger, but he mumbled through an explanation rather fuller than he had yet confided to Ijada, as well as he could remember the confusing old events. Both women listened raptly. Ingrey was uneasily aware that Bernan, who had taken his plate to a seat on his wooden chest, and Hergi, who snitched bites standing between mopping up after her mistress, were listening, too. But a Temple sorceress’s servants must surely be among the most discreet.
“Had your father had a previous interest in the animal magic of our Old Wealding forebears?” Hallana inquired, when he had finished describing the rite.
“None known to me,” Ingrey said. “It all seemed very sudden.”
“Why attempt such a thing then?” said Ijada.
Ingrey shrugged. “All who knew died or fled. There were none left to tell by the time I recovered enough to ask.” His mind shrank from the fragmented memories of those dark, bewildered weeks. Some things were better forgotten.
Hallana chewed, swallowed, and asked, “How came you to learn to bind your wolf?”
Things like that, for example. Ingrey rubbed his tense neck, without relief. “Audar’s ancient law, that those defiled by an
imal ghosts should be burned alive, had not been carried out within living memory at Birchbeck. Our local divine, who had known me all my life, was anxious that it not be invoked. As it turned out, the Temple inquirer sent to examine the case ruled that since the crime was not of my making, but imposed upon me by persons whose authority I was bound to obey, it would be tantamount to cutting off a man’s hand for being robbed. So I was formally pardoned, my life spared.”
Ijada looked up with keen attention at the news of this precedent, her lips parting as if to speak, but then just shook her head.
Ingrey gave her an acknowledging nod, and continued, “Still I could not be left to wander freely. Sometimes I was lucid, you see, but sometimes… I could not well remember the other times. So our divine set about trying to cure me.”
“How?” asked the sorceress.
“Prayer first, of course. Then rituals, what old ones he could find. Some I think he made up new out of bits. None worked. Then he tried exhortations, lectures and sermons, he and his acolytes taking turns for days together. That was the most wearisome part. Then we tried to drive it out by force.”
“We?” Hallana cocked an eyebrow.
“It was not…not done against my will. I was desperate by then.”
“Mm. Yes, I can…” She pressed her lips together for a long moment, then said, “What form did these wolf-wardings take?”
“We tried everything we could think of that wouldn’t outright cripple me. Starvation, beatings, fire and threats of fire, water. It did not drive out the wolf, but at least I learned to gain ascendance, and my periods of confusion grew shorter.”
“Under those conditions, I should imagine you learned rather quickly.”
He glanced up defensively at her dry tone. “It was clearly working. Anyway, better to be shoved under the Birchbeck till my lungs burst than listen to more sermons all day and night. Our divine held everyone steadfast through the task, though it was hard. It was the last thing he could do for my father, whom he felt he had failed.”
Ingrey took a swallow of wine. “After some months, I was pronounced well enough to be let out. Castle Birchgrove had been settled on my uncle by then. I was sent on pilgrimage, in hopes of finding some more permanent cure. I was glad enough to go; though as hope failed, and I grew to man size and shed my keepers, my search turned into mere wanderings. When I ran out of money, I’d take what odd tasks came to hand.” Anything had seemed better than turning his steps toward home. And then…one day, it hadn’t, anymore.
“I met Lord Hetwar when he was on an embassy to the king of Darthaca.” His desperate contrivances to win access to the sealmaster, he didn’t think worth recounting. “He was curious how a Wealding kinsman should be serving strangers so far from home, so I told him my tale. He was not daunted by my wolf and gave me a place in his guard that I might work my way back to my own country. I made myself useful during some incidents on the road, and he was pleased to make my place permanent. I rose in his household thereafter.” Ingrey’s mouth firmed in tight pride. “By my merits.”
He applied himself to his spiced meat, sopping up the last of its gingery gravy with the inn’s good bread. Ijada had stopped eating a little while ago and sat solemn with thought, running her finger around the rim of her empty wine beaker. When she looked up and caught his eye, she managed a wan smile. Hallana waved away her maid’s attempt to feed her a second apple tart, and Hergi rolled up the stained napkin and bundled it away.
The sorceress eyed Ingrey. “Feeling better now?”
“Yes,” he admitted reluctantly.
“Do you have any idea who laid this bridle on you?”
“No. It’s hard to think about it. It almost bothers me more that I cannot feel it, between fits. I begin to mistrust everything in my mind. As if straining to see the insides of my own eyeballs.” He hesitated, marshaled his nerve. “Can you take it off me, Learned?”
She huffed uncertainly, while the manservant, behind her, made an urgent negative gesture to Ingrey, and Hergi squeaked protest.
“The one thing I might safely do right now,” said Hallana, “is add to the disorder in your spirit. Whether this would break or disrupt the hold of this strange thing Ijada smells upon you, I do not know. I dare attempt nothing more complex. If I were not pregnant, I might try—well, never mind. Yes, yes, I see you, Bernan, please refrain from bursting,” she added to the agitated manservant. “If I do not vent disorder into Lord Ingrey, here, I shall just have to kill some mice, and I like mice.”
Ingrey rubbed his tired face. “I am willing to have you try, but…fetter me, first.”
Her brows climbed. “You think it necessary?”
“Prudent.”
The sorceress’s servants, at least, seemed greatly in favor of prudence in any form. While Ingrey laid his sword and belt knife against the wall by the door, Bernan opened what proved to be a well-stocked toolbox and rummaged within, producing a couple of lengths of sturdy chain. In consultation with Ingrey, he fitted loops tightly around Ingrey’s booted ankles, and secured them with an iron staple and hasp. Ingrey crossed his hands at the wrists and suffered a similar arrangement there, then tested both bindings, twisting and straining. They seemed solid enough. Then he sat on the floor with his back to the window seat and had Bernan bolt the wrist chains to the ankle chains. He felt an utter fool, sitting crouched with his knees up halfway to his ears. His audience looked extremely bemused, but no one demurred.
Learned Hallana heaved herself up out of her seat and waddled over to him. Ijada stood anxiously by her on one side, and Hergi on the other. Hallana shot back her cuffs and laced her fingers together, stretching her hands with a faint crackling pop of the joints. “Very good,” she said, in a medically brisk voice all the more sinister for its good cheer, “tell me if this hurts…” She laid a warm palm across Ingrey’s forehead.
The sense of heat flowing from her touch was pleasant for the first few seconds, and he leaned into her hand. But then it grew uncomfortably warm. A disturbing haze clouded his vision. Abruptly, the heat was roaring like a smithy’s furnace across his mind, and he was seeing double. The second image parted from the first: twisted, altered.
The room was still present to his physical senses. But equally present was another place. In it…
In it, he was standing nude. Above his heart, his pale flesh puckered, then swelled. The skin burst. From it, a vine, no, a vein, sprouted, and began to wind and twist around him, climbing. He felt a second hot bulge burst on his forehead, and saw the vine-vein wind down from it, blurred by its proximity. Another from his navel, another from his genitals. Their moving tips muttered and dripped blood. His tongue, too, was transformed, pushing out from his mouth, forming into a pulsing tube.
In the material room, his body began to writhe and yank against his chains. Harder. His eyes half rolled back, but still he could see the Learned Hallana leaning near—she scrambled back as he opened his mouth to howl. But between her two glowing hands, held apart, violet fire still roared, spiraling into his horribly transformed mouth.
The long tentacle growing from his tongue flapped and jerked in agony, its unintelligible whisper speeding into a hiss, yet seemed to devour the heat. The other four, mirroring its excitement, continued to mutter and thicken, splashing him with blood. The hot metallic smell and slippery feel of it drove him to distraction. His real body bucked and arched with near bone-cracking force, straining against his chains. His hair rippled, and his genitals engorged and stiffened. He fell sideways, convulsed, began to try to roll and rock himself across the room toward the wall where his sheathed sword leaned.
Ijada had fallen to her knees, mouth open, eyes wide. In the second reality, the leopardess appeared…
Its fur was a silken ripple over moving muscle, its claws carved ivory; its brilliant amber eyes flashed with golden lights. It fell upon the writhing veins for all the world like a kitten upon a mess of cords, paws patting, then clawing, then pulling the hissing things toward it to bite
at them with its great teeth. The veins lashed like whips of acid, leaving black burns across the elegant, spotted coat, and the leopardess snarled, a rich sound that shook the air, that shook Ingrey to his heart. From somewhere deep inside him, an answering growl arose.
His jaw began to lengthen…
No. No! I deny you, wolf-within! He bit down, clenched his teeth. Fought wolf, fought tentacles, fought his body, fought his mind, rocked nearer to his sword. Fight. Kill…something…everything…
The tortured chain twisted, an iron link snapping like a stick. His wrists and ankles were still bound, but freed from each other. His body straightened, and then he could writhe and roll, arch and turn. His sword was very close. Panicked feet trampled about him.
His real hands were as slippery with real blood as his second body now was with the strange red spew that flowed out of himself, onto himself. To his utter horror, he began to feel the links slip from his bleeding wrists, over his yanking hands. If he freed his right hand, reached his sword…surely none would leave this room alive. Perhaps not even himself.