“Hallana!” Ijada waved thankfully, as if all was now well. “Come over here, quickly!”
“You were expecting them?” Ingrey asked her.
“We all came together, pell-mell down the road for the past two days. Five gods, what a journey. The prince-marshal commanded everything. I galloped ahead at the last—my heart was calling me to hasten, and I was desperately afraid.”
Learned Lewko limped up to Ingrey and signed a hasty blessing. Jokol trod behind with the sort of breathless, maniacal grin upon his face that Ingrey imagined he’d have worn while facing a storm at sea, his boat climbing mountainous waves while all the sane men clung to the ropes and screamed.
“Ho! Ingorry!” he cried happily, saluting ghostly warriors right and left as though they were long-lost cousins. “This night will make some song!”
“Are you the mortal vessels for the gods, then?” Ingrey asked Lewko. “Are you all made saints?”
“I have been a saint,” wheezed Lewko, “and it isn’t this. If I had to guess…” His glare around the densely haunted clearing ended on a narrow-eyed look at Ingrey.
Oswin and Hallana abandoned their blown mount and came up, clutching each other by the arm over the uneven ground, staring at the ghostly warriors in wonder tinged with trepidation and, Ingrey would swear, a blazing scholarly curiosity not far removed, in its own way, from Jokol’s appalling enthusiasm.
“If I had to guess, Oswin,” Lewko continued to his colleague—Ingrey sensed the tail of a hot debate—“I think we are all made sacred funeral animals.”
Oswin looked at first faintly offended, then thoughtful. Hallana giggled. The sound was overwrought but queerly joyous.
“Ingrey must cleanse my ghosts,” Ijada said firmly. “I told you it would be so.”
Two days of debate, Ingrey guessed, but in a company, however odd, fearsomely well equipped for it. The gods have no hands in this world but ours. Hand to hand to hand…
Biast spied his sister, now sitting slumped on the long mound not far from Wencel’s body, and hurried to her, going to his knees and gathering her in his arms. Their heads bent together; they spoke hastily in low tones. He held her as she shuddered. She did not, yet, weep.
“Ijada,” murmured Ingrey, “I don’t think we had best delay, if this is to work.” He looked around at the revenants, who had stopped milling and jostling and now stared back at him in yearning silence. As if I were their last hope of heaven. “How do I…what do I…” What do I do?
She grasped the wolf’s head standard in both hands and set her shoulders. “You’re the shaman-king. Do what seems right to you, and it will be.” Beside her, the gold-belted marshal made a gesture of assent.
Four thousand, so many! It matters less where I begin, as that I begin.
Ingrey turned slowly around and caught sight of the tall warrior with the wolf cloak he’d seen earlier. He motioned the revenant forward and stared into his pale features. The ghost smiled and nodded kindly, as if to reassure him, fell to one knee before Ingrey, captured his left hand, and bowed his head. Fascinated, Ingrey extended his right index finger, down which a trickle of blood flowed from the soaked rag wrapping his reopened wound, and smeared a drop across the warrior’s forehead. It disturbed Ingrey more than a little that the ghost felt solid to him now, not liquid as before, and he wondered what it bespoke of his own changed state.
“Come,” Ingrey whispered, and the warrior’s spirit wolf, so ancient and worn as to be hardly more than a dark smear, passed out through his fingers. The warrior rose and lifted his face to the watching divines, then extended his hand toward Learned Oswin in a gesture half greeting, half plea. Oswin, with an anxious side glance at Hallana, who nodded vigorously at him, held out his hand to grasp the revenant’s. The wolf warrior clasped it, smiled beatifically, and melted away.
“Oh,” said Oswin, and his voice shook, tears starting in his eyes. “Oh, Hallana, I did not know…”
“Shh,” she said. “It will be very well now, I think.” She moistened her lips and gazed at Ingrey as though he were a cross between some famous work of Temple art she’d traveled days to see, and her favorite child.
Ingrey glanced around again, his eyes crammed with choices, and motioned another warrior to him. The man knelt and awkwardly, hopefully, presented his head held up between his two hands. Ingrey repeated the crimson unction upon the forehead, for whatever this last libation from the world of matter was worth, and released a dark hawk-spirit to fly into the night and vanish. The warrior reached for Oswin again, and this time Ingrey could see, just before he melted away, that the man was made whole. The Father speed you on your journey, then.
A woman revenant came forward, young-looking, carrying a banner that unfolded to display the ancient spitting-cat sigil of the Lynxlakes, a kin that had dwindled to extinction in the male line two centuries past. When Ingrey took her hand, he was startled to feel two other tattered souls clinging to her through her banner. Her lynx was sad and shabby, and the other two creatures so ragged as to be unidentifiable, in passing away. He signed her forehead in three parallel carmine strokes, which seemed to suffice, for she rose and strode to Jokol, who brightened and stood very straight, taking her hand to kiss it and murmuring something in her ear before she vanished. Ingrey swore he heard a faint low laugh, suddenly merry, linger for a moment in the air behind her. Jokol for the Daughter, aye. The Lady of Spring gives notoriously abundant blessings.
The next was a thin old man who went to Lewko, who stood looking very reflective as the revenant passed through. Lewko for the Bastard, naturally.
“Prince Biast,” called Ingrey softly. “I’m afraid I need you here.” Biast for the Son. Of course.
“I suspect I will be least used, this night,” murmured Hallana. She cast a shrewd glance toward the mound. “I will sit with poor Fara till you need me. I would guess she’s had a time of it.”
“Thank you, Learned, yes,” said Ingrey. “She was treated most miserably from first to last. But in the end she remembered she was a princess.”
Biast came forward to Ingrey’s side, studying him warily. The entranced expression upon his face when he looked at Ingrey was laced with a thread of defiance. In an attempt at irony that faltered, he murmured, “Should I call you sire, here?”
“You need not call me anything, so long as you turn your hand to the task. Will Fara be all right?” Ingrey nodded across the clearing to where the princess sat huddled, watching grimly, as Hallana lowered herself beside her.
“I offered to take her to where Symark and the divines’ servants wait, but she refused. She says she wants to bear witness.”
“She has earned that.” And it would make her the one person besides Ingrey who had seen all of Horseriver’s actions from her father’s death to…whatever the end of this night brought. If he survived, that could be important. And if I don’t survive, it could be even more important.
“The most here will be yours, I suspect,” Ingrey told Biast. “The old kings had two tasks: to lead their men to battle and to lead them home again. Horseriver lost sight of the second, I think, in his black madness and despair. These warriors of the Old Weald—their duty to their king is done; there remains only their king’s duty to them. It’s going to be”—Ingrey sighed—“a long night.”
Biast swallowed, and nodded shortly. “Go on.”
Ingrey looked around at the apprehensive revenants, pressing close again, and raised his voice, though he was not sure he needed to; within the bounds of Bloodfield, his voice carried. “Fear no stinting, kinsmen! I will not end my watch till your long watch is done.”
A blond-bearded young man knelt, first of a long string of such youths, many desperately mutilated. Ingrey released creature after creature: boar and bear, horse and wolf, stag and lynx, hawk and badger. Biast studied each man, as they passed through his hands, as though looking in some disquieting mirror.
It had taken a cadre of Audar’s troops two days to slay all these here; Ingrey did
not see how he was to release them all in a night, but something odd seemed to be happening to time in this woods. He was not sure if it was a variant upon what happened to his flow of perception in his battle madness—a shaman skill—or if the gods had lent some element of Their god-time, by which They attended to all souls in the world both simultaneously and equally. Ingrey only knew that each warrior was owed a moment at least of his hallow king’s full regard; and if the debt had not been Ingrey’s to contract, it had still fallen to him to pay. Heir indeed.
Then he wondered which he would come to the end of first, his warriors or himself. Perhaps they would end together, in perfect balance.
The Darthacan archers came forward midway through the night. Ingrey puzzled mightily over them, for they bore no spirit beasts for him to release. In what backwash of the uncanny their souls had been caught up, by what concatenation of disrupted magic, god-gift, night battle and bloody sacrifice they had been imprisoned here, he could not imagine. He signed them in his blood all the same, they thanked him with their eyes all the same, and he handed them off to their waiting gods, all the same.
The Wolfcliff woman with the gold wolf’s head arm rings gave him a kiss upon the brow in return for his blessing of blood, then, apparently in a moment of pure self-indulgence, a kiss upon the lips, before she turned to Hallana. His lips stiffened with the chill of her mouth, but her lips warmed to a faint color, like a memory of happiness, so he thought it a fair trade.
It was in the dark before dawn, the stars and the waning half-moon shuttered behind deep clouds, when he came to the bitter end of his task. Some two dozen or so ghosts hung back, turning their wan faces from the gods.
Ingrey turned to Oswin. “Learned, what shall I do with these?” He gestured to the revenants: unable to flee him, unwilling to come to him.
Oswin took a deep breath and said reluctantly, as if reciting an old lesson, “Heaven weeps, but free will is sacred. The meaning of yes is created by the ability to say no. As a forced marriage is no marriage, but instead the crime of rape. The gods either will not or cannot rape our souls; in any case, They do not. To my knowledge,” the meticulous scholar in him added.
These, too, died at Bloodfield; my duty to them does not change. All the same. Ingrey unlocked his voice and ordered each dark despairing revenant forward, and gave them their little gift of blood, and freed their spirit beasts. And let them go. Most unraveled, fading into utter nothingness, before they even reached the trees.
Two left now: the marshal-warrior, who had stood all night with Ijada and the royal Wolfcliff banner; and the being beside whom—for whom—he had once died at Bloodfield. It took most of Ingrey’s remaining strength to compel Horseriver forward to face him; they both ended on their knees.
This one is not the same. Horseriver’s spirit horse was gone, his kingship rescinded, but the concatenation of souls remained, generations of Horserivers still churning through his anguished form. Tentatively, Ingrey reached for the shreds of Wencel in the mass, and whispered, “Come.” And, louder, “Come!” A shudder ran through the being in front of him, but no individual soul peeled out. Ingrey wondered if he’d made a tactical mistake; if he had attempted Horseriver first, before he’d been exhausted by this night, could he have taken apart what Horseriver’s long curse had welded together? Or was this simply not within his earthly powers? He was almost certain it was not. Almost.
Some of Horseriver’s faces, rising to the surface of that dreadful skull, looked longingly toward the gates of the gods, the five ill-assorted persons who now leaned on each other in a fatigue that nearly matched Ingrey’s. Others looked away, with all of Horseriver’s bitterness and rage and endless agony in their devastating eyes.
“What is your whole desire?” Ingrey asked it. “Lost centuries are not within my gift. The revenge of sundering these other souls from the gods I have denied you, for that was not the right of your hallow kingship, but its betrayal. What then is left? I would give you mercy if you would take it.” The gods would give you rivers of it.
“Mercy,” whispered some of the voices of Horseriver, looking to the gates, and “Mercy,” whispered the rest, looking away. One word, encompassing opposite and exclusive boons. Could Ingrey, by any physical or magical strength, wrestle this divided being to any altar? Should he try?
Time had lingered for Ingrey this night, but time was running out. If dawn came without a decision, what would happen? And if he waited for dawn to carry the choice away from him, was that not itself the same decision? If Ingrey fell into his judgment out of sheer weariness, well, he would not be the first man or king to do so. He had thought leading men into battle against impossible odds to be the most fearsome task of a king, but this new impossibility enlightened him vastly. He stared at Horseriver and thought, He must have been a great-souled man, once, for the gods to desire him still, here in his uttermost ruin.
He looked around at the witnesses: three Temple divines, two princes, a princess, and the two royal banner-carriers, the quick and the dead. Biast’s earlier little flash of princely jealousy was entirely drained from his face now. Not even he wanted the hallow kingship in this moment. The marshal-warrior’s watching face was without expression.
Ingrey squeezed his aching right hand till the blood ran down his fingers, and dribbled a thick line all around the tortured revenant’s head. And drew a long inhalation of the foggy night air, and breathed out, “Mercy.” And let Horseriver go.
Slowly, like thick smoke rising up from a pyre, Horseriver dissipated, until soul-haze could not be told from the hanging fog. The marshal-warrior’s dead eyes closed, for a moment, as if it would spare him the knowledge with the sight. Of all here, he was the only one Ingrey was sure understood the choice. All the choices. The clearing was very silent.
Ingrey tried to stand up, failed, and tried again. He stood a moment with his hands on his knees, dizzy and faint. He did not think he had lost enough blood this night to kill him, but the amount strewn about on the ground and down his leathers was impressive nonetheless. It always looks like more when it’s spread around like that. Finally, he straightened his back and looked at the last revenant, and at Ijada, still holding up the wolf’s head standard. High upon its steel point, a shadow-heart still pulsed.
He bowed to the marshal-warrior. “I would ask one gift of you in return, my lord bannerman. One moment more of your time.”
The marshal-warrior opened a hand in curious permission. All my time now is your gift, sire, his eyes seemed to say.
Ingrey stepped forward and closed his hand around Ijada’s shoulder; she smiled wearily at him, her face pale and dirt-streaked and luminous. Ingrey looked over the five of the sacred band. Yes… “Learned Oswin, Learned Hallana, would you come here a moment?”
They glanced at each other and trod near. “Yes, Ingrey?” said Hallana.
“Would you each take one end of this, and hold it level. Not too high.”
A little apprehensively, they grasped the pole, as if uncertain at first if it would present a material grip to them, and stood apart. The Wolfcliff banner unfolded and hung down as though the great Wolf bowed its head to the ground.
Ingrey turned to Ijada. “Take my hand.”
She touched his right hand uncertainly, careful of the damp red mess, but he squeezed her fingers in return, and then she gripped more tightly. He turned them both to face the horizontal staff.
“Jump over with me,” he said, “if we shall be allies in such nights as this and lovers in all nights hereafter.”
“Ingrey…” She peered doubtfully at him, sideways through escaped strands of hanging hair. “Are you asking me to marry you?”
More or less, he started to say, and thought the better of it. It was only more. “Yes. You should marry a king. This is your great chance.” He looked around; Oswin’s sober face had lightened in comprehension, and Hallana’s had broken into a broad grin. “The company of witnesses could not be improved: three Temple divines of good character, two p
rinces—one a poet who will doubtless immortalize this moment before we’ve made it halfway back to Easthome—”
Jokol, who had loomed closer to see and hear, nodded delightedly. “Ah, Ingorry, good work! Yes, jump, jump, Ijada! My beautiful Breiga would like this one, yes!”
“A princess…” Ingrey cast a half bow somewhat uncertainly at Fara, now sitting up somberly on the edge of the mound; she returned him a grave but not disapproving jerk of her chin. “And one other.” Ingrey nodded to the marshal-warrior; Ingrey had not known ghosts could be bemused, but this one’s surprised smile blessed him in advance for this unexpected last use of his long-defended emblem. “You can have other ceremonies later, if you like,” Ingrey added to Ijada. “With better clothes or whatever. As many as you want. As long as they’re with me,” he added prudently.
“One or two is the usual limit,” Oswin rumbled from his end of the pole, starting to smile.
Ingrey opened his mouth to persuade further, but Ijada extended two fingers and touched his lips to stillness. He wobbled a little, as his knees nearly gave way, and she glanced aside at him thoughtfully. She looked each way at Oswin and Hallana, reached out, and pressed the pole down; the two divines obediently bent to lower the barrier to something their somewhat pallid hallow king was sure to be able to clear.
Looking at each other, Ingrey and Ijada held hands and jumped.
Ingrey stumbled a little on the landing, as his head was swimming, but Ijada steadied him. They exchanged one kiss, which Ingrey began to make swift and promissory; Ijada captured his face between her hands and made it more thorough. Yes, Ingrey thought, pausing to feel the softness, the warmth, the faint hint of her teeth. This is the only living Now.
They parted, trading pensive smiles, and Ingrey retrieved the standard. The pulsing heart had vanished from the spearpoint. But which of us received back which half? He wasn’t sure he knew.
The marshal-warrior knelt on one knee, undid his graying braids from his gold belt, and held his head up before him. Ingrey knelt, too, and shook down one last generous splash of blood to smear across the furrowed brow. The old spirit stallion he released was very worn, but Ingrey thought it must have been a fine fast beast in its time, for this night it flew.