The late Prince Boleso’s housemaster, Rider Ulkra, appeared around the keep from wherever he’d been lurking when Ingrey’s troop had been spied climbing the road. Stout, usually stolid, he was breathless now with apprehension and hurry. He bowed. “Lord Ingrey. Welcome. Will you take drink and meat?”
“I’ve no need. See to these, though.” He gestured to the half dozen men who followed him. The troop’s lieutenant, Rider Gesca, gave him an acknowledging nod of thanks, and Ulkra delivered men and horses into the hands of the castle servants.
Ingrey followed Ulkra up the short flight of steps to the thick-planked main doors. “What have you done so far?”
Ulkra lowered his voice. “Waited for instructions.” Worry scored his face; the men in Boleso’s service were not long on initiative at the best of times. “Well, we moved the body into the cool. We could not leave it where it was. And we secured the prisoner.”
What sequence, for this unpleasant inspection? “I’ll see the body first,” Ingrey decided.
“Yes, my lord. This way. We cleared one of the butteries.”
They passed through the cluttered hall, the fire in its cavernous fieldstone fireplace allowed to burn low, the few red coals half-hidden in the ashes doing nothing to improve the discomfort of the chamber. A shaggy deerhound, gnawing a bone on the hearth, growled at them from the shadows. Down a staircase, through a kitchen where a cook and scullions fell silent and made themselves small as they passed, down again into a chilly chamber ill lit by two small windows high in the rocky walls.
The little room was presently unfurnished but for two trestles, the boards laid across them, and the sheeted shape that lay silently upon the boards. Reflexively, Ingrey signed himself, touching forehead, lip, navel, groin, and heart, spreading his hand over his heart: one theological point for each of the five gods. Daughter-Bastard-Mother-Father-Son. And where were all of You when this happened?
As Ingrey waited for his eyes to adjust to the shadows, Ulkra swallowed, and said, “The hallow king—how did he take the news?”
“It is hard to say,” said Ingrey, with politic vagueness. “Sealmaster Lord Hetwar sent me.”
“Of course.”
Ingrey could read little in the housemaster’s reaction, except the obvious, that Ulkra was glad to be handing responsibility for this on to someone else. Uneasily, Ulkra folded back the pale cloth covering his dead master. Ingrey frowned at the body.
Prince Boleso kin Stagthorne had been the youngest of the hallow king’s surviving—of the hallow king’s sons, Ingrey corrected his thought in flight. Boleso was still a young man, for all he had come to his full growth and strength some years ago. Tall, muscular, he shared the long jaw of his family, masked with a short brown beard. The darker brown hair of his head was tangled now, and matted with blood. His booming energy was stilled; drained of it, his face lost its former fascination, and left Ingrey wondering how he had once been fooled into thinking it handsome. He moved forward, hands cradling the skull, probing the wound. Wounds. The shattered bone beneath the scalp gave beneath his thumbs’ pressure on either side of a pair of deep lacerations, blackened with dried gore.
“What weapon did this?”
“The prince’s own war hammer. It was on the stand with his armor, in his bedchamber.”
“How very…unexpected. To him as well.” Grimly, Ingrey considered the fates of princes. All his short life, according to Hetwar, Boleso had been alternately petted and neglected by parents and servants both, the natural arrogance of his blood tainted with a precarious hunger for honor, fame, reward. The arrogance—or was it the anxiety?—had bloated of late to something overweening, desperately out of balance. And that which is out of balance…falls.
The prince wore a short open robe of worked wool, lined with fur, blood-splashed. He must have been wearing it when he’d died. Nothing more. No other recent wounds marked his pale skin. When the housemaster said they had waited for instructions, Ingrey decided, he had understated the case. The prince’s retainers had evidently been so benumbed by the shocking event, they had not even dared wash or garb the corpse. Grime darkened the folds of Boleso’s body…no, not grime. Ingrey ran a finger along a groove of chill flesh, and stared warily at the smear of color, dull blue and stamen yellow and, where they blended, a sickly green. Dye, paint, some colored powder? The dark fur of the inner robe, too, showed faint smears.
Ingrey straightened, and his eye fell on what he had at first taken for a bundle of furs laid along the far wall. He stepped closer and knelt.
It was a dead leopard. Leopardess, he amended, turning the beast partly over. The fur was fine and soft, fascinating beneath his hands. He traced the cold, curving ears, the stiff white whiskers, the pattern of dark whorls upon golden silk. He picked up one heavy paw, feeling the leathery pads, the thick ivory claws. The claws had been clipped. A red silk cord was bound tightly around the neck, biting deeply into the fur. Its end was cut off. Ingrey’s hairs prickled, a reaction he quelled.
Ingrey glanced up. Ulkra, watching him, looked even more bleakly blank than before.
“This is no creature of our woods. Where in the world did it come from?”
Ulkra cleared his throat. “The prince obtained it from some Darthacan merchants. He proposed to start a menagerie here at the castle. Or possibly train it for hunting. He said.”
“How long ago was this?”
“A few weeks. Just before his lady sister stopped here.”
Ingrey fingered the red cord, letting his brows rise. He nodded at the dead animal. “And how did this happen?”
“We found it hanging from a beam in the prince’s bedroom. When we, um, went in.”
Ingrey sat back on his heels. He was beginning to see why no Temple divine had yet been called up to take charge of the funeral rites. The daubing, the red cord, the oak beam, hinted of an animal not merely slain but sacrificed, of someone dabbling in the old heresies, the forbidden forest magics. Had the sealmaster known of this, when he’d sent Ingrey? If so, he’d given no sign. “Who hung it?”
With the relief of a man telling a truth that could not hurt him, Ulkra said, “I did not see. I could not say. It was alive, leashed up in the corner and lying perfectly placidly, when we brought the girl in. We none of us heard or saw any more after that. Until the screams.”
“Whose screams?”
“Well…the girl’s.”
“What was she crying? Or were they…” Ingrey cut short the just cries. He’d a shrewd suspicion Ulkra would be a little too glad of the suggestion. “What were her words?”
“She cried for help.”
Ingrey stood up from the exotic, spotted carcass, his riding leathers creaking in the quiet, and let the weight of his stare fall on Ulkra. “And you responded—how?”
Ulkra turned his head away. “We had our orders to guard the prince’s repose. My lord.”
“Who heard the cries? Yourself, and…?”
“Two of the prince’s guards, who had been told to wait his pleasure.”
“Three strong men, sworn to the prince’s protection. Who stood—where?”
Ulkra’s face might have been carved from rock. “In the corridor. Near his door.”
“Who stood in the corridor not ten feet from his murder, and did nothing.”
“We dared not. My lord. For he did not call. And anyway, the screams…stopped. We assumed, um, that the girl had yielded herself. She went in willingly enough.”
Willingly? Or despairingly? “She was no servant wench. She was a retainer of Prince Boleso’s own lady sister, a dowered maiden of her household. Entrusted to her service by kin Badgerbank, no less.”
“Princess Fara herself yielded her up to her brother, my lord, when he begged the girl of her.”
Pressured, was how Ingrey had heard the gossip. “Which made her a retainer of this house. Did it not?”
Ulkra flinched.
“Even a menial deserves better protection of his masters.”
“
Any lord in his cups might strike a servant, and misjudge the force of the blow,” said Ulkra sturdily. The cadences sounded rehearsed, to Ingrey’s ear. How often had Ulkra repeated that excuse to himself in the depths of the night, these past six months?
The ugly incident with the murdered manservant was the reason Prince Boleso had suffered his internal exile to this remote crag. His known love of hunting made it a dubious punishment, but it had got the Temple out of the royal sealmaster’s thinning hair. Too little payment for a crime, too much for an accident; Ingrey, who had observed the shambles next morning for Lord Hetwar before it had all been cleaned away, had judged it neither.
“Any lord would not then go on to skin and butcher his kill, Ulkra. There was more than drink behind that wild act. It was madness, and we all knew it.” And when the king and his retainers had let their judgment be swayed, after that night’s fury, by an appeal to loyalty—not to the prince’s own soul’s need, but to the appearance, the reputation of his high house—this disaster had been laid in train.
Boleso would have been expected to reappear at court in another half year, duly chastened, or at least duly pretending to be. But Fara had broken her journey here from her earl-ordainer husband’s holdings to her father’s sickbed, and so her—Ingrey presumed, pretty—lady-in-waiting had fallen under the bored prince’s eye. One could take one’s pick of tales from the princess’s retinue, arriving barely before the bad news at the king’s hall in Easthome, whether the cursed girl had yielded her virtue in terror to the prince’s importunate lusts, or in calculation to her own vaulting ambition.
If it had been calculation, it had gone badly awry. Ingrey sighed. “Take me to the prince’s bedchamber.”
The late prince’s room lay high in the central keep. The corridor outside was short and dim. Ingrey pictured Boleso’s retainers huddled at the far end in the wavering candlelight, waiting for the screams to stop, then had to unset his teeth. The room’s solid door featured a wooden bar on the inside, as well as an iron lock.
The appointments were few and countrified: a bed with hangings, barely long enough for the prince’s height, chests, the stand with his second-best armor in one corner. A scattering of rugs on the wide floorboards. One was soaked with a dark stain. The sparse furnishings left just room enough for a quarry to dodge and run, a gasping chase. To turn at bay and swing…
The windows to the right of the armor stand were narrow, with thick wavery circles of glass set in their leads. Ingrey pulled the casements inward, swung wide the shutters, and gazed out upon the green-forested folds of countryside falling away from the crag. In the watery light, wisps of mist rose from the ravines like the ghosts of streams. At the bottom of the valley, a small farming village hacked out of the woods pushed back the tide of trees: source, no doubt, of food, servants, firewood for the castle, all crude and simple.
The fall from the sill to the stones below was lethal, the jump to the walls beyond quite impossible even for anyone slim enough to wriggle out the opening. In the dark and the rain. No escape by that route, except to death. A half turn from the window, the armor stand would be under a panicked prey’s groping hands. A battle-ax, its handle inlaid with gold and ruddy copper, still rested there.
The matching war hammer lay tossed upon the rumpled bed. Its claw-rimmed iron head—very like an animal’s paw—was smeared with dried gore like the blotch on the rug. Ingrey measured it against his palm, noted the congruity with the wounds he had just seen. The hammer had been swung two-handed, with all the strength that terror might lend. But only a woman’s strength, after all. The prince, half-stunned—half-mad?—had apparently kept coming. The second blow had been harder.
Ingrey strolled the length of the room, looking all around and then up at the beams. Ulkra, hands clutching one another, backed out of his way. Just above the bed dangled a frayed length of red cord. Ingrey stepped up on the bed frame, drew his belt knife, stretched upward, cut it through, and tucked the coil away in his jerkin.
He jumped down and turned to the hovering Ulkra. “Boleso is to be buried at Easthome. Have his wounds and his body washed—more thoroughly—and pack him in salt for transport. Find a cart, a team—better hitch two pairs, with the mud on the roads—and a competent driver. Set the prince’s guards as outriders; their ineptitude can do him no more harm now. Clean this room, set the keep to rights, appoint a caretaker, and follow on with the rest of his household and valuables.” Ingrey’s gaze drifted around the chamber. Nothing else here… “Burn the leopard. Scatter its ashes.”
Ulkra gulped and nodded. “When do you wish to depart, my lord? Will you stay the night?”
Should he and his captive travel with the slow cortege, or push on ahead? He wanted to be away from this place as swiftly as he could—it made his neck muscles ache—but the light was shortening with autumn’s advent, and the day was half-spent already. “I must speak to the prisoner before I decide. Take me to her.”
It was a brief step, down one floor to a windowless, but dry, storeroom. Not dungeon, certainly not guest room, the choice of prisons bespoke a deep uncertainty over the status of its occupant. Ulkra rapped on the door, called, “My lady? You have a visitor,” unlocked it, and swung it wide. Ingrey stepped forward.
From the darkness, a pair of glowing eyes flashed up at him like some great cat’s from a covert, in a forest that whispered. Ingrey recoiled, hand flying to his hilt. His blade had rasped halfway out when his elbow struck the jamb, pain tingling hotly from shoulder to fingertips; he backed farther to gain turning room, to lunge and strike.
Ulkra’s startled grip fell on his forearm. The housemaster was staring at him in astonishment.
Ingrey froze, then jerked away so that Ulkra might not feel his trembling. His first concern was to quell the violent impulse blaring through his limbs, cursing his legacy anew—he had not been caught by surprise by it since…for a long time. I deny you, wolf-within. You shall not ascend. He slid his blade back into its sheath, snicked it firmly home, slowly unwrapped his fingers, and placed his palm flat against his leather-clad thigh.
He stared again into the little room, forcing sense upon his mind. In the shadows, the ghostly shape of a young woman was rising from a straw pallet on the floor. There seemed to be bedding enough, a down-stuffed quilt, tray and pitcher, a covered chamber pot, necessities decently addressed. This prison secured; it did not, yet, punish.
Ingrey licked dry lips. “I cannot see you in that den.” And what I saw, I disavow. “Step into the light.”
The lift of a chin, the toss of a dark mane; she padded forward. She wore a fine linen dress dyed pale yellow, embroidered with flowers along the curving neckline; if not court dress, then certainly clothing of a maiden of rank. A dark brown spatter crossed it in a diagonal. In the light, her tumbling black hair grew reddish. Brilliant hazel eyes looked not up, but across, at Ingrey. Ingrey was of middle height for a man, compactly built; the girl was well grown for her sex, to match him so.
Hazel eyes, almost amber in this light, circled in black at the iris rim. Not glowing green. Not…
With a wary glance at him, Ulkra began speaking, performing the introduction as formally as if he were playing Boleso’s house-master at some festal feast. “Lady Ijada, this is Lord Ingrey kin Wolf-cliff, who is Sealmaster Lord Hetwar’s man. He is come to take you in charge. Lord Ingrey, Lady Ijada dy Castos, by her mother’s blood kin Badgerbank.”
Ingrey blinked. Hetwar had named her only, Lady Ijada, some minor heiress in the Badgerbank tangle, five gods help us. “That is an Ibran patronymic, surely.”
“Chalionese,” she corrected coolly. “My father was a lord dedicat of the Son’s Order, and captain of a Temple fort on the western marches of the Weald, when I was a child. He married a Wealding lady of kin Badgerbank.”
“And they are…dead?” Ingrey hazarded.
She tilted her head in cold irony. “I should have been better protected, else.”
She was not distraught, not weeping, or a
t least, not recently. Not, apparently, deranged. Four days in that closet to sort through her thoughts had left her composed, but for a certain tightness in her voice, a faint vibrato of fear or anger. Ingrey looked around the bare hall, glanced at Ulkra. “Take us to where we may sit and speak. Some place apart. In the light.”
“Um…um…” After a moment’s thought, Ulkra gestured them to follow. He did not, Ingrey noticed, hesitate to turn his back upon the girl. This prisoner did not fight or bite or scratch her jailers, it seemed. Her pace, following him, was steady. At the end of the next passage, Ulkra waved to a window seat overlooking the back side of the keep. “Will this do, my lord?”
“Yes.” Ingrey hesitated, as Lady Ijada gracefully swept her skirts aside and seated herself on the polished boards. Should he retain Ulkra, for corroboration, or dismiss him, to encourage frankness? Was the girl likely to become violent again? The unbidden picture of Ulkra crouching in the corridor above this one, waiting in the dark for screams to stop, troubled his mind. “You may go about your tasks, housemaster. Return in half an hour.”
Ulkra frowned uncertainly at the girl, but bowed himself out. Boleso’s men, Ingrey was reminded, were out of the habit of questioning the sense of their superiors’ orders. Or perhaps it was that any who dared were got rid of, one way or another; and these were the remainder. Residue. Scum.
A little awkwardly, for the short length of the seat forced them uncomfortably close together, Ingrey sat beside her. His presumption of prettiness, he decided, had been inadequate. The girl was luminous. Unless Boleso had gone blind as well as mad, she must have arrested his eye the moment it fell upon her. Wide brow, straight nose, sculpted chin…a livid blotch darkened one cheek, and others ringed her fair neck, a pattern of plum-colored bruises. Ingrey lifted his hands to lie lightly over them; she flinched a little, but then bore his probing touch. Boleso’s hands were somewhat larger than his own, it appeared. Her skin was warm under his fingers, fascinating, transporting. A golden haze seemed to cloud his vision. His strangling grip tightened—he whipped his hands away, his gasp masked by hers, and clenched them on his knees. What was that…?