To cover his confusion he bit out, “I am an officer of the Royal Sealmaster. I am charged to report to him all I see and hear. You must tell me the truth of all that happened here. Begin at the beginning.”
She sat back, her startled glance altering to a piercing regard. He caught her scent, neither perfume nor blood but grown woman, and, targeted by that gaze, for the first time wondered what he looked like—and smelled like—to her. Riding reek, cold iron and sweat-stained leather, chin dark-stubbled, tired. Weighed with sword and knife and dangerous duties. Why did she not recoil altogether?
“Which beginning?” she asked.
He stared at her for a blank and stupid instant. “From your arrival here at Boar’s Head, I suppose.” Was there another? He must remember to return to that question.
She swallowed, possessed herself, began: “The princess had started out in haste for her father’s hall, with only a small retinue, but she was overtaken by illness on the road. Nothing out of the usual, but her monthly time brings her dire headaches, and if she doesn’t rest quietly through them, she becomes very sick. We turned aside to this place, for it was as close as anything, and besides, Princess Fara wished to see her brother. I think she remembered him from when he was younger and less…difficult.”
How very tactful. Ingrey could not decide if the turn of phrase was diplomacy or dry wit. Caution, he concluded, studying her closed and careful expression. Wits, not wittiness, kept close about her.
“We were made welcome, if not to her custom, then to this place’s ability.”
“Had you ever met Prince Boleso before?”
“No. I’ve only been a few months in Princess Fara’s service. My stepfather placed me there. He said—” She stopped, began again. “Everything seemed usual at first. I mean, for a lord’s hunting lodge. The days were quiet, because the prince invited her guardsmen out to the hunt. Prince Boleso and his men were very boisterous in the evenings, and drank a great deal, but the princess did not attend, being laid down in her chambers. I took down complaints from her of the noise twice, but I was little heeded. They set the dogs on a wild boar they’d caught alive, out in the courtyard beneath her window, and made bets on the fight. Boleso’s huntsman was very distressed for his hounds. I wished Earl Horseriver had been there—he could have quelled them with a word. He has a deadly tongue, when he wishes. We bided here three days, until the princess was ready to travel again.”
“Did Prince Boleso court you?”
Her lips thinned. “Not that I could tell. He was equally obnoxious to all his sister’s ladies. I knew nothing of his…regard, supposed regard, until the morning we were to leave.”
She swallowed again. “My lady—Princess Fara—told me then I was to stay. That this might not have been my first choice, but that it would do me no harm in the long run. Another husband would be found for me, after. I begged her not to leave me here. She would not meet my eye. She said it was no worse a barter than any, and better than most, and that I should look to my own future. That it was just the woman’s version of the same loyalty due from a man to his prince. I said I did not think most men would…well, I’m afraid I said something rude. She refused to speak with me after that. They rode away and left me. I would not beg at her stirrup, for fear the prince’s men would mock me.” Her arms crossed, as if to clutch a tattered dignity about her anew.
“I told myself…maybe she was right. That it would be no worse than any other fate. Boleso wasn’t ugly, or deformed, or old. Or diseased.”
Ingrey couldn’t help checking himself against that list. At least he did not match any of the named categories, he trusted. Though there were others. Defiled sprang to mind.
“I did not realize how mad he’d grown until they’d left, and then it was too late.”
“Then what happened?”
“At nightfall, they brought me to his chamber and thrust me within. He was waiting for me. He wore a robe, but under it his body was naked and all covered over with signs drawn in woad and madder and crocus. Old symbols, the sort you sometimes still see carved on ancient wooden foundations, or in the forest where the shrines once stood. He had his leopard tied up in a corner, drugged. He said—it turned out—it seemed he had not fallen in love with me after all. It wasn’t even lust. He wanted a virgin for some rite he had—found, made up, I am not sure, he seemed very confused by this time—and I was the only one, his sister’s other two ladies being one a wife and the other a widow. I tried to dissuade him, I told him it was heresy, dire sin and against his father’s own laws, I said I would run away, that I would tell. He said he’d hunt me down with his dogs. That they would tear me apart as they had the pig. I said I would go to the Temple divine in the village. He said the man was only an acolyte, and a coward. And that he would kill anyone there who took me in. Even the acolyte. He was not afraid of the Temple, it was practically the property of kin Stagthorne and he could buy divines for a pittance.
“The rite was meant to catch the spirit of the leopard, as the old kin warriors were supposed to do. I said, it could not possibly work, nowadays. He said, he’d done it before, several times—that he meant to capture the spirits of every wisdom animal of the greater kinships. He thought it was going to give him some sort of power over the Weald.”
Ingrey, startled, said, “The Old Weald warriors only took one animal spirit to themselves, one in a lifetime. And even that risked madness. Miscarriage. Worse.” As I know to my everlasting cost.
Her velvety voice was growing faster, breathless. “He hauled the leopard up by its strangling cord. He hit me and threw me down on the bed. I fought him. He was muttering under his breath, spells or raving or both, I don’t know. I believed him, that he had done this before—his very mind was a menagerie, howling. The leopard distracted him in its death throes, and I wrenched out from under him. I tried to run, but there was nowhere to go. The door was locked. He’d put the key in his robe.”
“Did you scream for help?”
“I suppose so. I scarcely know. My throat was raw, after, so I suppose I must have. The window was hopeless. The forest beyond seemed to go on forever, in the night. I called on my father’s spirit, on his god, for my aid, out of the dark.”
Ingrey couldn’t help thinking that in such an extremity Lady Ijada would call on her proper patroness, the Daughter of Spring, the goddess to Whom virginity was sacred. It seemed very strange for a woman to call on Her Brother of Autumn. Though this is His season. The Lord of Autumn was the god of young men, harvest, the hunt, comradeship—and war. And the weapons of war?
“You turned,” said Ingrey, “and found the hammer handle under your hand.”
The hazel eyes widened. “How did you know?”
“I saw the chamber.”
“Oh.” She moistened her lips. “I struck him. He lunged at me, or…or lurched. I struck him again. He stopped. Fell, and did not rise. He wasn’t dead yet—his body spasmed, when I was groping in his robe for the key, and I nearly fainted. I fell to the floor on my hands and knees, anyway, and the room darkened. I…it… Finally, I got the door unbarred and called his men in.”
“Were they—what? Angry?”
“More frightened than angry, I think. They argued forever, and blamed each other, and me, and whatever they could think of. Even Boleso. It took them ages to decide to lock me up and send a courier.”
“What did you do?”
“I sat on the floor, mostly. I was feeling very unwell. They asked me such stupid questions. Had I killed him? Did they imagine he’d bludgeoned himself? I was glad for my cell, when they finally put me in it. I don’t think Ulkra ever noticed I could bar its door from the inside.”
Ingrey wondered. In the most neutral voice he could muster, he said, “Did Prince Boleso complete his rape?”
Her face lifted; her eyes glinted. “No.”
Truth rang in that voice, and a kind of rocky triumph. In the uttermost extremity, abandoned by all who should have protected her, she’d found that she
need not abandon herself. A powerful lesson. A dangerous lesson.
In an equally flat tone he asked, “Did he complete his rite?”
This time, she hesitated. “I don’t know. I am not sure…what his intent was.” She gazed down into her lap; her hands gripped each other. “What will happen next? Rider Ulkra said you would take me in charge. Where to?”
“Easthome.”
“Good,” she said, with unexpected fervor. “The Temple there will surely help me.”
“You do not fear your trial?”
“Trial? I defended myself! I was betrayed into this horror!”
“It is possible,” he said, still very level-voiced, “that some powerful people will not care to hear you proclaim so. Think. You cannot prove attempted rape, for one thing. A half dozen men could testify that you appeared to go to Boleso willingly.”
“Compared to fleeing into the woods to be eaten by the wild beasts, willing, yes. Compared to bringing a brutal death on anyone who tried to help me, willingly.” She stared at him in sudden incredulity. “Do you not believe me?”
“Oh, yes.” Oh, yes. “But I am not your judge.”
She frowned, a glint of white teeth pressing into a lower lip gone pale. In a moment, her spine straightened again. “In any case, if the rape was not witnessed, the unlawful rite was. They all saw the leopard. They saw the secret drawings on the prince’s body. Not assertions, but material things, that any man might reach out and touch.”
Not anymore. If not innocent, she was an innocent, Ingrey had no doubt. Lady Ijada, you have no idea what you are pitting yourself against.
A step sounded on the floorboards; Ingrey looked up to see Ulkra approaching, seeming to loom and crouch simultaneously. “Your pleasure, my lord?” he inquired nervously.
To be anywhere but here, doing anything but this.
He’d been over two days in the saddle. He was, he decided abruptly, too mortally tired to ride another mile today. Boleso could be in no hurry to gallop to his funeral, and divine judgment. And Ingrey had no burning desire to rush this accursed naïve girl to her earthly judgment, either. She was not afraid of the right things. Five gods help him, she seemed not afraid of anything.
“Will you,” he said to her, “give me your word, if I order your guard lightened, that you will not attempt to escape?”
“Of course,” she said. As if surprised he even felt a need to ask.
He gestured to the housemaster. “Put her in a proper room. Give her her things back. Find a decent maid, if any is to be found in this place, to attend her and help her pack. We’ll leave for Easthome with Boleso’s body at first light tomorrow.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Ulkra, ducking his head in relieved assent.
Ingrey added as an afterthought, “Have any men of the household fled, since Boleso’s death?”
“No, my lord. Why do you ask?”
Ingrey gave a vague gesture, indicating no reason that he cared to share. Ulkra did not pursue the question.
Ingrey creaked to his feet. He felt as if his muscles squeaked louder protest than his damp leathers. Lady Ijada gave him a grateful curtsey, and turned to follow the housemaster. She looked back over her shoulder at him as she turned onto the staircase, a grave, trusting glance.
His duty was to deliver her to Easthome. Nothing more. Into the hands of…no one friendly to her cause. His fingers clenched and unclenched on his hilt.
Nothing more.
CHAPTER TWO
THE CORTEGE, SUCH AS IT WAS, LUMBERED OUT THE CASTLE gate in the dawn fog. Ingrey set six of Boleso’s guards riding before and six behind what might charitably be described as a farm wagon. The wagon was burdened with a hastily cobbled-together oblong box, heavy with Boleso’s body and the coarse salt, meant to preserve game, which made his last bed. In some sad effort at proper ceremony, Rider Ulkra had found a stag hide to cover the coffin, and funereal cloths to wrap the posts at the corners of the wagon bed, in lieu of draperies unlikely to survive the local roads. Whatever attempts the guardsmen had made to furbish up their gear for this somber duty were lost from view in the clinging mists. Ingrey’s eye was more concerned for the security of the ropes that bound the box in place.
The teamster that Ulkra had drafted was a local yeoman, owner of both wagon and team, and he kept his sturdy horses well in hand during the first precarious turns and bumps of the narrow road. By his side, his wife hung on grimly but expertly to the wooden brake, which shrieked against the wheel as the wagon descended. She was a staid older woman, a better female chaperone for his prisoner, Ingrey thought, than the slatternly and frightened young servant girl Ulkra had first offered, and she would be guarded in turn by her husband. Ingrey trusted his own men, but remembered that inner bar on the prisoner’s chamber door; whatever Lady Ijada had supposed, Ingrey was quite sure that obstacle hadn’t been an oversight on Ulkra’s part.
The whitewashed walls and conical green slate tower caps of the castle disappeared dreamlike among the smoke-gray trees, and the road widened and straightened for a short stretch. Ingrey gave a quiet salute to the two of his own escort bringing up the rear, which was as silently returned, and urged his horse forward around the wagon and its outriders. In the lead, the other two pairs of Ingrey’s guards bracketed Lady Ijada.
The prisoner rode her own horse. Ingrey did not know whether Earl Horseriver’s stables or Lady Ijada’s own family had furnished her mount, but it was a fine showy chestnut, well fleshed and supple in action. It sidled and snorted in its freshness, its ears flicking nervously. If she should clap her heels to the beast’s sides and attempt some cross-country escape, it would not be easy to ride her down. She showed no signs of doing so just yet, however; she sat the mare lightly, with an occasional touch on the reins to keep it from outpacing the other horses. This morning Lady Ijada wore a riding habit suitable to a noblewoman’s hunting party, with a jacket dyed burnt-brown traced with copper thread, a polished gleam of boots peeping from the hems of her split skirts. Her dark hair was tied back severely and bundled in a crocheted net at her nape. Her creamy neckcloth just hid Boleso’s purplish finger marks.
Ingrey had no intention of making idle conversation with his charge, so merely favored her with a polite nod and pushed on to the head of the column. He rode in silence for a time. The dripping of water from high branches in the steep woods and the gurgling of freshets, running melodiously beneath the road through hollowedlog culverts, sounded loud in his ears despite the creaking of gear, groaning of the wagon wheels, and plodding of hooves behind him. They rounded a last dropping curve, the road leveled, and they emerged from beneath the leafy canopy into an unexpected well of light.
The sun had broken through a gap in the ridges to the east, turning the moist air to floating gold and the far slopes to a fiery green. Only one trickle of smoke, probably from a party of charcoal burners, marked any human occupation in the dense carpet of woods rising beyond the hamlet and its fields. The sight did not lift Ingrey’s spirits. He frowned down at the mud of the road instead, then reined his horse aside to check that the tail of the cortege cleared the trees without incident. He turned back to find himself riding beside Lady Ijada.
She was staring around with muted pleasure in her eyes, which appeared bright hazel-gold in this new light. “How the hills glow! I love these forests between the bitter heights and the tilled lands.”
“It’s difficult and dangerous country,” said Ingrey, “but the roads will improve once we descend from the wastes.”
She tilted her head at his sour expression. “This place does not please you? My dower lands are a like waste, then, west of here in the marches where the mountains dwindle.” She hesitated. “My stepfather is of your mind about such silent tracts—but then he is a town-man bred, a master of works for the Temple in Badger-bridge, and likes trees best in the form of rafters and gates and trestles. He says it were better I made my face my dower than those haunted woods.” She grimaced abruptly, the light fading in her eyes. “
He was so pleased for me when one of my Badgerbank aunts found me the place in the Horserivers’ high household. And now this.”
“Did he imagine you would snare a husband, under the princess’s eye?”
“Something like that. It was to be my great chance.” She shrugged. “I’ve since learned that high lords get to be such by being more concerned, not less, with dowers than other men. I should have anticipated…” Her mouth firmed. “I might have anticipated some seducer, arrogant in his rank. It was the heretical sorcery and howling madness that took me by surprise.”
For the first time, Ingrey wondered if the husband whose eye Ijada had snared might have been Earl Horseriver. Four years he had been married to the hallow king’s daughter, and no children yet; was there anything more to the delay than ill luck? Reason indeed for the princess to barter her handmaiden out of her household at the first opportunity—and if jealous enough of her lovely rival, to a fate Fara must have known would not be pleasant…? Had the princess known of her brother’s perilous plans? Aside from the rape, you mean?
Which beginning? Lady Ijada had asked, yesterday. As though there were a dozen to choose among.
“What did you think of Earl Horseriver?” Ingrey inquired, in a neutral voice. The earl was landed, of an ancient kin, but his most arresting power at present was doubtless his ordainer’s vote, one of the thirteen needed to confirm a new hallow king. Yet such political concerns seemed quite over this young woman’s head, however level it might be.