The Hallowed Hunt

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE PORTER ADMITTED INGREY AGAIN TO THE HALL. INGREY'S gaze flicked up. Ijada was above, locked in with her warden as instructed, presumably. It crossed Ingrey's mind that while Horseriver's servants and one somewhat-damaged swordsman might be enough to keep a docile naive girl from escaping this imprisonment, it was a woefully inadequate force to ward off attack. Ingrey might foil one assailant-well, a few-several-but a sufficiently determined enemy had merely to send enough men, and the conclusion would be grimly certain.

For some subtler, uncanny attack…the outcome was not so obvious. Could the weirding voice prove a defense? The hum of questionable power in his blood unnerved him still. Earl Horseriver apparently knew, even if Ingrey did not, of the full range of Ingrey's new capacities. Wencel's oblique promise of some sort of training troubled Ingrey's thoughts.

The porter produced a slightly crumpled piece of paper. “Temple messenger brought this for you, my lord.”

Ingrey broke the seal to find a short note from Learned Lewko, the penmanship blocky and neat. It appears my time will be taken today with that matter of internal Temple discipline you helped to uncover yesterday, for which I thank you, it read. I will wait upon you and Lady Ijada as soon as I may following the prince's funeral rites tomorrow.

He climbed to his rooms to have Tesko help change his soaked bandage and take away his town garb to clean the bloodstains. The new stitches proved intact, and the spaces between them had scabbed over again. The unhealing wound was beginning to disturb him. His episodes of bleeding had perfectly reasonable explanations, most having to do with his own carelessness; it was only in his nervous fancy that they were beginning to seem like unholy libations. And if small magics draw a small blood sacrifice, what would a great one do?

His bed beckoned, and he sank down on it. The notion of food was still repulsive, but perhaps sleep would help him heal. He no sooner lay down than his thoughts began spinning again. He had been assuming from the beginning that the motivation of Ijada's mysterious assassin must be political, or revenge for her killing of Boleso. Perhaps such theorizing was an effect of his being so long in Hetwar's train. Yet trying to widen his thinking only made it feel more diffuse and foolish. I know less and less each day. What was the end of this progression, a glum future as a village idiot? The absurd images trailed off at last in muzzy exhaustion.

HE WOKE LATER THAN HE HAD INTENDED, THIRSTY, BUT FEELING as if he had paid off some accumulated debts to his body. Inspired, he sent down orders via Tesko that dinner should be served to him and his prisoner in the ground-floor parlor. He donned town garb again, combed his hair, wondered why he owned no lavender water, considered sending Tesko out to buy some tomorrow, scrubbed his teeth, and shaved for the second time that day as the shadows deepened outside. He took a breath and descended the stairs.

He could not very well fall upon her like a ravening wolf, not least because the accursed warden stood at her side, hands and lips tightly folded. The table, he saw to his dismay, seemed to have been reflexively set for three. Horseriver's servant was surely Horseriver's spy. Simply to dismiss the duenna bore unknown dangers.

Regardless of his own strangely shifting internal allegiances, he supposed he must guard his own reputation as well as Ijada's, or risk being relieved of his post. But he might hazard a smile, and did. He might chance a touch of her hand, brought formally to his lips. The scent of her skin, so close, seemed to bring all of his senses to heightened sharpness. The sheer intensity of her, at this range, almost overwhelmed him.

One desperate return squeeze, her nails biting fiercely into his skin, was all her opportunity to say, I feel it, too. She muted her smile to something social, the trained courtesy of a high household, as he helped her to her seat and a manservant brought their meal.

“I believe this is the first time I have seen you out of your riding leathers, Lord Ingrey.” Her tone seemed to be quite approving.

He touched the fine black cloth of his jerkin. “Lady Hetwar makes sure that her husband's men do not disgrace her house.”

“She has a good eye, then.”

“Oh? Good.” Ingrey swallowed wine without choking. “Good.” His thoughts tangled on too many levels at once: the arousal of his body, the political and mortal fear of their situation, the remembered shock of that mystical kiss. He dropped a bite of food off his fork, and tried surreptitiously to retrieve it from his lap.

“Oh. Yes. He sent a note; he means to come tomorrow, after

the funeral.”

“Did anything further come of your ice bear? Or your pirate?”

“Not yet. Though the rumors had already reached my lord

Hetwar.”

“How did your conference with the sealmaster go?”

He tilted his head. “How would you guess?” Do you sense

where I am, how I feel, as I do you?

She gave a small nod in return, and essayed slowly, “Tense. Uncertain. There was…an incident.” Her gaze now seemed to dig under his skin. She glanced at the warden, who was chewing and listening.

“Truly.” He drew breath. “I believe Sealmaster Hetwar is to be trusted. His concerns, however, are wholly political ones. I am less and less of the opinion that your concerns are wholly political ones. Prince-marshal Biast was there, which I did not expect. He did not warm at once to the idea of a blood-price, but at least I had a chance to set the idea in his mind.”

She pushed some noodles across her plate with her fork. “I think the gods have little interest in politics. Only in souls. Look to souls, Lord Ingrey, if you seek to guess Their minds.” She looked up, frowning.

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.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

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?”

“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.”

“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.

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.

“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?

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.