The Hallowed Hunt

CHAPTER TWENTY

INGREY COULD NOT MUSTER MUCH SURPRISE WHEN, AFTER crossing the buried creek into the lower city, he rounded a corner and found Hallana's wagon blocking his path.

The two stubby horses, dusty and sweaty from the road, were standing hip-shot and bored, and Bernan sat on the driver's box with reins slack and his elbows on his knees. A riding horse, unsaddled, was tied on behind the wagon by a rope to its halter. Hergi crouched behind Bernan's shoulder. Hallana was hanging off the front brace of the canopy with one hand, shielding her gaze with the other, and peering dubiously up an alley too narrow for the wagon to enter.

Hergi pounded on Bernan's shoulder, pointed at Ingrey, and cried, “Look! Look!”

Hallana swung around, and her face brightened. “Ah! Lord Ingrey! Excellent.” She gave Bernan a pat on the other shoulder. “See, did I not say?” The smith gave a weary sort of head bob, halfway between agreement and exasperation, and Hallana stepped over him to hop down to the street and stand before Ingrey.

She had abandoned her loose and tattered robes for a natty traveling costume, a dark green coat upon a dress of pale linen, notably cinched in around the waist. Her shoulder braids were absent-traveling incognito? She remained short and plump, but trimmer, with her hair neatly braided in wreaths around her head. There were no visible signs of children or other trailing chaos.

Ingrey gave her a polite half bow; she returned a blessing, although her sign of the Five more resembled a vague check mark over her torso. “So glad to see you,” she told him. “I'm seeking Ijada.” “How?” he couldn't help asking. Presumably, she was once

“I usually just drive around until something happens.”

“That seems…oddly inefficient.”

“You sound like Oswin. He would have wanted to draw a grid over a chart of the city, and mark off sections in strict rotation. Finding you was much faster.”

Ingrey started to consider the logic of this, then thought better of it. “Speaking of Learned Oswin. He told me to tell you he has taken rooms for you all at the Inn of the Irises, across from the Mother's Infirmary on Temple Hill.”

A slight groan from Bernan greeted this news.

“Oh!” Hallana brightened still further. “You have met, how nice!”

“You are not surprised to be expected?”

“Oswin can be terribly stodgy at times, but he's not stupid. Of

course he would realize we'd be coming. Eventually.”

“Learned Sir will not be pleased with us,” Hergi predicted uneasily. “He wasn't before.”

“Pish posh,” said Oswin's spouse. “You survived.” She turned back to Ingrey, and her voice dropped to seriousness. “Did he tell you

about our dream?”

“Just a little.”

“Where is Ijada, anyway?”

The passersby all seemed ordinary folk, so far, but Ingrey declined to take chances. “I should not be seen talking to you, nor overheard.”

Hallana jerked her head toward the canopied wagon, and Ingrey nodded. He swung up after her into the shadowed interior, clambering over bundles and seating himself on a trunk, awkwardly adjusting his sword. Hallana sat down cross-legged on a pallet padded thickly with blankets and looked at him expectantly.

Hallana's eyes narrowed. “Interesting. Is Fara's husband no friend to Ijada after all-or too much the reverse? Or is it that wretched princess who is the problem?”

“Fara is a tangle of problems, but Wencel's interest in her handmaiden was not the simple lechery she had imagined. Wencel has secret powers and unknown purposes. Hetwar has just set me in his household to spy upon him in an effort to determine those purposes. I don't want the waters there muddied worse than they are already.”

“You think him dangerous?”

“Yes.”

“To you?” Her brows went up.

Ingrey bit his lip. “It has become suspected that he bears a spirit animal. Like mine. This is…true but incomplete.” He hesitated. “The geas we broke in Red Dike-he was the source of it.”

She huffed out her breath. “Why is he not arrested?”

“No!” said Ingrey sharply. And at her stare, more quietly, “No. In the first place, I have not determined how to prove the charge, and in the second, a premature arrest could trigger a disaster.” For me, at least.

She blinked up at him in a friendly way. “Oh, come, Lord Ingrey. You can tell me more.” He was sorely tempted. “I think…not yet. I am at the stage of things…I don't yet…I am still driving around in circles waiting for something to happen.”

He ran a hand through his hair. It was growing again around the stitches, which were surely ready to come out. “I cannot linger. I must catch up with Prince Biast and Princess Fara. Your husband was at Ijada's inquest this morning, and can likely tell you more of it than I can. Lewko knows something as well. I wonder”-Ingrey faltered-“if I can trust you.”

Her head came up, cocking a little to one side. She said dryly, “I assume that was not meant as an insult.”

Ingrey shook his head. “I stumble through a murk of lies and half lies and stranger tales right now. The legal thing, the obvious thing-like arresting Wencel-may not be the right thing, though I cannot explain it. All feels fluid. As though the gods themselves hold Their breaths. Something is about to happen.”

“What?”

“If I knew, if I knew-” Ingrey heard the rising tension in his own voice, and yanked it to a stop.

“Shh, hush,” Hallana soothed him, as though calming a nervy mount. “Can you trust me, at least, to move cautiously, speak little, listen, and wait?”

“Can you?”

“Unless my gods compel me otherwise.”

“Your gods. Not your Temple superiors.”

“I said what I said.”

Ingrey nodded and took a breath. “Ask Ijada, then. She is the only one I have trusted with everything I know so far. The others have only bits and pieces. She and I are bound together in this by more than”-his voice stumbled, choked-“more than affection. We have shared two waking visions. She can tell you more.”

“I am not sure if the gods and I seek the same ends. I am absolutely sure the gods and Wencel do not seek the same ends.” His brow wrinkled. “Oswin said you shattered. In your dream. I did not understand what was meant.”

“Neither do we.”

“Would the gods use us to destruction?” She had not brought her children-for speed, for simplicity? Or for safety? Theirs. Not hers.

“Perhaps.” Her voice was perfectly even, delivering this.

“You do not reassure me, Learned.”

Some might call her return smile enigmatic, but Ingrey thought it more sardonic. He returned her a salute in the same mode and glanced out the wagon back for witnesses. He added over his shoulder, “If you go at once to Lewko, you might find your husband still there. And possibly a red-haired islander whose tongue is lubricated by either vile liquor or holy kisses from the Lady of Spring, or both.”

“Ah-ha!” said Hallana, sitting up in sudden enthusiasm. “That is one part of my dream I should not object to finding prophetic. Is he as darling as he seemed?”

“I…don't think I can answer that,” said Ingrey, after a bemused pause. He swung out of the wagon, slipped around its side, and took the shortcut up the alley toward the Horseriver mansion.

THE EARL'S PORTER ADMITTED HIM WITH A MURMURED, “MY LADY and the prince-marshal await you in the Birch Chamber, Lord Ingrey.”

Ingrey took the hint, nodded, and ascended the stairs at once. The room was the same in which he had surprised Fara on the first day of his so-called service-perhaps its quiet colors and sober furnishings made it a favorite refuge of hers. He found the little company gathered there, Biast and Symark conversing over a tray of bread and cheeses, Fara half-reclining upon a settee while one of her women pressed a damp cloth to her forehead. The scent of lavender was cool and sharp upon the air.

“Lord Ingrey.” Biast graciously gestured him to sit. “The learned divine kept you long.”

Ingrey let this pass with a nod; he had no desire to explain Hallana.

Fara was not inclined to await a diplomatic lead-in. “What did he ask you? Did he ask you anything else about me?”

“He asked nothing further of you, my lady, nor of anything that happened at Boar's Head,” Ingrey reassured her. She sat back in evident relief. “His questions were largely”-he hesitated-“theological.”

Biast did not seem to share his sister's relief. His brows drew down in renewed concern. “Did they touch on our brother?”

“Only indirectly, my lord.” There seemed no reason not to be frank with Biast about Oswin's inquiries, although Ingrey was not at all sure he wanted to reveal his other connections with the scholarly divine just yet. “He wished to know if I could cleanse Lady Ijada's soul of her leopard spirit, in the event of her death, as I had seemed to do for the late prince. I said I did not know.”

Biast dragged one booted toe back and forth over the rug, frowned down and seemed to grow conscious of the tic, and stilled his foot. When he looked up, his voice had grown quieter. “Did you really see the god? Face-to-face?”

“He appeared to me as a young woodland lord of surpassing beauty. I did not get the sense…” Ingrey paused, uncertain how to express this. “You have seen children make shadow puppets upon a wall with their hands. The shadow is not the hand, though it is created by it. The young man I saw was, I think, the shadow of the god. Reduced to a simple outline that I could understand. As if there lay vastly more beyond that I could not see, that would have appeared nothing at all like the deceptive shadow if I could have taken it in without…shattering.”

“No, my lord. Are you feeling in need of some?”

Biast's lips huffed on a humorless laugh. “I reach for some certainty in an uncertain time, I suppose.”

“Then you come to the wrong storehouse,” said Ingrey bitterly. “The gods give me nothing but hints and riddles and maddening conundrums. As for my vision, I suppose I must call it, it was for Boleso's funeral. In that hour, the god attended to his soul alone. In our hours, we may receive the same undivided scrutiny.”

Fara, rubbing her hand along one skirt-clad thigh in a tension not unlike her brother's, looked up. The vertical grooves between her thick eyebrows deepened, as she considered this dark consolation with the wariness of a burned child studying a fire.

“I spoke at some length last night with Learned Lewko,” Biast began, and stopped. He squinted at his sister. “Fara, you really don't look well. Don't you think you had better go lie down for a while?”

The lady-in-waiting nodded endorsement to this idea. “We could draw the drapes in your chambers, my lady, and make it quite dark.”

“That might be better.” Fara leaned forward, only to sit staring down at her feet for a moment before allowing her waiting woman to pull her reluctantly upright. Biast rose also.

Ingrey seized the moment to conceal calculation in courtesy. “I am sorry you are so plagued, my lady. But if the inquest returns a verdict of self-defense, there might be no need for you to be so imposed upon again.”

Biast saw his sister out, but then left her to her waiting woman; he looked up and down the corridor a moment before returning to the chamber, shutting the door firmly behind him. He frowned at his bannerman Symark and then at Ingrey, as though considering some comparison, though whether of physical threat or personal discretion, Ingrey could not guess. Symark was a few years older than his lord and a noted swordsman; perhaps Biast imagined him a sufficient defense from Ingrey, should the wolf-lord run mad and attack. Or Symark and Biast together so, at least. Ingrey did not seek to disabuse the prince-marshal of this comforting error.

“As I said, I had some conversation with Lewko,” Biast continued. He sat again by the low table with the tray, gesturing for Ingrey to do likewise. Ingrey pulled his chair around and composed himself in close attention. “The Bastard's Order-which I take to mean, Lewko and a couple of forceful Temple sorcerers-have questioned Cumril in greater detail, at length.”

“Good. I hope they held his feet to the fire.”

“Something of a sort. I gather they dared not press him to the point of such disarray that his demon might reascend. That fear alone, Lewko assured me, was a greater goad to him than any threat to his body that any inquirer might make.” His brow wrinkled doubtfully. “I understand this.”

So that's why he had urged Fara out, that he might address these painful matters discreetly. Ingrey shrugged. “I am no seer. For anyone seeking the hallow kingship with less backing than you already have, it's a logical step.”

“Yes, but not my own-” Biast stopped, bit his lip.

Ingrey grasped the chance to cast another thread. “So it seems Lady Ijada saved your life, as well as her own. And your brother's soul from a great sin and crime. Or your god did, through her.”

Biast paused as though thinking uneasily about this, then began again. “I do not know how I earned my brother's hatred.”

“I believe his mind was well and truly unhinged, toward the end. Boleso's fevered fancies, not any actions of yours, seem to me the springs of his behavior.”

“I did not realize he was so-so lost. When that first dire incident with the manservant happened, I wrote my father I would come home, but he wrote back ordering me to stay at my post. Reducing one rebellious but ill-provisioned border castle and a few bandit camps seems to me now a less vital tutorial than what I might have been learning in the same time at Easthome. I suppose my father wished to insulate me from the scandal.”

Or, perhaps, to protect him from worse and subtler things? Or was Biast's diversion to the border in this crisis engineered by other persuaders? Was the print of Horseriver's hoof anywhere in this?

Biast sighed. “In the fullness of time I expected to receive the crown from my father's own hands, in his lifetime, like every Stagthorne king before me. He'd had the election and coronation of my older brother Byza all planned out three years ago, before Byza's untimely death. Now I must grasp with my own hands, or let the crown fall.” “Byza's was a sudden illness, wasn't it?” Ingrey had been gone from Easthome on an early courier mission for Hetwar to the Low Ports, and had missed that royal funeral. Biast had received the prince-marshal's banner that had belonged to his brother before him only a few weeks later. Had Boleso dwelt too unhealthily upon the precedent?

Ingrey had last seen the dying hallow king in person some weeks ago, just before his palsy stroke. He had been yellow-skinned, belly-swollen, and cheek-sunken even then, his movements heavy and voice low and slurred. “I think we must pray for other blessings for him, now.”

Biast stared away, not disputing this. “The charge against Boleso, if it is not just Cumril's calumny, has left me wondering whom I can trust.” His gaze, returning to Ingrey, made Ingrey feel rather odd.

“Each man according to his measure, I suppose.”

“This presumes an ability justly to measure men, which begs the question. Have you taken the measure of my brother-in-law yet?”

“Not, um, entirely.”

“Is he a danger like Boleso?”

“He's…smarter.” And so, Ingrey was beginning to be convinced, was Biast. “No insult intended,” Ingrey added, in a belated attempt at tact.

Biast grimaced. “At least, I trust, he is not so mad.”

Silence.

“One does so trust-doesn't one?” “I trust no one,” Ingrey evaded.

“Them least of all.”

“Mm.” Biast rubbed his neck. “Well, the impending kingship does not give me joy, under the circumstances, but I am not at all inclined to hand it on, over my dead body, to monsters.”

“Good, my lord,” said Ingrey. “Hold to that.”

Symark, who had been listening to this exchange with arms folded, rose and wandered to the window, evidently to check the clock of the sun, for he turned and gave his master an inquiring look. Biast nodded in return and stood with a tired grunt; Ingrey came to his feet likewise.

Biast ran a hand through his hair in a gesture copied or caught, Ingrey was fairly sure, from Hetwar. “Have you any other advice for me this day, Lord Ingrey?”

Ingrey was only a year or two older than Biast; surely the prince could not see him as an authority for that reason. “In all matters of policy, you are better advised by Hetwar, my lord.”

“And other matters?”

Ingrey hesitated. “For Temple politics, Fritine is most informed, but beware his favor to his kin. For, ah, practical theology, see Lewko.”

Biast appeared to muse for a moment over the unsettling implications of that practical. “Why?”

Ingrey's fingers stretched out, then tapped across the ball of his thumb in order, little finger to index. “Because the Thumb touches all four other fingers.” The words seemed to fall out of his mouth from nowhere, and he almost jerked back, startled.

Biast too seemed to find the words fraught beyond their simplicity, for he gave Ingrey a peculiar stare, unconsciously clenching his hand. “I shall hold that in my mind. Guard my sister.”

“I'll do my utmost, my lord.” Biast gave him a nod, gestured Symark ahead of him, and went out.

The situation seemed to have more need for wits than a strong sword arm, and if the body was neglected, the brain flagged, too, so Ingrey took himself to the earl's kitchen to forage a meal, which was served to him along with certain oblique complaints. After that, he tracked down Tesko and bullied him into giving back to the scullions the money he'd won cheating at dice. His servant temporarily cowed, Ingrey then had him snip and extract the stitches from his scalp and rebandage his sword hand. The long and ragged tear in his discolored skin seemed closed, but still tender, and he pressed the gauze wrapping warily after Tesko tied it off. This should have healed by now.

Autumn dusk crept through the window embrasures as Ingrey sat on his new bed and meditated. The princess's impending bereavement curtailed the sort of society that had enlivened Hetwar's palace of an evening, or demanded Ingrey's services as an escort for its lord or lady. If Earl Horseriver chose to send him off on some untimely courier mission, how then could he carry out his princely mandate to guard Fara, or his self-imposed task to save Ijada? Get one of Hetwar's men to ride, and remain in Easthome sneaking about spying? The notion seemed stuffed with disastrous complications. His public duty to obey the earl was a pitfall waiting to swallow him, it seemed to Ingrey, and he was not sure Hetwar had quite thought it through.

Could he defy Horseriver? Each of them, it seemed, had been gifted with kindred powers. Horseriver was vastly more practiced, but was he stronger? And what did strength mean, in that boundless hallowed space where visions took seeming shape?

How old is my wolf? The question niggled him, suddenly. Warily, he turned his perceptions inward, and once more, the sensation was akin to trying to see his own eyes. The accumulated wolf souls seemed to meld together into a smooth unity, as though their boundaries were more permeable somehow; wolves became Wolf in a way that Earls Horseriver had failed to achieve in that tormented soul's cannibal descent through the generations of his human kin. Ingrey sifted the fragmentary lupine memories that had come to him, both in that first terrible initiation and in later dreams. The viewpoint was odd, and scents seemed more sharply remembered than sights. A sufficiently impoverished rural village of recent days was hardly to be distinguished from a forest town of the lost times.

But suddenly a most peculiar memory surfaced, of chewing with wolf-puppy teeth upon a piece of boiled leather armor, a cuirass almost bigger than he was. The chastisement when he'd been caught at it did not diminish the satisfaction to his sore mouth. The armor had been quite new, dragged to a corner of some dim and smoky hall. The design was distinctive, the breast decoration more so, a silhouette of a wolf's head with gaping jaws burned into the leather with hot iron. My wolf is as old as the Old Weald, and then some.

As old as Wencel's horse? Older, surely, in a sense, for his wolf had been abroad, repeatedly reincarnated, for four hundred extra years before being so bloodily harvested. Part of that time had been spent high up in the Cantons, judging by the pictures of cold peaks that lingered in his mind. A long happy period, several domesticated wolf-lives, in some tiny hamlet in a forgotten vale where seasons and generations turned in a slow wheel…The attrition of mischance might have cut short the accumulation of wolf souls, yet had not. Which suggested in turn that Someone with a long, long attention span might have been manipulating those chances. Must have been, his mirthless reason corrected this.

He lay back and sought within himself for that millrace-current sense of Ijada. The quiet song of it calmed him instantly. She was not, at this moment, in pain, nor unduly fatigued, except for a tense piling-up of boredom. It did not follow that she was safe; the banal comfort of the narrow house was deceptive, that way. Horseriver had named this link the unintended relict of his murderous geas, and it might be so. Was not some good salvaged from evil, from time to time? He must contrive some way to see her again, secretly and soon. And to communicate. Could this subtle perception be made more explicit? One yank for yes, two yanks for no. Well, perhaps not that, but there must be something.

His brooding was interrupted by a page rapping on his door, bidding him to attend upon the earl. Ingrey armed himself, grabbed up his long court cloak, and descended to the entry hall, where he found Horseriver, who could only have come in a short time ago, preparing to go out again.

With some low-voiced instructions, the earl finished dispatching an anxious groom, then granted Ingrey a civil nod.

“Where away, my lord?”

“The hallow king's hall.” “Didn't you just come from there?”

And Horseriver ought to know. From both sides, Ingrey realized. They were briefly alone in the hall, the servants having been sent to hurry Fara; Ingrey lowered his voice. “Ought I to suspect you of some uncanny assassination?”

Wencel shook his head, apparently not the least offended by the suggestion. “His death comes quite without need of any man's assistance. At one time-long ago-I might have sought to speed it. Or, more vainly, to retard it. Now I just wait. A flicker of days, and it is done.” He vented a long, quiet sigh.

Death, an old familiar, did not disturb Wencel, and yet his languid weariness seemed a mask, to Ingrey. He was tense with some hidden anticipation, revealed, barely, only when his eyes repeatedly checked the staircase for some sign of Fara. At length the princess appeared: pale, chill, cloaked in black.

Ingrey, bearing a lantern, led the way through the darkening streets of Kingstown; the sole retainer, he noted, called to this duty. The evening air was chill and damp-the cobbles would be slippery with dew by midnight-but overhead the first stars shone down from a rainless sky. Wencel escorted his wife on his arm with the unfailing cold courtesy that was his studied habit. Ingrey extended his senses-all of his senses-yet found no new threat looming in the shadows. Indeed, no. We are the threats, Wencel and I.

Torches in brackets lit the entrance to the hallow king's hall in a flickering glow. Only the name recalled the old forest architectures of timber and thatch, for it was as much a stone palace as any other Easthome noble pile built during the latter days of Darthacan glory. Guardsmen hurried to swing wide the wrought-iron gates and bow apprehensively to the princess and her husband. The sentries seemed faintly mortified by how useless all their pikes and blades were to protect their lord from what stalked him tonight. As distant as they still were from the king's bedchamber, the servants' voices were hushed and tremulous as they escorted the party along the dim and musty halls.