The Hallowed Hunt

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE SENTINEL LED OFF, LIMPING, USING HIS SPEAR AS A walking stick. Horseriver continued to lead Fara. Her hand clutched the banner pole tightly, and its tremble and her horse's rocking were all that gave the limp flag motion in the breathless twilight. Ingrey's horse snorted and sidled, and the mount he led yanked at its bridle and dug in its heels, eyes rolling. Disliking the feel of both his hands encumbered, by his own horse's reins and by the other's, Ingrey dismounted and let the animals go free. They wheeled and skittered back past the tree, then, too weary to bolt farther, put their heads down and began nibbling the tough marsh grass. Ingrey turned and paced after the hallow king's banner.

As they entered the margins of the woods, more revenants stepped from the trees. They were as tattered as their sentry, or worse; most were decapitated, and carried their heads, sometimes still in helmets, variously: tied to belts by the hair or braids, tucked under their arms, over their shoulders in makeshift carrier bags made of rope or rags. It took Ingrey's disquieted gaze a few moments to wrench from their wounds and begin to take in other details of decoration, weaponry, or garb that told of their kin identities. Or personal identities.

silently cried belts, loops of necklaces, and furs and skulls and pelt after pelt of the wisdom animals whose strength they'd hoped to inherit. Everywhere, faded stitchery peeked out, on collars, on baldrics, on the hems of cloaks, on embroidered armbands. My wife made this, my daughter, my sister, my mother. See the intricacy, see the colors intertwined; I was beloved, once.

A tall soldier, whose head still balanced upon a neck half-cut through and crusted with dark blood, sidled close to Ingrey. He bore a thick wolf pelt over his shoulders, and he stared at Ingrey in as great a wonder as if Ingrey had been a ghost and he a living man. He reached out a hand, and Ingrey first flinched away, but then set his teeth and endured the touch. More than a gust of air, less than flesh, it left a liquid chill in its wake across his skin.

Other wolf-skin-clad warriors clustered about Ingrey, and a woman as well, gray-haired, stout, her torn dress elaborated with twining strips of gray fur, her looping gold armbands tipped with elegant little wolf's heads with garnet eyes. Some of these could be my own forefathers, Ingrey realized, and not just on the Wolfcliff side; a dozen other kins' blood ran through his veins from foremothers as well, in a turbulent stream. It had disturbed him to think himself an intruder in a graveyard; it devastated him to suspect the fascination of the ghostly warriors with him was the excitement of grandparents seeing for the first time a child they'd never hoped to look upon. Five gods help me, help me, help me… to do what?

He blinked in astonishment when the growing parade was joined by half a dozen dark-haired hacked-about men wearing the tabards of Darthacan archers of Audar's day. They swung wide around Horseriver, but crept up to Ingrey's heels. The other revenants did not seem to mind their presence here; equal in death for four centuries, perhaps they had made their own soldier's peace. Audar, Ingrey had heard, had carried out his own dead rather than burying them in this accursed ground, sealed from men and gods, but the battle had been great, and conducted largely in the dark; it was no wonder a few had been missed.

The bowl of the valley had turned shadowless with evening, but the sky above was still pale, and the oak branches overhead interlaced against it like crooked black webs. Horseriver seemed to be aiming generally toward the center of the wood, but not in a straight path; it was as though he searched for something. A faintly voiced Ah told Ingrey he had found it. The roof of branches thinned and drew back around a long low mound upon which no trees grew. Horseriver halted beside it, pulled Fara down from her wary cob, and helped her step up the bank and plant the banner pole by her boot.

Released, the horse sidled nervously away through the trees, somehow avoiding touching any of the gathering mob of curious revenants. More than curious, Ingrey realized; agitated. His blood seethed in the surf of their excitement. More and more came, crowding up thickly around them, and Ingrey began to feel in his marrow just how many four thousand murdered men were. He tried to count them, then count blocks and multiply, but lost his place and abandoned the attempt. It failed utterly to aid his sweating grip on reason anyway.

Horseriver knelt upon the mound, pushed aside a thin screen of sickly weeds, and ran his fingers through the dark soil. “This was the trench I was buried in,” he remarked conversationally to Ingrey. “I and many others. Though I never actually spilled my blood at Holytree. Audar was careful about that. That shall be rectified.” He climbed wearily to his feet. “All shall be rectified.” He nodded to the ghosts, who stirred uneasily.

At the outer edges of the circle, late arrivals milled about; those few who could, craned their necks. It seemed they spoke to each other; to Ingrey, the voices were blurred and faint, like hearing from underwater men calling or arguing on a shore. Ingrey touched the dirty bandage on his right hand, hardly more than a rag wrapped about to keep knocks from paining the healing wound's tenderness. It wasn't bleeding again, at least. Yet.

Horseriver smiled, faintly. “Finish it, Ingrey. If you hold to your task, and my banner-carrier holds to hers, that is. Finish it.”

“Hadn't you better tell us how, then?”

“Yes,” sighed Horseriver. “It is time.” He glanced skyward. “With neither sun nor moon nor stars to witness, in an hour neither day nor night; what more befitting a moment than this? Long was the preparation, long and difficult, but the doing-ah. The doing is simple and quick.” He drew his knife from his belt, the same he'd used to cut the throat of Ijada's mare, and Ingrey tensed. Kingly charisma or no, if Horseriver turned on Fara, Ingrey would have to try to…He made to lift his hand to his sword hilt, but found it heavy and unresponsive; his heart began to hammer in panic at the unexpected constraint.

But Horseriver instead pressed the haft into Fara's limp hand, then took the banner pole and ground it deeper into the soil so that it stood upright, if slightly tilted, on its own. “This will best be done kneeling, I think,” he mused. “The woman is weak.”

He turned again to Ingrey. “Fara”-he nodded to his wife, who stared back with eyes gone wide and black-“will shortly cut my throat for me. Being my banner-carrier, she will hold, for a little moment, my kingship and my soul here. You have until her grip fails, no more, to cleanse my spirit horse from me. If you do not succeed, you will have the full, but not unique, experience of becoming my heir. What will happen then, not even I can predict, but I am fairly certain it will be nothing good. And it will go on forever. So do not fail, my royal shaman.”

Ingrey's pulse throbbed in his ears, and his stomach knotted. “I thought you could not die. You said the spell held you in the world.”

“Follow it around, Ingrey. The trees, and all the living web of Holytree, are bound to the souls of my warriors, and support them in the world of matter. These”-he gestured broadly at the clustering revenants-“create my hallow kingship that binds them to me. My spirit horse”-he touched his breast-“my power as a shaman, binds the trees to the men. I told you that the hallow king was the hub of the spell for invincibility, I do remember that. Cut the link at any point, and the circle unwinds. This is the link you can reach.”

“I suppose you could call it that.”

“How many people did you actually kill to arrange this?” As carelessly as you set me on Ijada?

“Not as many as you'd think. They do die on their own.” Horseriver's lips twisted. “And to say I would rather die than to have all this to do over again both sums and fails even to touch the truth.”

Ingrey's mind lurched. “This will break the spell.”

“It's all of a piece. Yes.”

“What will happen to these, then?” Ingrey waved about at the crowding ghosts. “Will they go to the gods as well?”

“Gods, Ingrey? There are no gods here.”

It is true, Ingrey realized. Was that part of what disturbed him so deeply about this ground? The interlocking boundaries of the spell, the will of this unholy hallow king, excluded Them. Had done so for centuries, it appeared. Horseriver's war with the gods had been in stalemate for that long, while his host had slowly become instead his hostages.

Horseriver pressed Fara to her knees and knelt in front of her, facing away. He pulled her knife hand round over his right shoulder and briefly kissed the white knuckles. A flash of memory washed over Ingrey, of his wolf licking his ear before he'd cut its throat. The unmaking of this twisted spell, the long-delayed cleansing of Bloodfield, seemed no intrinsic sin, apart from Wencel's self-murder. Yet five gods had opposed this, and Ingrey could not see why. Not till now.

“You will be sundered? Wait-you will all be sundered?”

“You ask too many questions.”

Not enough. A very late one came to Ingrey then. Ijada, she had said, had given half her heart to these revenants. They held it still, somewhere here, somehow. What would happen to whatever piece of her soul she had pledged when these lost warriors went up in smoke? Could a woman live with half a heart? “Wait,” said Ingrey, then, reaching deeper, “wait!”

A ripple ran through the revenants as if they swayed in an earth shock, and Fara looked up, gasping.

“And you argue too much,” Horseriver added, and drew Fara's knife hand hard around his throat.

Blood spurted for three heartbeats while Horseriver stared ahead, his expression composed. Then his lips parted in relief, and he slumped forward out of Fara's grasp. She clutched the banner pole to keep from falling atop him, her lips moving in a soundless cry.

The world of magic peeled away from the world of matter then, ripping apart the congruence, and Ingrey found his vision doubled as it had been in Red Dike. Wencel's body lay facedown upon the mound, and Fara bent over it, half-fainting, the bloody knife fallen from her grasp. But upon the mound there arose… A black stallion, black as pitch, as soot, as a moonless night in a storm. Its nostrils flared red, and orange sparks trailed from its mane and tail as it shifted. It pawed the mound, once, and a ring of fire shimmered out around its hoofprint, then faded. Upon its back a man-shaped shadow rode astride, and the figure's legs curved down into the horse's ribs and united with them.

The stallion snorted. Ingrey pulled back his black-edged lips along his long jaws, bared his sharp teeth, and snarled back. His tongue lolled out to taste a rank sizzle in the air, like burning rotted hair, and saliva spattered from his jaws as he shook the toxic tang from his mouth.

The stallion stepped off the mound and circled him, tracking little flames.

If I lose this fight, what returns to my body will not be me. It would be Horseriver re-formed. With such a prize, no wonder Wencel had not bothered to bespell him further in his cause. Ingrey was battling for more than his life.

So.

He circled the stallion in turn, head lowered, neck ruff rising, the earth cool and damp under his pads. Fallen leaves crackled like real leaves, and the sharpness of their musty scent amazed his nose. The stallion swirled, its hind legs lashing out.

Ingrey ducked, too late; one hoof connected with a heavy thunk to his furry side, and he rolled away, yelping. How could an illusion not be able to breathe? He would have to pay as implacable an attention as in any sword fight, but now he had to watch four weapons, not just one. How do you kill a horse with your teeth? He tried to remember dogfights he had witnessed, boar-baitings, the climaxes of hunts.

He gathered himself on his haunches and launched himself at the horse's belly, twisting his open jaws at an awkward angle. He scored the skinless surface in a long slash, and barely made it away from a retaliating stamping. The-not blood-uncanny ichor, ink-black fluid, burned his mouth as the red snakes had, before. Worse. His jaws foamed madly in pained response.

The ghosts crowded around in a ring for all the world as though they were watching a boar-baiting. Which beast were they betting on, whom did they cheer? Not their lives but their souls had been wagered, and not by them. That Horseriver rode himself to oblivion, to sundering from the gods, was regrettable, but not even the gods could override a person's will in that matter. That his will overrode all these other wills seemed a blacker sin. Ijada would surely weep, Ingrey thought bleakly as he dodged the stallion's snapping teeth, swung round at the end of a suddenly snaky neck, ears back flat. And, Five weapons. I have to watch five weapons.

This is going badly. He was too small; the stallion was too large. Real wolves hunted prey this size in packs, not alone. Where can I get more me? Nothing of spirit could exist in the world of matter without…He eyed his standing human self, shivering mindlessly on his feet at the edge of the clearing. Dolt. Dupe. Useless son. All or nothing, then. All.

He pulled strength from his body, all he could. The emptied form swayed and collapsed onto a drift of leaves. Everything in the clearing slowed, and Ingrey's already-searing perceptions came ablaze. His wolf-body felt at once both dense as the past and weightless as the future. Yes. I know this state. I have traveled this path before.

He was, abruptly, half the size of the horse, and it shied back. But slowly, so slowly, as though it swam in oil. His mind sketched his strike at his leisure, measuring the arc of his leap. This looted strength could not last. No time. Now.

The thing in his jaws stilled. Then melted away and ran down his lips like a bite from an icicle in winter. He spat and backed up. Horse-shape became shapeless, a mound, a puddle, a blackness soaking into the ground like a spilled barrel of ink. Gone.

Wencel stood up, freed from his dark mount. On two bowed legs. His shape was restored to humanity, but his face…

“I'm glad I didn't use that stag,” he remarked from one of his mouths. “It would not have had the strength for this.” Another mouth grinned. “Good dog, Ingrey.”

Ingrey backed away, growling. Across Horseriver's skull, faces rippled, rising and sinking like corpses in a river. One succeeded another haphazardly, all the Earls Horseriver for four centuries and more. Young men, old men, angry men, sad; shaven, bearded, scarred. Mad. Young Wencel passed like a bewildered waif, his dumb gaze alighting on Ingrey in recognition and plea, though plea for what, Ingrey could not tell.

The body was worse. Cuts, scars, dreadful gaping wounds rose and fell from the surface of the skin, every death wound Horseriver had ever received. The burns were the most frightening, wide patches of red and weeping blisters, cooked and charred flesh. The stink of them wafted across Ingrey's sensitive wolf-nose, and he sneezed and backed away, whimpering for a moment and pawing his muzzle like a dog. This was Horseriver, turned inside out. This was what being Horseriver had been like, behind that smooth ironic mask, the brittle wit, the jerky rage, the apparent indifference. Every hour, every day, sunsets falling like trip-hammers, time without end. The eyes were worst of all.

Had Horseriver planned this? With his wolf and most of his own soul removed, Ingrey's silent husk was empty as an abandoned house, and as available for squatters to move into. If the undoing of his spell went awry, Horseriver might still have a body-heir, and now without the complications that had worried him earlier. Ingrey glanced up at the agonized thing that was Horseriver. No, that was not an end Horseriver desired, but if he indeed found himself with it all to do over again, well, he could. And judging by his level silence, watching Ingrey, he knew it. Ingrey shivered and pawed his unresponsive body again.

Hoofbeats and a frightened equine squeal sounded from the woods, and Ingrey whirled around. Could the haunt-horse have reanimated…? No, this was a real horse; he could feel the thudding of its gait through the solid ground as he had not the fiery footfalls of the other. The hoofbeats stopped, shuffled about in the leaf drifts; then lighter footsteps rustled, running flat out.

The ghosts spun aside, opening an aisle, and many lifted their hands in clumsy salutes. And blessings, or troubled supplications; the fivefold sign wandered awkwardly, when forehead and lips were hung at a belt, and the hand moved only aside to navel and groin before rising to the unbeating heart. Wolf-Ingrey's head lifted and he sniffed in wild surmise. I know that blissful smell, like sunlight in dry grass…

Running through the gap between the ghosts, Ijada appeared. She wore her dark brown riding dress, the jacket sweat-stained, her split skirts splashed with mud, and all of it scored with little rips as though she'd galloped through a thorn hedge. Wisps of dark hair clung to her flushed face. She stopped short, and her gasping became a cry; then she staggered more slowly to where Ingrey's body lay and dropped to her knees beside it, her face draining white.

She cannot see me, wolf-Ingrey realized. She cannot see any of us. Except for the very material Fara, still collapsed beside the throat-slashed body of Wencel. Ijada spared the couple a brief, appalled glance, clenching her teeth in distress, then turned back to Ingrey.

“Oh, love…” She lifted his face to her own teary one, and pressed her lips to his. Wolf-Ingrey danced around her in frustration, for he could not feel those warm lips or taste that wasted honeyed breath at all. Frantic, he pawed her sleeve, then licked her face.

Her breath drew in sharply, and she lifted her hand to her cheek and stared around. Had she felt some disturbing liquid chill, as he had from the ghost's hand? He licked her ear, and her breath huffed out in what might have been a laugh, under other circumstances; she scrubbed at the ear as though it had been tickled. She laid Ingrey's body out on his back, felt along it-oh, if I might feel that touch-and frowned. “Ingrey, what have they done to you…?” His body bore no visible wounds, no crookedness of broken bones, but his rag-wrapped right hand, he saw, was soaked with blood, and his leather jerkin was smeared slippery with it. Ijada's frown deepened as she clutched the gory hand to her breast. If I might only move those fingers… “Or you to yourself?” she added more shrewdly. “You tried something brave and foolish, didn't you?” Her gaze rose once more to Wencel's corpse and Fara.

Horseriver snorted, and Ingrey spun around, growling. The face of the moment stared across at Ijada with a mixture of astonishment and revulsion. “You do keep turning up where you are not wanted, don't you, girl?” he remarked to the air, or perhaps to Ingrey. Ijada, in any case, did not seem to hear him. “Always in ignorance, but does that slow you? Taste the betrayal of the gods, then; I have dined on it for ages.”

The looks the revenants gave him in return were not loving, Ingrey thought, but wary and dismayed. A faint translucence hung about them, and Ingrey realized that they were already starting to fade. The ghost of a man fresh-killed, if he did not go at once to the gods through the gates of his death, might yet be redeemed from sundering during the god-touched rites of his funeral, as Boleso's had been. Up to a point. But the sundering soon grew irrevocable, the soul, in that last refusal, self-doomed to fade. That period of uncertain grace had been prolonged for these, not for days or weeks, but for centuries. With their link to the Wounded Woods now broken, they would not linger long, Ingrey thought. Hours? Minutes?

Ijada started to rise to go to Fara, but then gasped and sank back down. Her hand touched her left breast, then her forehead; her lips moved in surprise, then pinched in pain. Ingrey's whines redoubled.

The mob of ghosts shuffled aside once more, and a great-limbed warrior strode forward. He wore a broad gold belt, and bore a spearhead-tipped banner staff, its furled flag stippled in grass green, white, and blue. His head hung from the gold belt, tied on by its own grayed-yellow braids. The grizzled head's gaze flicked up to Horseriver, who started in surprised recognition, and raised his hand to return a salute that had not, in fact, been given; the gesture faded at the end as Horseriver belatedly realized this. The warrior knelt by Ijada, bending over her in concern, his hand touching her shoulder.

Ingrey danced anxiously around the pair, his wolf's head lowering to the warrior's eye level. The warrior stared across at him in some silent query. Ijada's spine bent, and her grip on Ingrey's bloody hand grew limp; it slipped from her grasp, and her own white hand fell atop it. “Oh,” she breathed, her eyes wide and dark. She was growing still more pale, almost greenish; when wolf-Ingrey licked her face now, she did not respond.

He bowed low, Ijada had said. And placed my heart on a stone slab, and cut it in two with the hilt-shard of his broken sword…. The other half, they raised high upon a spearpoint. I did not understand if it was pledge, or sacrifice, or ransom…

All three, thought Ingrey. All three.

He did not know what, on this eerie ground, his actions all meant. But even with his voice muzzled, they were not without power. He was not without power. I brought down Horseriver's horse, and it is gone. Maybe I can do more. Horseriver plainly thought him spent, his task over, his use used up. Meant to just leave him, perhaps, in this disarray of body and spirit, to die alone upon the ground when the ghosts and all their magic drained away. And in and of himself, lone wolf, he did not think Horseriver was mistaken. But I am not alone, am I? Not now. She said it, so it must be so. Truthsayer. How was it that I came to love the truth above all things?

“Shall I die of love, then?” murmured Ijada, sinking onto Ingrey's chest. “I always thought that was a figure of speech. Together, then? No! My Lord of Autumn, in this Your season, help us…!”

There are no gods here.

But Ingrey was here. Try something else. Try anything. Maybe the revenant captain had some power here as well; he carried a banner, after all, Old Weald sacred sign of rescues beyond death and the death of all other hopes. Ingrey whined, danced around the man, scratched at his booted leg with one paw, then crouched and nudged his long nose repeatedly at the scabbard hung on the gold belt on the opposite side from his head. Would the revenant understand his plea? The man swiveled his hips to regard him, his sandy gray brows rising in surprise. He stood and drew the hilt shard. Yes! Ingrey nudged the hand some more, and turned to bite at his own side.

Ijada didn't say this had hurt! Ingrey strangled a yelp and controlled a twisting jerk away. The ghostly hand descended into the gaping gash in his wolf-chest and emerged dripping red. The shard edge sliced across a slippery object in the warrior's palm, and then the warrior tossed something skyward. The bloody fist descended once more, and Ingrey's wolf-self seemed to breathe again as the hand withdrew emptied and the gash closed up in a long red line. Ingrey scrambled upright on his paws once more.

High on the spear tip, a whole heart beat, picking up the pulse.

Ijada inhaled sharply and sat up, blinking around. Her eyes met Ingrey's wolf-gaze, and widened in astonishment and recognition. “There you are!” Her head swiveled, as she took in the mob of agitated ghosts who had crowded up around this strange operation. “There you all are! You!” She struggled to her feet and curtseyed to the bannerman, signing the Five. “I was looking for you, my lord marshal, but I could not see.”

The ghost bowed back in deep respect. Ijada's hand curled in Ingrey's neck ruff, clutching and stroking the thick fur. He pushed up into the caress. She looked down at him-not very far down, for his big head came nearly to her chest. “How came you to be all apart like this? What is happening here?” Her gaze traveled around the clearing till it caught on the multifaced Horseriver. “Oh.” She flinched a little, but then her back straightened. “So that's what you look like, out of the shadow. What are you doing on my land?”

Horseriver had composed himself in an attitude of utter indifference, but this last jerked him into rage. “Your land! This is Holytree!”

The form of Horseriver stiffened, and the ironic mouth murmured, “Indeed, we go. Alas that you shall find your enjoyment of your legacy…brief.” That mouth smiled nastily, and Ingrey growled in response. Ijada's hand tightened in his fur.

“And these?” Ijada glanced up at the gold-belted marshal, and gestured at the gathered revenants.

“I am their last true hallow king. Follow me, they must.”

“Into oblivion?” she demanded indignantly. “Shall they die for you twice? What kind of king are you?”

“I owe you nothing. Not even explanation.”

“You owe them everything!”

He could not, exactly, turn away, with the faces chasing each other around his skull, but he turned his shoulders from her. “It is done. It is long past done.”

“It is not.”

He whipped back, and snarled, “They will follow me down to darkness, and the gods who denied us will be denied in turn. Oblivion and revenge. They have made me, and you cannot unmake me.”

“I cannot…” She hesitated, and gestured at the banner pole upon which the marshal-warrior now leaned, listening. Raising her face, she pointed to the mound where Wencel's body lay huddled and Fara knelt silent and staring. “You died, I think. Death lays a kingship down, along with all else a life accumulates in the world of matter. We go to the gods naked and equal, as in any other birth, but for our souls and what we've made of them. Then the kin meeting makes the king again.” She stared around at the ghosts, challengingly. “Do you not?”

An odd rustle ran through the revenants. The marshal-warrior was watching with a most peculiar expression on his face, an amalgam of sorrow and unholy joy. It dawned on Ingrey then that this man must have been the very first Horseriver hallow king's royal banner-carrier, who had died by his lord's side at Bloodfield. His body was doubtless buried in this same pit, for Horseriver had said his banner had been broken and thrown in atop him. And this warrior would never have given it up alive. The royal bannerman should have received the hallow kingship in trust, to carry as steward to the next kin meeting, to be surrendered in turn to the new king-but for the great, disrupted spell, that had carried it instead into this far, unfriendly future.

Horseriver snorted. “There is no other.”

The rustle grew, racing around the mob like fire, then back to the beginning. The marshal-warrior stood up straight, then saluted Ijada with that eccentric looping sign of the Five. The ghostly lips turned up in a smile. He let his banner pole fall out of his hand; Ijada's hand caught it and gripped it tight.

Wait, thought Ingrey, we living ones cannot touch these ghostly things, they run through our fingers like water…

Ijada grasped the pole with both hands and gave it a great yank. Above her head, the banner unfurled and snapped out in no breeze. The wolf's head badge of the Wolfcliffs snarled upon it, black on red.

Ingrey blinked up through his human eyes and wrenched to his feet, stunned. He was back in his body again, and it felt astounding. He inhaled. His wolf was gone…No. He clutched his heart. It's right here. Howling joyously through his veins. And something more…A line ran between him and Horseriver: the current between Ingrey and Ijada that Horseriver had made, broken, and bound again to his kingship. Tension seemed to reverberate back and forth along that line now, its power ascending. The pull between them was massive, straining.

Horseriver reached down and yanked Fara to her feet, and clasped her hands around his banner pole. “Hold!” She stared at him in terror and gripped as though her life depended on it. Grounded upon that mound of death and woe, the strength of the old kingship was vast.

He could feel Horseriver's geas of silence fly away from around her face like a spring of metal released, spinning away in the air. Fara took a huge breath.

Horseriver turned to her, and Wencel's face rose fully to the surface for the first time. One hand reached out toward her. “Fara…?” that young voice quavered. “My wife…?”

Fara jerked as if shot with a crossbow bolt. Her eyes closed in pain. Opened. Glanced at Ijada, at Ingrey. At the ghastly revenant before her. “I tried to be your wife,” she whispered. “You never tried to be my husband.”

And she lowered the tip of the banner pole to the ground, the gray rag falling in a silky puddle, put her foot upon the dry wood, and snapped it in half.