The Hallowed Hunt

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.

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.

“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?

“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.

Now the lips pursed in a thoughtful frown. But not in dismay, Ingrey noted, nor in any flush of embarrassment. “I'm not sure. He's a strange…man. I almost said young man, but really, he scarcely seems young. I suppose it's partly the untimely gray in his hair. He's very sharp of wit, uncomfortably so at times. And moody. Sometimes he goes about for days in silence, as if lost in his own thoughts, and no one dares speak to him, not even the princess. At first I thought it was because of his little, you know, deformities, the spine and the oddly shaped face, but truly, he seems not to care about his body at all. It certainly doesn't impede him.” She glanced at Ingrey with belated wariness. “Do you know him well?”

“Not since we are grown,” said Ingrey. “I have a near tie to him by blood through his late mother. I met him a few times when we were both children.” Ingrey remembered the young Lord Wencel kin Horseriver as an undersized, clumsy boy, seeming slow of wit, with a rather wet mouth. Perhaps shyness had rendered Wencel tongue-tied; but the boy-Ingrey had lacked sympathy for a smaller cousin who did not keep up, and had made no effort to include him. Fortunately, in retrospect, Ingrey had made no effort to torment him, either. “His father and mine died within a few months of each other.”

Though the aged Earl Horseriver had died quietly and decently, of an ordinary stroke. Not in his prime, baying and foaming, his feverish screams echoing through the castle corridors as though rising from some pit of agony beneath the earth…Ingrey bit back the memory, hard.

“He was castlemaster of Birchgrove, under the lordship of old Earl Kasgut kin Wolfcliff.” And I am not. Would her rather too-quick wits notice, or would she merely assume him a younger son? “Birchgrove commands the valley of the Birchbeck, where it runs into the Lure.” Which did not, precisely, answer the question she'd asked. How had they drifted onto this dire subject? Her tone, he realized, had been as tensely neutral as his leading question about Horseriver.

“So Rider Ulkra told me.” She drew a long breath, staring ahead between her horse's ears. “He also said, it was rumored that your father died from the bite of a rabid wolf, that he'd tried to steal the spirit from, and that he gave you a wolf spirit, too, but it turned out to be crippled, and only made you very sick. And your life and wits were despaired of, which is why your uncle succeeded to Birchgrove and not you, but later your family sent you on pilgrimage, and you grew better. I wondered if all this was true, and why your father committed so reckless an act.” Only when she had spat out all this hurried chain of tattle did she turn her face to his, her eyes anxious and searching.

Ingrey's horse snorted and tossed its head at his jerk on the reins. Ingrey loosened his fist, and, a moment later, unclenched his teeth. He finally managed to growl, “Ulkra gossips. It is a fault.”

“He is afraid of you.”

“Not enough, it seems.” He yanked his horse away and pretended to inspect the cortege, returning up the other side to the head of the column. Alone. She looked after him as he passed, her mouth opening as if to speak, but he ignored her.

Forcing the cortege up the muddy road out of the valley diverted his mind enough to regain his calm, or at least replace his fuming with other irritations. On a steep incline, with the blowing team's hooves slipping, the wagon began to slide sideways toward a precipitous edge; the teamster's wife screeched alarm. Ingrey flung himself off his horse and led the quicker-witted among the guards to brace themselves and strain against the wagon's side and rear, pushing it away from the dizzying drop and up through the mire.

They paused at noon at a wide clearing just off the road, home to an ancient spring. His men unpacked the bread and cold meats provided by the castle cook, but Ingrey, calculating distances and hours of light, was more concerned for the horses. The team was mud-crusted and sweaty, so he set Boleso's surly retinue to assisting the teamster in unharnessing and rubbing them down before they were fed. The worst of the gradients were behind them now; with a suitable rest, he judged the beasts would last till nightfall, by which time he hoped to reach the Temple town of Reedmere, commandeer some more fitting conveyance, and send the rustic rig home.

More princely conveyance, Ingrey revised his thought. A former manure wagon seemed to him all too fitting. Closer to Easthome, he decided, he would send a rider ahead to guide a relief cortege to him, and hand off Boleso's body to more gaudy and noble ceremony, provided by those who cared for the prince. Or at least, cared for Boleso's rank and the show they made to each other. Maybe he'd send the rider tonight.

He washed his hands in the spring's outlet and accepted a slab of venison wrapped in bread from his lieutenant, Gesca. Gnawing, he looked around for his prisoner and her attendant. The teamster's wife was busy about the food baskets by the unhitched wagon. Lady Ijada was walking about the clearing-in that costume, she might whisk into the woods and disappear among the tall tree boles in a moment. Instead, she pried up a stone from the crumbled foundation above the spring and picked her way over to where Ingrey rested on a big fallen log.

Ingrey looked. On one side of the stone a spiral pattern was incised into the weathered surface.

“It's the same as one of the symbols Boleso had drawn on his body. In red madder, centered on his navel. Did you see it there?”

“No,” Ingrey admitted. “His body had been washed off already.”

“Oh,” she said, looking a little taken aback. “Well, it was.”

“I do not doubt you.” Though others will be free to. Had she realized this yet?

She stared around the clearing. “Do you think this place was a forest shrine, once?”

“Very possibly.” He followed her glance, studying the stumps and the sizes of the trees. Whatever holy or unholy purposes the original possessors had held, the latest ax work had been done by humble itinerant woodcutters, by the evidence. “The spring suggests it. This place has been cleared, abandoned, and recleared more than once, if so.” Following, perhaps, the ebb and flow of the Darthacan Quintarian war against the forest heresies that had so disrupted the kin lands, four centuries ago when Audar the Great had first conquered the Weald.

“I wonder what the old ceremonies were really like,” she mused. “The divines scorn the animal sacrifice, but really…When I was a child at my father's Temple fort, I went a few times with…with a friend to the marsh people's autumn rites. The fen folk aren't of the same race or language as the Old Wealdings, but I could almost have imagined myself going back to those days. It was more like a grand party and outdoor roast than anything. I mean, they made some songs and rituals over the creatures before they slaughtered them, but what's the difference if we pray over our meat after it's cooked instead of before?” She added with an air of fairness, “Or so my friend said. The fort's divine disagreed, but then, the two of them disagreed a lot. I think my friend enjoyed baiting him.”

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “that's true. Or at any rate, everyone ran about splashing each other and screaming with laughter. It was all very messy and silly, and rather smelly, but it was hard to see any evil in it. Of course, this tribe didn't sacrifice people.” She looked around the clearing as if imagining the ghostly image of some such evil slaying here.

“Indeed,” said Ingrey dryly. “That was the sticking point, between the Darthacan Quintarians and the Old Wealdings.” For all that both sides had worshipped the same five gods. “So when Audar the so-called Great slaughtered four thousand Wealding prisoners of war at Bloodfield, it's said he didn't pray at all. That made it a proper Quintarian act, I suppose, and not heresy. Some other crime, perhaps, but not human sacrifice. One of those theological fine points.”

That massacre of a generation of young spirit warriors had broken the back of the Wealding resistance to their eastern invaders, in any case. For the next hundred and fifty years, the Weald's lands, ceremonies, and people had been forcibly rearranged into Darthacan patterns, until Audar's vast empire broke apart in the bloody squabbles of his much less great descendants. Orthodox Quintarianism survived the empire that had fostered it, however. The suppressed animal practices and wisdom songs of the forest tribes had been lost and all but forgotten in the renewed Weald, except for rural superstitions, children's rhymes, and the odd ghost tale.

“I suppose we are all New Wealdings, now,” mused Ijada. She touched her Darthacan-dark hair, and nodded to Ingrey's own. “Almost every Wealding kin that survived has Darthacan forebears, too. Mongrels, to a man. Or to a lord, anyway. So we inherit Audar's sins and the tribes'. For all I know my Chalionese father had some Darthacan blood. The nobles there are a very mixed lot, really, he always said, for all that they carry on about their pedigrees.”

Ingrey bit, chewed, did not answer.

“When your father gave you your wolf,” she began, “how-”

“You should go eat,” he interrupted her, around a mouthful of cold roast. “It's going to be a long ride yet.” He rose and strode away from her, toward the wagon and its baskets. He did not want more food, but he did not want more of her chatter, either. He selected a not-too-wormy apple and nibbled it slowly while walking about. He stayed on the other side of the clearing from her, during the remainder of their rest.

AS THE CORTEGE RUMBLED ON THROUGH THE AFTERNOON, THE rugged angles of the hills grew gentler and hamlets more frequent, their fields more extensive. The sun was slanting toward the treetops when they came to an unanticipated check. A rocky ford, hock deep on the ride in, had risen with the rains and was now in full and muddy flood.

Ingrey halted his horse and looked over the problem. Boleso's wagon had not been made watertight with skins or tar, so the chance of its floating away at an awkward angle and yanking the horses off their feet was slight. The chance of its shipping water and bogging down, however, was good. He set mounted men at the wagon's four corners with ropes to help warp it through the hazard, and waved the yeoman onward with what speed he could muster from his tired team. The water came up past the horses' bellies, pushing the wagon off its wheels, but the outriders held it on course, and the whole assemblage struggled safely up the far bank. Only then did Ingrey motion Lady Ijada ahead of him into the water.

The cold water tugged at his knees as he urged his horse downstream. The dark head bobbed up by a trio of smooth rocks that stuck out of the spate boiling around them. An arm reached, caught…

“Hang on!” yelled Ingrey. “I'm coming to get you-!”

Two arms. Lady Ijada heaved herself upward, belly over the rock, wriggled and scrambled; by the time Ingrey brought his snorting horse close, she was standing upright, dripping and gasping. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her horse make it to the bank farther downstream, where it surged up, stumbled through the mud, and bolted into the woods. Ingrey spared it an unvoiced curse and waved one of his men after it.

He did not look to see if he was obeyed, for now he was within arm's reach of Lady Ijada. He leaned toward her, she leaned toward him…

A dark red fog seemed to come up over his brain, clouding his vision. Gripping her arms, he toppled into the stream, pulling her from her perch. Down, if he held her down…water filled his mouth. He spat, gasped, and went under again. He was blinded and tumbling. Some distant part of his mind, far, far off, was screaming at him: What are you doing, you fool! He must hold her down

The force of the water clubbed his head into something hard, and starry green sparks overflowed the red fog. All thought fled.

“Stop fighting me!” Lady Ijada's voice snapped in his ear. Something circling his neck tightened; he realized after a dizzy moment that it must be her arm. He must save her, drown her, save her-

She can swim. The belated realization slowed his flailing, if only in shock. Well, he could swim, too, after a fashion. He'd stayed alive through a shipwreck, once, admittedly mostly by hanging on to things that floated. The only thing floating here seemed to be Lady Ijada. Surely the weight of his blades and boots must drag them both down-his feet struck something. The current spat them into a back eddy, the river bottom flattened out, then she was dragging him up onto some welcome, blessed shore.

He twisted around out of her arm's grip, crawling up on hands and knees over the rocks onto the moss-covered bank. Pink water flowed from his hair, growing redder. He dashed it from his eyes and blinked around. The woods here were thick and tangled. He was not sure how far downstream they had come, but the ford, the wagon, and his men were nowhere in sight. He was shivering in shock from the head blow.

She stood up, water streaming from her clothes, and staggered out of the river toward him, her hand reaching. He cried out, a wordless bellow, and recoiled, wrapping his arms around a small tree, in part to hold himself upright, in part to hold…“Don't touch me!”

“What? Lord Ingrey, you're bleeding-”

“Don't come any nearer!”

“Lord Ingrey, if you will just-” His voice cracked. “My wolf is trying to kill you! It is coming unbound! Stay away!”

“Three times,” he gasped hoarsely. “That was the third time. Don't you realize, I tried to drown you just now? It's tried twice before. The first time I saw you, when I drew my steel, I meant to run you through on the spot. Then when we were sitting, I almost tried to strangle you.”

She was pale, thoughtful, intent. Not running away screaming. He wanted her to run, whether screaming or not made no matter to him. As long as she could outrun him…

“Run!”

Instead, maddeningly, she leaned against a tree bole and began to remove her squelching boots. It wasn't until she had tipped out the second one that she said, “It wasn't your wolf.”

His head was still ringing from the blow against the boulder. By the unpleasant rumbling in his gut, he was due to vomit some river water soon. He didn't comprehend her. “What?”

“It wasn't your wolf.” She set the boot down next to its mate and added in a tight, even voice, “I can smell your wolf, in a sense. Not smell really, but I don't know any other way to describe it.”

“It-I tried to kill you!”

“It wasn't your wolf. It wasn't you, either. It was the other smell. All three times.”

Now he merely stared, all words deserting him.

“Lord Ingrey-you never asked where the ghost of Boleso's leopard went.”

It wasn't a stare anymore, he feared. It was a gape.

“It came to me.” Her hazel eyes met his for one level, intent moment.

He retreated around his too-narrow tree, for what little privacy it could render him. He wished he could say the spasm gave him a moment to gather his wits, but they seemed scattered for a mile behind him up the river valley. Drowned, they were, without benefit of wine. All of the punishment, none of the reward.

He stumbled back around the tree to find her calmly wringing out her jacket. He gave up and sat down with a thump upon a mossy log. It was damp, but he was damper, his wet leathers sliding and squeaking unpleasantly.

She looked no different, to his eye. Well, wet, yes, sodden and wild, but still caressed by the slanting light as if the sun were her lover. He saw no cat shape in her shadow. He smelled nothing but himself, a sickly mix of wet leather, oil, sweat, and horse.

“I don't know if it was Boleso's intent that I should have it,” she continued in that same flat tone, undaunted by the repulsive interruption. “It came to me when I touched his dying body, looking for the key. The other animals stayed bound, and went with him. He had held them longer, or perhaps the rite hadn't been finished. The leopard's spirit was very frightened and frantic. It hid itself in my mind, but I could feel it.

“I did not know what to do, or what it might do. Boleso's men were fools. I said nothing about it, and no one asked.”

“Your defense-that could be your defense!” he said in sudden eagerness. “The leopard spirit killed the prince, in its frenzy. Not you. You were possessed by it. It was an accident.”

She blinked at him. “No,” she said in a voice of reason, “I just told you. The leopard did not come to me till Boleso lay dying.”

“Yes, but you could say otherwise. There is none to gainsay you.”

Her stare grew offended. We must return to this argument, I think. Ingrey waved a weak hand. “Well. And then…?”

“I first thought that I was going mad, but then I decided not. That closet was just like a cage, in a way; cruel and kind men brought food and cleaned it out. It was familiar. Calming.

“On the second night, I dreamed the leopard's dreams again. But this time…” Her voice faltered. Steadied. “This time, there came a Presence. There was nothing to see, in that black wood, but the smells were wonderful, beyond any perfume. Every good scent of the forest and field in the fall. Apples and wine, roast meat, crisp leaves and sharp blue air. I smelled the autumn stars, and cried out for their beauty. The leopard's spirit leapt in ecstasy, like a dog greeting its master or a cat rubbing around the skirts of its mistress. It purred, and writhed, and made eager noises.

“After that, the leopard's ghost seemed pacified. No longer frightened or wild. It just…lies there contentedly, waiting. No, more than contentedly. Joyfully. I don't know what it waits for.”

“A presence,” echoed Ingrey. No-she said, a Presence. “Did a-do you think-was it a god? That came to you, there in the dark?”

Did he doubt it? Luminous, Ingrey had called her, with a perception beyond sight, however denied. And even in those first confused moments, he had not mistaken it for mere physical beauty.

Her face grew suddenly fierce; she said through her teeth, “It didn't come to me, it came to the accursed cat. I wept for it to come to me. But it did not.” Her voice slowed. “Perhaps it could not. I am no saint, fit to have a god inhabit me.”

Ingrey grubbed in the moss with nervous fingers. His split scalp had stopped dripping blood into his eyebrows, finally. “It was also said-though not by the Quintarian divines-that the Old Wealdings used animal spirits to commune with the gods.”

Hers was not some idle curiosity, spurred by gossip. It was a most desperate need to know. And how much would he, in his first confusion so long ago, have given for some experienced mentor to tell him how to go on? Or even for a companion as confused as he, but sharing his experience, matching his confidences instead of denying them and naming him demented, defiled, and damned? And all the things he could never have explained even to a sympathetic ear, she had just experienced.

It still felt like hauling buckets from a well of memory with a rope that burned his hands. He gritted his teeth; began.

“I was but fourteen. It all came upon me without warning. I was brought to the ceremony uninstructed. My father had been for some days-or weeks-distraught about something that he would confide to no one. He suborned a Temple sorcerer to accomplish the rite. I do not know who caught the wolves, or how. The sorcerer disappeared immediately after-whether in fear of having botched the rite, or because he had deliberately betrayed us, I never found out. I was not fit to inquire, just then.”

“A sorcerer?” she echoed, leaning against a tree bole. “I saw no sorcerer with Boleso. Unless he had one hidden in disguise. If Boleso himself was demon-ridden, I saw no sign, not that I would. Well, you can't, unless you are god-sighted or a sorcerer yourself.”

“No, the Temple would have…” Ingrey hesitated. “In Easthome, some sensitive from the Temple must have detected it, if Boleso had caught a demon. If he'd caught it more recently, since his exile…he might not have encountered anyone with the gift to discern it.” But whatever had been wrong with Boleso had surely been going on since before he'd slain his manservant.

Because I have worked for a decade and more to cripple it, bind it down tight. And I thought I was safe, and now your questions frighten me worse than the wolf-within. “You said there was a thing, another…smell, not me or my wolf. A third thing.”

She stared at him unhappily, her brows drawing in, as though she grappled for a description of something that had no relation to language. “It is as if I can smell souls. Or the leopard does, and leaks it to me in patches. I can smell Ulkra, and know he is not to fear. Another few men in the retinue-I know to stay out of their reach. Your soul seems doubled: you, and something underneath, something dark and old and musty. It does not stir.”

“My wolf?” But his wolf had been a young one.

“I…maybe. But there is a third smell. It is wound about you like some parasitic vine, pulsing with blood, that has put tendrils and roots into your spirit to maintain itself. It whispers. I think it is some spell or geas.”

Ingrey was silent for a long moment, staring down at himself. How could she guess which was which? His wolf spirit was surely a kind of parasite. “Is it still there?”

“Yes.”

His voice tightened. “Then in my next inattentive moment, I might try to kill you again.”

“Perhaps.” Her eyes narrowed and nostrils flared, as if seeking a sensation that had nothing to do with the senses of the body. As futile as trying to see with her hands, or taste with her ears. “Till it is rooted out.”

“Don't you see? I must get to the Temple at Easthome. I must find help. And you are taking me there as fast as may be.”

“The divines were never much help to me,” he said bitterly. “Or I would not still be afflicted. I tried for years-consulting theologians, sorcerers, even saints. I traveled all the way to Darthaca to find a saint of the Bastard who was reputed to banish demons from men's souls, to destroy illicit sorcerers. Even he could not disentangle my wolf spirit. Because, he told me, it was of this world, not of the other; even the Bastard, who commands a legion of demons of disorder and can summon or dismiss them at His will, had no power over it. If even saints cannot help, the ordinary Temple authorities will be useless. Worse than useless-a danger. In Easthome, the Temple is the tool of the powerful, and it seems you have offended the powerful.”

Her gaze sharpened. “Who put the geas on you? Must it have been someone powerful?”

His lips parted, closed again. “I am not sure. I cannot say. It all slips away from me. Unless I am reminded, I don't even remember, between one time and the next, trying to kill you. A moment's distraction on my part could be deadly to you!”

“Then I will undertake to remind you,” she said. “It should be easier, now that we both know.”

As he opened his mouth to protest, he heard a distant crashing in the woods. A man called, “Lord Ingrey?” and another, “I heard voices toward the river-over that way…!”

“They're coming!” He struggled to his feet, swaying dizzily, his hands extending to her in pleading. “Before they find us. Flee!”

“Like this?” she said indignantly, sweeping a hand down her damp costume, her bare feet. “Soaking wet, no money, no weapons, no help, I am to run off into the woods and-what? Be eaten by bears?” Her jaw set. “No. Boleso came from Easthome. Your geas came from Easthome. It is there that the source of this evil must be stalked. I will not be diverted.”

“Then you'd better not babble about this to anyone.”

“I don't babble-” he began in outrage, but then their rescuers were upon them, two of Ingrey's men on horseback hacking through the undergrowth. Now he wanted to talk to her, and could not.

“My lord!” cried Rider Gesca in gladness. “You have saved her!”

Since Ijada did not correct this misperception, neither did Ingrey. Evading her gaze, he climbed to his feet.