The Hallowed Hunt

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

IJADA WAS SITTING AT THE BOTTOM OF THE STAIRCASE AS THE porter admitted Ingrey to the prison-house's entry hall, hunched over with her arms wrapped even more tightly about herself than the last time. Her warden sat a few steps above her, looking on in disquiet. Ijada sprang to her feet, her eyes searching Ingrey's face for he knew not what, but she seemed to find it, for she pounced upon him. Grasping his arm, she dragged him into the side room, slamming the door on the disapproving but cowed face of the warden.

“What was that, a while ago?” Ijada demanded. “What happened to you?”

“Visions, Ingrey, terrible visions. Not from the god, I swear. Some little while after you went out, I was overcome again. My knees gave way. The world around me did not fade altogether this time, but the pictures were stronger than memory, less than hallucination. Ingrey, I saw Bloodfield, I saw my men! Not tattered and worn as they were in my dream in the Wounded Woods, but from before, when they yet lived.” She hesitated. “Died.”

“Did you sense Wencel? Did you see him or hear his voice?”

“No, not…not as he is. These visions were in your mind, I think. Were they not?”

“Yes. Pictures from before-times, yes? The Old Weald. The massacre at Bloodfield.”

She shuddered and touched her own neck, and the horrible crunch of the ax parting bone sounded again in Ingrey's memory. She felt that, too.

“Why do we share such things? What has happened between us?” she asked.

“The pictures, those visions-Wencel put them in me. He is not just spirit warrior like you, not just shaman like me. He's more. Lost out of time, terrible in his power and pain. He thinks he is-he claims to be-hallow king.”

“But old Lord Stagthorne is king, has been since before I was born-how can there be two?”

“I think that is some problem, some mystery, that I have not yet come to the core of. I went to Wencel planning to beat the truth out of him if I had to. Instead, he beat it into me…”

He guided her into a chair and sat next to her, their hands still gripping each other across the tabletop. Haltingly, Ingrey described his terrifying interview with the earl. Ijada seemed to have shared only the mystic visions, not their context; Ingrey thought she must have spent the last hours wild with bewilderment, for even now her eyes were dilated and her body shivering.

“My other dream,” she breathed. “Of the burning horseman, the leashed wolf racing through the ash. It was you! It was both of you.”

“Do you think? Perhaps…”

“Ingrey, I recognized Holytree, I recognized my men. I am bound to them as certainly as I am bound to you, though I do not know how. And if Wencel spoke true, he is bound to them as well, and they to him.”

“Wencel's tale was full of gaps, but he did not lie about that,” said Ingrey certainly. “That binding is at the very heart of all this.”

“Then the circle is complete. You are bound to me, me to my ghosts, they to Wencel, and Wencel, it seems, to you. Is Wencel trying to work some great magic with all of us here?”

“I'm not sure. This is not all Wencel's doing, exactly. For one thing, the choice of his mystical heir is not his own, or he would surely have picked someone other than me. Which makes a sort of sense; the spell must have been made to work in the chaos and heat of battle, when both king and next heir might fall in the same hour-as happened at Bloodfield, more or less. The transfer must take place without attention or will on the part of the hallowed ones. So that part of the spell must be bound up with the dead spirit warriors in the Wounded Woods. It's as if the whole of the Old Weald, or what remains of its kin powers, chooses its heir through Wencel.” There seemed to Ingrey to be an enigmatic, daunting validation in the notion.

Ijada's eyes narrowed. “Are we all three supposed to go to Bloodfield, then? And if so, what are we supposed to do when we get there?”

Ijada rubbed her wrinkled brow. “What am I, in this? Half-in, half-out-do I even belong? I am alive, they are dead; I am a woman, they are men-mostly-I think…My leopard is not even a proper Wealding beast! I did nothing for Boleso's soul this morning; I just stood there stupidly gaping. It's you that's wanted, Ingrey, you who might free the ghosts from their old creatures!” Her gaze upon him was devouring in its conviction.

“A door in a wall is at once both inside and outside,” said Ingrey slowly. “Half and half, as you are in your very blood, by your father's grace. And you were wanted, too, though not, I think, by Wencel. Did your ghosts not choose you? Of all who slept and dreamed in the Woods that night?”

She hesitated, straightened a little. “Yes.”

“So, then.” Then what? Ingrey's exhausted brain did not supply an answer. “More matters arose, after the visions. Wencel wants very much to keep me closer, I think. He coaxed me with an offer of a post in his household. More than coaxed. Coerced.”

She frowned in new worry.

“Hetwar,” Ingrey continued, “instead of protecting me, wants me to take up the station so as to spy for him. Cumril raised the suspicion that Wencel bears a spirit animal, though the Temple and Hetwar do not yet know how much else he claims to be. I did not tell them. I'm not sure what consequences will spin from that, nor how quickly Wencel's darker secrets will unravel. Nor how I will be caught up in the tangle. Worse, Biast has taken a fear of his brother-in-law and wants to set me to guard Fara.” Ingrey grimaced.

“You don't see. If I am drawn off to Horseriver, they will take you from my charge, give you over to some other jailer. Maybe shut you up in some other prison, less easy of access. Or of escape.”

Tension tightened her face. “I must not be…must not be constrained, when it is finished. When it is time to go.”

“When what is finished?”

Her hand grasped air in a gesture of frustration. “This. Whatever this is. When the god's hunt closes in upon what He seeks. Do you not feel it, Ingrey?”

“Feel, yes, I am feverish with the strain, but I do not see it. Not clear.”

“What is Wencel about?”

Ingrey shook his head. “I am less certain all the time that he is about anything, besides defending his old secrets. His mind is so full, he actually seems to have trouble paying attention at moments. Not that this makes him less dangerous. What does he really fear? He cannot, after all, be slain, it would seem.” Execution would not stop the earl. Imprisonment, were Wencel desperate enough, he might escape the same hard way, no matter how deep the dungeon or heavy the guard. It came to Ingrey that he really didn't want to risk Wencel being imprisoned.

Ijada's lips twisted in new puzzlement. “And how has the earl been getting through his funerals, all these centuries, if his soul never goes to the gods?”

Ingrey paused, considering the lack of rumor, then made a little gesture of negation. “Occupying the body of his own heir, he would usually be in close charge of his own rites. I'm sure he became expert in arranging them to display what he willed. And if he missed a few, well, some men are sundered.”

Ijada nodded, some similar reflection sobering her face. She tapped the tabletop. “If the Temple were brought to attend upon his spell, what might they do?”

“I'm not sure. Nothing, I think, except by sorcery or miracle.”

“The gods are already hip deep in this. With very little reference to the Temple.”

“So it would seem.” Ingrey sighed.

“So what are we to do?'

Ingrey rubbed the back of his neck, which ached. “Wait, I think. Still. I will go to Horseriver's household. And spy, but not only for Hetwar. Maybe I will find something there to make sense of this, some piece yet lacking.”

“At what danger to yourself?” she fretted.

Ingrey shrugged.

She looked dissatisfied. “Something feels horribly unbalanced in this pause.”

“What pause?” Ingrey snorted. “This unmerciful day has battered me half to bits.”

Her hands waved in renewed exasperation. “While I have been mewed up in this house!”

He leaned forward, hesitated for a fraction of fear, and kissed her. She did not retreat. There was no sudden shock this time, no change in his sense of her, but that was only because her steady presence had never faded from their first kiss. He could feel it, a current like a millrace flowing between them. The arousal of his body was muted now in exhaustion, the pleasure of her lips drowned in a desperate uneasiness. She clutched him back not in lust or love, it seemed, but starveling trust: not in his dubious abilities, but in him whole. Wolf and all. His heart heated in wonder. He trembled.

“Not lately.”

“You look so tired. Perhaps you should.”

“Hetwar said the same.”

“Then it is so.” She rose. “I will order the kitchen to bestir itself for you.”

He pressed the back of her hand to his throbbing forehead, before reluctantly releasing her.

Halfway to the door, she looked over her shoulder, and said, “Ingrey…”

“Hm?” He lifted his head from where it had sunk down upon his arms crossed on the table.

“If Wencel is truly some mystical hallow king, and you are truly his heir…what does that make you?”

Terrified, mostly. “Nothing good.”

“Huh.” She shook her head and went out.

INGREY SLEPT LATER THAN HE'D INTENDED THE NEXT MORNING, and his new orders arrived earlier than he'd expected, by the hand of Gesca.

Still adjusting the jerkin and knife belt he'd just donned, Ingrey descended the staircase to meet his erstwhile lieutenant in the entry hall. Gesca lowered his voice to Ingrey's ear as the porter shuffled out the door to the kitchen, calling for his boy.

“You are to report to Earl Horseriver.” “Already? That was fast. What of my prisoner?”

Ingrey stiffened. “In whose name? Hetwar's or Horseriver's?”

“Hetwar's, and the archdivine's.”

“Do they plan to move her elsewhere?”

“No one has told me yet.”

Ingrey's eyes narrowed, studying the nervous lieutenant. “And

whom did you report to after Hetwar's meeting, last night?”

“Why should I have reported to anyone?”

With a casual step that fooled no one, Ingrey backed the man to the wall, leaning on his braced arm and turning to trap Gesca's gaze. “You may as well admit you went to Horseriver. If Wencel means me to serve him as I served Hetwar, I will be deep in his councils before long.”

Gesca's lips parted, but he only shook his head.

“No good, Gesca. I knew of your letters to him.” It was another shot in the almost-dark, but by the lieutenant's jerk, it hit the target.

“How did you-I thought there was no harm in it! He was Lord Hetwar's own ally! I just thought I was doing a favor for m'lord's

friend.”

“Suitably recompensed, one feels certain.”

“Well…I am not a rich man. And the earl is not a nip-purse.”

Gesca's brows drew down in new wariness. “How did you know? I'd swear you never saw.”

“By Wencel's so-timely arrival at Middletown. Among other things.”

“Oh.” Gesca's shoulders slumped, and he grimaced.

So was Gesca unhappy to have been lured into disloyalty to Hetwar, or merely unhappy to have been caught at it? “Slipping down the slope, are you? It makes a man as vulnerable to give favors as to take them. I seldom do either, therefore.” Ingrey smiled his most wolfish, the better to uphold the illusion of his invulnerability in Gesca's mind.

“Have I accused you yet?”

“That's not an answer. Not from you.”

“True.” Ingrey sighed. “If you were to confess yourself to Hetwar, instead of waiting for an accusation, you'd be more likely to earn a reprimand than a dismissal. Hetwar cares less for perfect honesty from his men, than that he understands precisely the limits of their guile. It's a comforting certainty of a kind, I suppose.”

“And what of your limits, then? What comfort does he find in them?”

“We keep each other alert.” Ingrey looked Gesca over. “Well, there could be worse wardens.”

“Aye, and worse-looking wards.”

Ingrey dropped his tone of edgy banter in favor of a much purer menace. “You will treat Lady Ijada with the strictest courtesy while she is in your charge, Gesca. Or the wrath of Hetwar, the Temple, Horseriver, and the gods combined will be the least of your worries.”

Gesca flinched under his glower. “Give over, Ingrey. I am no monster!”

“But I am,” Ingrey breathed. “Clear?”

Gesca scarcely dared inhale. “Very.”

“Good.” Ingrey stepped away, and though he had in fact not touched him, Gesca slumped like a man released from a throttling grip, patting his throat as if to probe for bruises. Or tooth marks.

Ingrey scuffed back upstairs to roust Tesko to pack his meager belongings again for transfer to Horseriver's mansion. He reviewed his last night's meeting with Hetwar and its probable effect, as filtered through Gesca's memory and wits, on Horseriver. As long as Ingrey was not so stupid as to pretend to conceal it from the earl, he doubted Horseriver would be much disturbed by the assignment to spy on him. And the earl would surely have gleaned from Gesca the fact that Ingrey had kept the darkest of his secrets. On the whole, Gesca's little betrayal of trust might prove more useful than not, Ingrey decided.

“Lady Ijada, if you please.”

Ijada shouldered past the woman into the little upstairs hall, her expression grave and questioning.

Ingrey ducked his head at her. “I am called away to Earl Horseriver's already. Gesca will be taking my place as your keeper, for a time.”

She brightened at the familiar name. “That's not so bad, then.”

“Perhaps. I'll try to come back and speak with you if I find, um, better understandings of things.”

She nodded. Her expression was more thoughtful than panicked, though what she was thinking, Ingrey could scarcely guess. She possessed no more answers than he did, but he admired her talent for finding very uncomfortable questions. He suspected he would be in want of it shortly.

He clasped her hands, in lieu of the good-bye kiss they could not make under watchful eyes. The strange current that seemed to flow between them still lingered, in that grip. “I will know if they move you.”

She nodded again, releasing him. “I'll be listening for you, too.”

He managed a ghost of a bow and tore himself away.

INGREY REPEATED HIS UPHILL WALK OF YESTERDAY THROUGH Kingstown, trailed this time by a puffing Tesko burdened with his belongings. Horseriver's porter was plainly expecting them, for they were shown at once to Ingrey's new room. It was no narrow servant's stall under the eaves, but a gracious chamber on the third floor appointed for highborn guests, with an alcove for Tesko. Leaving his servant to arrange his scant wardrobe, Ingrey left to explore the mansion. He wondered if Horseriver would expect him to clear the rest of his possessions from Hetwar's palace, and what the earl would construe if he did not.

“Lord Ingrey-is it?”

“Princess.” Ingrey essayed a sketchy salute, his hand to his heart recalling, but not quite completing, a sign of the Five.

She looked him over, frowning. “Biast told me last night you were to enter my husband's service.”

“And, ah…yours?”

“Yes. He told me that.” She glanced at her attendant. “Leave us. Leave open the door.” The woman rose, curtseyed, and slipped out past Ingrey; Fara beckoned him within.

She looked up at him in wary speculation as he came to the window. Her voice was low. “My brother said you would protect me.”

Keeping his tone neutral and equally quiet, Ingrey said, “Do you feel in need of protection?”

She made an uncertain gesture. “Biast said a dire suspicion has fallen upon Wencel. What do you think of it?”

“Can you not tell if it is so, lady?” She shook her head, not exactly in negation, and raised her long chin. “Can not you?”

Her thick black brows drew down in deeper unhappiness over this not-quite-answer. “No…yes. I don't know. He was strange from the start, but I thought him merely moody. I tried to lighten his spirit, and sometimes, sometimes it seemed to work, but always he fell back into his blackness again. I prayed to the Mother for guidance, and, and more-I tried to be a good wife, as the Temple teaches us.” Her voice quavered, but did not break. Her frown darkened. “Then he brought that girl in.”

“Lady Ijada? Did not you like her-at first?”

“Oh, at first-!” She gave an angry little shrug of her shoulders. “At first, I suppose. But Wencel…attended to her.”

“And what was her response to this regard of his? Did you tax her about it?”

“She pretended to laugh. I didn't laugh. I watched him, watching her-I had never seen him so much as look twice at another woman since we wed, or before for that matter, but he looked at her.”

Ingrey composed a question that would lead to Fara's version of the events at Boar's Head, though it scarcely seemed needful. No searing intellect here, no subtle guile, no eerie powers, just a hurt bewilderment. There seemed to be no uncanny tracks lingering upon her, either; Wencel did not choose to bespell his wife, it seemed. Why not?

But Fara's mind was circling in another direction. “Biast's accusation…” she murmured. Her gaze upon Ingrey sharpened. “It could be so, I suppose. I can tell nothing by looking at you, after all. If you really hide a wolf within, it is as invisible as any other man's sins. It would explain…much.” She drew breath, and demanded abruptly, “How did you get your dispensation?”

“If Wencel controls his beast so well that even I cannot tell he carries it, is that not proof enough to gain a like pardon?” she asked, a plaintive note leaking into her voice.

Ingrey moistened his lips. “You would have to ask the archdivine. It is no decision of mine.” Was Fara thinking in terms of protecting and preserving her husband? Could Wencel slip through a Temple examination such as the one that had vacillated so long over Ingrey's case? Horseriver had so much more to conceal, but also, it seemed, more power to bring to bear on the task. If he desired. Perhaps he would be driven, through the destruction of his old concealments now in progress, to attempt some such ploy.

In fact, one would think the task would claim all his attention. He pursues something else. Intently. What?

For whatever private reasons, Fara clearly found the accusation that Wencel possessed a spirit beast to be alarmingly believable, once presented to her imagination. She had the look of a woman fitting together some long-worked puzzle, the last pieces falling into place faster and faster. Frightened, yes, both of and for her husband, and for herself.

“Why not ask Wencel these questions yourself?” said Ingrey.

“He did not come to me last night.” She rubbed her face, and her eyes. The hard friction might be supposed to account for their reddening. “He doesn't, much, lately. Biast said to say nothing to him, but I do not know…”

“Wencel already knows he is privately accused. You would betray no one's secret by trying him.” She stared timidly at him. “Are you so much in his confidence already, then?”

Her hands wrung each other. “I shall be glad of you, then.”

That remains to be seen. Unfortunately, he could not very well express his low opinion of her betrayal of her handmaiden and simultaneously expect to cultivate her confidences. He stiffened, his senses attuned to an approaching presence even before the sound of a light step wafted from the corridor and a throat was cleared in the doorway.

“Lord Ingrey,” said Wencel, in a cordial voice. “They told me you had arrived.”

Ingrey made his little sketch bow. “My lord Horseriver.”

“I trust you have found your new chambers to your liking?”

“Yes, thank you. Tesko thinks we rise in the world.”

“So you might.” Wencel's gesture of greeting to his wife was unexceptionably polite. “Attend on me, if you please, Ingrey. Lady, pray excuse us.”

Fara's return nod was equally cool, only a slight rigidity of her body betraying her confusion of emotions.

Ingrey followed Wencel out and down two turnings of the halls to his study. Wencel pulled the door firmly shut behind them; Ingrey turned so as not to present his back to his host. Horseriver had certainly had time to prepare a magical attack, if he were so disposed. But the hairs on the back of Ingrey's neck stirred in vain, for Wencel merely waved him to a chair and hitched his hip over the edge of his writing table. He swung one leg and studied Ingrey through narrowed eyes.

“Hetwar released you most promptly,” Wencel observed. “Did Gesca tell you why?”

“Biast is most concerned for his sister. Fara dreams of saving you, I believe. How you came to deserve your wife's love, I cannot guess.”

“Nor can I.” Horseriver grimaced and spun one graying-blond ringlet, strayed to overhang his face, in his fingers in a gesture almost nervous. “I suspect her governesses allowed too much court poetry to rot her brain, before marriage. I have buried over a score of wives; I do not allow myself to become fond, these days. I can hardly explain what these women look like to me now. It is one of the subtler horrors of my present existence.”

“Like kissing a corpse?”

“Like being the corpse so kissed.”

“She seems not to know this.”

The earl shrugged. “For some notion now discarded-habit-I began this union intending to engender one more son, and for that, the body must be aroused somehow. Fortunately, this one is still young, and simple Wencel would have been quite pleased with his princess, I think.”

Did Horseriver allow that half-digested soul to surface, when feigning to make love to his bride? And how appallingly confusing for Fara, when the eager lost boy of the night gave way to the glacial stranger at breakfast…Could Horseriver call other faces to the fore, when dealing with other tasks? The princess might well spin herself dizzy, trying to follow such a progression of moods in her spouse.

Wencel had fallen into one of his forthcoming humors again, for whatever purpose. Ingrey decided to pursue the opportunity. “Why did you bring Lady Ijada into your household? Considering the consequences, that would seem to have been a mistake.”

Wencel grimaced. “Perhaps. In hindsight.” “Fara thought her intended for your new Horseriver broodmare.”

“If not that, then…for the Wounded Woods? And not merely Ijada's inheritance of the tract.” It went against Ingrey's habits to give away information, but in this case, it might prime the pump. “She told me of her dream of it.”

“Ah, yes,” said Wencel grimly. “So you do know about that, now. I wondered.”

“Did she tell you of it, too?”

“No. But I dreamed it with her, if from another angle of view. Since it was more than dream: it was event. Even acting as the gods' cat's-paw, she could not very well trouble my own waters without the ripples reaching me.” Wencel sighed. “She created me a very great puzzle thereby. I brought her into my household to observe her, but I could discover nothing unusual. If the gods intended her for bait, I declined to bite. She had undoubtedly become bound into the spell during her night camping at Holytree, but she remained as sightless and powerless as any other ignorant girl.”

“Until Boar's Head.”

“Indeed.”

“Did the gods intend all of this? Boleso's death as well?”

Wencel drew a long, thoughtful inhalation. “Resisting the gods somewhat resembles playing a game of castles and riders with an opponent who can always see several moves ahead of you. But even the gods cannot see infinitely far ahead. Our free wills cloud Their vision, even though Their eyes are more piercing than ours. The gods do not plan, so much as take advantage.”

“Why then did you send me to kill her? Mere prudence?” Ingrey kept his tone casual, as if the answer were of only scholarly interest to him. “Hardly mere. Once she had slain Boleso, she was most assuredly bound for the gallows. If there is a more perfect symbolic representation of an Old Weald courier sacrifice than to hang an innocent virgin by a sacred cord from a tree, with divines singing blessings about her, I cannot think of it. Death opens a gate to the gods. Her death in that mode would have opened Holytree wide, barricaded against Them as it has been these four centuries.”

Wencel merely shrugged, and made to slip off his perch and turn away.

“Unless”-Ingrey's mind leapt ahead-“there was more to that geas than murder.”

Wencel turned back. His face bore that deeply ironic look that masked irritation, which Ingrey took as a sign that his digging was striking something worthwhile. “It would have bound her murdered soul to yours in a haunting, until it faded into nothingness. Keeping her, and her link to Holytree, beyond the reach of the gods. It was a variant of an old, old spell, and I spent far too much blood on it; but I was hurried.”

“Charming.” Ingrey failed to keep the snarl out of his voice now. “Murder and sundering both.”

Wencel turned his palms out in a What would you? gesture. “Worse: a redundancy. For her leopard spirit would have done the same. If I had known of it. That move, I must concede to my Opponents. I still do not know if we were counterblocking each other to stalemate, or were all victims of Boleso's idiocy, or if more lies hidden beyond.” He hesitated. “For the haunting to be effected without the murder first was not in my plans. But it happened. Didn't it.” Wencel's eyes were cool upon Ingrey now, and it came to him that he was not the only man digging, here. Wait, was Horseriver saying that the current of awareness between Ingrey and Ijada was his doing?

At Ingrey's sudden silence, he added kindly, “Did you imagine you had fallen in love with her, cousin? Or she with you? Alas that I must shatter that idyllic illusion. Truly, I would have thought you-though perhaps not her-harder-headed.”

Wencel did not look entirely convinced of Ingrey's placidity, in the face of this, but he did not pursue the issue. “In truth, I have scarcely had time to consider the possibilities.”

“Inventing as you go, are you?”

“Yes, I am quite godlike in that way, if no other. Perhaps I shall give you a horse.”

“Hetwar spared me that expense. I rode his nags at need, and he fed them whether they were needed or not.”

“Oh, the beast would be stabled at my expense. It would uphold the distinction of my house to mount you properly.”

Ingrey was put instantly in mind of Horseriver's last wife-mother's death in her so-called riding accident, but he said merely, “Thank you, then, my lord.”

“Be at your leisure this morning. Plan to attend on me when I go out, later.”

“I am at your disposal, cousin.”

Wencel's mouth quirked in mockery. “I trust so.”

Ingrey took this for a sufficient dismissal and retreated from the study.

Nor I. Yet. Ingrey shook his head. He had much to think upon, in the next hours.