The Hallowed Hunt

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

BY THE TIME THE MOON WAS HIGH, THE LATHERED HORSES were flagging. They were miles beyond the point at which a royal courier would have stopped to change mounts, and Ingrey was beginning to wonder if Horseriver planned for them to ride the animals to death, when the earl finally allowed his big chestnut to drop to a weary walk. After a few more minutes, he pointed and led them off the road toward a farmhouse set alone in the trees toward the river. A lantern hung from its porch rafters, burning faint and red in the moon-blue dark.

Three horses were waiting, tied to the railing. As they dismounted a Horseriver groom scrambled up from a bedroll and set about transferring the tack. Horseriver allowed only enough time for Ingrey and Fara to consume some cheese wrapped in bread, swallow some ale, and visit the privy behind the house before mounting and taking to the road again. Fara was pale and strained, but the hallow king's will held her to her grim task of clinging to her fresh horse and galloping once more. Even Ingrey was swaying in his saddle by the time they stopped again, at another old thatched farmhouse just over a hill from the main river road. They had passed no other riders in the deep night, and had swung quietly around the walled villages lying farther and farther apart up the narrowing Stork. Fara fairly fell out of her saddle into her husband's arms.

“It is just as well. Even you and I could not ride straight through without stopping. We'll take a rest here.”

An arranged rest, clearly, for a daunted-looking farm girl appeared to take Fara in charge and lead her into the house. The earl followed another Horseriver groom, obviously stationed here for this duty, as he led the horses around behind the rambling house to a rickety shed. Wencel looked over the waiting remounts and grunted satisfaction. No farm nags, these, but more horses sent ahead from the earl's own stables.

This flight was well planned, it seemed. Pursuers might inquire at roadside inns and other public liveries where men in a hurry could rent remounts, yet find no trace of them, no witnesses, no abandoned horses. To stop and inquire at every farmhouse along the Stork between Easthome and the northern border would waste precious time, even for men with such resources as the prince-marshal and Hetwar. And they would have half a dozen other roads away from Easthome in all directions to search, as well.

To what degree can I resist this kingly geas? Ingrey wondered, in a sort of melted desperation. If he could but once gather the will and wits, that is. Would escape from the range of Wencel's voice break this false calm in which he seemed to float, would the trance falter if Wencel's attention was divided? Ingrey felt as hungry for that royal regard as a dog desiring a bone from its master or a boy a smile from his father. The dogged fawning merely made him grit his teeth, but that Horseriver should so casually pilfer a filial loyalty Lord Ingalef had never lived to enjoy sent a vein of molten rage through Ingrey's heart. Still he found himself creeping after his lord like a cold tired child huddling to a hearth.

“It is beautiful, my lord,” Ingrey said, nodding to the light-frosted view.

Wencel's lips twitched in an odd little grimace. “I have seen enough moonsets.” He added after a moment, “Enjoy it while you can.”

A disturbingly ambiguous remark, Ingrey thought. “Why do we gallop? What foe do we outrace? Pursuit from Easthome?”

“That as well.” Wencel stretched his back. “Time is not my friend. Thanks to the Stagthorne kin's shrewd habit of electing their sons hallow kings in their fathers' lifetimes, it has been more than a hundred and twenty years since the last interregnum. The effort of creating another such gap seems overwhelming to me, just now. I shall seize this one.” His lips drew back. “Or die trying does not apply.”

So, Hetwar's suspicions seemed sustained; Horseriver did covet the election, and had been manipulating the ordainers. And possibly the lives and deaths of potential rival candidates, as well? “Is this all to make yourself hallow king again, then?”

Horseriver snorted. “I am hallow king. I need no further making.”

He had needed something, however; some missing piece, spun off from the old Stagthorne king's departing soul. Some…half magic, or fragment of the Weald: but surely not political in its nature. “Hallow king in name and form, then. Publicly elected and acclaimed.” “If I had desired the name of king of this benighted land, I could have taken it years ago, Ingrey,” Horseriver said mildly. “In a better body, too.”

“If you don't want to win the election for yourself, what do you want?”

“To delay it.”

Ingrey blinked grimy eyes. “Will this flight do that?”

“Well enough. The absence of one earl-ordainer”-Horseriver touched his chest-“alone would not be enough, but Biast will be distracted by Fara's disappearance on the eve of her father's funeral, once he discovers it. I have planted a few other disruptions. The multiple proxies I left for different candidates should be good for several days of argument all by themselves, when they surface.” He grinned briefly and not especially humorously.

Ingrey hardly knew what to reply to that, although the term interregnum seemed to rumble in his mind, fraught with elusive weight. Through the mellow glow of his embezzled fealty, he gleaned his wits, and asked, “What was the stag for?”

“What, hadn't you guessed?”

“I thought you meant to invest it in Fara, to make her a spirit warrior, or to carry something away from her father. But then you chose the mare.”

“When playing against the gods, sudden unexpected ploys sometimes work better than deep-laid plans. Even They cannot block every chance. The stag was a great beast in the making; four stag-lives it has accumulated since I began it. But the hallow king's death fell before the stag was ready. I don't know if They hastened the one or delayed the other.”

“Someone. I had not yet decided whom. Were it not for securing you instead, I would have had to chance the unripe beast. Your wolf is surer, despite being less, ah, tame. Stronger. Better.”

Ingrey declined to wag his tail at this pat, though it took effort. Better for whom? His exhausted mind struggled to put the pieces together. A shaman, a banner-carrier, a hallow king, and the sacred ground of Holytree. And blood, no doubt. There had to be blood in there somewhere. Assemble them and achieve…what? No mere material purpose, surely. What was Wencel about, that the gods themselves should struggle to invade the world of matter to oppose it? What could Wencel aspire to beyond his bedazzling kingship?

What was greater than a king? Had Wencel's aspirations outgrown matter altogether? Four had become Five once, in the legendary past; could Five become Six?

“What do you plan to make of yourself, then? A god, or demigod?”

Wencel choked on his wine. “Ah, youth! So ambitious! And you yourself have seen a god, you claim. Go to bed, Ingrey. You're driveling.”

“What, then?” Ingrey asked stubbornly, although he did press himself to his feet.

“I told you what I wanted. You have forgotten.”

I want my world back, Wencel had cried in fierce despair into Ingrey's face. He had not forgotten, and wasn't sure he could if he tried. “No. But it cannot be had.”

“Just so. Go to bed. We ride at midmorning.”

Ingrey staggered into the farmhouse to find the cot that had been prepared for him, then lay staring upward in the dark despite his weariness. Surely his thrall to Horseriver was not absolute, or it would not chafe him so. Wencel's glamour sat ill upon his crooked shoulders, like a king's gilded armor, made in the flush of his youth, put upon a wizened old man. A dissonance between the man and his kingship that even Ingrey could sense whispered through the fissures.

His own present duties, to penetrate Horseriver's secrets and to defend Fara, both glued him to Horseriver's side perforce. Perhaps an effort to escape was premature. Better to lull his captor, watch, and wait his chance? Trust in the pursuit that his reason and private knowledge told him must follow? Pray?

He hadn't prayed before bed in his adult life. But sleep gave dreams and in dreams, gods sometimes walked. And talked. His dreams were no garden for Them to stroll in, as Hallana's were said to be, but in this remnant of night he prayed to be possessed.

BUT WHATEVER INGREY DREAMED VANISHED UPON AWAKENING. He shot up with a start when the groom shook his shoulder. Washbasin, food, and drink were thrust at him; Wencel had them on the road again within half the turning of a glass.

The rising land grew ever more rural and remote. There were other people and beasts on the road now in the broad day: farm wagons, pack trains, slower riders, sheep, cows, pigs. Wencel's gallop of last night gave way to a less conspicuous canter, alternated with trotting and walking where the road grew steep or, increasingly, bad. Nonetheless it was apparent that the pace was finely calculated to wring the maximum distance from their mounts in the minimum time. An hour after noon, another aging farmhouse yielded up another meal and change of horses.

Given the effect that Wencel's kingship had on him, it occurred to Ingrey to wonder what it would do to women. He watched Fara's response to Wencel, seeking his female mirror. She was dazzled, even astonished, when her eyes rested on her transformed husband, her lips parting in unconscious desire. But not happy. She already possessed what other women might vainly aspire to, and yet…not. Wencel's gaze in return offered nothing but cool evaluation, as though she were a mount of dubious soundness somehow foisted upon him, and she flinched under the disdain. Fara might not be brilliant or brave, but neither was she safe to betray. She had resisted Wencel's perceived infidelity before, if to disastrous consequence. Was she as entirely his chattel as he seemed to think?

Was Ingrey? Ingrey sought inward. His wolf and he were no longer divisible in this life, but it seemed to him that the uncanny part of himself was more fully and fawningly under Horseriver's spell than the rational. The part of him that thought in words remained more free. He had chained his wolf once, when he'd been younger and more frightened and bewildered than this. If the hallow king had leashed his wolf, did he truly control all there was of Ingrey?

He seeks speed. To resist, I should seek delay.

Horseriver slowed them to a walk again, looking leftward. At length, he turned toward the river upon a lesser road, and the horses slithered down a long bank through a thin screen of pine trees. Dirt gave way to stones; they faced not a rickety rural bridge, but a ford across the upper Stork. The Raven Range gave forth steady and abundant springs. The water here was not in so muddy a spate as the ford at which Boleso's cortege had so nearly come to grief, but the river was wide and deep despite the recent drought in this region that put a dusty autumn haze in the blue air.

Both horses stumbled, and Fara's went down. Ingrey had already kicked his feet free of his stirrups. He lunged out of his saddle, slid over the flanks of her plunging horse, and made a valiant grab for the princess.

She'd kept a grasp on one stirrup. Her wallowing mount might well have towed her to the far bank, but Ingrey's grip and weight yanked her away. She gave a brief cry ending in a gurgle as her head went under. Horseriver whipped around in time to see Ingrey trying to pull her back to the surface as they both were swept downstream.

“Stay!” the earl cried. Ingrey jerked in response, but though that uncanny voice might command man or beast, it had no effect on the heavy current. The water was chill but not bitterly so, and this time, Ingrey managed to avoid clouting his head on a boulder. But this time, he also discovered immediately, his partner could in truth not swim. He renewed his grip on the flailing woman and gasped as he in turn went under, and his struggle for breath grew as unfeigned as hers.

He still managed to push them back into the swiftest current three times, as his longer legs dragged the gravel, until at last the stream broadened and slowed in a pool so shallow that even Fara's feet could touch bottom. Sliding and floundering, they waded to shore.

Ingrey scanned the bank. They had passed some mighty tangles of brush, a stretch of high and rocky overhangs that had constricted the waters into a frighteningly speedy chute, and now, a clot of young willows growing thickly along the farther shore. Wencel, especially if he'd stopped to secure their abandoned mounts, would not soon catch up with them. Ingrey had a very clear idea of just how much delay such a sopping mishap might cause, and hoped to extend it even further.

It was not in Ingrey's present interests to clarify this. “My duty, my lady. And my fault-my horse stumbled into yours.”

“I thought I-I thought we were both going to drown.”

So did I. “No, my lady.”

“Did we…” she hesitated, turning her dark eyes up at him. “Did we escape?”

Ingrey took a long breath, and let it out slowly. Distance from the hallow king was, as he'd hoped, sobering-but not enough. The unwanted sense of Wencel that had replaced his link with Ijada was still present, body deep. The earl was urgent, somewhere upstream. But not panicked. “I don't think so. But we may be able to delay.”

“To what end?”

“We must be followed. You must be followed. Maybe more quickly than Wencel thinks. Biast will be frantic on your behalf.” The earl might have pictured them not being missed till the next day, but Ijada would have known instantly. Would she have thought him killed? Would she have been able to communicate with anyone? Lewko, Hallana? Would Gesca have listened to her pleas to seek them, late last night? Once faintly guilty for intimidating Gesca on her behalf, Ingrey was now sorry he had not terrorized the lieutenant more. Five gods help her. And us.

And if They are as interested as They seemed, where are They now, curse Them?

Fara stood shivering in a patch of sunlight, her heavy sodden garments clinging to her solid form, hair knocked loose from its braiding tailing in wet, miserable strands down her face. Ingrey was in little better case, wet leathers squeaking irritatingly as he moved. He stepped apart, drew his blades, and made a futile effort to wipe them dry.

“Holytree, that was. Bloodfield. The Wounded Woods that are.”

“Ijada's woods? Her dower land?” She stared in astonishment. “Is this for her, somehow?”

“The other way around. It is the Woods that Wencel desires, not their heiress. They are old, old and accursed.”

Fara's face pinched in, half-reassured, half-more alarmed. “Why? Why did he drag me from Papa's deathbed, what evil thing does he intend? Why did he defile me with this, this…” She turned in a circle, clawing at her breast as if she could so dig out her unwanted haunt.

Ingrey caught her clay-cold hands and held them. “Stop, lady. I do not know why you are wanted. Ijada thought I was destined to cleanse the ghosts of the Woods of their spirit animals, as I did for Prince Boleso. If this is what Wencel wants of me, I don't know why he doesn't just say so; it seems no improper charge.”

She looked up at him eagerly. “Can you take this horrible animal thing out of me, as well? As you did for my brother? Now?”

“Not while you live. The Old Weald shamans cleansed their comrades' souls only after death, it appears.”

“Then you had best outlive me,” she said slowly.

“I don't know. I don't know what will happen.”

Her face grew stonier. She grated, “I could make certain of it.”

“No, lady!” His grip tightened. “We are not in such dire straits yet, though I will swear to you if you wish that I will try, if our deaths fall out that way.”

She gripped him back, looking disturbingly possessive for an instant. “Perhaps. Perhaps.” She released him and wrapped her arms around her torso, shoulders hunching.

“Then you could not cleanse Wencel, alive, either,” she continued, brows pinching in worry.

“Wencel, well, Wencel is not just infested with a simple spirit horse like yours. He is…possessed, I suppose is as good a word as any, by a spirit, a soul, a concatenation…he claims, anyway, to be the sundered ghost of the last hallow king of the Old Weald.” More than claims. “Kept alive whether he will or nil by a great spell based in Bloodfield.”

Her voice went hushed. “Do you think he has gone mad?”

“Yes.” He added reluctantly, “But he's not lying. Not about that.”

Fara stared at him for a long, long moment. He almost expected her to ask, Do you think you have gone mad? to which Ingrey did not know the answer, but instead she said, “I felt it when he changed. He changed last night, when Papa died.”

“Yes. He reclaimed his kingship, or some missing part of it. Now he is…well, I'm not sure what he is. But he races time.”

She shook her head. “Wencel always ignored time. He was maddening, that way.”

“This thing in Wencel's body isn't really Wencel. I have to keep remembering that.”

She rubbed her temples.

“Is your head bothering you?” Ingrey asked cautiously.

“No. It's very strange.”

How should they delay further? Split up, so as to take longer to find? A clever notion; he could get back in the water, which was immune to the hallow king's glamour, and let it carry him downstream for miles until Wencel overtook him. Ingrey tried to remember if they'd passed any waterfalls coming up. But no. He could not leave this woman alone, shivering in the wilderness, waiting for the uncanny chimera she'd married to find her. “Prince-marshal Biast commanded me to guard you. We cannot separate.”

“Wencel will search first along the banks. Let us at least go a little more into the woods.”

It would not be enough to elude Horseriver altogether; he could already feel the tug of their tie, growing tighter. But truth to tell, he was becoming wildly curious about Bloodfield. He wanted to see it, needed to see it. And the straightest way was to let Horseriver take him there. But not too swiftly. Wencel might have had all he required in Ingrey and Fara, but Ingrey didn't think he had all he needed. I need Ijada. I'm sure of it. Did Horseriver know it, to separate them so? Trust in the gods, They will supply? Hardly. He wondered suddenly if it was as hard for the gods to have faith in Ingrey as it was for him to have faith in Them, and a weird wild urge to show Them how it should be done swept him for a moment.

Whatever fey look had possessed him made Fara step back. “I will follow you,” she said faintly.

They turned to scramble into the brush. Over rotting logs, up past the high-water mark of a second stony bank, into deeper shade. Out across a sunny meadow high with purple thistles and prickling weeds that laid a dotted trail of burrs on their damp clothes. Through scratching brambles into more shade, laced with fine spiderwebs that caught across their mouths. The hike did some good, he thought, if only to render them drier by the exercise.

But the crashing of a large animal sounded through the woods soon enough. There was nothing in this waste more dangerous than what sought them already, but it need not be more dangerous to be dangerous enough. Ingrey froze, hand on his hilt, and Fara cowered near him, until Horseriver's mount emerged from the blinking shadows, snorting displeasure at the clutching undergrowth that scraped its hide.

“Thank you, Lord Ingrey,” Wencel said, riding up.

“Sire.”

“My horse stumbled,” said Fara, unasked. “I almost drowned. Lord Ingrey held me up.”

Ingrey did not bother correcting that to I clambered on top of Lord Ingrey. A matter of viewpoint, he decided. His had been largely underwater.

“Aye, I saw,” said Wencel

Not all, or you wouldn't be thanking me so sincerely.

Wencel's look at Ingrey was searching but not unduly suspicious.

“Get her up,” said Wencel, holding out his hand, and Ingrey cupped his hands for the princess's muddy foot and boosted her up behind her husband. He took up station after the horse, to let it trample down the trail and rake off the spiderwebs, and followed Wencel wearily back upstream.

It took upwards of an hour for them to find the road again, and then they turned back eastward for more than half a mile to the river where Wencel had left their horses tied. There, to Ingrey's silent satisfaction, they found that Fara's horse had strained a tendon in its fall. Wencel pulled its tack off and turned it loose, had Ingrey lash the spare gear behind his own mount's saddle, heaved Fara up behind him once more, and led off west at a much slower pace.

Four hours lost at least, perhaps more by the time they dragged in to their next stop. Not enough. It's a start.

Ingrey had added another two hours to his tally by the time they turned off the back road to a grubby and impoverished little settlement scarcely meriting the name of hamlet. A rotting timber palisade provided bare defense from wild beasts and none from evil men. The sun was setting; Horseriver frowned at its yellow glint through the trees.

Wencel was indifferent to a set of surroundings that made Fara recoil. She was so unnerved by the slatternly sallow woman with no teeth and a near-unintelligible dialect, drafted to serve her, that she made Ingrey act her maid instead. He himself ended up sleeping on a blanket across her doorway, screened with only a tattered curtain, which she took for courtly devotion; Ingrey didn't explain that it was excuse to avoid the infested straw pallet he'd been offered. If Wencel slept, Ingrey did not see where.

DESPITE THE POOR AND IMPROVISED BEDDING, BOTH HE AND Fara rose late the following morning, drained by exhaustion of both body and heart. Without haste, but without undue delay, Wencel led them once more onto the rural road, in places hardly more than a track, which skirted the Raven Range now rising to their right.

The Ravens were rugged but not high; no snow, either early or late, clung to their green-and-brown heights, though here and there some sheer fall of rock, gleaming in the sun, gave the illusion of ice. Their deep folds were rucked up like a blanket, cut with sharp ravines and secret places. Autumn had turned their summer verdure to gold, brown, and in places splashes of scarlet like sword cuts, laced in turn by the dark green of pines and firs. Beyond the first line of slopes, seen through an occasional gap, the humped ranks swiftly receded into a hazy blue distance that blended imperceptibly with the horizon, as though these hills marched to some boundless otherworld.

Ingrey wondered how in five gods' names Great Audar had ever dragged an army through here, at speed. His respect for the old Darthacan grew despite all. Even though Audar had lacked the uncanny charisma of the hallow kings he opposed, his leadership must have been impassioned.

For a little while, they joined a larger road until they crossed the river by the stone bridge just above the town. Under the arches, lashings of timber and some barrels moved down the rocky stream, attended by nimble men and boys with poles. They passed carts, trudging husbandmen with their beasts, pack trains of mules. Horseriver hurried them along here without pausing, turning upstream, ignoring a main crossroad, then once more striking west into the woodlands on a lesser track.

Horseriver marked the course of the sun and picked up the pace for a while, but as the track dwindled was forced to a more careful progress. The horses labored up and slid down the steepening slopes. More up than down, and finally they turned right onto a faint trail, heaved up a short slope, and descended into a hidden dell.

No hamlet or farmhouse awaited here, but a mere campsite. A pair of grooms jumped up as they approached and ran to take the horses. The usual three remounts were picketed among the trees: sturdy cobs, this time, rather than the long-striding hot-blooded coursers Horseriver had favored for the roads. Fara, exhausted, dismounted slowly and stiffly and stared in dismay at her next proposed abode, bedrolls sheltered in a stand of fir trees, less even than last night's dire hovel. If she had ever camped before on royal hunts, Ingrey was fairly sure her days had ended in silken pavilions attended by cooing handmaidens and all possible comforts. Here, every other consideration was clearly sacrificed to speed and efficiency. We travel light now, and will not be here long.

The man signed himself in respect, ducking his head. “Yes, my lord.”

“Fetch it out.”

“Aye, my lord.”

Leaving the tired horses to his younger companion, the bowlegged groom trudged to the campsite and bent over a pile of packs. Horseriver, Fara, and Ingrey followed. The groom rose clutching a pole some seven feet long, wrapped about with ancient, brittle canvas tied with twine. Horseriver sighed in satisfaction as he took it, his hands wrapping about the canvas binding, and swung it upright, planting the butt by his boot. Briefly, he leaned his forehead against it and squeezed his eyes shut.

Ingrey led the weary Fara to one of the bedrolls and made sure she was able to sit down without falling. She stared up through shadowed eyes as he turned back to Horseriver. The groom trod away again to assist with the horse lines.

“What is that, sire?” Ingrey asked, nodding to the pole. It made his hairs stir, whatever it was.

Horseriver half grinned, though without mirth. “The true king must have his hallowed banner, Ingrey.”

“That's not the royal banner you had at Bloodfield, surely.”

“No, that one was broken and cut to shreds and buried with me. This is the one I carried when I last was king in name, if only to the remnant of the faithful kin who followed me, when I raided Audar's garrisons from across the fen borders. It was wrapped after my last death in battle and put away; and later delivered, it was thought, to my son and heir. Little comfort it brought me, but I was glad to have it nonetheless. I hid it in the rafters at Castle Horseriver. For three hundred years it has lain up there, preserved against some better day. Instead, it comes down to this day. But it comes.”

Horseriver licked his lips in something like satisfaction. “Good, my wise wolfling. Being so shrewd, have you realized yet what the other function of a banner-carrier was?”

“Eh?” said Ingrey. When Wencel wasn't deceiving him or terrorizing him, the earl also did a very good job of making him feel a fool, he reflected glumly.

“And yet you cleansed Boleso, no small task,” Horseriver mused. “I do weary of trying to herd your wits, but last time pays for all.” He glanced aside at Fara, as if to be certain she was listening, which caught Ingrey's attention, for Wencel had avoided looking at her or speaking to her beyond the most direct commands.

“The banner-carriers slit the throats of their comrades too wounded to carry from the field, you said,” Ingrey put in. A ghastly enough duty, but Ingrey was suddenly sure there was more. Ghastly, ghostly, wait…

Horseriver took a breath. “Put it together. The soul of a slain spirit warrior had to be cleansed of its life-companion before it might go to the gods. But a warrior was likely to fall in battle, when there was not time for proper rites or sometimes even the chance to carry the body away. For when even the wounded must be abandoned, the dead fare no better. Nothing of spirit can exist in the world of matter without a being of matter to support it, I know you have been taught this orthodoxy. That a warrior's soul might not drift as a sundered revenant and be lost, it was the banner-carrier's task to bind it to him or her as a haunt, and carry it away to where it might at length be cleansed by his true kin shaman. Or whatever shaman might be had, in a pinch.” “Five gods,” whispered Ingrey. “No wonder the bannermen were desperately defended by their comrades.” And had Wencel's binding of Ijada to him been some variant of this ancient practice?

“Now, the hallow king's bannerman…” Horseriver trailed off. He straightened his shoulders and began again. “He had this same duty to his lord's soul, should the hallow king bear a kin beast. Not all elected kings were so graced, though many were, especially in unsettled times. But whether his lord were spirit warrior or no, the hallow king's banner-carrier had another sacred task, and not only when his lord died in a battle going ill. Though you may take it that if the hallow king was slain on the field, that battle was generally going quite ill indeed. Water.” Wencel licked dry lips, and stared into his lap, his back curving again.

Ingrey glanced to the pile of packs, spotted a flaccid waterskin, and brought it to the tale-teller. Wencel tilted his head back and drank deep, indifferent to the musty staleness of it. He then sighed and propped himself on one hand, as though the burden of this telling was slowly driving him into the earth.

“It was the royal banner-carrier's duty, upon the death of his lord, to capture and hold the hallow kingship itself, until time to transfer it back to the ordained heir. And so this greatest of native Wealding magics was passed down from generation to generation, from times lost in time until…now.”

“Lord Stagthorne-the late king-had no banner-carrier when he died, day before yesterday,” Ingrey observed suddenly. “Was this your doing?”

“One of several necessary yet not sufficient arrangements, yes,” murmured Wencel. “If true interregnums were easy to come by, more would have occurred by chance ere now, I assure you. Or by design.”

He grimaced and drew breath, continuing: “The royal banner-carrier, by tradition and profound necessity, had several qualities. He-or she”-his glance at Fara sharpened-“was usually of the same kin, close-tied by shared high blood, though not always the heir. Chosen by the king, bound to the task by the royal shaman-the king himself if he was one-acclaimed by the spirit warriors assembled in the kin meeting. And so we have all here that is needed to make another such, if in miniature. Though ceremony, likewise, shall be lacking. Not in song but in silence, shall the last royal banner-carrier of the Old Weald ride at her beloved lord's side.” His side glance at Fara was blackly ironic.

“To what purpose?” whispered Ingrey. For he does not tutor us for no reason, of that I am certain. Horseriver had been instructing him for days, he realized in retrospect.

Wencel crouched, hesitated, pushed himself up with a pained grunt. He turned his head and spat a gobbet of blood into the gloom. The iron tang smote Ingrey's nostrils. The earl stared into the gathering twilight where the grooms had finished with the horses and were diffidently approaching. “We must have a fire. And food, I suppose. I hope they brought enough. Purpose? You'll see soon enough.”

“Should I expect to survive it?” Ingrey glanced at Fara. Either of us?

Wencel's lips curved, briefly. “You may.” He walked off into the resin-scented shadows.

Ingrey wasn't sure if that last was meant as prediction or permission.

INGREY WAS AWAKENED IN THE DARK BEFORE DAWN BY HORSERIVER himself, tossing wood on the fire to build it up to a bright flare. They had all slept in yesterday's riding clothes, and the grooms, it seemed, were to be left to break camp and ride the spent horses home. So there was little for Ingrey or Fara to do to prepare beyond sitting up, pulling on their boots, and eating the stale bread, cheese, and blessedly hot drinks shoved into their hands.

Through the night fog that had risen from the forest, creating a dripping hush, gray light began to filter. Fara shivered in the cold and damp as Ingrey boosted her aboard her horse, a sturdy little black with a hogged mane and white socks. Horseriver disposed his banner pole rather awkwardly along his horse's off side, tied beneath the stirrup flap to ride under his leg. He mounted and motioned them forward with a wave of his arm: as he had promised, in silence. Ingrey glanced back at the grooms. The elder stood at attention, looking worried; the younger was already climbing back into an abandoned bedroll to steal some extra warmth and sleep.

Horseriver led them up into a gap in the hills, first on a trail, then on a path, then on deer paths. Ingrey, bringing up the rear, ducked swinging branches. Gray twigs scraped on his leathers like clawing fingernails as the way narrowed. The horses' hooves crunched through the fallen leaves, and slid, sometimes, on last year's black rot beneath the drifts, sending up a musty dank smell.

The brightening day drew up the soft curtain of mist, and the boles of the beeches stood out in sharp relief at last, as though the fog had clotted into firm gray bark. Then, beneath the pale blue bowl of sky, it grew hot. Biting black flies found the riders and their mounts, so that to the heave and plunge of the horses over the uneven terrain was added the occasional squeal and buck as the insects tormented them. When Horseriver led them into a ravine that ended in a cleft, with no way out but back the way they'd climbed in, Ingrey grew aware that however well Horseriver had known this land once, it had changed even beyond his recognition. How long…? They backtracked and scrambled up an opposite ridge instead.

We are in Ijada's country, Ingrey realized. He was not sure at what point they had crossed into her dower gift: possibly as far back as the campsite. The scene took on a sudden new interest, and he was almost prepared to forgive even the black flies. Broad lands did not precisely convey their mood, though if they could be rolled out flat, Ingrey thought, they would equal a small earldom. Instead they were crimped into something difficult, stony, and wild; beauty that arrested rather than soothed. Yes, that is Ijada.

He felt in his mind for her absence, like a tongue probing the wounded socket of a drawn tooth. All he could find was the hot infection of Horseriver. Alone together, this taciturn royal procession of three seemed to him. Godsforsaken.

The sun was sinking toward the western horizon when they clambered up through another gap, angled left, and came out upon a sudden promontory. They pulled up their horses and stared.

Two steep-sided, undulating ridges embraced a valley about two miles wide and four miles long, then curved around again to enclose the far end like a wall. The valley floor was as flat as the surface of a lake. On the near end, beneath their feet, lay a stretch of dun grasses and yellowing reeds, a half-dried marsh. Beyond it, a few twisted oak trees stood out like sentinels, then a dark and dense oak wood crouched. Even with half the leaves down, backlit by the setting sun, its shadows were impenetrable to Ingrey's eye. His head jerked back at the miasma of woe that seemed, even from here, to arise from the trees.

“Feel it, do you?” the earl inquired, as if lightly.

“Aye.” What? What do I feel? If Ingrey had possessed a back ridge, all the fur along it would be rising in a ragged line right now, he thought.

Horseriver dismounted and untied his banner pole from under his saddle flap. He stared briefly and without pleasure at his wife for a moment; Fara stared back wide-eyed, her shoulders bowing in, then dropped her gaze and shuddered. Horseriver shook his head in something that, had it more heart, would have been disgust, and strolled over and handed the pole to Ingrey.

“Bear this for a time. I don't want it dropped.”

Ingrey's left stirrup included the small metal cup of a spear rest. He swung the pole up and seated it, and took up his reins with his right hand. His horse was far too tired by now to give him trouble. Horseriver remounted, swung his animal around, and motioned for them to follow.

They descended from the promontory in a zigzag through a thinning woods. At the bottom, Ingrey was compelled to dismount, hand the banner back to Horseriver, draw his sword, and hack a path for them all through a head-high hedge of brittle brambles that seemed not just thorny, but fanged. A few whipping backlashes pierced even his leathers, and the punctures and scratches bled flying drops as he fought his way in. On the other side, at the edge of the dried marsh, Horseriver dismounted again and unwrapped his banner at last.

The desiccated twine parted with faint puffs of powder as his knife touched it, and the brittle canvas cracked away. A discolored nettle-silk banner unfolded, bearing the device of his house, the running white stallion on a green field above three wavy blue lines; in the fading light, more gray stallion above gray lines on a gray field, disappearing into a fog. This time, he made Fara take it. He murmured words Ingrey could barely hear and still less understand, but Ingrey sensed it when a new, dark current sprang up between the two. The silent-silenced -Fara's backbone stiffened as though braced, and her chin came up; only in her eyes did pools of muted terror lurk.

They approached the outlying oak tree, and the name of Wounded Woods seemed doubly earned to Ingrey. The tree was huge and old, but seemed blighted. The leaves still clinging to its withered branches were not crisp, brown, fluted curls, but limp, blackened, and misshapen. Trunk and branches seemed knotted and twisted far beyond the rule for oaks-wrung like rags-and tumorous burls wept sickly black ooze.

A warrior stepped from the tree. Not from under it, or beside it, or behind it: he stepped from the trunk itself as though passing through a curtain. His boiled leather armor was rotten with age. From the haft of his spear, upon which he leaned as though it was an old man's staff, an unidentifiable scrap of animal fur fluttered. His blond beard was crusted with dried blood, and he still bore the wounds of his death; an ear hacked away, ax gashes splitting the armor, a dismembered hand tied to his belt with a bit of rag. A badger pelt was attached by its skull to his rusty iron cap, peering through sightless dried eyes, and the black-and-white fur dangled down the back of his neck as he turned to slowly scrutinize each of the three before him.

Ingrey grew aware only then that sometime during the passage of the marsh they had stepped from the world he knew into another, where such sights were possible; its congruence with the world of matter filling his fleshly eyes was but a feint. Fara, too, was drawn into this vision; her body remained rigidly upright, her face blank, but from the corners of her eyes a faint gleam of moisture trickled downward. Ingrey decided not to draw Horseriver's attention to this, lest he subtract her tears as well as her voice.

Horseriver's face could have been a carved wooden mask, but his eyes were like a night without end. “Aye,” he breathed.