The Hallowed Hunt

CHAPTER SIX

INGREY WOKE FEVERISH FROM DIMLY REMEMBERED NIGHTMARES. He blinked in the level light coming through the dormer window in the tiny, but private, chamber high up in the eaves of his inn. Dawn. Time to move.

Movement unleashed pain in every strained and sprained muscle he possessed, which seemed to be most of them, and he hastily abandoned his attempt to sit up. But lying back did not bring relief. He gingerly turned his head, his neck on fire, and eyed the trap of crockery he'd set on the floor by his door. The teetering pile appeared undisturbed. Good sign.

The wraps on his wrists and right hand were holding, although stained with brown blood. He stretched and clenched his fingers. So. Last evening had been no dream, for all its hallucinatory terrors. His stomach tightened in anxiety-painfully-as the memories mounted.

Hinges squeaked; a clatter of crockery was overridden by Rider Gesca's startled swearing. Ingrey squinted at the door. Gesca, grimacing in bewilderment, picked his way across the dislodged barrier of tumbling beakers and plates. The lieutenant was dressed for the road in boots and leathers and Hetwar's slate-blue tabard, and tidied for the solemnity of the duty: drab blond hair combed, amiable face new-shaved. He stared down at Ingrey in dismay. “My lord?”

“Ah. Gesca.” When the noise of rolling saucers died away, Ingrey managed, “How is pig-boy this morning?”

Gesca shook his head, seeming caught between wariness and exasperation. “His delusions passed off about midnight. We put him to bed.”

“See that he does not approach or annoy Learned Hallana again.”

“I don't think that will be a problem.” Gesca's worried eyes summed the bruises and bandages. “Lord Ingrey-what happened to you last night?”

Ingrey hesitated. “What do they say happened?”

“They say you were locked in with that sorceress for a couple of hours when suddenly a racket rose from the room-howling, and thumping to bring down the plaster from the ceiling below, and yelling. Sounded like someone being murdered.”

“The sorceress and her servants went out later as though nothing had happened, and you left limping, not talking to anyone.”

Ingrey reviewed the excuses Hallana had called through the door, as well as he could remember them. “Yes. I was carrying a…ham, and a carving knife, and I tripped over a chair.” No, she hadn't said a chair. “Upended the table. Cut my hand going down.”

Gesca's face screwed up, as he no doubt tried to picture how this event could result in Ingrey's peculiar array of bandages and bruises. “We're almost ready to load up, out there. The Red Dike divine is waiting to bless Prince Boleso's coffin. Are you going to be able to ride? After your accident.” He added after a reflective moment, “Accidents.”

Do I look that bad? “Did you deliver my message for Lord Hetwar to the Temple courier?”

“Yes. She rode out at first light.”

“Then…tell the men to stand down. I expect instructions. Better wait. We'll take a day to rest the horses.”

Gesca gestured assent, but his stare plainly questioned why Ingrey had driven both men and animals to their limits for two long days only to spend the time so gained idling here. He picked up the crockery, set it on the washstand, gave Ingrey another bemused look, and made his way out.

Ingrey had scrawled his latest note to Lord Hetwar immediately upon their arrival last night, reporting the cortege in Red Dike and pressing for relief of his command, feigning inability to supply adequate ceremony. The note had contained, therefore, no word of the Temple sorceress or hint of the later events in that upstairs room. He hadn't mentioned the incident of the river, or, indeed, any remark upon his prisoner at all. Uneasy awareness of his duty to report the truth to the sealmaster warred now with fear, in his heart. Fear and rage. Who placed that grotesque geas in me, and how? Why was I made a witless tool?

His own anger frightened him even as his fear stoked his fury, tightening his throat and making his temples throb. He lay back, trying to remember the hard-won self-disciplines that had stilled him under the earnest holy tortures at Birchgrove. Slowly, he willed his screaming muscles to resistless quiet again.

His wolf had been released last night. He had unchained it. Was it leashed again this morning? And if not…what then? For all the aches in his body, his mind felt no different from any other morning of his adult life. So was his frozen hesitation here in Red Dike just old habit, or was it good sense? Simple prudence, to refuse to advance one step farther toward Easthome in his present lethal ignorance? His physical injuries made a plausible blind to hide behind. But were they a hunter's screen or just a coward's refuge? His caged thoughts circled.

Another tap at the door broke the tensing upward spiral of his disquiet, and a sharp female voice inquired, “Lord Ingrey? I need to see you.”

“Mistress Hergi. Come in.” Belatedly, Ingrey grew conscious of his shirtless state. But she was presumably an experienced dedicat of the Mother's order, and no blushing maiden. Still, it would be courteous to at least sit up. It would.

“Hm.” Her lips thinned as she stepped to the bedside and regarded him, a coolly capable glint in her eye. “Rider Gesca did not exaggerate. Well, there is no help for it; you must get up. Learned Madam wishes to see your prisoner before she leaves, and I would have her on the road home at the earliest moment. We had enough trouble getting here; I dread the return trip. Come, now. Oh, dear. Let me see, better start with…”

She plunked her leather case down on the washstand and rummaged within, withdrawing a square blue glass bottle and pulling out the cork stopper. She poured a sinister syrup into a spoon, and as Ingrey creaked up on one elbow to ask, “What is it?” popped it into his mouth. The liquid tasted utterly vile. He swallowed, afraid to spit it out under her steely gaze.

Ingrey swallowed medicine and a surge of bile. “It's revolting.”

“Eh, you'll change your mind about it soon enough, I warrant. Here. Let's see how my work is holding up.”

Efficiently, she unbound his wrappings, applied new ointment and fresh bandages, daubed the stitches in his hair with something that stung, combed out the tangles, washed his torso, and shaved him, batting his hands away as he tried to protest his own competence to dress himself. “Don't you be getting my new wraps wet, now, my lord. And stop fighting me. I'll have no delays out of you.”

He hadn't been dressed like this by a woman since he was six, but his pain was fading most deliciously away, to be replaced by a floating lassitude. He stopped fighting her. The intensity of her concentration, he realized dimly, had nothing to do with him.

“Is Learned Hallana all right? After last night?” he asked cautiously.

“Baby's shifted position. Could be a day, could be a week, but there are twenty-five miles of bad roads between here and Suttleaf, and I wish I had her home safe now. Now, you mind me, Lord Ingrey; don't you dare do anything to detain her. Whatever she wants from you, give it to her without argument, if you please.” She sniffed rather fiercely.

“Yes, Mistress,” Ingrey answered humbly. He added after a blinking moment, “Your potion seems very effective. Can I keep the bottle?”

“No.” She knelt by his feet. “Oh. Your boots won't do, will they? Do you have any other shoes with you…?” She scavenged ruthlessly in his saddlebags, to emerge with a pair of worn leather buskins that she jammed onto his feet. “Up you come, now.”

THE SORCERESS-PHYSICIAN WAS ALREADY WAITING IN THE TAP-room of Ijada's inn at the other end of Red Dike's main street. Learned Hallana eyed his bandages, and inquired politely, “I trust this morning finds you much recovered, Lord Ingrey?”

“Yes. Thank you. Your medicine helped. Though it made an odd breakfast.” He smiled at her, a trifle hazily he feared.

“Oh. It would.” She glanced at Hergi. “How much…?” Hergi held up two fingers. Ingrey could not decide if the twitch of the divine's eyebrows was censure or approval, for Hergi merely shrugged in return.

Ingrey followed both women upstairs once more. They were admitted to the parlor, a little doubtfully, by the female warden. Ingrey looked around surreptitiously for signs of his late frenzy, finding none but for a few faint bloodstains and dents on the oak floorboards. Ijada stepped from the bedchamber at the sound of their entry. She was dressed for travel in the same gray-blue riding costume as yesterday, but had put off her boots in favor of light leather shoes. Uneasily, Ingrey searched her pale face; her expression, returning his gaze, was sober and pensive.

More uneasily, he searched his own shifted perceptions. She seemed not so much different to him this morning as more, with an energetic density to her person that seized his focus. A heady warm scent, like sunlight in dry grass, arose from her. He found his lips parting to better taste that sun-smell-a futile effort, as it did not come through the air.

Hallana, too, had more than a taste of the uncanny about her, a dizzying busyness partly from her pregnancy but mostly from a subdued swirl, smelling like a whiff of wind after a lightning strike, that he took for her pacified demon. The two ordinary women, Hergi and the warden, seemed suddenly thin and flat and dry by comparison, as though drawn on paper.

“I must leave very soon, or we won't be home before dark,” the divine told her. “I wish I could go along with you, instead. This is all most disturbing, especially…” She jerked her head at Ingrey, indicating his late geas, and his lips twisted in agreement. “That alone would make this Temple business, even without…well, never mind. Five gods guard you on your journey. This is a note to the master of my order in Easthome, begging his interest in your case. With luck, he can take up with you where I am forced to leave off.” She glanced Ingrey's way again, an untrusting tension around her mouth. “I charge you, my lord, to help see that this arrives at its destination. And no other.”

He opened his hand in an ambiguous acknowledgment, and Hallana's lips thinned a little more. As Hetwar's agent, he had learned how to open and copy letters without leaving traces, and he was fairly certain she guessed he knew those tricks of a spy's trade. Yet the Bastard was the very god of spies; what tricks might His sorceress know? And to which of her two holy orders had she addressed her concerns? Still, if she had enspelled the missive in any way, it was not apparent to Ingrey's new perceptions.

“Learned…” Ijada's voice was suddenly thin and uncertain. Learned, not dear Hallana, Ingrey noted. Hergi stood alertly ready to usher her mistress out the door; she frowned in frustration as the divine turned back.

“Yes, child?”

“No…never mind. It's nothing. Foolishness.”

“Suppose you let me be the judge of that.” Hallana lowered herself into a chair and tilted her head encouragingly.

“I had a very odd dream last night.” Ijada stepped nervously back and forth, then settled in the window seat. “A new one.”

“Unusually vivid. I remembered it in the morning right away, when I awoke, when my other dreams melted away out of my mind.”

“Go on.” Hallana's face seemed carved, so careful was her listening.

“It was brief, just a flash of a vision. It seemed to me I saw a sort of…I don't know. Death-haunt, in the shape of a stallion. Black as soot, black without gleam or reflection. Galloping, but very slowly. Its nostrils were red and glowing, and steamed; its mane and tail trailed fire. Sparks struck from its hooves, leaving prints of flame that burned all to ash in its wake. Clouds of ash and shadow. Its rider was as dark as it was.”

“Hm. Was the rider male or female?”

Ijada frowned. “That seems like the wrong question to ask. The rider's legs curved down to become the horse's ribs, as if their bodies were grown together. In the left hand, it held a leash. At the end of the leash ran a great wolf.”

Hallana's eyebrows went up, and she cast a glance at Ingrey. “Did you recognize this, ah, particular wolf?”

“I'm not sure. Maybe. Its pelt was pewter-black, just like…” Her voice trailed off, then firmed. “In my dream, anyway, I thought it felt familiar.” Briefly, her hazel eyes bored into Ingrey's, her sober look returning, to his immense discomfort. “But it was altogether a wolf, this time. It wore a spiked collar, but turned inside out, with the sharp points digging inward. Blood splashed from its paws as it ran, turning the ash it trod to splotches of black mud. Then the shadow and the cinders choked my breath and my sight, and I saw no more.”

Learned Hallana pursed her lips. “My word, child. Vivid, indeed. I'll have to think about that one.”

“Do you think it might have been significant? Or was it just an aftershock from…” She gestured around the room, plainly recalling the bizarre events of last evening here, then looked at Ingrey sideways through her lashes.

“No. It was very brief, as I said. Though intense.”

“What did you feel? Not when you awoke, but then, within the dream? Were you frightened?”

“Not frightened, exactly. Or at least, not for myself. I was more furious. Balked. As though I were trying to catch up, and could not.”

A little silence fell. After a moment Ijada ventured, “Learned? What should I do?”

Hallana seemed to wrench her distant expression into an unfelt smile. “Well…prayer never hurts.”

“That hardly seems like an answer.”

“In your case, it might be. This is not a reassurance.”

Ijada rubbed her forehead, as though it ached. “I'm not sure I want more such dreams.”

Ingrey, too, wanted to beg, Learned, what shall I do? But what answer, after all, could she give him? To stay frozen here? Easthome would only come to him, with all due ceremony. Travel on, as was his plain duty? Surely a Temple divine could advise no other course. Flee, or set Ijada to flight? Would she even go? He'd offered escape to her once, in that tangled wood. She'd sensibly refused. But what if her flight were made more practical? An escape in the night, with no hint to Ingrey's masters, oh no, as to how or from whose hand she had acquired horse, pack, money…escort? We must speak again of this. Or could he give her over to the sorceress, her friend-send her in secret to Suttleaf? Surely, if such a sanctuary were possible, Learned Hallana would have offered it already. He strangled his beginning noise of inquiry in a cough, scorning to be dismissed with instructions to pray. Hergi helped her mistress to rise again from her chair.

“Not for you, dear,” said Hallana in an absent tone. “Or not for you alone, at least. This is all much more complex than I anticipated. I long for the advice of my dear Oswin. He has such a logical mind.”

“Oswin?” said Ijada.

“My husband.”

“Wait,” said Ijada, her eyes growing round with astonishment. “Not-not that Oswin? Our Oswin, Learned Oswin, from the fen fort? That fussy stick? All arms and legs, with a neck like a heron swallowing a frog?”

“The very same.” Oswin's spouse seemed unruffled by this unflattering description of her mate; her firm lips softened. “He's improved with age, I promise you. He was very callow then. And I, well, I trust I may have improved a trifle, too.”

“Of all the wonders-I can scarcely believe it! You two used to argue and fight all the time!”

“Only over theology,” said Hallana mildly. “Because we both cared, you know. Well…mostly over theology.” Her mouth twitched up at some unspoken memory. “One shared passion led to others, in due time. He followed me back to the Weald, when his cycle of duty was ended-I told him he just wanted to have the last word. He's still trying. He is a teacher, too, now. He still likes to argue-it's his greatest bliss. I should be cruel to deny it to him.”

“Learned Sir has a way with words, he does,” confirmed Hergi. “Which I do not look forward to hearing, if I don't get you home safe and soon as I promised him.”

“Yes, yes, dear Hergi.” Smiling, the sorceress at last turned to lumber out under the close attendance of her handmaiden. Hergi gave Ingrey a nod of judicious approval in passing, presumably for his cooperation, or at least, for his failure to interfere.

“Oh,” she said, one hand flying to her mouth.

“Oh what?” he inquired, puzzled.

“You can smile!” From her tone, this was a wonder tantamount to his sprouting wings and flapping up to the ceiling. He glanced upward, picturing himself doing so. The winged wolf. What? He shook his head to clear it of these odd thoughts, but it just made him dizzy. Perhaps it was as well that Hergi had taken the blue bottle away with her.

Ijada stepped to the window onto the street, and Ingrey followed. Together they watched Hergi load her mistress into the wagon, its wheel repaired, under Bernan's anxious eye. The groom, or smith, or whatever he was took up the reins, clucking at the stubby horses, and the wagon trundled up the street and turned out of sight. Behind them in the chamber, the warden made herself busy unpacking a case evidently bound up for the road, but like Boleso's coffin not loaded because of Ingrey's order of delay.

He was standing very close to Ijada, looking over her shoulder; he might readily reach up and rest his left hand on the nape of her neck, where her hair, lifted into its bundling net, revealed the pale skin. His breath stirred a stray strand there, yet she did not move away. She did turn her head, though, to meet his glance. No fear convulsed her features, no revulsion: just an intense scrutiny.

And yet she had seen not just that other vile thing, but his wolf; his defilement, his capacity for violence, was not rumor or gossip to her now, but a direct experience. Undeniable. She denies nothing. Why does she not recoil?

His perceptions spun. Turn it around: how did he feel about her cat? He had seen it, in that other reality, as clearly as she had seen his wolfishness. Logically, her defilement should seem twin to his own. Yet a god had passed her in the night, the mere brush of His cloak hem seeming a breath of exaltation. All the theological theories of all the Temple divines who'd dinned their lessons into Ingrey's unwilling ear seemed to melt away under the pitiless gaze of some great Fact, hovering just beyond the reach of his reason. Her secret beast had been gloriously beautiful. Terror, it seemed, had a new and entrancing dimension today, one Ingrey had never before suspected.

His mind lurched back into motion. It would be perfectly unexceptionable to conduct his prisoner to the temple without her chaperone; at this hour, it would be nearly deserted, and they might converse in plain sight undisturbed. “No one would wonder if I escorted you to the altars of the gods to pray for mercy, lady.”

Her lips twisted. “Say justice, rather, and it would do.”

He backed a little from her and made a sign of assent. Turning, he dismissed the warden to whatever of her own affairs she cared to pursue for an hour, and saw Ijada out of the parlor. When they gained the street and turned up it, Ijada tucked her hand in his elbow and picked her way carefully over the damp cobbles, not looking at him. The temple loomed up at length, built of the gray stone of this district, its size and style and solidity typical of great Audar's grandson's reign, before the Darthacan conquerors demonstrated that they, too, were capable of racking themselves to ruin in bloody kin wars.

They walked past the iron gates into the high-walled, quiet precincts, and under the imposing portico. The inner chambers were dim and cool after the bright morning outside, with narrow shafts of sunlight streaming down from the round windows high above. Some three or four persons were on their knees, or prone, before the Mother's altar in Her chamber. Ijada stiffened briefly on Ingrey's arm; he followed her glance through the archway to the Father's altar to catch sight of Boleso's coffin, set up on trestles, blanketed with brocades, and guarded by soldiers of the Red Dike city militia. But both the Daughter's chamber and the Son's were empty at this hour; Ijada turned into the Son's.

“What,” Ingrey began quietly, “did you think would happen to you once you reached Easthome? What had you planned to do?”

Her glance shifted to him, though she did not turn her head. In a like undertone, she replied, “I expect I shall be examined, by the King's justiciars or the Temple inquirers, or both. I should certainly expect the Temple inquirers will take an interest now, given what has lately happened and Learned Hallana's letter. I plan to tell the exact truth, for the truth is my surest defense.” A wry smile twitched her lips. “Besides, it's easier to remember, they say.”

Ingrey let out a long sigh. “What do you imagine Easthome is like, now?”

“Why-I've never been there, but I've always supposed it is a splendid place. The king's court must be its crown, of course, but Princess Fara told me tales of the river docks and the glassworks, the great Temple schools-the Royal College as well. Gardens and palaces. Fine dressmakers. Scriptoriums and goldsmiths and artisans of every sort. There are plays put on, and not just for holy days, but for the great lords in their high houses.”

Ingrey tried again. “Have you ever seen a flock of vultures circling the carcass of some great and dangerous beast, bull or bear, that is not quite dead enough yet? Most hold back, waiting, but some dart in to peck and tear, then duck away. All hover closer as the day wears on, and the sight of the wheeling death watch draws in more distant kin, hot with fear of missing the best tidbits when all close in at last for the disembowelment.”

Her lips thinned in distaste, and she turned her face toward him in question: What now? “At present”-Ingrey dropped his voice to a growl-“Easthome is more like that. Tell me, Lady Ijada, who do you think will be elected the next hallow king?”

“So many others had assumed, till the hallow king was struck down with that wasting disease, then this palsy-stroke. If the blow had held off for five more years, Hetwar believes the king might have secured Biast's election in his own lifetime. Or if the old man had died quickly-Biast might have been rammed through on the momentum of grief, before the opposition could muster. Few could have foreseen or planned for this living half death, lasting months, giving time and motive for the worst, as well as the best and all between, to maneuver. To think. To whisper to each other. To be tempted.” Kin Stagthorne had held the hallow kingship for five generations; more than one other kin believed it might now be their turn to seize that high seat.

“Who, then?”

“If the hallow king were to die tonight, not even Hetwar knows who would be elected next week. And if Hetwar doesn't know, I doubt anyone else can guess, either. But by the pattern of bribes and rumors, Hetwar thought Boleso was to be a surprise candidate.”

Her brows flew up. “A bad one, surely!”

“A stupid and exploitable one. From the point of view of certain men, ideal. I thought such men were underestimating just how dangerous his erratic nature had become, and would have lived to regret their success. And that was before I knew of any bleeding of the uncanny into the mix.” Ingrey frowned. Had Hetwar known of Boleso's blasphemous dabblings? “The sealmaster was concerned enough to have me deliver a deposit of some one hundred thousand crowns to the archdivine-ordainer of Waterpeak, to secure his vote for Biast. His Grace thanked me in nicely ambiguous terms, I thought.”

“The sealmaster bribed an archdivine?” Ingrey winced at her tone, so innocently aghast. “The only thing unusual about the transaction was me. Hetwar normally uses me to deliver his threats. I'm good at it. I especially enjoy it when they try to bribe or threaten me back. One of my few pleasures, leading them into ambush and then, ah, into enlightenment. I think I was intended to be a double message, for the archdivine was nervous enough. A fact that Hetwar put…well, wherever he puts such things.”

“Sometimes. Sometimes not.” Now, for example? “He knows I have a curious mind, and feeds me tidbits now and then. But I do not press. Or I should get none.”

Ingrey took a deep breath. “So. Since you have not taken my hints to heart, let me lay it out for you more plainly. You did not just defend your virtue, there on the top of Boar's Head Castle. Nor did you merely offend the royal house of Stagthorne by making its scion's death a public scandal. You upset a political plot that has already cost someone hundreds of thousands of crowns and months of secret preparation. And involved illicit sorcery of the most dangerous sort. I deduce from my geas that somewhere in Easthome is a man-or men-of power who does not want you blurting the truth about Boleso to anyone at all. Their attempt to kill you subtly has miscarried. I am guessing that the next attempt will be less subtle. Or were you picturing some heroic stand before a justiciar or inquirer as brave and honest as yourself? There may be such men, I do not know. But I guarantee you will meet only the other sort.”

Her jaw, he saw out of the corner of his eye, had set.

“I am…irritated,” he finally chose. “I decline to be made a party to this. I can arrange your escape. Dry-shod, this time, with money and without hungry bears. Tonight, if you like.” There: disloyalty of secret thought made public words. As the silence grew thicker, he stared at the floor between his knees.

Her voice was so low it vibrated. “How convenient for you. That way, you won't have to stand up to anybody. Nor speak dangerous truths to anyone for any honor's sake. All can go on for you just as it was.”

“Scarcely,” he said. “I have a target painted on my back now, too.” His lips drew back in a sort of grin, the one that usually made men step away from him.

“Does that amuse you?”

Ingrey considered this. “It stirs my interest, anyway.”

Ijada drummed her nails on the pavement. It sounded like the clicking of distant claws. “So much for high politics. What about high theology?”

“What?”

“I felt a god brush past me, Ingrey! Why?”

He opened his mouth. Hesitated.

She continued in the same fierce whisper, “All my life I have prayed, and all my life I have been refused answer. I scarcely believed in the gods anymore, or if I did, it was only to curse them for their indifference. They betrayed my father, who had served Them loyally all his life. They betrayed my mother, or They were powerless to save her, which was as bad or worse. If a god has come to me, He certainly hasn't come for me! In all your calculating, how do you sum that?”

“High court politics,” said Ingrey slowly, “are as godless as anything I know. If you press on to Easthome, you choose your death. Martyrdom may be a glory, but suicide is a sin.”

“And just what do you press on to, Lord Ingrey?”

“I have Lord Hetwar himself as a patron.” I think. “You will have no one.”

“Not every Temple divine in Easthome can be venal. And I have my mother's kin!”

“Earl Badgerbank was at that conference that dispatched me. Are you so sure he was there in your interests? I'm not.”

Ingrey lay on his back and stared at the domed ceiling, angry, dizzy, and a little ill. Hergi's potion was beginning to wear off, he feared. His frustrated thought circled, then drifted, but not into piety. He let his tired eyelids shut.

After a formless time, Ijada's tart voice inquired, “Are you praying or napping? And are you, in either case, done?”

He blinked his eyes open to find her standing over him. Napping, apparently, for he had not heard her rise. “I am at your disposal, lady.” He started to sit up, stifled a yelp, and lay back more carefully.

“Yes, well, I'm not surprised, you know. Did you look, afterward, at what you did to those poor chains?” She held out an exasperated hand. Curious as to her strength, he grasped her hand and wrist with both hands. She leaned back like a sailor hauling on a rope, and he wallowed up.

As they made their way out under the portico into the autumn sun, Ingrey asked, “And what guidance did you receive for all your prayers, lady?”

She bit her lip. “None. Though my thoughts are less disordered, so a little quiet meditation did that much good at least.” Her sideways glance at him was enigmatic. “Somewhat less disordered. It's just that…I can't help thinking about…”

He made an encouraging noise of inquiry.

She burst out, “I still can't believe that Hallana married Oswin!”

THEY FOUND IJADA'S WARDEN IN THE TAPROOM OF HER INN. SHE was sitting in the corner with Rider Gesca, their heads bent together, tankards and a platter with bread crumbs, cheese rinds, and apple cores on the table between them. The walk up the warm street had loosened Ingrey's stiff muscles a trifle, and he fancied he strolled rather than limped over to them. They looked up, and their talk ceased.

“The cheese is excellent. Stay away from the beer, though-it's gone sour.”

Ijada's eyes widened, but she forbore comment.

“Ah. Thank you for the warning.” He leaned over and nabbed the last bread crust. “And what have you two been finding to talk about?”

The warden looked frightened, but Gesca, with a hint of challenge, merely said, “I've been telling Ingrey stories.”

“Ingrey stories?” Ijada said. “Are there many?”

Ingrey controlled a grimace.

Gesca, grinning at the encouragement, said, “I was just telling the tale of how Hetwar's train was attacked by those bandits in the forest of Aldenna, on the way home from Darthaca, and how you won your place in his household. It was my good word in the sealmaster's ear that did it, after all.”

“Was it?” said Ingrey, trying to decide if Gesca was gabbling nervously or not. And if so, why.

“We were a large party,” Gesca continued to the women, “and well armed, but this was a troop of outlaws who had fled to the forest and grown to over two hundred men, mostly by the addition of discharged soldiers and vagabonds and runaways. They were the plague of the country round about, and we likely looked rich enough that they dared to try us. I was right behind Ingrey in the van when they fell on us. They realized their mistake soon enough. Astonishing swordplay.” “I'm not that good,” said Ingrey. “They were bad.”

Ingrey had no memory of the moment, though he recalled the attack, of course. The beginning and the end of it, anyway. “Gesca, you are making up tales to swagger with.” Gesca was near a decade older than Ingrey; perhaps the staid middle-aged warden seemed a less unlikely object for dalliance to him.

“Ha. If I were making up grand lies for swagger, I'd tell them on myself. At that point, the rest turned and ran. You hewed down the slowest…” Gesca trailed off, not completing the story. Ingrey suddenly guessed why. He had come back to himself while methodically dispatching the wounded. Red to the elbows, the blood smell overpowering. Gesca, face appalled, gripping him by the shoulders and crying, Ingrey! Father's tears, man, save some for hanging! He had…not exactly forgotten that. He had merely refrained from revisiting the memory.

Gesca covered his hesitation by taking a swig of beer, evidently remembered its taste too late, and swallowed anyway. He made a face and wiped his lips. “It was at that point that I recommended to Hetwar that he make your place permanent. My thinking was purely selfish. I wanted to make sure that you never ended up on the opposite side to me in a fight.” Gesca smiled up at him, but not with his eyes.

Ingrey's return smile was equally austere. Subtlety, Gesca? How unlike you. What are you trying to say to me?

The ache from his head blow day before yesterday was returning. Ingrey decided to repair to his own inn to find food. He bade the warden to her duty, instructing the women to lock their chamber door once more, and withdrew.

returning. Ingrey decided to repair to his own inn to find food. He bade the warden to her duty, instructing the women to lock their chamber door once more, and withdrew. N

A FTER FORAGING A MEAL OF SORTS IN HIS INN'S COMMON room, Ingrey returned to his chamber to fall across his bed once more. He was a day and a half late fulfilling the Reedmere dedicat's prescription of rest for his aching head blow, and he apologized humbly in his heart to her. But for all his exhaustion, in the warming afternoon, sleep would not come.

It was no good dashing about arranging all in secret for Ijada's midnight escape if she refused to mount and ride away. She must be persuaded. If her secret beast was discovered, would they burn her? He imagined the flames licking up around her taut body, evil orange caresses, igniting the oil-soaked shift such prisoners were dressed in to speed their agony. He visualized her swinging from a hemp rope and oak beam, in vicious, senseless parody of an Old Wealding sacrifice hanged from a sacred forest tree. Or would the royal executioners allow her a silk rope, like her leopard, in honor of her kin rank? Though the old tribes, lacking silk, had used rope woven from shimmering nettle flax for their highest born, he had heard. Think of something else. But his thoughts circled in dreary morbidity.

They had begun as messengers to the gods, those willing human sacrifices of the Old Weald. Sacred couriers to carry prayers directly to heaven in unholy hours of great need, when all mere spoken words, or prayers of the heart or hands, seemed to fly up into the void and vanish into a vast silence. Like mine, now. But then, under the generations-long pressure from the eastern borders, the tribes' needs had grown, and so had their fears. Battles and ground were lost; woes waxed and judgment slipped; quality gave way to quantity, in the desperate days, and heroic holy volunteers grew harder to find.

Their ranks were filled by the less willing, then the unwilling; at the last, captured soldiers, hostages, kidnapped camp followers, worse. The sacred trees bore a bumper crop. Children, Ingrey had heard, in some of the Quintarian divines' favorite gruesome martyr tales. Enemy children. And what benighted mind places the name of enemy on a bewildered child? At the very least, the Old Wealding tribal mages might have reflected on what prayers that river of sacrifice had really borne to the gods, in their victims' weeping hearts.

His thoughts were growing worse, he was uncomfortably aware, but not wider. At length, he dozed. It wasn't a good doze, but it was better than the writhing that went before.

HE WOKE AS THE AUTUMN SUN WAS GOING DOWN, AND TOOK himself again to Ijada's inn to invite her to evening prayer.

She cocked an eyebrow at him, and murmured, “You are grown pious, of a sudden.” But at his tight-lipped look of anguish, she relented and accompanied him to the temple once more.

When they were on their knees before the Brother's altar-both the Mother's and the Daughter's chambers were full of Red Dike supplicants again-he began under his breath, “Listen. I must decide tonight whether we ride or bide tomorrow. You cannot just drift into disaster with no plan, no attempt even to throw some rope to shore. Else it will become the rope that hangs you, and it drives me half-mad to picture you dangling as your leopard did. I should think you'd both have had enough of hanging.” “Ingrey, think,” she returned in as low a voice. “Even assuming I could escape unseen, where would I go? My mother's kin could not take me in or hide me. My poor stepfather-he hasn't the strength to fight such high foes, and besides, his would be among the first places they'd look for such a fugitive. A woman, a stranger, alone-I would be utterly conspicuous, and a target for the vile.” She had taken thought, too, it appeared.

A long silence; he glanced aside to see her face gone still, staring straight ahead, wide-eyed. “You would do that? Desert your company and your duty?”

He set his teeth. “Perhaps.”

“Then where would we go? Your kin could not take us in either, I think.”

“I cannot imagine going back to Birchgrove for any reason. No. We would have to get out of the Weald altogether, cross the borders. To the Alvian League, perhaps-slip into the Cantons over the northern mountains. Or to Darthaca. I can speak and write Darthacan, at least.”

“I cannot. I would be your mute…what? Burden, servant, pet, paramour?”

Ingrey reddened. “We could pretend you were my sister. I could swear to regard you with that respect. I wouldn't touch you.”

“How very enticing.” Her lips set in a flat line.

He paused, feeling like a man crossing river ice in winter and hearing a first faint cracking sound coming from under his feet. What did she mean me to make of that remark? “Ibran was your father's tongue, presumably. Do you speak it?”

“A little. Do you?”

“A little. We could make for the Peninsula, then. Chalion or Ibra or Brajar. You would not then be so mute.” There was work for swordsmen there, too, Ingrey had heard, in the interminable border wars with the heretical Quadrene coastal princedoms-and few questions asked of foreign volunteers, so long as they signed the Five.

“Which? She talked a great deal. Clouds of chatter.”

“Look to her silences, then.”

That sounded so like one of Lord Hetwar's favorite aphorisms that Ingrey jerked. “Did she have any?”

“She said she sought me out-at a moment of great inconvenience, perhaps peril, for herself, mind you-for two reasons. Because she'd heard the news-and for the dreams, of course. Only Hallana could make that second reason sound like an afterthought. That I have had strange and dark dreams, nightmares almost as disturbing as my waking life, I take to be the result of fear, weariness, and…and Boleso's gift.” She moistened her lips. “But why should Hallana dream of me or my troubles? She is a Temple woman to the bone, and no renegade, for all that she clears her own path. Did she speak to you of her dreams?”

“No. But I didn't think to ask.”

“She asked many questions, learned I-know-not-what from watching us, but she gave me no direction, one way or another. That, too, is a silence. All she gave me, in the end, was the letter.” She touched her left breast, fingering the fine-embroidered fabric of her riding jacket. Ingrey fancied he heard a faint rustle of paper beneath the cloth, from some inner pocket. “She seemed to expect me to deliver it. As the only thing resembling guidance that she gave me, I am loath to give it up for some chancy flight into exile with…with a man I'd not met till four days ago.” She was silent a moment. “Especially not as your little sister, five gods spare me!”

He did not understand her offense, but he certainly could not mistake her refusal. He said heavily, “We'll continue on toward Easthome tomorrow, then, with Boleso's coffin.” Which would give him perhaps three more days to come up with some better argument or plan, less the time he spent sleeping. If any.

As he neared his inn, a dark shape thrust itself off the wall where it had been leaning. Ingrey's hand strayed to his sword hilt, but relaxed again as the figure moved into the yellow light of the lantern above the door, and he recognized Gesca. The lieutenant gave him a nod.

“Walk with me, Ingrey. I would have a word in private.”

Ingrey's brows twitched up, but he fell in willingly enough. They matched steps on the cobblestones, took a turn about the next square up the street near the city gates, and settled on a wooden bench by the covered well in the square's center. A servant turned away and stumped off past them with a pair of dripping buckets hung from a yoke over his shoulders. Beyond, in the street, a couple hurried home, the woman holding a lantern, the man with a boy atop his shoulder, who curled his small hands in the man's hair; the man laughed protest at the grip. The man's eyes shifted to assay the two loitering swordsmen, took reassurance from their repose, and returned to his woman. Their footsteps faded.

Silence fell, and lengthened. Gesca's fingers drummed uneasily on his thigh. “Is there a problem in the troop?” Ingrey prompted at last. “Or with Boleso's men?”

“Huh.” Gesca sat up and straightened his shoulders. “Maybe you'll tell me.” He hesitated again, sucked on his lower lip, then said abruptly, “Are you falling in love with that accursed girl, Ingrey?”

Ingrey stiffened. “Why should you think that?”

Sarcasm edged Gesca's voice. “Well, let me see. What could possibly have suggested this thing? Could it be the way you speak to her apart at every chance? Or could it be the way you plunged like a madman into a raging torrent to save her? Could it have been how you were surprised, half-dressed, trying to sneak into her bedchamber at midnight? The pale and starveling look on your face, when you think no one is watching you, when you look at her? The way the lovesick circles darken daily under your eyes? I admit, only Ingrey kin Wolfcliff would ignite with lust for a woman who bludgeons her lovers to death, but for you, that's not a deterrent, it's a lure!” Gesca snorted.

“What?”

“That she bludgeoned.” He added after a moment, “I admit, whatever her game bag lacks in numbers, it makes up in weight.” And after another moment, “In any case, she isn't attracted to me, so your fears are moot.”

“Not true. She thinks you a very comely man, though glum.”

“How do you know that?” Ingrey rapidly reviewed the past days-when had Gesca ever spoken with the prisoner?

“She discussed you with her warden, or perhaps it was the other way around. Quite frank and outspoken, that one, when you get her going. The Mother's work does that to some women.”

“The warden doesn't speak so to me.”

“That's because you terrify her. I don't. At least by contrast. Very useful, from my point of view. But have you ever overheard two women discussing men? Men are crude liars, comparing their drabs, but women-I'd rather have a Mother's anatomist dissect me alive than to listen to the things the ladies say about us when they think they are alone.” Gesca shuddered.

Ingrey managed not to blurt, What else did Ijada say of me? His prisoner, it occurred to him, would have had to fill the hours with something, when locked up with that countrywoman; and inconsequential chatter might conceal dire secrets better than silence itself. So. He ventured a blander, “Is there anything else I should know?”

Gesca's smile, Ingrey thought, was an altogether evil smirk. Evidently, however, the shadows were not deep enough yet to hide Ingrey's return glare, or possibly it burned through the darkness with its own heat, for Gesca sobered, raising a warding hand.

“Ingrey, look.” Gesca's voice grew serious. “I don't want to see you do something stupid. You have a future in Hetwar's house, far beyond mine, and it's not just your kinship that gives you the leg up. For me, maybe I'll make guard captain someday. You're a lettered man in two tongues, Hetwar talks to you as an equal-not just in blood, but in wits-and you give him back as good as you get. Listening to the two of you makes my head spin round, sometimes. I don't even want to walk the paths you seem destined to tread. Heights make me dizzy, and I like my head where it is. But most of all…I don't ever want to be the officer who's sent to arrest you.”

Ingrey unset his teeth. “Fair enough.”

“Right.”

“We ride again tomorrow.”

“Good.”

“If I can get my boots on.”

“I'll come help you.”

And I will dismiss that prying, spying, gossiping warden back to Reedmere, and replace her with another. Or with none. Feminine chatter was annoying enough, but what if her gossip dared extend to the curious events she had witnessed swirling around Hallana's visits? What if it already has?

So. Gesca watches me. But why? Idle-or carnal-curiosity? Self-interest, as he claimed? Worried comradeship? Strange gossip? It occurred to Ingrey that for all Gesca's modest claims to be an unlettered man, he was perfectly capable of penning a brief report. The sentences might be simple, the word choices infelicitous, the spelling erratic, but he could get his observations down in a logical enough order for all practical purposes.

And if Hetwar had both men's letters before him, which would be very like Hetwar…Ingrey's silences would shout.

Ingrey swallowed a curse and went indoors.

DURING THE NEXT DAY'S RIDE, THE AUTUMN COUNTRYSIDE PASSED in a blur of inattention for Ingrey. But he was all too keenly aware of Ijada, riding alongside the wagon near her new warden, a daunted young dedicat from the Daughter's Order in Red Dike, plucked by the local divine from her teaching duties for this unaccustomed task.

Once, when they first mounted up, Ijada smiled at him. Ingrey almost smiled back, till Gesca's mockery echoed in his mind, freezing his face in an uncomfortable distorted grimace that made her eyes widen, then slide away. He spurred ahead before his mouth muscles went into spasms.

He wondered what madness had seized his tongue last night in the temple. Of course Ijada must refuse to fly, even from the gallows, with a man who had tried to kill her, what, three times? Five? What sort of choice was that to lay before the girl? Think, man. Might he offer her another escort? Where could one be found, that he could trust? A vision of kidnapping her and riding off with her across his saddlebow led to even less useful imaginings. He knew the speed and ferocity his wolf could lend to him; what might her leopard do for her, woman though she most undoubtedly was? She had already slain Boleso, a bigger man than Ingrey, though admittedly, she had taken the prince by surprise. She'd even surprised herself, or so Ingrey read her. If she chose to resist him-if he then…and then she…The curiously absorbing reverie was shattered by his memory of Gesca's other jibe- For you, it's a lure!-and his scowl deepened.

Nor in lust.

Much.

Nothing that he could not fully control, anyway.

He spent the rest of the day not smiling at her, nor looking at her, nor riding near her, nor speaking to her, nor betraying any awareness of her existence in any way whatsoever. The effect seemed contagious; Gesca trotted near him to make some remark, took one look at his face, swallowed his words, and prudently retreated to the opposite end of the column. No one else approached him either, and Boleso's retainers shrank from his glower. At his few commands, men hastened to obey.

Their start had been late and their progress slow, seldom pushing the horses faster than a walk. As a result they arrived that afternoon at a smaller town than any prior stop, though still more miles nearer Easthome than Ingrey would have liked. Ingrey ruthlessly sent Boleso's men to bed down with their late master in Middletown's rustic temple, and seized the sole inn for himself, his prisoner and her duenna, and Hetwar's troop. He stalked the town's perimeter in the twilight, all too brief a task. There could be no excursion this night to that crowded temple for undervoiced argument. Tomorrow night, he must select a larger town for their halt, Ingrey determined. And the next night…there weren't enough next nights.

Since Gesca chose a bedroll in the taproom rather than to share Ingrey's chamber, Ingrey took his still-recovering hurts to bed early, and alone. WITH A SHORT LEG PLANNED FOR THEIR JOURNEY, INGREY DID not drive his men to an early start the next morning, either. He was still desultorily drinking bitter herb tea and nibbling bread in the little inn's taproom when Lady Ijada descended with her new warden. He managed to return her nod without undue distortion of his features.

“It sufficed.” Her return frown was searching, but better than that hazardous smile.

He thought of asking after her dreams, but hesitated for the fear that this would prove not a neutral topic at all. Perhaps he might dare to ride by her side for a time later today; she seemed fully capable, once given the lead, of carrying on an oblique conversation before unfriendly ears that might convey more information than it appeared.

The sound of horses' hooves and a jingle of harness from outside turned both their heads. “Halloo the house!” a hoarse voice shouted, and the tapster-and-owner scurried out through the hall to greet these new customers, pausing to send a servant to roust the stableboys to take the gentlemen's horses.

Ijada's nostrils flared; she drifted toward the door in the innkeeper's wake. Ingrey drained his clay beaker and followed, left hand reflexively checking his sword hilt. He came up behind her shoulder as she stepped onto the wooden porch.

Four armed men were dismounting. One was clearly a servant, two wore a familiar livery, and the last…Ingrey's breath stopped in surprise. And then blew out in shock.

Earl-ordainer Wencel kin Horseriver paused in his saddle, his reins gathered in his gloved hands. The young earl was a slender man, wearing a tunic from which gold threads winked under a leather coat dyed wine-red. The coat's wide collar was trimmed with marten fur, disguising his uneven build. His dark blond hair, lightened with a few streaks of premature gray, hung to his shoulders in ratty corkscrew strands, disheveled by his ride. His face was elongated, his forehead prominent, but his odd features were redeemed from potential ugliness by sharp blue eyes, fixed now on Ingrey. His presence here on this bright morning was unexpected enough. But the shock…

Too.

And I have never perceived it before.

Ingrey's head jerked toward Ijada; her face, also, had gone still with astonishment.

She senses it-smells it? Sees it? And it is a new thing to her as well. How new is it?

The perceptions, it appeared, ran three ways, for Wencel sat up with his head cocked, eyes widening, as his gaze first summed Ingrey, then turned to Ijada. Wencel's lips parted as his jaw dropped a fraction, then tightened again in a crooked smile.

Of the three of them, the earl recovered first. “Well, well, well,” he murmured. A pair of gloved fingers waved past his forehead in salute to Ingrey, then went to his heart to convey a shadow-bow to Ijada. “How very strangely met we three are. I have not been so taken by surprise for…longer than you would believe.”

The innkeeper began a gabble of welcome, intercepted, at a jerk of Wencel's chin, by one of his guardsmen, who took the man aside, presumably to explain what would be wanted of his humble house by his highborn guests. By trained civility, Ingrey went to Wencel's horse's head, though he did not really want to stand any nearer to the earl. The animal snorted and sidled at his hand on the bridle, and his grip tightened. The horse's shoulders were wet with sweat from the morning's gallop, the chestnut hairs curled and darkened, white lather showing between its legs. Whatever brings him, Wencel wastes no time.

Ingrey licked dry lips. “That will be a relief.”

“I thought it might be.” His eyes went to Ijada, and the sardonic, rehearsed cadences ceased. He lowered his head. “Lady Ijada. I cannot tell you how sorry I am for what has happened-for what was done to you. I regret that I was not there at Boar's Head to prevent this.”

Ijada inclined her head in acknowledgment, if not, precisely, in forgiveness. “I'm sorry you were not at Boar's Head, too. I did not desire this high blood on my hands, nor…the other consequences.”

“Yes…” Wencel drawled the word out. “It seems we have much more to discuss than I'd thought.” He shot Ingrey a tight-lipped smile and dismounted. At his adult height, Wencel was only half a hand shorter than his cousin; for reasons unclear to Ingrey, men regularly estimated his own height as greater than it was. In a much lower voice, Wencel added, “Strangely secret things, since you did not choose to discuss them even with the sealmaster. Some might chide you for that. Be assured, I am not one of them.”

Wencel murmured a few orders to his guardsmen; Ingrey gave up the reins to Wencel's servant, and the inn's stableboys came pelting up to lead the retinue away around the building.

“Where might we go to talk?” said Wencel. “Privately.” “Taproom?” said Ingrey, nodding to the inn.

Ingrey would have preferred to follow, but led off perforce. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Wencel offer a polite arm to Lady Ijada, which she warily evaded by making play with lifting her riding skirts up the steps and passing ahead of him.

“Out,” Ingrey said to Hetwar's two breakfasting men, who scrambled up in surprise at the sight of the earl. “You can take your bread and meat with you. Wait outside. See that no one disturbs us.” He closed the taproom door behind them and the confused warden.

Wencel, after an indifferent glance around the old-fashioned rush-strewn chamber, tucked his gloves in his belt, seated himself at one of the trestle tables, and waved Ingrey and Ijada to the bench across from him. His hands clasped each other on the polished boards, motionless but not relaxed.

Ingrey was uncertain what creature Wencel bore within. Of course, he'd had no clear perception of Ijada's, either, till his wolf had come unbound again. Even now, if he had not known from seeing both the leopard's corpse and its renewed spirit in their place of battle with the geas, he might not have been able to put a name to that disquieting wild presence within her.

Far more disturbing to Ingrey was the question, When? He had seen Wencel only twice since his own return from his Darthacan exile four years ago. The earl had been but lately married to Princess Fara, and had taken his bride back to his rich family lands along the lower Lure River, two hundred miles from Easthome. The first time the new-wed Horserivers had returned to the capital, for a midwinter celebration of the Father's Day three years back, Ingrey had been away on a mission for Hetwar to the Cantons. The next visit, he had seen his cousin only at a gathering at the king's hall when Prince Biast had received his marshal's spear and pennant from his father's hand. Wencel had been taken up with the ceremony, and Ingrey had been tied down in Hetwar's train. They'd passed face-to-face but briefly. The earl had acknowledged his disreputable and disinherited cousin with a courteous nod, unsurprised recognition with no hint of aversion, but had not sought him out thereafter. Ingrey had thought Wencel vastly improved over the unprepossessing youth he remembered, and had assumed that the burden of his early inheritance and high marriage had matured him, gifted him with that peculiar gravity. Had there been something strange underlying that gravity, even then? The next time they had met was in Hetwar's chambers, a week ago. Wencel had been quiet, self-effacing, among that group of grim older men-mortified, or so Ingrey had guessed, for he would not meet Ingrey's eyes. Ingrey could barely remember his saying anything at all.

The intensity of his gaze upon Ijada was not only, Ingrey thought, perturbation with her leopard. I think Princess Fara was not so astray in her jealousy as Wencel feigns. Four years married, and no heir to the great and ancient house of Horseriver; did that silence conceal barrenness, disaffection, some subtler impotence? Had it fueled a wife's fears, justly or no?

“I do not know how you may do so either,” returned Ijada. Ingrey was uncertain if the edgy chill of this represented anger or fear, and stole a glance at her face. That pure profile was remarkably expressionless. He suddenly wanted to know exactly what she saw when she looked at Wencel.

Wencel tilted his head in no less frowning a regard. “What is that, anyway? Surely not a badger. I would guess a lynx.”

Wencel's mouth screwed up in surprise. “That is no…and where did that fool Boleso get a…and why…my lady, I think you had better tell me all that happened there at Boar's Head.”

She glanced at Ingrey; he gave a slow nod. Wencel was as wound up in this as any of them, it seemed, on more than one level, and he appeared to have Hetwar's confidence. So…does Hetwar know of Wencel's beast, or not?

Ijada gave a short, blunt account of the night's deeds, factual as Ingrey understood the events, but with almost no hint of her own thoughts or emotions, devoid of interpretations or guesses. Her voice was flat. It was like watching a dumb show.

Wencel, who had listened with utmost attention, but without comment, turned his sharp gaze to Ingrey. “So where is the sorcerer?”

“What?”

He gestured at Ijada. “That did not happen spontaneously. There must have been a sorcerer. Illicit, to be sure, if he was both dabbler in the forbidden and tool to such a dolt as Boleso.”

“Lady Ijada-my impression from Lady Ijada's testimony was that Boleso performed the rite himself.”

“We were alone together in his bedchamber, certainly,” said Ijada. “If I ever encountered any such person in Boleso's household, I never recognized him as a sorcerer.”

Wencel absently scratched the back of his neck. “Hm. Perhaps. Yet…Boleso never learned such a rite by himself. He'd taken up many creatures, you say? Gods, what a fool. Indeed…No. If his mentor was not with him, he must certainly have been there recently. Or disguised. Hidden in the next room. Or fled?”

“I did wonder if Boleso might have had some accomplice,” Ingrey admitted. “But Rider Ulkra asserted that no servant of the house had slipped away since the prince's death. And Lord Hetwar would surely not have sent even me to arrest such a perilous power without Temple assistance.” Yes, Ingrey might have encountered something far less benign than salutary pig-delusions.

“The reports of the tragedy that Hetwar received that first night were garbled and inadequate, I grant you,” said Wencel with a scowl. “Leopards were entirely missing from them, among other things. Still…I could wish you had secured the sorcerer, whoever he was.” His gaze wandered back to Ijada. “At the least, confession from such a prisoner might have helped a lady of my household to whom I owe protection.”

Ingrey flinched at the cogency of that. “I doubt I should be here, alive or sane, if I had surprised the man.”

“An arguable point,” Wencel conceded. “But you, of all men, should have known to look.”

Had the geas been fogging Ingrey's thinking? Or just his own numb distaste for his task? He sat back a little, and, having no defense, countered on another flank: “What sorcerer did you encounter? And when?”

Wencel's sandy brows twitched up. “Can you not guess?”

“No. I did not sense your…difference, in Hetwar's chamber. Nor at Biast's installation, which was the last time I'd seen you before.”

“Truly? I was not sure if I had managed to conceal my affliction from you, or you had merely chosen to be discreet. I was grateful, if so.”

“I did not sense it.” He almost added, My wolf was bound, but to do so would be to admit that it now was not. And he had no idea where he presently stood with Wencel. “That's a comfort. Well. It came to me at much the same time as yours, if you must know. At the time of your father's death-or perhaps, I should say, of my mother's.” At Ijada's look and half-voiced query, he added aside to her, “My mother was sister to Ingrey's father. Which would make me half a Wolfcliff, except for all the Horseriver brides that went to his clan in earlier generations. I should need a pen and paper to map out all the complications of our cousinship.”

“Close and tangled. And I have long suspected that all those tragedies falling together like that were somehow bound up one in another.”

Ingrey said slowly, “I knew my aunt had died sometime during my illness, but I had not realized it was so near to my father's death. No one spoke of it to me. I'd assumed it was grief, or one of those mysterious wastings that happen to women in middle age.”

“No. It was an accident. Strangely timed.”

Ingrey hesitated. “Ties…Did you meet the sorcerer who placed your beast in you? Was it Cumril for you, too?”

Wencel shook his head. “Whatever was done to me was done while I was sleeping. And if you think that wasn't the most confusing awakening of my life…!”

“Did it not sicken you, or drive you mad?”

“Not so much as yours, apparently. There was clearly something wrong with yours. I mean, over and above the horror that happened to your father.”

“Why did you never say anything to me? My disaster was no secret. I wish I had known I was not alone!”

“Ingrey, I was thirteen, and terrified! Not least that if my defilement were discovered, they would do to me what they were doing to you! I didn't think I could survive it. I was never strong and athletic, like you. The thought of such torture as you endured sickened me. My only hope seemed concealment, at all costs. By the time I was sure of my own sanity again, and I began to regain my courage, you were gone, exiled, shuffled out of the Weald by your embarrassed uncle. And how could I have communicated? A letter? It would certainly have been intercepted and read, by your keepers or mine.” He breathed deeply, and brought his rapid and shaky voice back under control. “How odd it is to find us roped together now. We could all burn jointly, you know. Back to back to back.”

“Powers that can grant such mercies can also rescind them,” said Wencel darkly. “Ijada and I, then. Not the relation, front to front, that my wife feared, but a holy union of sorts.”

Ijada did not flinch from this remark, but stared at Wencel with a tense new interest, her brows drawn in. Reassessing, perhaps, a man she'd thought she'd known, that she was discovering she had not known at all? As I am?

Wencel focused on Ingrey's grubby bandages. “What happened to your hands?”

“Tripped over a table. Cut myself with a carving knife,” Ingrey answered, as indifferently as possible. He caught Ijada's curious look, out of the corner of his eye, and prayed she would not see fit to expand upon the tale. Not yet, anyway.

Instead, she asked the earl, “What is your beast? Do you know?”

He shrugged. “I had always thought it was a horse, for the Horserivers. That made sense to me, as much as anything in this could.” He drew a long, thoughtful breath, and his chill blue eyes rose to meet theirs. “There have been no spirit warriors in the Weald for centuries, unless maybe some remnant survived hidden in remote refuges. Now there are three new-made, not just in the same generation, but in the same room. Ingrey and I, I have long suspected were of a piece. But you, Lady Ijada…I do not understand. You do not fit. I would urge you search for this missing sorcerer, Ingrey. At the very least, the hunt for such a vital witness might delay proceedings against Ijada.”

Wencel's hands spread flat on the table in unease. “We are all in each other's hands now. I had imagined my secret safe with you, Ingrey, but now it seems you were merely ignorant of it. I've been alone so long. It is hard for me to learn trust, so late.”

Ingrey bent his head in wry agreement.

Wencel pulled his shoulders back, wincing as though they ached. “Well. I must refresh myself, and pay my respects to my late brother-in-law's remains. How are they preserved, by the way?”

“He's packed in salt,” said Ingrey. “They had a plentiful supply at Boar's Head, for keeping game.”

A bleak amusement flashed in Wencel's face. “How very direct of you.”

“I didn't have him properly skinned and gutted, though, so I expect the effect will be imperfect.”

“It's as well the weather is no warmer, then. But it seems we'd best not delay.” Wencel let out a sigh, planted both palms on the tabletop, and pushed himself wearily to his feet. For an instant, the blackness of his spirit seemed to strike Ingrey like a blow, then he was just a tired young man again, burdened too soon in life with dangerous dilemmas. “We'll speak again.”

The earl made his way out to the porch, where his retainers jumped alertly to their feet to escort him toward the town temple. In the door of the taproom, Ingrey touched Ijada's arm. She turned, her lips tight.

“What do you make of Wencel's beast?” he asked her, low-voiced.

She murmured back, “To quote Learned Hallana, if that's a stallion, I'm the queen of Darthaca.” Her eyes rose to meet his, level and intent. “Your wolf is not much like a wolf. And his horse is not much like a horse. But I will say this, Ingrey; they are both a lot like each other.”

much like a horse. But I will say this, Ingrey; they are both a lot like each other.” T

I NGREY RETURNED UPSTAIRS TO PACK HIS SADDLEBAGS, THEN

sought Gesca. The lieutenant's gear was gone from the corner of the taproom. Ingrey walked down the muddy street of Middletown-better named Middlehamlet, in his view-to the small wooden temple, in hopes of finding him. He reviewed which of the half dozen village stables they had commandeered for their horses and equipment Gesca was likely to have gone to next, but the plan proved unnecessary; Gesca was standing in the shade of the temple's wide porch. Speaking, or being spoken to, by Earl Horseriver.

Gesca glanced up at Ingrey, twitched, and fell silent; Wencel merely gave him a nod.

“Ingrey,” said Wencel. “Where is Rider Ulkra and the rest of Boleso's household now? Still at Boar's Head, or do they follow you?”

“They follow, or so I ordered. How swiftly, I do not know. Ulkra cannot expect much joy to await him in Easthome.”

“No matter. By the time I have leisure to attend to them, they will have arrived there, no doubt.” He sighed. “My horses could use a little rest. Arrange things, if you will, to depart at noon. We'll still reach Oxmeade before dark.”

“Certainly, my lord,” said Ingrey formally. He jerked his head at the unhappy-looking Gesca, and Wencel gave them a short wave of farewell and turned for the temple.

“And what did Earl Horseriver have to say to you?” Ingrey inquired of Gesca, low-voiced, as they trod down the street again.

“He's not a glad man. I cringe to think how black things would be if he'd actually liked his brother-in-law. But it's plain he does not love this mess.”

“That, I had already gathered.” “Still, an impressive young fellow, in his way, despite his looks. I thought so back at Princess Fara's wedding.”

“Eh. It wasn't that he did anything special. He just never…”

“Never what?”

Gesca's lips twisted. “I…it's hard to say. He never made a mistake, or looked nervous, never late or early…never drunk. It just crept up on you. Formidable, that's the word I want. In a way, he reminds me of you, if it was brains and not brawn that was wanted.” Gesca hesitated, then, perhaps prudently, declined to pursue this comparison any farther down the slope into the swamp.

“We are cousins,” Ingrey observed blandly.

“Indeed, m'lord.” Gesca gave him a sideways glance. “He was very interested in Learned Hallana.”

Ingrey grimaced. Well, that was inevitable. He would hear more from Wencel on that subject before the day was done, he was sure.

THE MIDDLETOWN TEMPLE DIVINE WAS A MERE YOUNG ACOLYTE, and had been thrown into panic by the descent upon him, on only a half day's notice, of the prince's cortege. But however much ceremony Earl Horseriver was sent to provide, it was clear it was not starting yet. The cavalcade left town promptly at noon with a grimmer efficiency than Ingrey in his vilest mood would have dared deploy. He applauded in his heart, and left the pallid acolyte a suitable purse to console him for his terrors.

Middletown was not yet out of sight on the road behind them when Wencel wheeled his chestnut horse around beside Ingrey's, and murmured, “Ride ahead with me. I need to speak with you.”

“Certainly.” Ingrey kneed his horse into a trot; he gave what he hoped was a reassuring nod to Ijada as they passed around her riding beside the wagon. Wencel favored her with a somewhat ambiguous salute.

“Reedmere.”

“Ha. At least one thing about his funeral will match poor Boleso's taste. They're hauling that silver-plated royal hearse from Easthome to meet us in Oxmeade. I trust it will not collapse any bridges on the way.”

“Indeed.” Ingrey tried to keep his lips from twitching.

“My household awaits me in Oxmeade to attend to my comfort tonight. And yours, if you will join me. I recommend you do so. There will be no lodgings to be found for love nor money once the court arrives there for this procession.”

“Thank you,” said Ingrey sincerely. There had been duels fought by desperate retainers over the possession of haylofts, in certain unwieldy royal excursions of Ingrey's experience. Wencel would certainly have secured the best chambers available.

“Tell me of this Learned Hallana, Ingrey,” said Wencel abruptly.

At least he did not tax Ingrey for his failure to mention her before. Ingrey wondered whether to feel relieved. “I judged her to be exactly what she claimed to be. A friend of Lady Ijada's who had known her as a child. She'd been a physician at some fort of the Son's Order out west in the fen marches-Ijada's father was a lord dedicat, and its captain, at the time.”

“I knew something of Lord dy Castos, yes. Ijada has spoken of him. But my mind picks at the coincidence. A sorcerer with some connection with Lady Ijada-and her new affliction-disappears from Boar's Head. Days later, a sorcerer-or sorceress-with a connection with Ijada comes to her in Red Dike. Is this two sorcerers, or one?”

Ingrey shook his head. “I cannot imagine Learned Hallana passing without note at Boar's Head. Inconspicuous, she was not. And she was very pregnant, which I gather lays great constraint upon her use of her demon for the duration. She stays in a hermitage at Suttleaf, for safety. I admit my evidence is indirect, but I'm certain that Boleso was already deep into his disastrous experiments when he murdered his manservant so grotesquely, six months ago. Which must put his pet sorcerer at Easthome then, or near then, as well.”

“It is as much an error to take truth for lies, as lies for truth,” Ingrey pointed out. “The dual-divine was a most unusual lady, but that she might also be Boleso's puppet is one too many things to believe about her. It doesn't fit. For one thing, she was no fool.”

Wencel tilted his head, conceding the point. “Suppose she were his puppet master, then?”

“Less unlikely,” Ingrey granted reluctantly. “But…no.”

Wencel sighed. “I shall give up my simplifying conjecture, then. We have two separate sorcerers. But-how separate? Might Boleso's tool have fled to her, after the debacle? The two in league?”

An uncomfortable idea. It occurred to Ingrey suddenly that the suggestion-misdirection?-that his geas had been laid on him at Easthome had come from Hallana. “The timing…would not be impossible.”

Wencel grunted disconsolately, staring between his horse's ears for a moment. “I understand the learned divine wrote a letter. Have you read it yet?”

Curse you, Gesca. And curse that gossiping warden. How much else did Wencel already know? “It was not entrusted to me. She handed it directly to Lady Ijada. Sealed.”

Wencel waved a hand in dismissal of this. “I'm sure you've been taught how to do the thing.”

“For ordinary correspondence, certainly. This is one from a Temple sorcerer. I hesitate to think what might happen to the letter-or to me-if I attempted to tamper with it. Burst into flame, maybe.” He left it to Wencel to decide if he meant the paper, or Ingrey himself. “Passing it on to Hetwar also has problems. At the least, he would need another Temple sorcerer to open it. I should think even the royal sealmaster would find it a challenge to suborn one to pry into letters addressed to the head of his own order.”

“If this multiplication of hypothetical sorcerers goes on, we shall have to hang them from the rafters like hams to make room.” Although, Ingrey was uncomfortably reminded, there was still his strange geas to account for.

Wencel gave a short, unhappy nod, then fell silent for a little. “Yes, speaking of hams,” he finally said. His voice grew conversational. “It is not, you know, that you lie well, cousin. It's merely that no one is foolhardy enough to call you on it. This may have given you an inflated idea of your skill at dissimulation.” The voice hardened. “What really happened in that upstairs room?”

“If I had anything more to report, it would be my duty to report it first to Lord Hetwar.”

Wencel's brows climbed. “Oh, really? First, and yet somehow…not yet? I saw your letters to Hetwar, such as they were. The number of items missing from them turns out to be quite notable. Leopards. Sorceresses. Strange brawls. Near drownings. Your romantic lieutenant Gesca would even have it that you have fallen in love-also, if more understandably, without hint in your scribblings.”

Ingrey flushed. “Letters can go astray. Or be read by unfriendly eyes.” He glowered, pointedly, at the earl.

Wencel's lips parted, closed. He attended for a moment to his horse, as he and Ingrey separated to ride around a patch of mire. When they were stirrup to stirrup again, Wencel said, “Your pardon if I seem anxious. I have a great deal to lose.”

With false cheeriness, Ingrey replied, “While I, on the other hand, have already lost it all. Earl-ordainer.”

It was Ingrey's turn to fall silent, abashed. Because Wencel's marriage was arranged-and, up till now, barren-did not necessarily entail that it was also loveless. On either side. Indeed, Princess Fara's betrayal of her handmaiden spoke of a hot unhappy jealousy, which could not be a product of bored indifference. And the hallow king's daughter must have seemed a great prize to so homely a young man, despite his own high rank.

“Besides,” Wencel's voice lightened again, “burning alive is a most painful death. I do not recommend it. I think this missing sorcerer could be a threat to us both, in that regard alone. He knows many things that he should not. We should find him first. If he proves to contain nothing, ah, personally dangerous, I'd be glad enough to pass him along to Hetwar thereafter.”

And if the sorcerer was dangerous to him, what did Wencel propose to do then? And, five gods, how? “Leaving aside all questions of duty-this is not an arrest I am equipped to handle, privately or otherwise.”

“How if you were? Does having first knowledge not attract you?”

“To what end?”

“Survival.”

“I am surviving.”

“You were. But your dispensation from the Temple depends, in part, upon a bond of surety now broken.”

Ingrey's eyes flicked to him, wary. “How so?”

Wencel's lips tightened in a small smile. “I could deduce it by the change in your perception of me alone, but I don't have to; I can see it. Your beast lies quietly within you, by long habit if nothing else, but nothing constrains it except that you do not call it up. Sooner or later, some Temple sensitive is bound to notice, or else you will make some revealing blunder.” His voice grew low and intense. “There are alternatives to cutting off your hand for fear of your fist, Ingrey.”

Wencel's hesitation was longer, this time. “The library at Castle Horseriver is a remarkable thing,” he began obliquely. “Several of my Horseriver forefathers were collectors of lore, and at least one was a scholar of note. Documents lie there that I am certain exist nowhere else, some of them hundreds of years old. Things old Audar's Temple-men would not have hesitated to burn. The most amazing eyewitness accounts-I should tell you some of the anecdotes, sometime. Enough to lure a not very bookish boy to read on. And then, later-to read as though his life depended on it.” His gaze found Ingrey's. “You dealt with your so-called defilement by running away from all knowledge, and acknowledgment. I dealt with mine by running toward. Which of us do you think has the best grip by now?”

Ingrey blew out his breath. “You give me a lot to think about, Wencel.”

“Do so, then. But do not turn away from understanding, this time, I beg you.” He added more softly, “Do not turn your back on me.”

Indeed not. I should not dare. He gave Wencel an equivocal salute.

The cortege came then to a rocky ford, fortunately not in so great a spate as the near-disastrous crossing on the first day, and Ingrey turned his attention to getting all across in safety. A mile farther on, the wagon nearly bogged in a stretch of mud, then a guardsman's mount went lame from a lost shoe. Then, at a stop to water the horses, a fight broke out between two of Boleso's retainers, some smoldering private quarrel that burst into flame. Ingrey's customary menace almost did not contain it, and he turned away from the separated pair pale with worry, which they fortunately took for rage, about what might happen the next time if mere threat was not enough, and he was forced to follow with action.

Ingrey had thought his anxiety over the strange geas to be his most pressing problem. The notion that Wencel's lore might contain clues to the matter was doubly exciting. It suggested Ingrey might have an ally to hand. It equally suggested that Ingrey might have found his unknown enemy. Or, how was it that Wencel seemed to regard illicit sorcerers as minor inconveniences, to be so readily handled? He glanced toward the head of the cortege where Wencel now rode, beyond earshot once more, interrogating one of Boleso's men. The guardsman was a big fellow, yet his shoulders were bowed as though trying to make himself smaller.

Wencel had dragged a number of lures across Ingrey's trail, yet it was not the new mystery but the old one that most arrested him, caught and held him suspended between fascination and fear. What does Wencel know about my father and his mother that I do not?

OXMEADE WAS LARGER THAN RED DIKE, BUT BOLESO'S CORTEGE was received at its big stone temple that afternoon with only moderate ceremony, mostly, it seemed, because the town was a madhouse of preparation for greater events tomorrow. Ingrey was hugely relieved finally to hand off responsibility for the corpse and its outriders to Wencel, who handed them in turn to his sober seneschal, a gaggle of Easthome Temple divines, and a formidable array of retainers and clerks. Princess Fara and her own household, Ingrey was glad to learn, had not followed on, but awaited them all in the capital. It was not yet twilight when Ingrey and his guard mounted up again with their prisoner and followed Wencel through the winding streets. Passing along the edge of a crowded square, Wencel pulled up his horse, and Ingrey stopped beside him. A street market was open late, presumably to serve the needs of the courtiers and their households already starting to arrive for the last leg of Boleso's funeral procession. Ingrey was not sure at first what had caught Wencel's attention, but he followed the earl's gaze past the busy booths to a corner where a fiddler played, his hat invitingly laid upside down at his feet. The musician was better than the usual sort, certainly, and his mellow instrument cast a strange, plaintive song into the golden evening air.

Wencel kept his face averted until the song ended. When he looked forward his profile was strange. Tense, but not with anger or fear; more like a man about to weep for some inconsolable, incalculable loss. Wencel grimaced the tension away and clucked his horse onward without looking back, nor sending anyone to throw a coin in the hat, though the fiddler looked after the rich party with thwarted hope.

They came at length to the large house Wencel had rented, or commandeered, one of several in a row in this wealthy merchants' quarter. Bright brass bosses in sunburst patterns studded the heavy planks of its front door. Ingrey handed off his horse to Gesca, shouldered his saddlebags, and oversaw Lady Ijada and her young warden taken upstairs by a maid. By their strained greetings, this was a servant who had known Ijada before. The Horseriver household, it seemed, found the justice of Ijada's case as disturbingly ambiguous as did their master.

Before Wencel went off to deal with the sheaf of messages that had arrived in his absence, he murmured to Ingrey, “We shall eat in an hour, you and Ijada and I. It may be our last chance for private speech for a while.”

Ingrey nodded. He was guided to a tiny chamber on the top floor, where a basin and a can of hot water were already waiting for him. It was clearly a servant's room, of whatever wealthy family the earl had dislodged, but its solitude was most welcome to him. Horseriver's own servants were likely crowded into some lesser dormitory or stable loft in this crisis, and Gesca and his men would fare little better. Ingrey trusted Horseriver's cook would console them.

Wencel was speaking to Ijada's warden, who was listening with a wide-eyed, daunted expression. He wheeled at the sound of Ingrey's step, and grimaced. “You may go,” he said to the warden, who bobbed a curtsey and withdrew into what was presumably Ijada's chamber. Wencel joined Ingrey at the staircase, motioning him ahead, but excused himself when they reached the ground floor to go off and confer with his clerk.

Ingrey stepped outside in the dusk and made his circuit of the environs of the house. Arriving again at the front door, he was passed from the porter to another servant and into a chamber at the back of the second floor. It was not the grand dining room, almost suitable to an earl's estate, but a small breakfast parlor, overlooking a kitchen garden and the mews. Its single door was heavy, and would muffle sound well, Ingrey judged. A little round table was set for three.

Ijada arrived escorted by a maidservant, who curtseyed to Ingrey and left her. She wore an overdress of wheatstraw-colored wool upon clean linen high to her neck. The effect was modest and maidenly, though Ingrey supposed the lace collar was mostly to hide the greening bruises on her throat. Wencel came in almost on her heels, glittering in the abundant candlelight, having also changed into richer garb than what he'd ridden in. And cleaner. Ingrey briefly wished his own saddlebags had held a better choice than least smelly.

“Ah,” murmured Wencel, lifting a silver cover and revealing a ham. “Dare I ask you to carve, Lord Ingrey?”

Ijada blinked warily. Ingrey returned Wencel an equally tight smile and haggled off slices. He slipped his hands below the table, after, to pull his cuffs down again over the bandages on his wrists. He waited to see how Wencel would bend the talk next, which resulted in a silence for a space, as all applied themselves to the meal.

At length Wencel remarked, “I had nothing but secondhand reports about the dire events at Birchgrove that left your father dead and you…well. They were quite jumbled and wild. And certainly incomplete. Would you tell me the full tale?”

Ingrey, braced for more questions about Hallana, hesitated in confusion, then mustered his memories once more. He had held them for years in silence, yet now recounted them aloud for the third time in a week. His story seemed to grow smoother with repetition, as though the account were slowly coming to replace the event, even in his own mind. Wencel chewed and listened, frowning.

“Your wolf was different than your father's,” he said, as Ingrey wound down after describing, as best he could, the wolfish turmoil in his mind that had blended into his weeks of delirium.

“Well, yes. For one thing, it was not diseased. Or at least…not in the same way. It made me wonder if animals could get the falling sickness, or some like disease of the mind.”

“I do not know. He was dead before I recovered enough to ask anything.”

“Huh. For I had heard”-a slight emphasis on that last word, a significant pause-“that it was not the wolf originally intended for you. That the rabid wolf had killed its pack mate, a day before the rite was to be held. And that the new wolf was found that night, sitting outside the sick wolf's cage.”

“Then you have heard more than I was told. It could be, I suppose.”

Wencel tapped his spoon beside his plate in a faint, nervous tattoo, seemed to catch himself, and set it down.

Ingrey added, “Did your mother say anything to you about your stallion? That morning when you awoke changed.”

“No. That was the morning she died.”

“Not of rabies!”

“No. And yet I have wondered, since. She died in a fall from a horse.”

Ingrey pursed his lips. Ijada's eyes widened.

“It died in the accident, too,” Wencel added. “Broke its leg. The groom cut its throat-it was said. By the time I came to wonder about it-some time afterward-she was long buried, and the horse butchered and gone. I have meditated by her grave, but there is no lingering aura to be sensed there. No ghosts, no answers. Her death was wrenching to me, so soon, just four months after my father's. I was not insensible to the parallels with your case, Ingrey, but if Wolfcliff brother and sister had some plan concocted, some intent, no one confided it to me.”

“Or some conflict,” Ijada suggested thoughtfully, looking back and forth between the pair of them. “Like two rival castles, one on each side of the Lure, building their battlements higher.” Wencel opened a hand in acknowledgment of the possible point, though his frown suggested that the idea did not sit easily with him.

Wencel shrugged. “Guesses, conjectures, fantasies, more like. My nights grew full of them, till I was wearied beyond measure with the wondering.”

Ingrey chased his last bite of dumpling across his plate, and said in a lower tone, “Why did you never approach me before, then?”

“You were gone to Darthaca. Permanent exile, for all I knew. Then your family lost all trace of you. You might have been dead, as far as anyone had heard to the contrary.”

“Yes, but what about after? When I returned?”

“You seemed to have reached a place of safety, under Hetwar's protection. Safer with your dispensation than I was with my secrets, certainly. I envied you that. Would you have thanked me for throwing your life back into doubt and disarray?”

“Perhaps not,” Ingrey conceded reluctantly.

A crisp double knock sounded at the room's thick door. Ijada started, but Wencel merely called, “Come!”

Wencel's clerk poked his head around the door and murmured apologetically, “The message you were awaiting has arrived, my lord.”

“Ah, good. Thank you.” Wencel pushed back from the table, and to his feet. “Excuse me. I shall return in a few moments. Pray continue.” He gestured at the serving dishes.

As soon as Wencel exited, a pair of servants bustled in to clear used plates, lay new courses, renew the wine and water, and retreat again with equally wordless bows. Ingrey and Ijada were left looking at each other. Some tentative exploration under the dish covers revealed dainties, fruits, and sweets, and Ijada brightened. They helped one another to the most interesting tidbits. Ingrey glanced at the closed door. “Do you think Princess Fara knows of Wencel's beast?” he asked her.

“Was he not courtly?”

“Oh, he was always polite, that I saw. Cool and courteous. I never saw why she seemed to have always a touch of fear around him, for he never raised his hand or even his voice to her. But if it was fear for him, and not-or not just-of him, perhaps that explains it.”

“And was he in love with her?”

Her frown deepened. “It's hard to say. He was so often moody, so distant and silent, for days on end it seemed. Sometimes, if there were visitors to Castle Horseriver, he would rouse himself, and there would be a spate of conversation and wit-he's really extraordinarily learned. Yet he has spoken more in one evening to you, here, than I ever heard him speak at any meal with his wife. But then…you are arresting to him in ways that she is not.” Her eyes slid toward and away from him, and he knew she tested her inner senses.

So are you, now, Ingrey realized. “He has only a little time to assure himself of his own safety in this new tangle. Perhaps that explains why he's pushing. He is pushing-don't you think?” Ingrey at least felt pressed.

“Oh, yes.” She paused in thought. “Too, it may be an outpouring long suppressed. Who could he speak to of this, before us, now? He's worried, yes, but also…I don't know. Excited? No-subtler or stranger than that. Surely joyful cannot be the word.” Her lips screwed up.

“I shouldn't think so,” Ingrey said dryly. The door clicked open, and Ingrey's gaze jerked up. It was Wencel, returning. He seated himself again with an apologetic gesture.

“Well enough. If I have not yet said so, Ingrey, let me congratulate you on the speed of your mission. It does not look as though I shall be able to emulate it, to my regret. I'll likely send you ahead with Lady Ijada tomorrow, as her presence in the cortege is like to be, hm, awkward, as it is turned into a parade. At half march all the way on to Easthome, five gods spare me.”

“Where in Easthome am I to be sent?” Ijada asked, a little tensely.

“That is a matter still being settled. I should know by tomorrow morning. No place vile, if I have my way.” He stared at her through lidded eyes.

Ingrey stared at them both, daring to extend his senses beyond sight. “You two are different from each other. Your beast is much darker, Wencel. Or something. Her cat makes me think of sundappled shade, but yours…goes all the way down.” Past the limits of his perceptions.

“Indeed, I think that leopardess must have been at the peak of its condition,” said Wencel. He cast Ijada a smile, as if to reassure her that the comment was well meant. “It has a fresh and pure power. A Weald warrior would have been proud to bear it, if there had been such a clan as kin Leopardtree back then.”

“But I am a woman, not a warrior,” said Ijada, watching him back.

“The women of the Old Weald used to take in sacred animals as well. Did you not know?”

“No!” Her eyes lit with interest. “Truly?”

“Oh, seldom as warriors, though there were always a few such called. Some tribes used theirs as their banner-carriers, and they were valued above all women. But there was a second sort…another sort of hallowed animal made, that women took more often. Well, more proportionally; they were much rarer to start with.”

“Made?” said Ingrey.

Wencel's lips curved up at the tautness in his voice, in an angler's smile. “Weald warriors were made by sending the soul of a sacrificed animal into a man. But something else was made when the soul of an animal was sacrificed into another animal.”

Ijada shook off her arrested look, and began, “Do you think Boleso was attempting-wait, no.”

“I have still not quite unraveled what Boleso thought he was about, but if it was in pursuit of some rumor of this old magic, he had it wrong. The animal was sacrificed, at the end of its life, into the body of a young animal, always of the same sort and sex. And all the wisdom and training it had learned went with it. And then, at the end of its life, that animal was sacrificed into another. And another. And another. Accumulating a great density of life. And-at some point along the chain, five or six or ten generations or more-it became something that was not an animal anymore.”

“An…animal god?” ventured Ijada.

Wencel spread his hands. “In some shadowy sense, perhaps. It's what some say the gods are-all the life of the world flows into them, through the gates of death. They accumulate us all. And yet the gods are an iteration stranger still, for they absorb without destroying, becoming ever more Themselves with each perfectly retained addition. The great hallowed animals were a thing apart.”

“How long did it take to make one?” asked Ingrey. His heart was starting to beat faster, and he knew his breath was quickening. And he knew Wencel marked it. Why am I suddenly terrified at Wencel's bedtime tale? His very blood seemed to growl in response to it.

“Decades-lifetimes-centuries, sometimes. They were vastly valued, for as animals, they were tame and trainable, uncannily intelligent; they came to understand the speech of men. Yet this great continuity suffered continuous attrition, and not just through ordinary mischance. For when a Weald man or woman took one of the great beasts into their soul, they became something far more than a warrior. Greater and more dangerous. Few of the oldest and best of the creatures survived unharvested under the pressure of Audar's invasion. Many were sacrificed prematurely just to save them from the Darthacan troops. Audar's Temple-men were specially disposed to slay them whenever they were found, in fear of what they could become. Of what they could make us into.”

Wencel bent his hand back and forth. “Let us not become confused in our language. A sorcerer, proper-or improper, if illicit and not bound by Temple disciplines-is possessed of an elemental of disorder and chaos, sacred to the Bastard, and the magic the creature endows is constrained into channels of destruction thereby. Such demons are bound up in the balance of the world of matter and the world of spirit. And the old tribes had such sorcerers, too, with their own traditions of discipline under the white god.

“The great hallowed animals were of this world, and had not ever been in the hands of the gods. Not part of their powers. Not constrained to destruction, either. A purely Wealding thing. Although their magic was wholly of the mind and spirit, they also could affect the body that the mind and spirit rule. The animal shamans had a quite separate tradition from the tribal sorcerers, and not always in alliance with them even in the same clan. One of the many divisions that weakened us in the face of the Darthacan onslaught.” Wencel's eyes grew distant, considering this ancient lapse.

Ijada was looking back and forth between Wencel and Ingrey. “Oh,” she breathed.

Ingrey's face felt drained. It was as if his fortress walls were crumbling, inside his mind, in the face of Wencel's sapping. No. No. This is rubbish, nonsense, old tales for children, some sort of vile joke Wencel is having on me, to see how much I can be persuaded to swallow. What he whispered instead was, “How?”

Ijada sat up with an even sharper stare. A flick of Wencel's eyes acknowledged his audience, and he continued: “Even a century and a half of persecution afterward did not erase all knowledge, though not for lack of trying. Pockets endured, though very few in writing like the library at Castle Horseriver-specially collected by certain of my ancestors, to be sure, but collected from somewhere. But in remote regions, fens and mountains, poor hamlets-the Cantons broke from the Darthacan yoke early-traditions, if not their wisdom, continued for long. Passed down from generation to generation as secret family or village rites, always dimming in ignorance. What even Audar could not accomplish, Time the destroyer did. I had not imagined any to be left, after the relentless erosion of centuries. But it seems there were at least…two.” His blue gaze pierced Ingrey.

Ingrey's thoughts felt like frantic claws scrambling and scraping on the floor of a cage. He managed only an inarticulate noise.

“For your consolation,” Wencel continued, “it explains your long delirium. Your wolf was a far more powerful intrusion upon your soul than your father's or Ijada's simple creatures. Four hundred years old seems impossible-how many wolf generations must that be?-and yet…” His gaze on Ingrey grew uneasy. “All the way down, indeed. An apt description. The spirit warriors mastered their beasts with little effort, for the ordinary animals were readily subordinated to the more powerful human mind. In the Old Weald, if you'd been destined to be gifted with a great beast, you would have had much preparation and study, and the support of others of your kind. Not abandoned to find your own way, stumbling in fear and doubt and near madness. No wonder you responded by crippling yourself.”

“Oh, aye.”

Ijada, her tone shrewd, said to Wencel, “And are you?”

He held a palm out. “Less so. I have my own burdens.”

How much less so, Wencel? Yet Ingrey was less moved by the suspicion that he might have found the source of his geas, as by the notion that he might have found his mirror.

Wencel turned again to Ingrey. “In the event, yours was a happy ignorance. If the Temple had suspected what manner of beast you really bore, you would not have found that dispensation so easy to come by.”

“It wasn't easy,” muttered Ingrey.

Wencel hesitated, as if considering a new thought. “Indeed. To bind a great beast could have been no small task.” A respectful, even wary, smile turned one corner of his mouth. He glanced at the candles burning down in their holders on the center of the table. “It grows late. Tomorrow's duties crowd the dawn. We must part company for a while, but Ingrey, I beg you-do nothing to draw fresh attention to yourself till we can talk again.”

Ingrey scarcely dared breathe. “I thought my wolf was just a well of violence. Rage, destruction, killing. What else can it-could I do?”

“That is the next lesson. Come to me for it when we are both back in Easthome. Meantime, if you value your life, keep your secrets-and mine.” Wencel pushed himself up, wearily. He ushered them out the door before him, plain signal that both the dinner and the revelations were done for the night. Ingrey, nearly sick to his stomach, could only be thankful. CHAPTER NINE

THE SERVANT'S COT CREAKED IN THE NIGHT SILENCE OF THE house as Ingrey sat down and clenched his hands upon his knees. Introspection was a habit he'd long avoided, for aversion to what it must confront. Tonight, at last, he forced his perceptions inward.

He pushed past the generalized dull terror, as through a too-familiar fog. Brushed aside clinging tendrils of self-deception, a veil on his inner sight. He had no time or patience for them anymore. Once, he had conceived of his bound wolf as a sort of knot under his belly, encysted, like an extra organ, but one without function. The knot, the wolf, was not there now. Nor in his heart, nor in his mind, exactly, though trying to see into his own mind felt like trying to see the back of his own head. The beast was truly unbound. So…where…?

It is in my blood, he realized. Not a part, but every part of him. It wasn't just in him, now; it was him. Not to be ripped out as readily as cutting off his fist, or tearing out his eyes, no, no such trivial surgery would answer.

It came to him then, a possible reason why the fen folk practiced their peculiar blood sacrifices, a meaning lost in the depths of time even to themselves. The marsh people were old enemies of the Old Wealdings. They had faced the forest tribes' spirit warriors and animal shamans in battle and raid along their marches for centuries out of mind-taken captives, perhaps including prisoners far too dangerous to hold. Had those sanguinary drainings once had a more grim and practical purpose?

Could a mere physical separation, of blood from body, also create a spiritual one, of sin from soul?

Denial, it seemed, ran at the end of its long road down into a bog of blood. More in a sort of chill curiosity than any other emotion, Ingrey rummaged in his saddlebags and drew out his coil of rope. He laid it and his belt knife out on the quilt beside him and glanced upward in the light of his single candle at the shadowy ceiling beams. Yes, it could be done, the supreme self-sacrifice. Bind his own ankles, hoist himself up, loop a knot. Hang upside down. Lift the finely honed blade to his own throat. He could let his wolf out in a hot scarlet stream, end its haunting of him, right here and now. Free himself of all defilement in the ultimate no.

So would his soul, rejected by the gods, just fade quietly into oblivion as the sundered and damned ghosts were said to do? It seemed no fearful fate. Or-if he had misjudged the rite-would his lost spirit, augmented by this unknown force, turn into something…else? Something presently unimaginable?

Did Wencel know what?

All those lures the young earl had thrown out, all that bait, were plain enough indicators of how Wencel thought of Ingrey, and about him. I am prey, in his eyes. Watch me run. He could deny Wencel his quarry.

Ingrey stood up, reached, felt along the beam, tucked the rope through a slight warped gap between the timber and the attic floor above, sat again and studied the cord's dangling length in the shadows. He touched the gray twist; his brain felt cool and distant, in this contemplation, and yet his hand shook. That much blood would make a mighty mess on the floor for some horrified servant to clean up in the morning. Or would it flow between the floorboards, seep through the ceiling of the room below? Announce the event overhead by a dripping in the dark, spattering wetly upon a pillow or a sleeping face? Was that thunder, does the roof leak? Until a light was struck, and its bright flare revealed the drizzle as a redder rain. Would there be screams?

Was Lady Ijada's room below his? He calculated the placement of corridors, and of the chamber door into which the warden had retreated. Perhaps. It hardly mattered.

He paused for a long time, barely breathing, balanced on the cusp of the night. No.

The thought did very odd things to his heart. He rejected the poets' phrases as drivel; his heart did not turn over, nor inside out, nor, most certainly not ever, dance. It went on beating right side up in his chest as usual, if a little faster and tighter-seeming. Was he odd, to relish the peculiar perilous sensation so? It wasn't exactly pleasant. Exactly. But what he relished in the darkness of his dreams wasn't what most men he'd known spoke of, in the crude braggings of their lusts, as pleasant; he'd been aware of that for some time.

His hand drew back, clenched closed.

So if I choose not to wake you so redly, Ijada, what then?

He had come to the end of the road of No; he could go no further down it without drowning in his own blood. I have three choices, I think. To wade into the red swamp and never come up again. To linger in numbness and immobility as before-yet it was certain that neither the tide of events nor the relentless Wencel would permit the continuation of his paralysis very much longer. Or…he might turn around and walk the other way.

So what does that mean, or has my thinking turned altogether to a poet's twaddle? His bedchamber was so quiet he could hear the susurrus of the blood in his ears like an animal's panting.

Could he stop denying himself, and deny others instead? He tested the phrases on his tongue. No, you are wrong, all of you, Temple and Court and folk in the streets. You always were wrong. I am not…am not… what? And are these the only terms I can think in, these shouted nos? Ah, habit.

Or Who I may meet along it, and that thought disturbed him more than knife and cord and haunted blood together.

Though if I can find a darker dark along it than this one, I shall be surprised.

He rose, sheathed his knife, packed the rope away. Stripped for sleep and lay down under the servant's sheets. Old and thin and mended, they were, but clean; it was a rich household that afforded even its servants such refinements.

I do not know where I am going. But I am quite weary enough of where I've been.

AFTER THE BRIEFEST DAWN MEETING WITH WENCEL, ALL practicalities, Ingrey took his prisoner on the road. Hetwar's troop still escorted them, glad enough to be lighter by one dead prince and a dozen surly retainers and all their baggage. Ingrey had even sent the latest warden-dedicat home, her place taken by a middle-aged maidservant of Horseriver's household who rode pillion behind Gesca. The small cavalcade climbed out of the valley of Oxmeade into the breaking day, and began to wind through the settled country of the rich lowlands belonging to the earldom of Stagthorne.

Taking a lead from Horseriver, Ingrey edged his mount forward and without apology motioned Ijada to ride ahead with him. He was nonetheless conscious of Gesca's narrow gaze, following them. Just so they outdistanced the curious lieutenant's ears.

Ijada was unusually pale and withdrawn this morning, with gray smudges under her eyes. Her smile, returning his curt nod, was brief and muted. Was she finally coming to realize that she rode into a trap? Too late? “We cannot continue to flounder along with no attempt at a plan,” he began firmly. “You've rejected mine. Have you a better?”

His mouth, tightening, paused. The first hour I saw you at Boar's Head, five gods help me. “In the upstairs room of that inn at Red Dike,” he answered instead.

She tilted her head in a conciliating nod.

“We share a certain problem apart from your legal morass,” he continued. “Cat maiden.”

“Oh, it's not apart. Dog lord.”

Despite himself, his lips twisted up in return. Did he truly smile so little, that his mouth should feel so odd doing this? “Earl Horseriver has promised this much to shield you. He told me this morning that you are to be lodged in a house in the capital that he owns, with his servants about you. Better than some dank cell down by the river, and a sign, I think, that your destruction is not yet set in train. There may be a little time.”

“He means to keep me close,” she said thoughtfully.

“At Wencel's request, Lord Hetwar has appointed me your house warden for this arrest.” No need to mention how his breath had skipped at this unexpected stroke of good fortune. “Judging by the note his courier brought me, Hetwar is glad enough to have you kept out of sight for a time.”

Her eyes flew up. “Wencel means to keep us both close, then. Why?”

“I judge…” his voice slowed, uncertain. “I judge he is a little off-balance, just now. So much is happening at once, with the funeral and his distraught wife, atop the roil already with the hallow king's illness and-the Mother avert, but it seems most probable-the impending election. Biast and his retinue will be arriving in Easthome, and the prince will certainly draw his brother-in-law into the concerns of his party. Beneath that lie Wencel's other uncanny secrets, old and new. If Wencel can make one piece of his puzzle hold still till he has time to attend to it, well, so much the better. For him. As for me, I don't intend to hold still.”

“I've had one idea, so far. If, as I suspect, more than one power in Easthome would like to see your trial suppressed, this scandal swept quietly aside, it might even be accepted. Your kin might call on the old kin-law, and offer a blood-price for Prince Boleso.”

She inhaled, brows climbing in surprise. “Will the Temple care to have its justiciars excluded from so high a case?”

“If the highest lords of kin Stagthorne and kin Badgerbank agree, the divines of the Father's Order will have no choice. There lies my first doubt, for the king is unfit to accept any proposal; at the time I left Easthome, Hetwar was uncertain that the old man had even been made to understand that Boleso had, um, met his death. Biast, once he arrives, will be half-prepared and wholly distracted. Clear decisions from the Court at Easthome have been hard to come by, these past weeks, and it will likely get worse before it gets better. But Earl-ordainer Badgerbank is no small power in his own right. If he could be convinced, for the honor of his house, to sponsor you, and Wencel urged to help persuade him, the scheme might have a chance.”

“A prince's blood-price could be no small sum. Far beyond my poor stepfather's means.”

“It would have to come from Badgerbank's purse. With Wencel, perhaps, helping fill it on the left hand.”

“Have you met Earl Badgerbank? I did not think he had the reputation as a generous man.”

“Um…” Ingrey hesitated, then answered honestly, “no, he doesn't.” He glanced across at her, riding in the warming morning light. “But if the money-”

“Bribe?” she muttered. “-were raised elsewhere, I think there would be less trouble coaxing him to lend his name. Your dower lands-how large are they?”

Ingrey blinked, taken aback. “That is rather larger than you led me to picture. A forested tract is no small resource; it may yield up game, timber, charcoal, mast for pigs, perhaps a great prize of minerals beneath…you have nearly the price of a prince right there, I think! How many villages or hamlets are to be found there, how many hearths in the tax census?”

“None. Not in those lands. No one hunts there. No one goes in.”

The sudden tension in her tone arrested him. “Why not?”

She shrugged, unconvincingly. “They are accursed. Haunted woods, whispering woods. The Wounded Woods, they are called, and indeed, the trees seem sick. All who enter are plagued by nightmares of blood and death, they say.”

“Tales,” Ingrey scoffed.

“I went in,” Ijada replied steadily. “After my mother died, and it was at last made clear that the tract had indeed come to me. I went to see for myself, for I believed I had the right. And duty. The forester was reluctant to escort me, but I made him. My stepfather's grooms and my maid were terrified. For a full day we rode in, then made a camp. Most of the land is raw and steep, all ravines and abrupt cliffs, briars and stones poking through, and gloomy hollows. At the center is one broad, flat valley, filled with great oak trees, centuries old. That is the darkest part, said to be the most haunted, a cursed shrine of the Old Weald. Local legend says it is lost Bloodfield itself, for all that two other earldoms along the Ravens claim that doubtful honor.”

“Many old shrine sites have become farmers' fields, in time.”

“Not this one. We slept there that night, much against the will of my escort. And indeed, we dreamed. The grooms dreamed of being torn apart by animals, and woke screaming. My maid dreamed that she drowned in blood. Come morning, they were all wild to get away.”

She hesitated so long this time he almost asked again, but held his tongue. His patience was rewarded at length when she murmured, “We all dreamed. It took me some time to realize that my dream was different.”

Silences, he reminded himself, had a power all their own. He waited some more. She regarded him under her lashes, as if gauging his tolerance for further tales of the uncanny.

She began, he thought, obliquely. “Have you ever witnessed an almsgiver mobbed by famished beggars? How they gather in a vast swirl, each one weak, but in their numbers strong and frightening, frantic? Give to us, give, for we starve… Yet however much you gave, all that you had, it would not be enough; they might tear you apart and devour you without being satisfied.”

He granted her a wary nod, uncertain where this was tending.

“In my dream…men came to me out of the trees. Bloody-handed men, many headless, in the rusted armor of the Old Weald. Some bore animal standards, the skulls all decorated about with colored stones, or wore capes of skins; stag and bear, horse and wolf, badger and otter, boar and lynx and ox and I know not what else. Faceless, blurred, horribly hacked. They raved around me in a great begging crowd, as though I were their queen, or liege-lady, come to spread some strange largesse among them. I could not understand their language, and their signs bewildered me. I was not afraid of them, for all they pawed my garments with rotting hands until my dress was soaked in cold black blood. They wanted something of me. I could not make out what it was. But I knew they were owed it.”

“A terrifying dream,” he said, in the most detached voice he could muster.

“I did not fear them. But they split my heart.” “Were they so pitiful?”

Began again. “Until Wencel said those words last night. Banner-carrier. I had half forgotten the dream, in the press of more recent woes, but at those words the memory of it slammed back, so vivid it was like a blow-I don't think you know how close I came to fainting.”

“I…no. To me, you just looked interested.”

She gave a relieved nod. “Good.”

“And so what new thing do you make of your dream as a result?”

“I thought…I think…I think now the dead warriors made me their banner-carrier, that night.” Her right hand rose from her rein to her left breast, and spread there in the sacred gesture; he thought the fingers clutched in a tiny spasm. “And I was suddenly reminded that the heart is the sign and signifier of the Son of Autumn. The heart for courage. And loyalty. And love.”

Ingrey had tried to wrench their thoughts to shrewd politics, to good, solid, reasonable, practical plans. How had he stepped hip deep into the eerie once again? “It was but a dream. How long ago?”'

“Some months. The others could not wait to break camp and gallop home, next morning, but I rode slowly, looking back.” “What did you see?”

“Surely someone might be found who does not know their local reputation.”

She shook her head. “You don't understand.”

“What, are the lands entailed to you?”

“No.”

“Already pledged for debt?”

“No! Nor shall they be. How would I ever redeem them?” She laughed mirthlessly. “No great marriage, or likely, any marriage, looms in my future now; and I have no other prospects of inheritance.”

“But if it might save your life, Ijada-”

“You don't understand. Five gods help me, I don't understand. But…they laid the woods into my charge, the dead men. I cannot lay that charge down until my men are…paid.”

“Paid? What coin can ghosts desire? Or hallucinations, as the case may be,” he added testily.

She grimaced in frustration, and with a little slice of her hand batted down his doubting shot. “I don't know. But they wanted something.”

“Then I shall just have to find another way,” Ingrey muttered. Or return to this argument later.

Now it was her turn to stare thoughtfully at him. “And what plans have you made to seek out the source of your geas?”

“None, yet,” he admitted. “Though after, um, Red Dike, I think no such thing could be laid upon me again without my seeing it. Resisting it.” Stung by the doubtful quirk of her eyebrows, he added more sternly, “I plan to be on my guard, and look about me.”

Ingrey's frown deepened at this unwelcome thought. “Many men. It's my calling. But I always figured an enemy would just send paid bravos.”

“Do you think the average bravo would be inclined to take you on?”

His lips lifted a little at this. “They might have to raise the price.”

Her lips curved, too. “Perhaps your unknown enemy is a pinch-purse, then. The bounty for a wild wolf warrior might be too steep for him.”

Ingrey chuckled. “My reputation is more lurid than my sword arm can sustain, I'm afraid. An adversary has merely to send enough men, or shoot from behind in the dark. Easily enough done. Men alone are not hard to kill, despite our swagger.”

“Indeed,” she murmured bleakly, and Ingrey cursed his careless tongue. After a moment, she added, “It's still a good question, though. What would have happened to you if the geas had worked as planned?”

Ingrey shrugged. “Disgraced. Dismissed from Hetwar's service. Maybe hanged. Our drowning would have passed as an accident, true. Some several men might have been happy that I'd relieved them of a dilemma, but I should not have looked to them for gratitude.”

“But it would be safe to say you'd have been removed as a force in the capital.”

“I'm no force in the capital. I'm just one of Hetwar's more dubious servants.”

“Such a charitable man Hetwar is to sponsor you, then.” Ingrey's lips opened, closed. “Mm.”

You thought it, too? Ijada, Ingrey reminded himself, had never known Wencel as a small, slow child. But did that leave her to overestimate, or Ingrey to underestimate, his cousin?

Ijada continued, “But in that case, I do not understand why we were both allowed to leave his house alive today.”

“That would have been too crude,” said Ingrey. “A hired assassin is always his own witness, but the geas would have left none. The spell-caster, Wencel or not, desired greater subtlety. Presumably.” He frowned in renewed doubt.

“He was never a comfortable man, but this new Wencel scares me to death.”

“Well, he does not me.” Ingrey's mouth and mind froze as he was suddenly reminded of how close he'd come to death at his own hand, not twelve hours past. A subtle enough death to pass unquestioned even under Wencel's roof? It was no geas that time, though. I did it to myself.

After Wencel cried wolf at me…

“Now what makes you grow grim?” Ijada demanded. “Nothing.” Her lips twisted in exasperation. “To be sure.” After a few more minutes of riding in silence, she added, “I want

to know what else Wencel knows of Bloodfield-or Holytree, as he called it-if he's such a scholar of the Old Weald as he claims. Tax him on it, if-when-you speak again. But do not tell him of my dream.”

Ingrey nodded agreement. “Had you ever discussed your legacy with him?”

“Never.” “With Princess Fara?”

Ingrey drummed his fingers on the thigh of his riding leathers. “It must have been but a dream. Most souls would have been taken up by the gods at the hour of their deaths, whether your woods were Bloodfield or some lesser Wealding defeat. Any sundered who refused the gods would have blurred to oblivion centuries ago, or so the divines taught me. Four hundred years is far too long for ghosts to survive so entire.”

“I saw what I saw.” Her tone neither offered nor requested rationalizations.

“Maybe that's what the addition of animal spirits does to men's souls,” Ingrey continued in a spurt of inspiration. “Instead of dissolution, damnation becomes an eternal, cold, and silent torment. Trapped between matter and spirit. All the pain of death lingering, all the joy of life stripped away…” He swallowed in sudden fear.

Ijada's gaze grew distant, looking down the winding road. “I trust not. The warriors were worn and tormented, but not joyless, for they took joy in me, I thought.” Her eyes, turning toward him, crinkled a little at the edges. “A moment ago, you said it must be a dream, but now you take it for truth, and your doom foreshadowed. You can't have it both ways, however delightfully glum piling up the prospects makes you.”

Ingrey was surprised into a snort; his lips curled up at the sides, just a little bit. He yanked them back straight. “So which do you think it is?”

“I think…” she said slowly, “that if I could go back now, I would know.” Her lids lowered briefly, and the next look she gave him seemed to weigh him. “I think you might, too.”

They were interrupted then by a crowd on the road, some kinlord's entourage from Easthome traveling to the funereal duty at Oxmeade. Ingrey motioned his men aside, scanning the mob of outriders for faces he recognized. He saw a few, and exchanged brief, sober salutes. Boarford's men, and therefore the two brotherearls and their wives sheltered in the tapestry-covered wagon that jounced along the ruts. Almost immediately thereafter, Ingrey's troop had to make way again for a procession of Temple-men, lord dedicats and high divines, richly dressed and well mounted.