The Hallowed Hunt

CHAPTER ELEVEN

AS INGREY MADE HIS WAY UP THE CORRIDOR TOWARD THE side entrance of the temple court, a cry of dismay echoed along the walls. His steps quickened in curiosity, then alarm, as the cry was succeeded by a scream. Frightened shouts erupted. His hand gripped the hilt of his sword as he burst into the central area, his head swiveling in search of the source of the uproar.

A bizarre melee was pouring out of the archway to the Father's court. Foremost was the great ice bear. Clamped in its jaws was the foot of the deceased man, an aged fellow dressed in clothes befitting a wealthy merchant, the stiff corpse bouncing along like some huge doll as the bear growled and shook its head. At the end of the silver chain hooked to the bear's collar, the groom-acolyte swung in a wide and stumbling arc. Some of the braver or more distraught mourners pelted after, shouting advice and demands.

His voice nearly squeaking, the panicked groom advanced on the bear, yanking the chain, then grabbing for the corpse's arm and pulling. The bear half rose, and one heavy paw lashed out; the groom staggered back, screaming in earnest now, clutching his side from which red drops spattered.

Ingrey drew his blade and ran forward, skidding to a stop before the maddened beast. From the corner of his eye he could see Prince Jokol, grasped in a restraining hug from behind by his companion, struggling toward him. “No, no, no!” cried the red-haired man in a voice of anguish. “Fafa only thought they were offering him a meal! Don't, don't hurt him!” By him, Ingrey realized, blinking, Jokol meant the bear…

Everything around him slowed, and Ingrey's perceptions came alight, in the black exultation of his wolf ascending, seemingly pumped from his heart up into his reeling brain. The noise in the court became a distant rumble. His sword in his hand felt weightless; the tip rose, then began to curve away in a glittering back-swing. His mind sketched the plunge of the steel, into the bear's heart and out again before it could even begin to react, caught as it was in that other, more sluggish stream of time.

It was then that he felt, more than saw, the faint god light sputtering from the bear like sparks off a cat petted in the winter dark. The light's beauty confounded him, burning into his eyes. His heightened perceptions reached for it in a desperate grasping after the fading god, and suddenly, his mind was in the bear's.

He saw himself, foreshortened: a doubled image of leather-clad man and moving blade, and a vast, dark, dense wolf with glowing silver-tipped fur spewing light in an aureole all around him. As his heart reached after the god light, so the bear's astounded senses reached toward him, and for an instant, a three-way circle completed itself.

A laughing Voice murmured in his mind, but not in his ear: “I see my Brother's pup is in better pelt, now. Good. Pray continue…” Ingrey's mind seemed to explode with the weight and pressure of that utterance.

For a moment, the bear's dazed and wordless memories became his. The recent procession into the Father's court, with the other animals all about. The distraction of the groom, the stink of his fear, but the reassurance of the familiar one, his smell and his voice, providing a link to calm in this disordered stone world. Voices droning, on and on. A dim comprehension of movement, positioning, yes, there had been food not long ago, when he did this, and let them lead him over there…And then his bear-heart swelled and burst with the overwhelming arrival of the god, followed by the happy certainty of a rocking amble toward the bier. Then confusion and pain; the small man hooked on the end of his chain was pulling back, yanking, punishing him for doing this thing, frustrating his happiness. He lunged forward in an attempt to complete his god-given task. More of these puny creatures ran about getting in his way. A red rage rose in his brain like a tide, and he grabbed that cold odd-smelling lump of meat and lumbered off with it toward the laughing light Who called him, Who was, confusingly, everywhere and yet nowhere…

Ingrey seemed to reach deep into his chest, his belly, his bowels, and brought out one word: “Down!” The command flew through the air with the weight of a stone from a catapult.

His sword tip circled once, then fell in a silver arc to the pavement before his feet. The bear's snout tracked it, following it down, and down, until the great beast was crouched before Ingrey's boots, pressing its jaw to the tiles, its paws drawn in close to its head, its massive haunches bunching up behind. The yellow eyes looked up at him in bear-bewilderment, and awe.

Ingrey glowered around to find the groom-acolyte scrabbling away on hands and knees nearby, white robes bloodied, eyes now more huge on Ingrey than they'd been on the ice bear. The claws had merely grazed his ribs, else he might have been disemboweled. The bear's rage still boiled up in Ingrey's brain. Letting his sword fall with a clang, he advanced upon the man. He scooped him up by the front of his robes, jamming him against the plinth of the holy fire. The man was as tall as Ingrey, and broader in the beam, but he seemed to float in Ingrey's grasp. Ingrey bent him backward over the licking heat. The groom's flailing feet sought the floor, without success, and his squeaking strained up beyond sound into silence.

“What did they pay you, to thwart the god's blessing? Who dared this execration?” Ingrey snarled into the groom's contorted face. His voice, pitched low and vibrating, snaked all around the stone walls like a rustle of velvet, and back into his own ears like a purr.

“He lies!” yelped the groom in the Father's livery, dragging his frightened gray dog on its lead, circling wide around the still-crouching bear.

The white-clad groom's eyes focused on Ingrey's, inches from his face, and he inhaled deeply and screamed, “I confess! Don't, don't, don't…”

Don't what? With difficulty, Ingrey straightened, opened his hands, and let the man fall back to his feet. He kept on going down, however, knees crumpling, till he was curled up in a bleeding ball at the base of the plinth, sniveling.

“Nij, you fool!” screamed the Father's groom. “Shut up!”

“I couldn't help it!” cried the Bastard's groom, cowering from Ingrey. “His eyes shone silver, and his voice had a terrible weirding on it!”

“Then you'd best listen, hadn't you,” said an unsympathetic voice at Ingrey's elbow.

Ingrey jerked away to find Learned Lewko, out of breath, exasperation manifest in the set of his teeth, standing looking over the chaotic scene.

Ingrey inhaled deeply, desperately trying to slow his heart, will time to its normal flow, calm his exacerbated senses. Light, shade, color, sound, all seemed to strike at him like ax blades, and the people all around him burned like fires. It was gradually borne in upon him how many people were staring at him now, mouths agape: some thirty or so mourners, the divine conducting the ceremony, all five groom-acolytes, Prince Jokol and his dumbfounded friend, and now, Learned Lewko. Who was not looking at all dumbfounded. I have let my wolf ascend, Ingrey reflected in a dizzied delirium. In front of forty witnesses. In the middle of the main temple court of Easthome.

“Learned, Learned, help me, mercy…” mumbled the injured groom, crawling to Lewko's feet and grabbing the hem of his robe. Lewko's look of exasperation deepened.

A dozen people now seemed to be arguing at once, accusations and counteraccusations of both bribes and threats, as the mourners fell apart into two camps. An inheritance seemed to be at stake, from the fragments of speech that reached Ingrey's ears, although the thread of this instantly tangled with other old grudges, slights, and resentments. The hapless divine who had been conducting the funeral ceremony made a few feeble attempts to restore order among his flock while simultaneously threatening discipline upon his grooms, then, thwarted in both tasks, turned instead to an easier target.

He whirled to Prince Jokol, and pointed a shaking hand at the bear. “Take that thing back,” he snarled. “Get it out of this temple at once! Never return!”

The towering red-haired man seemed nearly in tears. “But I was promised a divine! I must have one! If I do not bring one back to my island, my beautiful Breiga will not marry me!”

Ingrey stepped forward, chin up, and put all the authority of Sealmaster Hetwar's most dangerous sword hand into his voice. And perhaps…something extra. “The Temple of Easthome will give you a missioner in exchange for your silver ingots, Prince. Or perhaps I missed the offer to return them?” He let his eye fall stonily on the harassed divine.

Learned Lewko, in a tone seeming singularly calm compared to everyone else's, soothed, “The Temple will make all right, Prince, once we have ironed out this regrettable internal fault. It seems that your fine bear was the victim of an impious machination. For now, will you please take Fafa back to your boat for safekeeping?” He added out of the corner of his mouth to Ingrey, “And you, my lord, would oblige me vastly if you would go with them, and see that they both get there without eating any small children on the way.”

Lewko's eyelids flicked down; he added, “And take care of that.”

Ingrey followed his glance. New blood was leaking in a dark trickle down his fingers from beneath the soiled bandage on his right hand. Something half-healed had burst during his manhandling of the guilty groom, presumably. He'd felt nothing.

He looked up to find himself fixed with a fierce blue stare. Jokol's eyes narrowed; he bent his head for a low-voiced, rapid exchange with his brown-haired comrade. Then he looked up and favored Lewko with an abrupt nod, which he extended to Ingrey. “Yes. We like this one, eh, Ottovin?” He gave his companion a nudge in the ribs that might have knocked over a lesser man, and marched over to his bear. He picked up the silver chain. “Come, Fafa.”

The bear whined and shuffled a little, but kept its crouching pose.

Lewko's hand griped Ingrey's shoulder; a nearly soundless breath in his ear said, “Let it up again, Lord Ingrey. I think it is calmer now.”

“I…” Ingrey stepped nearer to the bear, and scooped up and resheathed his sword. The bear shuffled about some more, pressed its black nose to Ingrey's boots, and stared up at him piteously. Ingrey swallowed, and tried in a cracked voice: “Up.”

Nothing happened. The bear whimpered.

He reached down into a deep, deep well within himself, and brought up the word again; but a word given weight, a growling song that made his own bones vibrate. “Up.”

The great animal seemed to unfold. It lumbered to its master then, and Jokol dropped to his knees and petted the huge beast, big hands ruffling the thick fur of its neck, murmuring soothing endearments in a tongue Ingrey's ear could not translate. The ice bear rubbed its head on the prince's embroidered tunic, smearing it with bear spit and white hairs.

The short, strange parade exited the temple, leaving Learned Lewko to manage the babble and wailing left in their wake. Ingrey heard his crisp voice, addressed to the still-yammering groom and anyone else within earshot, “…then it must have been a trick of the light.” At Ingrey's last glance over his shoulder, Lewko's eyes met his, and his lips formed the word Tomorrow. Ingrey found it an un-reassuring but credible promise.

His eyes shone silver, and his voice had a terrible weirding on it… Familiar pain crept over Ingrey, and he realized he had done some most unpleasant things to his still-healing back, as well as to his hand. But the ringing in his ears was new, as was the thick tightening in his raw throat.

His memory returned unbidden to his old torments at Birchgrove. Of his head shoved under the Birchbeck, his lungs pulsing with red pain. Not even screams had been possible in that breathless cold. Of all his trials, that had proved the most effective, and his excited handlers had repeated it often, until his lucidity locked in. The strength of his silence, appallingly grim in a barely-boy, had been forged and quenched in that icy stream: stronger than his tormentors by far, stronger than fear of death.

He shook off the disquieting recollection and attended to guiding the island men back to the docks below Kingstown through the least crowded streets he could find. Lewko's concerns seemed less a joke when they picked up a tail of excited children, all pointing and chirping at the bear. Jokol grinned at them. Ingrey scowled and waved them off. His intensified senses seemed to be quieting, his heart slowing at last. Jokol and Ottovin spoke to each other in their own dialect, with frequent glances in Ingrey's direction.

“Ingrey.”

Jokol grimaced apologetically. “I fear I am a very stupid man in your talk. Well, my mouth will get better.”

“You speak Wealdean well,” said Ingrey diplomatically. “My Darthacan is hardly more fluent, and I do not speak your tongue at all.”

“Ah, Darthacan.” Jokol shrugged. “That is a hard talk.” His blue gaze narrowed. “Do you write?”

“Yes.”

“That is good. I cannot.” The big man sighed mournfully. “All feathers break in these.” He held out one thick hand for Ingrey's inspection; Ingrey nodded in an attempt at sympathy. He did not doubt Jokol's assertion in the least.

At the ice bear's ambling pace, they came at length to the gate in the Kingstown walls that led out to the cut-stone embankment and wooden wharves. A grove of masts and spars made a black tangle against the luminous evening sky. The working riverboats were flat and crude, for the most part, but scattered among them were a few seagoing vessels of light draft, up from the mouth of the Stork. Above Easthome no such ships went, for the rising hills created impassable rapids, although timber and other goods, on rafts or in barrels, were routinely floated down them whenever the water rose high enough.

Jokol's ship, tied up alongside one outthrusting jetty, proved altogether a different breed. It was easily forty feet long, curved out in the middle as gracefully as a woman's hips, narrowing on each end to where matching prows curled up, artfully carved with entwined rows of sea birds. It had a single mast, and a single deck; its passengers must presumably suffer the elements when it sailed, although at the moment, a large tent was arranged along the back half.

A crew of perhaps two dozen welcomed their prince back gladly, and the bear, if less gladly, at least familiarly. They were all strong-looking men, though none so tall as their leader: most as young, but a few grizzled. Some kept their hair in similar horsetails, some braided, and one had a shaved head, though judging from his pale and mottled scalp, that might have been in some desperate recent attempt to combat an infestation of vermin. None was ill clothed, and, taking a swift count of the weapons neatly stored along the vessel's sides with the shipped oars, none ill armed. Retainers, warriors, sailors, rowers? All men here did all work, Ingrey suspected; there could be no room for purposeless distinctions on this boat when the seas rose high.

The bear delivered, Ingrey considered escape, but as Hetwar's man he supposed he'd better accept Prince Jokol's bowl first, lest he give some offense that might reflect on the sealmaster. He trusted the ritual would be brief. Jokol waved Ingrey into his tent, which made a spacious enough hall. The fabric was wool, made waterproof with fat; Ingrey decided his nose would grow used to its odor soon. Two trestle tables with benches were set up within, and another bench at the side to which his host led Ingrey. Jokol and Ottovin plunked down on either side of him; the other men bustled about, efficiently setting out utensils and food.

Beyond the far end of the tent, through an open flap, a brazier and temporary kitchen were set up, and a smell of grilling meat made Ingrey's mouth abruptly water. “We will eat much soon,” Jokol assured him, with the smile of a host anxious to please.

Ingrey would have to eat sometime, to be sure; and drinking this pungent brew on an empty stomach seemed a dangerous indulgence just before an interview with the sealmaster. He nodded. Jokol slapped him on the back and grinned.

Jokol's grin faded as his eye fell on Ingrey's gory right hand. The prince caught a comrade by the sleeve, and gave a low-voiced order. In a few minutes, one of the older men appeared, laden with a basin, cloths, and a bundle. He evicted Ottovin from the bench and signed Ingrey to give over his wounded hand. As the grubby bandage came off, the man winced at the new rupture and the aging, dark purple bruises. Ottovin, leaning over to watch, gave a short whistle, and said something that made Jokol bark a laugh. Jokol kindly held the drinking bowl to Ingrey's lips again before the grizzled fellow stabbed and sewed the flesh once more. When the fellow had finished, wrapped the hand, gathered his gear, ducked his head, and gone off again, Ingrey resisted the strong desire to put his head down between his knees for sheer dizziness. It was plain he was not going anywhere just yet.

Full night had fallen before the men began actively to resist their cheerful kitchen comrades' attempts to reload their platters. Ingrey's plan to let time and the meal sober him enough to rise and go seek the sealmaster's palace seemed to need more time. Or less meal…The lamps blazed brightly on flushed and shining faces all around.

A babble of talk resolved in one man making some petition to their prince, who smiled and shook his head, but then made some compromise involving offering up Ottovin.

“They want tales,” Jokol whispered to Ingrey, as Ottovin rose and put one booted foot on the bench, and cleared his throat. “We shall have many, this night.”

Now, a new drink was offered around. Ingrey sipped cautiously. This one tasted like pine needles and lamp oil, and even Jokol's men took it in small glasses.

Ottovin launched into the sonorous speech of the islands, which seemed to bounce around the tent in rich rhythms. The dialect lay, maddeningly, just on the other side of Ingrey's understanding, though recognizable words seemed to spring out of the stream here and there. Whether they were Wealdean cognates or just accidents of similar sound, Ingrey was not sure.

“He is telling the tale of Yetta and the three cows,” Jokol whispered to Ingrey. “It is a favorite.”

“Can you translate it?” Ingrey whispered back. “Alas, no.”

Jokol's blue eyes danced, and he blushed. “Too filthy.”

“What, don't you know all those short words?”

Jokol sniggered happily, leaned back, and crossed his legs, his hand tapping his knee keeping time to Ottovin's voice. Ingrey realized that he'd just managed to make a joke. Across a language barrier. And had not even given offense. He smiled muzzily and took another sip of his liquid pine needles. The men crowding the benches and ranged along the walls laughed uproariously, and Ottovin bowed and sat, collecting his due drink; the custom seemed to involve tipping it back in one gulp. The islanders applauded, then began shouting at their prince, who acquiesced and rose in turn to his feet. After a rustling and murmur, the tent fell so silent Ingrey could hear the river waves lapping gently on the hull.

Jokol drew a deep breath and began. After the first few sentences, Ingrey realized he was listening to verse, rhythmic and alliterative. After the first few minutes, he realized that this was to be no short or simple offering.

“This is an adventure tale, good,” Ottovin confided to Ingrey in the usual behind-the-hand whisper. “These days, it is hard to get anything but love stories out of him.”

The sound of Jokol's voice washed over Ingrey like the rocking of a boat, a cradle, a horse's stride. The beat never wavered; he never seemed to pause at a loss for a word or phrase. His listeners sometimes giggled, sometimes gasped, but most often sat as though enspelled, lips parted, the lamplight caressing their faces and gleaming from their eyes.

“He's memorized all that?” Ingrey whispered in astonishment to Ottovin. And at the man's slightly blank look, repeated, tapping his forehead, “The words are all in his head?”

Ottovin smiled proudly. “That and a hundred hundred more. Why do you think we call him Skullsplitter? He makes our heads burst with his tales. My sister Breiga will be the happiest of women, aye.”

At astounding length, Jokol finished, to the enthusiastic applause of his men; they cheered as he knocked back his drink. He grinned sheepishly and waved away an immediate demand for more, with some vociferous debate over the selection. “Soon, soon! It will be ready for you soon,” he promised, tapping his lips, and sat for a time, smiling absently.

One of the other men took a turn then, though not in verse this time; judging from the raucous laughter, it was another that Prince Jokol might be too shy to translate.

“Ah,” said Jokol, leaning close to Ingrey to refill his glass. “You grow less glum. Good! Now I shall honor you with Ingorry's Tale.”

He rose again, and seemed to settle into himself, his face growing solemn. He launched again into verse, serious and, at moments, even sinister, judging from the riveted looks of his listeners. In very short order, Ingrey realized Jokol was retelling the tale of the corrupted funeral, and of Ingrey's rescue of the bear and the situation, for Ingrey's own name, in Jokol's rolling pronunciation, and that of Fafa, appeared often. The titles of the gods were quite distinct. And, to Ingrey's dismay, so was the term weirding. Which, judging by the way the men's eyes shifted to look warily at Ingrey, meant much the same thing in the island dialect as it did in the Weald.

Ingrey studied Jokol once more, considering the nature of a mind that could take his disaster of sunset and transmute it into heroic poetry by midnight. Extemporaneously. Or perhaps that was, into a campfire tale-the sort designed to send one's spooked listeners off to bed, but not to sleep…If the sense was represented by the sound, Jokol's observations had been more acute and detailed than Ingrey would have believed possible, not that his own had been exactly coherent. There seemed not to be any references to wolves, though. The response when Jokol finished this time was not raucous applause but something more like a sigh of awe. It became a murmur of commentary and, Ingrey suspected from certain voices rising from the back row, interested critique. Jokol's smile was more sly, this time, as he tipped back his glass.

“Tomorrow night,” said Jokol, “I will make them listen to a love story, in honor of my beautiful Breiga, or they shall get none. You are a young fellow like me, I think, Lord Ingorry. Do you love a one?”

Ingrey blinked, a bit owlishly. Hesitated. Claimed. “Yes. Yes, I do.” Sat shocked to hear those words coming from his mouth, in this place. Curse that horse urine.

“Ah! That is a good thing. Happy man! But you do not smile. Does she not love you back?”

“I…don't know. But we have other troubles.”

Jokol's brows rose. “Unwilling parents?” he inquired sympathetically.

“No. It's not like…It's…She may be under a death sentence.”

Jokol sat back, stunned serious. “No! For why?”

It was the inebriated haze he was seeing everything through, Ingrey decided, that made this southern madman seem such a cheerful confidant, a brotherly repository of the most intimate fears of his heart. Maybe…maybe no one would remember these words in the morning. “Have you heard of the death of Prince Boleso, the hallow king's son?”

“Oh, aye.” “She beat in his brains with his own war hammer.” This seemed too bald. He added by way of clarification, “He was trying to rape her at the time.” The uncanny complications seemed beyond explanation, at the moment.

Brother indeed! “What came of it?”

“Well, I asked her to marry me.” Jokol's grin flashed. “They were my horses. The thieves' blood-price was made low, because of the dishonor of their crime. I added it to her bride gift, aye, to please her father.” He glanced benignly over at Ottovin-his future brother-in-law?-who had slid off the bench a short while ago and now sat draped half over it with his head pillowed on his arm, snoring gently.

“Justice is not so simple, in the Weald.” Ingrey sighed. “And the blood-price of a prince is far beyond my purse.”

Jokol cocked an interested eye. “You are not a landed man, Lord Ingorry?”

“No. I have only my sword arm. Such as it is.” Ingrey flexed his bandaged right hand ruefully. “No other power.”

“I think you have one more thing than that, Ingorry.” Jokol tapped the side of his head. “I have a good ear. I know what I heard, when my Fafa bowed to you.”

Ingrey froze. His first panicked impulse, to deny everything, died on his lips under Jokol's shrewd gaze. Yet he must discourage further dangerous gossip on this topic, however poetic. “This”-he pressed his hand to his lips, then spread it on his heart, to indicate what he dared not name aloud-“must stay bound in silence, or the Temple will make me outlaw.”

Jokol pursed his lips, sat up a little, and frowned as he digested this. Ingrey's somewhat liquefied thoughts sloshed in his head and tossed up a new fear on the shores of his wits. Jokol's face bore no look of dismay or revulsion, though his interest was plainly deeply stirred. Yet even a good ear could not recognize something it had never before heard. “This, earlier”-he touched his throat, swept his hand down his torso-“have you ever heard the like?”

“How? Where?”

Jokol shrugged. “When I asked the singing woman at the forest's edge to bless my voyage, she gave me words in such a weirding voice as that.”

The phrase seemed to slide through Ingrey's head as sharply as the scent of pine needles. The singing woman at the forest's edge. The singing woman at… Yet Jokol seemed untouched by the uncanny; no demon-smell hung about him, certainly, no animal spirit hid within him, no geas clung to him like some acrid parasite. He gazed back at Ingrey with a blank affability that one might easily-fatally-mistake for oxlike stupidity.

A thump sounded upon the deck from outside the tent, then a silvery rattling, a bass growl, and a strangled cry.

“Fafa at least does not sleep through his watch,” murmured Jokol in satisfaction, and rose to his feet. He prodded Ottovin with a booted toe, but his kinsman-to-be merely stirred and mumbled. Jokol slipped a big hand under Ingrey's elbow and heaved up.

“I don't,” Ingrey began. “Whups…” The ship's deck heaved and swayed under his feet, though the tent's sides hung slack in the windless and waveless night. The lamps were burning low. Jokol's smile twitched, and he kindly kept Ingrey's arm, guiding him toward the tent flap. They stepped out into the gilded shadows to find Fafa sniffing and straining at the end of the taut chain toward an immobilized figure with his back pressed to the vessel's thwart.

Jokol murmured some soothing words in his own tongue to his pet, and the bear lost interest in its quarry and returned to flop down again by the mast. Ingrey staggered as the boat really rocked, this time, and Jokol's grip on his arm tightened.

“Oh,” said Ingrey. “Gesca. 'Ware the bear.” Ingrey smiled at his rhyme. The big islander shouldn't own all the good poetry. “Yes. I was just coming to see m'lord Hewwar. Het-war.”

“My lord Hetwar,” said Gesca, recovering his dignity and a frosty tone, “has gone to bed. He instructed me to-after I found you-inform you that you may wait upon him first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Ah,” mumbled Ingrey wisely. Ouch. “Then I'd best get some sleep. Hadn't I.”

“While you can,” muttered Gesca.

“A friend?” Jokol inquired, with a nod at Gesca.

“More or less,” said Ingrey. He wondered which. But Jokol seemed to take him at his word, and he handed off Ingrey to his lieutenant. “I don't need…”

“Lord Ingorry, I thank you for your company. And other things, you bet. Any man who can drink my Ottovin off his bench is welcome on my ship anytime. I hope I see you again, in Easthome.”

“You…you, too. Give my bes' to dear Fafa.” He groped with his numb tongue for further suitably princely farewells, but Gesca was steering him toward the gangplank.

The gangplank proved a challenge, as it was seized with the same wavering motions as the ship, and was much narrower, after all. Ingrey, after a short pause for consideration, solved the problem by tackling it on all fours. After crawling across without falling into the Stork, he rolled over and sat up triumphantly upon the dock. “See?” he told Gesca. “Not so drunk. Jokol is a prince, you know. S'all good diplomacy.”

Ingrey, a little sobered in mind, though his body still lagged, made an effort to put his boots one in front of the other for a time, as they made their way up through the gates and began to wind through the dark streets of Kingstown.

Gesca said in a voice of aggravation, “I've been hunting all over the city for you. At the house, they said you'd gone to the temple. At the temple, they said you were carried off by a pirate.”

“No; worse.” Ingrey cackled. “A poet.”

Gesca's face turned; even in the shadows, Ingrey could see the lieutenant was looking at him as though he'd just put his head on backward.

“Three people up there said they'd seen you enspell a giant ice bear. One said it was a miracle of the Bastard. Two others said it was no such thing.”

Ingrey remembered the Voice in his head, and shivered. “You know what nonsense frantic folks in crowds come up with.” He was starting to feel steadier on his feet. He withdrew his arm from Gesca's shoulder. Anyway, in the absence of a menacing bear in the midst of a funeral miracle, it hardly seemed something likely to happen again. No god-voice jarred him now, and animals were a quite different proposition from men. “Don't be gullible, Gesca. It's not as though I could say”-he reached down within himself for that hot velvet rumble-“ halt, and have you suddenly-”

Ingrey became aware that he was walking on alone.

He wheeled around. Gesca was standing frozen in the dim light from a wall lantern.

Ingrey's belly twisted up in a cold knot. “Gesca! That's not amusing!” He strode back, angry. “Stop that.” He gave Gesca a short shove in the chest. The man rocked a little, but did not move. He reached up with his bandaged hand-it trembled-and took Gesca by the jaw. “Are you mocking me?”

Ingrey licked his lips, stepped back. His throat seemed almost too tight to speak at all. He had to take two breaths before he could reach down again, and that barely. “Move.”

The paralysis broke. Gesca gasped, scrambled back to the nearest wall, and drew steel. Both wheezing, they stared at each other. Ingrey was suddenly feeling far too sober. He opened his hands at his sides, placating, praying Gesca would not lunge.

Slowly, Gesca resheathed his sword. After a moment, he said in a thick voice, “The prison house is just around the corner. Tesko is there waiting to put you to bed. Can you make it?”

Ingrey swallowed. He had to force his voice above a whisper. “I think so.”

“Good. Good.” Gesca backed along the wall, then turned and walked rapidly away into the shadows, glancing often over his shoulder.

Jaws clamped shut, hardly daring to breathe, Ingrey paced the other way, turning at the corner. A lantern hanging on a bracket beside the door of the narrow house burned steadily, guiding him in.