The Hallowed Hunt

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  He set the wine aside untasted and circled the room restlessly. Afternoon sun crept across thick carpets. The bookcases were but half-filled, mostly with dusty tomes that would seem to have been inherited with the house. The heavy, carved writing table was tidied and free of work in progress or correspondence; a promising drawer proved locked. Ingrey decided it was just as well, when only the barest sound of footsteps in the hall heralded the door opening on Wencel. This interview was likely to be difficult enough without his being caught reading the earl’s mail. Though he doubted Wencel would have been surprised.

  The earl still wore the somber court garb Ingrey had seen him in at the funeral. He was shrugging out of his long coat as he shouldered through the door and shut it behind him. He folded the cloth over his arm and circled around Ingrey, who circled around him, each keeping a wary distance as though they were on two ends of a rope. The earl tossed the coat over a chair and half sat, half leaned against the writing table, motionless but not relaxed, not yielding any advantage of height or tension. His stare at Ingrey was speculative; his only greeting a murmured, “Well, well, well.”

  Ingrey took up a careful position against the nearest bookcase, arms crossed. “So what did you see?”

  “My senses were tightly furled, as they always must be when I risk contact with the Temple’s Sighted. But I hardly needed more; I could infer it all well enough. The Lord of Autumn could not have taken Boleso uncleansed, yet take him He did. There were but two men present who might have turned the task, and I knew it wasn’t me. Therefore. Your masteries proceed apace, shaman.” His slight bow might or might not have been mockery. “Had Fara known and been capable of understanding, I’m sure she would have thanked you, wolf-lord.”

  Ingrey returned a nod equally balanced on the edge of irony. “It seems you are not my sole source of instruction after all. Horse-lord.”

  “Oh, fine new friends you have—until They betray you. If the gods toy with you, cousin, it is for Their ends, not yours.”

  “Still, it seems I might be gifted with the salvation of more than Boleso. I could rescue you from your secret burden, save you from your fear of Temple pyres. How if I attempt to relieve you of your spirit horse?” A safe offer; Ingrey suspected Wencel would rather be stripped of his skin.

  Wencel’s lips curled up. “Alas, there is an impediment. I am not dead. Souls yet anchored to matter do not yield their loyal companions, any more than you could sing my life itself out of my body.” Ingrey wasn’t exactly sure what his expression revealed, but Wencel added, “Don’t believe me? Try it, then.”

  Ingrey moistened his lips, half closed his eyes, and reached down. He lacked the floating glory of the god’s inspiration, but as it was the second trial, he might make up for it in confidence, he thought. He felt for that furled shadow within Wencel, extended his hand, and rumbled, “Come.”

  It was like tugging on a mountain.

  The shadow unfurled a little, but did not follow. Wencel’s brows rose in brief surprise, and he caught a breath. “Strong,” he allowed.

  “But not strong enough,” Ingrey conceded in return.

  “No.”

  “Then you cannot cleanse me, either,” Ingrey followed this out.

  “Not while you live, no.”

  Ingrey felt his careful course between opposed sides, Wencel and the Temple, to be narrowing dangerously. And if he did not choose before he lost all turning room, he risked betraying both powers. It was surely better to have one powerful enemy and one powerful ally than two offended enemies. But which should be which? He drew a long breath. “I met an unexpected old acquaintance this afternoon. We had a long talk.”

  Wencel lifted his chin in inquiry.

  “Cumril. Remember him?”

  A flare of nostrils and a sharp intake of breath. “Ah.”

  “Coincidentally, he proved to be just the man you were looking for as well. Remember your insistence that Boleso must have suborned an illicit sorcerer? Cumril was the one. I’d missed encountering him at Boar’s Head, for he recognized and avoided me.”

  Wencel’s eyes glittered with interest. “Not so coincidental as all that. Illicit sorcerers are few, and the Temple expends much effort toward making them even fewer. He, at least, was one Boleso might have heard about, and secretly sought.” He hesitated. “It must have been an interesting chat. Did Cumril survive it?”

  “Temporarily.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I can’t say.” Precisely.

  “At some point very soon, I am going to grow tired enough to stop humoring you. It has been a long and most unpleasant day.”

  “Very well, I shall come to the point. A question for you, Wencel. Why did you try to make me kill Ijada?” A shot not quite in the dark, but Ingrey held his breath to see what target it found.

  Wencel grew perilously still, but for a slight flare of his eyes. “Where do you come by this conviction? Cumril? Not the most reliable of accusers.”

  “No.” Ingrey quoted back to him: “There were but two men present who might have turned to the task, and I knew it wasn’t me. Therefore.” He added after a moment, “I must find out how you make a geas. I suspect necromancy.”

  Wencel paused for a long time, as though sorting through a wide variety of responses. “In a sense.” He sighed, by the squaring of his shoulders seeming to come to some unwelcome decision. “I would not call it a mistake, for if it had succeeded, it would have simplified my present life immeasurably. I would call it a false move, because of its peculiar consequences. I note merely, I am not playing against you.”

  “Whom do you play against, then?” Ingrey pushed off the wall and began to pace in a half circle around the earl. “At first I thought this was all about Easthome politics.”

  “Only indirectly.”

  Ingrey resolutely ignored the shivering in his belly, the thudding in his ears. The whirling confusion in his mind. “What is really going on here, Wencel?”

  “What do you think is going on?”

  “I think you will do anything to protect your secrets.”

  Wencel tilted his head. “Once, that was true.” He added more softly, “Though not for much longer, I…well, do not pray.”

  Ingrey’s body felt like a coiled spring. His hand caressed his knife haft. Wencel’s glance did not miss the gesture.

  “How if I release your soul the old hard way?” Ingrey returned as softly. “Whatever your powers, I doubt they would survive if I sawed off your head and tossed it in the Stork.”

  At least Wencel did Ingrey’s menace the compliment of holding very, very still. “You cannot imagine how very much you would regret such an act. If you seek to rid yourself of me, that is exactly the wrong method. My heir.”

  Ingrey blinked in bafflement. “I am no heir to kin Horseriver.”

  “At law and in property, no. By the laws of the Old Weald, however, a nephew is next to a son in kinship. And as it seems this ill-made body of mine will not engender a son on Fara, you are the heir of my blood, should you be living when I next die. This is no particular joy or choice of mine, understand. The spell adopts you.”

  The conversation had tilted too suddenly and violently for it to be all Ingrey’s doing; Wencel had met his daring push with a mighty yank, which was doubtless why Ingrey felt as though he were hanging upside down just now. Over a dire drop. Into a most uncertain darkness. The pressure of his hand on his hilt sagged. “Next die?”

  “Remember how I told you the shamans’ spirit animals were made, by the accumulation of life upon life, death upon death? Something akin was made to work for men’s souls, too. Once.”

  “Oh, gods, Wencel, is this another of your bedtime tales?”

  “This one shall keep you awake, I promise you.” He drew breath. “For sixteen generations of Horserivers, my soul has passed from father to son in an unbroken chain, save when it passed between brothers. It has proved an evil heritage. The death of this clay will not release me from the world of matter,
but only into the next male body in my line. Which is yours, at the moment. My blood coils in you through your mother’s and your father’s sides both, for all that the unruly Wolfcliff camp lends so much to your singular surliness.” Wencel grimaced.

  Ingrey envisioned it: not a great beast, but a great man? And if the piled-up spirits of animals blended and transmuted into something more powerfully uncanny, what strange thing might the piled-up souls of men become? “You have told me many lies, Wencel. Why should I believe this one?”

  Ingrey had spiraled toward the table as he paced, as though drawn on a cord. Wencel bent his head toward the threat looming at his shoulder, and his eyes glimmered steel-colored with a crush of emotions too strange for Ingrey to unravel: anger and scorn, pain and cruelty, curiosity and animosity. “Shall I show you? It would be a just punishment for your presumption, I think.”

  “Aye, Wencel,” Ingrey breathed. “Tell me true. For once.”

  “Since you ask so pressingly…” Wencel rotated until they were face-to-face, inches apart, and placed his stubby hands on either side of Ingrey’s head. “I am the last high holy king of the Weald. Or Old Weald, so-called to distinguish it from modern mockeries.”

  The writing table stopped Ingrey’s backward jerk. “You said the last real holy king died at Bloodfield.”

  “Not at all. Or twice, depending on how you look at it.” The earl’s fingers found Ingrey’s temples, caressing them in small sweaty circles, and he continued, “I was a young man, heir to my high house, hunting in the meadows along the Lure before ever Audar was born to soil his swaddling clothes. The Darthacans pressed my kin tribe, squatted on our lands, cut down our forests, sent missionaries to defile our shrines, then soldiers to drag the missionaries’ bodies home. My people fought and fell. I saw my father die, and my hallow king.”

  Pictures bloomed in Ingrey’s head as Wencel spoke, too vivid to be his own imagination. This is a weirding voice indeed, to make me remember what I never saw. Dark forests, green valleys, palisades of timber embracing village houses built of wattle and daub, smoke rising sharp-scented from vents in their thatched roofs. Horsemen armored in boiled leather passing out the gates to battle, or back in, bloodied and drooping, their scant metal chinking in the chill air. Exhausted voices carried by the winter fog in a tongue that just eluded Ingrey’s mind, but recalled Jokol’s rolling poetry.

  “The next election cast the kingship upon me, for I was grown leader of a grim people by then, with sons to follow at my back. They made me their torch, and I burned for them in the gathering shadows. Our hearts were hot. But the gods denied our sacrifices and turned Their faces from us.”

  A tawny young man, anxious and resolute, nude but for signs painted upon his body, stood high on an oak branch in flickering torchlight. A halter of silky nettle flax circled his neck, and blood ran down his limbs from a careful series of cuts. He raised his outstretched hands high, and spoke, vibrant voice marred by a quaver; then fell forward as a man might dive off a high rock into a pool. Nearly to the ground the fall was jerked to a neck-cracking stop…Wencel’s dilated eyes shivered. Was that one of the princely sons, sent to the gods as courier from his hallow king…? This was truth by the riverful; Ingrey felt as if he were being held head down in it till his brain might burst. The visions flowed on, engendered by the whispered words, in an overwhelming stream.

  “We wove Holytree itself into the spell for invincibility and, as hallow king, I was its hub.”

  Voices sang, beating upward against the night like wings. The trees shivered as if caressed by the breath of them. The deep blended tones made Ingrey’s every hair rise.

  “But we could not risk the continuity of the kingship in battle, for if I were to fall, the spell would shatter, and all who were bound into it would be lost in the instant. So my eldest son…”

  Bearded blond youth, faithful face etched by strain to untoward age. Some kinship in both those features and that strain, yes, to the tawny youth in the oak—brother or cousin?

  “…and I together undertook the great binding, so that kingship, soul, horse, hub, and all together might be handed down without a break, regardless of where or when or how our bodies met their ends. Until the victory was ours.”

  Wencel paused. “You do begin to see where this is going…?”

  Ingrey made a faint noise through parted lips, not quite a squeak, not quite a sigh. Wencel shifted to place himself more square to Ingrey. He did not draw back; his breath ghosted against Ingrey’s face as he spoke.

  “Audar’s troops took me in the first hours of the fight. Broke my body, wrapped me in my royal banner, threw me in the first ditch they dug. They began the butchery even before the fighting was done. I died with my mouth full of black blood and dirt…”

  The stench of it made Ingrey gag, a soup of filth and blood and urine.

  “…and awoke in the body of my child, man-child by then. Prisoner, by then. Our eyes were spared no horror. The ax fell upon our neck like a lover’s welcome kiss, at the end. I thought it ended. Defeat was ashes in my mouth…”

  Cold splinters of a tree stump, already soaked with gore, pressed into Ingrey’s stretched throat. Out of the corner of his eye, a weary voice grunted with effort, a steely arc fell, and a crunch shattered his keening woe as his vertebrae split.

  “…then I awoke in the body of my second son, miles away upon the border. I had escaped the massacre at Bloodfield in the hardest way, upon the wings of our weirding. His mind was unprepared for me. I had to wrestle him for speech, motion, the light of his eyes. We were all mad for a little while, we three, trapped in his skull. But first I won his body, then began my war to win back the Weald.”

  Ingrey gulped for control of his own voice, if only to be reassured by the sound of it that he was still inside his own head. “I have heard of that Horseriver prince, I think. He was a famous battle lord. Campaigned for twenty years along the fens, till his defeat and death.”

  “Defeat, yes. Death—ah. My son’s son was but twenty when I took his body from him. Holytree was an abandoned waste by then…”

  A sodden woods, leafless in an icy mist, struggled up from black mire. The trees were twisted, knotted with cysts from which cold sap smeared down in frozen grains like phlegm from rheumy eyes.

  “…every kin warrior who had been spell-bound there was dead, by battle or accident or age, even the few who had escaped the massacre. Save one.”

  Wencel’s own eyes, boring into Ingrey’s, now seemed something from a dream. The visions circled in those pupils, sucked away as by a drain. Visions that did not deceive, Wencel had once said. Perhaps; but Ingrey, too, knew how to lie with truth, truth and selected silences. I believe what I see. What do I not see?

  “The resistance went ill. There were many deaths in quick succession, among the exiled Horseriver kin of the old royal line. I found myself trapped in the body of a useless child, and in my impatience ate him; they treated us as mad. It was thirty years and another death before I won my way to leadership again. But no kin would fight for us anymore. I turned to politics, to the attempt to win back the Weald from within. I amassed wealth, and what power I could, and learned to bend men when I could not break them. I watched for fissures in the Darthacan royal house and applied myself to widening them.”

  The visions were fading, as if fading passion aged them to pale ghosts, impotent. “That was the Earl Horseriver they called the kingmaker, was it not?” said Ingrey faintly. “That was you, too?”

  “Aye, and his son, and his son’s son. I cascaded from body to body, amassing a great density of life. But my sons were not voluntary sacrifices to me, anymore. The gods, they say, accumulate souls without destroying them, which is proof, if any were needed, that I was no god on earth. If the invaded minds were not to explode in madness, only one could dominate. There was by then no choice of whose.

  “For a hundred and fifty years I fought, and schemed, and bled, and died, and defiled my soul by fatal error and the cannibal consu
mption of my children’s children’s children. And for one glorious moment I thought myself done, the Weald renewed. But the new kingship had no weirding in it, no song of the land, none of the old forest powers. It was adulterated by the gods. I was not released from my cycle of torment. My war was over but not won.

  “Thus began that line of strange and famously reclusive Earls Horseriver…”

  “Can you not be released from your spell?” Ingrey whispered. “Somehow?”

  Wencel’s voice and face both cracked. “Do you think I have not tried?”

  Ingrey flinched at the shout. “You need a miracle, I think.”

  “Oh, the gods have long hunted me.” Wencel’s grin grew unholy. “They harry me hard, now. They want me; but I do not want them, Ingrey.”

  Ingrey had to force his voice to an audible volume. “What do you want, then?”

  Wencel’s expression grew distant, as of grief withheld so long as to turn stone. “What do I want? I have wanted many things, over the course of centuries. But now my wants are grown simple indeed, as befits such an addled senility. Such simple things. I want my first wife back, and my sons in the mornings of their lives….”

  The vision returned in breathtaking light, drenched in color. A man, a laughing woman, and a gaggle of youths reined in their horses on the reedy margins of the Lure, and watched in awe as a family of gray herons flew up into the bursting gold of dawn.

  And for an instant, Horseriver’s eyes cried, Damn you for making me remember that! The hour of drowning in blood and despair had borne with it a less piercing pain. His trembling grip tightened on Ingrey’s face, fingers pressing hard enough to bruise. “I want my world back.”

  Ah. That was not an image doled out by design. It escaped. Ingrey moistened his lips. “But you can’t have it. No one could.”