The Hallowed Hunt

by Lois McMaster Bujold

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

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

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

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

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

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

  His brows went up. “I suppose I had a particularly charitable Temple inquirer. He was sorry for a sick orphan. At length, I gave some proof of control of my affliction that seemed to satisfy my examiners. Not enough to give a castlemastership into my young hands, of course. Later—later, Hetwar supported me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Wencel already knows he is privately accused. You would betray no one’s secret by trying him.”

  She stared timidly at him. “Are you so much in his confidence already, then?”

  “I am his closest living cousin.” Temporarily. “Wencel’s need for kinship has no nearer source of satisfaction, in this crisis.” So to speak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Hetwar released you most promptly,” Wencel observed.

  “Did Gesca tell you why?”

  “Oh, aye.”

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

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

  “Like kissing a corpse?”

  “Like being the corpse so kissed.”

  “She seems not to know this.”

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

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

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

  Wencel grimaced. “Perhaps. In hindsight.”

  “Fara thought her intended for your new Horseriver broodmare.”

  The scowl deepened. “So it seems. I did say Fara was a romantic.”

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

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

  “Did she tell you of it, too?”

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

  “Until Boar’s Head.”

  “Indeed.”

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

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

 
; “Why then did you send me to kill her? Mere prudence?” Ingrey kept his tone casual, as if the answer were of only scholarly interest to him.

  “Hardly mere. Once she had slain Boleso, she was most assuredly bound for the gallows. If there is a more perfect symbolic representation of an Old Weald courier sacrifice than to hang an innocent virgin by a sacred cord from a tree, with divines singing blessings about her, I cannot think of it. Death opens a gate to the gods. Her death in that mode would have opened Holytree wide, barricaded against Them as it has been these four centuries.”

  “And her murder would not? What’s the difference?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Ingrey almost rose to this bait. Aye, all the way out of the water, trailing foam. But he remembered how Wencel’s soft persuasions had almost had him cutting his own throat, not long back. The man scarcely needs magic to wind me into knots. The peculiar link between Ingrey and Ijada might indeed be a side effect of Wencel’s defeated geas, but Wencel did not control it any longer. And he does not like what he does not control, not when it lies so close to the heart of his matter. Whatever that matter was. And there is more between Ijada and me now than whatever you put there, Wencel. Ingrey managed a gesture of dry dismissal. “Howsoever. Now I am in your service, what duties would you have of me, my lord?”

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

  “Inventing as you go, are you?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “I am at your disposal, cousin.”

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

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

  Whatever Wencel was about, he was not making all of it up as he went. He had some fixed goal in sight. And if it was the hallow kingship, as Hetwar feared, it was not for any reason that Hetwar could imagine.

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

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BY RELENTLESS PROWLING, INGREY FAMILIARIZED HIMSELF with every corner of the Horseriver mansion that day, to little effect. Wencel had arrived here bare weeks ago to attend on the hallow king in his worsening illness, and Fara had followed shortly despite her fatal diversion to Boar’s Head. The city house was but lightly occupied, as though the couple were merely camping in it. There were no old secrets buried here, though five gods knew what Ingrey might find at Castle Horseriver. But the earl’s haunt was two hundred miles away on the middle Lure, and Ingrey doubted anyone would be going back there till all this was long over.

  As promised—or threatened—Earl Horseriver did conduct Ingrey later that afternoon to his stable mews, a stone building a few streets down the hill. Most of the great kins’ livestock was kept outside the walls, in pastures along the Stork above the glassworks and the tanners. Horseriver’s household was no exception, but a few beasts were kept nearby for the lord and lady, for grooms to use to collect other mounts at need, and for couriers. As befit the earl’s state, the appointments within the mews were very fine: the central corridor paved with colored stone, the stall walls of rubbed oak, the metal bars decorated with twining bronze leaves. Ingrey was bemused to spy Ijada’s showy chestnut mare, moving restlessly in a straight stall.

  Ingrey refrained from patting its haunches, lest he be kicked. “I know this one—I’d guessed it might be one of yours.”

  “Aye,” said Wencel absently. “She was too mettlesome for Fara. I was glad to find someone else to ride her.”

  Wencel stopped before a box stall on the opposite side and gestured. A dark gray gelding snuffled up to him, then snorted and shied away as Ingrey approached. “His name is Wolf,” said Horseriver blandly. “For his color, formerly, but now one suspects a secret destiny. And who am I to argue with destiny? He is yours.”

  The gelding was undoubtedly a beautiful beast, well muscled, clean-limbed, its dappled coat polished to a shimmer by the earl’s grooms. Ingrey suspected the animal concealed an explosive burst of speed. What else it might conceal—deadly geases sprang to mind—Ingrey could not tell. Did Wencel imagine it a bribe? So he might. Well, Ingrey could not look this gift in the mouth while the earl was watching. “Thank you, my lord,” he said, in a tone to match Horseriver’s.

  “Would you care to try his paces?”

  “Later, perhaps. I am not wearing my leathers.” And ever since his be-wolfing at Birchgrove he’d always made new mounts peculiarly tense; he preferred to make their first acquaintance in private, in an enclosed space where the spooked horses might be more readily re-caught and remounted till they had come to mutual understanding, or at least mutual exhaustion. This one looked as though it might take some time to wear down to tameness, under him.

  “Ah. Pity.”

  Two stalls away, an unhorselike movement caught Ingrey’s eye. Frowning, he walked down to peer into another loose box. His nostrils flared in surprise. An antlered stag abruptly raised its head from where it was lipping at a pile of hay, snorted, and sidled about. It banged its rack twice against the boards, causing a desultory wave of motion among the horses nearby.

  “I think your presence disturbs him,” murmured Wencel, in a tone of dry amusement.

  After turning in a few more circles, the handsome beast stilled at the back of the stall, though it did not yet lower its head again to the hay. Its dark and liquid eye glowered at the men. Ingrey judged it captive for some time, for it no longer struggled; new-taken stags could kill themselves in their first frenzy to escape.

  “What are you planning to do with it?” asked Ingrey, in a lighter tone than he felt. “Dinner? A gift for your in-laws?” And what sort of uncanny gift might Wencel make of it?

  Wencel’s lips twisted a little as he studied the nervous beast past Ingrey’s shoulder. “When one plays against such f
arsighted opponents as I do, it is as well to have more than one plan. But chances are it is fated for a spit. Come away, now.”

  Horseriver did not look back as they exited the mews. Ingrey inquired, “Do you ride much for sport, these days? As I recall you were excited by your father’s horses.” It had been one of the few topics his slow young cousin had actually chattered about, in fact.

  “Was I?” said Horseriver absently. “I fear I feel about horses much as I feel about wives, these days. They last such a short time, and I am weary of butchering them.”

  Unable to think of a response to that, Ingrey followed him silently up the hill.

  He considered the method in Wencel’s madness, or perhaps it was the other way around. Wencel’s rationale for his murderous attempt on Ijada and its equally swift abandonment was too peculiar to be a lie, but it did not follow that he was necessarily correct in it. Still, Wencel’s erratic tactics against the gods must have worked before. In naming Ijada god-bait, he was surely not mistaken. That alarm alone must be enough to trigger his nervous malice. He’d eluded four hundred years of this hunt if his claims were true.

  The gods would do better to wait at some choke point and let Wencel flail all he liked till he arrived there. But the strange intensity of Wencel’s greetings when they’d all met on the road to Easthome was now explained; the man must have been thinking five ways at once. Yes, but so must his Enemies.

  A disturbing notion came to Ingrey: perhaps Ijada had not been the bait at that fated meeting after all. Perhaps I was.

  And Wencel has swallowed me down whole.

  THE NEXT DAY, PRINCESS FARA WAS CALLED UPON TO TESTIFY BEfore the board of judges at the inquest upon Prince Boleso’s death.

  Fara’s first response was angered insult that a daughter of the hallow king would be ordered before the bench like a common subject—her secret fears taking shelter in injured pride, Ingrey judged. But some clever man—Hetwar, no doubt—had made Prince-marshal Biast the deliverer of the unwelcome summons. Since Biast had less interest in defending dubious actions, and more in finding the truth, his levelheaded persuasion overcame his sister’s nervous protests.