The Hallowed Hunt (Curse of Chalion)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Ingrey washed efficiently. His wardrobe was too limited to take much time over; he had brought clothing for hard riding, not for courtly dining. Done and dressed, he considered the temptations of the cot, but feared if once he lay down, he would be unable to force himself up again. He wended down the narrow staircase instead, planning to explore the house and the street around it, and perhaps check on Gesca, if the stable proved to be nearby. He paused on the next landing, hearing Wencel’s voice in the hallway. He turned that way instead.

  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.

  At Wencel’s gesture Ingrey brushed off his court manners and helped Lady Ijada to her chair, and Wencel to his, before seating himself. All equally distant from each other, tripod-tense. Servants, obviously instructed, bustled in around them, leaving covered dishes and withdrawing discreetly. The food, at least, proved good, if countrified: dumplings, beans, baked apples, a brace of stuffed woodcocks, sauces and savories, carafes of three sorts of wines.

  “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.”

  “How did your father’s huntsman come by it?”

  “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.

  “In all this time, you must have developed theories, Wencel,” said Ingrey.

  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.

  She studied a piece of honeyed marzipan and ate it before replying. Her frown was not, Ingrey thought, for the food. “It would fit some things that I didn’t understand about them. Their relationship seemed strange to me, although I didn’t necessarily expect such a high marriage to be like my mother’s. Either of hers. For all that he is not handsome, I think Fara wanted Wencel to be in love with her. In some more courtly fashion than he displayed.”

  “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.

  “Is your business settled?” Ijada inquired politely.

  “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.”

  “Banner-carrier?” Ijada echoed in an odd tone.

  “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.”

  “Sorcerers?” said Ijada breathlessly. “Wealding sorcerers? Is that what Boleso was attempting to become?”

  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?”

  “How came this wise wolf to you, you mean?” Wencel shrugged. “I, too, would like to know. When Great Audar”—his mouth gave the name a venomous twist—“tore out the heart of the Weald at Bloodfield—which was the great shrine of Holytree, before his utter desecration of it—even he did not manage to massacre all. Some spirit warriors and shamans were not present at the rite, by delay or chance. A few escaped the ambush.”

  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 t
he 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.”

  “Am I crippled?” Ingrey whispered. And what fearsome thing would I be if I were not?

  “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.”