The Hallowed Hunt (Curse of Chalion)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  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.

  I can refuse the dark power. By stepping into a darkness more absolute.

  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.

  His blood cried out for Ijada, but not like this. He considered the small miracle of her smile. Not the usual nervous polite grimace most women favored him with, never reaching their eyes; indeed, it seemed Ijada could smile at him with her eyes alone, fearlessly. Without concealed revulsion. Even delicately enjoying, it seemed, a sight she found inexplicably comely. His wolf was no less dangerous in its capacities to her than to any other woman he had not dared to touch or look upon, she was not safe from him, no…she was something unexpectedly else. She was dangerous right back at him.

  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.

  But if I turn and walk the other way, I do not know where the road goes. Or where it ends.

  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?�
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  “Run away was not my idea of a plan.” She cocked an eye at him. “And when did I become we?”

  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.”

  “What do you intend?”

  “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?”

  Her voice grew oddly reluctant. “They run for some thirty miles east and west along the roots of the Raven Range, and twenty miles north up to the rim of the watershed with the Cantons.”

  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.”

  Ingrey considered her words. And then he considered her silences. “But you were not?”

  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?”

  “No—I mean—really. Or not really, but in my dream—I parted my ribs, and reached into my chest, and brought out my beating heart and presented it to the revenant I took to be their captain. He was one of the headless ones—his head, in its helm, was fastened to his broad gold belt, and he bore a standard with its banner tight-furled. He bowed low, and placed my heart upon a stone slab, and cut it in two with the hilt-shard of his broken sword. Half he handed back to me again, with a sign of great respect. The other half, they raised high up
on the standard’s point, and they cried out again. I did not understand if it was pledge, or sacrifice, or ransom, or what, until…” She stopped, swallowed.

  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?”

  “Nothing.” Her brows drew in, as if in remembered pain. “Nothing but trees. The others feared that country, but it drew my heart. I wanted to return to the woods, alone if no escort would come, and try again to understand. But before I could slip away, I was sent to Earl Horseriver’s household, and, well.” Her glance at him intensified. “But the Wounded Woods cannot be sold.”

  “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.”