The Hallowed Hunt c-3

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  The sound of horses’ hooves and a jingle of harness from outside turned both their heads. “Halloo the house!” a hoarse voice shouted, and the tapster-and-owner scurried out through the hall to greet these new customers, pausing to send a servant to roust the stableboys to take the gentlemen’s horses.

  Ijada’s nostrils flared; she drifted toward the door in the innkeeper’s wake. Ingrey drained his clay beaker and followed, left hand reflexively checking his sword hilt. He came up behind her shoulder as she stepped onto the wooden porch.

  Four armed men were dismounting. One was clearly a servant, two wore a familiar livery, and the last… Ingrey’s breath stopped in surprise. And then blew out in shock.

  Earl-ordainer Wencel kin Horseriver paused in his saddle, his reins gathered in his gloved hands. The young earl was a slender man, wearing a tunic from which gold threads winked under a leather coat dyed wine-red. The coat’s wide collar was trimmed with marten fur, disguising his uneven build. His dark blond hair, lightened with a few streaks of premature gray, hung to his shoulders in ratty corkscrew strands, disheveled by his ride. His face was elongated, his forehead prominent, but his odd features were redeemed from potential ugliness by sharp blue eyes, fixed now on Ingrey. His presence here on this bright morning was unexpected enough. But the shock…

  It seemed partly a scent, though borne on no breeze, partly a shadow, an intense density that made Wencel seem, somehow, vastly more there than any man around him. The scent was a little acrid, like urine, a little warm, like sweet hay, and deeply potent. And it appeared in Ingrey’s mind without passing through his nostrils. He bears a spirit animal.

  Too.

  And I have never perceived it before.

  Ingrey’s head jerked toward Ijada; her face, also, had gone still with astonishment.

  She senses it—smells it? Sees it? And it is a new thing to her as well. How new is it?

  The perceptions, it appeared, ran three ways, for Wencel sat up with his head cocked, eyes widening, as his gaze first summed Ingrey, then turned to Ijada. Wencel’s lips parted as his jaw dropped a fraction, then tightened again in a crooked smile.

  Of the three of them, the earl recovered first. “Well, well, well,” he murmured. A pair of gloved fingers waved past his forehead in salute to Ingrey, then went to his heart to convey a shadow-bow to Ijada. “How very strangely met we three are. I have not been so taken by surprise for… longer than you would believe.”

  The innkeeper began a gabble of welcome, intercepted, at a jerk of Wencel’s chin, by one of his guardsmen, who took the man aside, presumably to explain what would be wanted of his humble house by his highborn guests. By trained civility, Ingrey went to Wencel’s horse’s head, though he did not really want to stand any nearer to the earl. The animal snorted and sidled at his hand on the bridle, and his grip tightened. The horse’s shoulders were wet with sweat from the morning’s gallop, the chestnut hairs curled and darkened, white lather showing between its legs. Whatever brings him, Wencel wastes no time.

  Staring down at Ingrey, Wencel drew a long breath. “You are just the man I wanted to see, cousin. Lord Hetwar takes pity on your aversion to ceremony, so repeatedly expressed in your otherwise laconic letters. So I am sent to take over my late brother-in-law’s cortege. A family duty, as I’m the only relative neither prostrate with grief, laid down with illness, or still stuck on bad roads halfway to the border. A royal show of equipment and mourners follows on to join us in Oxmeade. I had thought to meet you there last night, according to your ever-changing itineraries.”

  Ingrey licked dry lips. “That will be a relief.”

  “I thought it might be.” His eyes went to Ijada, and the sardonic, rehearsed cadences ceased. He lowered his head. “Lady Ijada. I cannot tell you how sorry I am for what has happened—for what was done to you. I regret that I was not there at Boar’s Head to prevent this.”

  Ijada inclined her head in acknowledgment, if not, precisely, in forgiveness. “I’m sorry you were not at Boar’s Head, too. I did not desire this high blood on my hands, nor… the other consequences.”

  “Yes… “ Wencel drawled the word out. “It seems we have much more to discuss than I’d thought.” He shot Ingrey a tight-lipped smile and dismounted. At his adult height, Wencel was only half a hand shorter than his cousin; for reasons unclear to Ingrey, men regularly estimated his own height as greater than it was. In a much lower voice, Wencel added, “Strangely secret things, since you did not choose to discuss them even with the sealmaster. Some might chide you for that. Be assured, I am not one of them.”

  Wencel murmured a few orders to his guardsmen; Ingrey gave up the reins to Wencel’s servant, and the inn’s stableboys came pelting up to lead the retinue away around the building.

  “Where might we go to talk?” said Wencel. “Privately.”

  “Taproom?” said Ingrey, nodding to the inn.

  The earl shrugged. “Lead on.”

  Ingrey would have preferred to follow, but led off perforce. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Wencel offer a polite arm to Lady Ijada, which she warily evaded by making play with lifting her riding skirts up the steps and passing ahead of him.

  “Out,” Ingrey said to Hetwar’s two breakfasting men, who scrambled up in surprise at the sight of the earl. “You can take your bread and meat with you. Wait outside. See that no one disturbs us.” He closed the taproom door behind them and the confused warden.

  Wencel, after an indifferent glance around the old-fashioned rush-strewn chamber, tucked his gloves in his belt, seated himself at one of the trestle tables, and waved Ingrey and Ijada to the bench across from him. His hands clasped each other on the polished boards, motionless but not relaxed.

  Ingrey was uncertain what creature Wencel bore within. Of course, he’d had no clear perception of Ijada’s, either, till his wolf had come unbound again. Even now, if he had not known from seeing both the leopard’s corpse and its renewed spirit in their place of battle with the geas, he might not have been able to put a name to that disquieting wild presence within her.

  Far more disturbing to Ingrey was the question, When? He had seen Wencel only twice since his own return from his Darthacan exile four years ago. The earl had been but lately married to Princess Fara, and had taken his bride back to his rich family lands along the lower Lure River, two hundred miles from Easthome. The first time the new-wed Horserivers had returned to the capital, for a midwinter celebration of the Father’s Day three years back, Ingrey had been away on a mission for Hetwar to the Cantons. The next visit, he had seen his cousin only at a gathering at the king’s hall when Prince Biast had received his marshal’s spear and pennant from his father’s hand. Wencel had been taken up with the ceremony, and Ingrey had been tied down in Hetwar’s train.

  They’d passed face-to-face but briefly. The earl had acknowledged his disreputable and disinherited cousin with a courteous nod, unsurprised recognition with no hint of aversion, but had not sought him out thereafter. Ingrey had thought Wencel vastly improved over the unprepossessing youth he remembered, and had assumed that the burden of his early inheritance and high marriage had matured him, gifted him with that peculiar gravity. Had there been something strange underlying that gravity, even then? The next time they had met was in Hetwar’s chambers, a week ago. Wencel had been quiet, self-effacing, among that group of grim older men—mortified, or so Ingrey had guessed, for he would not meet Ingrey’s eyes. Ingrey could barely remember his saying anything at all.

  Wencel was speaking to Ijada, his eyes downcast in chagrin. “My lady wife has done you a great wrong, Ijada, and it is surely the gods’ own justice that it has rebounded upon her head. She lied to me at first, claiming that it was your wish to stay with Boleso, until the courier from Boar’s Head brought that dark enlightenment. I swear I gave her no just cause for her jealousy. I should be more furious with her than I am, if her betrayal had not so clearly contained its own punishment. She weeps incessantly, and I… I scarcely know how to un
ravel this tangle and reweave the honor of my house.” He raised his head again.

  The intensity of his gaze upon Ijada was not only, Ingrey thought, perturbation with her leopard. I think Princess Fara was not so astray in her jealousy as Wencel feigns. Four years married, and no heir to the great and ancient house of Horseriver; did that silence conceal barrenness, disaffection, some subtler impotence? Had it fueled a wife’s fears, justly or no?

  “I do not know how you may do so either,” returned Ijada. Ingrey was uncertain if the edgy chill of this represented anger or fear, and stole a glance at her face. That pure profile was remarkably expressionless. He suddenly wanted to know exactly what she saw when she looked at Wencel.

  Wencel tilted his head in no less frowning a regard. “What is that, anyway? Surely not a badger. I would guess a lynx.”

  Ijada’s chin rose. “A leopard.”

  Wencel’s mouth screwed up in surprise. “That is no… and where did that fool Boleso get a… and why… my lady, I think you had better tell me all that happened there at Boar’s Head.”

  She glanced at Ingrey; he gave a slow nod. Wencel was as wound up in this as any of them, it seemed, on more than one level, and he appeared to have Hetwar’s confidence. So… does Hetwar know of Wencel’s beast, or not?

  Ijada gave a short, blunt account of the night’s deeds, factual as Ingrey understood the events, but with almost no hint of her own thoughts or emotions, devoid of interpretations or guesses. Her voice was flat. It was like watching a dumb show.

  Wencel, who had listened with utmost attention, but without comment, turned his sharp gaze to Ingrey. “So where is the sorcerer?”

  “What?”

  He gestured at Ijada. “That did not happen spontaneously. There must have been a sorcerer. Illicit, to be sure, if he was both dabbler in the forbidden and tool to such a dolt as Boleso.”

  “Lady Ijada—my impression from Lady Ijada’s testimony was that Boleso performed the rite himself.”

  “We were alone together in his bedchamber, certainly,” said Ijada. “If I ever encountered any such person in Boleso’s household, I never recognized him as a sorcerer.”

  Wencel absently scratched the back of his neck. “Hm. Perhaps. Yet… Boleso never learned such a rite by himself. He’d taken up many creatures, you say? Gods, what a fool. Indeed… No. If his mentor was not with him, he must certainly have been there recently. Or disguised. Hidden in the next room. Or fled?”

  “I did wonder if Boleso might have had some accomplice,” Ingrey admitted. “But Rider Ulkra asserted that no servant of the house had slipped away since the prince’s death. And Lord Hetwar would surely not have sent even me to arrest such a perilous power without Temple assistance.” Yes, Ingrey might have encountered something far less benign than salutary pig-delusions.

  … Such as a geas? What if his murderous compulsion had not come with him from Easthome after all? He kept his eyes from widening at this new thought. “Hetwar could not have suspected the true events.” But then why the sealmaster’s insistence on Ingrey’s discretion? Mere politics?

  “The reports of the tragedy that Hetwar received that first night were garbled and inadequate, I grant you,” said Wencel with a scowl. “Leopards were entirely missing from them, among other things. Still… I could wish you had secured the sorcerer, whoever he was.” His gaze wandered back to Ijada. “At the least, confession from such a prisoner might have helped a lady of my household to whom I owe protection.”

  Ingrey flinched at the cogency of that. “I doubt I should be here, alive or sane, if I had surprised the man.”

  “An arguable point,” Wencel conceded. “But you, of all men, should have known to look.”

  Had the geas been fogging Ingrey’s thinking? Or just his own numb distaste for his task? He sat back a little, and, having no defense, countered on another flank: “What sorcerer did you encounter? And when?”

  Wencel’s sandy brows twitched up. “Can you not guess?”

  “No. I did not sense your… difference, in Hetwar’s chamber. Nor at Biast’s installation, which was the last time I’d seen you before.”

  “Truly? I was not sure if I had managed to conceal my affliction from you, or you had merely chosen to be discreet. I was grateful, if so.”

  “I did not sense it.” He almost added, My wolf was bound, but to do so would be to admit that it now was not. And he had no idea where he presently stood with Wencel.

  “That’s a comfort. Well. It came to me at much the same time as yours, if you must know. At the time of your father’s death—or perhaps, I should say, of my mother’s.” At Ijada’s look and half-voiced query, he added aside to her, “My mother was sister to Ingrey’s father. Which would make me half a Wolfcliff, except for all the Horseriver brides that went to his clan in earlier generations. I should need a pen and paper to map out all the complications of our cousinship.”

  “I knew you had a tie, but I did not realize it was so close.”

  “Close and tangled. And I have long suspected that all those tragedies falling together like that were somehow bound up one in another.”

  Ingrey said slowly, “I knew my aunt had died sometime during my illness, but I had not realized it was so near to my father’s death. No one spoke of it to me. I’d assumed it was grief, or one of those mysterious wastings that happen to women in middle age.”

  “No. It was an accident. Strangely timed.”

  Ingrey hesitated. “Ties… Did you meet the sorcerer who placed your beast in you? Was it Cumril for you, too?”

  Wencel shook his head. “Whatever was done to me was done while I was sleeping. And if you think that wasn’t the most confusing awakening of my life…!”

  “Did it not sicken you, or drive you mad?”

  “Not so much as yours, apparently. There was clearly something wrong with yours. I mean, over and above the horror that happened to your father.”

  “Why did you never say anything to me? My disaster was no secret. I wish I had known I was not alone!”

  “Ingrey, I was thirteen, and terrified! Not least that if my defilement were discovered, they would do to me what they were doing to you! I didn’t think I could survive it. I was never strong and athletic, like you. The thought of such torture as you endured sickened me. My only hope seemed concealment, at all costs. By the time I was sure of my own sanity again, and I began to regain my courage, you were gone, exiled, shuffled out of the Weald by your embarrassed uncle. And how could I have communicated? A letter? It would certainly have been intercepted and read, by your keepers or mine.” He breathed deeply, and brought his rapid and shaky voice back under control. “How odd it is to find us roped together now. We could all burn jointly, you know. Back to back to back.”

  “Not me,” Ingrey asserted, and cursed the nervous quaver in his voice. “I have a dispensation from the Temple.”

  “Powers that can grant such mercies can also rescind them,” said Wencel darkly. “Ijada and I, then. Not the relation, front to front, that my wife feared, but a holy union of sorts.”

  Ijada did not flinch from this remark, but stared at Wencel with a tense new interest, her brows drawn in. Reassessing, perhaps, a man she’d thought she’d known, that she was discovering she had not known at all? As I am?

  Wencel focused on Ingrey’s grubby bandages. “What happened to your hands?”

  “Tripped over a table. Cut myself with a carving knife,” Ingrey answered, as indifferently as possible. He caught Ijada’s curious look, out of the corner of his eye, and prayed she would not see fit to expand upon the tale. Not yet, anyway.

  Instead, she asked the earl, “What is your beast? Do you know?”

  He shrugged. “I had always thought it was a horse, for the Horserivers. That made sense to me, as much as anything in this could.” He drew a long, thoughtful breath, and his chill blue eyes rose to meet theirs. “There have been no spirit warriors in the Weald for centuries, unless maybe some remnant survived hidden in remote refuge
s. Now there are three new-made, not just in the same generation, but in the same room. Ingrey and I, I have long suspected were of a piece. But you, Lady Ijada… I do not understand. You do not fit. I would urge you search for this missing sorcerer, Ingrey. At the very least, the hunt for such a vital witness might delay proceedings against Ijada.”

  “That would be a good thing,” Ingrey conceded readily.

  Wencel’s hands spread flat on the table in unease. “We are all in each other’s hands now. I had imagined my secret safe with you, Ingrey, but now it seems you were merely ignorant of it. I’ve been alone so long. It is hard for me to learn trust, so late.”

  Ingrey bent his head in wry agreement.

  Wencel pulled his shoulders back, wincing as though they ached. “Well. I must refresh myself, and pay my respects to my late brother-in-law’s remains. How are they preserved, by the way?”

  “He’s packed in salt,” said Ingrey. “They had a plentiful supply at Boar’s Head, for keeping game.”

  A bleak amusement flashed in Wencel’s face. “How very direct of you.”

  “I didn’t have him properly skinned and gutted, though, so I expect the effect will be imperfect.”

  “It’s as well the weather is no warmer, then. But it seems we’d best not delay.” Wencel let out a sigh, planted both palms on the tabletop, and pushed himself wearily to his feet. For an instant, the blackness of his spirit seemed to strike Ingrey like a blow, then he was just a tired young man again, burdened too soon in life with dangerous dilemmas. “We’ll speak again.”

  The earl made his way out to the porch, where his retainers jumped alertly to their feet to escort him toward the town temple. In the door of the taproom, Ingrey touched Ijada’s arm. She turned, her lips tight.

  “What do you make of Wencel’s beast?” he asked her, low-voiced.

  She murmured back, “To quote Learned Hallana, if that’s a stallion, I’m the queen of Darthaca.” Her eyes rose to meet his, level and intent. “Your wolf is not much like a wolf. And his horse is not much like a horse. But I will say this, Ingrey; they are both a lot like each other.”