The Hallowed Hunt c-3

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  As the earl raised his arms to help Fara into her jacket, Ingrey’s eye caught the gleam of new leather from a knife sheath at his waist. New sheath; new knife? Quietly, he backed out of the tack room into the stable aisle. Could he defy Horseriver’s entrancing will? If he could think resistance, surely he could act it? If he did not think too hard? Ijada, what is happening to you now? He could no longer tell. This moment was clearly well prepared for; with Ingrey securely leashed, had the earl readied some fatal assault on that narrow house, as well?

  Still backing, he grabbed and drew the latch to the wise-stag’s stall, dragging the door open. His fingers felt numb. “Go,” he whispered. The beast bounced twice in place, snorted like the crack of ice breaking, then bolted out past him, its hooves clattering and scraping on the colored pavement. It gathered itself and was gone into the outer darkness of the city in a near-hallucinatory flash of speed. Ingrey froze as Horseriver thrust his head out the tack room door and frowned. “Stay,” snapped the earl, and Ingrey perforce waited.

  He was still standing there struggling… not so much to move, as to want to move, when the earl appeared again, his own town robes exchanged for leathers and boots, escorting Fara firmly with one hand clenched around her upper arm. Horseriver glanced aside at the empty stall and, to Ingrey’s dismay, merely smiled sourly. “You almost frighten me,” he remarked in passing. “That was inspired. So nearly right. Perhaps I should muzzle you, as well.”

  He said no more, but aimed Fara into the straight stall where Ijada’s chestnut mare shifted uneasily.

  “I’m afraid of that horse, my lord,” Fara quavered.

  “Not for much longer, I promise you,” he murmured back. Ingrey could not see more over the boards and past the vine-decorated metal bars than the horse’s flickering ears and the tops of Horseriver’s blond and Fara’s dark heads, but he heard a leathery whisper as of a knife being drawn. A low murmur from the earl in words he half recognized made his blood race and raised all the hairs on his arms. Then a meaty thunk, a truncated squeal, a jerk against a head rope that shook the walls—then a thudding of a heavy body collapsing, convulsing, and going still.

  The two heads moved back into the aisle. Fara was leaning against Horseriver, shuddering fiercely. If blood spattered her riding costume, it did not show in the dark. “What have you done to me…?” she moaned.

  Within her, Ingrey’s shaman senses saw, a powerful but frightened shadow plunged and strained.

  “Sh,” Horseriver soothed her. He touched her brow with his thumb again, renewing her glassy stare. The horse-shadow, too, quieted, though seeming more benumbed than calmed. “It will be well. Come along, now.”

  The apprehensive groom had reappeared. “My lord? What was—”

  “Fetch the horses.”

  The three saddled horses were marshaled in the darkened court before the mews. The groom and Horseriver between them boosted Fara aboard her bay mare; Horseriver himself checked her girths, adjusted her boots in her stirrups, smoothed her split skirts, closed her trembling gloved hands tightly over her reins.

  “Mount up,” Horseriver directed Ingrey, handing him the gray gelding’s reins. Ingrey did so, though the horse skittered and hopped beneath him, trying to get its head down and buck. Horseriver glanced back and cast another Peace! over his shoulder in a voice of mild irritation, and Ingrey’s mount settled down, if still uneasily. The earl closed the stable doors behind them.

  The groom gave Horseriver a leg up, and the earl caught up his stirrups with the toes of his boots without looking, settling himself in his saddle. He reached down and laid a beneficent palm across the groom’s forehead. “Go home. Sleep. Forget.”

  The groom’s eyes went vague, and he turned away, yawning.

  Horseriver raised a hand and called to Ingrey and Fara, “Follow.” He wheeled his mount and led off at a walk into the foggy dark. Hooves scraped on the sloping cobbles, the sound echoing off the walls of the buildings as they wound down through the Kingstown streets.

  As they passed through the empty market square, Horseriver leaned over the side of his saddle, pressed his hand to his stomach, and quietly retched. He spat something dark and wet upon the paving bricks. Ingrey, passing after, smelled not bile but blood. Does he bleed for his weirding voice as I do for mine? More discreetly, it seemed. And how much of that treasure had he misspent for Ingrey’s murderous geas, that he named it too much?

  The night guards at the southeast town gate let them exit at a simple order from Horseriver. He did not even seem to need the weirding voice to have them saluting him solicitously on his way. Once clear of the walls and the paved causeway, Horseriver pressed his mount into a trot. They turned left at the first village crossroad leading down toward the Stork. Along the rim of the hills behind them, overtaking its heralding pale glow in the sky, a fat gibbous moon broke free and cast their long dim shadows onto the road before them.

  Where are we going? Why does he want us? What are we going to do when we get there?

  Ingrey gritted his teeth in frustration that he’d had no chance to send a message. Or leave one… He tried to imagine what folk would make tomorrow morning of the mess left in the stables: three horses and the stag gone, one mare bloodily dead, an untidy pile of court dress left on the tack room floor. They had left Easthome swiftly and quietly, to be sure, but by no means in secret. For Fara’s sake alone, there would surely be pursuit. Then whatever Horseriver plans, he expects it to go quickly, before pursuit can arrive. Should I seek delay?

  It was Ingrey’s charge to spy on Horseriver and guard Fara. So far the first was going swimmingly, in a way, but he was surely making a hash of the second, for all that he rode beside her seeming to guard her still. He’d made an effort with the stag that had proved sadly misdirected. His lurid fear that Horseriver might want his wife for some bizarre blood sacrifice did not stand up to reasonable examination. She could not be hanged from a tree as courier to the gods in her new horse-spirit-ridden state, nor was she virgin for all her barrenness. Nor did Ingrey think that Horseriver wanted to communicate with the gods, beyond obscene gestures of defiance. And where were They, in this night of inexplicable events?

  Stags for the Stagthornes. Horses for the Horserivers. Fara was a Horseriver by marriage, however unsatisfactory the union had been for her, and there was a Horseriver bride or two up her Stagthorne family tree as well, and not too far up at that. The earl’s sister-daughter-granddaughters all, they must have been in their day, Ingrey now realized. The loops in that family braid were staggering in their interlace, if one thought of the earl as one man and not a dozen. Kin. Kin. What of kin?

  A hallow king’s banner-carrier was traditionally a close kinsman. Symark was second cousin to Biast, and had been his elder brother Byza’s bannerman before that. The late king’s own longtime bannerman had died half a year before him, from natural causes, and the old man had delayed replacing him—anticipating his own end even then and scorning to set some latecomer in that treasured companion’s place? Or had a new appointment been blocked by Horseriver, for arcane reasons? A hallow king needed a bannerman of his own high blood, to match his honor. Or banner-woman? Ingrey glanced aside at Fara, clinging to her mount, her face pale and shadowed. She was an adequate horsewoman only. This night would test her endurance.

  Hetwar would blister him for this. If he lived. If he lived, Ingrey decided, Hetwar could blister him to his heart’s content. Better—if he and Fara lived, it would set an interesting conundrum for Ijada’s judges. Any precedent of punishment or reprieve to Ijada for bearing her leopard must logically apply also to the princess and her new night-mare. I think I could do something with this. And if I couldn’t, I’ll wager Oswin could.

  They neared the Stork and turned north along the main river road. The moonlight reflecting off the river’s broad surface filtered in bright bursts through the trees lining the banks. Past the clip of hooves and creak of leather Ingrey could hear the faint rippling of the current, mixing with the
whisper of falling leaves.

  He kneed Wolf forward to match the big chestnut’s long gait. “Sire, where are we going?”

  Horseriver’s head turned, and his teeth flashed briefly in the shadows at the honorific. “Can you not guess?”

  North. They could be in flight to exile in the Cantons, but somehow Ingrey thought not. A two-day ride at a courier’s pace would bring them to the edge of the Raven Range…

  “The Wounded Woods. Bloodfield.”

  “Holytree that was. Very good, my wise wolfling.”

  Ingrey waited, but Horseriver added nothing else. After a moment, the earl urged his horse into a canter, and the other two mounts snorted and picked up the pace.

  Ingrey’s reason still worked, it seemed. It was his emotions that Horseriver’s kingship had overwhelmed. What a strange geas—no, this was no mere spell. Not at all like the tight, self-contained parasite magic he had fought and defeated at Red Dike. This was something else, huge and old and strong. Older than Horseriver himself? Nor did it feel intrinsically evil, though all gifts turned to despair in Horseriver’s age-blackened hands.

  The terrible charisma of kings… men crept close, longing to bask in it, for something more than material reward. The lure of heroism, the benediction of action, might have only death for its prize, and yet men flocked to the king’s banner. The seductive promise of perfection of self in service to this high bright-seeming thing?

  Horseriver had not made his kingship out of himself alone, all those centuries ago. He had received it as heirloom—time immemorial was all too true a phrase for a tradition that knew no writing to bind the years in tame ranks, but the kin tribes had been on this ground so long they seemed as old as the great dark forest itself. Whatever royal magic they had made out of themselves, they had been making it for a very, very long time.

  The old kinsmen, even by their own accounts, had been a collection of arrogant, stiff-necked, bloody-minded, and bloody-handed madmen. It would take something as intense as this burning glamour to bring them into any sort of line, however ragged. Fear of Audar had driven them, to be sure, in their late days, but fear was as likely to scatter efforts like leaves in a storm as to concentrate them. How much energy had Horseriver possessed, how much expended, to bring that great rite at Holytree even to a beginning, let alone to fruition? If this was his kingship’s last dying gasp, what must it have been in its fierce prime?

  The rising moon met the rising mists to turn the world into a seething sea of light. The hallow king raised and flung down his arm, and led his followers in a hard gallop up this straight flat glowing stretch of river road. They seemed to course the clouds, flying. Ingrey’s eyes watered in the chill wind of their passage. His horse bounded effortlessly between his gripping legs, and Ingrey, his heart bursting, threw back his head and drank the rushing night. Failure lay behind, ruin, perhaps, ahead; but in this silver hour he was glorified.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  By the time the moon was high, the lathered horses were flagging. They were miles beyond the point at which a royal courier would have stopped to change mounts, and Ingrey was beginning to wonder if Horseriver planned for them to ride the animals to death, when the earl finally allowed his big chestnut to drop to a weary walk. After a few more minutes, he pointed and led them off the road toward a farmhouse set alone in the trees toward the river. A lantern hung from its porch rafters, burning faint and red in the moon-blue dark.

  Three horses were waiting, tied to the railing. As they dismounted a Horseriver groom scrambled up from a bedroll and set about transferring the tack. Horseriver allowed only enough time for Ingrey and Fara to consume some cheese wrapped in bread, swallow some ale, and visit the privy behind the house before mounting and taking to the road again. Fara was pale and strained, but the hallow king’s will held her to her grim task of clinging to her fresh horse and galloping once more.

  Even Ingrey was swaying in his saddle by the time they stopped again, at another old thatched farmhouse just over a hill from the main river road. They had passed no other riders in the deep night, and had swung quietly around the walled villages lying farther and farther apart up the narrowing Stork. Fara fairly fell out of her saddle into her husband’s arms.

  “Surely she can ride no more tonight, sire,” Ingrey murmured.

  “It is just as well. Even you and I could not ride straight through without stopping. We’ll take a rest here.”

  An arranged rest, clearly, for a daunted-looking farm girl appeared to take Fara in charge and lead her into the house. The earl followed another Horseriver groom, obviously stationed here for this duty, as he led the horses around behind the rambling house to a rickety shed. Wencel looked over the waiting remounts and grunted satisfaction. No farm nags, these, but more horses sent ahead from the earl’s own stables.

  This flight was well planned, it seemed. Pursuers might inquire at roadside inns and other public liveries where men in a hurry could rent remounts, yet find no trace of them, no witnesses, no abandoned horses. To stop and inquire at every farmhouse along the Stork between Easthome and the northern border would waste precious time, even for men with such resources as the prince-marshal and Hetwar. And they would have half a dozen other roads away from Easthome in all directions to search, as well.

  To what degree can I resist this kingly geas? Ingrey wondered, in a sort of melted desperation. If he could but once gather the will and wits, that is. Would escape from the range of Wencel’s voice break this false calm in which he seemed to float, would the trance falter if Wencel’s attention was divided? Ingrey felt as hungry for that royal regard as a dog desiring a bone from its master or a boy a smile from his father. The dogged fawning merely made him grit his teeth, but that Horseriver should so casually pilfer a filial loyalty Lord Ingalef had never lived to enjoy sent a vein of molten rage through Ingrey’s heart. Still he found himself creeping after his lord like a cold tired child huddling to a hearth.

  Ingrey trailed Wencel to a seat on the floor of the farmhouse porch, let his aching legs dangle over the edge, and stared with him out over the river valley at the descending moon. The groom brought plain fare again, bread and ham, though this time with a jug of new wine. The farm’s vineyard must have been fortunate in its sun and rain, for the wine was as sweet and smooth upon the tongue as liquid gold. Proximity to his master stirred a drunken elation in Ingrey, anchored by his fatigue, like that lassitude wherein an inebriated man might be quite positive he could rise and walk away, if only he chose. Ingrey drank again.

  “It is beautiful, my lord,” Ingrey said, nodding to the light-frosted view.

  Wencel’s lips twitched in an odd little grimace. “I have seen enough moonsets.” He added after a moment, “Enjoy it while you can.”

  A disturbingly ambiguous remark, Ingrey thought. “Why do we gallop? What foe do we outrace? Pursuit from Easthome?”

  “That as well.” Wencel stretched his back. “Time is not my friend. Thanks to the Stagthorne kin’s shrewd habit of electing their sons hallow kings in their fathers’ lifetimes, it has been more than a hundred and twenty years since the last interregnum. The effort of creating another such gap seems overwhelming to me, just now. I shall seize this one.” His lips drew back. “Or die trying does not apply.”

  So, Hetwar’s suspicions seemed sustained; Horseriver did covet the election, and had been manipulating the ordainers. And possibly the lives and deaths of potential rival candidates, as well? “Is this all to make yourself hallow king again, then?”

  Horseriver snorted. “I am hallow king. I need no further making.”

  He had needed something, however; some missing piece, spun off from the old Stagthorne king’s departing soul. Some… half magic, or fragment of the Weald: but surely not political in its nature. “Hallow king in name and form, then. Publicly elected and acclaimed.”

  “If I had desired the name of king of this benighted land, I could have taken it years ago, Ingrey,” Horseriver said mildly. “In a better b
ody, too.”

  I have a better body, Ingrey could not help thinking. But indeed, if it was the election Wencel desired, they ought to be galloping toward Easthome, not away from it. He wanted something else, something more, then. Something stranger. Ingrey fought for clarity through the fog of fatigue, wine on an empty stomach, and Horseriver’s arresting aura.

  “If you don’t want to win the election for yourself, what do you want?”

  “To delay it.”

  Ingrey blinked grimy eyes. “Will this flight do that?”

  “Well enough. The absence of one earl-ordainer”—Horseriver touched his chest—”alone would not be enough, but Biast will be distracted by Fara’s disappearance on the eve of her father’s funeral, once he discovers it. I have planted a few other disruptions. The multiple proxies I left for different candidates should be good for several days of argument all by themselves, when they surface.” He grinned briefly and not especially humorously.

  Ingrey hardly knew what to reply to that, although the term interregnum seemed to rumble in his mind, fraught with elusive weight. Through the mellow glow of his embezzled fealty, he gleaned his wits, and asked, “What was the stag for?”

  “What, hadn’t you guessed?”

  “I thought you meant to invest it in Fara, to make her a spirit warrior, or to carry something away from her father. But then you chose the mare.”

  “When playing against the gods, sudden unexpected ploys sometimes work better than deep-laid plans. Even They cannot block every chance. The stag was a great beast in the making; four stag-lives it has accumulated since I began it. But the hallow king’s death fell before the stag was ready. I don’t know if They hastened the one or delayed the other.”