The Sacred Hunt Duology

by Michelle West

  He rose. The drums stopped their beating, the breeze stilled. In silence, the huntbrother joined the Hunter Lord.

  Loss. Stephen understood it well. There had been many deaths and disappearances in his past, in the years with the den, and even those leading up to them. Lord Elseth had changed all that—and now he lay as dead as any commoner. The magic of his presence, the force of his words—with their harsh anger and their prickly comfort—had been given to the Hunter and His Death. It hurt.

  But not as much as it hurt Norn.

  He knew that Norn shouldn’t be alone. Gilliam caught his shoulder as he started forward, and he shook him off, quietly determined to go to Norn’s side.

  No doubt the death had been awful—it was hard to tell from the body—but at least, dead, Soredon was spared Lord William’s fate. Norn was not. He had nothing now; unlike his Hunter Lord, he couldn’t hear the voices of the dogs, and he couldn’t anchor himself to their needs.

  But when Stephen reached Norn, he found himself without words to say or comfort to offer. He reached out and placed one hand on Norn’s stooped shoulder, but the larger man shrugged it off.

  “Norn of Elseth,” the King said softly. “Lord Soredon made his choice years before—as did you. All loss, whether of life or of companionship, was accepted then. We are Hunters and huntbrothers, and the Death takes one of our number, always.”

  Norn said nothing, nor did the King expect a response. The choice made as a child was bitter solace indeed for such a moment as this. They waited—King, Priest, and huntbrother—but Norn did not touch the body at all. He stared long into the frozen face and then turned away with a whisper. “It should have been me.”

  Only Stephen heard it. He trailed alongside the older man, afraid of disturbing him, but more afraid of leaving him alone.

  • • •

  Kallandras was true to his word. When at last the King, a wounded Hunter Lord in his own right, retired to his place at the foot of the Queen’s dais, when the Priest and the drummers quietly paid their final respects to their fallen and withdrew into the shadows, when the Hunter Lords were finally free to mourn as they chose, he rose, his small lute cradled gently and formally in his arms, and took his place before the altar. He bowed, a sweeping, serious motion, first to Corwel and then to Soredon.

  The Hunter Lords looked askance at Gilliam, but as Gilliam did not demur, they kept their thoughts to themselves and waited.

  He sang.

  His voice was full with the emotion that the Hunter Lords kept carefully masked. They, who had always been strong, had no way to weep but through him—and his voice, accompanied by the sweeping range of lute strings that seemed too small, too inadequate to convey such sound, washed over them all.

  There were tears on his cheeks; the fire from the brazier caught them and made pale rubies of their fall. His voice broke over words more than once, but that too became part of his song.

  Stephen cried, and after a few minutes, Gilliam joined him. It was safe, after all; no one noticed. Their attention was fixed upon the bard.

  Time passed, no one knew—or cared—how long, and Kallandras’ song began to slowly change. Strains of grief and utter despair, of loss in the most primal sense, were joined by a thin strand of hope. The death of the Hunter Lord became a green, unfolding life for the land of Breodanir; the fields became fertile, the ground soft and rich. The children, untouched by sorrow and death, played in the peace of Lord Soredon’s sacrifice, instead of dying in drought or famine.

  All of this, they knew—but they had never felt it so clearly, and so cleanly, as at this moment. As Kallandras sang, the ghost of Lord Soredon moved slowly, and with purpose, before them. He smiled, if smile it was—it was hard to tell with Soredon—and reached for his weapons. He frowned down, and Corwel suddenly joined him; Corwel remade, young and perfect and a little too eager. Together, they passed into shadow and were gone with the last strain of music.

  In an hour, Kallandras had done what time would take months to do. A sweet, sad peace filled the clearing and spilled out into the forest. Hunter Lords and Ladies watched him quietly, seeing other deaths, other losses, from the perspective that peace allows.

  They did not know that it was not the death of Lord Elseth alone that he spoke of; they didn’t know that it was not the hope of the Breodani alone that filled the clearing. But they didn’t have to; what they felt was Kallandras’ emotion, and it was genuine, one with their own.

  He bowed, first to Lord Elseth and Stephen, and then to the crowd at large. Their silence was their applause.

  Only one man remained unmoved. He was like a lamp empty of flame. There was nothing at all left, not even for tears. Kallandras bowed to him as well, the third bow and the last of the evening. Norn nodded, but the nod, like the man, was empty.

  • • •

  Krysanthos, mage-born, was not proof against the magic of Kallandras’ talent. He wept as freely as any of the Hunter Lords, although he felt only contempt for their loss. Only when the bard stopped singing did the spell fade, and Krysanthos was left with anger, and not a little fear. He wanted to approach the Hunter Lords proper, but did not dare. Observers—the gifted and exalted of the realm who were not blessed by the Hunter’s gift—had a small area on the green that could not be abandoned until the full and proper end of the Sacred Hunt. As always, surrounded by Priests of various orders, and the official heads of many guilds, Krysanthos kept to custom. But magic augmented his vision as he watched.

  The pale, muddied hair of the Elseth huntbrother, who stood shoulder to shoulder with his Lord in the gloom, was a taunt and a question that he had no answer for. The Kovaschaii had gone out in the morning, trailing the hunt in silence. He had not returned, which Krysanthos had expected—but the boy had. What had happened?

  He felt certain that the boy could not have destroyed the assassin; or rather, he wanted to feel certain of it. But the boy’s life was evidence against the assumption.

  He didn’t understand why more had not been made of the attempt, didn’t understand why the boy had not mentioned the assassin at all. Unless the assassin had never even made the first attempt.

  But, no, that was unthinkable. The Kovaschaii were almost a legend, and for very good reason. Krysanthos had called upon them twice before, and both times they had offered success and silence in return for their very high fee.

  What a waste of an opportunity. He would have to hire again, or attend to the deed with his personal resources. He shivered; it was cool. The boy that had dealt with one of the Kovaschaii was not an opponent that Krysanthos was willing to challenge, however cunningly, without further study. None of the mage’s plans took into account his own death.

  Ah, the feast was starting. Perhaps food and a little wine would warm him. He began to walk over to the banquet tables set up for the perusal of hungry guests. Yes, he would eat, and then he would arrange for surveillance of the huntbrother to the new Lord Elseth.

  • • •

  Eadward Lord Valentin, his huntbrother Michaele, and Lord William of Valentin formed the honor guard. One of the mage-born—not Krysanthos, he was too highly placed—was called from the Collegium of the Order of Knowledge. He came with the dawn and attended to the body, with spells and potions made to preserve it on the long journey home.

  Lord Maubreche and his huntbrother Andrew also honored the dead with their presence. They held the preserve closest to Valentin, and slowed their journey home to lend the strength and dignity of numbers to Soredon’s last journey.

  Norn rode, in black robes with a hood that showed little of his face, at Soredon’s side. Michaele and Andrew tried twice to speak with him or offer their comfort, but he declined all human contact—and he shunned the dogs as well.

  The young Lord Elseth proved himself to be the model of restraint; he held the dogs in check throughout the two-week journey, and never once let tears be she
d in public. In all things, he was his father’s son, but especially in this. Stephen knew how important the appearance of strength was to his Hunter, and he said nothing at all about it, pretending, as the other Lords did, that all tears had already been shed in the closing of the Sacred Hunt.

  Lady Elseth saw the procession coming; she must have. When they arrived, she had food and rooms ready for the Lords who had served as guards. Dinner, for it was late afternoon, was hurriedly rearranged, and a Priest from the village was called for. He arrived within minutes, and showed sorrow more openly than did any of the Elseth clan save Maribelle, who, while on the verge of adulthood, had not completely left the fields of childhood’s open grief and sorrow.

  • • •

  Stephen heard Lady Elseth crying the evening before the funeral. He stopped outside of her drawing room doors. They were closed, and the rules of the house, made when he and Gilliam had been younger children, were quite strict: One did not disturb Lady Elseth if the doors were shut.

  But he lingered in the hall, the lamplight flickering beneath his chin like ghostly fingers. He wanted to enter and offer her comfort, but didn’t know how. If he hadn’t been wandering the halls, he would never have heard her—and it was obvious that she didn’t want to be heard, just as it was obvious that Gilliam did not.

  In the end, he chose to knock.

  The crying stopped; he heard the rustle of cloth behind the doors before they were opened. In the darkness, the redness of her eyes and the slight puffiness of lids and cheeks were not so obvious.

  “Stephen,” she said, and tried a smile.

  He held the lamp higher, so that its light touched them both. “Can I come in?”

  “What are you doing awake at this hour? The funeral’s tomorrow, and both you and Gilliam have to participate.”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “No.” She stepped back and held the door open. He glided past the inlaid panels and into the room. She didn’t wait for him to close the doors. Instead, she returned to her seat at the writing desk in the bay window. “I was—I was just working on accounts.” She picked up a quill and set it to paper that was blotched and sodden with a liquid other than ink.

  “The lamp is low,” he offered.

  She nodded. “I won’t be up for much longer.” But the quill trembled uselessly in her hands, and she set it aside. Gaining her feet, she turned to stare out of the windows. The curtains were pulled, and the moon, laced with clouds, glared down. Her feet, against the wood of the floor, must have been cold, but she didn’t notice.

  Stephen went through the drawing room and into her sleeping quarters, picked up the old knitted woolens and brought them out, offering them silently. She took them and bent down to place them on her feet, but her shoulders began to shake, and she left them in a messy pile on the floor.

  “It isn’t—it isn’t for Soredon,” she said, although it was hard to hear the words. “It’s Norn. I can’t reach him at all.”

  “He’s lost his Hunter,” Stephen replied.

  “I don’t care why,” was her equally quiet answer. It showed him, again, how different their lives had been, because it told him clearly how poorly she, who had loved Soredon, understood the depths of his loss to Norn. “I can’t reach him at all.”

  She opened the right-hand drawer of her desk and pulled out a crumpled handkerchief. She blew her nose, a most unladylike and inelegant gesture, and then rubbed her cheeks clean of tears with the sleeve of her night robe. “I’m so sick of the Hunter God,” she whispered. “I’m so sick of all of it. He won’t even talk to me. He only said, ‘Lady, I’m sorry.’ That was all. I called for him; he came and he just sat here, saying nothing.” The tears fell harder, and her voice became raw. “I’ve tried everything in the last day, Stephen. But he’s lost.”

  “He’ll come back,” Stephen said awkwardly. “Lord William did.”

  Her laughter was harsh and heated, a curse, not an expression of mirth. “Watch,” she said bitterly, “and learn. The Hunter has no mercy. It is not enough that I lose husband; I must lose huntbrother as well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Norn—he’s—” And then she dropped her face into her hands. “Go away, Stephen. I’m sorry, but I can’t be what I should. Go away.”

  He left.

  And in the morning, the Lords and their Ladies gathered to stand witness as the body of Soredon of Elseth was laid to rest in the cemetery of the Elseth estate. A headstone would follow soon enough, one as fine and unornamented and strong as Lord Soredon himself had been.

  Norn accompanied the body into the Priest’s circle, and Norn stood beside it as it came to rest upon the Elseth altar. He knelt in the mud and the dirt, and clung tightly to Soredon’s lifeless hands as if afraid of being parted.

  • • •

  And six months later, at the height of the harvest season, Norn of Elseth joined his Lord. He never recovered from the loss, it was said. What was not said, and what Stephen learned only with the passage of time, was that huntbrothers left alive after the Sacred Hunt were left alive in body only, a shadow of what they had been, until even the body, like an echo, paled and faded into nothing.

  Norn’s funeral was quiet but well-attended, and Lady Elseth was the gracious hostess throughout. She had wept what tears she had had on the nights after they had brought her husband’s body home.

  Stephen cried as he stood beside Maribelle; she, too, offered her tears. But Lord Elseth was as grim and silent as his mother. It was the best display of strength he could offer as his last sign of respect to the man who had been a second father for all of his life.

  Chapter Fifteen

  IN THE GLITTERING HALLS of Maubreche, beneath a flood of light made sharp and faceted by three huge chandeliers, Stephen of Elseth began to search for a quiet place to hide. It wasn’t easy; the press of moving bodies and alert Ladies—many of whom wished his aid in cornering the Elseth title for either themselves or their offspring—created an eddy in the social currents that threatened to pull him under. To make matters more complicated—which was only barely possible—he could sense that Gilliam, lost to view somewhere in the ever-changing, ever-moving crowd, was angry with him. That was the last thing he needed at the moment. He felt as if he were eight again; the surety, poise, and skill of his twenty-two years were about to abandon him to a room full of strangers.

  Luckily, recessed along the gold-foiled west wall of the ballroom, there were balconies, curtained heavily to close out the night and all hint of darkness. In the chill crisp air, he found his refuge. Lady Elseth would be disappointed, no doubt, and he would hear about it in the morning, but he needed the respite badly.

  He shrugged himself out of his dancing jacket, taking care to hold tight to cream ruffles and lace as they tried to follow green velvet and satin. Better. The jacket he slung over the stone balcony before he turned to face the night. Music—the opening strains of Coravel’s Revelry played with spice and skill by the small orchestra—reached above the din of conversation and tickled his ear. He knew, without checking his card, that he listened to the beginning of the fourth dance.

  It was a three-step waltz, simple enough to maneuver through without demanding much of the Hunter Lords who would always be too busy to learn the grace and skill a more difficult dance would require. And Lady Cynthia of Maubreche, the center of the evening’s celebration, would no doubt be dancing with one or another of the louts who’d been told to court her. He ground his teeth in frustration.

  Lady Cynthia had come late into her majority—she’d seen the turn of eighteen, when many young Ladies had already married into the fold of a Hunter Lord. She even had the grace to look—and act—her age; her long, slender body and her sharp, serious face had rarely been found in gatherings such as these. No, until now, Stephen had been likely to find her in the temple libraries—or the King’s libraries, if the time of ye
ar was proper.

  His fingers tried to dig holes in the balcony, and his mood was such that he wouldn’t have been surprised had the stone not resisted. But even that satisfaction was denied him.

  The music of the dance went on and on. He closed his eyes and saw more clearly the sweep of her emerald-green gown as it flew above the floor; saw the twinkle in her eye, the smile on her lips, the pale, pleasing blush along her cheeks. Which Lordling held her made no difference to him; he had not even tried to reserve a dance for the evening.

  “Stephen?” The curtains rustled and flew open, and Gilliam stepped out into the night. He was Lord Elseth now, which meant more to the Ladies than it did to the Lords, and he wore the title the same way he wore his clothes.

  Had Stephen not been so moody, he would have stopped to yank the lace out of the stranglehold the collar of Gilliam’s jacket had on it. He didn’t even have the energy to comment on the crumbs that had been crushed into the pile of the pleats above Gilliam’s left thigh. “Something bothering you?”

  “No.”

  “Dogshit.”

  Gilliam was angry; had been angry for most of the last fortnight. His huntbrother hadn’t been in the mood to deal with it, and frankly, he thought it would do Gilliam some good to deal with his tantrums on his own.

  Stephen drew a breath and turned to face his Hunter. Air hissed out as his jaw stiffened. “Gil, now is not the time. All right?”

  “‘Now is not the time.’” Gilliam shoved his jacket back and sat down, hard, on the stone. “It’s been the same damned story for the last month.”

  “Gil . . .”

  “You’ve come hunting, what, twice? If you can call what you were doing hunting.”

  “Fine.” Stephen bent down, picked up his jacket, and shoved his arms into the sleeves. Even angry, he was careful with both linen and lace. “What did you want of me?”