The Hallowed Hunt (Curse of Chalion) Read online

  Gesca covered his hesitation by taking a swig of beer, evidently remembered its taste too late, and swallowed anyway. He made a face and wiped his lips. “It was at that point that I recommended to Hetwar that he make your place permanent. My thinking was purely selfish. I wanted to make sure that you never ended up on the opposite side to me in a fight.” Gesca smiled up at him, but not with his eyes.

  Ingrey’s return smile was equally austere. Subtlety, Gesca? How unlike you. What are you trying to say to me?

  The ache from his head blow day before yesterday was returning. Ingrey decided to repair to his own inn to find food. He bade the warden to her duty, instructing the women to lock their chamber door once more, and withdrew.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AFTER FORAGING A MEAL OF SORTS IN HIS INN’S COMMON room, Ingrey returned to his chamber to fall across his bed once more. He was a day and a half late fulfilling the Reedmere dedicat’s prescription of rest for his aching head blow, and he apologized humbly in his heart to her. But for all his exhaustion, in the warming afternoon, sleep would not come.

  It was no good dashing about arranging all in secret for Ijada’s midnight escape if she refused to mount and ride away. She must be persuaded. If her secret beast was discovered, would they burn her? He imagined the flames licking up around her taut body, evil orange caresses, igniting the oil-soaked shift such prisoners were dressed in to speed their agony. He visualized her swinging from a hemp rope and oak beam, in vicious, senseless parody of an Old Wealding sacrifice hanged from a sacred forest tree. Or would the royal executioners allow her a silk rope, like her leopard, in honor of her kin rank? Though the old tribes, lacking silk, had used rope woven from shimmering nettle flax for their highest born, he had heard. Think of something else. But his thoughts circled in dreary morbidity.

  They had begun as messengers to the gods, those willing human sacrifices of the Old Weald. Sacred couriers to carry prayers directly to heaven in unholy hours of great need, when all mere spoken words, or prayers of the heart or hands, seemed to fly up into the void and vanish into a vast silence. Like mine, now. But then, under the generations-long pressure from the eastern borders, the tribes’ needs had grown, and so had their fears. Battles and ground were lost; woes waxed and judgment slipped; quality gave way to quantity, in the desperate days, and heroic holy volunteers grew harder to find.

  Their ranks were filled by the less willing, then the unwilling; at the last, captured soldiers, hostages, kidnapped camp followers, worse. The sacred trees bore a bumper crop. Children, Ingrey had heard, in some of the Quintarian divines’ favorite gruesome martyr tales. Enemy children. And what benighted mind places the name of enemy on a bewildered child? At the very least, the Old Wealding tribal mages might have reflected on what prayers that river of sacrifice had really borne to the gods, in their victims’ weeping hearts.

  Think of something useful, curse it. Ijada’s tart words in the temple seemed to bore into his skin like biting insects. You won’t have to stand up to anybody, nor speak dangerous truths… Five gods, what power did the fool girl imagine he had in Easthome? He himself lived on sufferance, under Hetwar’s shielding hand. Ingrey lent that hand a palpable force, yes, but so did the rest of Hetwar’s household troops; lent, perhaps, a more unique and subtly useful air of uncanny threat, but in the sealmaster’s web of authority he was surely a minor strand. Ingrey had never distributed favors, and so now had none to call in. If he had any chances at all to rescue or redeem Ijada, they would end when the cortege entered the city gates.

  His thoughts were growing worse, he was uncomfortably aware, but not wider. At length, he dozed. It wasn’t a good doze, but it was better than the writhing that went before.

  HE WOKE AS THE AUTUMN SUN WAS GOING DOWN, AND TOOK himself again to Ijada’s inn to invite her to evening prayer.

  She cocked an eyebrow at him, and murmured, “You are grown pious, of a sudden.” But at his tight-lipped look of anguish, she relented and accompanied him to the temple once more.

  When they were on their knees before the Brother’s altar—both the Mother’s and the Daughter’s chambers were full of Red Dike supplicants again—he began under his breath, “Listen. I must decide tonight whether we ride or bide tomorrow. You cannot just drift into disaster with no plan, no attempt even to throw some rope to shore. Else it will become the rope that hangs you, and it drives me half-mad to picture you dangling as your leopard did. I should think you’d both have had enough of hanging.”

  “Ingrey, think,” she returned in as low a voice. “Even assuming I could escape unseen, where would I go? My mother’s kin could not take me in or hide me. My poor stepfather—he hasn’t the strength to fight such high foes, and besides, his would be among the first places they’d look for such a fugitive. A woman, a stranger, alone—I would be utterly conspicuous, and a target for the vile.” She had taken thought, too, it appeared.

  He drew a breath. “How if I came with you?”

  A long silence; he glanced aside to see her face gone still, staring straight ahead, wide-eyed. “You would do that? Desert your company and your duty?”

  He set his teeth. “Perhaps.”

  “Then where would we go? Your kin could not take us in either, I think.”

  “I cannot imagine going back to Birchgrove for any reason. No. We would have to get out of the Weald altogether, cross the borders. To the Alvian League, perhaps—slip into the Cantons over the northern mountains. Or to Darthaca. I can speak and write Darthacan, at least.”

  “I cannot. I would be your mute…what? Burden, servant, pet, paramour?”

  Ingrey reddened. “We could pretend you were my sister. I could swear to regard you with that respect. I wouldn’t touch you.”

  “How very enticing.” Her lips set in a flat line.

  He paused, feeling like a man crossing river ice in winter and hearing a first faint cracking sound coming from under his feet. What did she mean me to make of that remark? “Ibran was your father’s tongue, presumably. Do you speak it?”

  “A little. Do you?”

  “A little. We could make for the Peninsula, then. Chalion or Ibra or Brajar. You would not then be so mute.” There was work for swordsmen there, too, Ingrey had heard, in the interminable border wars with the heretical Quadrene coastal princedoms—and few questions asked of foreign volunteers, so long as they signed the Five.

  She vented a long sigh. “I’ve been thinking, this afternoon, about what Hallana said.”

  “Which? She talked a great deal. Clouds of chatter.”

  “Look to her silences, then.”

  That sounded so like one of Lord Hetwar’s favorite aphorisms that Ingrey jerked. “Did she have any?”

  “She said she sought me out—at a moment of great inconvenience, perhaps peril, for herself, mind you—for two reasons. Because she’d heard the news—and for the dreams, of course. Only Hallana could make that second reason sound like an afterthought. That I have had strange and dark dreams, nightmares almost as disturbing as my waking life, I take to be the result of fear, weariness, and…and Boleso’s gift.” She moistened her lips. “But why should Hallana dream of me or my troubles? She is a Temple woman to the bone, and no renegade, for all that she clears her own path. Did she speak to you of her dreams?”

  “No. But I didn’t think to ask.”

  “She asked many questions, learned I-know-not-what from watching us, but she gave me no direction, one way or another. That, too, is a silence. All she gave me, in the end, was the letter.” She touched her left breast, fingering the fine-embroidered fabric of her riding jacket. Ingrey fancied he heard a faint rustle of paper beneath the cloth, from some inner pocket. “She seemed to expect me to deliver it. As the only thing resembling guidance that she gave me, I am loath to give it up for some chancy flight into exile with…with a man I’d not met till four days ago.” She was silent a moment. “Especially not as your little sister, five gods spare me!”

  He did not understand her of
fense, but he certainly could not mistake her refusal. He said heavily, “We’ll continue on toward Easthome tomorrow, then, with Boleso’s coffin.” Which would give him perhaps three more days to come up with some better argument or plan, less the time he spent sleeping. If any.

  He escorted her back through the lowering twilight to her inn, and into the hands of her warden once more. The countrywoman’s gaze upon him was now outright suspicious, though she made no comment at all. Starting back down the street, Ingrey began to wonder if he should be attending to Ijada’s silences. There were certainly enough of them.

  As he neared his inn, a dark shape thrust itself off the wall where it had been leaning. Ingrey’s hand strayed to his sword hilt, but relaxed again as the figure moved into the yellow light of the lantern above the door, and he recognized Gesca. The lieutenant gave him a nod.

  “Walk with me, Ingrey. I would have a word in private.”

  Ingrey’s brows twitched up, but he fell in willingly enough. They matched steps on the cobblestones, took a turn about the next square up the street near the city gates, and settled on a wooden bench by the covered well in the square’s center. A servant turned away and stumped off past them with a pair of dripping buckets hung from a yoke over his shoulders. Beyond, in the street, a couple hurried home, the woman holding a lantern, the man with a boy atop his shoulder, who curled his small hands in the man’s hair; the man laughed protest at the grip. The man’s eyes shifted to assay the two loitering swordsmen, took reassurance from their repose, and returned to his woman. Their footsteps faded.

  Silence fell, and lengthened. Gesca’s fingers drummed uneasily on his thigh. “Is there a problem in the troop?” Ingrey prompted at last. “Or with Boleso’s men?”

  “Huh.” Gesca sat up and straightened his shoulders. “Maybe you’ll tell me.” He hesitated again, sucked on his lower lip, then said abruptly, “Are you falling in love with that accursed girl, Ingrey?”

  Ingrey stiffened. “Why should you think that?”

  Sarcasm edged Gesca’s voice. “Well, let me see. What could possibly have suggested this thing? Could it be the way you speak to her apart at every chance? Or could it be the way you plunged like a madman into a raging torrent to save her? Could it have been how you were surprised, half-dressed, trying to sneak into her bedchamber at midnight? The pale and starveling look on your face, when you think no one is watching you, when you look at her? The way the lovesick circles darken daily under your eyes? I admit, only Ingrey kin Wolfcliff would ignite with lust for a woman who bludgeons her lovers to death, but for you, that’s not a deterrent, it’s a lure!” Gesca snorted.

  “You have,” said Ingrey coldly, “entirely the wrong impression of the matter.” Dismay verging on horror gripped him at the blatant plausibility of Gesca’s interpretation, succeeded by the arrested thought that it might not be so bad a public cloak for the stranger and more deadly reality of the geas, at that. Followed in turn by an even more frightening suspicion that Gesca might not be misled at all…No. No. “Anyway, it was only one lover.”

  “What?”

  “That she bludgeoned.” He added after a moment, “I admit, whatever her game bag lacks in numbers, it makes up in weight.” And after another moment, “In any case, she isn’t attracted to me, so your fears are moot.”

  “Not true. She thinks you a very comely man, though glum.”

  “How do you know that?” Ingrey rapidly reviewed the past days—when had Gesca ever spoken with the prisoner?

  “She discussed you with her warden, or perhaps it was the other way around. Quite frank and outspoken, that one, when you get her going. The Mother’s work does that to some women.”

  “The warden doesn’t speak so to me.”

  “That’s because you terrify her. I don’t. At least by contrast. Very useful, from my point of view. But have you ever overheard two women discussing men? Men are crude liars, comparing their drabs, but women—I’d rather have a Mother’s anatomist dissect me alive than to listen to the things the ladies say about us when they think they are alone.” Gesca shuddered.

  Ingrey managed not to blurt, What else did Ijada say of me? His prisoner, it occurred to him, would have had to fill the hours with something, when locked up with that countrywoman; and inconsequential chatter might conceal dire secrets better than silence itself. So. He ventured a blander, “Is there anything else I should know?”

  “Oh, aye”—Gesca let his voice lilt upward into a feminine falsetto—“the lady thinks your smile is devastating.”

  Gesca’s smile, Ingrey thought, was an altogether evil smirk. Evidently, however, the shadows were not deep enough yet to hide Ingrey’s return glare, or possibly it burned through the darkness with its own heat, for Gesca sobered, raising a warding hand.

  “Ingrey, look.” Gesca’s voice grew serious. “I don’t want to see you do something stupid. You have a future in Hetwar’s house, far beyond mine, and it’s not just your kinship that gives you the leg up. For me, maybe I’ll make guard captain someday. You’re a lettered man in two tongues, Hetwar talks to you as an equal—not just in blood, but in wits—and you give him back as good as you get. Listening to the two of you makes my head spin round, sometimes. I don’t even want to walk the paths you seem destined to tread. Heights make me dizzy, and I like my head where it is. But most of all…I don’t ever want to be the officer who’s sent to arrest you.”

  Ingrey unset his teeth. “Fair enough.”

  “Right.”

  “We ride again tomorrow.”

  “Good.”

  “If I can get my boots on.”

  “I’ll come help you.”

  And I will dismiss that prying, spying, gossiping warden back to Reedmere, and replace her with another. Or with none. Feminine chatter was annoying enough, but what if her gossip dared extend to the curious events she had witnessed swirling around Hallana’s visits?

  What if it already has?

  They both rose and started back down the ill-lit street. Ingrey paused at the door of his inn; Gesca, with a half salute of farewell, walked onward. Ingrey studied his back.

  So. Gesca watches me. But why? Idle—or carnal—curiosity? Self-interest, as he claimed? Worried comradeship? Strange gossip? It occurred to Ingrey that for all Gesca’s modest claims to be an unlettered man, he was perfectly capable of penning a brief report. The sentences might be simple, the word choices infelicitous, the spelling erratic, but he could get his observations down in a logical enough order for all practical purposes.

  And if Hetwar had both men’s letters before him, which would be very like Hetwar…Ingrey’s silences would shout.

  Ingrey swallowed a curse and went indoors.

  DURING THE NEXT DAY’S RIDE, THE AUTUMN COUNTRYSIDE PASSED in a blur of inattention for Ingrey. But he was all too keenly aware of Ijada, riding alongside the wagon near her new warden, a daunted young dedicat from the Daughter’s Order in Red Dike, plucked by the local divine from her teaching duties for this unaccustomed task.

  Once, when they first mounted up, Ijada smiled at him. Ingrey almost smiled back, till Gesca’s mockery echoed in his mind, freezing his face in an uncomfortable distorted grimace that made her eyes widen, then slide away. He spurred ahead before his mouth muscles went into spasms.

  He wondered what madness had seized his tongue last night in the temple. Of course Ijada must refuse to fly, even from the gallows, with a man who had tried to kill her, what, three times? Five? What sort of choice was that to lay before the girl? Think, man. Might he offer her another escort? Where could one be found, that he could trust? A vision of kidnapping her and riding off with her across his saddlebow led to even less useful imaginings. He knew the speed and ferocity his wolf could lend to him; what might her leopard do for her, woman though she most undoubtedly was? She had already slain Boleso, a bigger man than Ingrey, though admittedly, she had taken the prince by surprise. She’d even surprised herself, or so Ingrey read her. If she chose to resist him—if he the
n…and then she…The curiously absorbing reverie was shattered by his memory of Gesca’s other jibe—For you, it’s a lure!—and his scowl deepened.

  And I am most certainly not falling in love with her, either, burn your eyes, Gesca.

  Nor in lust.

  Much.

  Nothing that he could not fully control, anyway.

  He spent the rest of the day not smiling at her, nor looking at her, nor riding near her, nor speaking to her, nor betraying any awareness of her existence in any way whatsoever. The effect seemed contagious; Gesca trotted near him to make some remark, took one look at his face, swallowed his words, and prudently retreated to the opposite end of the column. No one else approached him either, and Boleso’s retainers shrank from his glower. At his few commands, men hastened to obey.

  Their start had been late and their progress slow, seldom pushing the horses faster than a walk. As a result they arrived that afternoon at a smaller town than any prior stop, though still more miles nearer Easthome than Ingrey would have liked. Ingrey ruthlessly sent Boleso’s men to bed down with their late master in Middletown’s rustic temple, and seized the sole inn for himself, his prisoner and her duenna, and Hetwar’s troop. He stalked the town’s perimeter in the twilight, all too brief a task. There could be no excursion this night to that crowded temple for undervoiced argument. Tomorrow night, he must select a larger town for their halt, Ingrey determined. And the next night…there weren’t enough next nights.

  Since Gesca chose a bedroll in the taproom rather than to share Ingrey’s chamber, Ingrey took his still-recovering hurts to bed early, and alone.