The Hallowed Hunt (Curse of Chalion) Read online

  Ingrey had no intention of making idle conversation with his charge, so merely favored her with a polite nod and pushed on to the head of the column. He rode in silence for a time. The dripping of water from high branches in the steep woods and the gurgling of freshets, running melodiously beneath the road through hollowedlog culverts, sounded loud in his ears despite the creaking of gear, groaning of the wagon wheels, and plodding of hooves behind him. They rounded a last dropping curve, the road leveled, and they emerged from beneath the leafy canopy into an unexpected well of light.

  The sun had broken through a gap in the ridges to the east, turning the moist air to floating gold and the far slopes to a fiery green. Only one trickle of smoke, probably from a party of charcoal burners, marked any human occupation in the dense carpet of woods rising beyond the hamlet and its fields. The sight did not lift Ingrey’s spirits. He frowned down at the mud of the road instead, then reined his horse aside to check that the tail of the cortege cleared the trees without incident. He turned back to find himself riding beside Lady Ijada.

  She was staring around with muted pleasure in her eyes, which appeared bright hazel-gold in this new light. “How the hills glow! I love these forests between the bitter heights and the tilled lands.”

  “It’s difficult and dangerous country,” said Ingrey, “but the roads will improve once we descend from the wastes.”

  She tilted her head at his sour expression. “This place does not please you? My dower lands are a like waste, then, west of here in the marches where the mountains dwindle.” She hesitated. “My stepfather is of your mind about such silent tracts—but then he is a town-man bred, a master of works for the Temple in Badger-bridge, and likes trees best in the form of rafters and gates and trestles. He says it were better I made my face my dower than those haunted woods.” She grimaced abruptly, the light fading in her eyes. “He was so pleased for me when one of my Badgerbank aunts found me the place in the Horserivers’ high household. And now this.”

  “Did he imagine you would snare a husband, under the princess’s eye?”

  “Something like that. It was to be my great chance.” She shrugged. “I’ve since learned that high lords get to be such by being more concerned, not less, with dowers than other men. I should have anticipated…” Her mouth firmed. “I might have anticipated some seducer, arrogant in his rank. It was the heretical sorcery and howling madness that took me by surprise.”

  For the first time, Ingrey wondered if the husband whose eye Ijada had snared might have been Earl Horseriver. Four years he had been married to the hallow king’s daughter, and no children yet; was there anything more to the delay than ill luck? Reason indeed for the princess to barter her handmaiden out of her household at the first opportunity—and if jealous enough of her lovely rival, to a fate Fara must have known would not be pleasant…? Had the princess known of her brother’s perilous plans? Aside from the rape, you mean?

  Which beginning? Lady Ijada had asked, yesterday. As though there were a dozen to choose among.

  “What did you think of Earl Horseriver?” Ingrey inquired, in a neutral voice. The earl was landed, of an ancient kin, but his most arresting power at present was doubtless his ordainer’s vote, one of the thirteen needed to confirm a new hallow king. Yet such political concerns seemed quite over this young woman’s head, however level it might be.

  Now the lips pursed in a thoughtful frown. But not in dismay, Ingrey noted, nor in any flush of embarrassment. “I’m not sure. He’s a strange…man. I almost said young man, but really, he scarcely seems young. I suppose it’s partly the untimely gray in his hair. He’s very sharp of wit, uncomfortably so at times. And moody. Sometimes he goes about for days in silence, as if lost in his own thoughts, and no one dares speak to him, not even the princess. At first I thought it was because of his little, you know, deformities, the spine and the oddly shaped face, but truly, he seems not to care about his body at all. It certainly doesn’t impede him.” She glanced at Ingrey with belated wariness. “Do you know him well?”

  “Not since we are grown,” said Ingrey. “I have a near tie to him by blood through his late mother. I met him a few times when we were both children.” Ingrey remembered the young Lord Wencel kin Horseriver as an undersized, clumsy boy, seeming slow of wit, with a rather wet mouth. Perhaps shyness had rendered Wencel tongue-tied; but the boy-Ingrey had lacked sympathy for a smaller cousin who did not keep up, and had made no effort to include him. Fortunately, in retrospect, Ingrey had made no effort to torment him, either. “His father and mine died within a few months of each other.”

  Though the aged Earl Horseriver had died quietly and decently, of an ordinary stroke. Not in his prime, baying and foaming, his feverish screams echoing through the castle corridors as though rising from some pit of agony beneath the earth…Ingrey bit back the memory, hard.

  Her eyes flicked toward him. “What was your father like?”

  “He was castlemaster of Birchgrove, under the lordship of old Earl Kasgut kin Wolfcliff.” And I am not. Would her rather too-quick wits notice, or would she merely assume him a younger son? “Birchgrove commands the valley of the Birchbeck, where it runs into the Lure.” Which did not, precisely, answer the question she’d asked. How had they drifted onto this dire subject? Her tone, he realized, had been as tensely neutral as his leading question about Horseriver.

  “So Rider Ulkra told me.” She drew a long breath, staring ahead between her horse’s ears. “He also said, it was rumored that your father died from the bite of a rabid wolf, that he’d tried to steal the spirit from, and that he gave you a wolf spirit, too, but it turned out to be crippled, and only made you very sick. And your life and wits were despaired of, which is why your uncle succeeded to Birchgrove and not you, but later your family sent you on pilgrimage, and you grew better. I wondered if all this was true, and why your father committed so reckless an act.” Only when she had spat out all this hurried chain of tattle did she turn her face to his, her eyes anxious and searching.

  Ingrey’s horse snorted and tossed its head at his jerk on the reins. Ingrey loosened his fist, and, a moment later, unclenched his teeth. He finally managed to growl, “Ulkra gossips. It is a fault.”

  “He is afraid of you.”

  “Not enough, it seems.” He yanked his horse away and pretended to inspect the cortege, returning up the other side to the head of the column. Alone. She looked after him as he passed, her mouth opening as if to speak, but he ignored her.

  Forcing the cortege up the muddy road out of the valley diverted his mind enough to regain his calm, or at least replace his fuming with other irritations. On a steep incline, with the blowing team’s hooves slipping, the wagon began to slide sideways toward a precipitous edge; the teamster’s wife screeched alarm. Ingrey flung himself off his horse and led the quicker-witted among the guards to brace themselves and strain against the wagon’s side and rear, pushing it away from the dizzying drop and up through the mire.

  It cost him a strained shoulder and a good deal of filth on his riding leathers, and he was almost tempted to let the load go into the ravine. He imagined it falling, breaking up, the coffin bouncing on the boulders and splitting open and Boleso’s nude corpse plunging to its just doom in a shower of salt. But the wagon must needs pull the struggling loyal horses after it, and they did not deserve the prince’s fate. And, given that he stood between the wagon and the drop, Ingrey himself would have been swept over, crushed underneath the first impact. They’d have had to use his good riding leathers as a bag for his remains, after that. The gruesome thought amused him enough that he remounted his horse afterward in a restored, if winded, humor.

  They paused at noon at a wide clearing just off the road, home to an ancient spring. His men unpacked the bread and cold meats provided by the castle cook, but Ingrey, calculating distances and hours of light, was more concerned for the horses. The team was mud-crusted and sweaty, so he set Boleso’s surly retinue to assisting the teamster in unharnessing an
d rubbing them down before they were fed. The worst of the gradients were behind them now; with a suitable rest, he judged the beasts would last till nightfall, by which time he hoped to reach the Temple town of Reedmere, commandeer some more fitting conveyance, and send the rustic rig home.

  More princely conveyance, Ingrey revised his thought. A former manure wagon seemed to him all too fitting. Closer to Easthome, he decided, he would send a rider ahead to guide a relief cortege to him, and hand off Boleso’s body to more gaudy and noble ceremony, provided by those who cared for the prince. Or at least, cared for Boleso’s rank and the show they made to each other. Maybe he’d send the rider tonight.

  He washed his hands in the spring’s outlet and accepted a slab of venison wrapped in bread from his lieutenant, Gesca. Gnawing, he looked around for his prisoner and her attendant. The teamster’s wife was busy about the food baskets by the unhitched wagon. Lady Ijada was walking about the clearing—in that costume, she might whisk into the woods and disappear among the tall tree boles in a moment. Instead, she pried up a stone from the crumbled foundation above the spring and picked her way over to where Ingrey rested on a big fallen log.

  “Look,” she said, holding out the glittery gray block.

  Ingrey looked. On one side of the stone a spiral pattern was incised into the weathered surface.

  “It’s the same as one of the symbols Boleso had drawn on his body. In red madder, centered on his navel. Did you see it there?”

  “No,” Ingrey admitted. “His body had been washed off already.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking a little taken aback. “Well, it was.”

  “I do not doubt you.” Though others will be free to. Had she realized this yet?

  She stared around the clearing. “Do you think this place was a forest shrine, once?”

  “Very possibly.” He followed her glance, studying the stumps and the sizes of the trees. Whatever holy or unholy purposes the original possessors had held, the latest ax work had been done by humble itinerant woodcutters, by the evidence. “The spring suggests it. This place has been cleared, abandoned, and recleared more than once, if so.” Following, perhaps, the ebb and flow of the Darthacan Quintarian war against the forest heresies that had so disrupted the kin lands, four centuries ago when Audar the Great had first conquered the Weald.

  “I wonder what the old ceremonies were really like,” she mused. “The divines scorn the animal sacrifice, but really…When I was a child at my father’s Temple fort, I went a few times with…with a friend to the marsh people’s autumn rites. The fen folk aren’t of the same race or language as the Old Wealdings, but I could almost have imagined myself going back to those days. It was more like a grand party and outdoor roast than anything. I mean, they made some songs and rituals over the creatures before they slaughtered them, but what’s the difference if we pray over our meat after it’s cooked instead of before?” She added with an air of fairness, “Or so my friend said. The fort’s divine disagreed, but then, the two of them disagreed a lot. I think my friend enjoyed baiting him.”

  It hadn’t been the menu that the Quintarian divines had objected to, for it wasn’t just meat that the Old Weald kin had taken from their hallowed beasts. The tribal sorcerers had defiled the souls of their battle lords with the ghosts of animals, making their leaders’ spirits fierce—but also unfit to offer, at the ends of their lives, to the gods. Ingrey doubted any festival this young woman would have been permitted to see involved any consumption beyond meat, though. “It is said the fen men paint themselves with blood.”

  “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “that’s true. Or at any rate, everyone ran about splashing each other and screaming with laughter. It was all very messy and silly, and rather smelly, but it was hard to see any evil in it. Of course, this tribe didn’t sacrifice people.” She looked around the clearing as if imagining the ghostly image of some such evil slaying here.

  “Indeed,” said Ingrey dryly. “That was the sticking point, between the Darthacan Quintarians and the Old Wealdings.” For all that both sides had worshipped the same five gods. “So when Audar the so-called Great slaughtered four thousand Wealding prisoners of war at Bloodfield, it’s said he didn’t pray at all. That made it a proper Quintarian act, I suppose, and not heresy. Some other crime, perhaps, but not human sacrifice. One of those theological fine points.”

  That massacre of a generation of young spirit warriors had broken the back of the Wealding resistance to their eastern invaders, in any case. For the next hundred and fifty years, the Weald’s lands, ceremonies, and people had been forcibly rearranged into Darthacan patterns, until Audar’s vast empire broke apart in the bloody squabbles of his much less great descendants. Orthodox Quintarianism survived the empire that had fostered it, however. The suppressed animal practices and wisdom songs of the forest tribes had been lost and all but forgotten in the renewed Weald, except for rural superstitions, children’s rhymes, and the odd ghost tale.

  Or…not quite forgotten, not by everyone. Father, what were you thinking? Why did you burden me with this bestial blasphemy? What were you trying to do? The old, painful, unanswered question…Ingrey thrust it from his mind.

  “I suppose we are all New Wealdings, now,” mused Ijada. She touched her Darthacan-dark hair, and nodded to Ingrey’s own. “Almost every Wealding kin that survived has Darthacan forebears, too. Mongrels, to a man. Or to a lord, anyway. So we inherit Audar’s sins and the tribes’. For all I know my Chalionese father had some Darthacan blood. The nobles there are a very mixed lot, really, he always said, for all that they carry on about their pedigrees.”

  Ingrey bit, chewed, did not answer.

  “When your father gave you your wolf,” she began, “how—”

  “You should go eat,” he interrupted her, around a mouthful of cold roast. “It’s going to be a long ride yet.” He rose and strode away from her, toward the wagon and its baskets. He did not want more food, but he did not want more of her chatter, either. He selected a not-too-wormy apple and nibbled it slowly while walking about. He stayed on the other side of the clearing from her, during the remainder of their rest.

  AS THE CORTEGE RUMBLED ON THROUGH THE AFTERNOON, THE rugged angles of the hills grew gentler and hamlets more frequent, their fields more extensive. The sun was slanting toward the treetops when they came to an unanticipated check. A rocky ford, hock deep on the ride in, had risen with the rains and was now in full and muddy flood.

  Ingrey halted his horse and looked over the problem. Boleso’s wagon had not been made watertight with skins or tar, so the chance of its floating away at an awkward angle and yanking the horses off their feet was slight. The chance of its shipping water and bogging down, however, was good. He set mounted men at the wagon’s four corners with ropes to help warp it through the hazard, and waved the yeoman onward with what speed he could muster from his tired team. The water came up past the horses’ bellies, pushing the wagon off its wheels, but the outriders held it on course, and the whole assemblage struggled safely up the far bank. Only then did Ingrey motion Lady Ijada ahead of him into the water.

  His gaze lifted to mark the wagon’s progress, then jerked back as the chestnut horse missed its footing, wallowed, and went down over its head. Lady Ijada was swept off into the torrent too quickly to cry out. Ingrey swore, spurring his horse forward into the flood. His head swiveled frantically, looking for dark hair, a flash of brown fabric in the turbid foam—her clothing would surely hold water, skirts dragging her down—there!

  The cold water tugged at his knees as he urged his horse downstream. The dark head bobbed up by a trio of smooth rocks that stuck out of the spate boiling around them. An arm reached, caught…

  “Hang on!” yelled Ingrey. “I’m coming to get you—!”

  Two arms. Lady Ijada heaved herself upward, belly over the rock, wriggled and scrambled; by the time Ingrey brought his snorting horse close, she was standing upright, dripping and gasping. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her hors
e make it to the bank farther downstream, where it surged up, stumbled through the mud, and bolted into the woods. Ingrey spared it an unvoiced curse and waved one of his men after it.

  He did not look to see if he was obeyed, for now he was within arm’s reach of Lady Ijada. He leaned toward her, she leaned toward him…

  A dark red fog seemed to come up over his brain, clouding his vision. Gripping her arms, he toppled into the stream, pulling her from her perch. Down, if he held her down…water filled his mouth. He spat, gasped, and went under again. He was blinded and tumbling. Some distant part of his mind, far, far off, was screaming at him: What are you doing, you fool! He must hold her down—

  The force of the water clubbed his head into something hard, and starry green sparks overflowed the red fog. All thought fled.

  SENSATION RETURNED IN PANICKED CHOKING. COLD AIR SLAPPED his face, somehow held up out of the water, and he drew enough breath to cough out both air and water. His limbs flailed, feeling desperately weak and heavy, as though trapped in oil.

  “Stop fighting me!” Lady Ijada’s voice snapped in his ear. Something circling his neck tightened; he realized after a dizzy moment that it must be her arm. He must save her, drown her, save her—

  She can swim. The belated realization slowed his flailing, if only in shock. Well, he could swim, too, after a fashion. He’d stayed alive through a shipwreck, once, admittedly mostly by hanging on to things that floated. The only thing floating here seemed to be Lady Ijada. Surely the weight of his blades and boots must drag them both down—his feet struck something. The current spat them into a back eddy, the river bottom flattened out, then she was dragging him up onto some welcome, blessed shore.