The Hallowed Hunt (Curse of Chalion) Read online

  Ingrey tried to stand up, failed, and tried again. He stood a moment with his hands on his knees, dizzy and faint. He did not think he had lost enough blood this night to kill him, but the amount strewn about on the ground and down his leathers was impressive nonetheless. It always looks like more when it’s spread around like that. Finally, he straightened his back and looked at the last revenant, and at Ijada, still holding up the wolf’s head standard. High upon its steel point, a shadow-heart still pulsed.

  He bowed to the marshal-warrior. “I would ask one gift of you in return, my lord bannerman. One moment more of your time.”

  The marshal-warrior opened a hand in curious permission. All my time now is your gift, sire, his eyes seemed to say.

  Ingrey stepped forward and closed his hand around Ijada’s shoulder; she smiled wearily at him, her face pale and dirt-streaked and luminous. Ingrey looked over the five of the sacred band. Yes…“Learned Oswin, Learned Hallana, would you come here a moment?”

  They glanced at each other and trod near. “Yes, Ingrey?” said Hallana.

  “Would you each take one end of this, and hold it level. Not too high.”

  A little apprehensively, they grasped the pole, as if uncertain at first if it would present a material grip to them, and stood apart. The Wolfcliff banner unfolded and hung down as though the great Wolf bowed its head to the ground.

  Ingrey turned to Ijada. “Take my hand.”

  She touched his right hand uncertainly, careful of the damp red mess, but he squeezed her fingers in return, and then she gripped more tightly. He turned them both to face the horizontal staff.

  “Jump over with me,” he said, “if we shall be allies in such nights as this and lovers in all nights hereafter.”

  “Ingrey…” She peered doubtfully at him, sideways through escaped strands of hanging hair. “Are you asking me to marry you?”

  More or less, he started to say, and thought the better of it. It was only more. “Yes. You should marry a king. This is your great chance.” He looked around; Oswin’s sober face had lightened in comprehension, and Hallana’s had broken into a broad grin. “The company of witnesses could not be improved: three Temple divines of good character, two princes—one a poet who will doubtless immortalize this moment before we’ve made it halfway back to Easthome—”

  Jokol, who had loomed closer to see and hear, nodded delightedly. “Ah, Ingorry, good work! Yes, jump, jump, Ijada! My beautiful Breiga would like this one, yes!”

  “A princess…” Ingrey cast a half bow somewhat uncertainly at Fara, now sitting up somberly on the edge of the mound; she returned him a grave but not disapproving jerk of her chin. “And one other.” Ingrey nodded to the marshal-warrior; Ingrey had not known ghosts could be bemused, but this one’s surprised smile blessed him in advance for this unexpected last use of his long-defended emblem. “You can have other ceremonies later, if you like,” Ingrey added to Ijada. “With better clothes or whatever. As many as you want. As long as they’re with me,” he added prudently.

  “One or two is the usual limit,” Oswin rumbled from his end of the pole, starting to smile.

  Ingrey opened his mouth to persuade further, but Ijada extended two fingers and touched his lips to stillness. He wobbled a little, as his knees nearly gave way, and she glanced aside at him thoughtfully. She looked each way at Oswin and Hallana, reached out, and pressed the pole down; the two divines obediently bent to lower the barrier to something their somewhat pallid hallow king was sure to be able to clear.

  Looking at each other, Ingrey and Ijada held hands and jumped.

  Ingrey stumbled a little on the landing, as his head was swimming, but Ijada steadied him. They exchanged one kiss, which Ingrey began to make swift and promissory; Ijada captured his face between her hands and made it more thorough. Yes, Ingrey thought, pausing to feel the softness, the warmth, the faint hint of her teeth. This is the only living Now.

  They parted, trading pensive smiles, and Ingrey retrieved the standard. The pulsing heart had vanished from the spearpoint. But which of us received back which half? He wasn’t sure he knew.

  The marshal-warrior knelt on one knee, undid his graying braids from his gold belt, and held his head up before him. Ingrey knelt, too, and shook down one last generous splash of blood to smear across the furrowed brow. The old spirit stallion he released was very worn, but Ingrey thought it must have been a fine fast beast in its time, for this night it flew.

  The marshal-warrior rose whole: he rolled his shoulders as if in relief and nodded solemnly at Ingrey. He then turned and reached for Learned Oswin’s hand, and, not looking back again, was gone.

  The real darkness flowed in across Ingrey’s eyes for the first time that night; only then did he become truly aware that he had been seeing, with unnatural clarity, by ghost-light for most of the hours past. Jokol grunted and hurried to stir up a small fire, unnoticed by Ingrey, that he had evidently built to warm Fara sometime during the night while waiting for devotees of his Lady to present themselves. The orange light licked up to gild the tired faces that now huddled around it.

  Biast nodded cautiously to the Wolfcliff royal standard which Ingrey still clutched, draped upon it for support. “What are you going to do with that?”

  What, indeed? He straightened up and stared at it, discomfited. It felt as solid under his hand as the Horseriver staff Fara had broken, but it had not come from the outer world, and Ingrey doubted he could carry it back there, beyond the borders of the Wounded Woods. He was equally doubtful that it would survive the dawn, presaged by a faint gray tinge in the mists that drifted through the gnarled trees. Ingrey’s hallow kingship was more bounded by space and time and need than Biast perhaps realized, or the prince-marshal would not look so uneasily at him, Ingrey thought.

  He was disinclined to hand his standard humbly to Biast, politically prudent as that might seem. It was Wolfcliff not Stagthorne, it was a thing of the night not the day, and anyway, anyway…Let him earn his own.

  “In the Old Weald,” said Ingrey, “the royal banner-carrier guarded the standard from the death of the old king to the investment of the new.” And now I know why. “Then it was broken, and the pieces burned on the pyre of the dead king, if events made such ceremony possible.” And if not, he began to suspect, someone had made it up as best he could out of inspiration, urgency, and whatever came to hand. He looked around a little vaguely. “Ijada, we must cleanse this ground as well, before we leave this place. With fire, I think. And we must go soon.”

  “Before the sun rises?” she asked.

  “That feels right.”

  “You should know.”

  “I do.”

  She followed his gaze around. “My stepfather’s forester said these trees were diseased. He wanted to fire the woods then, but I wouldn’t let him.”

  “Will you allow me?”

  “It is your realm.”

  “Only till dawn. Tomorrow it is yours again.” He glanced aside at Biast, to see if he took the hint.

  “Perhaps it is as well,” sighed Ijada. “Perhaps it is necessary. Perhaps it is…time. What, um,” she moistened her lips, “what of Wencel’s body?”

  Learned Lewko said uneasily, “I don’t think we can carry it out with us now. Our beasts were used hard yesterday, and will have burden enough getting us back to the main roads. Someone will have to be sent back for it. Should we build a little cairn, to protect it from the wild beasts and birds till then?”

  “The last Horseriver king never had his warrior’s pyre,” Ingrey said. “No one here did, except for a few trapped in burning huts that night, I suppose. I don’t know if burying them all in pits was a theological act of Audar’s, or part of his magic and curse, or just military efficiency. The more I learn of Bloodfield, the more I think no one really knew, even at the time. It is late; it is the last hour. We will fire the woods.” For Wencel. For all of them.

  Ijada moistened a cautious finger and held it in the air. “The wind’s a little in
the east, such as it is. It should do even if the rain doesn’t come on.”

  Ingrey nodded. “Biast, gentlemen, can you help Fara get out? Can someone collect the horses?”

  “I can do that!” said Hallana brightly, and took everyone but Oswin aback by stepping up onto the mound, turning to the four quarters, and calling loudly and rather maternally through her cupped hands, “Horses! Horses!”

  Oswin looked a trifle pained, but appeared not in the least surprised when after a few minutes a crashing and crunching through the undergrowth announced the arrival of their several abandoned mounts, trailing reins and snorting anxiously. Jokol and Lewko, at Ingrey’s nod, had quietly collected more dry deadfall from the margins of the clearing and discreetly piled it around Wencel’s body. Lewko took charge of Wencel’s purse, rings, and other items of interest to his future heirs at law. Ijada tucked the broken pieces of the Horseriver banner atop the pile. Hallana helped the widowed princess mount her horse. The company straggled into the foggy shadows in the direction of the marsh. Fara never looked back.

  Biast did, wheeling his horse about to watch as Ingrey poked up the fire with a stick. “Will you two be all right?”

  “Yes,” said Ingrey. “Make for the gate of thorns. We will catch you up.”

  Gravely, Ijada took the standard, backed a few paces, and held the black-and-red banner in the fire till it caught alight. She handed the staff to Ingrey. Ingrey gripped it tightly in both hands, closed his eyes, and heaved it skyward. He opened his eyes again, grabbed Ijada’s hand, and prepared to dodge whatever fell back. If anything.

  Instead, the staff spun up and burst into a hundred burning shards, which rained down all around.

  “Oh,” said Ijada in a tone of surprise. “I thought we would have to walk through the woods with torches for a while, finding dry brush piles…”

  “I think not,” said Ingrey, and began to tow her toward Biast, who was staring back wide-eyed in the growing yellow light. “But it’s time to go. Yes, definitely.” Somewhere in the woods behind them, something very, very dry went up with a roar and a fountain of sparks. “Briskly, even.”

  Biast’s horse jittered despite its weariness, but the prince-marshal kept pace with them as they wound through the misshapen trees back toward the marsh. He eyed Ingrey and Ijada as if trying to decide which of them to pull up behind him on his horse and gallop for it, if the wind shifted. Happily, in Ingrey’s view, because he did not have the energy for another argument tonight, the faint breeze didn’t shift, and the ring of fire crept out from its center at no more than a walking pace. They reached the edge of the woods if not well in advance of the flames’ steady destruction, sufficiently so.

  Ijada supported Ingrey as far as the gate of thorns. Then Biast, watching him stumble, climbed down off his horse and boosted Ingrey aboard instead, and led the beast. They needed no other lantern than the distant burning to climb the zigzag path up the wall of the valley. They reached the open promontory to find that all the others had gathered at a meager campsite prepared by Symark, Ottovin, Bernan, and Hergi.

  Lewko helped Ingrey down from Biast’s horse. Ingrey was shivering badly now, in the dawn cold. Seeing Lewko draw Ingrey’s arm over his shoulders to escort him to the campfire, Hallana abandoned Fara, who was being hovered over by Hergi as well, and hurried to them. Ingrey found her low mutter of Dratsab! more alarming than his own weakness.

  She frowned medically. “Get him hot drinks and hot food, swiftly,” she ordered Bernan and Oswin. “And whatever blankets and cloaks we have.”

  Ingrey sank down on a saddle pad, because standing was no longer quite feasible.

  “Has he spent too much blood?” Ijada asked her in worry.

  Hallana replied, a little too indirectly, “He’ll be all right if we can get him warmed up and fed.”

  Hergi appeared with her leather case, and Ingrey endured yet another washing and rebandaging of his crusted right hand, though the wound was closed—again—and the bruises green and fading. Others bustled about with what seemed to him needless excitement, scavenging food and blankets and building up the fire. Ingrey was tired, breathless, and dizzy, and his chilled shaking threatened to spill the odd-tasting herb tea from his cup before he could get it to his numb lips, but Ijada plied him repeatedly with refills and what bits of fare the camp could supply. Better still, she huddled under his blankets with him to share the warmth of her own body, warming his hands with hers. Eventually the shudders stopped, and then he was merely very, very tired.

  “How did you come here?” Ingrey asked Learned Lewko, who sat down to keep him company and share a bit of dried fruit someone had produced from a saddlebag. “I could not send a message, after we left the king’s deathbed, though I wanted to. Horseriver held both Fara and me in thrall.”

  “I had escorted Hallana to interrogate Ijada that night. We were talking together when Ijada became most upset, insisting something dire must have just befallen you.”

  “I could not feel you anymore,” Ijada put in. “I feared you had been killed.” She would have inched closer, but they were out of inches already; her arm around him tightened instead.

  “Horseriver stole our bond.”

  “Ah!” she breathed.

  Lewko raised a curious eyebrow at this, but elected to go on with his narrative. “Lady Ijada insisted we go investigate. Hallana agreed. I…decided not to argue. Your Rider Gesca also decided not to argue, at least not with Hallana, though he followed along for the sake of his warden’s duty. We all four walked up to Horseriver’s palace, where they told us you had gone to the hallow king’s bedside. Then up to the hallow king’s hall, where we found Biast at his father’s deathbed saying you had all gone back to the earl’s. We knew we had not missed you in the dark. Hallana got, well, the way she gets sometimes, and led us to the earl’s stables.”

  “That must have been quite a scene,” Ingrey remarked.

  “To say the least. Biast had been unconvinced of anything untoward beyond his sister’s usual illness, till then. From that point on, no one could have been more urgent in pursuit. Hallana hurried off to fetch Oswin and Bernan and their wagon, and found Prince Jokol talking to Oswin—he still wants a divine to carry back to his island—and she brought everyone. I was uncertain about taking this unruly mob upon the road, but, well, I can count to five. At least”—Lewko sighed—“Jokol didn’t bring his ice bear.”

  “Did he want to?” Ingrey asked, bemused.

  “Yes,” said Ijada. “But I talked him out of it. He is a very sweet man.”

  Ingrey chose to let that pass without remark.

  Lewko continued, “That was the point at which I decided the gods must be on our side—how does one say five gods help Them when it is the gods?—just imagine this same jaunt with the ice bear.” He shuddered. “Fafa would have had to ride in the wagon, I suppose, although the beast is big enough to ride.” He blinked for a moment, looking reflective. “I wonder…do you suppose this whole quest for a divine was a ploy on the beautiful Breiga’s part to get rid of the bear before it ended up sleeping at the foot of her marriage bed?”

  Ijada’s eyes lit, and she giggled. “Or worse, on it. Possibly. She sounds a determined lady. For pity’s sake, don’t suggest that in Jokol’s hearing.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.” Lewko rubbed the grin from his mouth and continued, “Biast thrust everything in Easthome onto Hetwar’s shoulders, which I think are sturdy enough to hold them. We were on the river road pelting north not four hours after you three had left Easthome. After that it was all commandeering Temple courier horses and royal mail station remounts, and taking turns resting in the wagon, all the way to Badgerbridge.”

  “You took the main road straight there?” said Ingrey, considering a mental map. “That would have saved some time. We took a lesser track when we turned west, for secrecy I think.”

  “Yes. There appeared never to be any doubt about where we were going. Such a deluge of dreams! I did not see why, until…wel
l. I have now seen why. We traded the wagon for fresh mounts and outraced the prince-marshal’s escort out of Badgerbridge; they may yet catch us up, if they have not lost themselves in Ijada’s forest, here.”

  Ijada nodded thoughtfully, as she considered this possibility. “The forester is with them; they will find their way eventually, maybe by another pass.” She glanced out over the valley. “The smoke must draw them, if nothing else.”

  Hallana motioned to Ijada from across the camp, and Ijada rose to see what she wanted. Ingrey stretched and, finally warmed to comfort despite a headache, clambered up to wander to the edge of the promontory and gaze out over the bowl of Holytree–Bloodfield–The Wounded Woods. My kingdom of All-That-Was.

  He unclutched the blanket from around his neck and sat on it, his arms wound about his knees, and stared into the graying gulf of mist and smoke. The earlier hot bright yellow that had seared the dark was dying down to a sullen red ring, black in the growing middle. The bloody light reflected off the undersides of the charcoal-colored clouds; far off, Ingrey heard a faint rumble of thunder reverberate through the serried hills, and the heavy scent of the coming rain mixed in his nostrils with the stink of smoke. He wondered if the morning after the original massacre had looked and smelled like this, and if Audar himself had also paused upon this spot to reflect on what clashing kings had wrought.

  Biast strolled over to stand beside him, his arms crossed, staring out likewise, as if sociably. The prince-marshal was a little too drawn to bring off the illusion, but Ingrey spread his hand in invitation nonetheless, and Biast sank down next to him. Biast’s tired sigh was not feigned.

  “What will you do now?” Biast inquired of him.

  “Sleep, I hope. Before we must ride.”

  “I meant more generally.”

  I know you did. Ingrey sighed, then a small smile turned his mouth. “After that, I shall pursue a courtier’s supreme ambition—”