The Hallowed Hunt

his banner pole fall out of his hand; Ijada’s hand caught it and gripped it tight.

Wait, thought Ingrey, we living ones cannot touch these ghostly things, they run through our fingers like water...

Ijada grasped the pole with both hands and gave it a great yank. Above her head, the banner unfurled and snapped out in no breeze. The wolf’s head badge of the Wolfcliffs snarled upon it, black on red.

Ingrey blinked up through his human eyes and wrenched to his feet, stunned. He was back in his body again, and it felt astounding. He inhaled. His wolf was gone... No. He clutched his heart. It’s right here. Howling joyously through his veins. And something more... A line ran between him and Horseriver: the current between Ingrey and Ijada that Horseriver had made, broken, and bound again to his kingship. Tension seemed to reverberate back and forth along that line now, its power ascending. The pull between them was massive, straining.

Horseriver reached down and yanked Fara to her feet, and clasped her hands around his banner pole. 'Hold!' She stared at him in terror and gripped as though her life depended on it. Grounded upon that mound of death and woe, the strength of the old kingship was vast.

Ingrey moistened his lips, cleared his throat. Found his weirding Voice. 'What do you have to say, Fara?'

He could feel Horseriver’s geas of silence fly away from around her face like a spring of metal released, spinning away in the air. Fara took a huge breath.

Horseriver turned to her, and Wencel’s face rose fully to the surface for the first time. One hand reached out toward her. 'Fara... ?' that young voice quavered. 'My wife... ?'

Fara jerked as if shot with a crossbow bolt. Her eyes closed in pain. Opened. Glanced at Ijada, at Ingrey. At the ghastly revenant before her. 'I tried to be your wife,' she whispered. 'You never tried to be my husband.'

And she lowered the tip of the banner pole to the ground, the gray rag falling in a silky puddle, put her foot upon the dry wood, and snapped it in half.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

HORSERIVER FELL BACK A PACE. HALF HIS FACES SEEMED contorted in rage. Others registered ironic resignation, disgust and self-disgust, and one sad visage an ageless, dignified endurance. His hands dropped to his sides, and the current between him and Ingrey faded away like sparks burning out in the dark. The unspeakably agonized eyes stared across at Ingrey, and almost all of his expressions melted into a bitter pity.

Ingrey found himself clinging to Ijada’s banner pole lest he fall down. The immense flaring pressure of Horseriver’s kingship was not gone, exactly, but it seemed to become dispersed, as if pouring in from all sides and not just from the one quarter. And then there came a moment of stillness, hushed hesitation, and the inward flow of the kingly current seemed to turn, becoming an outward urgency. And with that came a diffuse dread unlike any other he had experienced in these long hours filled with fierce shocks.

'You shall find,' breathed Horseriver, 'that a hallow kingship looks different from the inside. And my revenge shall be redoubled thereby. And oblivion... shall still be mine.' His voice faded away in a sigh.

Though Horseriver did not move from his burial mound, he grew distanced, silenced at last, like a corpse seen underwater. Stripped of both his yoked powers—his great horse and his hallow kingship—he was reduced to one revenant among the many, except for his dire multiplicity, an extra denseness that lingered about him. Yes, thought Ingrey, he, too, is a ghost of Bloodfield, who died on this sacred and accursed ground; he is no longer more, but he cannot become less.

But what have I become?

He could feel the mystical kingship settle into place upon him, in him, through him. It did not make him feel as though he’d been stuffed with pride and power, replete and overflowing. It made him feel as though all his blood was being drawn out of him.

Ijada and Fara both, he realized, were staring at him with that same openmouthed awe tinged with physical desire that Horseriver had inspired. Such stares ought to make any man preen, surely. Instead, he felt as though they contemplated eating him alive.

No, not Ijada and Fara—well, yes, them, too–it was the ghosts that alarmed him now. They crowded up closer as if fascinated, reaching for him, touching him in chill liquid strokes that stole the warmth from his skin. They were growing unruly in their urgency, shouldering past and even climbing over one another, thicker and thicker about him. Famished beggars.

Nothing of spirit can exist in the world of matter without a being of matter to support it. The old catechism rang through his spinning head. Four thousand still-accursed spirits swarmed upon the ground of Bloodfield, upon it but no longer sustained by it. Instead, they were all now connected to...

Him.

'Ijada... ' His voice came out a wail. 'I cannot maintain them all, I cannot hold!'

He was growing colder and colder as the ghosts pawed him. He grabbed for Ijada’s outstretched hand like a drowning man, and for a moment live warmth, her warmth, flooded him. But she gasped as she, too, felt the unholy pull of the ghosts’ insatiable hunger. They will pull us both to shreds, drain us dry. And when there was no more warmth left to give, his and Ijada’s frozen corpses would be left upon the ground, fog steaming off them in the night air. And all trapped here would dwindle to oblivion in a last, starveling cry of abandonment, betrayal, and despair.

'Ijada... ! Let go!' He tried to draw his hand back from hers.

'No!' She gripped him tighter.

'You must let go! Take Fara and run, out of here, back through the marsh, quickly! The revenants will consume us both if you do not!'

'No, Ingrey! That’s not what is meant! You must cleanse them as you cleansed Boleso, so that they may go to the gods! You can, that’s what you were made for, I swear it!'

'I cannot! There are too many, I cannot hold, and there are no gods here!'

'They wait at the gate!'

'What?'

'They wait at the gate of thorns! For the master of the realm to admit them. Audar cursed and sealed this ground, and Horseriver held it against the gods ever after in his rage and black despair, but the old kings are gone, and the new king is acclaimed.'

'I am only a king of ghosts and shadows, a king of the dead.' Soon to join my subjects.

'Open your realm to the Five. Five mortals will bear Them across the ground, but you must admit Them— invite Them in.' Shivering now almost as badly as he was, she eyed the thronging ghosts, and her voice went quavering up: 'Ingrrreyyy, hurry!'

Terrified nearly to incoherence, he extended his senses. Yes, he could feel the boundaries of his blighted realm around him in the dark, an irregular circle encompassing most of the valley floor, saturated with all the ancient woe of this place. It extended past the marsh, all the way to the wall of brambles. Only now did he become aware that his first act as the last living shaman of the Old Weald this night had passed without his own notice, when he had taken his sword and hacked his way—all of our ways–through the towering