The Hallowed Hunt

The movement made the room turn in slow jerks, and his grunt came out sounding more like a moan, or perhaps a whimper. Ijada wasn’t leaping to her feet, either. She sat limply, her hands on the floor propping her; she caught his gaze, took a breath, and pushed upright. 'I’m all right,' she said, although no one had inquired. All eyes had been on Ingrey’s far more spectacular performance.

Hallana’s head came round. 'What did you just experience?'

'I fell to my knees—I was still on my knees, in this room, but at the same time, I was suddenly in the leopard’s body. The leopard’s spirit body—I did not mistake it for flesh. But oh, it was strong! Glorious. My senses were terribly acute. I could see! But I was mute—no, beyond mute. Wordless. We were in some bigger space, or other space—it was as big as it needed to be, anyway. You'—her gaze swung to Ingrey—'were in the place before me. Your body was sprouting scarlet horrors. They seemed to be of you, yet attacking you. I pounced on them and tried to bite them off you. They burned my jaws. Then you started to turn into a wolf, or a man-wolf, some strange hybrid—it was as if your body couldn’t make up its mind. You grew a wolf’s head, at least, and started tearing at the red horrors, too.' She looked at him sideways, in a fresh fascination.

Ingrey wondered, but dared not ask, if she’d hallucinated a loincloth for him as well. The wild arousal of his frenzied state was only now passing off, damped by confusion and pain.

'When we had ripped the burning, clutching things all out of you, they could be seen to be not many, but all one thing. For a moment it looked like a ball of mating snakes, raked from under a ledge in the springtime. Then it went silent and vanished, and I was back here. In this body.' She held up one long- fingered hand before her eyes as if still expecting to see pads and claws. 'If that was anything like what the Old Weald warriors experienced... I think I begin to see why they desired this. Except not the part about the bleeding things. Yet even that... we won.' The pulsing dilation of her eyes was not just fear, Ingrey thought, but also a vast, astonished exhilaration. She added to Hallana, 'Did you see my leopard? The bleeding things, the wolf’s head?'

'No.' Hallana huffed in frustration. 'Your spirits were very disturbed, but I hardly needed second sight to tell that. Do you think you could return to that place where you were? At will?'

Ingrey started to shake his head, discovered that his brain felt as though it had come loose, and mumbled, 'No!'

'I’m not sure,' said Ijada. 'The leopard took me there—I didn’t go myself. And it wasn’t exactly a there. We were still here.'

Hallana’s expression grew, if possible, more intent. 'Did you sense any of the gods’ presences, in that space?'

'No,' said Ijada. 'None. There was a time I might not have known for sure, but after the leopard dream... no. I would have known, if He were back.' Despite her distress, a smile softened her lips. The smile was not for him, Ingrey knew. It still made him want to crawl toward her. Now, that was madness by any measure.

Hallana stretched her shoulders, which had alarming effects given her current girth, and grimaced. 'Bernan, help Lord Ingrey up. Take off those bolts.'

'Are you sure, Learned?' the manservant said doubtfully. His eyes flicked toward Ingrey’s sword, now lying in the room’s corner; he had apparently kicked it out of Ingrey’s rolling reach during his scramble to get into striking position with his crowbar.

'Lord Ingrey? What is your opinion? You were certainly correct before.'

'I don’t think... I can move.' The oak floor was hard and chilly, but by the swimming of Ingrey’s head, horizontal seemed vastly preferable to vertical.

He was forced to the vertical despite himself, dragged up and placed in the divine’s vacated chair by the two servants. Bernan tapped off the bolts with a hammer and Hergi, clucking, collected a basin of fresh water, soap, towels, and the leather case of what proved to be medical instruments and supplies that she had brought in with her. She tended expertly to Ingrey’s injuries, new and old, under the divine’s eye, and it occurred to Ingrey belatedly that of course the sorceress would travel with her own midwife-dedicat, in her present state. He wondered if Hergi was married to the smith, if that was Bernan’s real calling.

Ijada levered herself up as far as her own chair and watched Hergi’s mending in apparent fascination, pinching her lips at the needle pokes. The flap of flesh on the back of Ingrey’s hand was neatly reaffixed and covered with a white-linen bandage, the lesser lacerations on the other wrist cleaned and wrapped. His hand did not hurt nearly as much as the burning muscles in his back, or his throbbing ankles; or perhaps each pain served as distraction from the next. He wondered if he ought to pull off his boots while he still could, and if he didn’t, if they would have to be cut off later. They were good boots; he hated to risk them. The chains had left deep scorings in the leather.

'In that place you found yourselves,' Hallana began again.

'It wasn’t real,' mumbled Ingrey.

'Mm, well, yes. But while you were in that, um, state, what did you perceive of me, if anything?'

'Colored fire flowed from your hands. Into my mouth. It drove the vein growing there into a frenzy, which it passed on to the others. Its other parts, I suppose. It was as though your fire flushed them from their hiding places.' He ran his tongue around his mouth now, to reassure himself that the hideous distortion was truly gone. More disturbingly, he found his face was slimed with spittle. He started to wipe away the sticky foam with the bandage on his left wrist, but his hand was intercepted by Hergi, protecting her work. She gave him a disapproving headshake and wrung out a wet cloth instead. Ingrey swabbed and tried not to think about his father.

'The tongue is the Bastard’s own sign and signifier upon our bodies,' Hallana mused.

As forehead for the Daughter, navel for the Mother, genitals for the Father, and heart for the Brother. 'The veins, tentacles, whatever they were, of the geas seemed to grow from all of my five theological points.'

'That ought to mean something. I wonder what? I wonder if there are any manuscripts of Old Weald lore that would illuminate this puzzle? When I get back to Suttleaf, I will search our library, but I’m afraid we’ve mostly medical tracts. The Darthacan Quintarians who conquered us were more interested in destroying the old ways than in chronicling them. It was as if they wished to put the old forest powers out of reach of everyone, even themselves. I’m not sure they were wrong.'

'When I was in the leopard—when I was the leopard,' said Ijada, 'I saw the phantasmal images, too. But then it was all shut away from me again.' A faint regret tinged her tone.

'I, on the other hand'—the sorceress’s fingers drummed on the closest level surface, which happened to be the top of her stomach—'saw nothing. Except for Lord Ingrey ripping his way out of iron chains that should have held a horse, that is. If that was typical of the strength their spirit animals lent the old warriors, it’s no wonder they were prized.'

If the old warriors had hurt like this afterward, Ingrey wasn’t so sure their ghost animals would have been as prized as all that. If the forest kin had carried on as he just had... he wanted to ask about the noises he’d made, but was too mortified.

'If there was anything to see, I should have seen it,' Hallana went on in increasing exasperation. She plunked down on a spare chair. 'Dratsab, dratsab. Let us think.' After a moment, she narrowed her eyes at Ingrey. 'You say the thing is gone. If we cannot say what it was—can you at least now remember who put it on you?'

Ingrey leaned forward, rubbing his scratchy eyes. He suspected they were glaringly bloodshot. 'I’d better have these boots off.' At Hallana’s gesture, Bernan knelt and assisted; Ingrey’s ankles were indeed swelling and discolored. He stared down at them for a moment more.

'I did not feel the geas before I first saw Ijada,' he said at last. 'For all I know it could have been riding me for days, or months, or years. I thought it was years, at first—I thought it was my wolf, as much as I could think about it at all. If not for Lady Ijada’s testimony, and... and what happened just now, I might still think that. If I had succeeded in slaying her, I would certainly have gone on believing so.'

Hallana sucked on her lower lip. 'Think harder. A compulsion to kill your prisoner was more likely laid on you between the time the news came of Boleso’s death and the time you left Easthome for Boar’s Head. Before then, there was no reason, and after, no time. Whom did you see in that time?'

Put like that, it was even more disturbing. 'Not very many men. I was called to Lord Hetwar’s chambers in the evening. The courier was still there. Hetwar, Hetwar’s secretary of the chamber, Prince Rigild the king’s