The Hallowed Hunt

courier?'

'Yes. She rode out at first light.'

'Then... tell the men to stand down. I expect instructions. Better wait. We’ll take a day to rest the horses.'

Gesca gestured assent, but his stare plainly questioned why Ingrey had driven both men and animals to their limits for two long days only to spend the time so gained idling here. He picked up the crockery, set it on the washstand, gave Ingrey another bemused look, and made his way out.

Ingrey had scrawled his latest note to Lord Hetwar immediately upon their arrival last night, reporting the cortege in Red Dike and pressing for relief of his command, feigning inability to supply adequate ceremony. The note had contained, therefore, no word of the Temple sorceress or hint of the later events in that upstairs room. He hadn’t mentioned the incident of the river, or, indeed, any remark upon his prisoner at all. Uneasy awareness of his duty to report the truth to the sealmaster warred now with fear, in his heart. Fear and rage. Who placed that grotesque geas in me, and how? Why was I made a witless tool?

And can it happen again?

His own anger frightened him even as his fear stoked his fury, tightening his throat and making his temples throb. He lay back, trying to remember the hard-won self-disciplines that had stilled him under the earnest holy tortures at Birchgrove. Slowly, he willed his screaming muscles to resistless quiet again.

His wolf had been released last night. He had unchained it. Was it leashed again this morning? And if not... what then? For all the aches in his body, his mind felt no different from any other morning of his adult life. So was his frozen hesitation here in Red Dike just old habit, or was it good sense? Simple prudence, to refuse to advance one step farther toward Easthome in his present lethal ignorance? His physical injuries made a plausible blind to hide behind. But were they a hunter’s screen or just a coward’s refuge? His caged thoughts circled.

Another tap at the door broke the tensing upward spiral of his disquiet, and a sharp female voice inquired, 'Lord Ingrey? I need to see you.'

'Mistress Hergi. Come in.' Belatedly, Ingrey grew conscious of his shirtless state. But she was presumably an experienced dedicat of the Mother’s order, and no blushing maiden. Still, it would be courteous to at least sit up. It would.

'Hm.' Her lips thinned as she stepped to the bedside and regarded him, a coolly capable glint in her eye. 'Rider Gesca did not exaggerate. Well, there is no help for it; you must get up. Learned Madam wishes to see your prisoner before she leaves, and I would have her on the road home at the earliest moment. We had enough trouble getting here; I dread the return trip. Come, now. Oh, dear. Let me see, better start with... '

She plunked her leather case down on the washstand and rummaged within, withdrawing a square blue glass bottle and pulling out the cork stopper. She poured a sinister syrup into a spoon, and as Ingrey creaked up on one elbow to ask, 'What is it?' popped it into his mouth. The liquid tasted utterly vile. He swallowed, afraid to spit it out under her steely gaze.

'A decoction of willow bark and poppy, wine spirits, and a few other useful things.' Her gaze traveled up and down his body; she pursed her lips, then bent and administered another spoonful. She nodded shortly and restoppered the bottle. 'That should do it.'

Ingrey swallowed medicine and a surge of bile. 'It’s revolting.'

'Eh, you’ll change your mind about it soon enough, I warrant. Here. Let’s see how my work is holding up.'

Efficiently, she unbound his wrappings, applied new ointment and fresh bandages, daubed the stitches in his hair with something that stung, combed out the tangles, washed his torso, and shaved him, batting his hands away as he tried to protest his own competence to dress himself. 'Don’t you be getting my new wraps wet, now, my lord. And stop fighting me. I’ll have no delays out of you.'

He hadn’t been dressed like this by a woman since he was six, but his pain was fading most deliciously away, to be replaced by a floating lassitude. He stopped fighting her. The intensity of her concentration, he realized dimly, had nothing to do with him.

'Is Learned Hallana all right? After last night?' he asked cautiously.

'Baby’s shifted position. Could be a day, could be a week, but there are twenty-five miles of bad roads between here and Suttleaf, and I wish I had her home safe now. Now, you mind me, Lord Ingrey; don’t you dare do anything to detain her. Whatever she wants from you, give it to her without argument, if you please.' She sniffed rather fiercely.

'Yes, Mistress,' Ingrey answered humbly. He added after a blinking moment, 'Your potion seems very effective. Can I keep the bottle?'

'No.' She knelt by his feet. 'Oh. Your boots won’t do, will they? Do you have any other shoes with you... ?' She scavenged ruthlessly in his saddlebags, to emerge with a pair of worn leather buskins that she jammed onto his feet. 'Up you come, now.'

The agony, as she pulled on his arms, seemed pleasantly distant, like news from another country. She towed him relentlessly out the door.

THE SORCERESS-PHYSICIAN WAS ALREADY WAITING IN THE TAP-room of Ijada’s inn at the other end of Red Dike’s main street. Learned Hallana eyed his bandages, and inquired politely, 'I trust this morning finds you much recovered, Lord Ingrey?'

'Yes. Thank you. Your medicine helped. Though it made an odd breakfast.' He smiled at her, a trifle hazily he feared.

'Oh. It would.' She glanced at Hergi. 'How much... ?' Hergi held up two fingers. Ingrey could not decide if the twitch of the divine’s eyebrows was censure or approval, for Hergi merely shrugged in return.

Ingrey followed both women upstairs once more. They were admitted to the parlor, a little doubtfully, by the female warden. Ingrey looked around surreptitiously for signs of his late frenzy, finding none but for a few faint bloodstains and dents on the oak floorboards. Ijada stepped from the bedchamber at the sound of their entry. She was dressed for travel in the same gray-blue riding costume as yesterday, but had put off her boots in favor of light leather shoes. Uneasily, Ingrey searched her pale face; her expression, returning his gaze, was sober and pensive.

More uneasily, he searched his own shifted perceptions. She seemed not so much different to him this morning as more, with an energetic density to her person that seized his focus. A heady warm scent, like sunlight in dry grass, arose from her. He found his lips parting to better taste that sun-smell—a futile effort, as it did not come through the air.

Hallana, too, had more than a taste of the uncanny about her, a dizzying busyness partly from her pregnancy but mostly from a subdued swirl, smelling like a whiff of wind after a lightning strike, that he took for her pacified demon. The two ordinary women, Hergi and the warden, seemed suddenly thin and flat and dry by comparison, as though drawn on paper.

Learned Hallana embraced Ijada and pressed a letter into her hands.

'I must leave very soon, or we won’t be home before dark,' the divine told her. 'I wish I could go along with you, instead. This is all most disturbing, especially... ' She jerked her head at Ingrey, indicating his late geas, and his lips twisted in agreement. 'That alone would make this Temple business, even without... well, never mind. Five gods guard you on your journey. This is a note to the master of my order in Easthome, begging his interest in your case. With luck, he can take up with you where I am forced to leave off.' She glanced Ingrey’s way again, an untrusting tension around her mouth. 'I charge you, my lord, to help see that this arrives at its destination. And no other.'

He opened his hand in an ambiguous acknowledgment, and Hallana’s lips thinned a little more. As Hetwar’s agent, he had learned how to open and copy letters without leaving traces, and he was fairly certain she guessed he knew those tricks of a spy’s trade. Yet the Bastard was the very god of spies; what tricks might His sorceress know? And to which of her two holy orders had she addressed her concerns? Still, if she had enspelled the missive in any way, it was not apparent to Ingrey’s new perceptions.