The Hallowed Hunt

shrewd suspicion Ulkra would be a little too glad of the suggestion. 'What were her words?'

'She cried for help.'

Ingrey stood up from the exotic, spotted carcass, his riding leathers creaking in the quiet, and let the weight of his stare fall on Ulkra. 'And you responded—how?'

Ulkra turned his head away. 'We had our orders to guard the prince’s repose. My lord.'

'Who heard the cries? Yourself, and... ?'

'Two of the prince’s guards, who had been told to wait his pleasure.'

'Three strong men, sworn to the prince’s protection. Who stood—where?'

Ulkra’s face might have been carved from rock. 'In the corridor. Near his door.'

'Who stood in the corridor not ten feet from his murder, and did nothing.'

'We dared not. My lord. For he did not call. And anyway, the screams... stopped. We assumed, um, that the girl had yielded herself. She went in willingly enough.'

Willingly? Or despairingly? 'She was no servant wench. She was a retainer of Prince Boleso’s own lady sister, a dowered maiden of her household. Entrusted to her service by kin Badgerbank, no less.'

'Princess Fara herself yielded her up to her brother, my lord, when he begged the girl of her.'

Pressured, was how Ingrey had heard the gossip. 'Which made her a retainer of this house. Did it not?'

Ulkra flinched.

'Even a menial deserves better protection of his masters.'

'Any lord in his cups might strike a servant, and misjudge the force of the blow,' said Ulkra sturdily. The cadences sounded rehearsed, to Ingrey’s ear. How often had Ulkra repeated that excuse to himself in the depths of the night, these past six months?

The ugly incident with the murdered manservant was the reason Prince Boleso had suffered his internal exile to this remote crag. His known love of hunting made it a dubious punishment, but it had got the Temple out of the royal sealmaster’s thinning hair. Too little payment for a crime, too much for an accident; Ingrey, who had observed the shambles next morning for Lord Hetwar before it had all been cleaned away, had judged it neither.

'Any lord would not then go on to skin and butcher his kill, Ulkra. There was more than drink behind that wild act. It was madness, and we all knew it.' And when the king and his retainers had let their judgment be swayed, after that night’s fury, by an appeal to loyalty—not to the prince’s own soul’s need, but to the appearance, the reputation of his high house—this disaster had been laid in train.

Boleso would have been expected to reappear at court in another half year, duly chastened, or at least duly pretending to be. But Fara had broken her journey here from her earl-ordainer husband’s holdings to her father’s sickbed, and so her—Ingrey presumed, pretty—lady-in-waiting had fallen under the bored prince’s eye. One could take one’s pick of tales from the princess’s retinue, arriving barely before the bad news at the king’s hall in Easthome, whether the cursed girl had yielded her virtue in terror to the prince’s importunate lusts, or in calculation to her own vaulting ambition.

If it had been calculation, it had gone badly awry. Ingrey sighed. 'Take me to the prince’s bedchamber.'

The late prince’s room lay high in the central keep. The corridor outside was short and dim. Ingrey pictured Boleso’s retainers huddled at the far end in the wavering candlelight, waiting for the screams to stop, then had to unset his teeth. The room’s solid door featured a wooden bar on the inside, as well as an iron lock.

The appointments were few and countrified: a bed with hangings, barely long enough for the prince’s height, chests, the stand with his second-best armor in one corner. A scattering of rugs on the wide floorboards. One was soaked with a dark stain. The sparse furnishings left just room enough for a quarry to dodge and run, a gasping chase. To turn at bay and swing...

The windows to the right of the armor stand were narrow, with thick wavery circles of glass set in their leads. Ingrey pulled the casements inward, swung wide the shutters, and gazed out upon the green-forested folds of countryside falling away from the crag. In the watery light, wisps of mist rose from the ravines like the ghosts of streams. At the bottom of the valley, a small farming village hacked out of the woods pushed back the tide of trees: source, no doubt, of food, servants, firewood for the castle, all crude and simple.

The fall from the sill to the stones below was lethal, the jump to the walls beyond quite impossible even for anyone slim enough to wriggle out the opening. In the dark and the rain. No escape by that route, except to death. A half turn from the window, the armor stand would be under a panicked prey’s groping hands. A battle-ax, its handle inlaid with gold and ruddy copper, still rested there.

The matching war hammer lay tossed upon the rumpled bed. Its claw-rimmed iron head—very like an animal’s paw—was smeared with dried gore like the blotch on the rug. Ingrey measured it against his palm, noted the congruity with the wounds he had just seen. The hammer had been swung two-handed, with all the strength that terror might lend. But only a woman’s strength, after all. The prince, half-stunned—half-mad?—had apparently kept coming. The second blow had been harder.

Ingrey strolled the length of the room, looking all around and then up at the beams. Ulkra, hands clutching one another, backed out of his way. Just above the bed dangled a frayed length of red cord. Ingrey stepped up on the bed frame, drew his belt knife, stretched upward, cut it through, and tucked the coil away in his jerkin.

He jumped down and turned to the hovering Ulkra. 'Boleso is to be buried at Easthome. Have his wounds and his body washed—more thoroughly—and pack him in salt for transport. Find a cart, a team—better hitch two pairs, with the mud on the roads—and a competent driver. Set the prince’s guards as outriders; their ineptitude can do him no more harm now. Clean this room, set the keep to rights, appoint a caretaker, and follow on with the rest of his household and valuables.' Ingrey’s gaze drifted around the chamber. Nothing else here... 'Burn the leopard. Scatter its ashes.'

Ulkra gulped and nodded. 'When do you wish to depart, my lord? Will you stay the night?'

Should he and his captive travel with the slow cortege, or push on ahead? He wanted to be away from this place as swiftly as he could—it made his neck muscles ache—but the light was shortening with autumn’s advent, and the day was half-spent already. 'I must speak to the prisoner before I decide. Take me to her.'

It was a brief step, down one floor to a windowless, but dry, storeroom. Not dungeon, certainly not guest room, the choice of prisons bespoke a deep uncertainty over the status of its occupant. Ulkra rapped on the door, called, 'My lady? You have a visitor,' unlocked it, and swung it wide. Ingrey stepped forward.

From the darkness, a pair of glowing eyes flashed up at him like some great cat’s from a covert, in a forest that whispered. Ingrey recoiled, hand flying to his hilt. His blade had rasped halfway out when his elbow struck the jamb, pain tingling hotly from shoulder to fingertips; he backed farther to gain turning room, to lunge and strike.

Ulkra’s startled grip fell on his forearm. The housemaster was staring at him in astonishment.

Ingrey froze, then jerked away so that Ulkra might not feel his trembling. His first concern was to quell the violent impulse blaring through his limbs, cursing his legacy anew—he had not been caught by surprise by it since... for a long time. I deny you, wolf-within. You shall not ascend. He slid his blade back into its sheath, snicked it firmly home, slowly unwrapped his fingers, and placed his palm flat against his leather-clad thigh.

He stared again into the little room, forcing sense upon his mind. In the shadows, the ghostly shape of a young woman was rising from a straw pallet on the floor. There seemed to be bedding enough, a down-stuffed quilt, tray and pitcher, a covered chamber pot, necessities decently addressed. This prison secured; it did not, yet, punish.

Ingrey licked dry lips. 'I cannot see you in that den.' And what I saw, I disavow. 'Step into the light.'

The lift of a chin, the toss of a dark mane; she padded forward. She wore a fine linen dress dyed pale yellow, embroidered with flowers along the curving neckline; if not court dress, then certainly clothing of a maiden of rank. A dark brown spatter crossed it in a diagonal. In the light, her tumbling black hair grew reddish. Brilliant hazel eyes looked not up, but across, at Ingrey. Ingrey was of middle height for a man, compactly built; the girl was