The Hallowed Hunt

vicious, senseless parody of an Old Wealding sacrifice hanged from a sacred forest tree. Or would the royal executioners allow her a silk rope, like her leopard, in honor of her kin rank? Though the old tribes, lacking silk, had used rope woven from shimmering nettle flax for their highest born, he had heard. Think of something else. But his thoughts circled in dreary morbidity.

They had begun as messengers to the gods, those willing human sacrifices of the Old Weald. Sacred couriers to carry prayers directly to heaven in unholy hours of great need, when all mere spoken words, or prayers of the heart or hands, seemed to fly up into the void and vanish into a vast silence. Like mine, now. But then, under the generations-long pressure from the eastern borders, the tribes’ needs had grown, and so had their fears. Battles and ground were lost; woes waxed and judgment slipped; quality gave way to quantity, in the desperate days, and heroic holy volunteers grew harder to find.

Their ranks were filled by the less willing, then the unwilling; at the last, captured soldiers, hostages, kidnapped camp followers, worse. The sacred trees bore a bumper crop. Children, Ingrey had heard, in some of the Quintarian divines’ favorite gruesome martyr tales. Enemy children. And what benighted mind places the name of enemy on a bewildered child? At the very least, the Old Wealding tribal mages might have reflected on what prayers that river of sacrifice had really borne to the gods, in their victims’ weeping hearts.

Think of something useful, curse it. Ijada’s tart words in the temple seemed to bore into his skin like biting insects. You won’t have to stand up to anybody, nor speak dangerous truths... Five gods, what power did the fool girl imagine he had in Easthome? He himself lived on sufferance, under Hetwar’s shielding hand. Ingrey lent that hand a palpable force, yes, but so did the rest of Hetwar’s household troops; lent, perhaps, a more unique and subtly useful air of uncanny threat, but in the sealmaster’s web of authority he was surely a minor strand. Ingrey had never distributed favors, and so now had none to call in. If he had any chances at all to rescue or redeem Ijada, they would end when the cortege entered the city gates.

His thoughts were growing worse, he was uncomfortably aware, but not wider. At length, he dozed. It wasn’t a good doze, but it was better than the writhing that went before.

HE WOKE AS THE AUTUMN SUN WAS GOING DOWN, AND TOOK himself again to Ijada’s inn to invite her to evening prayer.

She cocked an eyebrow at him, and murmured, 'You are grown pious, of a sudden.' But at his tight-lipped look of anguish, she relented and accompanied him to the temple once more.

When they were on their knees before the Brother’s altar—both the Mother’s and the Daughter’s chambers were full of Red Dike supplicants again—he began under his breath, 'Listen. I must decide tonight whether we ride or bide tomorrow. You cannot just drift into disaster with no plan, no attempt even to throw some rope to shore. Else it will become the rope that hangs you, and it drives me half-mad to picture you dangling as your leopard did. I should think you’d both have had enough of hanging.'

'Ingrey, think,' she returned in as low a voice. 'Even assuming I could escape unseen, where would I go? My mother’s kin could not take me in or hide me. My poor stepfather—he hasn’t the strength to fight such high foes, and besides, his would be among the first places they’d look for such a fugitive. A woman, a stranger, alone—I would be utterly conspicuous, and a target for the vile.' She had taken thought, too, it appeared.

He drew a breath. 'How if I came with you?'

A long silence; he glanced aside to see her face gone still, staring straight ahead, wide-eyed. 'You would do that? Desert your company and your duty?'

He set his teeth. 'Perhaps.'

'Then where would we go? Your kin could not take us in either, I think.'

'I cannot imagine going back to Birchgrove for any reason. No. We would have to get out of the Weald altogether, cross the borders. To the Alvian League, perhaps—slip into the Cantons over the northern mountains. Or to Darthaca. I can speak and write Darthacan, at least.'

'I cannot. I would be your mute... what? Burden, servant, pet, paramour?'

Ingrey reddened. 'We could pretend you were my sister. I could swear to regard you with that respect. I wouldn’t touch you.'

'How very enticing.' Her lips set in a flat line.

He paused, feeling like a man crossing river ice in winter and hearing a first faint cracking sound coming from under his feet. What did she mean me to make of that remark? 'Ibran was your father’s tongue, presumably. Do you speak it?'

'A little. Do you?'

'A little. We could make for the Peninsula, then. Chalion or Ibra or Brajar. You would not then be so mute.' There was work for swordsmen there, too, Ingrey had heard, in the interminable border wars with the heretical Quadrene coastal princedoms—and few questions asked of foreign volunteers, so long as they signed the Five.

She vented a long sigh. 'I’ve been thinking, this afternoon, about what Hallana said.'

'Which? She talked a great deal. Clouds of chatter.'

'Look to her silences, then.'

That sounded so like one of Lord Hetwar’s favorite aphorisms that Ingrey jerked. 'Did she have any?'

'She said she sought me out—at a moment of great inconvenience, perhaps peril, for herself, mind you—for two reasons. Because she’d heard the news—and for the dreams, of course. Only Hallana could make that second reason sound like an afterthought. That I have had strange and dark dreams, nightmares almost as disturbing as my waking life, I take to be the result of fear, weariness, and... and Boleso’s gift.' She moistened her lips. 'But why should Hallana dream of me or my troubles? She is a Temple woman to the bone, and no renegade, for all that she clears her own path. Did she speak to you of her dreams?'

'No. But I didn’t think to ask.'

'She asked many questions, learned I-know-not-what from watching us, but she gave me no direction, one way or another. That, too, is a silence. All she gave me, in the end, was the letter.' She touched her left breast, fingering the fine-embroidered fabric of her riding jacket. Ingrey fancied he heard a faint rustle of paper beneath the cloth, from some inner pocket. 'She seemed to expect me to deliver it. As the only thing resembling guidance that she gave me, I am loath to give it up for some chancy flight into exile with... with a man I’d not met till four days ago.' She was silent a moment. 'Especially not as your little sister, five gods spare me!'

He did not understand her offense, but he certainly could not mistake her refusal. He said heavily, 'We’ll continue on toward Easthome tomorrow, then, with Boleso’s coffin.' Which would give him perhaps three more days to come up with some better argument or plan, less the time he spent sleeping. If any.

He escorted her back through the lowering twilight to her inn, and into the hands of her warden once more. The countrywoman’s gaze upon him was now outright suspicious, though she made no comment at all. Starting back down the street, Ingrey began to wonder if he should be attending to Ijada’s silences. There were certainly enough of them.

As he neared his inn, a dark shape thrust itself off the wall where it had been leaning. Ingrey’s hand strayed to his sword hilt, but relaxed again as the figure moved into the yellow light of the lantern above the door, and he recognized Gesca. The lieutenant gave him a nod.

'Walk with me, Ingrey. I would have a word in private.'

Ingrey’s brows twitched up, but he fell in willingly enough. They matched steps on the cobblestones, took a turn about the next square up the street near the city gates, and settled on a wooden bench by the covered well in the square’s center. A servant turned away and stumped off past them with a pair of dripping buckets hung from a yoke over his shoulders. Beyond, in the street, a couple hurried home, the woman holding a lantern, the man with a boy atop his shoulder, who curled his small hands in the man’s hair; the man laughed protest at the grip. The man’s eyes shifted to assay the two loitering swordsmen, took reassurance from their repose, and returned to his woman.