The Hallowed Hunt

would have been proud to bear it, if there had been such a clan as kin Leopardtree back then.'

'But I am a woman, not a warrior,' said Ijada, watching him back.

'The women of the Old Weald used to take in sacred animals as well. Did you not know?'

'No!' Her eyes lit with interest. 'Truly?'

'Oh, seldom as warriors, though there were always a few such called. Some tribes used theirs as their banner-carriers, and they were valued above all women. But there was a second sort... another sort of hallowed animal made, that women took more often. Well, more proportionally; they were much rarer to start with.'

'Banner-carrier?' Ijada echoed in an odd tone.

'Made?' said Ingrey.

Wencel’s lips curved up at the tautness in his voice, in an angler’s smile. 'Weald warriors were made by sending the soul of a sacrificed animal into a man. But something else was made when the soul of an animal was sacrificed into another animal.'

Ijada shook off her arrested look, and began, 'Do you think Boleso was attempting—wait, no.'

'I have still not quite unraveled what Boleso thought he was about, but if it was in pursuit of some rumor of this old magic, he had it wrong. The animal was sacrificed, at the end of its life, into the body of a young animal, always of the same sort and sex. And all the wisdom and training it had learned went with it. And then, at the end of its life, that animal was sacrificed into another. And another. And another. Accumulating a great density of life. And—at some point along the chain, five or six or ten generations or more—it became something that was not an animal anymore.'

'An... animal god?' ventured Ijada.

Wencel spread his hands. 'In some shadowy sense, perhaps. It’s what some say the gods are—all the life of the world flows into them, through the gates of death. They accumulate us all. And yet the gods are an iteration stranger still, for they absorb without destroying, becoming ever more Themselves with each perfectly retained addition. The great hallowed animals were a thing apart.'

'How long did it take to make one?' asked Ingrey. His heart was starting to beat faster, and he knew his breath was quickening. And he knew Wencel marked it. Why am I suddenly terrified at Wencel’s bedtime tale? His very blood seemed to growl in response to it.

'Decades—lifetimes—centuries, sometimes. They were vastly valued, for as animals, they were tame and trainable, uncannily intelligent; they came to understand the speech of men. Yet this great continuity suffered continuous attrition, and not just through ordinary mischance. For when a Weald man or woman took one of the great beasts into their soul, they became something far more than a warrior. Greater and more dangerous. Few of the oldest and best of the creatures survived unharvested under the pressure of Audar’s invasion. Many were sacrificed prematurely just to save them from the Darthacan troops. Audar’s Temple-men were specially disposed to slay them whenever they were found, in fear of what they could become. Of what they could make us into.'

'Sorcerers?' said Ijada breathlessly. 'Wealding sorcerers? Is that what Boleso was attempting to become?'

Wencel bent his hand back and forth. 'Let us not become confused in our language. A sorcerer, proper—or improper, if illicit and not bound by Temple disciplines—is possessed of an elemental of disorder and chaos, sacred to the Bastard, and the magic the creature endows is constrained into channels of destruction thereby. Such demons are bound up in the balance of the world of matter and the world of spirit. And the old tribes had such sorcerers, too, with their own traditions of discipline under the white god.

'The great hallowed animals were of this world, and had not ever been in the hands of the gods. Not part of their powers. Not constrained to destruction, either. A purely Wealding thing. Although their magic was wholly of the mind and spirit, they also could affect the body that the mind and spirit rule. The animal shamans had a quite separate tradition from the tribal sorcerers, and not always in alliance with them even in the same clan. One of the many divisions that weakened us in the face of the Darthacan onslaught.' Wencel’s eyes grew distant, considering this ancient lapse.

Ijada was looking back and forth between Wencel and Ingrey. 'Oh,' she breathed.

Ingrey’s face felt drained. It was as if his fortress walls were crumbling, inside his mind, in the face of Wencel’s sapping. No. No. This is rubbish, nonsense, old tales for children, some sort of vile joke Wencel is having on me, to see how much I can be persuaded to swallow. What he whispered instead was, 'How?'

'How came this wise wolf to you, you mean?' Wencel shrugged. 'I, too, would like to know. When Great Audar'—his mouth gave the name a venomous twist—'tore out the heart of the Weald at Bloodfield—which was the great shrine of Holytree, before his utter desecration of it—even he did not manage to massacre all. Some spirit warriors and shamans were not present at the rite, by delay or chance. A few escaped the ambush.'

Ijada sat up with an even sharper stare. A flick of Wencel’s eyes acknowledged his audience, and he continued: 'Even a century and a half of persecution afterward did not erase all knowledge, though not for lack of trying. Pockets endured, though very few in writing like the library at Castle Horseriver—specially collected by certain of my ancestors, to be sure, but collected from somewhere. But in remote regions, fens and mountains, poor hamlets—the Cantons broke from the Darthacan yoke early—traditions, if not their wisdom, continued for long. Passed down from generation to generation as secret family or village rites, always dimming in ignorance. What even Audar could not accomplish, Time the destroyer did. I had not imagined any to be left, after the relentless erosion of centuries. But it seems there were at least... two.' His blue gaze pierced Ingrey.

Ingrey’s thoughts felt like frantic claws scrambling and scraping on the floor of a cage. He managed only an inarticulate noise.

'For your consolation,' Wencel continued, 'it explains your long delirium. Your wolf was a far more powerful intrusion upon your soul than your father’s or Ijada’s simple creatures. Four hundred years old seems impossible—how many wolf generations must that be?—and yet... ' His gaze on Ingrey grew uneasy. 'All the way down, indeed. An apt description. The spirit warriors mastered their beasts with little effort, for the ordinary animals were readily subordinated to the more powerful human mind. In the Old Weald, if you’d been destined to be gifted with a great beast, you would have had much preparation and study, and the support of others of your kind. Not abandoned to find your own way, stumbling in fear and doubt and near madness. No wonder you responded by crippling yourself.'

'Am I crippled?' Ingrey whispered. And what fearsome thing would I be if I were not?

'Oh, aye.'

Ijada, her tone shrewd, said to Wencel, 'And are you?'

He held a palm out. 'Less so. I have my own burdens.'

How much less so, Wencel? Yet Ingrey was less moved by the suspicion that he might have found the source of his geas, as by the notion that he might have found his mirror.

Wencel turned again to Ingrey. 'In the event, yours was a happy ignorance. If the Temple had suspected what manner of beast you really bore, you would not have found that dispensation so easy to come by.'

'It wasn’t easy,' muttered Ingrey.

Wencel hesitated, as if considering a new thought. 'Indeed. To bind a great beast could have been no small task.' A respectful, even wary, smile turned one corner of his mouth. He glanced at the candles burning down in their holders on the center of the table. 'It grows late. Tomorrow’s duties crowd the dawn. We must part company for a while, but Ingrey, I beg you—do nothing to draw fresh attention to yourself till we can talk again.'

Ingrey scarcely dared breathe. 'I thought my wolf was just a well of violence. Rage, destruction, killing. What else can it—could I do?'

'That is the next lesson. Come to me for it when we are both back in Easthome. Meantime, if you value your life, keep your secrets—and mine.' Wencel pushed himself up, wearily. He ushered them out the door before him, plain signal that both the dinner and the revelations were done for the night. Ingrey, nearly sick to his stomach, could only be thankful.