The Hallowed Hunt

CHAPTER NINE

THE SERVANT’S COT CREAKED IN THE NIGHT SILENCE OF THE house as Ingrey sat down and clenched his hands upon his knees. Introspection was a habit he’d long avoided, for aversion to what it must confront. Tonight, at last, he forced his perceptions inward.

He pushed past the generalized dull terror, as through a too-familiar fog. Brushed aside clinging tendrils of self-deception, a veil on his inner sight. He had no time or patience for them anymore. Once, he had conceived of his bound wolf as a sort of knot under his belly, encysted, like an extra organ, but one without function. The knot, the wolf, was not there now. Nor in his heart, nor in his mind, exactly, though trying to see into his own mind felt like trying to see the back of his own head. The beast was truly unbound. So... where... ?

It is in my blood, he realized. Not a part, but every part of him. It wasn’t just in him, now; it was him. Not to be ripped out as readily as cutting off his fist, or tearing out his eyes, no, no such trivial surgery would answer.

It came to him then, a possible reason why the fen folk practiced their peculiar blood sacrifices, a meaning lost in the depths of time even to themselves. The marsh people were old enemies of the Old Wealdings. They had faced the forest tribes’ spirit warriors and animal shamans in battle and raid along their marches for centuries out of mind—taken captives, perhaps including prisoners far too dangerous to hold. Had those sanguinary drainings once had a more grim and practical purpose?

Could a mere physical separation, of blood from body, also create a spiritual one, of sin from soul?

Denial, it seemed, ran at the end of its long road down into a bog of blood. More in a sort of chill curiosity than any other emotion, Ingrey rummaged in his saddlebags and drew out his coil of rope. He laid it and his belt knife out on the quilt beside him and glanced upward in the light of his single candle at the shadowy ceiling beams. Yes, it could be done, the supreme self-sacrifice. Bind his own ankles, hoist himself up, loop a knot. Hang upside down. Lift the finely honed blade to his own throat. He could let his wolf out in a hot scarlet stream, end its haunting of him, right here and now. Free himself of all defilement in the ultimate no.

I can refuse the dark power. By stepping into a darkness more absolute.

So would his soul, rejected by the gods, just fade quietly into oblivion as the sundered and damned ghosts were said to do? It seemed no fearful fate. Or—if he had misjudged the rite—would his lost spirit, augmented by this unknown force, turn into something... else? Something presently unimaginable?

Did Wencel know what?

All those lures the young earl had thrown out, all that bait, were plain enough indicators of how Wencel thought of Ingrey, and about him. I am prey, in his eyes. Watch me run. He could deny Wencel his quarry.

Ingrey stood up, reached, felt along the beam, tucked the rope through a slight warped gap between the timber and the attic floor above, sat again and studied the cord’s dangling length in the shadows. He touched the gray twist; his brain felt cool and distant, in this contemplation, and yet his hand shook. That much blood would make a mighty mess on the floor for some horrified servant to clean up in the morning. Or would it flow between the floorboards, seep through the ceiling of the room below? Announce the event overhead by a dripping in the dark, spattering wetly upon a pillow or a sleeping face? Was that thunder, does the roof leak? Until a light was struck, and its bright flare revealed the drizzle as a redder rain. Would there be screams?

Was Lady Ijada’s room below his? He calculated the placement of corridors, and of the chamber door into which the warden had retreated. Perhaps. It hardly mattered.

He paused for a long time, barely breathing, balanced on the cusp of the night.

No.

His blood cried out for Ijada, but not like this. He considered the small miracle of her smile. Not the usual nervous polite grimace most women favored him with, never reaching their eyes; indeed, it seemed Ijada could smile at him with her eyes alone, fearlessly. Without concealed revulsion. Even delicately enjoying, it seemed, a sight she found inexplicably comely. His wolf was no less dangerous in its capacities to her than to any other woman he had not dared to touch or look upon, she was not safe from him, no... she was something unexpectedly else. She was dangerous right back at him.

The thought did very odd things to his heart. He rejected the poets’ phrases as drivel; his heart did not turn over, nor inside out, nor, most certainly not ever, dance. It went on beating right side up in his chest as usual, if a little faster and tighter-seeming. Was he odd, to relish the peculiar perilous sensation so? It wasn’t exactly pleasant. Exactly. But what he relished in the darkness of his dreams wasn’t what most men he’d known spoke of, in the crude braggings of their lusts, as pleasant; he’d been aware of that for some time.

His hand drew back, clenched closed.

So if I choose not to wake you so redly, Ijada, what then?

He had come to the end of the road of No; he could go no further down it without drowning in his own blood. I have three choices, I think. To wade into the red swamp and never come up again. To linger in numbness and immobility as before—yet it was certain that neither the tide of events nor the relentless Wencel would permit the continuation of his paralysis very much longer. Or... he might turn around and walk the other way.

So what does that mean, or has my thinking turned altogether to a poet’s twaddle? His bedchamber was so quiet he could hear the susurrus of the blood in his ears like an animal’s panting.

Could he stop denying himself, and deny others instead? He tested the phrases on his tongue. No, you are wrong, all of you, Temple and Court and folk in the streets. You always were wrong. I am not... am not... what? And are these the only terms I can think in, these shouted nos? Ah, habit.

But if I turn and walk the other way, I do not know where the road goes. Or where it ends.

Or Who I may meet along it, and that thought disturbed him more than knife and cord and haunted blood together.

Though if I can find a darker dark along it than this one, I shall be surprised.

He rose, sheathed his knife, packed the rope away. Stripped for sleep and lay down under the servant’s sheets. Old and thin and mended, they were, but clean; it was a rich household that afforded even its servants such refinements.

I do not know where I am going. But I am quite weary enough of where I’ve been.