The Hallowed Hunt

'Oh? That’s a new twist. I thought you defied anyone you damned well pleased.'

How long they would have locked each other’s gazes, Ingrey was not sure, but Biast reached the door first. Hetwar perforce followed, waving Ingrey out. 'You had better not lie to Lewko. I’ll speak with him later. And with you later.' His gaze flicked down. 'Don’t drip on my carpets.'

Ingrey flinched, and clasped his right hand with his left. The bandage was wet through, and leaking.

'What happened to your—no, tell me later. Attend on me at the funeral rite. Dress properly,' Hetwar ordered.

'Sir.' Ingrey bowed to his retreating back. Symark, who had wandered away down the hall to examine Hetwar’s tapestries, hurried to join the prince.

So. Hetwar was going to think before reacting. Ingrey did not find this wholly reassuring.

It was full morning in Easthome, lively with bustling crowds, when Ingrey regained the street and turned toward the river. Ijada was awake now, he felt in his heart. Awake, and not, at the moment, unduly distressed. The reassurance eased him. Without what he now realized was an endemic state of covert panic driving his strides, his feet found their own pace, and it was a slow one. Did this strange new perception run two ways? He would have to ask her. He trudged wearily back toward the narrow house.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE PORTER ADMITTED INGREY AGAIN TO THE HALL. INGREY’S gaze flicked up. Ijada was above, locked in with her warden as instructed, presumably. It crossed Ingrey’s mind that while Horseriver’s servants and one somewhat-damaged swordsman might be enough to keep a docile naive girl from escaping this imprisonment, it was a woefully inadequate force to ward off attack. Ingrey might foil one assailant—well, a few— several—but a sufficiently determined enemy had merely to send enough men, and the conclusion would be grimly certain.

For some subtler, uncanny attack... the outcome was not so obvious. Could the weirding voice prove a defense? The hum of questionable power in his blood unnerved him still. Earl Horseriver apparently knew, even if Ingrey did not, of the full range of Ingrey’s new capacities. Wencel’s oblique promise of some sort of training troubled Ingrey’s thoughts.

The porter produced a slightly crumpled piece of paper. 'Temple messenger brought this for you, my lord.'

Ingrey broke the seal to find a short note from Learned Lewko, the penmanship blocky and neat. It appears my time will be taken today with that matter of internal Temple discipline you helped to uncover yesterday, for which I thank you, it read. I will wait upon you and Lady Ijada as soon as I may following the prince’s funeral rites tomorrow.

Ingrey could imagine that the Temple would urgently wish to correct the dereliction of its acolytes before the state occasion. It was perhaps not entirely his imagination that he sensed a tart aggravation between the brief lines. Relief warred with disappointment in his heart. Lewko unsettled him, but he could think of no one better to ask about the laughing Voice that he had heard in his head during yesterday’s scuffle in the temple court. Although his greatest secret hope, that Lewko would assure him it must have been a hallucination, seemed increasingly forlorn.

He climbed to his rooms to have Tesko help change his soaked bandage and take away his town garb to clean the bloodstains. The new stitches proved intact, and the spaces between them had scabbed over again. The unhealing wound was beginning to disturb him. His episodes of bleeding had perfectly reasonable explanations, most having to do with his own carelessness; it was only in his nervous fancy that they were beginning to seem like unholy libations. And if small magics draw a small blood sacrifice, what would a great one do?

His bed beckoned, and he sank down on it. The notion of food was still repulsive, but perhaps sleep would help him heal. He no sooner lay down than his thoughts began spinning again. He had been assuming from the beginning that the motivation of Ijada’s mysterious assassin must be political, or revenge for her killing of Boleso. Perhaps such theorizing was an effect of his being so long in Hetwar’s train. Yet trying to widen his thinking only made it feel more diffuse and foolish. I know less and less each day. What was the end of this progression, a glum future as a village idiot? The absurd images trailed off at last in muzzy exhaustion.

HE WOKE LATER THAN HE HAD INTENDED, THIRSTY, BUT FEELING as if he had paid off some accumulated debts to his body. Inspired, he sent down orders via Tesko that dinner should be served to him and his prisoner in the ground-floor parlor. He donned town garb again, combed his hair, wondered why he owned no lavender water, considered sending Tesko out to buy some tomorrow, scrubbed his teeth, and shaved for the second time that day as the shadows deepened outside. He took a breath and descended the stairs.

He turned into the parlor to find Ijada already standing there in the illumination of the sconces, in the wheat-colored dress looking like candlelight herself. She turned at the sound of his step, and a smile flared on her face that made his lips part.

He could not very well fall upon her like a ravening wolf, not least because the accursed warden stood at her side, hands and lips tightly folded. The table, he saw to his dismay, seemed to have been reflexively set for three. Horseriver’s servant was surely Horseriver’s spy. Simply to dismiss the duenna bore unknown dangers.

Regardless of his own strangely shifting internal allegiances, he supposed he must guard his own reputation as well as Ijada’s, or risk being relieved of his post. But he might hazard a smile, and did. He might chance a touch of her hand, brought formally to his lips. The scent of her skin, so close, seemed to bring all of his senses to heightened sharpness. The sheer intensity of her, at this range, almost overwhelmed him.

One desperate return squeeze, her nails biting fiercely into his skin, was all her opportunity to say, I feel it, too. She muted her smile to something social, the trained courtesy of a high household, as he helped her to her seat and a manservant brought their meal.

'I believe this is the first time I have seen you out of your riding leathers, Lord Ingrey.' Her tone seemed to be quite approving.

He touched the fine black cloth of his jerkin. 'Lady Hetwar makes sure that her husband’s men do not disgrace her house.'

'She has a good eye, then.'

'Oh? Good.' Ingrey swallowed wine without choking. 'Good.' His thoughts tangled on too many levels at once: the arousal of his body, the political and mortal fear of their situation, the remembered shock of that mystical kiss. He dropped a bite of food off his fork, and tried surreptitiously to retrieve it from his lap.

'Learned Lewko did not come.'

'Oh. Yes. He sent a note; he means to come tomorrow, after the funeral.'

'Did anything further come of your ice bear? Or your pirate?'

'Not yet. Though the rumors had already reached my lord Hetwar.'

'How did your conference with the sealmaster go?'

He tilted his head. 'How would you guess?' Do you sense where I am, how I feel, as I do you?

She gave a small nod in return, and essayed slowly, 'Tense. Uncertain. There was... an incident.' Her gaze now seemed to dig under his skin. She glanced at the warden, who was chewing and listening.

'Truly.' He drew breath. 'I believe Sealmaster Hetwar is to be trusted. His concerns, however, are wholly political ones. I am less and less of the opinion that your concerns are wholly political ones. Prince-marshal Biast was there, which I did not expect. He did not warm at once to the idea of a blood-price, but at least I had a chance to set the idea in his mind.'

She pushed some noodles across her plate with her fork. 'I think the gods have little interest in politics. Only in souls. Look to souls, Lord Ingrey, if you seek to guess Their minds.' She looked up, frowning.

Conscious of the glowering warden, Ingrey asked more lightly after Ijada’s day; she returned in kind a