The Hallowed Hunt

description of an amusing old book of household hints, apparently the only reading matter the house had offered up. After that the conversation fell flatly silent for a space. Not what he had hoped, but at least they were both in the same room, alive and breathing. I must raise my standards for dalliance.

A sharp rap on the front door, the shuffle of the porter, voices; Ingrey tensed, aware he’d left his sword upstairs and bore only his belt knife, then relaxed a trifle as he recognized the new voice as Wencel’s. He rose to his feet as the earl-ordainer entered the parlor, and the warden scrambled up and curtseyed apprehensively.

'Ingrey. Lady Ijada.' Wencel nodded to them. He was dressed in full court mourning, a little grimed, and looked weary to the point of exhaustion. The darkness within him was quiescent, as if benumbed or suppressed. His eye summed the chairs. 'You may be excused,' he said to the warden. 'Take your plate.'

The woman curtseyed again and removed herself promptly. She did not need to be told, by Wencel at least, to close the door behind her.

'Have you eaten?' Lady Ijada inquired civilly.

'This and that.' He waved. 'Just some wine, please.'

She poured from the carafe, and he took the beaker and sat back in his chair, his legs stretched out, his head tilted back. 'You are well, lady? My people are seeing to your needs?'

'Yes, thank you. My material needs, anyway. It is news that I lack.'

Wencel’s chin came down. 'There is no news, at least of your plight. Boleso has arrived in Templetown, where his body will rest tonight. By this time tomorrow, that carnival, at least, will be over.' He grimaced.

And Ijada’s legal one will begin? 'I have been thinking, Wencel... ' Succinctly, Ingrey explained his blood-price ploy once more. 'If you really seek to redeem the honor of your house, cousin, this could be one way. If the Stagthornes and the Badger-banks could both be persuaded. Which you are also in a position to do, I would point out.'

Wencel gave him a shrewd look. 'I see you are not an impartial jailer.'

'If such a jailer was what you really wanted, I’m sure you could have found one,' Ingrey returned dryly.

Wencel lifted his beaker in an only half-mocking salute, and drank. After a moment he added, 'Speaking of indirect evidence, I presume by the fact that I am not yet arrested for defilement that you have kept our secrets.'

'I have managed to keep you out of my conversations so far, yes. I don’t know how much longer I can succeed. I’ve drawn some unfortunate attention from the Temple. Did you hear about the ice bear yet?'

Wencel’s lips twisted. 'This funeral procession today being short on piety and long on gossip, yes. The tales I heard were lurid, conflicting, and ambiguous. I was possibly the only confidant to whom the events were crystal clear. Congratulations upon your discovery. I didn’t imagine you would learn of that power for quite some time yet.'

'My wolf never spoke like this before.'

'The great beasts have no speech. That shaping must come from the man. The whole is a different essence from either part; they alter each other as they merge.'

Ingrey contemplated this remark for a moment, finding it plangent but maddeningly vague. He decided to leave out mention of that other Voice.

'And,' Wencel added, 'your wolf was truly bound before. Separated from you even while trapped within. Neither the Temple nor I was mistaken on that, I promise you. It is its unbinding that remains a mystery to me.' Wencel raised his brows invitingly.

Ingrey ignored the hint. 'What else might it—might I—we—do?'

'The weirding voice is actually a great and subtle power, nearer the heart of the matter than you know.'

'Since I know practically nothing, that is no great observation, Wencel.'

Wencel shrugged. 'Indeed, the shamans of the forest tribes bore other powers. Visions that did not deceive. Healings, of wounds of the body or mind, of fevers, of sicknesses of the blood. Sometimes, they could follow men who had fallen into great darkness of mind and bring them back out again. Sometimes their powers were reversed; they could plunge victims into those darknesses, or thwart healing, even unto death. Darker necromancies still, consuming mortal sacrifices.'

Casting geases? Ingrey wondered silently.

'Great powers,' Wencel continued more lowly, 'and yet—even in the days of the Old Weald’s greatest glory and heartbreak, not great enough. Outnumbered, the shamans and spirit warriors were borne down under the weight of their most implacable enemies. Let that be a lesson to you, Ingrey. We are far too alone in this. Secrecy is our only source of safety.'

Ijada took a breath and ventured, 'I have heard that great Audar overcame Wealding sorceries with swords alone, in his last push. Swords and courage.'

Wencel snorted. 'Darthacan lies. He had gathered all the Temple saints and sorcerers that Darthaca could muster in his train. It took the gods’ own betrayals to bring us down at Holytree.'

Ingrey guessed at Ijada’s direction, and followed her lead. 'Yes, what does your library at Castle Horseriver have to say about Bloodfield that the Darthacan chronicles do not?'

Wencel’s lips curled up in a weird little smile. 'Enough to know that whatever they’ve taught you of it in these degenerate days is fabrication.'

Ingrey said, 'Whatever evil rites the Wealdings were attempting, Audar won. No lie there.'

Wencel’s shoulders jerked in aggravation. 'Not evil, but a great, if desperate, deed. The Weald was sorely pressed. We had lost half our lands to the Darthacans in the past generation. The bravest of our young men were dying in droves beneath the Darthacan lances.'

'The military accounts I have read all assert that Audar’s army was better organized, trained, and led, and its baggage train a wonder, by the standards of the day,' Ingrey observed. 'They built their own roads through the forests almost as fast as they could march.'

'Hardly that fast, but indeed, their descent on any tribal district fell as a destructive plague. With all of their own resources and half of ours in Darthacan hands, courage alone was no longer enough to stem their advance. The hallow king in that day—the last true consecrated servant of our people, and by the way one of my Horseriver ancestors—met with all the shamans of all the kin he could gather, and together they devised a great rite to make their spirit warriors invincible. Men of might, who could not be wounded or slain, to meet the Darthacans in battle and throw them back across the river Lure forever. Men whose bodies and spirits would be bound to the sacred Weald itself, renewed by its life until the victory was gained. The wisdom songs they composed to effect the bindings were to last for three days, all the voices blended together in a chant of overwhelming majesty, greater and more unified than anything attempted before. They sang up strength out of the very forest.'

Ijada, listening with breathless attention, murmured, 'So what went wrong?'

Wencel shook his head, his lips tightening to paleness. 'It would have worked, had not Audar, with the aid of his sorcerers and the gods, come upon us too soon. A forced march at unprecedented speed through the forests and hills, then, instead of waiting till dawn for the light and to rest his men, an immediate attack in the darkness. It was the night of the second day of the great rite, and we were unprepared and vulnerable, the kin shamans exhausted and drained with their labors, the king already bound but the men still partly not.'

'You—we did fight, though?' she pressed.

'Oh, fiercely. But Audar had concentrated three times our numbers. I—no one thought he could gather that many, that fast, and move them so far.'

'Still, magically healing warriors must have been hard to overcome. How?'

'When bodies are buried in one pit, and all their heads buried in a pit half a mile away, even such uncanny men die. Eventually. They slew the hallow king, the hub of the spell, first, though I grant not by beheading. They broke his limbs and cast him into the first pit, and piled the decapitated bodies of his comrades in upon him. He took hours to die. Suffocated—drowned in their beloved blood—at the last.' Wencel’s eyes glittered in the candlelight.

'Audar’s men worked all night and all day,' he continued, 'red to their waists and half-mad with the task. Some broke from the horror of their own deeds, sat and rocked and wept. They slew all they found within the