The Hallowed Hunt

bounds of Holytree, whether surrendered or resisting: shamans, spirit warriors, innocent camp followers, males, females, children. They were taking no more chances. They leveled every structure, killed every animal, cut down and burned the Tree of Sacrifice. The hallow king’s eldest son and holy heir they beheaded last, at the end of the next day, after he had witnessed it all. When no living thing was left within the sacred bounds except the trees, they withdrew, and forbade entry. As if to bury their own sins along with us. And the rains came, and the snows of many winters, and men died, and forgot Holytree, and all the glory that had passed there.'

Ingrey found his breath had nearly stopped, so caught up was he in Wencel’s impassioned delivery of this old tale. What else might Wencel be prodded into revealing? 'They say Audar was made furious with tribal treaty betrayals, and was sorry afterward for the massacre. He made great gifts to the Temple for the forgiveness of his soul.'

'His Temple!' Wencel scoffed. 'He received with his left hand what he gave with his right. And a forced treaty is no treaty at all, but a robbery. The Darthacan encroachment was never-ending, and their treaties, self-serving lies.'

'I don’t know,' said Ingrey judiciously. 'It’s clear enough from the chronicles that the Darthacans did not start out intending to conquer the Weald. They slid into it over two generations. Every time they set up a boundary, they found themselves with a new frontier to defend, and the unruly kin tribes picking piecemeal at their defenses, until they moved the outposts farther to defend those lines, and it started all over again.'

'You are half a Darthacan yourself, Ingrey.' Wencel’s tone fell from impassioned back to dry once more.

'Most of us are, these days.'

'Yes. I know.'

'But some kin warriors escaped to the borders,' said Ijada, watching Wencel closely. Her hands were tight in her lap. 'They fought on, our ancestors. We fought back. In time, we won. The Weald was renewed.'

Wencel snorted. 'Audar’s empire fell to the squabbles and stupidities of his great-grandsons, not for any virtue remaining in the Weald. What came back, a century and a half later, was a shadow and a mockery of the Old Weald, emptied of its essences and its beauties, stamped in the mold of Darthacan Quintarian orthodoxy. The men who re-created that parody of the hallow kingship thought they were restoring something, but they were too ignorant even to know what had been lost. The great free days, the forest days, were gone, netted under the roads and mills, cut down with the trees turned to towns, weighted beneath the groaning stones of Audar’s temples. A hundred and fifty years of tears and strain and blood had been spent for nothing. They congratulated themselves most smugly, the new kin lords, the grand rich earl-ordainers—and archdivine-ordainers, what a travesty!—but their vaunted throne was empty of anything but men’s buttocks. They should have been weeping in the ashes, on that day of final betrayal.'

Wencel at last seemed to grow conscious of the wide-eyed stares of both his listeners. 'Faugh! So ends the lesson, children.' He exhaled. 'I grow morbid. It has been an ugly day, and too long. I should go home.' His lips compressed. 'To my wife.'

Ijada said in a constricted voice, 'How is she taking it all?'

'Not well,' Wencel conceded.

Ingrey worried suddenly how much of a push against Ijada might come from that quarter. Princess Fara was one Stagthorne who might well want blood, not money, in order to wash her own hands of a grievous guilt. And Fara surely had not only Wencel’s ear, but her brother Biast’s.

Wencel pushed back his chair, pinched the bridge of his nose, and rose to his feet. His eyes were dark- circled, Ingrey noticed. And too old for his face.

Ingrey saw him out the front, then nipped back into the parlor and closed the door once more before the warden could reappear. Ijada was frowning, as he seated himself beside her.

'I wonder,' she said slowly, 'what dreams Wencel has been having?'

'Hm?'

She tapped two fingers on the table edge. 'He did not speak of Bloodfield as one who has read or heard. He spoke as one who’d seen.'

'As you have—do you think? Yet at a different time.'

'My dream was in the present, I thought. Why should he dream of the past? Why should he dream of my men at all?'

Ingrey noted her unthinking possessive. 'He seems to feel they are—were—his men.' He hesitated. 'His father had a reputation for a historical mania. So did his grandfather, I think, from some things my father and aunt said. He was not drawn in to his sires’ passions as a child, that I know, but perhaps some crept upon him as he studied their writings later. He must have been frantic for explanations of what had happened to him.' He added after a moment, 'Have you dreamed again of the Wounded Woods since you were there?'

She shook her head. 'There was no... no need. The task, whatever it was, was done. It didn’t need to be done twice. Nothing of it has faded or changed since then.' Her eyes sought his face. 'Until you came along, that is.'

Alone as they briefly were, Ingrey was torn between desire and fear of another kiss. What else might such a caress reveal? His bandaged hand crept toward hers and closed over it, and a small grateful smile flashed at him from those dizzying lips.

Her eyes narrowed. 'Kin shaman. Spirit warrior. Banner-carrier. Holytree. Why should all these symbols of the Old Weald be resurrected here, now? We three are linked and linked again—you and Wencel by blood and old tragedy, he and I by... recent events, you and I by... ' She took a breath. 'We should be trying to figure it out.'

'We should be trying to stay alive, Ijada!'

'I am not at all sure,' she said rather quietly, 'that staying alive is what this is all about.'

His hand clutched hers on the tabletop despite the twinge of pain. 'Don’t you become fey!'

'Why not? Do you imagine feyness is only your task?' Her brows twitched up in sudden amusement. 'It is most becoming upon you, I admit. Unfairly so.' She leaned toward him, and he froze between terror and joy as her lips brushed his. Only flesh on flesh this time, only a touch of warmth.

Before he could lunge at her in a quest for holy fire, the door clicked open. The warden entered and eyed them both, unsmiling. Unwillingly, he released Ijada’s hand and eased back. He was conscious that his breath was coming too fast.

The warden sketched a curtsey. 'Begging your pardon, my lord. The earl instructed me to keep close to my lady.'

'I am obliged for his consideration,' said Ijada, in a voice so expressionless even Ingrey could not decide if it was sincere or dry. She tipped up and drained her beaker and set it down. 'Should we retire again to that dull chamber?'

'If it please you, my lady, it was what the earl said.'

Beneath the woman’s stodgy stubbornness Ingrey perceived a real unease. The earl-ordainer’s secular powers alone were enough to overawe his servants, Ingrey supposed, but did they sense—or had they experienced—more?

'Perhaps it is as well to turn in early,' Ingrey conceded reluctantly. 'I must attend Lord Hetwar at the funeral rites tomorrow morning.'

Ijada nodded and rose. 'I should be grateful if you would wait upon me after, and tell me of them.'

'Certainly, Lady Ijada.'

He watched her pass out of the parlor. It was only in his overwrought fancy that the room seemed to grow darker for her going from it.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE TEMPLE SQUARE WAS ALREADY CROWDED WITH COURTLY and would-be-courtly mourners when Ingrey arrived there in the midmorning. His eye picked out a few of Gesca’s men at the outer edges of the mob, indicating that Lord Hetwar was already within. Ingrey lengthened his stride and shouldered through the