press. Those who recognized him gave way at once.
The sky was a bright autumn blue, and he shrugged in relief as he stepped out of the sun into the shade of the portico. His best court dress was heavy and a trifle hot, the somber sleeveless coat swirling about his ankles and tending to tangle with his sword. The sunbeams shone down also into the open central court, where the holy fire burned high on its plinth, and he blinked at the adjustment from light to dark to light. He spotted Lady Hetwar, attended by Gesca and Hetwar’s oldest son, made his way to her side, and bowed. She gave him an acknowledging nod, her glance approving his garb, and shifted a little to make him space to loom in proper retainer’s style beside Gesca at her back. Gesca gave him a nervy sideways stare, but by no other sign revealed any aftereffects of their last tense encounter, and Ingrey began to hope Gesca had kept the eerie incident to himself.
Beyond the plinth, Ingrey also noted Rider Ulkra and some of Prince Boleso’s higher servants; good, the exiled household had arrived in Easthome as instructed. Ulkra cast him a polite nod of greeting, though most of the retainers who had ridden escort to Boleso’s wagon with him avoided his eyes—whether conscious of his contempt or simply unnerved by him, Ingrey could not tell.
From a stone passage, the sound of a temple choir started up, the echoing effect making the fine, blended voices sound appropriately distant and doleful. At a slow pace, the singing acolytes entered the court: five times five, a quintet for each god, robed in blue, green, red, gray, and white. The archdivine of Easthome followed solemnly. Behind him, six great lords carried the prince’s bier. Hetwar was among them, both kin Boarford brothers, and three more earl-ordainers.
Boleso’s body was tightly wrapped in layers of herbs beneath his perfumed princely robes, Ingrey guessed, though his swollen face was exposed. The delay in his burial pushed the limits of a decomposition that would necessitate a closed coffin. But the death of one so highborn demanded witnesses, the more the better, to prevent later imposters and pretenders from troubling the realm.
The principal mourners followed next. Prince-marshal Biast, resplendent of dress and weary of face, was attended by Symark, holding the prince-marshal’s standard with its pennant wrapped and bound to its staff as a sign of grief. Behind them, Earl Horseriver supported his wife, Princess Fara. Her dark garb was plain to severity, her brown hair drawn back and without jewels or ribbons, and her face deathly white by contrast. She had not her brothers’ height, and the long Stagthorne jaw was softened in her; she was not a beauty, but she was a princess, and her proud carriage and presence normally made up for any shortfall. Today she just looked haggard and ill.
Horseriver’s spirit horse seemed stopped down so tight as to be mistakable for a mere blackness of mood.
Ingrey was relieved to see that the hallow king had not been dragged from his sickbed and propped in some sedan chair or litter to attend his son’s funeral. It would have been too much like one bier following another.
Ingrey trailed Lady Hetwar as she took her place in the procession entering the high-vaulted Son of Autumn’s court. The wide, paved space filled; lesser hangers-on crowded up and peeked through the archway from the central court. The high lords set down the bier before the Son’s altar, the choir chanted another hymn, and Archdivine Fritine stepped forth to conduct the ceremonies of Boleso’s send-off. Ingrey widened his stance, clasped his hands behind his back, and prepared to endure the obsequies. On the whole, and fortunately in his view, the speakers kept their words brief and formal, with no references to the embarrassing manner of the prince’s death. Even Hetwar restricted himself to a few platitudes about young lives cut tragically short.
A rustling sounded from the central court as the crowd parted to allow the procession of the sacred animals to pass. Three of the stiff-looking groom-acolytes who led them were not the ones Ingrey had seen the other day. Fafa the impressive ice bear had been replaced by a notably small long-haired white cat curled tamely in the arms of a new woman groom in the Bastard’s whites. The boy who led the copper colt was the same as before, though; while he kept his attention on his animal and the archdivine, his glance did cross Ingrey’s once, above Lady Hetwar’s head, and his eyes widened in alarmed recognition.
With extreme circumspection, each animal was led to the bier to sign the acceptance, if any, of Boleso’s soul by its god. No one much expected a blessing from the Daughter of Spring’s blue hen nor the Mother of Summer’s green bird, but nerves stretched as the copper colt was led forth. The horse’s response was ambiguous to nonexistent, as were those of the gray dog and the white cat. The grooms looked worried. Biast appeared grim indeed, and Fara seemed ready to faint.
Was Boleso’s soul sundered and damned, then, rejected by the Son of Autumn Who was his best hope, unclaimed even by the Bastard, doomed to drift as a fading ghost? Or defiled by the spirits of the animals he had sacrificed and consumed, caught between the world of matter and the world of spirit in chill and perpetual torment, as Ingrey had once envisioned to Ijada?
The archdivine motioned Biast, Hetwar, and Learned Lewko—who had been lurking in the background so unobtrusively even Ingrey had not seen him before—to his side for a low-voiced conference, and the grooms began to lead up the animals one by one and present them again to the bier.
The heat and the tension were suddenly too much for Ingrey. The chamber wavered and lurched before his eyes. His right hand throbbed. As quietly as he could, he stepped back to the wall to brace his shoulders against the cool stone. It wasn’t enough. As the copper colt clopped forth once more, his eyes rolled back and he crumpled to the pavement in a boneless heap, the only sound a faint clank from his scabbard.
AND THEN, ABRUPTLY, HE WAS STANDING IN THAT OTHER PLACE, that unbounded space he had entered once before to do battle. Only it seemed not to be a battle to which he was called now. He still wore his court garb, his jaw was still human...
Out of an avenue of autumn-scented trees a red-haired young man appeared. He was tall, clothed as for a hunt in leggings and leathers, his bow and quiver strapped across his back. His eyes were bright, sparkling like a woodland stream; freckles dusted across his nose, and his generous mouth laughed. His head was crowned with autumn leaves, brown oak, red maple, yellow birch, and his stride was wide. He pursed his lips and whistled, and the sharp sweet sound pierced Ingrey’s spirit like an arrow.
Bounding out of the mists, a great dark wolf with silver-tipped fur ran to the youth’s side, jaws agape, tongue lolling foolishly; the huge beast crouched at his feet, licked his leg, rolled to one side and let the red-haired youth crouch and thump and rub its belly. A collar of autumn leaves much like the youth’s crown circled the thick fur of its neck. The wolf seemed to laugh, too, as the youth stood once more, legs braced.
Pacing in a more dignified manner, but still eagerly, the spotted leopard appeared. Ijada, looking bewildered, walked beside it. The leopard’s neck was bound with a garland of autumn flowers, all purple and deep yellow, and a plaited chain of them ran up to circle Ijada’s wrist like a leash, but which was leader and which was led was not clear. Ijada wore the spotted yellow dress in which Ingrey had first seen her, the one she’d been wearing during the nightmare of Boleso’s death, but the bloodstains were fresh and red, shimmering like rubies embroidered across her breast. Her expression, as she saw the youth’s bright face, changed from bewildered to wide-eyed, exalted, and terrified. The leopard rubbed against the youth’s legs on the other side from the wolf, nearly knocking him over, and its rumbling purr sawed through the air like some serrated song.
The youth gestured; Ingrey’s and Ijada’s heads turned.
Prince Boleso stood before them in an agonized paralysis. He, too, wore what he’d been found in the night he’d died: a short coat and daubs of paint and powder across his waxy skin. The muted colors made Ingrey’s head ache; they clashed, not rightly composed. They reminded Ingrey of an ignorant man, hearing another language, responding with mouthed gibberish, or of a child, not yet able to write, scribbling eager senseless scrawls across a page in imitation of an older brother’s hand.
Boleso’s skin seemed translucent to Ingrey’s eyes. Beneath his ribs, a swirling darkness barked and yammered, grunted and whined. Boar there was, and dog, wolf, stag, badger, fox, hawk, even a terrified housecat.
The god said softly, 'He cannot enter My gates bearing these.'
Ijada stepped forward, her hands held out in tentative supplication. 'What would You have of us, my lord?'
The god’s eye took in them both. 'Free him, if it be your will, that he may enter in.'
