The Hallowed Hunt

'I... ' He was about to firmly deny any such weakness, then thought better of it. He wanted nothing more passionately than to remove himself from this fraught scene at once. '... fear so, my lady. Pray excuse me, and excuse me to your lord husband.' I must find Ijada. He clambered to his feet and began to feel his way along the wall. 'I would rather not pitch up my breakfast on the temple floor in the middle of all this.'

'Indeed not,' she agreed fervently. 'Go on, quickly. Gesca, help him.' She waited just long enough to see Gesca grasp his arm, then turned back to her son.

Over by the altar, the choir was again singing, forming up to lead the procession out, and people were beginning to shuffle themselves back into their positions. Ingrey was grateful for the covering noise. Across the crowd, he thought he saw Learned Lewko crane his neck toward his disruption, but he did not meet the divine’s eyes. Keeping to the walls, half for support and half to skim around the throng, he made his escape. By the time they exited the portico, he was towing Gesca.

'Leave me,' he gasped, shaking off Gesca’s hand.

'But Ingrey, Lady Hetwar said—'

He didn’t even need the weirding voice; Gesca recoiled at his glower alone. He stood staring in bewilderment as Ingrey weaved away through the crowded square.

By the time Ingrey reached the stairway down to Kingstown, he was nearly running. He bolted down the endless steps two and three at a time, at risk of tumbling head over tail. By the time he passed over the covered creek, he was running, his long coat flapping around his boot heels. By the time he pounded on the door of the narrow house, and stood a moment with his hands on his knees, wheezing for breath, he had nearly made his lie to Lady Hetwar true; his stomach was heaving almost as much as his lungs. He fell through the door as the astonished porter opened it.

'Lady Ijada—where is she?'

Before the porter could speak, a thumping on the stairs answered his question. Ijada flew down them, the warden in her train crying, 'Lady, you should not, come back and lie down again—'

Ingrey straightened, grasping her hands as she grasped his. 'Did you—'

'I saw—'

'Come!' He yanked her into the parlor. 'Leave us!' he shouted back over his shoulder. Porter, porter’s boy, warden, and housemaid all blew back like leaves in a storm gust. Ingrey slammed the door upon them.

The handgrip turned into a shaken embrace, having in it very little romance but a great deal of terror. Ingrey was not sure which of them was trembling more. 'What did you see?'

'I saw Him, Ingrey, I heard Him. Not a dream this time, not a fragrance in the dark—a daylight vision, clear.' She pushed him back to stare into his face. 'And I saw you.' Her look turned to disbelief, though not, apparently, of her vision. 'You stood face-to-face with a god, and you could find nothing better to do than to argue with Him!' She gripped and shook his shoulders. 'Ingrey!'

'He took Boleso—'

'I saw! Oh, grace of the Son, my transgression was lifted from me.' Tears were running down her real face, as they had her dream face. 'By your grace, too, oh, Ingrey, such a deed... ' She was kissing his face, cool lips slipping across hot sweat on his brow, his eyelids, his cheeks.

He fell back a little, and said through gritted teeth, 'I don’t do this sort of thing. These things do not happen to me.'

She stared. 'They happen to you rather a lot, I’d say.'

'No! Yes... Gods! I feel as though I’ve become some unholy lightning rod in the middle of a thunderstorm. Miracles, I have to stay away from funeral miracles, they dodge aside from their targets and come at me. I don’t, I can’t... '

Her left hand squeezed his right. She looked down. 'Oh!'

The wretched bandage was soaked again. Wordlessly, she turned to the sideboard, rooted briefly in a drawer, and found a length of linen. 'Here, sit.' She drew him to the table, stripped off the red rag, and wrapped his hand more tightly. Their mutual wheezing was dying down at last. She had not run across half of Easthome, but he did not question her breathlessness.

'A physician should look at that,' she said, knotting the cloth. 'It’s not right.'

'I won’t say you’re mistaken.'

She leaned forward and pushed a lock of sweat-dampened hair off his forehead. Her gaze searched his face, for what he did not know. Her expression softened. 'I may have murdered Boleso—'

'No, only killed.'

'But thanks to you I did not encompass his sundering from the gods. It’s something. No small thing.'

'Aye. If you say so.' For her, then. If his actions had pleased Ijada, perhaps they were worthwhile. Ijada and the Son. 'That was it, then. That was what we were chivvied here for. Boleso’s undeserved redemption. We have accomplished the god’s will, and now it’s over, and we are discarded to our fates.'

Her lips curved up. 'That’s very Ingrey of you, Ingrey. Always look on the dark side.'

'Someone has to be realistic, in the midst of this madness!'

Now her brows rose, too. She was laughing at him. 'Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too. It was my undeserved redemption as well.'

He ought to feel offended. Not buoyed up by her laughter as if floating in some bubbling hot spring.

She took a breath. 'Ingrey! If one soul trapped in the world by an anchor of animals is such an agony to the gods that they make miracles out of, of such unlikely helpers as us, what must four thousand such souls be?'

'You think of your Wounded Woods? Your dream?'

'I don’t think we’re done. I don’t think we’re even started yet!'

Ingrey moistened his lips. He followed her jump of inspiration, yes. He wished it wasn’t so easy to do. If freeing one such soul had been an experience of muted terror to him... 'Nor shall we be, if I am burned and you are hanged. I do not say you are wrong, but first things first.'

She shook her head in passionate denial. 'I still do not understand what is wanted of me. But I saw what is wanted of you. If your great-wolf has made you a true shaman of the Weald, the very last—and the god’s own Voice said it was so—then you are their last hope indeed. A purification—the men who fell at Bloodfield were never purified, never released. We need to go there.' She jerked in her seat as if ready to leap up and run out the door at once and down the morning road on foot.

His hands tightened on hers, as much to hold her in place as anything. 'I would point out, we have a few hindrances here. You are arrested and bound for trial, and I am your arresting officer.'

'You offered to smuggle me away once before. Now I know where! Don’t you see?' Her eyes were afire.

'And then what? We would be pursued and dragged back, perhaps even before we could do anything, and your case would be worse than before, and I would be wrenched from you. Let us solve this problem in Easthome first, then go. That is the logical order of things. If your men have waited four hundred years for you, they can surely wait a little longer.'

'Can they?' Her brows drew down in a deep frown. 'Do you know this? How?'

'We must concentrate on one problem at a time, the most urgent first.'

Her right hand touched her heart. 'This feels most urgent to me.'

Ingrey’s jaw set. Just because she was passionate and loving and beautiful and god-touched didn’t mean she was right in all things.

More than god-touched. Personally redeemed by miraculous intervention. No wonder she seemed a conflagration just now. He might melt in her radiance.

But only redeemed in her soul and sin. Her body and crime were still hostage to the world of matter and Easthome politics. Whatever he was called to, it was not to follow her into plain folly.

He drew breath. 'I did not dream your dream of the Woods. I have only your—admittedly vivid—description to go on. Ghosts fade, starved of nourishment from their former bodies. Why have not these? Do you imagine they’ve been stuck in the blasted trees for four centuries?'