The Hallowed Hunt

wagon and the drop, Ingrey himself would have been swept over, crushed underneath the first impact. They’d have had to use his good riding leathers as a bag for his remains, after that. The gruesome thought amused him enough that he remounted his horse afterward in a restored, if winded, humor.

They paused at noon at a wide clearing just off the road, home to an ancient spring. His men unpacked the bread and cold meats provided by the castle cook, but Ingrey, calculating distances and hours of light, was more concerned for the horses. The team was mud-crusted and sweaty, so he set Boleso’s surly retinue to assisting the teamster in unharnessing and rubbing them down before they were fed. The worst of the gradients were behind them now; with a suitable rest, he judged the beasts would last till nightfall, by which time he hoped to reach the Temple town of Reedmere, commandeer some more fitting conveyance, and send the rustic rig home.

More princely conveyance, Ingrey revised his thought. A former manure wagon seemed to him all too fitting. Closer to Easthome, he decided, he would send a rider ahead to guide a relief cortege to him, and hand off Boleso’s body to more gaudy and noble ceremony, provided by those who cared for the prince. Or at least, cared for Boleso’s rank and the show they made to each other. Maybe he’d send the rider tonight.

He washed his hands in the spring’s outlet and accepted a slab of venison wrapped in bread from his lieutenant, Gesca. Gnawing, he looked around for his prisoner and her attendant. The teamster’s wife was busy about the food baskets by the unhitched wagon. Lady Ijada was walking about the clearing—in that costume, she might whisk into the woods and disappear among the tall tree boles in a moment. Instead, she pried up a stone from the crumbled foundation above the spring and picked her way over to where Ingrey rested on a big fallen log.

'Look,' she said, holding out the glittery gray block.

Ingrey looked. On one side of the stone a spiral pattern was incised into the weathered surface.

'It’s the same as one of the symbols Boleso had drawn on his body. In red madder, centered on his navel. Did you see it there?'

'No,' Ingrey admitted. 'His body had been washed off already.'

'Oh,' she said, looking a little taken aback. 'Well, it was.'

'I do not doubt you.' Though others will be free to. Had she realized this yet?

She stared around the clearing. 'Do you think this place was a forest shrine, once?'

'Very possibly.' He followed her glance, studying the stumps and the sizes of the trees. Whatever holy or unholy purposes the original possessors had held, the latest ax work had been done by humble itinerant woodcutters, by the evidence. 'The spring suggests it. This place has been cleared, abandoned, and recleared more than once, if so.' Following, perhaps, the ebb and flow of the Darthacan Quintarian war against the forest heresies that had so disrupted the kin lands, four centuries ago when Audar the Great had first conquered the Weald.

'I wonder what the old ceremonies were really like,' she mused. 'The divines scorn the animal sacrifice, but really... When I was a child at my father’s Temple fort, I went a few times with... with a friend to the marsh people’s autumn rites. The fen folk aren’t of the same race or language as the Old Wealdings, but I could almost have imagined myself going back to those days. It was more like a grand party and outdoor roast than anything. I mean, they made some songs and rituals over the creatures before they slaughtered them, but what’s the difference if we pray over our meat after it’s cooked instead of before?' She added with an air of fairness, 'Or so my friend said. The fort’s divine disagreed, but then, the two of them disagreed a lot. I think my friend enjoyed baiting him.'

It hadn’t been the menu that the Quintarian divines had objected to, for it wasn’t just meat that the Old Weald kin had taken from their hallowed beasts. The tribal sorcerers had defiled the souls of their battle lords with the ghosts of animals, making their leaders’ spirits fierce—but also unfit to offer, at the ends of their lives, to the gods. Ingrey doubted any festival this young woman would have been permitted to see involved any consumption beyond meat, though. 'It is said the fen men paint themselves with blood.'

'Well,' she said thoughtfully, 'that’s true. Or at any rate, everyone ran about splashing each other and screaming with laughter. It was all very messy and silly, and rather smelly, but it was hard to see any evil in it. Of course, this tribe didn’t sacrifice people.' She looked around the clearing as if imagining the ghostly image of some such evil slaying here.

'Indeed,' said Ingrey dryly. 'That was the sticking point, between the Darthacan Quintarians and the Old Wealdings.' For all that both sides had worshipped the same five gods. 'So when Audar the so-called Great slaughtered four thousand Wealding prisoners of war at Bloodfield, it’s said he didn’t pray at all. That made it a proper Quintarian act, I suppose, and not heresy. Some other crime, perhaps, but not human sacrifice. One of those theological fine points.'

That massacre of a generation of young spirit warriors had broken the back of the Wealding resistance to their eastern invaders, in any case. For the next hundred and fifty years, the Weald’s lands, ceremonies, and people had been forcibly rearranged into Darthacan patterns, until Audar’s vast empire broke apart in the bloody squabbles of his much less great descendants. Orthodox Quintarianism survived the empire that had fostered it, however. The suppressed animal practices and wisdom songs of the forest tribes had been lost and all but forgotten in the renewed Weald, except for rural superstitions, children’s rhymes, and the odd ghost tale.

Or... not quite forgotten, not by everyone. Father, what were you thinking? Why did you burden me with this bestial blasphemy? What were you trying to do? The old, painful, unanswered question... Ingrey thrust it from his mind.

'I suppose we are all New Wealdings, now,' mused Ijada. She touched her Darthacan-dark hair, and nodded to Ingrey’s own. 'Almost every Wealding kin that survived has Darthacan forebears, too. Mongrels, to a man. Or to a lord, anyway. So we inherit Audar’s sins and the tribes’. For all I know my Chalionese father had some Darthacan blood. The nobles there are a very mixed lot, really, he always said, for all that they carry on about their pedigrees.'

Ingrey bit, chewed, did not answer.

'When your father gave you your wolf,' she began, 'how—'

'You should go eat,' he interrupted her, around a mouthful of cold roast. 'It’s going to be a long ride yet.' He rose and strode away from her, toward the wagon and its baskets. He did not want more food, but he did not want more of her chatter, either. He selected a not-too-wormy apple and nibbled it slowly while walking about. He stayed on the other side of the clearing from her, during the remainder of their rest.

AS THE CORTEGE RUMBLED ON THROUGH THE AFTERNOON, THE rugged angles of the hills grew gentler and hamlets more frequent, their fields more extensive. The sun was slanting toward the treetops when they came to an unanticipated check. A rocky ford, hock deep on the ride in, had risen with the rains and was now in full and muddy flood.

Ingrey halted his horse and looked over the problem. Boleso’s wagon had not been made watertight with skins or tar, so the chance of its floating away at an awkward angle and yanking the horses off their feet was slight. The chance of its shipping water and bogging down, however, was good. He set mounted men at the wagon’s four corners with ropes to help warp it through the hazard, and waved the yeoman onward with what speed he could muster from his tired team. The water came up past the horses’ bellies, pushing the wagon off its wheels, but the outriders held it on course, and the whole assemblage struggled safely up the far bank. Only then did Ingrey motion Lady Ijada ahead of him into the water.

His gaze lifted to mark the wagon’s progress, then jerked back as the chestnut horse missed its footing, wallowed, and went down over its head. Lady Ijada was swept off into the torrent too quickly to cry out. Ingrey swore, spurring his horse forward into the flood. His head swiveled frantically, looking for dark hair, a flash of brown fabric in the turbid foam—her clothing would surely hold water, skirts dragging her down—there!

The cold water tugged at his knees as he urged his horse downstream. The dark head bobbed up by a trio of smooth rocks that stuck out of the spate boiling around them. An arm reached, caught...

'Hang on!' yelled Ingrey. 'I’m coming to get you—!'

Two arms. Lady Ijada heaved herself upward, belly over the rock, wriggled and scrambled; by the time Ingrey brought his snorting horse close, she was standing upright, dripping and gasping. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her horse make it to the bank farther downstream, where it surged up, stumbled through the mud, and bolted into the woods. Ingrey spared it an unvoiced curse and waved one of his men after it.