The Hallowed Hunt

arm, she dragged him into the side room, slamming the door on the disapproving but cowed face of the warden.

'What was that, a while ago?' Ijada demanded. 'What happened to you?'

'What did you—did you see something, too?'

'Visions, Ingrey, terrible visions. Not from the god, I swear. Some little while after you went out, I was overcome again. My knees gave way. The world around me did not fade altogether this time, but the pictures were stronger than memory, less than hallucination. Ingrey, I saw Bloodfield, I saw my men! Not tattered and worn as they were in my dream in the Wounded Woods, but from before, when they yet lived.' She hesitated. 'Died.'

'Did you sense Wencel? Did you see him or hear his voice?'

'No, not... not as he is. These visions were in your mind, I think. Were they not?'

'Yes. Pictures from before-times, yes? The Old Weald. The massacre at Bloodfield.'

She shuddered and touched her own neck, and the horrible crunch of the ax parting bone sounded again in Ingrey’s memory. She felt that, too.

'Why do we share such things? What has happened between us?' she asked.

'The pictures, those visions—Wencel put them in me. He is not just spirit warrior like you, not just shaman like me. He’s more. Lost out of time, terrible in his power and pain. He thinks he is—he claims to be—hallow king.'

'But old Lord Stagthorne is king, has been since before I was born—how can there be two?'

'I think that is some problem, some mystery, that I have not yet come to the core of. I went to Wencel planning to beat the truth out of him if I had to. Instead, he beat it into me... '

He guided her into a chair and sat next to her, their hands still gripping each other across the tabletop. Haltingly, Ingrey described his terrifying interview with the earl. Ijada seemed to have shared only the mystic visions, not their context; Ingrey thought she must have spent the last hours wild with bewilderment, for even now her eyes were dilated and her body shivering.

'Wencel claims I am his soul’s heir, my body to be seized by his spell whether he or I will it or not. How long this has been so, I do not know. There might once have been some other cousin between us, who died more lately, but... but it may even go back to the death of my father. Which raises yet more questions without answers about what my father intended with his wolf rite.'

'My other dream,' she breathed. 'Of the burning horseman, the leashed wolf racing through the ash. It was you! It was both of you.'

'Do you think? Perhaps... '

'Ingrey, I recognized Holytree, I recognized my men. I am bound to them as certainly as I am bound to you, though I do not know how. And if Wencel spoke true, he is bound to them as well, and they to him.'

'Wencel’s tale was full of gaps, but he did not lie about that,' said Ingrey certainly. 'That binding is at the very heart of all this.'

'Then the circle is complete. You are bound to me, me to my ghosts, they to Wencel, and Wencel, it seems, to you. Is Wencel trying to work some great magic with all of us here?'

'I’m not sure. This is not all Wencel’s doing, exactly. For one thing, the choice of his mystical heir is not his own, or he would surely have picked someone other than me. Which makes a sort of sense; the spell must have been made to work in the chaos and heat of battle, when both king and next heir might fall in the same hour—as happened at Bloodfield, more or less. The transfer must take place without attention or will on the part of the hallowed ones. So that part of the spell must be bound up with the dead spirit warriors in the Wounded Woods. It’s as if the whole of the Old Weald, or what remains of its kin powers, chooses its heir through Wencel.' There seemed to Ingrey to be an enigmatic, daunting validation in the notion.

Ijada’s eyes narrowed. 'Are we all three supposed to go to Bloodfield, then? And if so, what are we supposed to do when we get there?'

'And who—or Who—presses us to that end?' Ingrey muttered. He sat back, frowning. 'The spell was locked tighter, heretofore. Just the Horserivers and the dead warriors, around and around for sixteen generations. You—you broke into it from the outside. The spell broke out to claim me. Its boundaries are not what they were. Boundaries between death and life, spirit and matter. Bloodline and bloodline. The Weald and an outer land. Changes—for the first time in centuries, changes are breaking in.'

Ijada rubbed her wrinkled brow. 'What am I, in this? Half-in, half-out—do I even belong? I am alive, they are dead; I am a woman, they are men—mostly—I think... My leopard is not even a proper Wealding beast! I did nothing for Boleso’s soul this morning; I just stood there stupidly gaping. It’s you that’s wanted, Ingrey, you who might free the ghosts from their old creatures!' Her gaze upon him was devouring in its conviction.

'A door in a wall is at once both inside and outside,' said Ingrey slowly. 'Half and half, as you are in your very blood, by your father’s grace. And you were wanted, too, though not, I think, by Wencel. Did your ghosts not choose you? Of all who slept and dreamed in the Woods that night?'

She hesitated, straightened a little. 'Yes.'

'So, then.' Then what? Ingrey’s exhausted brain did not supply an answer. 'More matters arose, after the visions. Wencel wants very much to keep me closer, I think. He coaxed me with an offer of a post in his household. More than coaxed. Coerced.'

She frowned in new worry.

'Hetwar,' Ingrey continued, 'instead of protecting me, wants me to take up the station so as to spy for him. Cumril raised the suspicion that Wencel bears a spirit animal, though the Temple and Hetwar do not yet know how much else he claims to be. I did not tell them. I’m not sure what consequences will spin from that, nor how quickly Wencel’s darker secrets will unravel. Nor how I will be caught up in the tangle. Worse, Biast has taken a fear of his brother-in-law and wants to set me to guard Fara.' Ingrey grimaced.

'Biast may not be not so far abroad as all that,' said Ijada slowly. 'I surely do not want my disasters to be the death of any more Stagthornes.'

'You don’t see. If I am drawn off to Horseriver, they will take you from my charge, give you over to some other jailer. Maybe shut you up in some other prison, less easy of access. Or of escape.'

Tension tightened her face. 'I must not be... must not be constrained, when it is finished. When it is time to go.'

'When what is finished?'

Her hand grasped air in a gesture of frustration. 'This. Whatever this is. When the god’s hunt closes in upon what He seeks. Do you not feel it, Ingrey?'

'Feel, yes, I am feverish with the strain, but I do not see it. Not clear.'

'What is Wencel about?'

Ingrey shook his head. 'I am less certain all the time that he is about anything, besides defending his old secrets. His mind is so full, he actually seems to have trouble paying attention at moments. Not that this makes him less dangerous. What does he really fear? He cannot, after all, be slain, it would seem.' Execution would not stop the earl. Imprisonment, were Wencel desperate enough, he might escape the same hard way, no matter how deep the dungeon or heavy the guard. It came to Ingrey that he really didn’t want to risk Wencel being imprisoned.

Ijada’s lips twisted in new puzzlement. 'And how has the earl been getting through his funerals, all these centuries, if his soul never goes to the gods?'

Ingrey paused, considering the lack of rumor, then made a little gesture of negation. 'Occupying the body of his own heir, he would usually be in close charge of his own rites. I’m sure he became expert in arranging them to display what he willed. And if he missed a few, well, some men are sundered.'

The strangeness of it disturbed Ingrey’s imagination anew. What must it have been like for Horseriver to watch his own body being buried, over and over? In a bereavement twisted back on itself, knowing that it was not the father but the son being lost in that hour?