CHAPTER NINETEEN
BY RELENTLESS PROWLING, INGREY FAMILIARIZED HIMSELF with every corner of the Horseriver mansion that day, to little effect. Wencel had arrived here bare weeks ago to attend on the hallow king in his worsening illness, and Fara had followed shortly despite her fatal diversion to Boar’s Head. The city house was but lightly occupied, as though the couple were merely camping in it. There were no old secrets buried here, though five gods knew what Ingrey might find at Castle Horseriver. But the earl’s haunt was two hundred miles away on the middle Lure, and Ingrey doubted anyone would be going back there till all this was long over.
As promised—or threatened—Earl Horseriver did conduct Ingrey later that afternoon to his stable mews, a stone building a few streets down the hill. Most of the great kins’ livestock was kept outside the walls, in pastures along the Stork above the glassworks and the tanners. Horseriver’s household was no exception, but a few beasts were kept nearby for the lord and lady, for grooms to use to collect other mounts at need, and for couriers. As befit the earl’s state, the appointments within the mews were very fine: the central corridor paved with colored stone, the stall walls of rubbed oak, the metal bars decorated with twining bronze leaves. Ingrey was bemused to spy Ijada’s showy chestnut mare, moving restlessly in a straight stall.
Ingrey refrained from patting its haunches, lest he be kicked. 'I know this one—I’d guessed it might be one of yours.'
'Aye,' said Wencel absently. 'She was too mettlesome for Fara. I was glad to find someone else to ride her.'
Wencel stopped before a box stall on the opposite side and gestured. A dark gray gelding snuffled up to him, then snorted and shied away as Ingrey approached. 'His name is Wolf,' said Horseriver blandly. 'For his color, formerly, but now one suspects a secret destiny. And who am I to argue with destiny? He is yours.'
The gelding was undoubtedly a beautiful beast, well muscled, clean-limbed, its dappled coat polished to a shimmer by the earl’s grooms. Ingrey suspected the animal concealed an explosive burst of speed. What else it might conceal—deadly geases sprang to mind—Ingrey could not tell. Did Wencel imagine it a bribe? So he might. Well, Ingrey could not look this gift in the mouth while the earl was watching. 'Thank you, my lord,' he said, in a tone to match Horseriver’s.
'Would you care to try his paces?'
'Later, perhaps. I am not wearing my leathers.' And ever since his be-wolfing at Birchgrove he’d always made new mounts peculiarly tense; he preferred to make their first acquaintance in private, in an enclosed space where the spooked horses might be more readily re-caught and remounted till they had come to mutual understanding, or at least mutual exhaustion. This one looked as though it might take some time to wear down to tameness, under him.
'Ah. Pity.'
Two stalls away, an unhorselike movement caught Ingrey’s eye. Frowning, he walked down to peer into another loose box. His nostrils flared in surprise. An antlered stag abruptly raised its head from where it was lipping at a pile of hay, snorted, and sidled about. It banged its rack twice against the boards, causing a desultory wave of motion among the horses nearby.
'I think your presence disturbs him,' murmured Wencel, in a tone of dry amusement.
After turning in a few more circles, the handsome beast stilled at the back of the stall, though it did not yet lower its head again to the hay. Its dark and liquid eye glowered at the men. Ingrey judged it captive for some time, for it no longer struggled; new-taken stags could kill themselves in their first frenzy to escape.
'What are you planning to do with it?' asked Ingrey, in a lighter tone than he felt. 'Dinner? A gift for your in-laws?' And what sort of uncanny gift might Wencel make of it?
Wencel’s lips twisted a little as he studied the nervous beast past Ingrey’s shoulder. 'When one plays against such farsighted opponents as I do, it is as well to have more than one plan. But chances are it is fated for a spit. Come away, now.'
Horseriver did not look back as they exited the mews. Ingrey inquired, 'Do you ride much for sport, these days? As I recall you were excited by your father’s horses.' It had been one of the few topics his slow young cousin had actually chattered about, in fact.
'Was I?' said Horseriver absently. 'I fear I feel about horses much as I feel about wives, these days. They last such a short time, and I am weary of butchering them.'
Unable to think of a response to that, Ingrey followed him silently up the hill.
He considered the method in Wencel’s madness, or perhaps it was the other way around. Wencel’s rationale for his murderous attempt on Ijada and its equally swift abandonment was too peculiar to be a lie, but it did not follow that he was necessarily correct in it. Still, Wencel’s erratic tactics against the gods must have worked before. In naming Ijada god-bait, he was surely not mistaken. That alarm alone must be enough to trigger his nervous malice. He’d eluded four hundred years of this hunt if his claims were true.
The gods would do better to wait at some choke point and let Wencel flail all he liked till he arrived there. But the strange intensity of Wencel’s greetings when they’d all met on the road to Easthome was now explained; the man must have been thinking five ways at once.
A disturbing notion came to Ingrey: perhaps Ijada had not been the bait at that fated meeting after all.
THE NEXT DAY, PRINCESS FARA WAS CALLED UPON TO TESTIFY BEfore the board of judges at the inquest upon Prince Boleso’s death.
Fara’s first response was angered insult that a daughter of the hallow king would be ordered before the bench like a common subject—her secret fears taking shelter in injured pride, Ingrey judged. But some clever man —Hetwar, no doubt—had made Prince-marshal Biast the deliverer of the unwelcome summons. Since Biast had less interest in defending dubious actions, and more in finding the truth, his levelheaded persuasion overcame his sister’s nervous protests.
Thus it was that Ingrey found himself pacing up the steep hill to Templetown as part of a procession consisting of the prince-marshal, his banner-carrier Symark leading the princess’s palfrey, Fara’s two ladies-in- waiting who had attended her at Boar’s Head, and Fara’s matched twin pages. In the main temple court, Symark was dispatched to find directions to where the judges sat, and Fara slipped her brother’s leash, briefly, to lead her ladies to kneel and pray in the Mother’s court. Whether Fara was trying to call upon the goddess who had so signally ignored her prayers in the past, or merely wanted an unassailable excuse to compose herself in semi- privacy for a few minutes, Ingrey could not guess.
In either case, Ingrey was standing with Biast when an unexpected figure exited the Daughter’s court.
'Ingorry!'
Prince Jokol waved cheerfully and trod across the pavement past the holy fire’s plinth to where Ingrey waited. The giant islander was shadowed as usual by his faithful Ottovin, and Ingrey wondered if the young man was under instructions from his formidable-sounding sister to make sure her betrothed was returned from his wanderings in good order, or else. Jokol was dressed as before in his somewhat gaudy island garb, but now he had a linen braid dyed bright blue tied around his thick left biceps, mark of a prayer of supplication to the Daughter of Spring.
'Jokol. What brings you here?'
'Eh!' The big man shrugged. 'Still I try to get my divine I was promised, but they put me off. Today, I try to see the headman, the archdivine, instead of those stupid clerks who always tell me to go away and come back later.'
'Do you pray for an appointment?' Ingrey nodded to Jokol’s left sleeve.
Jokol clapped his right hand on the blue braid and laughed. 'Perhaps I should! Go over his head, eh.'
Ingrey would have thought the Son of Autumn to be Jokol’s natural guardian, or perhaps, considering recent
