The Hallowed Hunt

'Quite so. My question, then, is: were Lady Ijada to be executed as a result of her future trial, could you, Lord Ingrey, remove the defiling animal spirit from her soul as you did for Prince Boleso’s?'

Ingrey froze. The first memory that roared back into his mind was of Wencel’s worried vision of Ijada as an Old Weald courier sacrifice, opening Holytree to the gods. Wencel had thought that path safely blocked by Ijada’s defilement. Not so safe, and not so blocked, if Ingrey could unblock it again. And I could. Five gods, and curse Them one and five, was this the unholy holy plan for the pair of them? Is this why You have chased us here? Thoughts tumbling, Ingrey temporized, 'Why do you ask, Learned?'

'It is a theological fine point that I greatly desire clarified. Execution, properly speaking, is a punishment of the body for crimes in the world of matter. The question of the salvation or sundering of a soul and its god is not more affected than by any other death, nor should it be; for the improper sundering of a soul would be a heinous sin and burden upon the officers charged with such a duty. An execution that entails such an unjust sundering must be resisted. An execution that does not may proceed.' A silence followed this pronouncement; the divine added solicitously, 'Do you follow the argument, my lord?'

Ingrey followed it. Claws scrabbling, dragged as by a leash. If I say I can cleanse her soul, it frees them to hang her body with a blithe good will. If he said he could not... he would be lying, but what else? He whispered, 'It was only... ' Stopped, cleared his throat, forced his voice to a normal volume. 'It was only a dream, Learned. You refine too much upon it.'

A warm autumnal voice murmured, somewhere between his ear and his mind, If you deny Me and yourself before this little company, brother wolf, how shall you manage before a greater?

Ingrey did not know if his face drained white, though several of the judges stared at him in alarm. With an effort, he kept himself from swaying on his feet. Or, five gods forbid, falling down in a faint. Wouldn’t that be a dramatic development, coming pat upon his words of disavowal.

'Hm,' said the scholarly divine, his gaze narrowing. 'The point is an important one, however.'

'How, then, if I simplify it for you? If I have not this ability, the point is moot. If I have... I refuse to use it so.' Eat that.

'Could you be forced?' The divine’s tone conveyed no hint of threat; it seemed the purest curiosity.

Ingrey’s lips drew back in a grin that had nothing to do with humor, at all, at all; several of the men pushed back in their seats in an instinctive recoil. 'You could try,' he breathed. Under the circumstances—under those circumstances, with Ijada’s dead body cut down from a gallows and laid at his feet—he might just find out everything his wolf could really do. Until they cut him down as well.

'Hm.' The scholarly divine tapped his lips; his expression, strangely, seemed more satisfied than alarmed. 'Most interesting.' He glanced down the panel. 'Have you any more questions?'

The senior judge, looking vastly disturbed, said, 'Not... not at this time. Thank you, Most Learned, for your... um... always thought-provoking commentary.'

'Yes,' muttered another under his breath, 'trust you to come up with a horrible complication no one else ever thought of.'

A slight tilt of the scholarly divine’s head and a glint in his eye took this as more compliment than complaint, despite the tone. 'Then I thank you, Lord Ingrey.'

It was clearly a dismissal, and not a moment too soon; Ingrey managed a civil nod and turned away, quelling an urge to run. He turned onto the gallery outside the chamber and drew a long breath, but before he could entirely compose himself again, heard footsteps behind him. He glanced back to see the strange divine following him out.

The lanky man signed the Five by way of greeting; a swift gesture, but very precise, neither perfunctory nor sketched. Ingrey nodded again, started to rest his hand on his sword hilt, decided the gesture might be interpreted as too threatening, and let his hands drift to clench each other behind his back. 'May I help you, Learned?' Over the gallery rail, headfirst, perhaps?

'My apologies, Lord Ingrey, but I just realized that I was introduced before your party came in, but not again after. I am Learned Oswin of Suttleaf.'

Ingrey blinked; his mind, briefly frozen, bolted off again in a wholly unexpected new direction. 'Hallana’s Oswin?'

The divine smiled, looking oddly abashed. 'Of all my titles, the truest, I fear. Yes, I’m Hallana’s Oswin, for my sins. She told me much of your meeting with her at Red Dike.'

'Is she well?'

'Well, and delivered of a fine little girl, I am pleased to say. Who I pray to the Lady of Spring shall grow up to look like her mother and not like me, else she will have much to complain of when she is older.'

'I’m glad she is safe. Both safe. Learned Hallana worried me.' In more ways than one. He touched his still-bandaged right hand, reminded of how close he had come to retrieving his sword, in his scarlet madness in that upstairs room.

'Had you time to know her better, she would not have worried you.'

'Ah?'

'She would have terrified you, just like the rest of us. Yet somehow, we all survived her, again. She sent me here, you see. Quite drove me from her bedside. Which many women tend to do to their poor husbands after a childbirth, but not for such reasons.'

'Have you spoken with Learned Lewko?'

'Yes, at length, when I arrived last night.'

Ingrey groped for careful wording. 'And on whose behalf did Hallana send you?' It occurred to him belatedly that the divine’s alarming theological argument back in the chamber might well have been intended to impede Ijada’s execution, not speed it.

'Well... well, now, that’s a little hard to say.'

Ingrey considered this. 'Why?'

For the first time, Oswin hesitated before he answered. He took Ingrey by the arm and led him away, around the corner of the gallery, well out of earshot of the door where a couple of what looked like more servants from Boar’s Head were just being led inside by a gray-robed dedicat. Oswin leaned on the rail, looking down thoughtfully into the well of the hall; Ingrey matched his pose and waited.

When Oswin resumed, his voice was oddly diffident. 'You are a man with much experience in the uncanny and the holy, I understand. The gods speak to you in waking visions, face-to-face.'

'No!' Ingrey began, and stopped. Denial again? 'Well... in a way. I have had many bizarre experiences lately. They crowd upon me now. It does not make me deft.'

Oswin sighed. 'I cannot imagine growing deft in the face of this. You have to understand. I had never had a direct experience of the holy in my life, for all that I tried to serve my god as seemed best to me, according to my gifts as we are taught. Except for Hallana. She was the only miracle that ever happened to me. The woman seems vastly oversupplied with gods. At one point, I accused her of having stolen my share, and she accused me of marrying her solely to sustain a proper average. The gods walk through her dreams as though strolling in a garden. I just have dreams of running lost through my old seminary, with no clothes, late for an examination of a class I did not know I had, and the like.'

'Taking the examination, or giving it?' Ingrey couldn’t help asking.

'Either, variously.' Oswin’s brow furrowed. 'And then there are the ones where I am wandering through a house that is falling apart, and I have no tools to repair... well, anyway.' He took a long breath, and settled into himself. 'The night after our new daughter was born, I slept once again with Hallana. We both shared a significant dream. I woke crying out in fear. She was utterly cheery about it. She said it meant we must go at once to Easthome. I asked her if she had run mad, she could not rise and go about yet! She said she could put a pallet in the back of the wagon and rest the whole way. We argued about it all day. The dream came again the next night. She said that cinched the matter. I said she had a duty to the babe, to the children, that she could neither abandon them nor drag them along into danger. She gave way; I gloated. I took to my horse that afternoon. I was ten miles down the road before I realized that I had been neatly foxed.'

'How so?'

'Separated, there was no way for me to continue the argument. Or to stop her. I have no doubt she’s upon