The Hallowed Hunt

practical. 'Why?'

Ingrey’s fingers stretched out, then tapped across the ball of his thumb in order, little finger to index. 'Because the Thumb touches all four other fingers.' The words seemed to fall out of his mouth from nowhere, and he almost jerked back, startled.

Biast too seemed to find the words fraught beyond their simplicity, for he gave Ingrey a peculiar stare, unconsciously clenching his hand. 'I shall hold that in my mind. Guard my sister.'

'I’ll do my utmost, my lord.'

Biast gave him a nod, gestured Symark ahead of him, and went out.

INGREY SCOUTED THE MANSION TO DISCOVER FARA LAID DOWN in her chambers and tended by her ladies as expected, and the earl gone out to the hallow king’s hall. So what drew Wencel there that was more riveting than awaiting the news from the inquest? That he had not escorted his wife to the judges’ bench was no surprise; Wencel quietly avoided Temple Hill, in such a routine fashion as to occasion no remark. But whatever menace the earl concealed, he’d been attending on his sick father-in-law for weeks without Ingrey’s supervision. Ingrey hesitated to pursue him there. Yet.

The situation seemed to have more need for wits than a strong sword arm, and if the body was neglected, the brain flagged, too, so Ingrey took himself to the earl’s kitchen to forage a meal, which was served to him along with certain oblique complaints. After that, he tracked down Tesko and bullied him into giving back to the scullions the money he’d won cheating at dice. His servant temporarily cowed, Ingrey then had him snip and extract the stitches from his scalp and rebandage his sword hand. The long and ragged tear in his discolored skin seemed closed, but still tender, and he pressed the gauze wrapping warily after Tesko tied it off. This should have healed by now.

Autumn dusk crept through the window embrasures as Ingrey sat on his new bed and meditated. The princess’s impending bereavement curtailed the sort of society that had enlivened Hetwar’s palace of an evening, or demanded Ingrey’s services as an escort for its lord or lady. If Earl Horseriver chose to send him off on some untimely courier mission, how then could he carry out his princely mandate to guard Fara, or his self-imposed task to save Ijada? Get one of Hetwar’s men to ride, and remain in Easthome sneaking about spying? The notion seemed stuffed with disastrous complications. His public duty to obey the earl was a pitfall waiting to swallow him, it seemed to Ingrey, and he was not sure Hetwar had quite thought it through.

Could he defy Horseriver? Each of them, it seemed, had been gifted with kindred powers. Horseriver was vastly more practiced, but was he stronger? And what did strength mean, in that boundless hallowed space where visions took seeming shape?

How, for that matter, did one practice, and upon what? Ingrey’s battle-madness could not be rehearsed at all; it came only at need, and in deadly earnest. And the weirding voice—could its suggestions be resisted? Defied? Broken? Did they wear off in time, like Hallana’s demon-sorcery had upon the be-pigged man? Ingrey could not imagine finding glad volunteers to test his talents upon. Though Hallana, he suddenly suspected, would be all for the trial, and Oswin would take careful notes. The image made him smile despite himself.

How old is my wolf? The question niggled him, suddenly. Warily, he turned his perceptions inward, and once more, the sensation was akin to trying to see his own eyes. The accumulated wolf souls seemed to meld together into a smooth unity, as though their boundaries were more permeable somehow; wolves became Wolf in a way that Earls Horseriver had failed to achieve in that tormented soul’s cannibal descent through the generations of his human kin. Ingrey sifted the fragmentary lupine memories that had come to him, both in that first terrible initiation and in later dreams. The viewpoint was odd, and scents seemed more sharply remembered than sights. A sufficiently impoverished rural village of recent days was hardly to be distinguished from a forest town of the lost times.

But suddenly a most peculiar memory surfaced, of chewing with wolf-puppy teeth upon a piece of boiled leather armor, a cuirass almost bigger than he was. The chastisement when he’d been caught at it did not diminish the satisfaction to his sore mouth. The armor had been quite new, dragged to a corner of some dim and smoky hall. The design was distinctive, the breast decoration more so, a silhouette of a wolf’s head with gaping jaws burned into the leather with hot iron. My wolf is as old as the Old Weald, and then some.

As old as Wencel’s horse? Older, surely, in a sense, for his wolf had been abroad, repeatedly reincarnated, for four hundred extra years before being so bloodily harvested. Part of that time had been spent high up in the Cantons, judging by the pictures of cold peaks that lingered in his mind. A long happy period, several domesticated wolf-lives, in some tiny hamlet in a forgotten vale where seasons and generations turned in a slow wheel... The attrition of mischance might have cut short the accumulation of wolf souls, yet had not. Which suggested in turn that Someone with a long, long attention span might have been manipulating those chances. Must have been, his mirthless reason corrected this.

If he ever saw the god again, he could ask, Ingrey supposed. I could ask now. I could pray. He had no desire to; praying held all the appeal of thrusting his hand into the holy fire on the temple plinth and holding it there. Talking to the gods had been a much more comfortable proposition when there had seemed no danger of Their talking back.

He lay back and sought within himself for that millrace-current sense of Ijada. The quiet song of it calmed him instantly. She was not, at this moment, in pain, nor unduly fatigued, except for a tense piling-up of boredom. It did not follow that she was safe; the banal comfort of the narrow house was deceptive, that way. Horseriver had named this link the unintended relict of his murderous geas, and it might be so. Was not some good salvaged from evil, from time to time? He must contrive some way to see her again, secretly and soon. And to communicate. Could this subtle perception be made more explicit? One yank for yes, two yanks for no. Well, perhaps not that, but there must be something.

His brooding was interrupted by a page rapping on his door, bidding him to attend upon the earl. Ingrey armed himself, grabbed up his long court cloak, and descended to the entry hall, where he found Horseriver, who could only have come in a short time ago, preparing to go out again.

With some low-voiced instructions, the earl finished dispatching an anxious groom, then granted Ingrey a civil nod.

'Where away, my lord?'

'The hallow king’s hall.'

'Didn’t you just come from there?'

Wencel nodded. 'It is nearly time. I think the king will not last the night. There is a particular waxy look to the skin'—Wencel passed a hand over his face—'that is a very distinctive herald to these sorts of deaths.'

And Horseriver ought to know. From both sides, Ingrey realized. They were briefly alone in the hall, the servants having been sent to hurry Fara; Ingrey lowered his voice. 'Ought I to suspect you of some uncanny assassination?'

Wencel shook his head, apparently not the least offended by the suggestion. 'His death comes quite without need of any man’s assistance. At one time—long ago—I might have sought to speed it. Or, more vainly, to retard it. Now I just wait. A flicker of days, and it is done.' He vented a long, quiet sigh.

Death, an old familiar, did not disturb Wencel, and yet his languid weariness seemed a mask, to Ingrey. He was tense with some hidden anticipation, revealed, barely, only when his eyes repeatedly checked the staircase for some sign of Fara. At length the princess appeared: pale, chill, cloaked in black.

Ingrey, bearing a lantern, led the way through the darkening streets of Kingstown; the sole retainer, he noted, called to this duty. The evening air was chill and damp—the cobbles would be slippery with dew by midnight—but overhead the first stars shone down from a rainless sky. Wencel escorted his wife on his arm with the unfailing cold courtesy that was his studied habit. Ingrey extended his senses—all of his senses—yet found no new threat looming in the shadows. Indeed, no. We are the threats, Wencel and I.

Torches in brackets lit the entrance to the hallow king’s hall in a flickering glow. Only the name recalled the old forest architectures of timber and thatch, for it was as much a stone palace as any other Easthome noble pile built during the latter days of Darthacan glory. Guardsmen hurried to swing wide the wrought-iron gates and bow