The Hallowed Hunt

boots in her stirrups, smoothed her split skirts, closed her trembling gloved hands tightly over her reins.

'Mount up,' Horseriver directed Ingrey, handing him the gray gelding’s reins. Ingrey did so, though the horse skittered and hopped beneath him, trying to get its head down and buck. Horseriver glanced back and cast another Peace! over his shoulder in a voice of mild irritation, and Ingrey’s mount settled down, if still uneasily. The earl closed the stable doors behind them.

The groom gave Horseriver a leg up, and the earl caught up his stirrups with the toes of his boots without looking, settling himself in his saddle. He reached down and laid a beneficent palm across the groom’s forehead. 'Go home. Sleep. Forget.'

The groom’s eyes went vague, and he turned away, yawning.

Horseriver raised a hand and called to Ingrey and Fara, 'Follow.' He wheeled his mount and led off at a walk into the foggy dark. Hooves scraped on the sloping cobbles, the sound echoing off the walls of the buildings as they wound down through the Kingstown streets.

As they passed through the empty market square, Horseriver leaned over the side of his saddle, pressed his hand to his stomach, and quietly retched. He spat something dark and wet upon the paving bricks. Ingrey, passing after, smelled not bile but blood. Does he bleed for his weirding voice as I do for mine? More discreetly, it seemed. And how much of that treasure had he misspent for Ingrey’s murderous geas, that he named it too much?

The night guards at the southeast town gate let them exit at a simple order from Horseriver. He did not even seem to need the weirding voice to have them saluting him solicitously on his way. Once clear of the walls and the paved causeway, Horseriver pressed his mount into a trot. They turned left at the first village crossroad leading down toward the Stork. Along the rim of the hills behind them, overtaking its heralding pale glow in the sky, a fat gibbous moon broke free and cast their long dim shadows onto the road before them.

Where are we going? Why does he want us? What are we going to do when we get there?

Ingrey gritted his teeth in frustration that he’d had no chance to send a message. Or leave one... He tried to imagine what folk would make tomorrow morning of the mess left in the stables: three horses and the stag gone, one mare bloodily dead, an untidy pile of court dress left on the tack room floor. They had left Easthome swiftly and quietly, to be sure, but by no means in secret. For Fara’s sake alone, there would surely be pursuit. Then whatever Horseriver plans, he expects it to go quickly, before pursuit can arrive. Should I seek delay?

It was Ingrey’s charge to spy on Horseriver and guard Fara. So far the first was going swimmingly, in a way, but he was surely making a hash of the second, for all that he rode beside her seeming to guard her still. He’d made an effort with the stag that had proved sadly misdirected. His lurid fear that Horseriver might want his wife for some bizarre blood sacrifice did not stand up to reasonable examination. She could not be hanged from a tree as courier to the gods in her new horse-spirit-ridden state, nor was she virgin for all her barrenness. Nor did Ingrey think that Horseriver wanted to communicate with the gods, beyond obscene gestures of defiance. And where were They, in this night of inexplicable events?

Stags for the Stagthornes. Horses for the Horserivers. Fara was a Horseriver by marriage, however unsatisfactory the union had been for her, and there was a Horseriver bride or two up her Stagthorne family tree as well, and not too far up at that. The earl’s sister-daughter-granddaughters all, they must have been in their day, Ingrey now realized. The loops in that family braid were staggering in their interlace, if one thought of the earl as one man and not a dozen. Kin. Kin. What of kin?

A hallow king’s banner-carrier was traditionally a close kinsman. Symark was second cousin to Biast, and had been his elder brother Byza’s bannerman before that. The late king’s own longtime bannerman had died half a year before him, from natural causes, and the old man had delayed replacing him—anticipating his own end even then and scorning to set some latecomer in that treasured companion’s place? Or had a new appointment been blocked by Horseriver, for arcane reasons? A hallow king needed a bannerman of his own high blood, to match his honor. Or banner-woman? Ingrey glanced aside at Fara, clinging to her mount, her face pale and shadowed. She was an adequate horsewoman only. This night would test her endurance.

Hetwar would blister him for this. If he lived. If he lived, Ingrey decided, Hetwar could blister him to his heart’s content. Better—if he and Fara lived, it would set an interesting conundrum for Ijada’s judges. Any precedent of punishment or reprieve to Ijada for bearing her leopard must logically apply also to the princess and her new night-mare. I think I could do something with this. And if I couldn’t, I’ll wager Oswin could.

They neared the Stork and turned north along the main river road. The moonlight reflecting off the river’s broad surface filtered in bright bursts through the trees lining the banks. Past the clip of hooves and creak of leather Ingrey could hear the faint rippling of the current, mixing with the whisper of falling leaves.

He kneed Wolf forward to match the big chestnut’s long gait. 'Sire, where are we going?'

Horseriver’s head turned, and his teeth flashed briefly in the shadows at the honorific. 'Can you not guess?'

North. They could be in flight to exile in the Cantons, but somehow Ingrey thought not. A two-day ride at a courier’s pace would bring them to the edge of the Raven Range...

'The Wounded Woods. Bloodfield.'

'Holytree that was. Very good, my wise wolfling.'

Ingrey waited, but Horseriver added nothing else. After a moment, the earl urged his horse into a canter, and the other two mounts snorted and picked up the pace.

Ingrey’s reason still worked, it seemed. It was his emotions that Horseriver’s kingship had overwhelmed. What a strange geas—no, this was no mere spell. Not at all like the tight, self-contained parasite magic he had fought and defeated at Red Dike. This was something else, huge and old and strong. Older than Horseriver himself? Nor did it feel intrinsically evil, though all gifts turned to despair in Horseriver’s age- blackened hands.

The terrible charisma of kings... men crept close, longing to bask in it, for something more than material reward. The lure of heroism, the benediction of action, might have only death for its prize, and yet men flocked to the king’s banner. The seductive promise of perfection of self in service to this high bright-seeming thing?

Horseriver had not made his kingship out of himself alone, all those centuries ago. He had received it as heirloom—time immemorial was all too true a phrase for a tradition that knew no writing to bind the years in tame ranks, but the kin tribes had been on this ground so long they seemed as old as the great dark forest itself. Whatever royal magic they had made out of themselves, they had been making it for a very, very long time.

The old kinsmen, even by their own accounts, had been a collection of arrogant, stiff-necked, bloody- minded, and bloody-handed madmen. It would take something as intense as this burning glamour to bring them into any sort of line, however ragged. Fear of Audar had driven them, to be sure, in their late days, but fear was as likely to scatter efforts like leaves in a storm as to concentrate them. How much energy had Horseriver possessed, how much expended, to bring that great rite at Holytree even to a beginning, let alone to fruition? If this was his kingship’s last dying gasp, what must it have been in its fierce prime?

The rising moon met the rising mists to turn the world into a seething sea of light. The hallow king raised and flung down his arm, and led his followers in a hard gallop up this straight flat glowing stretch of river road. They seemed to course the clouds, flying. Ingrey’s eyes watered in the chill wind of their passage. His horse bounded effortlessly between his gripping legs, and Ingrey, his heart bursting, threw back his head and drank the rushing night. Failure lay behind, ruin, perhaps, ahead; but in this silver hour he was glorified.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

BY THE TIME THE MOON WAS HIGH, THE LATHERED HORSES were flagging. They were