THE HALLOW KING'S BEDCHAMBER WAS LESS CROWDED THAN Ingrey had imagined it. One green-robed physician and his acolyte sat near the head of the canopied bed with an air of depressed quietude that acknowledged all their medical efforts now vain. A divine in the gray garb of the Father's Order waited also, in an inverse mood of stretched readiness not yet called upon. In a room beyond an antechamber, out of sight and, thankfully, muffled by the intervening walls, a five-voice chorus of Temple singers started a hymn. The quintet sounded hoarse and tired; perhaps they would take a rest soon.
Ingrey studied the king in the bed. He was not weighted by such dark intrusions as Ingrey's or Wencel's, not shaman, nor sorcerer, nor saint; he was but a man, if a riveting one even in this last hour. He was a long way now from the Stagthorne scion Hetwar nostalgically spoke of from his childhood, who had taken the prince-marshal's banner from his own father's kingly hand to earn early victory and reputation in a now half-forgotten border clash with Darthaca. When Ingrey had first returned to the Weald in Hetwar's train, the king had been hale and vigorous despite his graying head and all the sorrows of his life. The past months of creeping illness had aged him speedily, as if to make up for lost time.
Now his final sleep was upon him. Ingrey hoped Fara had exchanged whatever last words she wanted with her father earlier, for there would be no more tonight. The thin, spotted skin, an ugly yellow shade, indeed bore that waxy sheen Horseriver had named the harbinger of finality. More: the king's breathing was harsh and hesitant, each breath drawn in and released, followed by a pause that drew all eyes, until the chest heaved again, and the gazes dropped away.
The glance Fara cast him was equally devoid of both fear and consolation, or indeed, much expression at all. Ingrey was impressed that she did not snarl in return; if offered such a platitude in such a moment, he would have been tempted to draw steel and run the divine through. She merely murmured, “Where is my brother Biast? He should be here. And the archdivine.”
“He was here earlier, my lady, for a good long time, and will return shortly. I expect the archdivine and my lord Hetwar will be accompanying him.”
She nodded once and shrugged away from him. His hand hesitated in air, as if to offer another consolatory pawing, but fortunately he thought better of it, stepping away to leave the princess in her stolid sorrow.
Horseriver stood watching all this with his feet braced a little apart, the picture of a supporting spouse and lord. His face seemed no more stern than the occasion demanded. It was only to Ingrey's eye that he seemed crouched like a cat at a mousehole. What more was about to happen in this room than the long-expected death of an aged man, even if aged king? Horseriver had been hovering in Easthome for weeks. What did he await, besides the end of this vigil? And if his presence here was so vital to his schemes, how much had it maddened him to have to break away and tend to the untimely intrusion of Boleso's funeral?
There are two hallow kings in this room. How can there be two?
The question Ingrey had asked in Hetwar's chambers, to which he'd received no satisfactory reply, came back to him now. What made the hallow kingship hallowed? Ingrey could barely guess. Horseriver, he suspected, knew.
Ingrey felt his own blood pulsing through his veins. He would have thought the piling up of his wolf's wolf-lives, and of Horseriver's stallion's horse-lives, would have made each more quintessentially wolf or horse, but it seemed not; it was as though all such wisdom-creatures converged on some common center, the denser and deeper they grew. They are both a lot like each other, Ijada had said. Indeed.
The hymn singers came to the end of their piece, and stopped; a faint shuffling suggested a recess. The Mother's acolyte had been dispatched down the corridor to watch out for Prince-marshal Biast. The divine had walked to the other side of the chamber and was helping himself to a glass of water. From the bed came a labored breath that was not followed by another.
Fara's face went stiffer, her eyes glassy with moisture that did not fall. Horseriver stepped briefly forward only to hand her a lace handkerchief, which she clutched with a spasm of her hand, then stepped back. The earl did not say anything foolish. He did not say anything at all.
He did shift back a pace, then rose almost on his toes, stretching his arms out like a falconer calling his bird to him.
Ingrey boiled up to full alertness, craning his neck and straining his senses. Ingrey could not see souls, as saints were reputed to do. He discerned the departing essence only because something unwound from it in its passing, spooling off like some heady perfume spiraling through the air. Gods, he had more than felt before; only by that experience could he identify the vast Presence that raised his hackles like a breath in the dark. But this One was not to his address, and was gone with its prize before his pupils could widen in a futile effort to take it in.
Ingrey caught the moment when Horseriver's head jerked back and breathed the kingship in. The earl staggered a little, as though a great eagle had landed upon those outstretched falconer's arms. His eyes squeezed shut, he folded his arms around himself, and he breathed out in a satisfied huff. When his eyes snapped open again, they blazed.
Holy fire, thought Ingrey. And, So fast! What just happened? Surely Horseriver had not-no, he had not waylaid the hallow king's departing soul and taken it in like another spirit animal atop the dark, distorted hoard he held already. And his spell for deathlessness captured body and soul both, leaving his own corpse behind like an emptied husk. Ingrey whispered in mystification to Wencel, “Have you stolen a blessing from the gods…?”
Horseriver's faint mirth nearly melted his heart. “This”-the earl gestured down himself, barely breathing the words-“was never the gods'. We made it ourselves. It belongs here. It was wrenched from me two and a half centuries ago. Now it returns. For a little time.”
The Father's divine, oblivious to all this, had hurried to the hallow king's bedside, where the physician was bent over making his final examination. They murmured together in grave consultation. The divine signed the corpse and himself, and began intoning a short prayer.
So. Wencel was revealed in another lie, or half-truth; Ingrey could not summon the least surprise anymore. There had not been two hallow kings in this room; there had been two partial kings, mutually crippled, each holding hostage the other's fulfillment. Now there was one, whole again. Ingrey shivered under the terrible weight of his sovereign smile.
Fara turned to glance at her husband: her eyes widened and her breath drew in. If she saw one-tenth the towering glamour with her ordinary eyes that Ingrey sensed with his shaman's sight, he could not wonder at her sudden awe. Horseriver licked his thumb again and touched her brow, then moved to embrace her, leaning their foreheads together in a gesture one might mistake for comfort or blessing. Fara's eyes, when he drew back, were glazed and staring. Ingrey wondered if his own eyes looked just like that.
His arm around his wife's waist as if to support her, the earl turned to the Father's divine. “Tell my brother-in-law, when he arrives, that I have taken the princess home to lie down. All of this has brought on one of her debilitating headaches, I'm afraid.”
The divine, suddenly very attentive to the earl, nodded eager understanding. “Of course, my lord. I am so sorry for your loss, my lady. But your father's soul is born now into a better world.”
Horseriver's lips twisted. “Indeed, all men are born pregnant with their own deaths. The experienced eye can watch it quicken within them day by day.”
The divine flinched at this disturbing metaphor, but plowed on sturdily. “I'm not sure that-” Horseriver held up a restraining hand, and the man fell silent at once. “Peace. Tell the prince-marshal that we will meet with him in the morning. Late morning, probably. He may begin the arrangements as he wills.”
“Ingrey…” Horseriver turned to his retainer, and his lips drew back on the most disquieting smile yet. His voice dropped to an eerie low register that vibrated through Ingrey's bones. “Heel.”
Furious, fascinated, and frantic, Ingrey bowed and followed his master out.
HORSERIVER HUSTLED HIS WIFE AND INGREY SWIFTLY AND ALONE through the darkened corridors of the hallow king's hall. Another murmur of Peace had the gate guards saluting them through without hindrance or question. They turned into the night streets, the air growing misty in the gathering chill. As they rounded the first corner, Ingrey looked back over his shoulder and saw a procession of swinging lanterns. Voices carried through the fog: Biast and a noble company hurrying back to his father's deathbed. Too late. Ingrey's ear picked out Hetwar's voice, replying to the prince-marshal. He wondered if Hetwar carried the hallow king's seal that was his charge in its oak box, together with the silver hammer to break it at the bedside.
Horseriver's party was lightless, black-cloaked, stepping softly; Ingrey doubted anyone from the prince-marshal's retinue saw them at all. They started down the hill. A few streets farther on, they did not turn aside to Horseriver's mansion as Ingrey expected, but continued till the stable mews loomed out of the darkness. The doors were open wide, and a few lanterns, hung from the rafters, burned softly within the redolent space.
A groom scrambled up from the bench by the outer wall and bowed fearfully as the earl approached. “All is ready, my lord. The clothes are in the tack room.” “Good. Stay a moment.”
Horseriver pointed to a lantern, which Ingrey reached up and retrieved, then led them through the open door of the tack room. Harness glowed on the wall pegs, with leather burnished and brightwork shining. Across some empty saddle racks, three piles of garments waited. Ingrey recognized his own riding leathers, together with his boots standing below. Another was a woman's riding habit in some wine-dark fabric picked out with gold thread. Horseriver gestured to the piles. “Clothe yourselves,” he addressed Fara and Ingrey equally, “and make ready to ride.”
Stone-faced, Fara dropped her voluminous cloak, which whispered to the wooden floor. “I must have help with the buttons, my lord,” she said levelly.
“Ah, yes.” Horseriver grimaced, and with practiced fingers undid the row of tiny pearl buttons down her back from their velvet loops. Ingrey stripped off court cloak, town shoes, and silver-stitched jerkin and had his leathers hiked up and fastened before Fara's dress and petticoats fell in a pool at her feet. He did not think either of them was prey to embarrassment at this unexpected intimacy. Exaltation, bewilderment, and terror left no room for lesser emotions. He slipped his boots on and straightened, then cinched up his belt for knife and scabbard. His unholy liege lord was still absorbed in the intricacies of his wife's garb.
As the earl raised his arms to help Fara into her jacket, Ingrey's eye caught the gleam of new leather from a knife sheath at his waist. New sheath; new knife? Quietly, he backed out of the tack room into the stable aisle. Could he defy Horseriver's entrancing will? If he could think resistance, surely he could act it? If he did not think too hard? Ijada, what is happening to you now? He could no longer tell. This moment was clearly well prepared for; with Ingrey securely leashed, had the earl readied some fatal assault on that narrow house, as well?
He was still standing there struggling…not so much to move, as to want to move, when the earl appeared again, his own town robes exchanged for leathers and boots, escorting Fara firmly with one hand clenched around her upper arm. Horseriver glanced aside at the empty stall and, to Ingrey's dismay, merely smiled sourly. “You almost frighten me,” he remarked in passing. “That was inspired. So nearly right. Perhaps I should muzzle you, as well.”
He said no more, but aimed Fara into the straight stall where Ijada's chestnut mare shifted uneasily.
“I'm afraid of that horse, my lord,” Fara quavered.
“Not for much longer, I promise you,” he murmured back. Ingrey could not see more over the boards and past the vine-decorated metal bars than the horse's flickering ears and the tops of Horseriver's blond and Fara's dark heads, but he heard a leathery whisper as of a knife being drawn. A low murmur from the earl in words he half recognized made his blood race and raised all the hairs on his arms. Then a meaty thunk, a truncated squeal, a jerk against a head rope that shook the walls-then a thudding of a heavy body collapsing, convulsing, and going still.
The two heads moved back into the aisle. Fara was leaning against Horseriver, shuddering fiercely. If blood spattered her riding costume, it did not show in the dark. “What have you done to me…?” she moaned.
“Sh,” Horseriver soothed her. He touched her brow with his thumb again, renewing her glassy stare. The horse-shadow, too, quieted, though seeming more benumbed than calmed. “It will be well. Come along, now.”
The apprehensive groom had reappeared. “My lord? What was-”
“Fetch the horses.”
The three saddled horses were marshaled in the darkened court before the mews. The groom and Horseriver between them boosted Fara aboard her bay mare; Horseriver himself checked her girths, adjusted her 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?
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?
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?”
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?