Wasn’t it?
“But…” Ijada’s lovely lips thinned with thought. “Sealmaster Hetwar must have a hundred swordsmen, soldiers, bravos. A half dozen of his guardsmen rode out with you. The…the person, whoever—might have laid the geas on any of them just as well. Why should the only man in Easthome who is known to bear an animal spirit be sent to me?”
A flash of expression—insight, satisfaction?—flew across Learned Hallana’s face and vanished. But she did not speak, only sat back more intently, presumably because leaning forward more intently was not feasible. “Is it widely known, your spiritual affliction?” she asked.
Ingrey shrugged. “It is general gossip, yes. Variously garbled. My reputation is useful to Hetwar. I’m not someone most men want to cross.” Or have around them for very long, or invite to their tables, or, above all, introduce to their female kin. But I’m well accustomed to that, by now.
Ijada’s eyes widened. “You were chosen because your wolf could be blamed! Hetwar chose you. Therefore, he must be the source of the geas!”
Ingrey did not care for that thought. “Not necessarily. Lord Hetwar was in consultation for some time before I came. Any man in the room might have suggested me for the task.” The wolf part, however, seemed all too plausible. Ingrey himself had been ready to blame his prisoner’s death on his wolf-within. He’d have stood self-accused, incapable of his own defense. Presuming he’d even survived his attempt on Lady Ijada’s life…he remembered yesterday’s near-fatal swim. One way or another, victim and tool would both have been silenced.
Two extremely unpleasant realizations crept over Ingrey. One was that he was still bearing Lady Ijada toward her potential death. Her drowning in the river yesterday could have been no worse than some later poisoning or strangling in her cell, and a hundred times more merciful than the horrors of a dubious trial and subsequent hanging.
And the other was that an enemy of great and secret power was going to be seriously upset when they both arrived at Easthome alive.
CHAPTER SIX
INGREY WOKE FEVERISH FROM DIMLY REMEMBERED NIGHTMARES. He blinked in the level light coming through the dormer window in the tiny, but private, chamber high up in the eaves of his inn. Dawn. Time to move.
Movement unleashed pain in every strained and sprained muscle he possessed, which seemed to be most of them, and he hastily abandoned his attempt to sit up. But lying back did not bring relief. He gingerly turned his head, his neck on fire, and eyed the trap of crockery he’d set on the floor by his door. The teetering pile appeared undisturbed. Good sign.
The wraps on his wrists and right hand were holding, although stained with brown blood. He stretched and clenched his fingers. So. Last evening had been no dream, for all its hallucinatory terrors. His stomach tightened in anxiety—painfully—as the memories mounted.
Groaning, he forced himself up again, lurched out of bed, and staggered to his washstand. A left-handed splash of cold water on his face helped nothing. He pulled on his trousers, sat on the edge of his bed, and attempted his boots. They would not slide over his swollen ankles. Defeated, he let them fall to the floor. He lowered his body carefully into his rumpled bed linens. Reason, in his head, seemed replaced by a kind of buzz. He lay for what was probably half the turning of a glass, judging by the creep of the sunlit squares across his wall, with no more useful thought than a surly resentment of his hopeless boots.
Hinges squeaked; a clatter of crockery was overridden by Rider Gesca’s startled swearing. Ingrey squinted at the door. Gesca, grimacing in bewilderment, picked his way across the dislodged barrier of tumbling beakers and plates. The lieutenant was dressed for the road in boots and leathers and Hetwar’s slate-blue tabard, and tidied for the solemnity of the duty: drab blond hair combed, amiable face new-shaved. He stared down at Ingrey in dismay. “My lord?”
“Ah. Gesca.” When the noise of rolling saucers died away, Ingrey managed, “How is pig-boy this morning?”
Gesca shook his head, seeming caught between wariness and exasperation. “His delusions passed off about midnight. We put him to bed.”
“See that he does not approach or annoy Learned Hallana again.”
“I don’t think that will be a problem.” Gesca’s worried eyes summed the bruises and bandages. “Lord Ingrey—what happened to you last night?”
Ingrey hesitated. “What do they say happened?”
“They say you were locked in with that sorceress for a couple of hours when suddenly a racket rose from the room—howling, and thumping to bring down the plaster from the ceiling below, and yelling. Sounded like someone being murdered.”
Almost…
“The sorceress and her servants went out later as though nothing had happened, and you left limping, not talking to anyone.”
Ingrey reviewed the excuses Hallana had called through the door, as well as he could remember them. “Yes. I was carrying a…ham, and a carving knife, and I tripped over a chair.” No, she hadn’t said a chair. “Upended the table. Cut my hand going down.”
Gesca’s face screwed up, as he no doubt tried to picture how this event could result in Ingrey’s peculiar array of bandages and bruises. “We’re almost ready to load up, out there. The Red Dike divine is waiting to bless Prince Boleso’s coffin. Are you going to be able to ride? After your accident.” He added after a reflective moment, “Accidents.”
Do I look that bad? “Did you deliver my message for Lord Hetwar to the Temple courier?”
“Yes. She rode out at first light.”
“Then…tell the men to stand down. I expect instructions. Better wait. We’ll take a day to rest the horses.”
Gesca gestured assent, but his stare plainly questioned why Ingrey had driven both men and animals to their limits for two long days only to spend the time so gained idling here. He picked up the crockery, set it on the washstand, gave Ingrey another bemused look, and made his way out.
Ingrey had scrawled his latest note to Lord Hetwar immediately upon their arrival last night, reporting the cortege in Red Dike and pressing for relief of his command, feigning inability to supply adequate ceremony. The note had contained, therefore, no word of the Temple sorceress or hint of the later events in that upstairs room. He hadn’t mentioned the incident of the river, or, indeed, any remark upon his prisoner at all. Uneasy awareness of his duty to report the truth to the sealmaster warred now with fear, in his heart. Fear and rage. Who placed that grotesque geas in me, and how? Why was I made a witless tool?
And can it happen again?
His own anger frightened him even as his fear stoked his fury, tightening his throat and making his temples throb. He lay back, trying to remember the hard-won self-disciplines that had stilled him under the earnest holy tortures at Birchgrove. Slowly, he willed his screaming muscles to resistless quiet again.
His wolf had been released last night. He had unchained it. Was it leashed again this morning? And if not…what then? For all the aches in his body, his mind felt no different from any other morning of his adult life. So was his frozen hesitation here in Red Dike just old habit, or was it good sense? Simple prudence, to refuse to advance one step farther toward Easthome in his present lethal ignorance? His physical injuries made a plausible blind to hide behind. But were they a hunter’s screen or just a coward’s refuge? His caged thoughts circled.
Another tap at the door broke the tensing upward spiral of his disquiet, and a sharp female voice inquired, “Lord Ingrey? I need to see you.”
“Mistress Hergi. Come in.” Belatedly, Ingrey grew conscious of his shirtless state. But she was presumably an experienced dedicat of the Mother’s order, and no blushing maiden. Still, it would be courteous to at least sit up. It would.
“Hm.” Her lips thinned as she stepped to the bedside and regarded him, a coolly capable glint in her eye. “Rider Gesca did not exaggerate. Well, there is no help for it; you must get up. Learned Madam wishes to see your prisoner before she leaves, and I would have her on the road home at t
he earliest moment. We had enough trouble getting here; I dread the return trip. Come, now. Oh, dear. Let me see, better start with…”
She plunked her leather case down on the washstand and rummaged within, withdrawing a square blue glass bottle and pulling out the cork stopper. She poured a sinister syrup into a spoon, and as Ingrey creaked up on one elbow to ask, “What is it?” popped it into his mouth. The liquid tasted utterly vile. He swallowed, afraid to spit it out under her steely gaze.
“A decoction of willow bark and poppy, wine spirits, and a few other useful things.” Her gaze traveled up and down his body; she pursed her lips, then bent and administered another spoonful. She nodded shortly and restoppered the bottle. “That should do it.”
Ingrey swallowed medicine and a surge of bile. “It’s revolting.”
“Eh, you’ll change your mind about it soon enough, I warrant. Here. Let’s see how my work is holding up.”
Efficiently, she unbound his wrappings, applied new ointment and fresh bandages, daubed the stitches in his hair with something that stung, combed out the tangles, washed his torso, and shaved him, batting his hands away as he tried to protest his own competence to dress himself. “Don’t you be getting my new wraps wet, now, my lord. And stop fighting me. I’ll have no delays out of you.”
He hadn’t been dressed like this by a woman since he was six, but his pain was fading most deliciously away, to be replaced by a floating lassitude. He stopped fighting her. The intensity of her concentration, he realized dimly, had nothing to do with him.
“Is Learned Hallana all right? After last night?” he asked cautiously.
“Baby’s shifted position. Could be a day, could be a week, but there are twenty-five miles of bad roads between here and Suttleaf, and I wish I had her home safe now. Now, you mind me, Lord Ingrey; don’t you dare do anything to detain her. Whatever she wants from you, give it to her without argument, if you please.” She sniffed rather fiercely.
“Yes, Mistress,” Ingrey answered humbly. He added after a blinking moment, “Your potion seems very effective. Can I keep the bottle?”
“No.” She knelt by his feet. “Oh. Your boots won’t do, will they? Do you have any other shoes with you…?” She scavenged ruthlessly in his saddlebags, to emerge with a pair of worn leather buskins that she jammed onto his feet. “Up you come, now.”
The agony, as she pulled on his arms, seemed pleasantly distant, like news from another country. She towed him relentlessly out the door.
THE SORCERESS-PHYSICIAN WAS ALREADY WAITING IN THE TAP-room of Ijada’s inn at the other end of Red Dike’s main street. Learned Hallana eyed his bandages, and inquired politely, “I trust this morning finds you much recovered, Lord Ingrey?”
“Yes. Thank you. Your medicine helped. Though it made an odd breakfast.” He smiled at her, a trifle hazily he feared.
“Oh. It would.” She glanced at Hergi. “How much…?” Hergi held up two fingers. Ingrey could not decide if the twitch of the divine’s eyebrows was censure or approval, for Hergi merely shrugged in return.
Ingrey followed both women upstairs once more. They were admitted to the parlor, a little doubtfully, by the female warden. Ingrey looked around surreptitiously for signs of his late frenzy, finding none but for a few faint bloodstains and dents on the oak floorboards. Ijada stepped from the bedchamber at the sound of their entry. She was dressed for travel in the same gray-blue riding costume as yesterday, but had put off her boots in favor of light leather shoes. Uneasily, Ingrey searched her pale face; her expression, returning his gaze, was sober and pensive.
More uneasily, he searched his own shifted perceptions. She seemed not so much different to him this morning as more, with an energetic density to her person that seized his focus. A heady warm scent, like sunlight in dry grass, arose from her. He found his lips parting to better taste that sun-smell—a futile effort, as it did not come through the air.
Hallana, too, had more than a taste of the uncanny about her, a dizzying busyness partly from her pregnancy but mostly from a subdued swirl, smelling like a whiff of wind after a lightning strike, that he took for her pacified demon. The two ordinary women, Hergi and the warden, seemed suddenly thin and flat and dry by comparison, as though drawn on paper.
Learned Hallana embraced Ijada and pressed a letter into her hands.
“I must leave very soon, or we won’t be home before dark,” the divine told her. “I wish I could go along with you, instead. This is all most disturbing, especially…” She jerked her head at Ingrey, indicating his late geas, and his lips twisted in agreement. “That alone would make this Temple business, even without…well, never mind. Five gods guard you on your journey. This is a note to the master of my order in Easthome, begging his interest in your case. With luck, he can take up with you where I am forced to leave off.” She glanced Ingrey’s way again, an untrusting tension around her mouth. “I charge you, my lord, to help see that this arrives at its destination. And no other.”
He opened his hand in an ambiguous acknowledgment, and Hallana’s lips thinned a little more. As Hetwar’s agent, he had learned how to open and copy letters without leaving traces, and he was fairly certain she guessed he knew those tricks of a spy’s trade. Yet the Bastard was the very god of spies; what tricks might His sorceress know? And to which of her two holy orders had she addressed her concerns? Still, if she had enspelled the missive in any way, it was not apparent to Ingrey’s new perceptions.
“Learned…” Ijada’s voice was suddenly thin and uncertain. Learned, not dear Hallana, Ingrey noted. Hergi stood alertly ready to usher her mistress out the door; she frowned in frustration as the divine turned back.
“Yes, child?”
“No…never mind. It’s nothing. Foolishness.”
“Suppose you let me be the judge of that.” Hallana lowered herself into a chair and tilted her head encouragingly.
“I had a very odd dream last night.” Ijada stepped nervously back and forth, then settled in the window seat. “A new one.”
“How odd?”
“Unusually vivid. I remembered it in the morning right away, when I awoke, when my other dreams melted away out of my mind.”
“Go on.” Hallana’s face seemed carved, so careful was her listening.
“It was brief, just a flash of a vision. It seemed to me I saw a sort of…I don’t know. Death-haunt, in the shape of a stallion. Black as soot, black without gleam or reflection. Galloping, but very slowly. Its nostrils were red and glowing, and steamed; its mane and tail trailed fire. Sparks struck from its hooves, leaving prints of flame that burned all to ash in its wake. Clouds of ash and shadow. Its rider was as dark as it was.”
“Hm. Was the rider male or female?”
Ijada frowned. “That seems like the wrong question to ask. The rider’s legs curved down to become the horse’s ribs, as if their bodies were grown together. In the left hand, it held a leash. At the end of the leash ran a great wolf.”
Hallana’s eyebrows went up, and she cast a glance at Ingrey. “Did you recognize this, ah, particular wolf?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe. Its pelt was pewter-black, just like…” Her voice trailed off, then firmed. “In my dream, anyway, I thought it felt familiar.” Briefly, her hazel eyes bored into Ingrey’s, her sober look returning, to his immense discomfort. “But it was altogether a wolf, this time. It wore a spiked collar, but turned inside out, with the sharp points digging inward. Blood splashed from its paws as it ran, turning the ash it trod to splotches of black mud. Then the shadow and the cinders choked my breath and my sight, and I saw no more.”
Learned Hallana pursed her lips. “My word, child. Vivid, indeed. I’ll have to think about that one.”
“Do you think it might have been significant? Or was it just an aftershock from…” She gestured around the room, plainly recalling the bizarre events of last evening here, then looked at Ingrey sideways through her lashes.
“Significant dreams,” said Hallana, a faint didactic t
inge leaking into her tone, “may be prophecy, warning, or directive. Do you have any sense of which this might be?”
“No. It was very brief, as I said. Though intense.”
“What did you feel? Not when you awoke, but then, within the dream? Were you frightened?”
“Not frightened, exactly. Or at least, not for myself. I was more furious. Balked. As though I were trying to catch up, and could not.”
A little silence fell. After a moment Ijada ventured, “Learned? What should I do?”
Hallana seemed to wrench her distant expression into an unfelt smile. “Well…prayer never hurts.”
“That hardly seems like an answer.”
“In your case, it might be. This is not a reassurance.”
Ijada rubbed her forehead, as though it ached. “I’m not sure I want more such dreams.”
Ingrey, too, wanted to beg, Learned, what shall I do? But what answer, after all, could she give him? To stay frozen here? Easthome would only come to him, with all due ceremony. Travel on, as was his plain duty? Surely a Temple divine could advise no other course. Flee, or set Ijada to flight? Would she even go? He’d offered escape to her once, in that tangled wood. She’d sensibly refused. But what if her flight were made more practical? An escape in the night, with no hint to Ingrey’s masters, oh no, as to how or from whose hand she had acquired horse, pack, money…escort? We must speak again of this. Or could he give her over to the sorceress, her friend—send her in secret to Suttleaf? Surely, if such a sanctuary were possible, Learned Hallana would have offered it already. He strangled his beginning noise of inquiry in a cough, scorning to be dismissed with instructions to pray.