lois Bujold - The Hallowed Hunt

Ingrey hardly knew what to reply to that, although the term interregnum seemed to rumble in his mind, fraught with elusive weight. Through the mellow glow of his embezzled fealty, he gleaned his wits, and asked, “What was the stag for?”

“What, hadn't you guessed?”

“I thought you meant to invest it in Fara, to make her a spirit warrior, or to carry something away from her father. But then you chose the mare.”

“When playing against the gods, sudden unexpected ploys sometimes work better than deep-laid plans. Even They cannot block every chance. The stag was a great beast in the making; four stag-lives it has accumulated since I began it. But the hallow king's death fell before the stag was ready. I don't know if They hastened the one or delayed the other.”

“Someone. I had not yet decided whom. Were it not for securing you instead, I would have had to chance the unripe beast. Your wolf is surer, despite being less, ah, tame. Stronger. Better.”

Ingrey declined to wag his tail at this pat, though it took effort. Better for whom? His exhausted mind struggled to put the pieces together. A shaman, a banner-carrier, a hallow king, and the sacred ground of Holytree. And blood, no doubt. There had to be blood in there somewhere. Assemble them and achieve…what? No mere material purpose, surely. What was Wencel about, that the gods themselves should struggle to invade the world of matter to oppose it? What could Wencel aspire to beyond his bedazzling kingship?

What was greater than a king? Had Wencel's aspirations outgrown matter altogether? Four had become Five once, in the legendary past; could Five become Six?

“What do you plan to make of yourself, then? A god, or demigod?”

Wencel choked on his wine. “Ah, youth! So ambitious! And you yourself have seen a god, you claim. Go to bed, Ingrey. You're driveling.”

“What, then?” Ingrey asked stubbornly, although he did press himself to his feet.

“I told you what I wanted. You have forgotten.”

I want my world back, Wencel had cried in fierce despair into Ingrey's face. He had not forgotten, and wasn't sure he could if he tried. “No. But it cannot be had.”

“Just so. Go to bed. We ride at midmorning.”

Ingrey staggered into the farmhouse to find the cot that had been prepared for him, then lay staring upward in the dark despite his weariness. Surely his thrall to Horseriver was not absolute, or it would not chafe him so. Wencel's glamour sat ill upon his crooked shoulders, like a king's gilded armor, made in the flush of his youth, put upon a wizened old man. A dissonance between the man and his kingship that even Ingrey could sense whispered through the fissures.

His own present duties, to penetrate Horseriver's secrets and to defend Fara, both glued him to Horseriver's side perforce. Perhaps an effort to escape was premature. Better to lull his captor, watch, and wait his chance? Trust in the pursuit that his reason and private knowledge told him must follow? Pray?

He hadn't prayed before bed in his adult life. But sleep gave dreams and in dreams, gods sometimes walked. And talked. His dreams were no garden for Them to stroll in, as Hallana's were said to be, but in this remnant of night he prayed to be possessed.

BUT WHATEVER INGREY DREAMED VANISHED UPON AWAKENING. He shot up with a start when the groom shook his shoulder. Washbasin, food, and drink were thrust at him; Wencel had them on the road again within half the turning of a glass.

The rising land grew ever more rural and remote. There were other people and beasts on the road now in the broad day: farm wagons, pack trains, slower riders, sheep, cows, pigs. Wencel's gallop of last night gave way to a less conspicuous canter, alternated with trotting and walking where the road grew steep or, increasingly, bad. Nonetheless it was apparent that the pace was finely calculated to wring the maximum distance from their mounts in the minimum time. An hour after noon, another aging farmhouse yielded up another meal and change of horses.

Given the effect that Wencel's kingship had on him, it occurred to Ingrey to wonder what it would do to women. He watched Fara's response to Wencel, seeking his female mirror. She was dazzled, even astonished, when her eyes rested on her transformed husband, her lips parting in unconscious desire. But not happy. She already possessed what other women might vainly aspire to, and yet…not. Wencel's gaze in return offered nothing but cool evaluation, as though she were a mount of dubious soundness somehow foisted upon him, and she flinched under the disdain. Fara might not be brilliant or brave, but neither was she safe to betray. She had resisted Wencel's perceived infidelity before, if to disastrous consequence. Was she as entirely his chattel as he seemed to think?

Was Ingrey? Ingrey sought inward. His wolf and he were no longer divisible in this life, but it seemed to him that the uncanny part of himself was more fully and fawningly under Horseriver's spell than the rational. The part of him that thought in words remained more free. He had chained his wolf once, when he'd been younger and more frightened and bewildered than this. If the hallow king had leashed his wolf, did he truly control all there was of Ingrey?

He seeks speed. To resist, I should seek delay.

Horseriver slowed them to a walk again, looking leftward. At length, he turned toward the river upon a lesser road, and the horses slithered down a long bank through a thin screen of pine trees. Dirt gave way to stones; they faced not a rickety rural bridge, but a ford across the upper Stork. The Raven Range gave forth steady and abundant springs. The water here was not in so muddy a spate as the ford at which Boleso's cortege had so nearly come to grief, but the river was wide and deep despite the recent drought in this region that put a dusty autumn haze in the blue air.

Both horses stumbled, and Fara's went down. Ingrey had already kicked his feet free of his stirrups. He lunged out of his saddle, slid over the flanks of her plunging horse, and made a valiant grab for the princess.

She'd kept a grasp on one stirrup. Her wallowing mount might well have towed her to the far bank, but Ingrey's grip and weight yanked her away. She gave a brief cry ending in a gurgle as her head went under. Horseriver whipped around in time to see Ingrey trying to pull her back to the surface as they both were swept downstream.

“Stay!” the earl cried. Ingrey jerked in response, but though that uncanny voice might command man or beast, it had no effect on the heavy current. The water was chill but not bitterly so, and this time, Ingrey managed to avoid clouting his head on a boulder. But this time, he also discovered immediately, his partner could in truth not swim. He renewed his grip on the flailing woman and gasped as he in turn went under, and his struggle for breath grew as unfeigned as hers.

He still managed to push them back into the swiftest current three times, as his longer legs dragged the gravel, until at last the stream broadened and slowed in a pool so shallow that even Fara's feet could touch bottom. Sliding and floundering, they waded to shore.

Ingrey scanned the bank. They had passed some mighty tangles of brush, a stretch of high and rocky overhangs that had constricted the waters into a frighteningly speedy chute, and now, a clot of young willows growing thickly along the farther shore. Wencel, especially if he'd stopped to secure their abandoned mounts, would not soon catch up with them. Ingrey had a very clear idea of just how much delay such a sopping mishap might cause, and hoped to extend it even further.

It was not in Ingrey's present interests to clarify this. “My duty, my lady. And my fault-my horse stumbled into yours.”

“I thought I-I thought we were both going to drown.”