lois Bujold - The Hallowed Hunt

“Oh,” said Oswin, and his voice shook, tears starting in his eyes. “Oh, Hallana, I did not know…”

“Shh,” she said. “It will be very well now, I think.” She moistened her lips and gazed at Ingrey as though he were a cross between some famous work of Temple art she'd traveled days to see, and her favorite child.

Ingrey glanced around again, his eyes crammed with choices, and motioned another warrior to him. The man knelt and awkwardly, hopefully, presented his head held up between his two hands. Ingrey repeated the crimson unction upon the forehead, for whatever this last libation from the world of matter was worth, and released a dark hawk-spirit to fly into the night and vanish. The warrior reached for Oswin again, and this time Ingrey could see, just before he melted away, that the man was made whole. The Father speed you on your journey, then.

A woman revenant came forward, young-looking, carrying a banner that unfolded to display the ancient spitting-cat sigil of the Lynxlakes, a kin that had dwindled to extinction in the male line two centuries past. When Ingrey took her hand, he was startled to feel two other tattered souls clinging to her through her banner. Her lynx was sad and shabby, and the other two creatures so ragged as to be unidentifiable, in passing away. He signed her forehead in three parallel carmine strokes, which seemed to suffice, for she rose and strode to Jokol, who brightened and stood very straight, taking her hand to kiss it and murmuring something in her ear before she vanished. Ingrey swore he heard a faint low laugh, suddenly merry, linger for a moment in the air behind her. Jokol for the Daughter, aye. The Lady of Spring gives notoriously abundant blessings.

“Prince Biast,” called Ingrey softly. “I'm afraid I need you here.”

Biast for the Son. Of course.

“I suspect I will be least used, this night,” murmured Hallana. She cast a shrewd glance toward the mound. “I will sit with poor Fara till you need me. I would guess she's had a time of it.”

“Thank you, Learned, yes,” said Ingrey. “She was treated most miserably from first to last. But in the end she remembered she was a princess.”

Biast came forward to Ingrey's side, studying him warily. The entranced expression upon his face when he looked at Ingrey was laced with a thread of defiance. In an attempt at irony that faltered, he murmured, “Should I call you sire, here?”

“You need not call me anything, so long as you turn your hand to the task. Will Fara be all right?” Ingrey nodded across the clearing to where the princess sat huddled, watching grimly, as Hallana lowered herself beside her.

“I offered to take her to where Symark and the divines' servants wait, but she refused. She says she wants to bear witness.”

“She has earned that.” And it would make her the one person besides Ingrey who had seen all of Horseriver's actions from her father's death to…whatever the end of this night brought. If he survived, that could be important. And if I don't survive, it could be even more important.

“The most here will be yours, I suspect,” Ingrey told Biast. “The old kings had two tasks: to lead their men to battle and to lead them home again. Horseriver lost sight of the second, I think, in his black madness and despair. These warriors of the Old Weald-their duty to their king is done; there remains only their king's duty to them. It's going to be”-Ingrey sighed-“a long night.”

Ingrey looked around at the apprehensive revenants, pressing close again, and raised his voice, though he was not sure he needed to; within the bounds of Bloodfield, his voice carried. “Fear no stinting, kinsmen! I will not end my watch till your long watch is done.”

A blond-bearded young man knelt, first of a long string of such youths, many desperately mutilated. Ingrey released creature after creature: boar and bear, horse and wolf, stag and lynx, hawk and badger. Biast studied each man, as they passed through his hands, as though looking in some disquieting mirror.

It had taken a cadre of Audar's troops two days to slay all these here; Ingrey did not see how he was to release them all in a night, but something odd seemed to be happening to time in this woods. He was not sure if it was a variant upon what happened to his flow of perception in his battle madness-a shaman skill-or if the gods had lent some element of Their god-time, by which They attended to all souls in the world both simultaneously and equally. Ingrey only knew that each warrior was owed a moment at least of his hallow king's full regard; and if the debt had not been Ingrey's to contract, it had still fallen to him to pay. Heir indeed.

Then he wondered which he would come to the end of first, his warriors or himself. Perhaps they would end together, in perfect balance.

The Darthacan archers came forward midway through the night. Ingrey puzzled mightily over them, for they bore no spirit beasts for him to release. In what backwash of the uncanny their souls had been caught up, by what concatenation of disrupted magic, god-gift, night battle and bloody sacrifice they had been imprisoned here, he could not imagine. He signed them in his blood all the same, they thanked him with their eyes all the same, and he handed them off to their waiting gods, all the same. The Wolfcliff woman with the gold wolf's head arm rings gave him a kiss upon the brow in return for his blessing of blood, then, apparently in a moment of pure self-indulgence, a kiss upon the lips, before she turned to Hallana. His lips stiffened with the chill of her mouth, but her lips warmed to a faint color, like a memory of happiness, so he thought it a fair trade.

Ingrey turned to Oswin. “Learned, what shall I do with these?” He gestured to the revenants: unable to flee him, unwilling to come to him.

Oswin took a deep breath and said reluctantly, as if reciting an old lesson, “Heaven weeps, but free will is sacred. The meaning of yes is created by the ability to say no. As a forced marriage is no marriage, but instead the crime of rape. The gods either will not or cannot rape our souls; in any case, They do not. To my knowledge,” the meticulous scholar in him added.

These, too, died at Bloodfield; my duty to them does not change. All the same. Ingrey unlocked his voice and ordered each dark despairing revenant forward, and gave them their little gift of blood, and freed their spirit beasts. And let them go. Most unraveled, fading into utter nothingness, before they even reached the trees.

Two left now: the marshal-warrior, who had stood all night with Ijada and the royal Wolfcliff banner; and the being beside whom-for whom-he had once died at Bloodfield. It took most of Ingrey's remaining strength to compel Horseriver forward to face him; they both ended on their knees.

This one is not the same. Horseriver's spirit horse was gone, his kingship rescinded, but the concatenation of souls remained, generations of Horserivers still churning through his anguished form. Tentatively, Ingrey reached for the shreds of Wencel in the mass, and whispered, “Come.” And, louder, “Come!” A shudder ran through the being in front of him, but no individual soul peeled out. Ingrey wondered if he'd made a tactical mistake; if he had attempted Horseriver first, before he'd been exhausted by this night, could he have taken apart what Horseriver's long curse had welded together? Or was this simply not within his earthly powers? He was almost certain it was not. Almost.

“What is your whole desire?” Ingrey asked it. “Lost centuries are not within my gift. The revenge of sundering these other souls from the gods I have denied you, for that was not the right of your hallow kingship, but its betrayal. What then is left? I would give you mercy if you would take it.” The gods would give you rivers of it.