They had made the initial cut the length of the stag’s proud throat with a blade that Gilliam pulled from a long pouch at his back, one carried for only this purpose. The flaps of wet, supple skin were pulled back almost to the neck, and the dogs were given their reward for the baying of the hart—a few mouthfuls of flesh and blood that had not yet cooled.
Stephen coupled the hounds, treading with care around the muddy ground. The hounds’ tails whapped against his thighs, and the occasional dog tried to knock him over with a none-too-subtle shoulder-check—but he was used to this.
While Stephen worked, Gilliam played out the nine again, slowly and surely calling a triumphant close to his first Sacred Hunt. The sun was not yet upon the horizon, and the day not yet too cold. He carried the last note with what little breath remained in his lungs. The dogs looked up at this and joined him in their own fashion.
Stephen knew that Gilliam would make—and break—the last trance-connection with each of his hunting dogs. He would praise them and feed their animal egos before he set the horn aside and began the onerous task of carrying the stag back to the Queen’s pavilion.
Carrying? Stephen grunted as he tied the front and back legs of the carcass together. Dragging, more like. At any other Hunt, there would be aides to help with the task of returning the kill. But, no, on the one day when the Hunter was most at risk, everything had to be done “independently.” He grunted as he pulled.
Gilliam came to help him, and the dogs, tired from their run and satisfied with their master’s praise, obeyed his terse commands. They followed at heel, and only occasionally got into the little territorial scrapes that so annoyed their master.
The Hunter Lord only called a stop once as they followed their trail backward, but the ground was clear and marked only by the many feet of the passing animals and their human masters. Stephen could not find the body of his would-be killer anywhere. He knew that he hadn’t gone mad because the dogs found the scent—but even Absynt thought it weak and almost directionless, more like the scent of a place than like the trail of any living quarry.
“The thing I don’t understand,” Gilliam said between grunts, “is why anyone’d want to kill you.”
“How should I—Terwel!—know?”
“Maybe he thought you were someone else.” Gilliam stopped long enough to kick Terwel in the shoulder with the flat of his boot. Terwel whined and rolled over, and Gilliam started to lug again. “I mean, we’re all dressed the same.”
“I think he knew what he was doing.”
“Oh. Maybe we should just ask Kallandras.”
Kallandras had knelt by the body and gently cradled the corpse. There had been no anger in his eyes, in fact, no expression at all upon his face. But Stephen had had much experience with masking emotion, and he knew the sorrow the bard’s stooped shoulders had spoken of. He felt that they were somehow cohorts in a very strange crime, and he didn’t want to expose Kallandras to anyone else. Yet. “I will.”
“We will.”
“I will.”
“Look, you’re my huntbrother, and it’s my responsibility to protect you. We talk to him.”
“I talk to him.”
“Oh right,” Gilliam said, dropping the legs of the stag. “So you talk to him, and maybe someone else tries to kill you, and no one else is around to help. Forget it. I forbid it.”
“If someone else tries to kill me, Kallandras’ll probably handle him the same bloody way.” Stephen’s arms crossed his chest as his jaw tightened. “And what the hell do you mean, ‘forbid it’?”
“I’m the Hunter Lord.”
“You’re an idiot!”
“An idiot. Right.” Gilliam’s shoulders tensed. “Idiot enough to finish the Hunt on my own.”
Stephen drew breath sharp enough to cut his tongue; it meant he didn’t have to bite it. How dare you? He thought, his face flushing. You know damn well why I missed the last leg! Red-faced, he spoke with anger’s voice and anger’s words. “What’s the matter, Gil? Are you upset that Kallandras was a better protector than you’ll ever be?”
Bull’s-eye. Stephen had just enough time to recognize the hit before Gilliam answered anger with anger. Of course, Gilliam didn’t answer with words, and the dogs watched in curious concern as their master and his closest ally began to roll around in the dirt, shouting, spitting, and punching each other with the happy abandon of sibling fury.
They were both so enraged that Stephen didn’t stop to think about what Lady Elseth would say, which was just as well.
• • •
An hour later, they emerged from the King’s preserve. The dogs, even Terwel, were quiet as they followed Gilliam’s terse commands, walking to heel so perfectly that there was hardly any need for leads. Stephen’s left eye was blackened, and his lip was swollen. Gilliam’s lip was split and smeared with dried blood. Both of the young men were covered with dirt and the remnants of the previous year’s fall; the careful crafted green velvet of Hunter’s cloaks looked entirely brown at a distance. Blond hair and brown hair were a mass of knots and wild tangles, but at least the Elseth Hunters had come back successful.
Lord Maubreche, Lord Valentin, and Lord William of Valentin approached them in silence; the bare head of the eldest lord, framed in a ring of white tufts of hair, bent low. His huntbrother, Andrew, came to his aid, and together they lifted and dragged the carcass away to the center of the King’s impromptu court—it would be unmade there, according to all of the proper rituals.
Lord Valentin bowed low; his peppered hair fell forward around his thin, lined cheeks. “Your Hunt,” he said gravely. His huntbrother, rounder and shorter than he, also bowed. Michaele was not known for polite deference to either Hunters or huntbrothers, although he was still quite capable when it came to the politics of the Ladies.
Stephen was acutely conscious of the mess he presented. He glanced surreptitiously at Gilliam and cringed at what he saw.
But none of the Hunters or their huntbrothers seemed at all concerned—and not one of them was amused. No, their faces were grave, almost gray, in the afternoon light. He started to say something, and then his jaw stopped moving at all. All of the lords had removed their hats, and all of them wore the black sash of the Hunter’s Death; it traveled across thin midriff and thick alike, clinging like a web.
Lord William of Valentin approached last; he fell to one knee and held out his hands. There, cradled carefully in the thin, scarred palms of the Hunter Lord were the three knives of unmaking; one to cut flesh and muscle, one to cut bone, and one to remove hide.
Each of these were much older than he—than any of the Hunter Lords who stood in silence before them—and they bore the crest of a stag over a field of stars in gold relief.
“The unmaking, Lord Elseth,” William whispered with bowed head.
No one moved for a moment. William raised his head and caught Gilliam in the light of his gray eyes. They were red-rimmed and murky with held tears. “These are yours, Lord Elseth.”
Stephen felt Gilliam’s confusion turn. He knew a stab of fear so sharp, he wasn’t certain whether it was his own, or his Hunter’s. It twisted at him, doing more than a blade’s damage. He bit his lip and looked at Gilliam’s face. Gilliam didn’t notice. He stared down at the three knives.
“Norn?” he said at last, and his voice was perfectly composed.
“Alive.” William’s response came quickly and easily—it was the only good news he carried.
The new Lord of Elseth swallowed and accepted Lord William’s burden. His hands were sure and certain as he took the weight of the unmaking and the responsibility of his father’s lands.
But Stephen of Elseth cried. Tears streamed down his cheeks, and his eyes were so full that the world blurred and moved incomprehensibly. He wanted to speak, but words couldn’t escape the closed wall of his throat.
And he knew that it w
asn’t his pain alone that drove him to such an improper display. He was huntbrother, and linked to a Hunter Lord—and Gilliam had never been good at expressing pain; the only emotion that came easily was anger, and Stephen was certain he would see that later.
Chapter Fourteen
SOREDON LAY IN DEATH’S REPOSE atop an ornate altar ten feet from the Queen’s dais. The King’s Priest stood beside him in the silence of the Sacred Hunt, his brown robes flapping at his legs like crippled wings. He did not speak, not yet, but rather attended to the body with the ease of experience. The blood had been washed away, and the vital organs—what was left of them—were now bound to the body in a skein of pale green. Soredon’s face was slack; whatever pain had been felt in the dying had left him with his life.
At the foot of the rough-hewn altar lay Corwel; his spine had been snapped, but he had not otherwise been savaged. The great white hound, with his bandit’s black mask and a history of successful, even enviable, Hunts behind him, still attended his Lord.
No one watched the Priest at work. The Hunter Lords, drawn now and silent, went about the final responsibility of the Hunt. Beside the burning braziers that were meant as an offering to the Hunter God, they unmade their kills, working with sleeves pushed up past the elbows and cloaks discarded on the ground. It was cool, but warming as the season yearned toward summer. The meat had to be cut, cured, and hung if it was to serve as food for the people in the various demesnes of the kingdom.
Only the kills of the King and the Huntsmen of the Chamber were for the nobles who now waited, and even these were properly unmade with the quiet respect for the hunted that the Hunter knows.
Gilliam worked in silence, first anchoring the stag by his horns, then widening the cut along the throat until it traced the whole of the stag’s underbelly. He removed the heart with care, and Stephen stepped quickly in to catch Gil’s sleeves before they became blood-sodden. It was the only way he was allowed to help.
The heart was offered to the fire; there was no formal prayer, no formal thanks to accompany the sizzle of flesh that would soon char. But the beast’s spirit would be free when the heart was ashes—he would go to the Hunter, and dwell in the afterlands in peace and plenty.
Maybe, Stephen reflected quietly, as he watched the heart burn, there were no formal words because the Hunter Lords, too new from their losses here, could not have been trusted to say them with the proper amount of pride and strength. Smoke, made heavy and dark with blood and flesh burning, wound its way up in a spiral of air, darkening the landscape and dimming the sun. He shivered as he watched, and then turned back to Gilliam.
A familiar figure barred his way. The pale, drawn face of the bard was a mirror to those of the Hunters, and any of the Lords who had thought his bawdy ballad a disgrace were mollified by the sorrow he now offered as his sole expression.
Only Stephen knew that the sorrow was not for Soredon’s death, and he was surprised at the anger this brought him.
Kallandras saw the shift in Stephen’s face and shook his head, smiling wryly. “It won’t do, you know,” he said softly. “You’re too transparent by half, and it won’t serve your House well in the company of the Hunter Ladies. They’re all sharp and cold as hunting falcons—but only twice as deadly.”
It was meant, Stephen knew, as a friendly comment; he smiled stiffly.
“Walk with me?”
“I can’t. I have to attend to Gilliam—Lord Elseth.”
Kallandras nodded and threw the folds of his newly donned cloak aside. Cradled like a child in the crook of his arm sat his small lute. “Salla,” he said, naming her. “I wish to speak with your Lord, if he will allow it.”
“About what?”
“I would—I would sing his father’s death.”
Stephen started to sidle away, and Kallandras caught his shoulder with his free hand.
“I offer it,” he said quietly, “because it is the only thing I can offer. And not a bard in the kingdom, not even the foremost of the Masters of Senniel, could sing a better death than I.”
“Why?”
“Why? Skill, perhaps. Too much practice.”
“I meant, why did you save my life? How did you know?”
“Ah.” Kallandras grew quiet. “If I answer your question—and I must say that you don’t seem grateful for the saving of it—will you take my request to your Lord?”
Stephen nodded. Grudgingly, he added, “I’d ask him anyway.”
“And honest, too.” Kallandras shook his head, and ringlets glinted with firelight and dying sun. “Evayne sent me.”
“Evayne?” The lady, robed in midnight blue and surrounded by shadows and dark hair, who had stalked his sleep for three nights.
“Yes. You are under the wyrd of her father.”
“F-father?”
“She is god-born; that much I’ve been able to discover about her in the few years that we’ve . . . known each other. She calls me when she needs me, and I do what I must to help her.”
“Why?”
“Too many questions,” Kallandras answered gently, but the distance had returned to his eyes. He stepped back, bowed, and then looked up again; Stephen’s eyes had not left his face. “You are young,” he said, relenting a little. “I help because I’m committed to it. She fights the darkness in ways I don’t understand, but she fights it with everything at her disposal. I fight because I, too, am under Fate’s wyrd.” He lifted Salla and began to idly strum her strings. Without thought, he pulled melody and harmony from her; a pensive, wordless tune. “It always costs. Always.”
Costs? Stephen’s dream came back, an echo too sharp to be just memory. Suddenly, he didn’t want to ask any more questions. “Let me go find Lord Elseth. I’m sure he’d be happy if you’d sing his father’s death. But—but don’t make any jests, please?”
“No jests,” Kallandras said gravely. “In mourning, young huntbrother, we are closer than you will ever understand.” But the last words were a whisper, and Stephen, already searching for Gilliam’s back, missed them.
• • •
The ring of torches and glass lamps and fires strove to capture the dying daylight when at last the Hunter Lords were entirely finished and ready. Their Ladies joined them in their bitter silence, offering them comfort and support by merely taking, and leaning on, the arms held out to them. Each Lord was allowed the presence of four dogs for the ceremony, and the clearing was warm and crowded.
Seventy-seven Hunter Lords stood at attention as the Hunter’s Priest walked to the altar, accompanied by the King, four of the King’s hounds, and four of the Priesthood. He carried a burning brazier on a link of chain that hung from a dark pole. The smoke from it smelled sweet and pungent as it rippled through the crowd. Two feet from the altar, he took the pole and drove it, hard, into the soft ground.
That done, he knelt before the King.
The King wore black; gone were Hunter greens and browns, gone the bow and the spear. Only black remained; emptiness, an absence of color, warmth, and light. For one instant, Stephen could see great tined antlers rising from the King’s forehead into the night sky above the deep, calm wilderness of his eyes.
“Master of the Game, is the Hunt over?” The words, firm and strong, were ritual. But they were also sincere; a question that began and ended without a surety of the answer.
The Master of the Game walked over to Soredon, Master Hunter, and formerly Lord of Elseth. He stared down at the slack, still face as if searching for signs of life; nor did he give off this quiet, desperate search until minutes had passed. Then, with infinite care and a respect that was tangible and not begrudged, the King reached down and gently closed his Hunter’s eyes. “It is over.”
He held out one hand, palm up, and curled his fingers tightly around the horn the Priest gave him. The drums started as the four who had accompanied the King and his Priest took their places on
the green and began to play. Their faces were hooded by more than the night, but their pain came out in the throbbing of the skins. The horn sounded the end of the Hunt, and before the first note had died, every Hunter in the realm, Gilliam and Stephen included, had joined in.
The dogs, aware of their masters’ grief, began to howl in time of sorts—and together, men and beasts, they made enough noise to be heard even by a God.
The King stepped away at last, and silence was allowed to return. He gestured to the Priest, and the Priest took over while the King stood by his side. He began a quiet incantation over Soredon’s body. The hems of his sleeves brushed pale white cheeks and shuttered eyes.
“Hunter,” he intoned, and it was clear that he spoke to the God. “We are no oath-breakers; we have come, and we have hunted at your behest, in your lands.
“And you, too, have hunted; you have taken, with skill that we cannot imagine or match, one of the greatest of our number.
“Keep him in peace, and keep our lands whole and healthy for another year. Feed the very land as we feed our people, and we shall return again to renew our vows.”
The silence that followed was also part of the yearly ritual—but it, too, was full and heavy with genuine emotion and a grief too deep for words.
Only one man moved in the gathering. He came from the shadows at the farthest edge of the clearing in silence, carrying no torch, no horn, no weapon. He caught the King’s eye, and the Priest’s, but instead of gently remonstrating with him, they bowed their heads and looked away as he approached the body, to give him what privacy they could in such a public circumstance.
Norn of Elseth knelt in the dirt, his back to the gathered mourners. His broad shoulders seemed so shrunken they barely supported his bulk; the red lights of his hair were extinguished. His fingers moved blindly over Corwel’s cold fur before they reached for the edge of the altar.
The Sacred Hunt Duology Page 27