The Complete Chalion

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  THE EARL’S PORTER ADMITTED HIM WITH A MURMURED, “MY LADY and the prince-marshal await you in the Birch Chamber, Lord Ingrey.”

  Ingrey took the hint, nodded, and ascended the stairs at once. The room was the same in which he had surprised Fara on the first day of his so-called service—perhaps its quiet colors and sober furnishings made it a favorite refuge of hers. He found the little company gathered there, Biast and Symark conversing over a tray of bread and cheeses, Fara half-reclining upon a settee while one of her women pressed a damp cloth to her forehead. The scent of lavender was cool and sharp upon the air.

  Fara collected herself and sat up as Ingrey entered, regarding him with a worried glower. Her face was pale, the skin around her eyes a smudged gray, and he recalled Ijada’s report of the princess’s tendency to sick headaches.

  “Lord Ingrey.” Biast graciously gestured him to sit. “The learned divine kept you long.”

  Ingrey let this pass with a nod; he had no desire to explain Hallana.

  Fara was not inclined to await a diplomatic lead-in. “What did he ask you? Did he ask you anything else about me?”

  “He asked nothing further of you, my lady, nor of anything that happened at Boar’s Head,” Ingrey reassured her. She sat back in evident relief. “His questions were largely”—he hesitated—“theological.”

  Biast did not seem to share his sister’s relief. His brows drew down in renewed concern. “Did they touch on our brother?”

  “Only indirectly, my lord.” There seemed no reason not to be frank with Biast about Oswin’s inquiries, although Ingrey was not at all sure he wanted to reveal his other connections with the scholarly divine just yet. “He wished to know if I could cleanse Lady Ijada’s soul of her leopard spirit, in the event of her death, as I had seemed to do for the late prince. I said I did not know.”

  Biast dragged one booted toe back and forth over the rug, frowned down and seemed to grow conscious of the tic, and stilled his foot. When he looked up, his voice had grown quieter. “Did you really see the god? Face-to-face?”

  “He appeared to me as a young woodland lord of surpassing beauty. I did not get the sense…” Ingrey paused, uncertain how to express this. “You have seen children make shadow puppets upon a wall with their hands. The shadow is not the hand, though it is created by it. The young man I saw was, I think, the shadow of the god. Reduced to a simple outline that I could understand. As if there lay vastly more beyond that I could not see, that would have appeared nothing at all like the deceptive shadow if I could have taken it in without…shattering.”

  “Did He give you any directions for…for me?” Biast’s tone of diffident hope robbed the question of hubris. He glanced over at his intently listening sister. “For any of the rest of us?”

  “No, my lord. Are you feeling in need of some?”

  Biast’s lips huffed on a humorless laugh. “I reach for some certainty in an uncertain time, I suppose.”

  “Then you come to the wrong storehouse,” said Ingrey bitterly. “The gods give me nothing but hints and riddles and maddening conundrums. As for my vision, I suppose I must call it, it was for Boleso’s funeral. In that hour, the god attended to his soul alone. In our hours, we may receive the same undivided scrutiny.”

  Fara, rubbing her hand along one skirt-clad thigh in a tension not unlike her brother’s, looked up. The vertical grooves between her thick eyebrows deepened, as she considered this dark consolation with the wariness of a burned child studying a fire.

  “I spoke at some length last night with Learned Lewko,” Biast began, and stopped. He squinted at his sister. “Fara, you really don’t look well. Don’t you think you had better go lie down for a while?”

  The lady-in-waiting nodded endorsement to this idea. “We could draw the drapes in your chambers, my lady, and make it quite dark.”

  “That might be better.” Fara leaned forward, only to sit staring down at her feet for a moment before allowing her waiting woman to pull her reluctantly upright. Biast rose also.

  Ingrey seized the moment to conceal calculation in courtesy. “I am sorry you are so plagued, my lady. But if the inquest returns a verdict of self-defense, there might be no need for you to be so imposed upon again.”

  “I can do what I have to do,” she replied coolly. But she looked as though a dismissal of charges was, for the moment, a newly attractive notion. She gave him a civil enough nod of farewell, though it caused her to raise one hand to her temple immediately thereafter. Biast’s glance back at Ingrey was more curious. Ingrey wondered if he might, after all, remove the threat of a trial from Ijada by one strand of persuasion at a time, like a web, rather than in some more concentrated and dramatic manner: if so, well and good. The parallel with Wencel’s preferred techniques of indirection did not escape him.

  Biast saw his sister out, but then left her to her waiting woman; he looked up and down the corridor a moment before returning to the chamber, shutting the door firmly behind him. He frowned at his bannerman Symark and then at Ingrey, as though considering some comparison, though whether of physical threat or personal discretion, Ingrey could not guess. Symark was a few years older than his lord and a noted swordsman; perhaps Biast imagined him a sufficient defense from Ingrey, should the wolf-lord run mad and attack. Or Symark and Biast together so, at least. Ingrey did not seek to disabuse the prince-marshal of this comforting error.

  “As I said, I had some conversation with Lewko,” Biast continued. He sat again by the low table with the tray, gesturing for Ingrey to do likewise. Ingrey pulled his chair around and composed himself in close attention. “The Bastard’s Order—which I take to mean, Lewko and a couple of forceful Temple sorcerers—have questioned Cumril in greater detail, at length.”

  “Good. I hope they held his feet to the fire.”

  “Something of a sort. I gather they dared not press him to the point of such disarray that his demon might reascend. That fear alone, Lewko assured me, was a greater goad to him than any threat to his body that any inquirer might make.” His brow wrinkled doubtfully.

  “I understand this.”

  “So you might.” Biast sat back. “More disturbing to me was Cumril’s assertion that my brother had indeed planned my assassination, as you guessed. How did you know?”

  So that’s why he had urged Fara out, that he might address these painful matters discreetly. Ingrey shrugged. “I am no seer. For anyone seeking the hallow kingship with less backing than you already have, it’s a logical step.”

  “Yes, but not my own—” Biast stopped, bit his lip.

  Ingrey grasped the chance to cast another thread. “So it seems Lady Ijada saved your life, as well as her own. And your brother’s soul from a great sin and crime. Or your god did, through her.”

  Biast paused as though thinking uneasily about this, then began again. “I do not know how I earned my brother’s hatred.”

  “I believe his mind was well and truly unhinged, toward the end. Boleso’s fevered fancies, not any actions of yours, seem to me the springs of his behavior.”

  “I did not realize he was so—so lost. When that first dire incident with the manservant happened, I wrote my father I would come home, but he wrote back ordering me to stay at my post. Reducing one rebellious but ill-provisioned border castle and a few bandit camps seems to me now a less vital tutorial than what I might have been learning in the same time at Easthome. I suppose my father wished to insulate me from the scandal.”

  Or, perhaps, to protect him from worse and subtler things? Or was Biast’s diversion to the border in this crisis engineered by other persuaders? Was the print of Horseriver’s hoof anywhere in this?

  Biast sighed. “In the fullness of time I expected to receive the crown from my father’s own hands, in his lifetime, like every Stagthorne king before me. He’d had the election and coronation of my older brother Byza all planned out three years ago, before Byza’s untimely death. Now I must grasp with my own hands, or let the crown fall.”

&nb
sp; “Byza’s was a sudden illness, wasn’t it?” Ingrey had been gone from Easthome on an early courier mission for Hetwar to the Low Ports, and had missed that royal funeral. Biast had received the prince-marshal’s banner that had belonged to his brother before him only a few weeks later. Had Boleso dwelt too unhealthily upon the precedent?

  “Lockjaw.” Biast shuddered in memory. “I was in Byza’s train at his naval camp near Helmharbor at the time. He was preparing some new ships for sea trials. Several men were stricken so. Five gods spare me from such a fate. It gave me an aversion to deathbeds that lingers still. My heart fails me at the thought of facing another. I pray five times a day for my father’s recovery.”

  Ingrey had last seen the dying hallow king in person some weeks ago, just before his palsy stroke. He had been yellow-skinned, belly-swollen, and cheek-sunken even then, his movements heavy and voice low and slurred. “I think we must pray for other blessings for him, now.”

  Biast stared away, not disputing this. “The charge against Boleso, if it is not just Cumril’s calumny, has left me wondering whom I can trust.” His gaze, returning to Ingrey, made Ingrey feel rather odd.

  “Each man according to his measure, I suppose.”

  “This presumes an ability justly to measure men, which begs the question. Have you taken the measure of my brother-in-law yet?”

  “Not, um, entirely.”

  “Is he a danger like Boleso?”

  “He’s…smarter.” And so, Ingrey was beginning to be convinced, was Biast. “No insult intended,” Ingrey added, in a belated attempt at tact.

  Biast grimaced. “At least, I trust, he is not so mad.”

  Silence.

  “One does so trust—doesn’t one?”

  “I trust no one,” Ingrey evaded.

  “Not even the gods?”

  “Them least of all.”

  “Mm.” Biast rubbed his neck. “Well, the impending kingship does not give me joy, under the circumstances, but I am not at all inclined to hand it on, over my dead body, to monsters.”

  “Good, my lord,” said Ingrey. “Hold to that.”

  Symark, who had been listening to this exchange with arms folded, rose and wandered to the window, evidently to check the clock of the sun, for he turned and gave his master an inquiring look. Biast nodded in return and stood with a tired grunt; Ingrey came to his feet likewise.

  Biast ran a hand through his hair in a gesture copied or caught, Ingrey was fairly sure, from Hetwar. “Have you any other advice for me this day, Lord Ingrey?”

  Ingrey was only a year or two older than Biast; surely the prince could not see him as an authority for that reason. “In all matters of policy, you are better advised by Hetwar, my lord.”

  “And other matters?”

  Ingrey hesitated. “For Temple politics, Fritine is most informed, but beware his favor to his kin. For, ah, practical theology, see Lewko.”

  Biast appeared to muse for a moment over the unsettling implications of that practical. “Why?”

  Ingrey’s fingers stretched out, then tapped across the ball of his thumb in order, little finger to index. “Because the Thumb touches all four other fingers.” The words seemed to fall out of his mouth from nowhere, and he almost jerked back, startled.

  Biast too seemed to find the words fraught beyond their simplicity, for he gave Ingrey a peculiar stare, unconsciously clenching his hand. “I shall hold that in my mind. Guard my sister.”

  “I’ll do my utmost, my lord.”

  Biast gave him a nod, gestured Symark ahead of him, and went out.

  INGREY SCOUTED THE MANSION TO DISCOVER FARA LAID DOWN in her chambers and tended by her ladies as expected, and the earl gone out to the hallow king’s hall. So what drew Wencel there that was more riveting than awaiting the news from the inquest? That he had not escorted his wife to the judges’ bench was no surprise; Wencel quietly avoided Temple Hill, in such a routine fashion as to occasion no remark. But whatever menace the earl concealed, he’d been attending on his sick father-in-law for weeks without Ingrey’s supervision. Ingrey hesitated to pursue him there. Yet.

  The situation seemed to have more need for wits than a strong sword arm, and if the body was neglected, the brain flagged, too, so Ingrey took himself to the earl’s kitchen to forage a meal, which was served to him along with certain oblique complaints. After that, he tracked down Tesko and bullied him into giving back to the scullions the money he’d won cheating at dice. His servant temporarily cowed, Ingrey then had him snip and extract the stitches from his scalp and rebandage his sword hand. The long and ragged tear in his discolored skin seemed closed, but still tender, and he pressed the gauze wrapping warily after Tesko tied it off. This should have healed by now.

  Autumn dusk crept through the window embrasures as Ingrey sat on his new bed and meditated. The princess’s impending bereavement curtailed the sort of society that had enlivened Hetwar’s palace of an evening, or demanded Ingrey’s services as an escort for its lord or lady. If Earl Horseriver chose to send him off on some untimely courier mission, how then could he carry out his princely mandate to guard Fara, or his self-imposed task to save Ijada? Get one of Hetwar’s men to ride, and remain in Easthome sneaking about spying? The notion seemed stuffed with disastrous complications. His public duty to obey the earl was a pitfall waiting to swallow him, it seemed to Ingrey, and he was not sure Hetwar had quite thought it through.

  Could he defy Horseriver? Each of them, it seemed, had been gifted with kindred powers. Horseriver was vastly more practiced, but was he stronger? And what did strength mean, in that boundless hallowed space where visions took seeming shape?

  How, for that matter, did one practice, and upon what? Ingrey’s battle-madness could not be rehearsed at all; it came only at need, and in deadly earnest. And the weirding voice—could its suggestions be resisted? Defied? Broken? Did they wear off in time, like Hallana’s demon-sorcery had upon the be-pigged man? Ingrey could not imagine finding glad volunteers to test his talents upon. Though Hallana, he suddenly suspected, would be all for the trial, and Oswin would take careful notes. The image made him smile despite himself.

  How old is my wolf? The question niggled him, suddenly. Warily, he turned his perceptions inward, and once more, the sensation was akin to trying to see his own eyes. The accumulated wolf souls seemed to meld together into a smooth unity, as though their boundaries were more permeable somehow; wolves became Wolf in a way that Earls Horseriver had failed to achieve in that tormented soul’s cannibal descent through the generations of his human kin. Ingrey sifted the fragmentary lupine memories that had come to him, both in that first terrible initiation and in later dreams. The viewpoint was odd, and scents seemed more sharply remembered than sights. A sufficiently impoverished rural village of recent days was hardly to be distinguished from a forest town of the lost times.

  But suddenly a most peculiar memory surfaced, of chewing with wolf-puppy teeth upon a piece of boiled leather armor, a cuirass almost bigger than he was. The chastisement when he’d been caught at it did not diminish the satisfaction to his sore mouth. The armor had been quite new, dragged to a corner of some dim and smoky hall. The design was distinctive, the breast decoration more so, a silhouette of a wolf’s head with gaping jaws burned into the leather with hot iron. My wolf is as old as the Old Weald, and then some.

  As old as Wencel’s horse? Older, surely, in a sense, for his wolf had been abroad, repeatedly reincarnated, for four hundred extra years before being so bloodily harvested. Part of that time had been spent high up in the Cantons, judging by the pictures of cold peaks that lingered in his mind. A long happy period, several domesticated wolf-lives, in some tiny hamlet in a forgotten vale where seasons and generations turned in a slow wheel… The attrition of mischance might have cut short the accumulation of wolf souls, yet had not. Which suggested in turn that Someone with a long, long attention span might have been manipulating those chances. Must have been, his mirthless reason corrected this.

&
nbsp; If he ever saw the god again, he could ask, Ingrey supposed. I could ask now. I could pray. He had no desire to; praying held all the appeal of thrusting his hand into the holy fire on the temple plinth and holding it there. Talking to the gods had been a much more comfortable proposition when there had seemed no danger of Their talking back.

  He lay back and sought within himself for that millrace-current sense of Ijada. The quiet song of it calmed him instantly. She was not, at this moment, in pain, nor unduly fatigued, except for a tense piling-up of boredom. It did not follow that she was safe; the banal comfort of the narrow house was deceptive, that way. Horseriver had named this link the unintended relict of his murderous geas, and it might be so. Was not some good salvaged from evil, from time to time? He must contrive some way to see her again, secretly and soon. And to communicate. Could this subtle perception be made more explicit? One yank for yes, two yanks for no. Well, perhaps not that, but there must be something.

  His brooding was interrupted by a page rapping on his door, bidding him to attend upon the earl. Ingrey armed himself, grabbed up his long court cloak, and descended to the entry hall, where he found Horseriver, who could only have come in a short time ago, preparing to go out again.

  With some low-voiced instructions, the earl finished dispatching an anxious groom, then granted Ingrey a civil nod.

  “Where away, my lord?”

  “The hallow king’s hall.”

  “Didn’t you just come from there?”

  Wencel nodded. “It is nearly time. I think the king will not last the night. There is a particular waxy look to the skin”—Wencel passed a hand over his face—“that is a very distinctive herald to these sorts of deaths.”

  And Horseriver ought to know. From both sides, Ingrey realized. They were briefly alone in the hall, the servants having been sent to hurry Fara; Ingrey lowered his voice. “Ought I to suspect you of some uncanny assassination?”

  Wencel shook his head, apparently not the least offended by the suggestion. “His death comes quite without need of any man’s assistance. At one time—long ago—I might have sought to speed it. Or, more vainly, to retard it. Now I just wait. A flicker of days, and it is done.” He vented a long, quiet sigh.