She tilted her head at his sour expression. “This place does not please you? My dower lands are a like waste, then, west of here in the marches where the mountains dwindle.” She hesitated. “My stepfather is of your mind about such silent tracts-but then he is a town-man bred, a master of works for the Temple in Badger-bridge, and likes trees best in the form of rafters and gates and trestles. He says it were better I made my face my dower than those haunted woods.” She grimaced abruptly, the light fading in her eyes. “He was so pleased for me when one of my Badgerbank aunts found me the place in the Horserivers' high household. And now this.”
“Did he imagine you would snare a husband, under the princess's eye?”
“Something like that. It was to be my great chance.” She shrugged. “I've since learned that high lords get to be such by being more concerned, not less, with dowers than other men. I should have anticipated…” Her mouth firmed. “I might have anticipated some seducer, arrogant in his rank. It was the heretical sorcery and howling madness that took me by surprise.”
For the first time, Ingrey wondered if the husband whose eye Ijada had snared might have been Earl Horseriver. Four years he had been married to the hallow king's daughter, and no children yet; was there anything more to the delay than ill luck? Reason indeed for the princess to barter her handmaiden out of her household at the first opportunity-and if jealous enough of her lovely rival, to a fate Fara must have known would not be pleasant…? Had the princess known of her brother's perilous plans? Aside from the rape, you mean?
“What did you think of Earl Horseriver?” Ingrey inquired, in a neutral voice. The earl was landed, of an ancient kin, but his most arresting power at present was doubtless his ordainer's vote, one of the thirteen needed to confirm a new hallow king. Yet such political concerns seemed quite over this young woman's head, however level it might be.
Now the lips pursed in a thoughtful frown. But not in dismay, Ingrey noted, nor in any flush of embarrassment. “I'm not sure. He's a strange…man. I almost said young man, but really, he scarcely seems young. I suppose it's partly the untimely gray in his hair. He's very sharp of wit, uncomfortably so at times. And moody. Sometimes he goes about for days in silence, as if lost in his own thoughts, and no one dares speak to him, not even the princess. At first I thought it was because of his little, you know, deformities, the spine and the oddly shaped face, but truly, he seems not to care about his body at all. It certainly doesn't impede him.” She glanced at Ingrey with belated wariness. “Do you know him well?”
“Not since we are grown,” said Ingrey. “I have a near tie to him by blood through his late mother. I met him a few times when we were both children.” Ingrey remembered the young Lord Wencel kin Horseriver as an undersized, clumsy boy, seeming slow of wit, with a rather wet mouth. Perhaps shyness had rendered Wencel tongue-tied; but the boy-Ingrey had lacked sympathy for a smaller cousin who did not keep up, and had made no effort to include him. Fortunately, in retrospect, Ingrey had made no effort to torment him, either. “His father and mine died within a few months of each other.”
Though the aged Earl Horseriver had died quietly and decently, of an ordinary stroke. Not in his prime, baying and foaming, his feverish screams echoing through the castle corridors as though rising from some pit of agony beneath the earth…Ingrey bit back the memory, hard.
“He was castlemaster of Birchgrove, under the lordship of old Earl Kasgut kin Wolfcliff.” And I am not. Would her rather too-quick wits notice, or would she merely assume him a younger son? “Birchgrove commands the valley of the Birchbeck, where it runs into the Lure.” Which did not, precisely, answer the question she'd asked. How had they drifted onto this dire subject? Her tone, he realized, had been as tensely neutral as his leading question about Horseriver.
“So Rider Ulkra told me.” She drew a long breath, staring ahead between her horse's ears. “He also said, it was rumored that your father died from the bite of a rabid wolf, that he'd tried to steal the spirit from, and that he gave you a wolf spirit, too, but it turned out to be crippled, and only made you very sick. And your life and wits were despaired of, which is why your uncle succeeded to Birchgrove and not you, but later your family sent you on pilgrimage, and you grew better. I wondered if all this was true, and why your father committed so reckless an act.” Only when she had spat out all this hurried chain of tattle did she turn her face to his, her eyes anxious and searching.
Ingrey's horse snorted and tossed its head at his jerk on the reins. Ingrey loosened his fist, and, a moment later, unclenched his teeth. He finally managed to growl, “Ulkra gossips. It is a fault.”
“He is afraid of you.”
“Not enough, it seems.” He yanked his horse away and pretended to inspect the cortege, returning up the other side to the head of the column. Alone. She looked after him as he passed, her mouth opening as if to speak, but he ignored her.
Forcing the cortege up the muddy road out of the valley diverted his mind enough to regain his calm, or at least replace his fuming with other irritations. On a steep incline, with the blowing team's hooves slipping, the wagon began to slide sideways toward a precipitous edge; the teamster's wife screeched alarm. Ingrey flung himself off his horse and led the quicker-witted among the guards to brace themselves and strain against the wagon's side and rear, pushing it away from the dizzying drop and up through the mire.
They paused at noon at a wide clearing just off the road, home to an ancient spring. His men unpacked the bread and cold meats provided by the castle cook, but Ingrey, calculating distances and hours of light, was more concerned for the horses. The team was mud-crusted and sweaty, so he set Boleso's surly retinue to assisting the teamster in unharnessing and rubbing them down before they were fed. The worst of the gradients were behind them now; with a suitable rest, he judged the beasts would last till nightfall, by which time he hoped to reach the Temple town of Reedmere, commandeer some more fitting conveyance, and send the rustic rig home.
More princely conveyance, Ingrey revised his thought. A former manure wagon seemed to him all too fitting. Closer to Easthome, he decided, he would send a rider ahead to guide a relief cortege to him, and hand off Boleso's body to more gaudy and noble ceremony, provided by those who cared for the prince. Or at least, cared for Boleso's rank and the show they made to each other. Maybe he'd send the rider tonight.
He washed his hands in the spring's outlet and accepted a slab of venison wrapped in bread from his lieutenant, Gesca. Gnawing, he looked around for his prisoner and her attendant. The teamster's wife was busy about the food baskets by the unhitched wagon. Lady Ijada was walking about the clearing-in that costume, she might whisk into the woods and disappear among the tall tree boles in a moment. Instead, she pried up a stone from the crumbled foundation above the spring and picked her way over to where Ingrey rested on a big fallen log.
Ingrey looked. On one side of the stone a spiral pattern was incised into the weathered surface.
“It's the same as one of the symbols Boleso had drawn on his body. In red madder, centered on his navel. Did you see it there?”
“No,” Ingrey admitted. “His body had been washed off already.”
“Oh,” she said, looking a little taken aback. “Well, it was.”
“I do not doubt you.” Though others will be free to. Had she realized this yet?
She stared around the clearing. “Do you think this place was a forest shrine, once?”
“Very possibly.” He followed her glance, studying the stumps and the sizes of the trees. Whatever holy or unholy purposes the original possessors had held, the latest ax work had been done by humble itinerant woodcutters, by the evidence. “The spring suggests it. This place has been cleared, abandoned, and recleared more than once, if so.” Following, perhaps, the ebb and flow of the Darthacan Quintarian war against the forest heresies that had so disrupted the kin lands, four centuries ago when Audar the Great had first conquered the Weald.