“It is beautiful, my lord,” Ingrey said, nodding to the light-frosted view.
Wencel's lips twitched in an odd little grimace. “I have seen enough moonsets.” He added after a moment, “Enjoy it while you can.”
A disturbingly ambiguous remark, Ingrey thought. “Why do we gallop? What foe do we outrace? Pursuit from Easthome?”
“That as well.” Wencel stretched his back. “Time is not my friend. Thanks to the Stagthorne kin's shrewd habit of electing their sons hallow kings in their fathers' lifetimes, it has been more than a hundred and twenty years since the last interregnum. The effort of creating another such gap seems overwhelming to me, just now. I shall seize this one.” His lips drew back. “Or die trying does not apply.”
So, Hetwar's suspicions seemed sustained; Horseriver did covet the election, and had been manipulating the ordainers. And possibly the lives and deaths of potential rival candidates, as well? “Is this all to make yourself hallow king again, then?”
Horseriver snorted. “I am hallow king. I need no further making.”
He had needed something, however; some missing piece, spun off from the old Stagthorne king's departing soul. Some…half magic, or fragment of the Weald: but surely not political in its nature. “Hallow king in name and form, then. Publicly elected and acclaimed.” “If I had desired the name of king of this benighted land, I could have taken it years ago, Ingrey,” Horseriver said mildly. “In a better body, too.”
“If you don't want to win the election for yourself, what do you want?”
“To delay it.”
Ingrey blinked grimy eyes. “Will this flight do that?”
“Well enough. The absence of one earl-ordainer”-Horseriver touched his chest-“alone would not be enough, but Biast will be distracted by Fara's disappearance on the eve of her father's funeral, once he discovers it. I have planted a few other disruptions. The multiple proxies I left for different candidates should be good for several days of argument all by themselves, when they surface.” He grinned briefly and not especially humorously.
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.