Somewhere a grass peeper shrilled and shrilled again, an arrhythmic pulse within the grove, repeating until it was almost but not quite a pattern, then silencing until she thought it had stopped, only to return once more. She caught a glimpse of a peeper out of the corner of her eye, white and wriggly, squirming among the grass roots.
A hound bayed, a deep, bellowing aroo which made her heart falter as it went on and on. Then another joined, half a tone above, the sound of the two like a knife in her ears. Then all the pack, the tones of the voices lost in a vast cacophony, aroo and aroo, unmelodious and dissonant. The mounts screamed in answer and lunged deeper into the wood. They had found the fox, started the fox, would pursue the fox. Dimity shut her eyes and held on once more, biting her tongue, biting her cheeks, anything to stay conscious and upright, anything at all. A thought came to her.
This is Darenfeld’s Coppice, her mind told her. Darenfeld’s Coppice which lay, once upon a time, within the bounds of Darenfeld’s estancia. You are riding to hounds in Darenfeld’s Coppice, where your friend Janetta bon Maukerden died. Dimity’s mouth opened to shout, and her mind told her mouth to close itself once more. You will be still about it, she told herself. No one really said Janetta died here. No one said that. No one said anything except her name and then whispering, “Darenfeld’s Coppice.” And when Dimity asked, they said shush, shush, don’t say, don’t ask.
They know more than you do, she told herself. You can’t tell them anything they don’t know already.
The hounds were baying as they raced away, and the mount beneath her was dashing after them. She stayed on, eyes shut once more. It was all she could do to hold on. To stay where she was. Not to fall off. To be silent. To bear the pain. To go on with the Hunt.
The Hunt does go on. Time passes. The fox runs for hours. The riders pursue it for hours. Dimity forgets who she is or where she is. There is no yesterday, nor any tomorrow. There is only an everlasting now, full of the pound of feet on the turf, the rustle of grasses as they push their way through, the scream of the fox far ahead, the bay of the hounds. Hours gone. Days, perhaps. Perhaps they have ridden for days. She would not know.
There is nothing to mark the passage of time. Thirst, yes. Hunger, yes. Weariness, yes. Pain, yes. All of these have been there since early in the morning: burning thirst, gnawing hunger, aching bones, deep-set as a disease. Her mouth cannot be drier than it is, her stomach emptier. She cannot hurt more than she hurts. And now, at last, she gives up fighting against it. It will last forever. The thing in her head wipes out any concern about that. Nothing measures time. No before. No after. Nothing, nothing. Until the mount beneath her slows and stops and she unwillingly leaves the agonized daze she has fallen into and opens her eyes.
They are standing at the edge of another copse, moving slowly into it, into a grove, into the dusky cathedral shade of the trees. High above them the foliage opens to allow the sun to pierce the gloom in long radiant spears. One of them lights Stavenger where he stands upon his mount with the harpoon in his hands, ready to throw. From the tree branches above comes a scream of rage, then Stavenger’s arm whips out and the line streaks behind the harpoon like a thread of purest gold. A horrible scream again, this time of agony.
A hound leaps high to seize the line in his teeth. Other hounds as well. They have it. They are pulling the fox out of the tree, still howling, still screaming, never silent for an instant. Something huge and dark with glistening eyes and mighty fangs falls among them, and then there is only the sound of screaming mixed with the sound of teeth.
Dimity closes her eyes again, too late not to see the dark blood fountaining among the struggling bodies, and feels… feels a welling of pleasure so deeply intimate it makes her flush and draw her breath in, makes her legs quiver where they bestride the body beneath her, makes her whole body rock in a spasm of ecstatic sensation.
All around her other eyes are closed, other bodies quiver. Except for Sylvan. Sylvan sits erect, eyes fixed on the bloody tumult before him, teeth bared in a silent rage of defiance, his face quite blank. He can see Dimity from where he is, see her body thrashing, her eyes closed. In order not to see it, he turns his face away.
Dimity did not open her eyes again until they had come all the way back to Klive and had left the Dark Forest to enter upon the Trail of Greens and Blues, There the pain became too much to bear silently and she moaned without thinking, only a tiny sound. One of the hounds looked back at her, a great, violet-mottled hound, its eyes like flames. There was blood on it, blood all over it, its own blood or the blood of the fox. She was conscious in that moment that those same eyes had looked at her again and again during the hunt, that those same eyes had looked at her even when the fox fell from the tree into the middle of the pack, when she felt… that.
She looked down at her hands clenched upon the reins and did not raise her head again.
When they arrived at the Hunt Gate, she could not dismount by herself. Sylvan had to help her. He was at her side so quickly that she thought no one noticed how weak she was. No one but that same hound, his red eyes gleaming in the gathering dusk. Then he went away, all the hounds went away, the mounts went away, and the Huntsman sounded his horn softly at the gate, crying, “The Hunt is over. We have returned. Let us come in.”
From the balcony, Rowena heard the muted horn call. It meant the creatures were gone and humans waited to be attended to. She leaned across the balustrade, hands clutching one another, mouth open, as a servant opened the Kennel Gate from inside and the weary hunters straggled through: the Master and the members of the Hunt in their red coats, the women in their black, their padded breeches making them look wide and froglike in the gloom. White breeches were sweat-stained now, and the pristine purity of the hunt ties had been sullied by dust and by chaff from the tall grasses. Male servants waited with goblets of water and bits of grilled meat on skewers. Baths were waiting, had been waiting for some hours, steaming from the heat of their own little furnaces, and the hunters, hands full of meat and drink, scattered toward their various rooms. Gasping, ready to cry out at last from the fear she had fought during the long day, Rowena sought among the riders until she found the slight figure of Diamante leaning on Sylvan’s arm. Then the tears spilled over and she sought a voice she had almost lost in the conviction that Dimity had not returned.
“Dimity.” Rowena leaned across the rail, not wishing to be overheard by Stavenger or one of the other aristocratic old guard. When the girl looked up, Rowena beckoned, and Sylvan nodded toward a side door. Within a few minutes Dimity was in her mother’s room and Salla was greeting her with an exclamation of disgust.
“Dirty! Oh, you’re filthy, girl-i Filthy. Like a migerer mole creature. Covered all over. Take that coat off, and that tie. I’ll get your robe and you can take off the rest of this filthy stuff.”
“I’m dirty but I’m all right, Salla,” said the girl, moon-pale, pushing weakly at Salla’s busy hands.
“Dimity?”
“Mother.”
“Give Salla your clothes, dear. Here, I’ll help you with your boots.” There was a brief, grunting interlude as the high black boots were tugged off. “You can have your bath in here while you tell me about the Hunt.” She moved through the luxurious bedroom, beckoning, opening the door into the mosaic-tiled bath, where water had been already drawn and kept steaming by its own fires. “You can use my bath oil. You always liked that when you were tiny. Are you sore?”