“Hm. Well, they’ll be busy about their tasks. Let’s see what he did with that fox.”
Inglis shrugged but followed behind Penric, his curiosity, too, overcoming his prudence.
The stable had once been meant for more horses, judging by the number and generous proportions of the stalls. All its current residents seemed to be out in the pasture, leaving several doors hanging open or half open. Only one stall had both the top and bottom halves of its door latched.
Gently, trying to make no squeak, Pen unlatched the top and swung it part open. He blinked to try to adjust his eyes to the shadows, then gave up and thought, Des, light.
Some half-a-dozen, no, seven unhappy foxes were imprisoned within. Some lay in the straw panting in apparent exhaustion, others crouched as far from their fellows as they could get, growling. Several were bleeding from fox fights. The hostile atmosphere, Pen thought, was much the same as one might get by jamming seven sorcerers and their demons into a similar space.
“That,” Inglis muttered, “is a decidedly odd thing to do with foxes.”
“Really. If that fellow spoke the truth about thinning the local vermin, they should all be pelts tacked to the stable wall by now, waiting for the women servants to get around to scraping them.”
“So what’s next? I might add, my probationary status with the Fellowship would not be helped by my being either arrested for trespassing, or for getting into a fight trying to avoid being arrested for trespassing.”
“Yet… hm. You have a valid point. We need Oswyl up here in order to go much further.”
“For what? It’s not against the law to trap foxes. Especially by a forester on his own lord’s land.”
“All right. That’s a problem, too.” Convincing the somewhat rigid Oswyl of… what? Even Pen wasn’t sure.
Inglis snorted softly. “It does look like, if you were craving to survey all the foxes on this land, someone seems to be doing it for you. Might be easier to stand off and wait.”
“Except there is one fox out there I’d rather no one catch but me.”
“I wonder… if anyone could catch it but you?”
“Hm.” Which led directly to the uncomfortable question of the state of mind of the lost demon, trapped in a lower animal that could not support it. It might (if indeed in a fox, not yet proved) make a very shrewd fox indeed. Or it might make for a drowning agony of confusion and despair. Easily mistaken for a sick fox by anyone, and thereby hung a whole host of other hazards.
“I’d want to find out what Oswyl has uncovered today, first,” said Inglis. “Before…”
He didn’t complete the thought, but the heartening implication seemed to be that if Pen wanted to try something chancy in aid of all this, he might not have to do it alone. Pen bit his lip, trying to think. They were supposed to meet Oswyl in town for dinner, and there relate the events of each of their days. The light was leveling. By the time they made it back to the hill village of Weir, collected their horses, and rode down into Easthome, it would be well on toward evening.
“I think,” said Pen slowly, “we’d better withdraw for tonight, before someone catches us skulking around. Come back tomorrow in better force.”
Inglis nodded agreement, and they turned to slip away into the woods. At the last moment Pen stepped back, unlatched the lower door to the stall, and edged it open. Inglis raised his brows but did not comment until they had reached the cover of the copse once more. As they paused to look back, they saw one rusty streak, then another, flit around the corner of the stable and speed for the forest.
“Two hundred foxes,” Inglis murmured. “Do you think your god has His thumb in all this?”
“Oh, yes,” sighed Pen, signed himself, and tapped his lips twice.
The tavern where they were to rendezvous was a modest place, tucked up in an alley not far from the big chapterhouse of the Father’s Order on the Templetown heights. They found Oswyl and his assistant arrived before them, though not by much, in a small upstairs chamber, a compromise between cheap and private. But the pitcher of beer the servant brought was decent, the tureen of stew contained identifiable meat, the bread and butter were abundant, and Penric, by this time, was starving. The servant’s presence gave them all a welcome head start on the meal, but at last he decamped, closing the door behind him.
Though town-clean, Oswyl looked even more tired than Pen felt after barging around in the woods all day. Both Oswyl and his assistant Thala, who Penric gathered was also his apprentice, were dressed in their most formal gray uniforms, having just come from Learned Magal’s funeral; it being high summer, the ceremony had not been delayed. Penric was relieved to learn that the Easthome sacred animals had plainly signed her soul as taken up by the white god.
“Her service was very well attended,” Thala remarked. “Whoever killed her either did not know or did not care how much his deed would have her entire Easthome Order up in arms against him.”
“Aye,” said Oswyl. “Although I spoke to as many as I could, and their most common response after anger was bewilderment. Kin and colleagues both. Usually by this time in an inquiry I start to have some direction, some odd crack, some… unpleasant smell, but not here. She seems to have been the most blameless woman imaginable. I’d feel myself forced back to shot by mistake for a deer, except no one had any idea what she was doing out in those woods in the first place. Either she’d told no one of her errand, or at least one person was lying to me.” He sighed, as if this latter were an irreducible hazard.
“We made a good start on finding out everything she’d done day before yesterday,” said Thala, “right down to what she ate for breakfast, but about the third hour of the afternoon she left the chapterhouse and just never came back.”
“Afoot?” said Inglis. “Hard to get all the way up to those woods before dark that way. Livery stables…?”
“We’re in process of canvassing them all,” said Oswyl. “No luck yet.”
“Why shoot a sorceress?” Pen mused. “Why murder anyone, for that matter?” Belatedly self-conscious, he managed not to glance at Inglis. “I mean, in a premeditated way.”
Oswyl chased a bite of bread with a long swallow of beer, then sat back. “Some reasons are more common than others.”
“Money?” asked Inglis. “An inheritance…?”
“Money to be sure, but inheritances very rarely. Usually murder happens in the course of a robbery. Next most common is some brawl or ambush after losses at play, and after that, debt.”
“Her purse was still tied to her belt,” observed Thala, “though it didn’t hold much, and those little pearl earrings were still in her ears. No ordinary cutpurse would have left either. Stolen demons I can’t speak to.”
Oswyl nodded at her in a mentor’s approval. “Magal was an orphan, she didn’t gamble, and she neither owed nor was owed money,” he said. “We’ve checked all that. She owned no property. What she inherited from her late husband went to her daughter’s dowry and her son’s apprenticeship.”
“Temple divines are seldom rich,” Penric noted.
“To hear them complain of it, no, yet they seldom go hungry,” said Oswyl. Penric considered his dinner of last night, and let this comment go by. Oswyl continued, “But no, I’m… let’s say I would be surprised if money turns out to be an issue in this.
“Then there’s jealousy. And not just rivalries of the bedchamber, in all their customary variations. Siblings. Colleagues, fellow workmen, fellow students. The envy by one with lesser skill or luck of those with greater. Some very corrosive emotions, there. Except I’ve found nothing of that sort hanging on Learned Magal’s robes, either. So far.” He drank again, and frowned. “An odd sort of fellow traveler with jealousy and envy is revenge. That one can be tricky. People, and not just the stupid sort, can decide that the most absurd things were an unbearable slight to them. And not necessarily in retaliation for some wrongdoing, or in some cases even right-doing, as we of the Father’s Order have sometimes suffered.” He grimaced in memory. “Not all who experience justice appreciate it.”