“He took Boleso-”
“I saw! Oh, grace of the Son, my transgression was lifted from me.” Tears were running down her real face, as they had her dream face. “By your grace, too, oh, Ingrey, such a deed…” She was kissing his face, cool lips slipping across hot sweat on his brow, his eyelids, his cheeks.
He fell back a little, and said through gritted teeth, “I don't do this sort of thing. These things do not happen to me.”
She stared. “They happen to you rather a lot, I'd say.”
“No! Yes…Gods! I feel as though I've become some unholy lightning rod in the middle of a thunderstorm. Miracles, I have to stay away from funeral miracles, they dodge aside from their targets and come at me. I don't, I can't…”
Her left hand squeezed his right. She looked down. “Oh!” The wretched bandage was soaked again. Wordlessly, she turned to the sideboard, rooted briefly in a drawer, and found a length of linen. “Here, sit.” She drew him to the table, stripped off the red rag, and wrapped his hand more tightly. Their mutual wheezing was dying down at last. She had not run across half of Easthome, but he did not question her breathlessness.
“I won't say you're mistaken.”
She leaned forward and pushed a lock of sweat-dampened hair off his forehead. Her gaze searched his face, for what he did not know. Her expression softened. “I may have murdered Boleso-”
“No, only killed.”
“But thanks to you I did not encompass his sundering from the gods. It's something. No small thing.”
“Aye. If you say so.” For her, then. If his actions had pleased Ijada, perhaps they were worthwhile. Ijada and the Son. “That was it, then. That was what we were chivvied here for. Boleso's undeserved redemption. We have accomplished the god's will, and now it's over, and we are discarded to our fates.”
Her lips curved up. “That's very Ingrey of you, Ingrey. Always look on the dark side.”
“Someone has to be realistic, in the midst of this madness!”
Now her brows rose, too. She was laughing at him. “Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too. It was my undeserved redemption as well.”
He ought to feel offended. Not buoyed up by her laughter as if floating in some bubbling hot spring.
She took a breath. “Ingrey! If one soul trapped in the world by an anchor of animals is such an agony to the gods that they make miracles out of, of such unlikely helpers as us, what must four thousand such souls be?”
“I don't think we're done. I don't think we're even started yet!”
Ingrey moistened his lips. He followed her jump of inspiration, yes. He wished it wasn't so easy to do. If freeing one such soul had been an experience of muted terror to him…“Nor shall we be, if I am burned and you are hanged. I do not say you are wrong, but first things first.”
She shook her head in passionate denial. “I still do not understand what is wanted of me. But I saw what is wanted of you. If your great-wolf has made you a true shaman of the Weald, the very last-and the god's own Voice said it was so-then you are their last hope indeed. A purification-the men who fell at Bloodfield were never purified, never released. We need to go there.” She jerked in her seat as if ready to leap up and run out the door at once and down the morning road on foot.
His hands tightened on hers, as much to hold her in place as anything. “I would point out, we have a few hindrances here. You are arrested and bound for trial, and I am your arresting officer.”
“You offered to smuggle me away once before. Now I know where! Don't you see?” Her eyes were afire.
“And then what? We would be pursued and dragged back, perhaps even before we could do anything, and your case would be worse than before, and I would be wrenched from you. Let us solve this problem in Easthome first, then go. That is the logical order of things. If your men have waited four hundred years for you, they can surely wait a little longer.”
“Can they?” Her brows drew down in a deep frown. “Do you know this? How?”
“We must concentrate on one problem at a time, the most urgent first.”
Her right hand touched her heart. “This feels most urgent to me.” Ingrey's jaw set. Just because she was passionate and loving and beautiful and god-touched didn't mean she was right in all things.
But only redeemed in her soul and sin. Her body and crime were still hostage to the world of matter and Easthome politics. Whatever he was called to, it was not to follow her into plain folly.
He drew breath. “I did not dream your dream of the Woods. I have only your-admittedly vivid-description to go on. Ghosts fade, starved of nourishment from their former bodies. Why have not these? Do you imagine they've been stuck in the blasted trees for four centuries?”
He'd meant it for half a joke, but she took it wholly seriously. “I think so. Or something of a sort. Something alive must be sustaining them in the world of matter. Remember what Wencel said, about the great rite that Audar interrupted?”
“I don't trust anything Wencel says.”
She regarded him doubtfully. “He's your cousin.”
Ingrey couldn't decide if she meant that as an argument for or against the earl.
“I do not understand Wencel,” Ijada continued, “but that rang true to me, it rang in my bones. A great rite that bound the spirit warriors to the Weald itself for their sustenance, until their victory was achieved.” A most unsettled, and unsettling, look stole over her face. “But they never achieved victory, did they? And the Weald that came back, in the end, was not what they'd lost, but something new. Wencel says it was a betrayal, though I do not see it. It was not their world to choose, anymore.”
A knock sounded on the street door of the narrow house, making Ingrey flinch in surprise. The porter's shuffle and low voice sounded through the walls, the words blurred but the tone protesting. Ingrey's teeth clamped in irritation at the untimely interruption. Now what?
Ingrey's teeth clamped in irritation at the untimely interruption. Now what? N
A PERFUNCTORY RAP SHIVERED THE PARLOR DOOR, AND IT swung inward. The porter's voice carried from the hall, “…no, Learned, you daren't go in there! The wolf-lord ordered us not-”
Learned Lewko stepped around the frame and closed the door firmly on the porter's panicked babble. He was dressed as Ingrey had glimpsed him earlier that morning, in the white robes of his order, cleaner and newer than what he'd worn in his dusty office but still unmarked with any rank. Unobtrusive: against the busy background of Templetown, surely nearly invisible. He was not exactly wheezing, but his face was flushed, as if he'd been walking quickly in the noon sun. He paused to reorder his robes and his breathing, his gaze on Ingrey and Ijada penetrating and disturbed.
“I am only a petty saint,” he said at last, signing himself, his touch lingering on his heart, “but that was unmistakable.”
Ingrey moistened his lips. “How many others there saw, do you know?”
“As far as I know, I was the only Sighted one present.” He tilted his head. “Do you know any differently?”
Wencel. If there had been signs apparent to Lewko, Ingrey rather thought Wencel could not have been unaware. “I'm not sure.”
Lewko wrinkled his nose in suspicion.
Ijada said tentatively, “Ingrey…?”
“Ah.” Ingrey jumped to his feet to perform introductions, grateful to take refuge for a moment in formality. “Lady Ijada, this is Learned Lewko. I have, um…told you each something of the other. Learned, will you sit…?” He offered the third chair. “We expected you.”
“I fear I cannot say the same of you.” Lewko sighed and sank down, flapping one hand briefly to cool his face. “In fact, you become more unexpected by the hour.”
Lewko drew breath. “When the animals were first presented at the prince's bier, I feared an ambiguous outcome. We do try to avoid those; they are most distressing to the relatives. Disastrous, in this case. The groom-acolytes are normally under instruction to, ah, amplify their creature's signs, for clarity. Amplify, mind you, not substitute or alter. I fear that this habit became misleading to some, and led to that attempt at fraud the day before yesterday. Or so our later inquiries revealed. None of the orders was pleased to learn that this was not the first time recently that some of our people let themselves be tempted by worldly bribes or threats. Such corruption feeds on its own success when it meets no correction.”