The divine, suddenly very attentive to the earl, nodded eager understanding. “Of course, my lord. I am so sorry for your loss, my lady. But your father's soul is born now into a better world.”
Horseriver's lips twisted. “Indeed, all men are born pregnant with their own deaths. The experienced eye can watch it quicken within them day by day.”
The divine flinched at this disturbing metaphor, but plowed on sturdily. “I'm not sure that-” Horseriver held up a restraining hand, and the man fell silent at once. “Peace. Tell the prince-marshal that we will meet with him in the morning. Late morning, probably. He may begin the arrangements as he wills.”
“Ingrey…” Horseriver turned to his retainer, and his lips drew back on the most disquieting smile yet. His voice dropped to an eerie low register that vibrated through Ingrey's bones. “Heel.”
Furious, fascinated, and frantic, Ingrey bowed and followed his master out.
HORSERIVER HUSTLED HIS WIFE AND INGREY SWIFTLY AND ALONE through the darkened corridors of the hallow king's hall. Another murmur of Peace had the gate guards saluting them through without hindrance or question. They turned into the night streets, the air growing misty in the gathering chill. As they rounded the first corner, Ingrey looked back over his shoulder and saw a procession of swinging lanterns. Voices carried through the fog: Biast and a noble company hurrying back to his father's deathbed. Too late. Ingrey's ear picked out Hetwar's voice, replying to the prince-marshal. He wondered if Hetwar carried the hallow king's seal that was his charge in its oak box, together with the silver hammer to break it at the bedside.
Horseriver's party was lightless, black-cloaked, stepping softly; Ingrey doubted anyone from the prince-marshal's retinue saw them at all. They started down the hill. A few streets farther on, they did not turn aside to Horseriver's mansion as Ingrey expected, but continued till the stable mews loomed out of the darkness. The doors were open wide, and a few lanterns, hung from the rafters, burned softly within the redolent space.
A groom scrambled up from the bench by the outer wall and bowed fearfully as the earl approached. “All is ready, my lord. The clothes are in the tack room.” “Good. Stay a moment.”
Horseriver pointed to a lantern, which Ingrey reached up and retrieved, then led them through the open door of the tack room. Harness glowed on the wall pegs, with leather burnished and brightwork shining. Across some empty saddle racks, three piles of garments waited. Ingrey recognized his own riding leathers, together with his boots standing below. Another was a woman's riding habit in some wine-dark fabric picked out with gold thread. Horseriver gestured to the piles. “Clothe yourselves,” he addressed Fara and Ingrey equally, “and make ready to ride.”
Stone-faced, Fara dropped her voluminous cloak, which whispered to the wooden floor. “I must have help with the buttons, my lord,” she said levelly.
“Ah, yes.” Horseriver grimaced, and with practiced fingers undid the row of tiny pearl buttons down her back from their velvet loops. Ingrey stripped off court cloak, town shoes, and silver-stitched jerkin and had his leathers hiked up and fastened before Fara's dress and petticoats fell in a pool at her feet. He did not think either of them was prey to embarrassment at this unexpected intimacy. Exaltation, bewilderment, and terror left no room for lesser emotions. He slipped his boots on and straightened, then cinched up his belt for knife and scabbard. His unholy liege lord was still absorbed in the intricacies of his wife's garb.
As the earl raised his arms to help Fara into her jacket, Ingrey's eye caught the gleam of new leather from a knife sheath at his waist. New sheath; new knife? Quietly, he backed out of the tack room into the stable aisle. Could he defy Horseriver's entrancing will? If he could think resistance, surely he could act it? If he did not think too hard? Ijada, what is happening to you now? He could no longer tell. This moment was clearly well prepared for; with Ingrey securely leashed, had the earl readied some fatal assault on that narrow house, as well?
He was still standing there struggling…not so much to move, as to want to move, when the earl appeared again, his own town robes exchanged for leathers and boots, escorting Fara firmly with one hand clenched around her upper arm. Horseriver glanced aside at the empty stall and, to Ingrey's dismay, merely smiled sourly. “You almost frighten me,” he remarked in passing. “That was inspired. So nearly right. Perhaps I should muzzle you, as well.”
He said no more, but aimed Fara into the straight stall where Ijada's chestnut mare shifted uneasily.
“I'm afraid of that horse, my lord,” Fara quavered.
“Not for much longer, I promise you,” he murmured back. Ingrey could not see more over the boards and past the vine-decorated metal bars than the horse's flickering ears and the tops of Horseriver's blond and Fara's dark heads, but he heard a leathery whisper as of a knife being drawn. A low murmur from the earl in words he half recognized made his blood race and raised all the hairs on his arms. Then a meaty thunk, a truncated squeal, a jerk against a head rope that shook the walls-then a thudding of a heavy body collapsing, convulsing, and going still.
The two heads moved back into the aisle. Fara was leaning against Horseriver, shuddering fiercely. If blood spattered her riding costume, it did not show in the dark. “What have you done to me…?” she moaned.
“Sh,” Horseriver soothed her. He touched her brow with his thumb again, renewing her glassy stare. The horse-shadow, too, quieted, though seeming more benumbed than calmed. “It will be well. Come along, now.”
The apprehensive groom had reappeared. “My lord? What was-”
“Fetch the horses.”
The three saddled horses were marshaled in the darkened court before the mews. The groom and Horseriver between them boosted Fara aboard her bay mare; Horseriver himself checked her girths, adjusted her boots in her stirrups, smoothed her split skirts, closed her trembling gloved hands tightly over her reins.
“Mount up,” Horseriver directed Ingrey, handing him the gray gelding's reins. Ingrey did so, though the horse skittered and hopped beneath him, trying to get its head down and buck. Horseriver glanced back and cast another Peace! over his shoulder in a voice of mild irritation, and Ingrey's mount settled down, if still uneasily. The earl closed the stable doors behind them.
The groom gave Horseriver a leg up, and the earl caught up his stirrups with the toes of his boots without looking, settling himself in his saddle. He reached down and laid a beneficent palm across the groom's forehead. “Go home. Sleep. Forget.”
The groom's eyes went vague, and he turned away, yawning.
Horseriver raised a hand and called to Ingrey and Fara, “Follow.” He wheeled his mount and led off at a walk into the foggy dark. Hooves scraped on the sloping cobbles, the sound echoing off the walls of the buildings as they wound down through the Kingstown streets. As they passed through the empty market square, Horseriver leaned over the side of his saddle, pressed his hand to his stomach, and quietly retched. He spat something dark and wet upon the paving bricks. Ingrey, passing after, smelled not bile but blood. Does he bleed for his weirding voice as I do for mine? More discreetly, it seemed. And how much of that treasure had he misspent for Ingrey's murderous geas, that he named it too much?
Where are we going? Why does he want us? What are we going to do when we get there?
Ingrey gritted his teeth in frustration that he'd had no chance to send a message. Or leave one…He tried to imagine what folk would make tomorrow morning of the mess left in the stables: three horses and the stag gone, one mare bloodily dead, an untidy pile of court dress left on the tack room floor. They had left Easthome swiftly and quietly, to be sure, but by no means in secret. For Fara's sake alone, there would surely be pursuit. Then whatever Horseriver plans, he expects it to go quickly, before pursuit can arrive. Should I seek delay?