Learned Lewko limped up to Ingrey and signed a hasty blessing. Jokol trod behind with the sort of breathless, maniacal grin upon his face that Ingrey imagined he’d have worn while facing a storm at sea, his boat climbing mountainous waves while all the sane men clung to the ropes and screamed.
“Ho! Ingorry!” he cried happily, saluting ghostly warriors right and left as though they were long-lost cousins. “This night will make some song!”
“Are you the mortal vessels for the gods, then?” Ingrey asked Lewko. “Are you all made saints?”
“I have been a saint,” wheezed Lewko, “and it isn’t this. If I had to guess… “ His glare around the densely haunted clearing ended on a narrow-eyed look at Ingrey.
Oswin and Hallana abandoned their blown mount and came up, clutching each other by the arm over the uneven ground, staring at the ghostly warriors in wonder tinged with trepidation and, Ingrey would swear, a blazing scholarly curiosity not far removed, in its own way, from Jokol’s appalling enthusiasm.
“If I had to guess, Oswin,” Lewko continued to his colleague—Ingrey sensed the tail of a hot debate—”I think we are all made sacred funeral animals.”
Oswin looked at first faintly offended, then thoughtful. Hallana giggled. The sound was overwrought but queerly joyous.
“Ingrey must cleanse my ghosts,” Ijada said firmly. “I told you it would be so.”
Two days of debate, Ingrey guessed, but in a company, however odd, fearsomely well equipped for it. The gods have no hands in this world but ours. Hand to hand to hand…
Biast spied his sister, now sitting slumped on the long mound not far from Wencel’s body, and hurried to her, going to his knees and gathering her in his arms. Their heads bent together; they spoke hastily in low tones. He held her as she shuddered. She did not, yet, weep.
“Ijada,” murmured Ingrey, “I don’t think we had best delay, if this is to work.” He looked around at the revenants, who had stopped milling and jostling and now stared back at him in yearning silence. As if I were their last hope of heaven. “How do I… what do I… “ What do I do?
She grasped the wolf’s head standard in both hands and set her shoulders. “You’re the shaman-king. Do what seems right to you, and it will be.” Beside her, the gold-belted marshal made a gesture of assent.
Four thousand, so many! It matters less where I begin, as that I begin.
Ingrey turned slowly around and caught sight of the tall warrior with the wolf cloak he’d seen earlier. He motioned the revenant forward and stared into his pale features. The ghost smiled and nodded kindly, as if to reassure him, fell to one knee before Ingrey, captured his left hand, and bowed his head. Fascinated, Ingrey extended his right index finger, down which a trickle of blood flowed from the soaked rag wrapping his reopened wound, and smeared a drop across the warrior’s forehead. It disturbed Ingrey more than a little that the ghost felt solid to him now, not liquid as before, and he wondered what it bespoke of his own changed state.
“Come,” Ingrey whispered, and the warrior’s spirit wolf, so ancient and worn as to be hardly more than a dark smear, passed out through his fingers. The warrior rose and lifted his face to the watching divines, then extended his hand toward Learned Oswin in a gesture half greeting, half plea. Oswin, with an anxious side glance at Hallana, who nodded vigorously at him, held out his hand to grasp the revenant’s. The wolf warrior clasped it, smiled beatifically, and melted away.
“Oh,” said Oswin, and his voice shook, tears starting in his eyes. “Oh, Hallana, I did not know… “
“Shh,” she said. “It will be very well now, I think.” She moistened her lips and gazed at Ingrey as though he were a cross between some famous work of Temple art she’d traveled days to see, and her favorite child.
Ingrey glanced around again, his eyes crammed with choices, and motioned another warrior to him. The man knelt and awkwardly, hopefully, presented his head held up between his two hands. Ingrey repeated the crimson unction upon the forehead, for whatever this last libation from the world of matter was worth, and released a dark hawk-spirit to fly into the night and vanish. The warrior reached for Oswin again, and this time Ingrey could see, just before he melted away, that the man was made whole. The Father speed you on your journey, then.
A woman revenant came forward, young-looking, carrying a banner that unfolded to display the ancient spitting-cat sigil of the Lynxlakes, a kin that had dwindled to extinction in the male line two centuries past. When Ingrey took her hand, he was startled to feel two other tattered souls clinging to her through her banner. Her lynx was sad and shabby, and the other two creatures so ragged as to be unidentifiable, in passing away. He signed her forehead in three parallel carmine strokes, which seemed to suffice, for she rose and strode to Jokol, who brightened and stood very straight, taking her hand to kiss it and murmuring something in her ear before she vanished. Ingrey swore he heard a faint low laugh, suddenly merry, linger for a moment in the air behind her. Jokol for the Daughter, aye. The Lady of Spring gives notoriously abundant blessings.
The next was a thin old man who went to Lewko, who stood looking very reflective as the revenant passed through. Lewko for the Bastard, naturally.
“Prince Biast,” called Ingrey softly. “I’m afraid I need you here.” Biast for the Son. Of course.
“I suspect I will be least used, this night,” murmured Hallana. She cast a shrewd glance toward the mound. “I will sit with poor Fara till you need me. I would guess she’s had a time of it.”
“Thank you, Learned, yes,” said Ingrey. “She was treated most miserably from first to last. But in the end she remembered she was a princess.”
Biast came forward to Ingrey’s side, studying him warily. The entranced expression upon his face when he looked at Ingrey was laced with a thread of defiance. In an attempt at irony that faltered, he murmured, “Should I call you sire, here?”
“You need not call me anything, so long as you turn your hand to the task. Will Fara be all right?” Ingrey nodded across the clearing to where the princess sat huddled, watching grimly, as Hallana lowered herself beside her.
“I offered to take her to where Symark and the divines’ servants wait, but she refused. She says she wants to bear witness.”
“She has earned that.” And it would make her the one person besides Ingrey who had seen all of Horseriver’s actions from her father’s death to… whatever the end of this night brought. If he survived, that could be important. And if I don’t survive, it could be even more important.
“The most here will be yours, I suspect,” Ingrey told Biast. “The old kings had two tasks: to lead their men to battle and to lead them home again. Horseriver lost sight of the second, I think, in his black madness and despair. These warriors of the Old Weald—their duty to their king is done; there remains only their king’s duty to them. It’s going to be”—Ingrey sighed—”a long night.”
Biast swallowed, and nodded shortly. “Go on.”
Ingrey looked around at the apprehensive revenants, pressing close again, and raised his voice, though he was not sure he needed to; within the bounds of Bloodfield, his voice carried. “Fear no stinting, kinsmen! I will not end my watch till your long watch is done.”
A blond-bearded young man knelt, first of a long string of such youths, many desperately mutilated. Ingrey released creature after creature: boar and bear, horse and wolf, stag and lynx, hawk and badger. Biast studied each man, as they passed through his hands, as though looking in some disquieting mirror.
It had taken a cadre of Audar’s troops two days to slay all these here; Ingrey did not see how he was to release them all in a night, but something odd seemed to be happening to time in this woods. He was not sure if it was a variant upon what happened to his flow of perception in his battle madness—a shaman skill—or if the gods had lent some element of Their god-time, by which They attended to all souls in the world both simultaneously and equally. Ingrey only knew that each warrior was owed a moment at least of his hallow king’s full regard; and if the debt had not been Ingrey’s to contract, it had still fallen to him to pay. Heir indeed.