The warden sketched a curtsey. “Begging your pardon, my lord. The earl instructed me to keep close to my lady.”

“I am obliged for his consideration,” said Ijada, in a voice so expressionless even Ingrey could not decide if it was sincere or dry. She tipped up and drained her beaker and set it down. “Should we retire again to that dull chamber?”

“If it please you, my lady, it was what the earl said.”

Beneath the woman’s stodgy stubbornness Ingrey perceived a real unease. The earl-ordainer’s secular powers alone were enough to overawe his servants, Ingrey supposed, but did they sense—or had they experienced—more?

“Perhaps it is as well to turn in early,” Ingrey conceded reluctantly. “I must attend Lord Hetwar at the funeral rites tomorrow morning.”

Ijada nodded and rose. “I should be grateful if you would wait upon me after, and tell me of them.”

“Certainly, Lady Ijada.”

He watched her pass out of the parlor. It was only in his overwrought fancy that the room seemed to grow darker for her going from it.

The temple square was already crowded with courtly and would-be-courtly mourners when Ingrey arrived there in the midmorning. His eye picked out a few of Gesca’s men at the outer edges of the mob, indicating that Lord Hetwar was already within. Ingrey lengthened his stride and shouldered through the press. Those who recognized him gave way at once.

The sky was a bright autumn blue, and he shrugged in relief as he stepped out of the sun into the shade of the portico. His best court dress was heavy and a trifle hot, the somber sleeveless coat swirling about his ankles and tending to tangle with his sword. The sunbeams shone down also into the open central court, where the holy fire burned high on its plinth, and he blinked at the adjustment from light to dark to light. He spotted Lady Hetwar, attended by Gesca and Hetwar’s oldest son, made his way to her side, and bowed. She gave him an acknowledging nod, her glance approving his garb, and shifted a little to make him space to loom in proper retainer’s style beside Gesca at her back. Gesca gave him a nervy sideways stare, but by no other sign revealed any aftereffects of their last tense encounter, and Ingrey began to hope Gesca had kept the eerie incident to himself.

Beyond the plinth, Ingrey also noted Rider Ulkra and some of Prince Boleso’s higher servants; good, the exiled household had arrived in Easthome as instructed. Ulkra cast him a polite nod of greeting, though most of the retainers who had ridden escort to Boleso’s wagon with him avoided his eyes—whether conscious of his contempt or simply unnerved by him, Ingrey could not tell.

From a stone passage, the sound of a temple choir started up, the echoing effect making the fine, blended voices sound appropriately distant and doleful. At a slow pace, the singing acolytes entered the court: five times five, a quintet for each god, robed in blue, green, red, gray, and white. The archdivine of Easthome followed solemnly. Behind him, six great lords carried the prince’s bier. Hetwar was among them, both kin Boarford brothers, and three more earl-ordainers.

Boleso’s body was tightly wrapped in layers of herbs beneath his perfumed princely robes, Ingrey guessed, though his swollen face was exposed. The delay in his burial pushed the limits of a decomposition that would necessitate a closed coffin. But the death of one so highborn demanded witnesses, the more the better, to prevent later imposters and pretenders from troubling the realm.

The principal mourners followed next. Prince-marshal Biast, resplendent of dress and weary of face, was attended by Symark, holding the prince-marshal’s standard with its pennant wrapped and bound to its staff as a sign of grief. Behind them, Earl Horseriver supported his wife, Princess Fara. Her dark garb was plain to severity, her brown hair drawn back and without jewels or ribbons, and her face deathly white by contrast. She had not her brothers’ height, and the long Stagthorne jaw was softened in her; she was not a beauty, but she was a princess, and her proud carriage and presence normally made up for any shortfall. Today she just looked haggard and ill.

Horseriver’s spirit horse seemed stopped down so tight as to be mistakable for a mere blackness of mood. I must find out from Wencel how he does that. Ingrey began to see how Wencel might long evade the lesser among the Sighted, but he wondered at the cost.

Ingrey was relieved to see that the hallow king had not been dragged from his sickbed and propped in some sedan chair or litter to attend his son’s funeral. It would have been too much like one bier following another.

Ingrey trailed Lady Hetwar as she took her place in the procession entering the high-vaulted Son of Autumn’s court. The wide, paved space filled; lesser hangers-on crowded up and peeked through the archway from the central court. The high lords set down the bier before the Son’s altar, the choir chanted another hymn, and Archdivine Fritine stepped forth to conduct the ceremonies of Boleso’s send-off. Ingrey widened his stance, clasped his hands behind his back, and prepared to endure the obsequies. On the whole, and fortunately in his view, the speakers kept their words brief and formal, with no references to the embarrassing manner of the prince’s death. Even Hetwar restricted himself to a few platitudes about young lives cut tragically short.

A rustling sounded from the central court as the crowd parted to allow the procession of the sacred animals to pass. Three of the stiff-looking groom-acolytes who led them were not the ones Ingrey had seen the other day. Fafa the impressive ice bear had been replaced by a notably small long-haired white cat curled tamely in the arms of a new woman groom in the Bastard’s whites. The boy who led the copper colt was the same as before, though; while he kept his attention on his animal and the archdivine, his glance did cross Ingrey’s once, above Lady Hetwar’s head, and his eyes widened in alarmed recognition.

With extreme circumspection, each animal was led to the bier to sign the acceptance, if any, of Boleso’s soul by its god. No one much expected a blessing from the Daughter of Spring’s blue hen nor the Mother of Summer’s green bird, but nerves stretched as the copper colt was led forth. The horse’s response was ambiguous to nonexistent, as were those of the gray dog and the white cat. The grooms looked worried. Biast appeared grim indeed, and Fara seemed ready to faint.

Was Boleso’s soul sundered and damned, then, rejected by the Son of Autumn Who was his best hope, unclaimed even by the Bastard, doomed to drift as a fading ghost? Or defiled by the spirits of the animals he had sacrificed and consumed, caught between the world of matter and the world of spirit in chill and perpetual torment, as Ingrey had once envisioned to Ijada?

The archdivine motioned Biast, Hetwar, and Learned Lewko—who had been lurking in the background so unobtrusively even Ingrey had not seen him before—to his side for a low-voiced conference, and the grooms began to lead up the animals one by one and present them again to the bier.

The heat and the tension were suddenly too much for Ingrey. The chamber wavered and lurched before his eyes. His right hand throbbed. As quietly as he could, he stepped back to the wall to brace his shoulders against the cool stone. It wasn’t enough. As the copper colt clopped forth once more, his eyes rolled back and he crumpled to the pavement in a boneless heap, the only sound a faint clank from his scabbard.

And then, abruptly, he was standing in that other place, that unbounded space he had entered once before to do battle. Only it seemed not to be a battle to which he was called now. He still wore his court garb, his jaw was still human…