“No.” Ingrey quoted back to him: “There were but two men present who might have turned to the task, and I knew it wasn’t me. Therefore.” He added after a moment, “I must find out how you make a geas. I suspect necromancy.”

Wencel paused for a long time, as though sorting through a wide variety of responses. “In a sense.” He sighed, by the squaring of his shoulders seeming to come to some unwelcome decision. “I would not call it a mistake, for if it had succeeded, it would have simplified my present life immeasurably. I would call it a false move, because of its peculiar consequences. I note merely, I am not playing against you.”

“Whom do you play against, then?” Ingrey pushed off the wall and began to pace in a half circle around the earl. “At first I thought this was all about Easthome politics.”

“Only indirectly.”

Ingrey resolutely ignored the shivering in his belly, the thudding in his ears. The whirling confusion in his mind. “What is really going on here, Wencel?”

“What do you think is going on?”

“I think you will do anything to protect your secrets.”

Wencel tilted his head. “Once, that was true.” He added more softly, “Though not for much longer, I… well, do not pray.”

Ingrey’s body felt like a coiled spring. His hand caressed his knife haft. Wencel’s glance did not miss the gesture.

“How if I release your soul the old hard way?” Ingrey returned as softly. “Whatever your powers, I doubt they would survive if I sawed off your head and tossed it in the Stork.”

At least Wencel did Ingrey’s menace the compliment of holding very, very still. “You cannot imagine how very much you would regret such an act. If you seek to rid yourself of me, that is exactly the wrong method. My heir.”

Ingrey blinked in bafflement. “I am no heir to kin Horseriver.”

“At law and in property, no. By the laws of the Old Weald, however, a nephew is next to a son in kinship. And as it seems this ill-made body of mine will not engender a son on Fara, you are the heir of my blood, should you be living when I next die. This is no particular joy or choice of mine, understand. The spell adopts you.”

The conversation had tilted too suddenly and violently for it to be all Ingrey’s doing; Wencel had met his daring push with a mighty yank, which was doubtless why Ingrey felt as though he were hanging upside down just now. Over a dire drop. Into a most uncertain darkness. The pressure of his hand on his hilt sagged. “Next die?”

“Remember how I told you the shamans’ spirit animals were made, by the accumulation of life upon life, death upon death? Something akin was made to work for men’s souls, too. Once.”

“Oh, gods, Wencel, is this another of your bedtime tales?”

“This one shall keep you awake, I promise you.” He drew breath. “For sixteen generations of Horserivers, my soul has passed from father to son in an unbroken chain, save when it passed between brothers. It has proved an evil heritage. The death of this clay will not release me from the world of matter, but only into the next male body in my line. Which is yours, at the moment. My blood coils in you through your mother’s and your father’s sides both, for all that the unruly Wolfcliff camp lends so much to your singular surliness.” Wencel grimaced.

Ingrey envisioned it: not a great beast, but a great man? And if the piled-up spirits of animals blended and transmuted into something more powerfully uncanny, what strange thing might the piled-up souls of men become? “You have told me many lies, Wencel. Why should I believe this one?”

Ingrey had spiraled toward the table as he paced, as though drawn on a cord. Wencel bent his head toward the threat looming at his shoulder, and his eyes glimmered steel-colored with a crush of emotions too strange for Ingrey to unravel: anger and scorn, pain and cruelty, curiosity and animosity. “Shall I show you? It would be a just punishment for your presumption, I think.”

“Aye, Wencel,” Ingrey breathed. “Tell me true. For once.”

“Since you ask so pressingly… “ Wencel rotated until they were face-to-face, inches apart, and placed his stubby hands on either side of Ingrey’s head. “I am the last high holy king of the Weald. Or Old Weald, so-called to distinguish it from modern mockeries.”

The writing table stopped Ingrey’s backward jerk. “You said the last real holy king died at Bloodfield.”

“Not at all. Or twice, depending on how you look at it.” The earl’s fingers found Ingrey’s temples, caressing them in small sweaty circles, and he continued, “I was a young man, heir to my high house, hunting in the meadows along the Lure before ever Audar was born to soil his swaddling clothes. The Darthacans pressed my kin tribe, squatted on our lands, cut down our forests, sent missionaries to defile our shrines, then soldiers to drag the missionaries’ bodies home. My people fought and fell. I saw my father die, and my hallow king.”

Pictures bloomed in Ingrey’s head as Wencel spoke, too vivid to be his own imagination. This is a weirding voice indeed, to make me remember what I never saw. Dark forests, green valleys, palisades of timber embracing village houses built of wattle and daub, smoke rising sharp-scented from vents in their thatched roofs. Horsemen armored in boiled leather passing out the gates to battle, or back in, bloodied and drooping, their scant metal chinking in the chill air. Exhausted voices carried by the winter fog in a tongue that just eluded Ingrey’s mind, but recalled Jokol’s rolling poetry.

“The next election cast the kingship upon me, for I was grown leader of a grim people by then, with sons to follow at my back. They made me their torch, and I burned for them in the gathering shadows. Our hearts were hot. But the gods denied our sacrifices and turned Their faces from us.”

A tawny young man, anxious and resolute, nude but for signs painted upon his body, stood high on an oak branch in flickering torchlight. A halter of silky nettle flax circled his neck, and blood ran down his limbs from a careful series of cuts. He raised his outstretched hands high, and spoke, vibrant voice marred by a quaver; then fell forward as a man might dive off a high rock into a pool. Nearly to the ground the fall was jerked to a neck-cracking stop… Wencel’s dilated eyes shivered. Was that one of the princely sons, sent to the gods as courier from his hallow king…? This was truth by the riverful; Ingrey felt as if he were being held head down in it till his brain might burst. The visions flowed on, engendered by the whispered words, in an overwhelming stream.

“We wove Holytree itself into the spell for invincibility and, as hallow king, I was its hub.”

Voices sang, beating upward against the night like wings. The trees shivered as if caressed by the breath of them. The deep blended tones made Ingrey’s every hair rise.

“But we could not risk the continuity of the kingship in battle, for if I were to fall, the spell would shatter, and all who were bound into it would be lost in the instant. So my eldest son… “

Bearded blond youth, faithful face etched by strain to untoward age. Some kinship in both those features and that strain, yes, to the tawny youth in the oak—brother or cousin?

“… and I together undertook the great binding, so that kingship, soul, horse, hub, and all together might be handed down without a break, regardless of where or when or how our bodies met their ends. Until the victory was ours.”

Wencel paused. “You do begin to see where this is going…?”

Ingrey made a faint noise through parted lips, not quite a squeak, not quite a sigh. Wencel shifted to place himself more square to Ingrey. He did not draw back; his breath ghosted against Ingrey’s face as he spoke.

“Audar’s troops took me in the first hours of the fight. Broke my body, wrapped me in my royal banner, threw me in the first ditch they dug. They began the butchery even before the fighting was done. I died with my mouth full of black blood and dirt… “