“He is afraid of you.”

“Not enough, it seems.” He yanked his horse away and pretended to inspect the cortege, returning up the other side to the head of the column. Alone. She looked after him as he passed, her mouth opening as if to speak, but he ignored her.

Forcing the cortege up the muddy road out of the valley diverted his mind enough to regain his calm, or at least replace his fuming with other irritations. On a steep incline, with the blowing team’s hooves slipping, the wagon began to slide sideways toward a precipitous edge; the teamster’s wife screeched alarm. Ingrey flung himself off his horse and led the quicker-witted among the guards to brace themselves and strain against the wagon’s side and rear, pushing it away from the dizzying drop and up through the mire.

It cost him a strained shoulder and a good deal of filth on his riding leathers, and he was almost tempted to let the load go into the ravine. He imagined it falling, breaking up, the coffin bouncing on the boulders and splitting open and Boleso’s nude corpse plunging to its just doom in a shower of salt. But the wagon must needs pull the struggling loyal horses after it, and they did not deserve the prince’s fate. And, given that he stood between the wagon and the drop, Ingrey himself would have been swept over, crushed underneath the first impact. They’d have had to use his good riding leathers as a bag for his remains, after that. The gruesome thought amused him enough that he remounted his horse afterward in a restored, if winded, humor.

They paused at noon at a wide clearing just off the road, home to an ancient spring. His men unpacked the bread and cold meats provided by the castle cook, but Ingrey, calculating distances and hours of light, was more concerned for the horses. The team was mud-crusted and sweaty, so he set Boleso’s surly retinue to assisting the teamster in unharnessing and rubbing them down before they were fed. The worst of the gradients were behind them now; with a suitable rest, he judged the beasts would last till nightfall, by which time he hoped to reach the Temple town of Reedmere, commandeer some more fitting conveyance, and send the rustic rig home.

More princely conveyance, Ingrey revised his thought. A former manure wagon seemed to him all too fitting. Closer to Easthome, he decided, he would send a rider ahead to guide a relief cortege to him, and hand off Boleso’s body to more gaudy and noble ceremony, provided by those who cared for the prince. Or at least, cared for Boleso’s rank and the show they made to each other. Maybe he’d send the rider tonight.

He washed his hands in the spring’s outlet and accepted a slab of venison wrapped in bread from his lieutenant, Gesca. Gnawing, he looked around for his prisoner and her attendant. The teamster’s wife was busy about the food baskets by the unhitched wagon. Lady Ijada was walking about the clearing—in that costume, she might whisk into the woods and disappear among the tall tree boles in a moment. Instead, she pried up a stone from the crumbled foundation above the spring and picked her way over to where Ingrey rested on a big fallen log.

“Look,” she said, holding out the glittery gray block.

Ingrey looked. On one side of the stone a spiral pattern was incised into the weathered surface.

“It’s the same as one of the symbols Boleso had drawn on his body. In red madder, centered on his navel. Did you see it there?”

“No,” Ingrey admitted. “His body had been washed off already.”

“Oh,” she said, looking a little taken aback. “Well, it was.”

“I do not doubt you.” Though others will be free to. Had she realized this yet?

She stared around the clearing. “Do you think this place was a forest shrine, once?”

“Very possibly.” He followed her glance, studying the stumps and the sizes of the trees. Whatever holy or unholy purposes the original possessors had held, the latest ax work had been done by humble itinerant woodcutters, by the evidence. “The spring suggests it. This place has been cleared, abandoned, and recleared more than once, if so.” Following, perhaps, the ebb and flow of the Darthacan Quintarian war against the forest heresies that had so disrupted the kin lands, four centuries ago when Audar the Great had first conquered the Weald.

“I wonder what the old ceremonies were really like,” she mused. “The divines scorn the animal sacrifice, but really… When I was a child at my father’s Temple fort, I went a few times with… with a friend to the marsh people’s autumn rites. The fen folk aren’t of the same race or language as the Old Wealdings, but I could almost have imagined myself going back to those days. It was more like a grand party and outdoor roast than anything. I mean, they made some songs and rituals over the creatures before they slaughtered them, but what’s the difference if we pray over our meat after it’s cooked instead of before?” She added with an air of fairness, “Or so my friend said. The fort’s divine disagreed, but then, the two of them disagreed a lot. I think my friend enjoyed baiting him.”

It hadn’t been the menu that the Quintarian divines had objected to, for it wasn’t just meat that the Old Weald kin had taken from their hallowed beasts. The tribal sorcerers had defiled the souls of their battle lords with the ghosts of animals, making their leaders’ spirits fierce—but also unfit to offer, at the ends of their lives, to the gods. Ingrey doubted any festival this young woman would have been permitted to see involved any consumption beyond meat, though. “It is said the fen men paint themselves with blood.”

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “that’s true. Or at any rate, everyone ran about splashing each other and screaming with laughter. It was all very messy and silly, and rather smelly, but it was hard to see any evil in it. Of course, this tribe didn’t sacrifice people.” She looked around the clearing as if imagining the ghostly image of some such evil slaying here.

“Indeed,” said Ingrey dryly. “That was the sticking point, between the Darthacan Quintarians and the Old Wealdings.” For all that both sides had worshipped the same five gods. “So when Audar the so-called Great slaughtered four thousand Wealding prisoners of war at Bloodfield, it’s said he didn’t pray at all. That made it a proper Quintarian act, I suppose, and not heresy. Some other crime, perhaps, but not human sacrifice. One of those theological fine points.”

That massacre of a generation of young spirit warriors had broken the back of the Wealding resistance to their eastern invaders, in any case. For the next hundred and fifty years, the Weald’s lands, ceremonies, and people had been forcibly rearranged into Darthacan patterns, until Audar’s vast empire broke apart in the bloody squabbles of his much less great descendants. Orthodox Quintarianism survived the empire that had fostered it, however. The suppressed animal practices and wisdom songs of the forest tribes had been lost and all but forgotten in the renewed Weald, except for rural superstitions, children’s rhymes, and the odd ghost tale.

Or… not quite forgotten, not by everyone. Father, what were you thinking? Why did you burden me with this bestial blasphemy? What were you trying to do? The old, painful, unanswered question… Ingrey thrust it from his mind.

“I suppose we are all New Wealdings, now,” mused Ijada. She touched her Darthacan-dark hair, and nodded to Ingrey’s own. “Almost every Wealding kin that survived has Darthacan forebears, too. Mongrels, to a man. Or to a lord, anyway. So we inherit Audar’s sins and the tribes’. For all I know my Chalionese father had some Darthacan blood. The nobles there are a very mixed lot, really, he always said, for all that they carry on about their pedigrees.”

Ingrey bit, chewed, did not answer.

“When your father gave you your wolf,” she began, “how—”