The stench of it made Ingrey gag, a soup of filth and blood and urine.

“… and awoke in the body of my child, man-child by then. Prisoner, by then. Our eyes were spared no horror. The ax fell upon our neck like a lover’s welcome kiss, at the end. I thought it ended. Defeat was ashes in my mouth… “

Cold splinters of a tree stump, already soaked with gore, pressed into Ingrey’s stretched throat. Out of the corner of his eye, a weary voice grunted with effort, a steely arc fell, and a crunch shattered his keening woe as his vertebrae split.

“… then I awoke in the body of my second son, miles away upon the border. I had escaped the massacre at Bloodfield in the hardest way, upon the wings of our weirding. His mind was unprepared for me. I had to wrestle him for speech, motion, the light of his eyes. We were all mad for a little while, we three, trapped in his skull. But first I won his body, then began my war to win back the Weald.”

Ingrey gulped for control of his own voice, if only to be reassured by the sound of it that he was still inside his own head. “I have heard of that Horseriver prince, I think. He was a famous battle lord. Campaigned for twenty years along the fens, till his defeat and death.”

“Defeat, yes. Death—ah. My son’s son was but twenty when I took his body from him. Holytree was an abandoned waste by then… “

A sodden woods, leafless in an icy mist, struggled up from black mire. The trees were twisted, knotted with cysts from which cold sap smeared down in frozen grains like phlegm from rheumy eyes.

“… every kin warrior who had been spell-bound there was dead, by battle or accident or age, even the few who had escaped the massacre. Save one.”

Wencel’s own eyes, boring into Ingrey’s, now seemed something from a dream. The visions circled in those pupils, sucked away as by a drain. Visions that did not deceive, Wencel had once said. Perhaps; but Ingrey, too, knew how to lie with truth, truth and selected silences. I believe what I see. What do I not see?

“The resistance went ill. There were many deaths in quick succession, among the exiled Horseriver kin of the old royal line. I found myself trapped in the body of a useless child, and in my impatience ate him; they treated us as mad. It was thirty years and another death before I won my way to leadership again. But no kin would fight for us anymore. I turned to politics, to the attempt to win back the Weald from within. I amassed wealth, and what power I could, and learned to bend men when I could not break them. I watched for fissures in the Darthacan royal house and applied myself to widening them.”

The visions were fading, as if fading passion aged them to pale ghosts, impotent. “That was the Earl Horseriver they called the kingmaker, was it not?” said Ingrey faintly. “That was you, too?”

“Aye, and his son, and his son’s son. I cascaded from body to body, amassing a great density of life. But my sons were not voluntary sacrifices to me, anymore. The gods, they say, accumulate souls without destroying them, which is proof, if any were needed, that I was no god on earth. If the invaded minds were not to explode in madness, only one could dominate. There was by then no choice of whose.

“For a hundred and fifty years I fought, and schemed, and bled, and died, and defiled my soul by fatal error and the cannibal consumption of my children’s children’s children. And for one glorious moment I thought myself done, the Weald renewed. But the new kingship had no weirding in it, no song of the land, none of the old forest powers. It was adulterated by the gods. I was not released from my cycle of torment. My war was over but not won.

“Thus began that line of strange and famously reclusive Earls Horseriver… “

“Can you not be released from your spell?” Ingrey whispered. “Somehow?”

Wencel’s voice and face both cracked. “Do you think I have not tried?”

Ingrey flinched at the shout. “You need a miracle, I think.”

“Oh, the gods have long hunted me.” Wencel’s grin grew unholy. “They harry me hard, now. They want me; but I do not want them, Ingrey.”

Ingrey had to force his voice to an audible volume. “What do you want, then?”

Wencel’s expression grew distant, as of grief withheld so long as to turn stone. “What do I want? I have wanted many things, over the course of centuries. But now my wants are grown simple indeed, as befits such an addled senility. Such simple things. I want my first wife back, and my sons in the mornings of their lives….”

The vision returned in breathtaking light, drenched in color. A man, a laughing woman, and a gaggle of youths reined in their horses on the reedy margins of the Lure, and watched in awe as a family of gray herons flew up into the bursting gold of dawn.

And for an instant, Horseriver’s eyes cried, Damn you for making me remember that! The hour of drowning in blood and despair had borne with it a less piercing pain. His trembling grip tightened on Ingrey’s face, fingers pressing hard enough to bruise. “I want my world back.”

Ah. That was not an image doled out by design. It escaped. Ingrey moistened his lips. “But you can’t have it. No one could.”

The brief flare faded back into dry dark, darkness absolute, and Ingrey knew the visions were over.

“I know. Not all the gods together, by any miracle they might devise, can give me my desire.”

“Do you fear the gods will destroy you?”

That disturbing smile again. “That is not a fear. That is a prayer.”

“Or… do you fear their punishment? That they would plunge your soul into some eternal torment?”

Wencel leaned forward, up on his toes. “That,” he breathed in Ingrey’s ear, “would be redundant.” To Ingrey’s intense relief he finally released his grip, stepping back once more. He cocked his head as if studying Ingrey’s face. “But you’ll learn all about that, if your luck holds ill.”

Ingrey should have thought he’d faced a raving lunatic, but for the stream of searing sights Wencel had sent spinning through his head. Whatever truth he had sought to shake from Wencel, it had not been this. Staggered he was, and Wencel could doubtless tell it from the winded way he sagged against the table, for all that he clutched the edge to conceal any betraying shudder in his body. Disbelieving… he merely wished he could be.

Ingrey felt for the gaps in the tale. There were many, both old and recent, but Ijada’s army of ghosts at the Wounded Woods seemed the vastest. How could Horseriver bewail Bloodfield, yet make no mention of his abandoned and accursed comrades? That Wencel had laid the murderous geas against Ijada, he had admitted when he could no longer evade doing so, but the why of it he’d evaded naming still. Were the two silences connected?

A knock sounded on the chamber door, and both men jerked. “What?” the earl called, his sharp tone not inviting entry.

“My lord.” The dutiful voice of some senior servant. “My lady is ready to depart and begs your company.”

Wencel’s lips thinned in annoyance, but he called back, “Tell her I come anon.” Footsteps faded outside, and Wencel sighed and turned back briefly to Ingrey. “We are to attend upon her father. It is going to be an unpleasant evening. You and I shall have to continue this later.”

“I, too, would wish to go on,” Ingrey conceded, considered his words, and decided to let the dual meaning—speaking or just breathing—stand unaided.

Wencel measured him, still wary. “You understand, our family curse is asymmetrical. While my death would be your disaster, the reverse does not hold.”

“Why do you not slay me as I stand, then?” For all of Ingrey’s fighting edge, he did not doubt Wencel could do so. Somehow.

“It would stir up troubles I am still contemplating. At present, the spell would merely replace you with another, perhaps more inconvenient. Your Birchgrove cousin, likely. Unless you have some Darthacan by-blow I know nothing of.”