“Oh, love… “ She lifted his face to her own teary one, and pressed her lips to his. Wolf-Ingrey danced around her in frustration, for he could not feel those warm lips or taste that wasted honeyed breath at all. Frantic, he pawed her sleeve, then licked her face.

Her breath drew in sharply, and she lifted her hand to her cheek and stared around. Had she felt some disturbing liquid chill, as he had from the ghost’s hand? He licked her ear, and her breath huffed out in what might have been a laugh, under other circumstances; she scrubbed at the ear as though it had been tickled. She laid Ingrey’s body out on his back, felt along it—oh, if I might feel that touch –and frowned. “Ingrey, what have they done to you…?” His body bore no visible wounds, no crookedness of broken bones, but his rag-wrapped right hand, he saw, was soaked with blood, and his leather jerkin was smeared slippery with it. Ijada’s frown deepened as she clutched the gory hand to her breast. If I might only move those fingers… “Or you to yourself?” she added more shrewdly. “You tried something brave and foolish, didn’t you?” Her gaze rose once more to Wencel’s corpse and Fara.

Horseriver snorted, and Ingrey spun around, growling. The face of the moment stared across at Ijada with a mixture of astonishment and revulsion. “You do keep turning up where you are not wanted, don’t you, girl?” he remarked to the air, or perhaps to Ingrey. Ijada, in any case, did not seem to hear him. “Always in ignorance, but does that slow you? Taste the betrayal of the gods, then; I have dined on it for ages.”

He turned away and looked across at the gathering of ghosts. “All here now,” he breathed. Now the terrible eyes were distant, removed, implacably calmed. “But not for much longer, I swear to you, beloved ones.”

The looks the revenants gave him in return were not loving, Ingrey thought, but wary and dismayed. A faint translucence hung about them, and Ingrey realized that they were already starting to fade. The ghost of a man fresh-killed, if he did not go at once to the gods through the gates of his death, might yet be redeemed from sundering during the god-touched rites of his funeral, as Boleso’s had been. Up to a point. But the sundering soon grew irrevocable, the soul, in that last refusal, self-doomed to fade. That period of uncertain grace had been prolonged for these, not for days or weeks, but for centuries. With their link to the Wounded Woods now broken, they would not linger long, Ingrey thought. Hours? Minutes?

Ijada started to rise to go to Fara, but then gasped and sank back down. Her hand touched her left breast, then her forehead; her lips moved in surprise, then pinched in pain. Ingrey’s whines redoubled.

The mob of ghosts shuffled aside once more, and a great-limbed warrior strode forward. He wore a broad gold belt, and bore a spearhead-tipped banner staff, its furled flag stippled in grass green, white, and blue. His head hung from the gold belt, tied on by its own grayed-yellow braids. The grizzled head’s gaze flicked up to Horseriver, who started in surprised recognition, and raised his hand to return a salute that had not, in fact, been given; the gesture faded at the end as Horseriver belatedly realized this. The warrior knelt by Ijada, bending over her in concern, his hand touching her shoulder.

Ingrey danced anxiously around the pair, his wolf’s head lowering to the warrior’s eye level. The warrior stared across at him in some silent query. Ijada’s spine bent, and her grip on Ingrey’s bloody hand grew limp; it slipped from her grasp, and her own white hand fell atop it. “Oh,” she breathed, her eyes wide and dark. She was growing still more pale, almost greenish; when wolf-Ingrey licked her face now, she did not respond.

Ingrey backed away and looked up. Then rose on his hind limbs, resting one forepaw on the warrior’s shoulder for balance, sniffing; the man stiffened to support him. Something was skewered up there on the narrow, willow-leaf-shaped spear point. A beating heart… no, half a heart. But its rhythm was slowing.

He bowed low, Ijada had said. And placed my heart on a stone slab, and cut it in two with the hilt-shard of his broken sword…. The other half, they raised high upon a spearpoint. I did not understand if it was pledge, or sacrifice, or ransom…

All three, thought Ingrey. All three.

He did not know what, on this eerie ground, his actions all meant. But even with his voice muzzled, they were not without power. He was not without power. I brought down Horseriver’s horse, and it is gone. Maybe I can do more. Horseriver plainly thought him spent, his task over, his use used up. Meant to just leave him, perhaps, in this disarray of body and spirit, to die alone upon the ground when the ghosts and all their magic drained away. And in and of himself, lone wolf, he did not think Horseriver was mistaken. But I am not alone, am I? Not now. She said it, so it must be so. Truthsayer. How was it that I came to love the truth above all things?

“Shall I die of love, then?” murmured Ijada, sinking onto Ingrey’s chest. “I always thought that was a figure of speech. Together, then? No! My Lord of Autumn, in this Your season, help us…!”

There are no gods here.

But Ingrey was here. Try something else. Try anything. Maybe the revenant captain had some power here as well; he carried a banner, after all, Old Weald sacred sign of rescues beyond death and the death of all other hopes. Ingrey whined, danced around the man, scratched at his booted leg with one paw, then crouched and nudged his long nose repeatedly at the scabbard hung on the gold belt on the opposite side from his head. Would the revenant understand his plea? The man swiveled his hips to regard him, his sandy gray brows rising in surprise. He stood and drew the hilt shard. Yes! Ingrey nudged the hand some more, and turned to bite at his own side.

The man could not nod, but he half bowed. He knelt, and Ingrey lay down with his paws waving ridiculously in the air, his belly exposed. If this can save her… The sharp shard entered his chest in a long sweep.

Ijada didn’t say this had hurt! Ingrey strangled a yelp and controlled a twisting jerk away. The ghostly hand descended into the gaping gash in his wolf-chest and emerged dripping red. The shard edge sliced across a slippery object in the warrior’s palm, and then the warrior tossed something skyward. The bloody fist descended once more, and Ingrey’s wolf-self seemed to breathe again as the hand withdrew emptied and the gash closed up in a long red line. Ingrey scrambled upright on his paws once more.

High on the spear tip, a whole heart beat, picking up the pulse.

Ijada inhaled sharply and sat up, blinking around. Her eyes met Ingrey’s wolf-gaze, and widened in astonishment and recognition. “There you are!” Her head swiveled, as she took in the mob of agitated ghosts who had crowded up around this strange operation. “There you all are! You!” She struggled to her feet and curtseyed to the bannerman, signing the Five. “I was looking for you, my lord marshal, but I could not see.”

The ghost bowed back in deep respect. Ijada’s hand curled in Ingrey’s neck ruff, clutching and stroking the thick fur. He pushed up into the caress. She looked down at him—not very far down, for his big head came nearly to her chest. “How came you to be all apart like this? What is happening here?” Her gaze traveled around the clearing till it caught on the multifaced Horseriver. “Oh.” She flinched a little, but then her back straightened. “So that’s what you look like, out of the shadow. What are you doing on my land?”

Horseriver had composed himself in an attitude of utter indifference, but this last jerked him into rage. “Your land! This is Holytree!”

“I know,” said Ijada coolly. “It is my inheritance. For you are finished with it, are you not?”