The Sacred Hunt Duology (57 page)

He hit the ground, hard, and rose quickly, gaining both feet and weapon as he approached the seeress again.

“Do not make me injure you, Hunter Lord,” she said gravely. “I know that you feel his loss, but he is not dead. He is as safe as he can be upon this road.”

He attacked her as if driven, and once again, orange light illuminated his body and sent it shuddering back.

“He is not dead.”

Gilliam froze and the stillness was enough; her words touched him and took root. “Where—where is he?”

Evayne met his eyes and held them. “I cannot tell you,” she said softly.

• • •

“No. But you can—and will—tell me.”

The Queen of the Winter road stepped out of the forest and onto the path. She moved slowly and carefully, and no motion was wasted, no gesture unnecessary. She wore plate armor across her chest and thighs, and down the length of her arms, but beneath that, gossamer, something bright and pale and cold. No
padding, no gauntlets, no boots—but it was clear that she needed none. She wore no surcoat, although she was the only one in her hunting party who did not; she wore instead a tiara that seemed to be made of four fine filaments: earth and air, fire and water, twisted into one perfect shape. Beneath it, her hair was as white as the snow, but purer and clearer; it fell down her shoulders like a spill of light, brushing the ground in an end-knot secured by silver and obsidian. Her skin was white, and her eyes—

Gilliam looked away from her eyes.

There was much else to look at. He followed the length of her left arm, and saw a bow, strung but not readied, that gleamed in a perfect curve; followed the length of her right, and saw a halter. The halter was a simple, thin chain of gold and black; it might have served to contain a ferret, but not a hunting horse.

He looked away again, but he could not easily forget what the Queen led onto the road.

It wasn't a horse; nothing so coarse or so solid. It had legs like a stag's, hooves as delicate and perfect; he couldn't see a tail, but was certain that it matched the body. It had antlers, sharp as steel spears, tinged with a patina of brown at the tips, and a strong neck, a fine set of shoulders, a sleek and glossy coat.

And it had a human face, eyes the color of cornflowers, lips pale, cheeks reddened with the chase. Even that, he could have borne. But the expression that flittered across the face was the very expression a woman might have worn had she been trapped for an eternity of service on roads such as these, in hunts that Gilliam had never experienced in the darkest of nightmare.

• • •

Zareth Kahn stepped forward as Gilliam of Elseth and the girl that hovered beside him recoiled. He saw the Queen and her mount every bit as clearly as Gilliam but much more clinically. Blue light sparked across his fingers and his eyes. As the light cleared, a look of wonder transformed his expression; wonder, awe, and a hint of desire.

She saw it all, of course, and in the seconds that she spared him, she smiled a winter smile. Then it was gone to ice and shadow as she turned her gaze upon Evayne.

To choose between them, on this road, would have been easy. Where the Queen was tall and slender, strong and unbowed in her beauty and her cold, cold light, Evayne was bent and curled in, her face slightly marred by an expression of pain. Her eyes were black, her skin lined by sun and age, her clothing dowdy and ordinary.

Stephen had made his choice unknowing; Zareth Kahn wondered, if he had seen the Queen, whether his choice would have been a different one. Then he smiled grimly and cast a different magery about himself; it allowed him to look away from the Queen.

At her side, antlered and perfect as the Queen's mount, was a creature that was so much legend very little reliable description of him survived. He was taller than the Queen, and broader of shoulder, with arms and thighs as thick as any of the wrestlers who took the King's Challenge. His hands were human hands, but his feet were cloven and sat heavily upon the snow. He wore no clothing and no armor, and he carried no weapons, but on a belt at his side were a series of three horns. Standing behind him were a handful of tall, slender men who resembled the Queen, at least in superficial details; they were fine-boned and pale-haired, and their large, narrowed eyes were gray; they wore chain hauberks and swords, but carried readied bows. It was clear that they deferred to the Hunter and his Queen.

The great, antlered creature looked down. At his feet, silent but bristling, were the hounds of the hunt. The beasts' eyes were milky, almost white, with no pupil or iris to make the direction of their stare obvious.

One growled, and Gilliam, Lord Elseth, lifted his eyes. Zareth Kahn watched quietly as beast and man exchanged a long stare. To his great surprise, it was the dog—black and sleek and twice the size of any Breodanir hound—who finally looked away. A ghost of a satisfied smile twitched at the corner of Lord Elseth's ashen face, but that was all. The beast lifted its mighty head, baring its long dark throat. It howled, and any similarity between it and a hound was lost.

Gilliam touched his sword hilt, for comfort and for stability, and then joined Evayne, choosing a position at her back that was almost inch for inch the same as the one that the antlered Hunter took behind his Queen. Espere joined him, standing before him as if she were a companion, but growling as if she would, at any moment, test herself against the hounds of the horned man. Gilliam was suddenly very glad that he'd sent his hounds away. He closed his eyes and gently probed the darkness behind his lids, searching for any sign of them. They were gone. She remained.

The Queen came forward, her step light. She stopped ten feet away from the seeress and gestured. The ground beneath her feet broke in a crisp snap of frozen dirt and ice. A throne rose from the breached earth, one much like the Queen herself in seeming; tall and thin and perfect—but dark and cold and hard. She stepped back and sat upon it. The Hunter came to stand at her right, and to her left, the hounds; the small court that she traveled with formed a semicircle at her back.

Evayne's lips turned up in a smile that was as hard as the obsidian throne. “Your Majesty,” she said, bowing as if it were her robes, and not her desire, that forced the gesture of respect.

The Queen smiled as well. “Seeress. You grace our road again. It has been many, many years. Had I known that it was you who occasioned the Winter hunt, I would have ridden your friend; I believe that he misses you.”

“Ariane,” Evayne said, and the word was a warning.

The Queen was not moved. “You have knowledge of something that I have claimed.”

“You are not the only one to claim it,” Evayne replied. “And the rules of the hunt are clear enough. I am not your quarry.”

The Queen turned her smile to Gilliam. The blush that rose in his cheeks had nothing to do with the weather. He took an involuntary step past Evayne, and Espere was suddenly at his side. She pushed him back, and he skittered across a road made slippery by ice so smooth it was hard to believe that anyone had ever walked upon it.

The wild girl stalked forward, her golden eyes feral. Her dark hair was tangled and matted, and her skin covered with its usual patina of sweat and dirt—but she looked in her element here, as if the heart of her wildness was the only part of her that was true or real. She growled.

The hounds looked up at the sound as it left her lips. They rose as she placed herself squarely in front of her companions. The Hunter stepped forward; she snarled in defiance.

“Enough,” the Queen said, lifting her chin. “Seeress, why have you come? It is Winter. Surely you must know by now that there is nothing for you here.” There was no pretense of amusement in her dark eyes; she lifted her long fingers to her chin as she sat and stared.

“I am not required to explain my movements to you, be you Summer or Winter Queen,” the seeress replied. “I know the dark devotions, and I have already proved my ability and my willingness to pay the price of travel.” She straightened her shoulders, and her robes, rippling strangely, reached for the ground. She looked like a duchess approaching a queen; not her equal, but with power and station nonetheless.

“Indeed,” the Queen replied gravely. “And yet we have chosen, by the rules of Winter, the quarry for the hunt.” She sat forward. “Where is he?”

“It is called a hunt,” Evayne said, no less gravely but with respect, “for a reason, Ariane.”

“It is only in the mortal world that you may play your games with impunity. It is Winter, little half-sister, and I am waiting.”

“Then send out the hounds, Your Majesty. Send the Hunter. Send the Court. Walk the roads yourself, or ride them. What you find there is yours for eternity. What you do not find you cannot keep. Winter is only Winter for the passage of a mortal evening, be it the hidden path or no.”

“Very well, if you will play this game.” She raised her right hand, and the dogs leaped forward, jaws bristling with perfect teeth.

The wild girl caught the lead hound by the throat.

“Hold!”
Evayne cried. “Let them come—they are bound by their rules and their chosen game; let them come, Espere!”

• • •

Gilliam heard the panic in the seeress' command, but he still paused an instant before he forced Espere to release the hound unharmed. She battled him—tested him—every inch of the way. He had never heard her voice so wild or so frenzied, and although in the end he had to slip into her body to force her to carry out his order, he did not stay there. He forgot that she had been human, or almost human, scant hours past—because it was easy. Because it was natural.

He did not take his hand from his sword, but he offered the dogs—and their master—no violence.
Easy
, he thought to Espere as she strained against their bond.
Be easy. We're not in danger. Be still.
The hunting bond, however, was not a good place to lie, and she knew immediately that Gilliam didn't trust his own command, or the reason for it. Knew it better than his dogs would have known it.

The sleek black bodies of the white-eyed dogs slipped past them, crackling with energy. Their master, the antlered Hunter, came at their back, pausing in turn by each of the companions.

Zareth Kahn he had little enough use for, which suited the mage; as the Hunter drew close, he found himself both attracted and repelled by the being's presence—and Zareth Kahn was not a man given to either. He held his ground, confident in his magery, as the other drew near.

But the Hunter was not a creature of magic, nor a creature to be deterred by it. He was masculinity defined, but not a human masculinity—not a controlled, elegant strength, or even a brutish, vicious one. The very air around the Hunter was a wild, electric air; his scent filled it; his presence could not be denied.

As he had reacted to the Queen, so, too, did he react to the Hunter, but the latter reaction had a viscerality to it that the mage's daily life completely lacked. Only when he moved on, did the mage begin to breathe again, and for a few minutes, it was in uneven, shallow breaths.

The Hunter stopped next in front of Espere; she growled but did not open her mouth to bare her teeth. Gilliam felt her anger and her desire to challenge the Hunter, but beneath it, he felt her unease and her sense of . . . kinship?

She stepped back as the Hunter stepped forward, but she did not look away as the Hunter's hounds had done when tested by Gilliam of Elseth. He felt a pride in that, and then unease as he thought of what Stephen would say.

Stephen . . .

The panic started and he forced it back. Now was not the time. Not the place. The Hunter was coming to him.

As the Queen and Evayne, Gilliam and the Hunter were of a kind, but Gilliam would not have presumed upon the Hunt of this wild, deadly creature. He was not afraid to meet the Hunter's eyes, but when he did, he found that he could not look away.

Something in the gaze, in the dark green of the Hunter's eyes, felt familiar—as
if a tune he'd heard throughout childhood was being sung in another language and a different key.

Had he thought himself a Hunter? Had he ever given himself the title Hunter Lord? The longer he was held by the Hunter's gaze, the farther away those memories became. What was a hunt with spear or mount? What was a chase if he could not
know
where the quarry ran, and how fast—if he had to stop and study the dirt passed over by hooves or paws or feet?

“Lord Elseth,” someone said sharply, pulling him back to himself. He broke away from the Hunter and met Evayne's stern face. Squaring his shoulders, he remembered who he was.

It was easy, now; the Hunter had come to Evayne.

“Hello,” she said, inclining her already bent head a little farther groundward before lifting her chin to meet his level gaze.

He did not speak—Gilliam doubted that he could—but he tested the air as if pausing downwind of a scent that had, until now, eluded him. His coat rippled, brown and sleek; her cape replied, dark and heavy. They locked eyes again, but Evayne's gave nothing away; she looked both bored and confident. Gilliam had never liked the older Evayne, and he was not certain that he liked her now—but he was very, very glad that it was the older Evayne, and not the young one, that had come to rouse them from their sleep in an inn a world away.

At last, the Hunter lifted his head, and the highest tine of curved antler gently brushed Evayne's cheek. It drew no blood and left no mark, but she shivered slightly at its passing. He smiled, a quick and subtle twitch of lips over teeth—but it was a victory smile, and he shared it with his Lady as he turned his head to face her.

“Oh, Evayne,” the Queen said, using the seeress' name for the first time. “You are a sorry fool. You do not understand Winter, if you seek to hide my quarry from me in such a wise.” She stood, and in the darkness cast a shadow; although there was no source of light to throw it upon the ground, it fell, dark and terrible. “You fight the Winter, and it will consume you. But before it does, you will consume the soul you shelter.