The Hallowed Hunt (Curse of Chalion) Read Free Page B

invited her guardsmen out to the hunt. Prince Boleso and his men were very boisterous in the evenings, and drank a great deal, but the princess did not attend, being laid down in her chambers. I took down complaints from her of the noise twice, but I was little heeded. They set the dogs on a wild boar they’d caught alive, out in the courtyard beneath her window, and made bets on the fight. Boleso’s huntsman was very distressed for his hounds. I wished Earl Horseriver had been there—he could have quelled them with a word. He has a deadly tongue, when he wishes. We bided here three days, until the princess was ready to travel again.”
    “Did Prince Boleso court you?”
    Her lips thinned. “Not that I could tell. He was equally obnoxious to all his sister’s ladies. I knew nothing of his…regard, supposed regard, until the morning we were to leave.”
    She swallowed again. “My lady—Princess Fara—told me then I was to stay. That this might not have been my first choice, but that it would do me no harm in the long run. Another husband would be found for me, after. I begged her not to leave me here. She would not meet my eye. She said it was no worse a barter than any, and better than most, and that I should look to my own future. That it was just the woman’s version of the same loyalty due from a man to his prince. I said I did not think most men would…well, I’m afraid I said something rude. She refused to speak with me after that. They rode away and left me. I would not beg at her stirrup, for fear the prince’s men would mock me.” Her arms crossed, as if to clutch a tattered dignity about her anew.
    “I told myself…maybe she was right. That it would be no worse than any other fate. Boleso wasn’t ugly, or deformed, or old. Or diseased.”
    Ingrey couldn’t help checking himself against that list. At least he did not match any of the named categories, he trusted. Though there were others. Defiled sprang to mind.
    “I did not realize how mad he’d grown until they’d left, and then it was too late.”
    “Then what happened?”
    “At nightfall, they brought me to his chamber and thrust me within. He was waiting for me. He wore a robe, but under it his body was naked and all covered over with signs drawn in woad and madder and crocus. Old symbols, the sort you sometimes still see carved on ancient wooden foundations, or in the forest where the shrines once stood. He had his leopard tied up in a corner, drugged. He said—it turned out—it seemed he had not fallen in love with me after all. It wasn’t even lust. He wanted a virgin for some rite he had—found, made up, I am not sure, he seemed very confused by this time—and I was the only one, his sister’s other two ladies being one a wife and the other a widow. I tried to dissuade him, I told him it was heresy, dire sin and against his father’s own laws, I said I would run away, that I would tell. He said he’d hunt me down with his dogs. That they would tear me apart as they had the pig. I said I would go to the Temple divine in the village. He said the man was only an acolyte, and a coward. And that he would kill anyone there who took me in. Even the acolyte. He was not afraid of the Temple, it was practically the property of kin Stagthorne and he could buy divines for a pittance.
    “The rite was meant to catch the spirit of the leopard, as the old kin warriors were supposed to do. I said, it could not possibly work, nowadays. He said, he’d done it before, several times—that he meant to capture the spirits of every wisdom animal of the greater kinships. He thought it was going to give him some sort of power over the Weald.”
    Ingrey, startled, said, “The Old Weald warriors only took one animal spirit to themselves, one in a lifetime. And even that risked madness. Miscarriage. Worse.” As I know to my everlasting cost.
    Her velvety voice was growing faster, breathless. “He hauled the leopard up by its strangling cord. He hit me