The Hallowed Hunt (Curse of Chalion) Read Online Free PDF

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