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

sacrifice, but really…When I was a child at my father’s Temple fort, I went a few times with…with a friend to the marsh people’s autumn rites. The fen folk aren’t of the same race or language as the Old Wealdings, but I could almost have imagined myself going back to those days. It was more like a grand party and outdoor roast than anything. I mean, they made some songs and rituals over the creatures before they slaughtered them, but what’s the difference if we pray over our meat after it’s cooked instead of before?” She added with an air of fairness, “Or so my friend said. The fort’s divine disagreed, but then, the two of them disagreed a lot. I think my friend enjoyed baiting him.”
    It hadn’t been the menu that the Quintarian divines had objected to, for it wasn’t just meat that the Old Weald kin had taken from their hallowed beasts. The tribal sorcerers had defiled the souls of their battle lords with the ghosts of animals, making their leaders’ spirits fierce—but also unfit to offer, at the ends of their lives, to the gods. Ingrey doubted any festival this young woman would have been permitted to see involved any consumption beyond meat, though. “It is said the fen men paint themselves with blood.”
    “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “that’s true. Or at any rate, everyone ran about splashing each other and screaming with laughter. It was all very messy and silly, and rather smelly, but it was hard to see any evil in it. Of course, this tribe didn’t sacrifice people .” She looked around the clearing as if imagining the ghostly image of some such evil slaying here.
    “Indeed,” said Ingrey dryly. “That was the sticking point, between the Darthacan Quintarians and the Old Wealdings.” For all that both sides had worshipped the same five gods. “So when Audar the so-called Great slaughtered four thousand Wealding prisoners of war at Bloodfield, it’s said he didn’t pray at all. That made it a proper Quintarian act, I suppose, and not heresy. Some other crime, perhaps, but not human sacrifice. One of those theological fine points.”
    That massacre of a generation of young spirit warriors had broken the back of the Wealding resistance to their eastern invaders, in any case. For the next hundred and fifty years, the Weald’s lands, ceremonies, and people had been forcibly rearranged into Darthacan patterns, until Audar’s vast empire broke apart in the bloody squabbles of his much less great descendants. Orthodox Quintarianism survived the empire that had fostered it, however. The suppressed animal practices and wisdom songs of the forest tribes had been lost and all but forgotten in the renewed Weald, except for rural superstitions, children’s rhymes, and the odd ghost tale.
    Or…not quite forgotten, not by everyone. Father, what were you thinking? Why did you burden me with this bestial blasphemy? What were you trying to do? The old, painful, unanswered question…Ingrey thrust it from his mind.
    “I suppose we are all New Wealdings, now,” mused Ijada. She touched her Darthacan-dark hair, and nodded to Ingrey’s own. “Almost every Wealding kin that survived has Darthacan forebears, too. Mongrels, to a man. Or to a lord, anyway. So we inherit Audar’s sins and the tribes’. For all I know my Chalionese father had some Darthacan blood. The nobles there are a very mixed lot, really, he always said, for all that they carry on about their pedigrees.”
    Ingrey bit, chewed, did not answer.
    “When your father gave you your wolf,” she began, “how—”
    “You should go eat,” he interrupted her, around a mouthful of cold roast. “It’s going to be a long ride yet.” He rose and strode away from her, toward the wagon and its baskets. He did not want more food, but he did not want more of her chatter, either. He selected a not-too-wormy apple and nibbled it slowly while walking about. He stayed on the other side of the clearing from her, during the remainder of