The Hallowed Hunt (Curse of Chalion) by Lois McMaster Bujold Page B

the lesser lacerations on the other wrist cleaned and wrapped. His hand did not hurt nearly as much as the burning muscles in his back, or his throbbing ankles; or perhaps each pain served as distraction from the next. He wondered if he ought to pull off his boots while he still could, and if he didn’t, if they would have to be cut off later. They were good boots; he hated to risk them. The chains had left deep scorings in the leather.
    “In that place you found yourselves,” Hallana began again.
    “It wasn’t real,” mumbled Ingrey.
    “Mm, well, yes. But while you were in that, um, state, what did you perceive of me, if anything?”
    “Colored fire flowed from your hands. Into my mouth. It drove the vein growing there into a frenzy, which it passed on to the others. Its other parts, I suppose. It was as though your fire flushed them from their hiding places.” He ran his tongue around his mouth now, to reassure himself that the hideous distortion was truly gone. More disturbingly, he found his face was slimed with spittle. He started to wipe away the sticky foam with the bandage on his left wrist, but his hand was intercepted by Hergi, protecting her work. She gave him a disapproving headshake and wrung out a wet cloth instead. Ingrey swabbed and tried not to think about his father.
    “The tongue is the Bastard’s own sign and signifier upon our bodies,” Hallana mused.
    As forehead for the Daughter, navel for the Mother, genitals for the Father, and heart for the Brother. “The veins, tentacles, whatever they were, of the geas seemed to grow from all of my five theological points.”
    “That ought to mean something. I wonder what? I wonder if there are any manuscripts of Old Weald lore that would illuminate this puzzle? When I get back to Suttleaf, I will search our library, but I’m afraid we’ve mostly medical tracts. The Darthacan Quintarians who conquered us were more interested in destroying the old ways than in chronicling them. It was as if they wished to put the old forest powers out of reach of everyone, even themselves. I’m not sure they were wrong.”
    “When I was in the leopard—when I was the leopard,” said Ijada, “I saw the phantasmal images, too. But then it was all shut away from me again.” A faint regret tinged her tone.
    “I, on the other hand”—the sorceress’s fingers drummed on the closest level surface, which happened to be the top of her stomach—“saw nothing. Except for Lord Ingrey ripping his way out of iron chains that should have held a horse, that is. If that was typical of the strength their spirit animals lent the old warriors, it’s no wonder they were prized.”
    If the old warriors had hurt like this afterward, Ingrey wasn’t so sure their ghost animals would have been as prized as all that. If the forest kin had carried on as he just had…he wanted to ask about the noises he’d made, but was too mortified.
    “If there was anything to see, I should have seen it,” Hallana went on in increasing exasperation. She plunked down on a spare chair. “Dratsab, dratsab. Let us think.” After a moment, she narrowed her eyes at Ingrey. “You say the thing is gone. If we cannot say what it was—can you at least now remember who put it on you?”
    Ingrey leaned forward, rubbing his scratchy eyes. He suspected they were glaringly bloodshot. “I’d better have these boots off.” At Hallana’s gesture, Bernan knelt and assisted; Ingrey’s ankles were indeed swelling and discolored. He stared down at them for a moment more.
    “I did not feel the geas before I first saw Ijada,” he said at last. “For all I know it could have been riding me for days, or months, or years. I thought it was years, at first—I thought it was my wolf, as much as I could think about it at all. If not for Lady Ijada’s testimony, and…and what happened just now, I might still think that. If I had succeeded in slaying her, I would certainly have gone on believing so.”
    Hallana