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

some bigger space, or other space—it was as big as it needed to be, anyway. You”—her gaze swung to Ingrey—“were in the place before me. Your body was sprouting scarlet horrors. They seemed to be of you, yet attacking you. I pounced on them and tried to bite them off you. They burned my jaws. Then you started to turn into a wolf, or a man-wolf, some strange hybrid—it was as if your body couldn’t make up its mind. You grew a wolf’s head, at least, and started tearing at the red horrors, too.” She looked at him sideways, in a fresh fascination.
    Ingrey wondered, but dared not ask, if she’d hallucinated a loincloth for him as well. The wild arousal of his frenzied state was only now passing off, damped by confusion and pain.
    “When we had ripped the burning, clutching things all out of you, they could be seen to be not many, but all one thing. For a moment it looked like a ball of mating snakes, raked from under a ledge in the springtime. Then it went silent and vanished, and I was back here. In this body.” She held up one long-fingered hand before her eyes as if still expecting to see pads and claws. “If that was anything like what the Old Weald warriors experienced…I think I begin to see why they desired this. Except not the part about the bleeding things. Yet even that…we won .” The pulsing dilation of her eyes was not just fear, Ingrey thought, but also a vast, astonished exhilaration. She added to Hallana, “Did you see my leopard? The bleeding things, the wolf’s head?”
    “No.” Hallana huffed in frustration. “Your spirits were very disturbed, but I hardly needed second sight to tell that . Do you think you could return to that place where you were? At will?”
    Ingrey started to shake his head, discovered that his brain felt as though it had come loose, and mumbled, “No!”
    “I’m not sure,” said Ijada. “The leopard took me there—I didn’t go myself. And it wasn’t exactly a there . We were still here.”
    Hallana’s expression grew, if possible, more intent. “Did you sense any of the gods’ presences, in that space?”
    “No,” said Ijada. “None. There was a time I might not have known for sure, but after the leopard dream…no. I would have known, if He were back.” Despite her distress, a smile softened her lips. The smile was not for him, Ingrey knew. It still made him want to crawl toward her. Now, that was madness by any measure.
    Hallana stretched her shoulders, which had alarming effects given her current girth, and grimaced. “Bernan, help Lord Ingrey up. Take off those bolts.”
    “Are you sure, Learned?” the manservant said doubtfully. His eyes flicked toward Ingrey’s sword, now lying in the room’s corner; he had apparently kicked it out of Ingrey’s rolling reach during his scramble to get into striking position with his crowbar.
    “Lord Ingrey? What is your opinion? You were certainly correct before.”
    “I don’t think…I can move.” The oak floor was hard and chilly, but by the swimming of Ingrey’s head, horizontal seemed vastly preferable to vertical.
    He was forced to the vertical despite himself, dragged up and placed in the divine’s vacated chair by the two servants. Bernan tapped off the bolts with a hammer and Hergi, clucking, collected a basin of fresh water, soap, towels, and the leather case of what proved to be medical instruments and supplies that she had brought in with her. She tended expertly to Ingrey’s injuries, new and old, under the divine’s eye, and it occurred to Ingrey belatedly that of course the sorceress would travel with her own midwife-dedicat, in her present state. He wondered if Hergi was married to the smith, if that was Bernan’s real calling.
    Ijada levered herself up as far as her own chair and watched Hergi’s mending in apparent fascination, pinching her lips at the needle pokes. The flap of flesh on the back of Ingrey’s hand was neatly reaffixed and covered with a white-linen bandage,