Deryni Chronology 13 – The Bishop’s Heir – Kurtz, Katherine

And he put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and was clad with zeal for a cloak.

— Isaiah 59:17

Edmund Loris, once the Archbishop of Valoret and Primate of All Gwynedd, stared out to sea through the salt-smeared windowpanes of his tower prison and allowed himself a thin smile. The rare display of self-indulgence did nothing to diminish the fury of the wind shrilling at the ill-fitted glass, but the letter secreted in the breviary under his arm gave its own grim comfort. The offer was princely, befitting even the exalted status he had enjoyed before his fall.

Exhaling softly of his long-hoarded bitterness, Loris bowed his head and shifted the book to hold it in both hands, wary lest the gesture seem to make it too precious in the eyes of his jailers, who could look in on him at any time. For two years now they had kept him here against his will. For two years his existence had been defined by the walls of this monastic cell and the token participation permitted him in the life of the rest of the abbey: daily attendance at Mass and Vespers, always in the company of two silent and all-too-attentive monks, and access to a confessor once each month — seldom the same man twice, and never the same one any two months in succession. Were it not for one of the lay brothers who brought his meals, whose fondness for intrigue Loris had early discovered, he would have had no contact whatsoever with the outside world.

The outside world — how he longed for it again! The two years spent in Saint Iveagh’s were but an extension of the outrage which had begun a full year before that, with the death of King Brion. On just such a chill November day as this had Brion Haldane met his doom — blasted from life by the hell-spawned magic of a Deryni sorceress, but leaving an unexpected legacy of forbidden powers to his son and heir, the fourteen-year-old Kelson.

Nor had young Kelson hesitated to seize his unholy patrimony and use it to overturn almost everything Loris held sacred, not the least of which was the Church’s stand against the use of magic in whatever form. And all of this had been done under the guise of his “Divine right” to rule and his sacred duty to protect his people — though how a king could justify consorting with the powers of evil to effect that protection was beyond Loris’ comprehension. By the end of the following summer, with the help of the Deryni heretics Morgan and McLain, Kelson had even managed to turn most of Loris’ fellow bishops against him. Only the ailing Corrigan had remained true — and his faithful heart had given out before he could be subjected to the humiliation Loris finally endured. The rebel bishops actually believed they had done a great kindness by allowing Loris to attend the travesty of a trial at which they stripped away his offices and banished him to a life of forced contemplation.

Bitter still, but heartened by the prospect of a chance to set things right, the former archbishop tapped the edge of his book lightly against his lips and thought about its secret contents — yet another communication from folk with similar cause to feel uneasy at what the new king had wrought. The wind whining in the roof slates of Saint Iveagh’s sea-girt towers sang of the freedom of the open seas whence it came, bearing the tang of salt air and the cries of the wheeling gulls that circled the abbey during all but the darkest hours of night, and for the first time since his imprisonment, Loris allowed himself to hope that he, too, might soon be free. For many, many months, he had feared never to taste freedom again except in death.

Oh, he was not fool enough to think there would not be a price — but he could afford to promise anything, for now. With care and craft, he might play more than one side to his advantage, perhaps eventually becoming even more powerful than before his fall. Then he would make himself the instrument of God’s retribution, driving the cursed Deryni from the land once and for all.

And the Deryni taint was in the very blood of the king — perhaps in all the Haldane line, not in Kelson alone. In the very beginning, Loris had thought Kelson’s forbidden magic strictly the legacy of his Deryni mother — that poor, conscience-hounded lady who even now kept strict seclusion in another remote abbey, praying for the soul of her Deryni son as well as her own and devoting her life to penance for the evil she carried. She had confessed her guilt before them all, that solemn day of Kelson’s coronation, prepared to sacrifice life and even soul to protect him from the sorceress who had already been responsible for his father’s death.

But Queen Jehana, though she had the will, had not the power to fight Kelson’s battle for him; and in the end, the young king had had to face the challenge with his own resources — prodigious resources, as it happened, easily equal to the challenge, but frightening in their implications. While granting that his mother’s Deryni blood might have made its contribution. Kelson had publicly claimed sacred right as the source of his newfound abilities. Loris had feared otherwise, even at the time, for he remembered stories about the boy’s father.

In fact, the more Loris thought on it — and he had had ample time for that in the last two years — the more convinced he became that Brion and hitherto unsuspected Deryni ancestors were as much to blame for Kelson’s condition as Jehana. The full extent of the taint could only be guessed. Certainly both Brion and his father before him had harbored Deryni at court from time to time. The detested Morgan and McLain were but the most recent and blatant of many such — and the latter a priest all the while, hypocrite to the core — on both of whom Loris wished only the vilest of fates, for the two were largely responsible for his present situation.

As for Brion, who could deny that the late king once had faced and killed a Deryni sorcerer in single combat? Loris, then but a parish priest of rising prominence, had heard of the incident only at second and third hand, but even in the first throes of public jubilation at the king’s victory, he had been chilled by the recurring suggestion that Brion’s opponent, father to the woman eventually responsible for his death, had fallen not alone to Brion’s sword but to strange powers wielded by the king himself. In the taverns for months afterward, haunted eyewitnesses with tongues loosened by ale whispered fearfully of magic worked upon the king by young Morgan before that fateful confrontation — the unleashing of awesome forces which Brion said were benign, the royal legacy of his father — but even that admission cast grave suspicions on the king, so far as Loris was concerned. Though a man of honest if rigid religious conviction, he was not naive enough to concede that purity of intent and fervence of faith — or Divine favor to an anointed king — had been Brion’s salvation, though he kept his misgivings to himself so long as Brion lived.

Now Loris knew that only power such as the Enemy himself wielded could have given Brion victory against such odds, and over such a foe. And if that power had been granted, or even merely released, by one of the accursed Deryni, then its source was clear: an evil legacy from years of dark alliance with that unholy race. The double inheritance of evil from Brion and Jehana was doubly damning in their son. Kelson was beyond redemption, and must be eliminated.

Nor, by the same logic, were Brion’s brother Nigel and his brood to be spared — for though uncontaminated by Jehana’s blood, still they, like Kelson, traced their ancestry back through the generations of Haldane kings who had carried forward some other variant of Deryni curse from the time of the Restoration. The land must be freed of this evil, cleansed of the dark Deryni taint. A new royal line must be raised to rule in Gwynedd — and what better source, and who with better legal claim, than the old royal line of Meara, human to the core, one of whose supporters even now offered assistance to Gwynedd’s rightful Primate, if that Primate would support Mearan independence?

With a shiver, Loris slipped his breviary into the breast of his homespun woolen robe and drew his meager cloak around his shoulders — he, who had worn fine linen and silk and furs before being deprived of his office! Two years of the sparse, simple fare of the Fratri Silentii had pared a handspan from an already trim waist and honed the hawk-like features to even sharper definition, but the hunger which gnawed at Loris now had nothing to do with physical appetites. As he laid one hand flat against the window glass, his eye was caught by the amethyst on his finger — sole reminder left him of his former rank — and he savored the words of the letter next to his heart.

Meara will bow no more to a Deryni king, the missive had said, echoing his own determination. If this plan meets with your approval, ask shriving of a monk named Jeroboam who shall come within the week to preach, and be guided by his advice. Until Laas….

Laas. The very name conjured images of ancient glories. It had been the capital of an independent Meara a hundred years before the first Haldanes came to Gwynedd. From Laas, sovereign Mearan princes had ruled as proudly as any Haldane, and over lands by no means less fair.

But Jolyon, the last Mearan prince, had sired only daughter? by the time he lay dying a century before, and the eldest, Roisian, was only twelve. To prevent the rending of his lands by avaricious guardians, regents, and suitors, Jolyon willed his coronet and the hand of Roisian to the strongest man he could find: Malcolm Haldane, newly crowned King of Gwynedd, a respected former adversary.

But Jolyon’s final act found little favor with Meara’s native sons; the prince had read his nobles well. Before Malcolm could even bed his young bride, dissident Mearan knights abducted both of the queen’s sisters and proclaimed the elder, Roisian’s twin, Meara’s sovereign princess. Malcolm put down the ensuing rebellion in less than a month, capturing and hanging several of the ringleaders, but he never did locate the stolen princesses — though he encountered their heirs many times in the years which followed. He moved Meara’s territorial capital from Laas to the more central Ratharkin the following summer, both for greater ease of administration and to lessen the importance of Laas as a symbol of former Mearan sovereignty, but the ancient city remained, from time to time, a rallying point for cadet lines of the old royal house which waxed with each new generation and as swiftly waned whenever Haldane expeditions swept into the principality to quash the beginnings of revolt — and execute pretenders. Malcolm and his son Donal were scrupulous about their periodic “Mearan housecleaning,” as Donal called it, but King Brion had taken such action only once during his reign, shortly after the birth of his own son. The venture, while necessary, had been so personally distasteful that he had avoided even considering the need for a repeat campaign a generation later.

Now Brion’s softness was likely to cost his son a throne. The current Mearan Pretender had no cause to love King Kelson, for she had lost a husband as well as a child the last time a Haldane flexed his strength in Meara. It was even rumored in Meara that an impassive Brion had watched the baby prince put to the sword — a lie promulgated by Mearan dissidents, though it was true that the child had died. Soon afterward, the self-styled Princess Caitrin of Meara, descendant of Queen Roisian’s twin, took as husband and consort the ambitious younger brother of one of Gwynedd’s earls and disappeared into the mountains to breed rebellion and more pretenders — until Brion’s death brought them out of hiding. It was one of Caitrin’s agents who had contacted Loris.

Sighing, Loris pressed his nose against the glass of his prison and watched an autumn squall-line crawl toward the shore from the northwest, well aware that many would regard what he was about to do as treason. He did not. It was a means to an end. If he had learned one thing in more than half a century of service to his faith, it was that the integrity of Holy Mother Church depended upon temporal dealings as well as spiritual ones. Higher loyalties than those binding him to any temporal lord bound him to his future course, for as bishop as well as priest he was duty-bound to root out evil and corruption. Inevitably, the source of that corruption lay in the devil’s brood called the Deryni.

The Deryni must be eradicated — every last one of them. The time was past for leniency, for trying to save their souls. Though Loris’ mind recoiled at the thought of raising hand against an anointed king — Kelson, whom he himself had crowned — the thought of not raising hand against a servant of darkness on the throne repelled him even more.

The boy had put on a bold charade, but blood would always run true, in the end. For the sake of every soul in Gwynedd, the Deryni heresy must be stamped out — and Edmund Loris would use whatever means he must to accomplish that end.

He made him a lord of his house, and ruler of all his substance: to bind his princes at his pleasure.

— Psalms 105:21-22

The Bishop of Meara was dead. In more stable times, that fact might have elicited little more than academic interest on the part of Duke Alaric Morgan, for his duchy of Corwyn lay far on the other side of Gwynedd, well beyond the reach of any Mearan prelate’s influence. Bishops there were whose passing would have meant a personal loss to Morgan, but Carsten of Meara was not one of them.

This is not to say that Morgan had regarded Carsten as an enemy. On the contrary, even though the old bishop had been of a very different generation, bred in an age when fear of magic had made far greater men rabid in their intolerance of such as Corwyn’s Deryni duke, Carsten had never succumbed to the open hostility displayed by some. When, on the premature accession of Kelson Haldane to the throne of Gwynedd, it had become increasingly clear that the young king was somehow heir to magical abilities which the Church had come to condemn as heretical over the years — powers that Kelson intended to use for the protection of his kingdom — Carsten had retired quietly to his episcopal holdings in Meara, rather than choose between his fanatically anti-Deryni archbishop and his more moderate brethren who supported the king despite the questionable status of his Deryni soul. The king’s party had eventually prevailed, and the deposed Archbishop Loris languished even now in the secure Abbey of Saint Iveagh, high in the sea cliffs north of Carbury. Morgan himself thought the sentence far too lenient to balance the harm Loris had done human-Deryni relations by his venom, but it had been the recommendation of Loris’ successor, the scholarly Bradene of Grecotha, and was actively supported by the majority of Gwynedd’s other bishops.

No such majority prevailed in the consistory Morgan now watched in the chamber below, assembled in Culdi to elect old Carsten’s successor. The unexpected vacancy in the See of Meara had touched off old, old controversies regarding its tenure. Mearan separatists had been agitating for a Mearan-born prelate for as long as Morgan could remember, and had been agitating in vain through the reigns of at least three Haldane kings. This was the first time that young Kelson had had to face the ongoing argument, but with the king less than a fortnight past his seventeenth birthday, it was not likely to be the last. Even now, he was addressing the assembled bishops in the chamber below, outlining the factors he wished them to consider in weighing the many candidates.

Suppressing a cough, Morgan shifted forward on the hard stone seat in the listening gallery and eased aside the heavy curtain to peer down. He could see only Kelson’s back from this angle, stiff and formal in a long scarlet court robe, but Conall, Prince Nigel’s eldest son and second in line to the throne after his father, was visible in profile to Kelson’s right, looking very bored. The bishops themselves seemed attentive enough, but many of those watching from the tiered benches along the walls wore stormy faces. Morgan could identify several of the principal aspirants to the vacant Mearan See.

“We wish, therefore, to reassure you that the Crown will not interfere unduly in your election, my lords,” the king was saying, “but we enjoin you to consider well the candidates who shall come under your examination in the coming days. The name of the individual eventually chosen matters little to us, personally, but the peace of Meara matters a great deal. That is why we have spent this past season progressing through our Mearan lands. We recognize that a bishop’s principal function is to provide spiritual guidance — yet we would be naive in the extreme if we did not also acknowledge the temporal power wielded by the incumbent of any such office. All of you are well aware of the weight your opinions carry in our own secular deliberations.”

He went on, but Morgan released the curtain with a bored sigh and folded his arms along the railing, allowing his attention to drift as he laid his head on his crossed forearms and closed his eyes.

They had gone over all of this before. Morgan had not been along on the royal progress, having business of his own in Corwyn, but he joined the king as soon as word arrived of old Carsten’s death. His first night back in the royal entourage. Archbishop Cardiel had briefed him on the political ramifications and acceptable successors, while Kelson listened and Duncan occasionally added .his own observations. Duncan was down there now at Cardiel’s side, poised and attentive in his clerical black — at thirty-one, young even to be serving as a bishop’s secretary, much less an incipient bishop himself, though he had shown sufficient promise even a full five years ago to be appointed the then – Prince Kelson’s chaplain and given the rank of Monsignor.

Not that Duncan would be Carsten’s successor — though many might have feared that, had they known of his impending change of status. Fortunately, most did not. The bishops knew, of course. Cardiel had determined to make Duncan his assistant even before Carsten’s death, and had spearheaded his election as one of the first items of business when the convocation convened a few days earlier.

But partially because Duncan’s secular status already presented complications in the deliberations ahead, and partially because he wished to delay his formal consecration until the following Easter, no public announcement had yet been made. Duncan’s very presence at the convocation, ostensibly as secretary for the proceedings, had been enough to raise eyebrows among the Mearan clergy and lay observers in attendance.

Nor did Mearan uneasiness spring from the fact that Duncan, like Morgan, was Deryni — though the Deryni question had certainly presented problems of its own in the beginning, and doubtless would continue to be a factor of varying importance. For nearly two centuries, no known Deryni had been permitted ordination to the priesthood. Discovery that Duncan was Deryni and had been so ordained had sparked a panicked flurry of ecclesiastical speculation as to how many other Deryni might have served in the clergy secretly, to the possible detriment of uncountable human souls to whom they might have ministered — and how many might be serving now? No one knew how virulent the infection might be, if Deryni consorted unbeknownst with decent Christian folk. The very thought had sent men like Edmund Loris into near-apoplectic fits on more than one occasion.

Fortunately, cooler logic than Loris’ had eventually prevailed. Under the physical protection of a part-Deryni king, both Duncan and Morgan had managed to convince a majority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy that they, at least, did not fit the image of evil for so long attributed to Deryni — for surely evil men would not have put themselves so thoroughly at risk to save their king and kingdom from another of their race.

But while Morgan could quickly return to a status not unlike that which he had enjoyed before the death of Brion — known and sometimes feared for what he was, but nonetheless grudgingly respected, if only for the threat of what he might do if provoked — Duncan’s situation required more delicate handling. Once he and Morgan had made peace with the bishops, the Deryni priest had spent many agonizing weeks reconciling his own conscience on the matter of having accepted ordination to the priesthood when he knew it was forbidden to Deryni. He had resumed his priestly function only after Kelson’s victory at Llyndruth Meadows.

In Duncan’s favor, at least, was the fact that few outside the confines of consistory and court definitely knew he was Deryni; and whatever rumor and innuendo might be whispered beyond that circle of intimates, scrupulous avoidance of any public display of magic had enabled Duncan not to confirm anything. He was not known to be Deryni by most; he was only known to consort with them — Morgan and the king, in particular. Arilan, now the Bishop of Dhassa, was Deryni too; but among the bishops only Cardiel knew that — as did a meager handful outside the episcopal ranks — for neither Arilan nor Duncan had had to reveal their powers against Wencit at the Llyndruth Meadows confrontation two years before. Morgan did not fully trust Arilan, but he was sure he and Cardiel were largely responsible for Duncan’s cautious acceptance among the clergy. Certainly, Duncan could not have been elected bishop without their support.

What gave the Mearans cause to distrust Duncan, then, had almost entirely to do with Duncan’s secular status; for following his father’s death without other heir, Duncan had assumed the ducal and county titles of Cassan and Kierney — titles which had once belonged to Old Meara. To Mearan separatists, working to establish a powerbase for a Mearan restoration, a Cassani duke loyal to the crown of Gwynedd was merely a political annoyance across the northern border, to be worked around and watched, as Duncan’s father had been watched for years; but if that duke was also a high-ranking priest, and Meara’s only bishopric fell suddenly vacant, matters instantly became more complicated. A Cassani royalist duke who also became Bishop of Meara would wield both spiritual and temporal authority over two vast areas.

Indeed, Duncan’s election to any bishopric would be viewed with suspicion in Meara; for even if he himself had no aspirations in that direction, his politically motivated wishes could carry great weight in the selection of the man who was chosen to occupy the Mearan See. Monsignor The Duke of Cassan represented a threat, then, for all that he seemed to be an innocuous-looking priest-secretary seated quietly beside the Archbishop of Rhemuth.

Smothering another cough, Morgan glanced down at the consistory chamber again — Kelson was winding up his speech — then allowed his gaze to drift lazily over his own form, reflecting on the effort which had gone into making his image less threatening in the past two years. Gone was the somber black attire which a younger, more arrogant Morgan had affected in those days as Brion’s shadow and confidant. Cardiel had told him quite frankly that such affectations only tended to reinforce the sinister notions most people still entertained about Deryni.

“Why dress as the Adversary?” Cardiel demanded. “You’ve shown amply by your actions that you’re a servant of Light, not Darkness. Why, with your pale hair and fair features, you could have come off my chapel ceiling: one of the Lord’s messengers — maybe even blessed Michael himself!”

And Lord Rathold, his wardrober at Coroth, had badgered him no less mercilessly about his ducal image.

“You must think of your people. Your Grace!” Rathold had said stubbornly. “You dress like a common soldier, when you have your way. No one wishes to think he serves an impoverished master — or to have others think it! ‘Tis a matter of pride!”

And so, unless there was a need for stealth, the sable leathers had been put aside and replaced with color: a deep burgundy cloak at first, as a self-conscious concession to his rank as King’s Champion — he could not bring himself to adopt the crimson Kelson favored — but worn over muted, conservative grey, with little embellishment. Deep blues followed, and eventually greens and golds and even particolors — the rich jewel-tones rather than bright shades. Eventually, he even learned to like them.

His body squire had chosen verdant hues for him today: a blue-green cloak collared and lined in silver fox drawn over a nubby wool robe in a slightly lighter shade, ankle-length and slit front and rear for riding. The borders and cuffs were stiff with dozens of his Corwyn gryphons worked in gold bullion, the throat clasped with a silver penannular brooch which had been his mother’s.

He still wore a mail shirt beneath his finery, as he always had: fine, supple chain which would turn aside all but the most direct dagger thrust. But where once the metal would have gleamed openly at wrists and throat, boldly belligerent and just a little to ready for trouble, now it was hidden beneath an undertunic of rich, slubbed silk, with soft wool between the chain and his skin. The scabbard of the sword at his left hip was mounted with silver-set Cassani cairngorms the size of a man’s thumbnail — Duncan’s birthday gift to him two months before: civilized splendor, even if the blade the scabbard sheathed was as serviceable as ever.

A shorter blade was thrust into his right boot-top, the hilt never far from his gloved hand, and he still carried a narrow stiletto in a wrist-sheathed strapped along his left forearm, underneath the mail. Around his neck he wore the gilded captain-general’s chain Kelson had given him at last year’s Christmas Court, each link engraved with Haldane lions and Corwyn gryphons chasing one another’s tails. The old Morgan would not have understood the joke.

He sighed and shifted, and the sound of the chain chiming against the stone railing brought him back to awareness of his surroundings. Kelson’s voice in the chamber below had been replaced by another while Morgan day-dreamed, and a quick glance between the curtains confirmed that the speaker was Archbishop Bradene. Seconds before the door latch lifted, Morgan sensed the king approaching even as he quested outward with his mind. He was already rising to incline his head in a slight bow as Kelson stepped inside.

“Well, no sense trying to take you by surprise,” the boy remarked with a rueful smile. “You always seem to know it is I. How did I do?”

Morgan shrugged and returned the smile.

“The part that I heard was fine, my prince. I must confess that my attention wandered, toward the end. We went over this so many times in Droghera.”

“I know. I nearly bored myself as well.” Kelson flashed a more wistful grin as he drifted over to peer through the curtains as Morgan had done. “Still, it had to be said.”

“Aye.”

As the king stood there poised and listening, Morgan was reminded once again how much had changed in the past three years. Kelson had grown more than a handspan since that day Morgan had come to help a grief-stricken boy of fourteen keep his throne. The boy was a man now — still not as tall as Morgan, but already taller than his father had been, if more slightly built. In other ways than size, he would also be a bigger man than Brion. Already he knew more of his magical heritage than Brion ever had, and more of the ways of people.

The eyes were the same, though — the grey Haldane eyes that could pierce all subterfuge and read a man’s soul, even if the vigor of merely human potential were not enhanced by Haldane magic. The silky black hair was Brion’s, too, though Kelson wore it far longer of late than his father ever had — short across his forehead, but almost brushing his shoulders on the sides. A golden circlet chased with an interlace design bound the long part off his face, but the back was rumpled where it had caught the high-standing collar of his formal court robe. Kelson raked the fingers of one hand through the snarls and glanced aside at Morgan with a mischievous grin as he let the curtains fall back into place.

“I’ve a mind to do something that I know will vex you,” he said, beginning to shrug out of his heavy outer robe. “Would you be terribly cross if I went off and left you here for a few days to supervise the bishops?”

Adopting the bland expression as well as the stance of a valet, Morgan caught Kelson’s robe before it could slip to the floor and laid it aside, gathering up the fur-lined cloak of scarlet that the king had worn earlier in the day.

“I shan’t deny that listening to a pack of bishops argue is among my least favorite occupations — or that I should prefer you didn’t go too far afield, this close to Meara,” he said neutrally. “On the other hand, you generally have good reasons for the things you want to do. Where, specifically, did you plan to go?”

Still grinning, the king took off his circlet long enough to rub his forehead where the band had pressed, before turning to back into the cloak Morgan extended. In the process, one long strand of hair caught on the wire of the great ruby winking in his right earlobe, and he tossed his head to free it as he settled the circlet back on his head.

“Why, Morgan, you’re beginning to sound like a true courtier,” he said, adjusting the cloak on his shoulders and snapping the clasp as Morgan freed his hair from the sable collar. “I need to go to Trurill, though. I’d planned to include it in my progress this summer, but Carsten’s death interrupted that, as you know. It occurs to me that this might be my last chance to poke about before the rains start.”

“Why Trurill, in particular?” Morgan asked. “Do you have reason to suspect trouble there?”

“No. But if Meara should go more sour than it already has, I’d like to be certain of my border barons. Brice of Trurill says he’s loyal — all of them do, when I’m nearby and they’re this far from Rhemuth — but in another few weeks, he’ll be beyond my reach until the spring.”

Morgan grimaced, personal distaste for the job Kelson was leaving him giving way to very real concern for the royal safety.

“Are you sure this isn’t just an excuse to get out of an onerous job?” he murmured. “I hasten to remind you that the troops we brought from Rhemuth are not accustomed to the ways of the bordermen. Up here, they fight an entirely different kind of skirmish. If Brice isn’t loyal — “

“If he isn’t loyal, then I need to know,” Kelson interrupted. “I’m taking Duncan’s Jodrell as guide. He’s familiar with the area.” He paused to grin. “And of course it’s an excuse to get out of an onerous job. You don’t think I’d be fool enough to go into the borderlands without you if I really thought Brice was vacillating, do you? You taught me better than that.”

“I should like to think so,” Morgan returned, little reassured. “I just hope you’re as good a judge of character as you think you are. I’ve met this Brice. He’s a tricky devil.”

“Tricky enough to lie to me and get away with it?”

“Probably not. But he might not tell all the truth, either. Half-truths can sometimes be more dangerous than outright lies — and Truth-Reading isn’t much defense against that.”

Kelson shrugged. “That’s true. But I fancy I know enough to ask the right questions.”

Morgan said nothing, but he was thinking that sometimes Kelson did now know quite as much as he thought he did. The boy was more experienced than many other young men of far more years, and mature for his age. God knew — he could not have survived the past three years if he were not — but he sometimes tended to take his newly gained maturity for granted and to overestimate what could be done. Age and further experience would compensate for that in time, but meanwhile, the king sometimes gave Morgan the odd, anxious moment.

Still, Morgan supposed that Kelson could not get into too much trouble this close to Culdi, and with the local barons aware that the king’s champion was not far away and expecting a prompt return. In all ages, fledglings must be permitted to try their wings — even if the trying sometimes turned their mentors prematurely grey. Morgan was suddenly grateful that his hair was already light, so Kelson would never know the extent of the anxiety he caused.

“You aren’t really worried, are you?” Kelson asked after a few seconds, when Morgan did not speak, apparently sensing the other’s reservations. “Nothing is going to happen. Ewan is dying to get away to the mountains for a few days — I think he dislikes being cooped up at court even more than you do — and I thought I’d take Conall along, as well. Maybe a little patrol work will teach him patience. It’s a courtesy call, Alaric — that’s all. I want to see how Brice operates when he isn’t expecting me to see.”

“Do as you wish, then,” Morgan muttered. “You will, anyway. I don’t know why I bother worrying.”

Kelson grinned, a boyish quirk of a smile which was quite at odds with his regal attire and bearing.

“I think you do. I do, if you don’t. And the day you stop worrying is the day I’ll start.” He touched Morgan lightly on the shoulder.

“Just keep our wayward bishops in line for me, Alaric. I’ll be back in a few days.”

By the following afternoon. Kelson was beginning to wonder whether he had truly gotten the better end of the bargain. He had expected the weather to hold for at least another week; but as he and his warband rode west along the river toward Trurill — a full two dozen knights and men-at-arms, in addition to squires and servants — the air grew increasingly still and oppressive. An annoying drizzle set in just before noon, dampening dispositions as well as armor and equipment. Conall, riding beside his royal cousin, spent nearly all of their brief meal-break complaining about the weather, but at least the more important grumbling of the men was mostly good-natured. The road was still good, the rain only settling the dust as they resumed travel. At midafternoon they entered an area of sparse forest, where the drizzle subsided to a less irritating drip as it filtered through the trees.

They heard the sound of fighting long before they came upon it. The shrill whinnies of horses in distress warned them first, setting their own blooded warhorses to prancing and snorting with anticipation. As shouts and the clash of steel began to reach them. Duke Ewan signalled a halt and sent two advance riders spurring on ahead to investigate. Kelson, who had been chatting with several of’his younger knights halfway back along the column, eased his mount forward at once, tugging distractedlyat a gauntlet cuff.

“Jodrell, were you expecting any activity along here?” the king called softly, as he drew rein beside their guide.

The young Kierney baron only shook his head, still poised in a listening attitude. When the outriders did not return within a few minutes. Kelson silently signalled Saer de Traheme to begin stripping the waterproof cover off the Haldane battle standard.

“What are we waiting for, Ewan?” Conall fretted, standing in his stirrups to peer ahead into the forest gloom. “If there’s trouble, we should try to stop it!”

Old Ewan, sitting his horse ahead of the two Haldanes and at right angles to them, squeezed his eyes to calculating slits as he glanced in their direction, armored hand already fingering his sword hilt. His bushy red beard protruded beneath his helmet quite without discipline of razor or scissors.

“Their trouble, not ours. Your Highness — unless, of course, we insist upon charging into things without knowing what we’re about. Hush ye, now, so I can listen.”

Still the silence was broken only by the continuing sounds of the distant fighting and the closer noises of the Haldane greathorses held in check, bits and chains jingling, leather creaking, mail clinking softly as the knights strained to hear. Kelson surveyed the two dozen mounted knights settling helmets on heads and taking up shields behind him, then shifted his attention back to Ewan.

“What do you think?” he whispered.

Ewan slowly shook his head. “I dinnae know yet, Sire. We’re on the edge of Trurill holdings, eh, Jodrell? That means that Trurill levies are likely on one side of whatever’s dusting up.”

The border baron nodded. “Aye, Your Grace — though it’s God’s good guess who’s on the other side. I’d wait for Macaire and Robard, if I were you. Sire.”

“I fully intend to.”

“But, can’t we — “ Conall began.

“No, we can’t,” Kelson murmured, giving Conall a warning look as he twisted to take the shield that his squire had brought forward. “Jodrell, check the men, please.”

Conall started to object again as Jodrell reined his horse out of line and headed quietly back along the column, but another sharp look from Kelson silenced him. The prince, only a few months younger than Kelson, had been along on the Cardosa campaign two summers before, but he still had much to learn about strategy and the art of command. It was a common failing, and not entirely Conall’s fault, for though Gwynedd common law declared fourteen to be the legal age of manhood, in fact few boys were actually called upon to function as adults for several more years.

Chivalric custom recognized this, even if the law did not, denying the knightly accolade to those under eighteen except on rare occasions. Even Kelson, who could have made himself such an exception as king, had declined to be knighted until his eighteenth birthday. If Conall gained sufficient experience in the coming year, his knighting might be moved forward a few months to coincide with Kelson’s; but meanwhile, he remained in the subordinate rank of squire, royal though he was.

That was little comfort to Kelson just now, weighing Conall’s inexperience against the possible dangers of the coming skirmish. He could not help remembering Morgan’s warning about the difference of fighting styles and wondered whether the Deryni lord could have known he was foretelling the future. Border fighting favored quick, lightly mounted and armed raiding bands, not the heavier horses and armor to which Conall was accustomed and with which the warband was equipped. Should the terrain ahead boast closer maneuvering room than what lay immediately around them, the inexperienced among Kelson’s company might find themselves at the disadvantage despite their numbers and superior armor.

Still, Kelson supposed he could let his untried cousin at least think he was performing an important function, while still keeping him relatively safe and under watchful eyes. As he adjusted the angle of his helm and secured the chin strap, he cast a stem glance at the impatient Conall, then relented and nodded to Traheme. Immediately, Conall was kneeing his charger between the two of them and reaching out for the royal standard, tight-jawed but triumphant as his gloved hand locked around the polished staff.

“No heroics, now,” Kelson warned.

“Don’t worry.”

The crimson of the banner’s field seemed almost subdued against the deep green of the surrounding forest, but the golden Haldane lion shimmered like a living thing as Conall gave the silk a shake and set the butt of the staff in his stirrup rest. The prince’s grin was infectious, and Ewan and Traheme as well as Kelson found themselves smiling in response as muffled hoofbeats approached. Kelson cast about for hidden dangers as a returning scout burst through the trees and reined his horse to a sliding halt, but he sensed nothing other than the body of men ahead.

“Liveried men-at-arms. Sire — lightly mounted, against what appears to be a band of brigands,” the man reported. “Maybe twenty on a side, but none of them are particularly well armored.”

“Whose livery?” Kelson demanded.

“Trurill, Sire. Two swords in saltire over a third in pale, all on a blue field.”

Kelson glanced at Ewan, who nodded confirmation. “Those’ll be Brice’s lads, right enough. Do we have maneuvering room, son?”

“At least as good as here. Your Grace. Part of the area is an open glade. Robard has stayed to watch they don’t shift while we’re planning.”

“Well done.” Kelson drew his sword and glanced back at his waiting men. “Very well, gentlemen, I think it’s time to show ourselves. If we can manage without bloodshed, so much the better. Traheme, I want you on Conall’s other side. Jodrell, you ride on my right. Ewan, deploy the men.”

With an economy of silent hand signals, Ewan gave the necessary orders. As ever. Kelson was impressed with the efficiency and polish which came with more than thirty years’ experience as a field commander. The jingle of harness and the wet, sucking sound of the horses’ hooves on the moss-covered forest floor temporarily covered the battle sounds as the knights peeled off to either side and fanned out in perfect parade ground formation, Ewan and one of the senior knights each taking a wing. Kelson urged his bay forward at the trot, sword at the ready, he and his escort marking the center of a deepening crescent intended to engulf attackers and defenders alike. Ahead, through the trees, he began to see the signs of battle.

“Yield, in the king’s name!” he heard Ewan cry, as the royal knights burst upon the skirmish. “Hold, in the name of Kelson of Gwynedd!”

They all hold swords, being expert in war: every man hath his sword upon his thigh.

— Song of Solomon 3:8

Kelson’s first impression, as he and his warband burst into the clearing, was one of brawl rather than battle. Though most of the Trurill men were armed with swords or the short horse-spears favored by bordermen, their opponents seemed limited to cudgels, quarterstaffs, and the occasional dirk. Nor did the Trurill men appear inclined to overpress their advantage. Even as the Haldane ring tightened. Kelson saw a Trurill retainer grab his opponent’s plaid and yank him off his pony, cracking him across the back of the head with the pommel of his sword when he just as easily could have killed him. Several of both sides lay unmoving or groaning feebly on the ground, but few seemed seriously injured.

Trurill livery and leathers swirled and surged chaotically around Border tartans strange and familiar, loose ponies and an occasional terrified highland sheep creating additional hazards for the few men who continued to fight from the ground. The ponies’ whinnying and the frantic bleating of the sheep made vocal counterpart to the grunts and exclamations of the struggling men.

The confrontation was quickly over. With shouts of “A Haldane!” the royal knights closed, shouldering their greathorses deftly between the smaller, lighter border mounts to break up individual skirmishes, flat-blading recalcitrants who tried to keep on fighting, and sometimes bowling over horses and surprised riders of both sides. Kelson and the rest of the royal party held back as a reserve, but their help was never necessary. The closest Kelson came to action was the startled leap his horse made when one of the sheep suddenly bolted between its front legs.

Soon the brigands began dropping their weapons and raising their arms in surrender. With a shout, the Trurill men rallied to surround them. As Kelson’s warband pulled back to sit their horses quietly at the perimeter of the clearing, still encircling captors as well as prisoners, the Trurill men began ordering the prisoners to dismount and to bind them, a few starting to see to the injured. Ewan, scanning his own command for injuries and seeing none, kneed his charger to Kelson’s side and saluted with upraised gauntlet.

“Well, that was a pleasant enough romp. Sire,” he said in a low voice, nodding toward the borderers. “You there — Trurill Sergeant’“ he called in a louder voice. “Attend us at once!”

At his command, one of the older, better armored Trurill men glanced back at him, then broke away from the rest of his band and rode slowly toward the royal party, eying the Haldane standard with something akin to suspicion. He gave perfunctory salute with his sword as he reined in before them, glancing first at Kelson and Conall, then at Ewan.

“You are well come, sir,” the man said, sheathing his sword. “By your plaid, I make you a highland man. Would you be The Claibourne, then?”

But before Ewan could reply, the man glanced less certainly between Kelson and Conall once again. “And you, my lords — I thank you for your assistance. We see few Haldanes this far west.”

And doubtless wish to see fewer still. Kelson thought sourly, as he also sheathed his sword and removed his helmet.

He supposed he should not be annoyed that the man did not recognize him. Other than his own brief foray into Culdi two years before for the ill-fated wedding of Kevin McLain and Morgan’s sister Bronwyn, Kelson doubted any other Haldane had penetrated this deep into the western borderlands for several years before his father’s death. His progress of the summer just past had been confined primarily to Meara itself, and the flatlands of Kierney and Cassan. And even were bordermen not notorious for their indifference to lowland titles of nobility, how could a mere border sergeant be expected to know his king by sight?

“I am Kelson,” he said patiently, pushing back a sweat-stained arming cap from damp black hair and handing off his helmet to a waiting squire. “It appears that the presence of this particular Haldane was rather timely. You are — ?”

The man dipped his head in dutiful if chilly respect.

“Gendon, my Lord King, in service to the Baron of Trurill.”

Kelson favored the man with the same sort of cool, impersonal nod which he himself had received, then scooped damp tendrils of hair from his face with the back of one mailed gauntlet as he glanced over the prisoners being secured by Gendon’s men. How to unbend the man?

“Gendon, eh?” he said neutrally. “Tell me, Master Gendon, what brought about this little set to? Actually, I’m not sure you needed our help at all. They weren’t very well armed.”

“They’re outlaws, my lord,” came the surprised reply, as if that explained everything. “They raid across the borders for livestock — sometimes even women and children.”

“Oh?”

“Well, we try to stop it, of course, my lord,” the man went on a little defensively. “The baron posts a regular patrol, as is his duty, but a man can slip off into these hills with half a dozen sheep and never be seen again. The young Laird MacArdry says this particular lot have been plaguing Transha as well.”

“The young laird — you mean Dhugal, the chief’s son?” Kelson asked, his more personal interest suddenly piqued.

Gendon raised one eyebrow in surprise. “You know young Dhugal, my lord?”

“You might say that,” Kelson replied with a grin. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen him lately?”

“Lately? Aye, my lord. Every blessed day.”

But as Gendon gestured toward his men and twisted in his saddle to look, clearly taken aback at this lowland king’s apparent recognition of highland relationships, Kelson had already spotted the object of his inquiry: a slight, ramrod-straight rider wrapped in a grey, black, and yellow plaid which only partially hid the russet leather of a neat Connaiti brigandine. He was talking to a Trurill man balancing on one leg beside his horse, gesturing for someone else to come and assist the man. A mail coif partially obscured the hair which would have made a beacon of his presence out of war harness, but the shaggy brown-and-white spotted border horse he rode was well known to Kelson, though its markings were common enough not to be remarked during the heat of battle — doubtless the reason Kelson had not noticed them earlier.

The MacArdry heir became aware of the royal scrutiny at about the same moment Kelson first saw him. One look at the riders sitting beneath the royal standard was enough to make him break away and urge his mount into a trot toward the king, grinning hugely.

“Dhugal MacArdry, what the devil is that?” Kelson shouted, pointing a gauntleted finger at the other’s steed and grinning almost as widely as he. “Surely, ‘tis no horse that looks so strange!”

The young MacArdry drew rein and almost flung him self from the saddle, pushing his coif back from bright copper-bronze hair as he thumped to both knees before the king’s horse.

“Why, ‘tis the beast who threw Your Grace the first half-dozen times you tried to ride her!” Dhugal replied. His sword hung from a baldric over his left shoulder, rigged to be drawn from the left, but he half-drew it with his right hand and offered the pommel in salute, face glowing with pride.

“Welcome to the borders — my King! It’s been too many years.”

“Aye, and I shall trounce you for a knave if you don’t get off your knees at once!” Kelson said happily, signalling the other to rise. “I was your brother before I was your king. Conall, look how he’s grown! Ewan, you remember my foster brother, don’t you?”

“Aye, Sire — and the mischief with which both of you used to terrorize my pages’ school! ‘Tis good to see you, Master Dhugal.”

“And you. Your Grace.”

As Dhugal let his sword slip back into its scabbard and stood, and Kelson jumped down from his tall R’Kassan stallion, Conall also nodded in tight-lipped response to Dhugal’s slight bow in his direction; the two had been rivals in those earlier days. Though nearly as tall as Kelson, the young border lord looked hardly older than when he had left court four years before, a sprinkling of freckles across his nose and cheeks only adding to the childlike first impression. Large, square front teeth flashed bright white as his face creased in a pleased, open grin, the smudge of reddish mustache across his upper lip hardly more than adolescent down. But the eyes which met Kelson’s were no longer those of a child.

The two young men embraced exuberantly, thumping each other on the back and then drawing apart to study the other more soberly. Kelson did not resist as Dhugal took his hand and pressed fervent lips to the back of the gauntlet in homage before looking back at him.

“How are you, Dhugal?” he murmured.

“I am well, my prince, now that you are here,” Dhugal replied softly, in the cultured court accents he had learned so many years before. “We have heard stories here in the west, of course, but — “ He shrugged and grinned broadly. “Well, frankly, I did not think to see Your Grace in person until the day I came to claim my earldom. The borders and highlands have never been a favorite haunt of Haldane kings.”

“The borders are loved by this Haldane,” Kelson said, flashing with fond remembrance on the image of Dhugal’s elderly father, who had fostered Dhugal to court when he was seven and Kelson nine. “And praise God it did not take your father’s death to bring us back together after all. How is old Caulay?”

“He does as well as one might hope,” Dhugal replied, a trifle more subdued. “He’s not travelled since your coronation, though. I’ve spent the past three years standing in for him, learning a proper border soldier’s trade. I — don’t suppose my apprenticeship can last much longer now.”

“His illness is worse, then. Dhugal, I’m sorry,” Kelson murmured. But before he could continue, Gendon, the Trurill sergeant, cleared his throat.

“Your pardon, Lord King, but young MacArdry does have duties. Dhugal, there are wounded.”

“Aye, Sergeant, I’ll see to them directly.” Dhugal gave Kelson a short bow of apology. “By your leave. Sire.”

“Of course. My men will assist.”

Most of the injuries were slight — the minor cuts and bruises expected of any rough and tumble altercation — but a few of the men, Trurill and prisoners alike, sported more serious wounds. One man was dead, despite the apparent restraint shown by all. Kelson detailed his battle surgeon and the squires to work with the bordermen and, when it became clear that Gendon did not intend to return to Trurill that night, gave orders for camp to be made. Conall he assigned to Ewan’s supervision, to observe how the old duke integrated his command with Gendon’s.

Kelson himself wandered in the forming Trurill camp with only Jodrell for escort, saying little but watching everything with interest. Recalling Dhugal’s comment about the “stories” which had come westward in the past three years, he wondered what preconceptions these highland men might have about him as a result. In the eyes of men such as these, that Kelson was a Haldane was reason enough to suspect him. What further suspicion might have been generated by tales of his magic?

But when he tried chatting with a few of them, he sensed that their reticence had as much to do with his lowland origins as with his rank or any vague uneasiness they might have because he was part Deryni. They were respectful enough, in their rough, border way, but they offered no more than was asked for, never volunteering information.

The prisoners volunteered no information either, though that was hardly surprising. Nor was the information which was extracted, sometimes forcefully, of anything but local interest. Kelson Truth-Read a few of them while others asked the questions, but there seemed no point in flaunting his Deryni abilities when the interrogators were getting exactly the same answers he was. The distance between these men and himself had little to do with magic, but the loneliness was just as real. Eventually he found himself .watching Dhugal from behind and signalled Jodrell not to speak.

Dhugal was kneeling beside the most seriously wounded of his own men. Kelson’s squire Jatham assisting him, unaware of the royal scrutiny. His plaid lay discarded in a heap beside him, sword and baldric atop it, and Kelson could see that he had unbuckled the front of his brigandine for greater ease of movement as he bent to his surgeoning duties.

Dhugal’s patient was a sturdy mountain lad hardly older than himself but half again as large, sporting a gash from wrist to elbow which would probably render him useless as a swordsman in the future, if he even kept the arm. His other brawny arm was pressed across his eyes, the bearded face beneath it drained of color. As the squire poured water over the wound and Dhugal loosened the tourniquet above it just slightly, bright blood pumped from deep within. Even from where he stood. Kelson could see that the cut had severed deep muscles and probably arteries.

“Damn!” Dhugal muttered under his breath, tightening file tourniquet again and muttering an apology as his patient sucked in breath between his teeth in pain. Neither he, his assistant, nor his patient seemed to notice Kelson’s presence as he picked up a needle trailing a length of gut threat.

“Ye must nàå move now, Bertie, if we’re tae save yer arm,” Dhugal said, his earlier court accents blurred with the lilt of the highlands now, as he positioned the bloody arm to his liking and shifted Jatham’s grip. “Hold him steady as ye can, lad.”

As Bertie braced himself and young Jatham clamped down at wrist and bicep. Kelson touched the squire’s shoulder and nodded as he looked up, startled. Dhugal, too, blinked as he suddenly became aware of Kelson’s presence.

“Why don’t you let me take over here, Jatham?” he said to the boy, smiling and signalling him to move aside. “He’s a little big for you to hold. Go with Baron Jodrell.”

As Jodrell and the boy withdrew. Kelson dropped to his knees across from Dhugal and rinsed his hands in the basin of clean water near the patient’s head, permitting himself a little smile as Dhugal stared at Mm in amazement.

“I was beginning to feel useless,” Kelson explained. “Besides, it looked as if young Bertie, here, nearly outweighted you both. Hello, Bertie,” he added, as their patient uncovered his eyes to squint at him suspiciously.

“Well, then,” Dhugal grinned, the lilt of the highlands muted to only a slight blurr as he shifted to court dialect. “Last I heard, you weren’t a battle surgeon.”

“Last I heard, neither were you,” Kelson countered. “I suspect we’ve both learned some things in the past few years. What would you like me to do?”

Dhugal made a grim attempt at a chuckle. “Hold his arm steady, then — just there,” he said, repositioning the arm and guiding Kelson’s hands into place as his patient continued to stare.

“Unfortunately,” Dhugal went on, “battle surgeoning isn’t one of the things I’ve had time to learn as well as I’d like — more’s the pity for friend Bertie, here. Just because I’ve made something of a reputation patching up horses, he’s convinced I can put him back together, aren’t ye, Bertie?” he added, lapsing into border dialect again for just a few words.

“Ach, just watch who yer comparin’ to a horse, young MacArdry,” Bertie replied good-naturedly, though he hissed through his teeth and then tried to curl up on his side in reflex as Dhugal probed in the wound.

Moving nimbly, Dhugal helped Kelson immobilize the arm and again attempted to place his first suture, shifting from court speech to border dialect and back again with ease, though his face reflected the strain of the other.

“Bertie MacArdry, ye may be as strong as a horse, in smell if not in muscle,” he ranted, “but if ye wish sommat besides a sleeve-filler, ye must lie still! Kelson, you’ve got to keep his arm from moving, or it’s little use. I can’t control his bleeding if he thrashes around.”

Kelson did his best, slipping easily into the old camaraderie he and Dhugal had enjoyed so long ago, as boys, and which remained so comfortable now that they were men. But as Dhugal continued to probe, and Bertie gasped and tensed again. Kelson glanced over his shoulder and, in a moment of sudden decision, shifted the back of one bloodied hand to the man’s forehead, reaching out with his Deryni senses.

“Sleep, Bertie,” he whispered, slipping his wrist down over the man’s eyes and feeling the tense body go limp. “Go to sleep and remember nothing of this when you wake. No pain. Just sleep.”

Dhugal’s hand faltered and paused in midstitch as he sensed the change come over his patient, but when he looked across at Kelson there was only wonder — not the fear the king had come so often to expect in the past few years. After a few seconds, Dhugal returned to his task, working more quickly now, a faint smile playing across his Ups.

“You have, indeed, learned a few things in four years, haven’t you. Sire?” he asked softly, when he had tied off the last of the internal sutures and cut the gut thread close to the knot.

“You didn’t use my title when we were boys, Dhugal, and I wish you wouldn’t in the future, at least in private,” Kelson murmured. “And I would have to say that you’ve teamed a few things yourself.”

Dhugal shrugged and began rethreading his needle with bright green silk. “You probably remember that I was always good with animals. Well, after Michael died and I had to come home from Court, one of the things they had me study was surgeoning — part of the training of a laird, they said: to be able to patch up one’s animals and men.”

He flushed out the partially sutured wound again, pausing when Bertie moaned and stirred a little — and Kelson had to reach out with his mind once more — then dusted the raw flesh with a bluish grey powder and had Kelson press the lips of the wound together from either side. Carefully, meticulously, he began drawing them together with neat, green silk stitches.

“Is it true that Duke Alaric healed himself at your coronation?” Dhugal asked after a moment, not looking up from his work.

Kelson raised one eyebrow, wondering why Dhugal was asking.

“Is that one of the stories that’s come west?”

“And others — aye.”

“Well, it’s true,” Kelson said, a little defensively. “Father Duncan helped him. I didn’t see it happen, but I saw the result — and I did see him heal Duncan later on: a wound that should have killed anyone else.”

“You actually saw this?” Dhugal asked, pausing to stare at Kelson.

Kelson shivered a little, and had to look away from the blood on his own hands to shake the memory.

“They took a terrible chance,” he whispered. “We needed to convince Warm de Grey that Deryni weren’t necessarily evil. Warm claims that his own healing comes from God, so Duncan decided to show him that Deryni can heal, too. He let Warm wound him in the shoulder, but it was almost too severe. I hate to think of what would have happened, if it hadn’t worked.”

“What do you mean, ‘if it hadn’t worked?’“ Dhugal asked softly, his needle half-forgotten in his fingers. “I thought you said he and Morgan could heal.”

“They can,” Kelson replied, “only they don’t really know how they do it, and the gift isn’t always reliable. Maybe that’s because they’re only half-Deryni. From Father Duncan’s research, we now believe that some Deryni were able to do such things on a regular basis during the Interregnum, but the art apparently has been lost since. Only a small percentage of Deryni had the healing gift, even then.”

“But that Warm fellow can do it?”

“Yes.”

“And he isn’t Deryni?”

Kelson shook his head. “Not so far as we’ve been able to tell. He still insists his gift comes from God — and maybe it does. Maybe he’s a genuine miracle-worker. Who are . we to say?”

Dhugal snorted and resumed his work. “That sounds more capricious than being Deryni, if you ask me — working miracles! For myself, I think I’d gladly settle for being able to do your trick.”

“My trick?”

“To knock out a patient painlessly before trying to work on him. From a battle surgeon’s point of view, that’s a blessing, no matter where the ability comes from, though I suspect ecclesiastical opinion would argue the point. No reflection on friend Bertie’s courage, but if you hadn’t done — whatever you did — he wouldn’t have been able to hold still for me to do this. I suppose it was some of your…Deryni magic?”

Almost hypnotically. Kelson watched the bloody hands move up and down, drawing the wound closed with Dhugal’s own almost magical ability, and he had to shake his head lightly to break the spell.

“I think you have your own kind of magic,” he murmured, looking across at Dhugal in admiration. “And thank God you don’t seem to be intimidated by mine. You have no idea what a relief it is to be able to use my powers for something like this — which is what they were intended for, in the beginning, I feel sure — and not have you be afraid.”

With a smile, Dhugal tied off the last of his sutures and cat the thread, then looked up at Kelson with a keen, frank appraisal of the borderman.

“I seem to recall that we once swore a blood-oath to live as brothers all our lives,” he said softly, “and to do whatever good we might. Why should I fear my brother, then, simply because he has been given the means to do greater good? I know you would never harm me — brother.”

As Kelson caught his breath in surprise, Dhugal ducked his head and returned to his work, sluicing clean water over the sutures and then binding a handful of dried sphagnum moss over the wound.

That, at least. Kelson felt he understood, as he washed his hands and dried them on a corner of their patient’s tunic. He was not sure he understood the other kneeling across from him, but he did not think he cared to question what had just passed between them. He had forgotten what a comfort it could be to confide in a friend of his own generation. Conall was his age, and Payne and Rory only a little younger, but that was not the same. They had not been tempered with adult responsibilities the way he and Dhugal had. Morgan and Duncan understood, of course, and perhaps his Uncle Nigel, but even they were somewhat removed by age and experience — and they were not always around. He found himself heaving a sigh of relief as Dhugal finally rinsed his hands and dried them on a blood-stained grey towel.

“That’s it, then,” Dhugal said, peering tentatively under one of his patient’s eyelids and glancing at Kelson inquiringly. “I think I did one of my better repair jobs, but only time will tell for sure. He’s still lost a lot of blood. Best if he simply sleeps through the night.”

“We’ll see that he does then,” Kelson said, touching the sleeping man’s forehead and making the necessary mental adjustments. “I’d have someone rouse him every few hours to drink some wine — Duncan says that helps to restore the lost blood faster — but otherwise, he shouldn’t stir until morning.”

As the two of them stood, Dhugal gathering up his sword and plaid. Kelson signalled one of his men to attend. Dhugal gave brief instructions, but then he and Kelson moved off slowly toward the edge of the camp which had formed around them while they worked; Wordlessly, Kelson took the sword and plaid while Dhugal began adjusting his armor.

The two were nearly of a height, side by side. Kelson perhaps a few fingers taller and a little heavier, though neither had yet come into their true man’s growth. Before, Kelson had thought Dhugal’s copper-colored hair cut short, but now, as Dhugal pulled off his mail coif and ran fingers under the neck of his brigandine in the back to free his hair. Kelson saw that it was even longer than his own, drawn to the nape of the neck in border fashion and plaited in a short braid tied with a leather thong. He took the coif as the young borderman began buckling the front closures of the brigandine, leaning against a tree to watch indulgently until Dhugal, with a roguish grin, reached out to finger a strand of Kelson’s shoulder-length hair.

“So that’s what comes of having no wars for the past two years,” Dhugal said, dropping the lock and taking back the sword to loop its baldric over his shoulder. “Decadently long hair, like any common borderer. I wonder how you’d look in a border braid?”

“Why don’t you invite me home to greet your father and sample highland hospitality, and perhaps you’ll see,” Kelson returned with a smile, giving him back his plaid and coif. “If I haven’t already scandalized my men simply by being Deryni, then playing at being a wild border chieftain will surely turn the trick. You’ve changed, Dhugal.”

“So have you.”

“Because I’ve acquired — magic?”

“No, because you’ve acquired a crown.” Dhugal lowered his eyes, fingering the leather-lined mail of the coif. “Despite what you said before, you are the king now.”

“And does that make a difference?”

“You know it does.”

“Then, let it be a positive difference,” Kelson said. “You yourself admitted that with the power I’ve been given, both temporal and — other — I now have the power to do greater good. Perhaps some of the things that we only dreamed about when we were boys. God knows, I loved my father, and I miss him terribly, but there are things I’d have done differently, if I’d been faced with some of the things he had to face. Now I have that chance.”

“And does that make a difference?” Dhugal asked.

Kelson shrugged. “I’m alive — and my father is dead. I’ve kept the peace for two years now.”

“And the peace is being threatened in Meara. That’s part of what this was all about, you know.” Dhugal gestured around him at the resting men and the knot surrounding the prisoners across the glade. “We’ve always had a raiding problem in the highlands — it’s part of our way of life — but some of these men, on both sides, are at least sympathetic to the Lady Caitrin’s cause.” He made a face. “She’s my aunt, you know.”

Kelson raised an eyebrow. “Is she?”

“Aye. My Uncle Sicard’s wife. Sicard and my father haven’t spoken for years, but border blood runs thick, as you know. Some wonder that we don’t support them, being so far from central Gwynedd and all. I’m surprised you didn’t catch some inkling of that during your progress this summer. Isn’t that the sort of thing you’re supposed to be able to do now, with your new powers?”

The question was not at all hostile, but it was clear that Dhugal was fishing for reassurance, as uncertain as any of his men about just what a Deryni king could and could not do.

“I’m not omnipotent, Dhugal,” Kelson said quietly, looking the other in the eyes. “I can tell whether a man is lying, with very little effort — it’s called Truth-Reading — but to actually learn the truth, I need to ask the right questions.”

“I — thought that Deryni could read minds,” Dhugal whispered. And though he did not break eye contact, Kelson needed no Deryni senses to know what courage that took, operating from ignorance as Dhugal was. That Dhugal trusted him, there was no question; but despite his earlier protestations that he was not afraid of what Kelson had become, certain fears could only be allayed by experience — and that, Dhugal did not have yet.

“We can,” Kelson murmured. “But we don’t, among our friends, unless we’re invited. And the first time, even among Deryni, it almost requires some kind of physical contact.”

“Like the way you touched Bertie’s forehead?”

“Yes.”

Dhugal let out an audible sigh and lowered his eyes, self-consciously wrapping his plaid around his shoulders like a mantle and fussing with a brooch to secure it. When he had adjusted it to his satisfaction, he gave Kelson a brief, bright smile.

“Well, then. I suppose we ought to see whether the others have gotten anything else out of the prisoners. You won’t forget what I said about highland loyalties, will you?”

Kelson smiled. “I told you how I go about learning whether a man is lying. How do you do it?”

“Why, we highland folk have the Second Sight, don’t you know?” Dhugal quipped. “Ask anyone in my father’s hall about Meara, and her greedy would-be princess.”

“Well, then, if it’s Meara, I suppose I’d better be back there, come spring,” Kelson replied. “And with men beside me who understand what’s happening. Maybe even men who have this — Second Sight. Would your father let you come to court, do you think?”

“If you asked it as king, he’d have no choice.”

“And what is your choice?” Kelson asked.

Dhugal grinned. “We were like brothers once. Kelson. We still make a good team.” He glanced over his shoulder at the sleeping Bertie and back again. “What do you think?”

“I think,” said Kelson, “that we should ride up to Transha in the morning and find out what he’ll say.”

And thou shalt put the mitre upon his head…

— Exodus 29:6

The rain which had been only an annoyance to Kelson, in Transha, had turned to storm by the time it reached Culdi the following afternoon. Stamping mud from the soles of thigh-high riding boots, Morgan paused just inside the doorway to the guest apartments at Culdi Abbey to shake more water from his streaming leather cloak. He and Duncan had intended to ride in the hills nearby as soon as the afternoon session of the consistory adjourned, but the unexpected storm had neatly stymied that plan. Now the iron grey R’Kassan stud moping down in the bishop’s barn would have to wait another day, and perhaps longer, he and his master both growing surly and restless from the forced inactivity. It hardly seemed fair, especially with Kelson out enjoying himself.

Blowing on gloved fingers to warm them, Morgan stalked on along the corridor toward Duncan’s temporary quarters and indulged a brief fantasy about a rainstorm in Transha, too. The notion brought a smile to his lips. None of the servants were about when he let himself into the common room Duncan shared with his master, Archbishop Cardiel, so he built up the fire himself and set wine to mull, spreading his sodden cloak on a stool to dry and shedding cap and gloves. Half an hour later, Duncan found his friend ensconced in a deeply recessed window seat which overlooked the cloister garth, boots propped indolently on the stone bench opposite and a steaming cup all but forgotten in one hand. His nose was pressed to the rain-streaked window glass, free hand shading his eyes against glare.

“I see I was right,” Duncan said, casting off his black cloak and rubbing his hands briskly before the fire. “When I saw how hard it was raining, I guessed that even you wouldn’t choose to ride in this kind of weather. What are you looking at?”

“The ambitious Father Judhael,” Morgan replied, not moving from his vantage point. “Come and see.”

Duncan needed no second invitation, for Judhael of Meara was probably the single most controversial candidate being evaluated by the bishops. Though unimpeachable on ecclesiastical grounds, and personable enough as an individual, his family connections inspired more suspicion than confidence among those aware of the politics which went with the Mearan See, for Judhael was nephew to the Pretender Caitrin. Just now, he was standing outside the door to the chapter house, deep in conversation with old Creoda of Carbury, Bishop of the new See of Culdi since last winter and host for this convocation. Only when the two had moved off down another corridor and disappeared from sight did Duncan draw back from the window.

“I don’t like that,” the priest said softly, glancing at Morgan with tight-lipped disapproval. “Old Creoda can change with the wind. You remember how he stayed by Loris almost to the end, two summers ago. When the bishops decided to phase out his old see, I thought for sure they’d retire him. Who would have guessed they’d give him Culdi instead?”

“Hmmm, I shan’t argue that,” Morgan agreed. “He certainly wouldn’t have been my choice for a see so closely associated with a Deryni saint. But perhaps they thought Carsten would balance him, with Culdi being so close to Meara. I doubt anyone expected that Carsten wouldn’t last out the ó ear.”

Duncan raised an eyebrow. “No? But then, no one asked me. Carsten’s health had been frail for some time. Everyone in Kierney and Cassan knew that. Still, there was no real trouble in Meara while he was alive. Now that he’s gone, most of the Mearan clergy are suddenly talking about Judhael for his replacement. Now, that’s one I certainly don’t fancy being appointed to the See of Meara.”

“Judhael?” Morgan toyed with one of the links of his captain-general’s chain, tapping the engraved gold against a front tooth as he nodded. “Nor do I. It’s entirely too much like a real throne. Even by separatist standards, he’s too far down the succession to press his own claim to the Mearan coronet, but as Bishop of Meara, he could certainly exert a great deal of influence for his aunt and her sons.”

“Those sons — “ Duncan snorted. “Sometimes I think we’d be better off if old Malcolm had killed off all the other Mearan heirs when he took the coronet and married Roisian. Perhaps that sounds cold and unpriestly, but it might have prevented a lot more bloodshed later on.”

“Aye. And our Mearan princelings are only a little younger than Kelson: just old enough to be ambitious about asserting their mother’s claim. And Judhael on a bishop’s throne could be the foot in the door. The very thought gives me the shakes.”

“You’ll get no argument from me on that,” Duncan replied. ‘The sad thing is, he’s well qualified for the job. His record as a priest is spotless, and he has all the right administrative abilities to make a very good bishop.”

“Or the focus for a separatist revolt,” Morgan said. “Still, credentials like his will make it very difficult to ignore his candidacy. And let’s face it: the man had no more say about being born into a cadet royal house than you and I did about being born Deryni.”

“More’s the pity.”

With a sigh, Duncan turned away from the window and sat down in a high-backed chair whose shadows nearly swallowed his black cassock, stretching out his legs toward the fire. Morgan followed him, lifting mulled wine in wordless question and only refilling his own cup when Duncan shook his head. As Morgan sat in another chair beside him, Duncan rolled his head in Morgan’s direction and looked at him searchingly, folding his hands and tapping joined forefingers against his cheek as he rested his elbows on the chair arms.

“I’m beginning to be really concerned, Alaric,” the priest said softly. “We’ve interviewed a lot of candidates, but none of them match up to Judhael. Oh, some are better in one area or another, but none of them average out as well.”

“What about that one they interviewed this morning?” Morgan asked. “What was his name — Father Benoit? He seemed well qualified to me.”

Duncan shook his head. “A fine priest, but far too naive to cope with the Mearan situation. He’s someone to keep id mind for the future, and he can be groomed for the episcopate in some subsidary post, but that doesn’t help us now. No, what we need is a good compromise candidate — and I’m not sure he exists. He needs to be the king’s man, but he also ought to have at least some familiarity with Mearan politics. The only men who seem to fill both. requirements are either too young or too inexperienced. They can’t all be like Arilan, I suppose: auxiliary bishop at thirty-five, and with his own see before he was forty.”

“No, I suppose not,” Morgan said. He took a thought-fill pull at his wine, then cocked his head at Duncan. “Has it occurred to you that perhaps the bishops have expanded the episcopal structure a little too quickly? — reviving three old sees and only abolishing one — that you’ve used up your reserve of men qualified to promote? Plus, you’ve, lost — what? — four bishops in the past two years? Five, if you count Loris.”

Duncan grimaced. “Count that a blessing, not a loss, cousin. Anyway, he’s safely locked away at Saint Iveagh’s, so I don’t think we need to worry.”

“Let’s hope not. Wouldn’t that muddy the waters, if he got out?”

“Don’t even think it. They say he hasn’t changed a bit, you know,” Duncan went on, in a more confidential tone. 1 hear he nearly had apoplexy when he heard Arilan had been made Bishop of Dhassa.”

“Did he, now?”

“Oh, you needn’t pretend to be surprised,” Duncan replied with a droll grin. “Who, of all the so-called rebel bishops, was largely responsible for his fall, after all? And even if Loris doesn’t know for sure that Arilan’s Deryni, think about it. A suspected Deryni in one of the oldest sees in Gwynedd? It would have been bad enough if he’d only stayed the assistant in Rhemuth.”

As if the mere mention of Arilan’s name had conjured his presence, the door opened at that moment to admit Bishop Denis Arilan, closely followed by Cardiel. The two looked inordinately pleased with themselves as Duncan and Morgan divested them of their soggy cloaks, Cardiel shaking rain from his steel grey hair and smoothing back little wings of it over his ears with both palms as he sat in the chair which Morgan held for him. As the darker-haired Arilan also sat, leaning forward lazily to poke at the fire with a piece of kindling, Cardiel glanced at Duncan, who was setting new cups on the hearth by the pot of mulled wine.

“Duncan, a messenger’s just arrived for you in the inner courtyard,” he said. “A lad wearing your ducal livery. He’s taken an amazing number of dispatches off a packhorse.”

Grinning, Duncan turned over his hosting duties to Morgan and rose.

“Ah, well, I suppose they’ve found me. I was rather afraid the correspondence would catch up with me, if I stayed too long in Culdi. Will you excuse me for a moment, sir? I suppose I really ought to see what he’s got.”

Cardiel said nothing as he waved permission, but as Duncan left the room, Morgan was once again struck by an undercurrent of something brewing beneath the surface, another hint of the self-satisfaction he had sensed when the two first entered. He wondered about it as he handed Cardiel a steaming cup, aware, as their fingers brushed, that Cardiel was the source of most of it, but he did not even consider probing deeper with Arilan present. The Deryni bishop had a knack for knowing when he or Duncan were using their powers in ways of which he did not approve — in almost any way, it sometimes seemed. Of late, it often made Morgan ill-at-ease even to be around Arilan, though that was not the case today.

“Well, I’m glad Duncan’s messenger arrived when he did,” Cardiel said, as Morgan passed Arilan a second brimming cup. “We wanted to discuss something with you privately, very quickly before he comes back. What would you think of Duncan being consecrated bishop a little sooner than we’d planned?”

Morgan nearly dropped the cup he was refilling for himself.

“You’re not thinking of making him Bishop of Meara lifter all, are you?”

“No, no — not of Meara,” Cardiel reassured him quickly. “Just my assistant, as we’d already decided. We have found a candidate for Meara, however. If we take him, I’m going to need Duncan’s help more than ever.”

Morgan made no attempt to hide his sigh of relief. Still shaking his head slightly, he hooked a three-legged stool closer to the two and sat, his back to the fire.

“Sweet Jesu, I confess I thought you’d taken leave of your senses for a moment there. Are you really going to pass over Judhael?”

“Not — exactly,” Cardiel replied. “That is, we’re not going to consecrate someone else bishop instead of him. We’ve been aware from the beginning that any bishop not to the Mearans’ liking was going to have his hands full, trying to learn his job and cope with Mearan hostility both at once. But suppose we were to put someone in Meara who’s already experienced? That would eliminate half the problem from the start.”

“You’d transfer an existing bishop, then,” Morgan guessed, running swiftly down the list of prelates in his mind.

Arilan lowered his cup to nod. “That’s correct. And there can be no question about passing over Judhael in favor of a man who already knows how to run a diocese.”

“Except that all your diocesan bishops are already occupied,” Morgan said, even more mystified. “Where are you going to find this paragon?”

Cardiel smiled. “Henry Istelyn, Bradene’s assistant.”

“Ah.”

“He’s already been handling a great deal of work behind the scenes for Bradene for the past two years,” Arilan said. “Furthermore, when he was first made an itinerant bishop, several years ago, he spent a great deal of time in Kierney and the border areas. He probably knows the people better than anyone besides Judhael himself — or Duncan, of course. But we’ve already agreed that he’s to be otherwise occupied.”

Morgan nodded thoughtfully. From Gwynedd’s point of view, the selection of Istelyn made perfect sense — but simply choosing a logically qualified candidate did not eliminate the very practical political repercussions which were likely to result if anyone besides Judhael were posted to Meara.

“You’re saddling Istelyn with a heavy responsibility,” he said. “What makes you think the Mearans will accept him? They have their minds set on Judhael.”

“That’s true,” Arilan agreed. “However, even if they object — “

“Which you know they’re going to do, if it’s anyone else — “

“Even if they object,” Arilan continued, “it’s too late in the season to mount any kind of major military campaign to try to oust him. Ratharkin will be secure enough through the winter, if we leave him a detachment of episcopal troops for local security. And with the king planning to campaign in Meara next year…”

At Morgan’s still-doubtful expression, Cardiel spread his hands helplessly.

“There isn’t going to be a perfect candidate, Alaric — not one who will please every faction. And we could certainly find a lot worse than Istelyn. Incidentally, when is the king due back? Naturally, we’d like his concurrence before we go ahead with any formal announcement.”

Morgan raised an eyebrow, still unconvinced. “I had word this morning that he expects to be back in a few days. He’s headed north to see the Earl of Transha.”

“Transha — that’s The MacArdry?” Cardiel asked.

Arilan nodded knowingly. “I remember when his “eager son was fostered at court a few years ago: a bright, about Kelson’s age, as I recall. What was his name?”

“Dhugal,” Morgan replied. “In any case. Kelson apparently ran across him over Trurill way, so he’s decided to tide back to Transha with the boy and pay a courtesy call on the old man.”

“Well, I suppose a few days won’t make any difference, one way or the other,” Cardiel said. “There are still details to work out on Istelyn — such as finding out whether he’s even willing to take on Meara. This assumes, of course, that Kelson has no objection.”

Before Morgan could reply, a sharp cry and the sounds of a scuffle in the corridor outside suddenly intruded, punctuated by a mental scream: Duncan’s. Morgan was on his feet and moving before the others could even glance in that direction. As he burst into the corridor, he saw Duncan struggling with someone at the far end, but by the time he could reach them, Duncan was letting the body of his attacker slide to the floor. There was blood everywhere.

“Are you all — “

“Don’t touch me,” Duncan gasped, cradling a bloody right hand against his equally bloody cassock and wobbling to his knees. “There was merasha on the blade.” He glanced woozily at his motionless attacker. “Christ, I’m afraid I killed him.”

Merasha. The very word took Morgan back for just an instant to a chapel that was no more, and a barb on an altar rail gate, and the terror of being in the drug’s grip, helpless to use his powers, at the mercy of men who would have killed him because of what he was. Duncan had gotten him out and nursed him through the worst of the physical effects of the ordeal, but the memory had never been fully exorcised, especially that final, haunting image of the stake wrapped with chains, which they had passed as they made their escape. It had been intended for him.

“Never mind him,” Morgan replied, stepping over the body to crouch cautiously beside the wounded priest. “Where are you hurt? How much of that blood is yours?”

Drawn by the disturbance, others were congregating in the corridor to gawk, servants and priests and even a few guards from the courtyard outside, forcing Cardiel and Arilan to push their way through to reach Duncan’s side. White-faced, Duncan only shook his head and drew in his breath between clenched teeth as he gingerly eased open his right hand. The palm was slashed almost to the bone where he had tried to ward off his attacker’s knife with his bare hand, but more terrifying, by far, was the wave of queasy disharmony that he radiated as Morgan reached out in instinctive mental probe and as quickly recoiled.

“Careful of the blade,” Morgan warned, though Arilan had already stopped with his hand poised above the knife as he, too, sensed the drug’s effects.

Taking care to avoid the blood, which might carry traces of the drug to affect them as well, the two Deryni turned over the dead assassin. Bright scarlet stained the front of the blue Cassani livery and steamed where it had pooled on the cold stone beneath the body, welling from a second mouth which gaped beneath a beardless chin. The bloody face could not have been more than fourteen.

“Why, it’s a boy!” Cardiel murmured.

“As God is my witness, I had no choice,” Duncan whispered, closing his hand again and slumping back to sit on his heels. “Until he actually cut me, I thought he was legitimate.”

“You don’t know him?” Arilan asked.

“No — but I wouldn’t expect to recognize every last page or squire in my service. And with — with the merasha in me, I was afraid that if I didn’t kill him while I still could, he might be able to outwait me, until I was helpless with the drug. Why did he do it?”

Morgan shook his head, reaching out gingerly with his mind as he slid a hand around the back of the boy’s neck, where there was less blood. Sometimes it was possible to readjust a little from a dead man’s mind, if he had not been dead too long, but Morgan could detect nothing beyond a few hazy images of dim childhood memories, fading even as he read them. While Arilan and a monk began gathering up the scattered dispatches, he carefully searched the body for anything which might give them a clue as to the boy’s identity or origin, but there was nothing. Duncan was beginning to weave as Morgan glanced over at him again, his blue eyes glassy from the drug, keeping them open only by the sheerest force of will. Cardiel had an arm around his shoulder to support him, but it was obvious that Duncan was slipping fast into the chaos of the merasha. Whoever the assassin had been, he had known his quarry to be Deryni.

“Thomas, why don’t you take Duncan back to your quarters and see to his wound?” Arilan suggested softly, touching a hand to Cardiel’s shoulder and including Morgan in his glance. “I’ll see to the clean-up here and try to find out more about our boy-assassin.”

Cardiel nodded, he and Morgan helping Duncan to stand.

“Very well. You might check with the guards who let the boy into the compound. Perhaps someone may have recognized him. It would also be interesting to know whether he was the original messenger sent with the dispatches, or if the real one is lying dead in a ditch somewhere — or, at the least, relieved of his livery.”

Duncan went completely limp as Cardiel finished speaking, and Morgan and the archbishop together had to carry him back to the episcopal apartments. An hour later, washed and bandaged, Duncan was sleeping soundly in his own room, an exhausted Morgan running himself through a brief spell to banish fatigue.

“I’ll try to heal him in the morning, when he’s over the worst effects of the drug,” Morgan whispered, as he turned at last from Duncan’s bed. “It’s a nasty wound, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to put my fingers into all that merasha.’’’

His hands were trembling as he took the cup of wine which Cardiel gave him, for going into Duncan’s merasha-muddled mind had been a great personal trial, as well as a physically taxing one, forcing him to relive much of his own terrifying experience. He still kept flashing on the worst of it, unless he kept his mind on short leash. He knew he would have nightmares for days to come.

But Cardiel’s touch on his shoulder conveyed genuine compassion and even understanding as he guided Morgan to one of the cushioned chairs beside the fireplace. Morgan guessed that the archbishop was remembering his own part in the later aftermath of that ordeal, when Morgan and Duncan had come to him and Arilan in Dhassa and disclosed all in desperate confession, seeking to make peace with the Church which had declared them excommunicate for what they had done to escape.

Morgan sat and sipped silently at his wine for several minutes, staring blindly into the fire and feeling himself gradually unwind, then laid his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes until Arilan returned. The fatigue-banishing spell did not seem to have worked very well, even though he tried it several times.

“I’ve been questioning some of the guards,” the Deryni bishop said, sitting beside Morgan after he had looked in on their patient. “Apparently the boy came from Ballymar, up on the north coast. He was trained in Duke Jared’s household and page to one of the local barons for a while, but was dismissed. One of my informants seemed to think it had to do with Mearan sympathies.”

“Mearan sympathies?” Cardiel murmured. “How old is the lad?”

“Older than he looked,” Arilan replied, “and old enough to risk paying for his actions with his life. What puzzles me is why he tried to kill Duncan. It can’t be over the Mearan bishopric. Everyone knows that Duncan was not a candidate.”

Duncan and Meara. Suddenly Morgan sat up straighter, remembering the conversation he and Duncan had observed between Judhael and old Creoda. They had assumed that Judhael was campaigning for his coveted bishopric. What came to Morgan now was an oblique approach to Judhael getting what he wanted, but its further potential was yet more chilling.

“No, it wasn’t about the bishopric — at least not directly,” he said softly, reviewing the genealogical relationships in his mind just to make sure. “But Duncan is Duke of Cassan and Earl of Kierney. That makes him almost a prince in his own right — and his lands have not always gone by their present names.”

Arilan’s deep blue-violet eyes lit in sudden comprehension. “The other half of ancient Meara,” he said with a nod. “Now, wouldn’t that be a power base, if one wanted to break away from one’s overlord and establish an independent holding? The two Mearas reunited!”

“And Duncan has no direct heir,” Cardiel added, catching the gist of what they were suggesting. “Who is his heir-at-law, Alaric? You? You’re cousins, aren’t you?”

Morgan grimaced. “Not in the right degree for this, I fear — and I say that not out of any greed to amass more titles and land, but out of concern about who comes ahead of me. There are three, actually — though I’d only thought about the first two until today. Neither Duncan’s father or his grandfather had any brothers, but his grandfather had two sisters. The younger, my paternal grandmother, produced one son: my father. The elder sister also produced a son, however; and he married the Princess Annalind of Meara.”

“Queen Roisian’s twin sister,” Cardiel whispered. “Then, Caitrin’s eldest son is Duncan’s heir!”

Morgan nodded. “Ithel; and after him, his brother Llewell. The girl isn’t in the succession, though any eventual son others would be, if her brothers failed to produce heirs.” He paused to moisten his lips as the two bishops stared at him expectantly.

“You’re still wondering who the third heir is, then. I’m surprised you haven’t guessed.” He paused. “Caitrin also had a sister, and that sister had a son. Who else could he be but your good Father Judhael of Meara?”

As Cardiel’s jaw dropped in disbelief, Arilan slapped an open palm against the arm of his chair and swore softly.

“I’m not saying he had anything to do with the attack on Duncan, mind you,” Morgan went on. “I simply point out that if it had succeeded, Judhael and his kin certainly stood to gain. All we really know about his politics at this point is that he wants very badly to be Bishop of Meara. If one of his Mearan cousins were Duke of Cassan and Earl of Kierney, that might make the whole thing fall together. The Bishop of Ballymar would have no choice but to support the candidate of his new duke’s choice: Cousin Judhael. And with Judhael in the bishopric, that’s added leverage to put his aunt on the throne of Meara — a united Meara, once she’s gone and her son succeeds her in the south. It’s ingenious, really.”

“Its diabolical, if you ask me,” Cardiel muttered, “not to mention treasonous. Denis, there must be something we can do. Perhaps we ought to call Judhael in and question him.”

Arilan considered the suggestion, running his pectoral cross back and forth distractedly on its chain, then lowered his gaze.

“On what grounds, Thomas? We’ve been interviewing the man all week. Other than the fact that he’s ambitious, he almost shimmers, he’s so pure. What Duke Alaric has just outlined is a theory only — an incredibly brilliant one, if we were Mearan — but we have no proof it has occurred to Judhael.”

“Well, use your powers to find out, then!” Cardiel blurted. “What good are they, if you don’t use them?”

As Arilan sighed patiently, preparing to go into the argument he had used so often when trying to explain things Deryni to Cardiel, Morgan forced himself to put the temptation from his own mind. He had wrestled with this particular ethical problem before, not always successfully.

“Ultimately, it’s a matter of ethics,” Arilan finally said, echoing Morgan’s rationale. “I have used my powers all this week, Thomas — to gauge whether our candidates were lying about their qualifications. That I could do without their knowledge, and without revealing myself as Deryni.” He smiled, “Besides, they suspected Duncan was Deryni, and that helped to keep them honest: wondering whether he could read their minds — which he couldn’t, of course, under those conditions, but they didn’t know that.”

“Then, let Duncan be present, if you feel you need a decoy,” Cardiel insisted. “Or Alaric, since Duncan is temporarily out of action. Between the two of you, you should be able to get at the truth.”

“And if he really is just a godly man, with ecclesiastical ambition but no interest in politics?” Arilan asked. “Then we’ve made another enemy for Deryni.”

‘Then, make him forget, afterward, if he’s innocent!”

“And that begins to enter really hazy areas of conscience,” Arilan replied. “Truth-Reading is one thing. Using our powers to detect whether a man is lying can be justified, since it doesn’t force action against a person’s will. To make someone tell the truth, however — well, I think that requires more than just a vague suspicion that he may be hiding something. So does making him forget. Sometimes such measures can be justified in a life and death situation, or where the subject is willing, but where does one draw the line?”

“Are you so unsure of that line, then?” Cardiel snapped.

“Of course not. At least I pray to God that I’ll never be tempted to cross over and misuse my powers. But it was abuse of power that gave us the atmosphere of the past two hundred years. It’s what the Camberian Council was created to prevent.”

Morgan looked up sharply at that, for Arilan had scrupulously avoided discussion of the mysterious Camberian Council for the past two years. His reaction apparently reminded Arilan that he was beginning to speak of things best left unsaid to humans, even one as close as Cardiel. The Deryni bishop paused to regroup, shaking his head as he laid a hand on Cardiel’s arm.

“Listen to me, Thomas. I’m flattered at your confidence in me, but you mustn’t think all Deryni are like me, or Alaric, or Duncan, or you may get hurt one day. We’ve tried to be very careful not to do anything which might frighten you unduly, but you have to admit that we’ve made you more than a little nervous on more than one occasion — and you know and trust us. Think about the ones who don’t have a strict moral code like the one we follow. How many feet in the door does it take to produce a Charissa or a Wencit of Torenth? Or an Interregnum? Alaric knows what I’m talking about, don’t you, Alaric?”

Grudgingly, Morgan had to agree, though sometimes Arilan’s scruples seemed to him to be rigid almost to the point of crippling. But in front of Cardiel was not the place to pursue that old argument. Cardiel himself required additional persuasion, but eventually he, too, had to admit that forcing Judhael to the question was premature.

“I still think Kelson should be told what has happened,” Cardiel said stubbornly. “And I don’t think it should wait until he gets back in three or four days, either. That was fine when we were only talking about Istelyn, but now —”

For that, at least, Morgan had a Deryni solution.

“Not all of our powers are forbidden. Excellency,” he said quietly. “It’s possible I might be able to reach Kelson in his sleep, later tonight. He won’t be expecting it, but I can try.” Cardiel nodded happily as Morgan went on. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll leave for Transha in the morning, after I’ve seen to Duncan — unless you have a better idea, sir?” he queried, glancing at Arilan.

The Deryni bishop shook his head. “No, none. Given the bond I know binds you and Kelson, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if your plan works. However, I also know how difficult it is to make the link at such a distance and without preparation at both ends. If you don’t succeed, we’ll make the time you need to get there physically.”

Arilan’s confidence in his ability helped to take the edge off Morgan’s earlier resentment at having to back off on questioning Judhael, but now that his own course was set for the next few hours, he needed some time alone. When he had assured himself that Duncan was resting more easily, and slipped briefly inside the priest’s mind to deepen his sleep, he took his leave of the two prelates and headed for his own quarters. He tried not to think about how close Duncan had come to death, or the mortal helplessness Duncan had suffered under the influence of merasha, concentrating instead on the calm he would need if he hoped to succeed in reaching the king.

But distraction in the form of Judhael of Meara met him as he passed the open door of the chapel in the guest wing. Morgan stiffened as he saw him, mentally berating himself for even having glanced inside. Judhael and another vaguely familiar-looking priest were just coming out. The temptation at least to test whether Judhael had heard about the attack on Duncan was too enticing to resist.

“Your Grace,” Judhael murmured, as Morgan loomed in the doorway and blocked his exit, all diffidence and courtly courtesy to the king’s champion.

“Father Judhael,” Morgan acknowledged. “I wonder whether I might have a word with you in private,” he said, glancing pointedly at Judhael’s companion. “Perhaps we could step back into the chapel.”

Judhael looked puzzled and a little uneasy, but he agreed readily enough. When one aspired to high office in the confirmation of the king, one did not decline the invitation of the king’s friend and confidant. He watched dispassionately as Morgan closed the chapel door behind them, inclining his head and preceding him down the short aisle when Morgan gestured toward the front of the chapel. Both men genuflected and signed themselves when they reached the altar rail, Morgan and then Judhael easing onto the kneelers which lay along its length. Morgan bowed his head for a moment as if in prayer, letting Judhael’s curiosity and apprehension grow, then glanced at the priest sidelong.

“You’re acquainted with my cousin. Father Duncan McLain, I believe,” he said softly.

Judhael cocked his head and stared at Morgan in surprise.

“Why, I’m aware that he is secretary to the Lord Archbishop of Rhemuth, Your Grace. He’s been keeping the accounts of the interviews this week.”

“That he has,” Morgan murmured, opening his mind to Truth-Read. “Are you aware that he was set upon by a boy with a knife earlier this evening?”

Judhael’s eyes widened at the news, then shuttered behind a quickly composed mask of concern.

“Father McLain is a priest like myself. Your Grace,” he said in a low, uninflected voice. “I am sorry to hear that someone would attempt his sacrilegious murder, but it grieves me far more to think that you might believe me involved in any way.”

“You have no knowledge of it, then?” Morgan asked, a little taken aback to realize that Judhael was telling the truth.

“None, Your Grace.”

“I see.”

No knowledge whatsoever. Judhael really had not known. Morgan gazed searchingly into the priest’s eyes for several seconds, not doing anything but looking — though Judhael might construe what he liked, and hopefully panic enough to let slip some additional bit of information — but Judhael met his gaze with no more uneasiness than anyone might have exhibited when stared at by a Deryni, the extent of whose powers were uncertain.

“Just one more question, then,” Morgan said, choosing his words carefully. “When was the last time you heard from your aunt?”

Judhael hardly batted an eye.

“Last Christmastide, Your Grace. Why do you ask?”

Last Christmastide, long before Meara’s bishopric became vacant, Morgan noted. Nor was there any duplicity in Judhael’s answer. Not only was Judhael innocent of knowledge about the attempt on Duncan, but he did not seem to be involved in any machinations his aunt might have planned for his insertion into a bishop’s see — though Judhael surely had his own ambitions.

Morgan dared not push the issue any further, however. Judhael was beginning to look more anxious, and the only way to go from here was to actually force a deep reading on the priest — and Arilan would very likely skin him if he got wind of it, after his earlier lecture to Cardiel.

“Very well. Father. I’ll leave you, then. Thank you for your time. If you’ve a mind to ease a soul, you might whisper a prayer for the boy with the knife. I’m afraid he died unshriven.”

He signed himself slowly and deliberately, not taking his eyes from Judhael’s, then rose and glided back up the aisle. Judhael was still kneeling, face buried in his hands, when Morgan glanced back just before going out.

He walked for a while after that, reviewing what he had done and finally inquiring among the guards as to what had happened to the body of Duncan’s attacker. He found it in the infirmary, covered with a blanket, and he stared at the face of the dead boy for some time, wondering who had sent him.

Thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment.

— Psalms 60:3

Farther north and east of Culdi, nearer the coast, an early dusk began to settle as Kelson and his warband urged their weary horses along the final stretch approaching Castle Transha, cloaks pulled close against an increasingly bitter drizzle. Dhugal, riding at the king’s side, had set them a brisk pace since leaving the Trurill patrol at midmorning, pushing to reach the shelter of his father’s castle before dark. They slowed as the grade of the road got steeper, Dhugal expectantly searching the rain ahead until the vast pile which was Transha gradually took shape, almost black against the darkening sky. The young border lord grinned as he glanced aside at the king.

“We’re nearly there now,” he said cheerily. “My father’s castellan should have everything prepared. We’ve been observed for the past hour, you know.”’

“Oh?”

Surprised and a little taken aback. Kelson turned to look at Dhugal in question, for he had been scanning the craggy hills with Deryni senses as well as sight for nearly that long, and had detected nothing.

“Don’t worry,” Dhugal went on with a chuckle. “I didn’t see them either. But then, I’m not as experienced as Ciard yet. He signalled me when we made our last rest stop.”

Ciard. Of course. He had been the only other MacArdry retainer riding with the Trurill patrol, so of course had come with them. Kelson remembered him well from the days of Dhugal’s fosterage at court. Glancing back thoughtfully at the middle-aged gillie riding a few ranks behind, he recalled being told that Ciard O Ruane had been made Dhugal’s personal attendant and bodyguard by the MacArdry chief himself, shortly after Dhugal’s birth. Kelson had never known him to be far from his young charge’s side. The man’s almost uncanny ability in the field had mystified Kelson even in the old days; and Deryni perceptions gained since their last contact had added no further explanation.

“Ciard. I might have known,” Kelson muttered aside to Dhugal, as he returned his attention to the narrowing trail ahead. “I suppose next you’ll be telling me he does it with that borderer Second Sight you mentioned yesterday.”

“Why, I thought your kind knew all about such things,” Dhugal replied with another chuckle. “You really needn’t worry, though. I personally guarantee my people’s loyalty — though I should warn you not to be surprised if your welcome seems a little cool at first. Even if you weren’t the king, you are a lowlander. Both make you an oddity this far west.”

And being Deryni makes me odder still, Kelson added in his own mind, completing what Dhugal had not said. Despite Dhugal’s assurance, he could not suppress a faint itch between his shoulderblades.

The air tasted increasingly of salt as they approached the castle’s outer defenses, and the gulls screeching overhead gave odd counterpoint to the dull clop of mud-clogged hooves and the muted jingle of harness. Ewan and Conall followed directly behind, the rain-soaked Haldane standard flapping wetly against Conal’s gloved hand and occasionally lifting enough on the rising wind to actually be read. Dhugal had advised them not to furl it, so that there could be no mistaking their identity. The rest of the warband also followed by twos, Ciard with one of Ewan’s gillies and then Jodrell, Traheme, and the rest of the column — knights, squires, and servants.

They came within easy bowshot of the outer curtain before Kelson at last spotted lockouts manning the battlements high above, barely silhouetted against the grey sky. Torchlight flickered at some of the arrow slits piercing the stone of the barbican gate, betokening human habitation there as well — a suspicion confirmed by Kelson’s Deryni senses — but no one appeared at closer hand. The column slowed almost to a stop as they neared the gatehouse.

“They know who you are, but not why you’re here,” Dhugal murmured, as the heavy doors swung outward and chains clattered on windlass drums, raising the heavy portcullis. “One can hardly blame them for being wary.”

“I suppose not.”

As soon as there was headroom beneath the portcullis, Ciard kneed his pony past them with a scrambling of unshod hooves and jogged into the gatehouse passage, seizing a torch from a wall bracket before leading on across the drawbridge beyond. He reined in and looked back as he reached the other side, gesturing for them to follow, and Dhugal set heels to his own pony at once. Kelson glanced upward as he and the rest of the column followed Dhugal through the gatehouse, and was rewarded with a glimpse of a red-cheeked border face watching from a murder-hole high above. The man gave a nod and touched two fingers to the front of his highland bonnet before disappearing, but Kelson sensed that the salute was as much for Dhugal as for him.

The hollow clatter of the horses’ hooves on the drawbridge gave way to the more solid ring of steel on flint paving as they reached the other side of the ditch protecting the outer ward, and as they resumed climbing, Kelson reflected that if ever a castle had been designed to take all advantage of its natural defenses, Transha was it. The road spiraling upward to the left rapidly became a steep, narrow killing zone, the seaward side sheering off in a heart-stopping plunge to the surf crashing far below. On their unshielded right, the keep itself rose forty feet above their heads, the gaps along the crenellated wall providing easy vantage points from which to bombard an approaching enemy. The way was wide enough for two border ponies side by side, but the Haldane greathorses were obliged to go single file. Sea gulls swooped in for a closer look at the intruders, veering off with angry cries when a horse would snort or a cloak would flap. The smell of the sea was strong, even when they had passed beneath a second gatehouse.

“Bring light for the young master and his guests!” Ciard cried, turning his pony in a tight circle and waving his torch as the Haldane column clattered into the inner ward. “‘Tis I, Ciard O Ruane. Th’ young master is home. Where is Caball MacArdry? Bring light, I tell ye!”

His voice brought immediate response. As torches flared all around the perimeter of the yard and voices began to buzz, a breathless stableboy came scurrying to take his pony. Kelson sat his greathorse beside Dhugal and the spotted pony and watched Ciard stride toward them. Behind them, the yard was filling with the rest of the Haldane warband, but Kelson signalled them to remain mounted before himself swinging to the ground. Dhugal was already there to take his reins, giving both their animals over to Ciard before setting his hand under Kelson’s elbow to guide him toward the stair leading up to the great hall.

“Ho, Caball!” Dhugal called, as the door to the hall opened and a knot of tartan-clad men began to descend the stair. Some of them had pulled an edge of plaid over their heads against the rain, and a few bore torches. The leader wore the two feathers of a clan chieftain in his cap, and his bearded face split in a pleased grin as he came hurrying down to meet the unexpected visitors.

“Master Dhugal!”

“My father’s castellan,” Dhugal murmured aside to Kelson, as the men reached the bottom of the stair. “Caball, is all prepared to give fair guesting to the King’s Majesty? Sire, I present my kinsman Caball MacArdry, who speaks for the clan and The MacArdry. How is my father, Caball?”

“The MacArdry’s leal greeting. Lord King,” Caball replied, touching his cap in salute and making his nod include his young master as well as his sovereign. “Dhugal, Himself will be heartened to see ye hame sae unexpectedly.” He returned his attention to Kelson. “We cannae offer more than simple border fare on sae short a notice, but The MacArdry looks forward tae greetin’ ye himself, when ye hae refreshed yerself, an’ extends his hospitality tae yerself an’ yer men tae sup with him in his hall.”

“Please tell the MacArdry that I look forward to seeing him as well,” Kelson replied, inclining his head graciously. “I’ve not had that pleasure since he came to see me crowned, and Dhugal tells me he’s not been well of late. I’m sorry to hear that.”

The castellan dipped his chin in clipped acknowledgment, rain dripping from his beard.

“As for the fare,” Kelson went on with a disarming smile, “we’ve been in the field for several days. Any hot meal and a roof over our heads will be most welcome.”

Caball seemed to unbend a little as he glanced back at Dhugal. “I think we can do that much for ye, sir — an’ perhaps a mite better. Dhugal, we’ll bed th’ King’s Grace an’ such others as he wishes in yer quarters. The men can sleep in the hall with our own garrison, when supper’s done.”

“Prince Conall will be with us, then,” Dhugal replied, looking to Kelson for confirmation, “and perhaps Jodrell and Traherne — or Duke Ewan, of course, unless they’d prefer to sleep with the men. Will that be satisfactory, Sire?”

“Ewan of Claibourne?” Caball murmured, head jerking up to search the riders behind the king. “By yer leave, sir, I’ll make th’ rest of the arrangements with him. Dhugal, take His Grace in out of the rain.”

He and his henchmen were already moving past them before Kelson could do more than nod, border affinity for another highland man drawing the castellan instinctively toward Ewan’s distinctive tartan mantle, his casual salute in Kelson’s direction almost an afterthought. Kelson was only bemused, used to the brusque manners of bordermen from his dealings with Dhugal and his attendants as a boy, but an affronted Prince Conall kneed his greathorse nearer the king in shocked outrage.

“Do you intend to let him treat you that way?” he demanded in a loud stage whisper, bending beneath the dripping Haldane standard to peer at Kelson. “He dismissed you like a servant!”

“He asked my leave. Don’t make a scene,” Kelson warned, as he laid a hand on his cousin’s reins. “The man has a job to do.”

“Yes! To show proper respect for his overlord!”

“No disrespect was intended,” Kelson replied, “and standing in the rain is no time for formality. I am not offended.”

But Conall was, and he continued to fume and mutter to himself all the way up the newel stair behind Dhugal and Kelson, not ceasing his complaints even when the three of them reached a snug little room at the top of the tower. Kelson’s squire came to help them off with their boots, but Conall continued to reiterate his displeasure about border disregard for rank and precedence, ending with a graceless remark about the accommodations. Kelson sent the squire out of the room before taking Conall to task, afterward apologizing to an uncomfortable Dhugal. The air was charged with resentment as the three young men began stripping off rain-sodden harness and tunics to wash for supper.

In the sullen silence of the next little while. Kelson could not help noticing the contrast between Dhugal’s casual dismissal of the incident and Conall’s petulant formality. His cousin’s behavior had embarrassed him greatly. The squire soon returned with their meager baggage and helped Conall dress in a fresh court tunic which was far too ornate for this casual highland setting, but when Kelson tried tactfully to mention that to Conall, his cousin renewed his tirade about stiff-necked bordermen and declared that he would show them all how a proper prince behaved, donning a silver circlet of rank as he stalked out the door. Kelson sent the squire after him, hoping he could prevent Conall from insulting any other bordermen he encountered, and pulled a clean woolen singlet from his own pack in silence.

“I really am sorry about Conall’s boorishness,” he said after a moment, as Dhugal’s head emerged from the neck of a saffron-colored shirt. “I hope it’s only the folly of youth.”

“Youth?” Dhugal made a rude noise, his courtly veneer vanishing in border frankness. “Kelson, he’s a year older than I am. If respect is what he values, he’ll never win it with behavior like that. He’s second in line for the throne, too.”

Kelson crouched to help his foster-brother finish arranging the pleats of a great kilt on the floor, unable to disagree.

“That’s true, in theory,” he said, watching Dhugal lie down on the kilt to belt it around his narrow waist. “Thank God his father comes first — and I’ve never heard anyone say an unkind word about Nigel. Perhaps by the end of next year there will be a new heir altogether. Still, you’re right about youth being no excuse for rude behavior. Conall can be a terrible boor.”

Dhugal, sitting up to brooch part of the plaid to his shoulder with an amethyst the size of plover’s egg, looked up from the gem’s clasp with a start to stare at the king.

“Bugger Conall! What do you mean, a new heir? Kelson, you aren’t betrothed, are you?”

“No, no, not that, yet,” Kelson replied with a chuckle. “But don’t look so shocked. I’m seventeen and I’m a king. It’s expected. Nigel and Aunt Meraude have been badgering me for over a year, and Morgan nearly as long.”

“Morgan, too?”

Kelson shrugged wistfully. “Well, all of them are right, of course. The succession has to be secured. I’ve lost count of the princesses and countesses and other eligible girls I’ve had to inspect in the last year. Every lordling in Gwynedd with a marriageable daughter or sister between the ages of twelve and thirty has been finding some excuse to bring her to court. Even Morgan is threatening to trot out some R’Kassan princess for Twelfth Night. She’s a relative of his wife.”

“His wife?” Dhugal stared even harder, though now he, too, was grinning. “So that’s what it’s all about! Morgan’s gotten married, so now he thinks everyone else ought to be. Who’s the lady?”

Kelson shook his head and grinned. He kept forgetting how isolated Transha was from the capital and its doings.

“You are out of touch, aren’t you? You did know I’d made him Lord Protector of the South, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Did you know that Torenth has a regency again?” Kelson ventured.

“A regency? What happened to Prince Alroy?”

Kelson sighed, trying to keep at least some of the old worry out of his voice.

“A fall from a horse, around Midsummer. He broke his neck. From what I’ve been able to gather, it was clearly an accident, but he’d just come of age. So some folk are saying I arranged it — the way Charissa arranged my father’s death.”

“You mean, with magic?” Dhugal whispered.

Kelson nodded. “They don’t know me very well, do they?”

“But, what possible motive could you have, even if you were able to — are you able to kill someone with magic, Kelson?”

“If you mean, do I have the ability to kill someone with magic, the answer is yes — I have the power and the knowledge to do so,” Kelson said quietly, “I’ve — had to do it once already. I killed Alroy’s father and uncle that way — and the Earl of Marley. I’m not proud of it, but there was no other way at the time. And I’d do it again to protect my kingdom.”

He swallowed uncomfortably. “As for motive. I’m afraid I have that, too. Keeping a minor on the throne of Torenth lessens the chance that Torenth will move against me in anything but border skirmishes, at least until the new king is of age. Liam, Alroy’s next brother, is only nine. That gives me nearly five years to get things settled in Meara, before I have to worry seriously about Torenth again — maybe more. I didn’t kill Liam’s brother, though.”

“I believe you,” Dhugal said.

The three words were spoken quietly, with little inflection, but Kelson knew that they were true. Four years had passed since he and Dhugal last had met, but he could sense that the old closeness had not weakened with the passage of the years and all that had gone on during them. He glanced down at his hands, the hands which literally held the power of life and death over so many, then shook his head, knowing he would never be able to put aside the knowledge of his power.

“But, enough of all this,” Kelson continued more brightly. “You asked about Morgan, and Morgan’s wife. He married Richenda of Marley a year ago last spring. They have a little daughter who’s nearly a year old now. Briony, she’s called.”

“For your father,” Dhugal murmured, nodding approvingly. “I like that. But Richenda of Marley — wasn’t she the Countess of Marley? Didn’t you just say you’d had to kill her husband?”

“Yes. But she wasn’t responsible for her husband’s treason,” he said softly, “Nor was their son. I confirmed young Brendan in the Earldom of Marley when he turned six this past summer. I’ve made him Morgan’s ward, until he’s of age, and Richenda his regent.”

“And what will he say when he’s older, and he leams who killed his father?” Dhugal whispered. “Suppose he comes to hate you for it?”

“I suppose I hope that by then, he’ll have learned why I had to do it,” Kelson said with a sigh. “Bran Coris’ was one of the first lives I had to take. Unfortunately, it won’t be the last. At least I’ve learned a few things since then — not that they’d make any difference if I had to do over again.” He sighed again, a gesture of finality.

“But that’s done. There’s no sense brooding about something I can’t change. One thing I hope I can change is the reception I got when I rode in here an hour ago.”

Dhugal laughed aloud, the solemnity of the past few minutes dispelled.

“Now, that will be magic, if you can accomplish that. You saw them. Kelson. They’re bordermen. Most of them have never been to court, and never will. You can’t expect to earn their respect overnight.”

“Not overnight, no. But I do have an idea for making a start, perhaps.”

Half an hour later, two young bordermen emerged from the tower room where only one had entered. Dhugal’s comment about his long hair the day before had given Kelson his inspiration. He had decided not to hazard a great kilt such as Dhugal himself wore, for he was disinclined to trust a garment which depended on only a belt to discipline so many pleats, so he had chosen a set of Dhugal’s rust-colored border leathers instead — close-fitting trews and sleeveless doublet over a saffron wool shirt like Dhugal’s. A length of grey, black, and yellow. MacArdry plaid was caught across his chest baldric style and secured at the left shoulder with a deeply chased silver ring brooch, and soft indoor boots of buckskin encased his feet in comfort. Instead of the golden circlet which would have adorned his head at any normal court function, he wore a border bonnet like Dhugal’s. His black hair made a borderman’s braid shorter by a handspan than Dhugal’s copper one, but that, plus the clothing, transformed the king from a polished young lowland noble into a darker echo of the chief’s son. Now, if only old Caulay would play along.

He began to hear the skirl of pipers tuning as he followed Dhugal down the newel stair and along the passage toward the castle’s great hall — dissonant and whining at first, but then catching and carrying a traditional border air, one of the few he knew. The music put a new spring in his step as he and Dhugal emerged near the entrance to the hall, and he could hear Dhugal whistling softly under his breath.

Border henchmen, servants, and a few Haldane men alike milled in the anteroom outside the open doors to the hall, but in Dhugal’s company, dressed as he was, no one paid Kelson any particular notice. Seizing a torch from a fire-blackened cresset, Dhugal led him through the press and quickly through a nondescript wooden door just beyond the entryway, signing for silence as he continued up a steep, narrow intramural passageway which paralleled the great hall. When Kelson judged them to be about halfway along its length, Dhugal stopped and uncovered two narrow squints cut at different angles in the stone, carefully holding his torch below and close to the wall to shield its light. Using each squint in turn. Kelson could see nearly all the length of the hall below, though the entrance and the dais at the other end were out of range.

“It looks like most of your men who aren’t on duty are already seated,” Dhugal murmured, gazing downward with Kelson. “You can see how they’ve all kept to themselves, though. A lot is going to depend on how you’re received.”

Kelson nodded as he studied the hall. Since, by border custom, all clansmen were more or less of equal rank, there were no separate arrangements for nobles and men-at-arms. He saw Duke Ewan moving down the hall with a surly-looking Conall — to be seated at the high table, Dhugal assured him — but other than them, almost all the rest of the royal entourage seemed to be crowded on either side of a long table parallelling one side wall — carefully isolated. Kelson noted, from the rest of the clansmen and their women. Hospitality, it seemed, had its limits.

He was thoughtful as he followed Dhugal farther along the passageway and around a bend, the pipers’ jig hardly intruding at all now on his thinking as he gazed through another squint looking toward the high table. From there, he was able to survey everyone on the dias, including the Earl of Transha.

Caulay MacArdry had aged in the three years since Kelson last had seen him, but though time had robbed the old border chief of much of his mobility, it clearly had not touched his other faculties. A gillie had to help him into his chair at the high table, for he could no longer walk without assistance, but the arms emerging from his fine saffron shirt were still corded with muscle, tanned nut-brown from the high summer sun and wind of the Transha highlands. Kelson could see the muscles ripple as the old man hefted a full wineskin and drank unerringly from a stream of red without spilling a drop.

His wiry grey hair was drawn back in a borderer’s clout and bound with a ribbon woven in the colors of his clan, but the full beard flowing onto his chest still showed a little of the chestnut gleam of his youth. The brown eyes were clear and alert as he conversed with Duke Ewan, seated on the other side of Conall, at his left hand; but he kept glancing at the far end of the hall as if in expectation.

“Is he looking for us?” Kelson asked softly, glancing aside at Dhugal. “Hadn’t we better go on in?”

“Yes, but not in the way you’re thinking,” Dhugal replied. He grinned slyly as he seized a fold of Kelson’s sleeve and drew him back into the passage. “Let’s go. Just follow my lead, and do what I do.”

Soon they were emerging behind the screens which separated the kitchen from the dais in the great hall, Dhugal nudging the king through one of the bays to move with him among the gillies serving the high table. The men deferred to their chief’s son, but they hardly gave Kelson a second look other than to avoid running into him as he stuck to Dhugal’s side. They were too busy watching Conall, seated on the chief’s left, and Jodrell, who had pulled up a stool at the end of the table to sit and speak to Ewan between them. The old Duke of Claibourne had been readily accepted among them, for he came of the same clan system as themselves and understood their customs, but the others were lowlanders, like the knights and men-at-arms seated in the hall below. Conall, defiantly aloof in court dress and the silver circlet of his rank, looked particularly out of place.

But Kelson sensed Dhugal’s intentions now. As the younger boy worked his way closer to the high table, gesturing toward the place of honor at old Caulay’s right and easing onto the bench to the right of that. Kelson controlled a smile and followed. With casual nonchalance, he slipped into the place between Dhugal and the old man and leaned an elbow on the table, merely raising an eyebrow at a gillie who ducked between him and Dhugal to pour wine for both of them and started to question.

Some of his own men began to recognize him at that, however, and as more and more of them got to their feet with much clatter and scraping of wooden benches against stone floor, the commotion caught old Caulay’s attention. As he turned to ascertain the reason for it, he was astonished to see a strange young borderman sitting at his right hand. The pipers’ skirling wheezed to a halt as all eyes turned toward the MacArdry chief.

“The Haldane gives fair greeting to The MacArdry of Transha,” Kelson said gravely, inclining his head in respect as Caulay’s jaw dropped. “My brother Dhugal bade me sit at your right hand, sir, and I am right honored to do so, for his father must be my father, since I have none anymore.”

Stunned speechless, Caulay stared into the grey Haldane eyes as the buzz of questions grew among his people, seeing the strange mixed with the familiar. The last Haldane old Caulay had seen had been a boy of just fourteen, on the occasion of his coronation. The lad before him was young, but he was a man, with the frank, direct gaze of his other border chieftains. As he glanced beyond the stranger at his son, Dhugal rose and came to kiss his father’s cheek with a grin.

“I’ve brought m’brother home tae sup with us. Da,” he said in his broad border accent. “He would count it a great favor if ye could put his other rank aside for a night, for he would do honor to our house an’ blood for sake o’ the bond he shares wi’ me. Will ye nàå greet him as a kinsman an’ a son?”

For an interminable instant. Kelson feared that Caulay would not go along, that the close-knit bonds of border kinship would force him back into the royal role he was so often obliged to play. But then the old man’s face split in a pleased grin and he held out a huge hand to Kelson, the brown eyes warming.

“Aye, and it’s pleased that I am to see ye, son,” he said softly. “I left ye a boy, and ye’ve come back a man. Will ye nàå give yer old Da the kiss of peace?”

Solemnly Kelson placed his hand in Caulay’s and rose, inclining his head in proper salute, borderer to hosting chief, acutely aware of the eyes upon him. When he bent to kiss the old man’s cheek, however, a ragged murmur of approval rippled among the bordermen and the pipes struck up a dutiful salute, this time punctuated by drums.

It was not the most spontaneous of welcomes, but it was a start. Pretending not to notice Conall’s sour looks farther down the table, and the confused expressions on most of the rest of his retinue. Kelson took his seat, smiling. Brion would never have done this, but Kelson was not Brion. They would just have to adjust to the fact that he was going to develop his own style. He laughed at a joke Dhugal murmured in an aside, and when Ciard came to serve them roast fowl and beef on a trencher of hearty highland bread, he dug in with his fingers in proper border fashion.

He and Caulay made casual small talk through the meal. Kelson touching on some of his experiences of the past three years and the old chief proudly recounting Dhugal’s skill as a future border chief. Only passing comment was made on his own failing health.

Out of respect for his host. Kelson veered away from politics or any other subjects of possible controversy, intending to save such conversation for more private surrounds, perhaps later that night. But just before the sweet was served — a sticky confection of crushed almonds and biscuit and honey — Caulay made passing reference to his brother Sicard, whose wife was the Mearan Pretender.

“What’s she like, the Lady Caitrin?” Kelson asked, trying to keep too much interest out of his tone. To his relief, Caulay was neither offended nor reticent, wine having loosened his tongue to the point of amiability.

“Ach, she nurses an old dream whose time passed lang ago,” Caulay said. “I did nàå ever like her. She’s of an age wi’ me — no spring hen-chick, she — but she has fierce bairns an’ a fiercer mate. She an’ my brother — !”

He spat contemptuously, and Kelson raised an eyebrow in feigned surprise.

“You and Sicard had a falling out?”

“Ye might say that,” the old man allowed. “Truth is, he. an’ I were never close. I’m nàå close to the bairns, either — leastways not the boys. Ithel an’ Llewell, they’re named — though I expect ye know that. About your age, they are — mayhap a year or so younger. The girl, though — “

“Not another daughter,” Kelson breathed, almost to himself.

Old Caulay immediately caught his drift, however, and laughed uproariously as he clapped Kelson on the shoulder.

“Ach, I see they’ve been pushing ye to choose a mate, haven’t they, lad? Well, a man could do far worse than sweet Sidana. Her name means ‘silk’ in the old tongue, an’ she has all the grace the boys an’ their mother lack. Pretty she is, as well as heiress to a great name, wi’ fine sleek hair that reaches to her knees — brown as a chestnut burr it is — an’ eyes like a bonnie fawn. Fair white teeth, too, an’ hips tae bear a man many fine sons, though she can nàå be more than fifteen.”

“You sound as if you’re trying to marry her off,” Kelson said with a smile. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

Caulay’s shoulders lifted with a coy shrug, even though he was shaking his head no.

“Weel, ‘tis not I who’d presume tae barter a bride for my king, son,” the old man said. “But if a man wanted tae resolve an old, old rift an’ bring peace tae his people, he could do far worse than marryin’ Sidana. If I thought it would help, I’d marry Dhugal to her — or praise God, if I were a younger man, an’ could find a willing priest, I’d marry her myself, an’ she my own dear niece.”

Kelson smiled wanly, remembering what he once read about incest of an only slightly closer degree toppling a throne two centuries before — though there had been a Deryni question in the case of Imre and Ariella, as well.

But Caulay’s theoretical solution would certainly have no such repercussions, even if it were to occur. For that matter, he supposed he and Sidana were distantly related — his eyes glazed a little as he tried to sort out the generations of cousins through a common great-great-grandfather — though they were certainly outside the bounds of consanguinity proscribed by the Church.

“I don’t think it will be necessary for you to make the sacrifice,” he reassured Caulay, with a faint, droll grin.

“Ach, o’ course not. Tis a Haldane husband she’d be needin’, not another borderer, tae muddy matters further. If not Yer Grace, than perhaps yer young cousin, there — “

The old man glanced down the table where Conall had moved to sit between Ewan and Jodrell, brooding over his wine cup.

“Nah, on second reflection, Conall would nàå do,” Caulay went on more soberly. “She would nàå be happy with the likes o’ him — though methinks yer young cousin has ambitions o’ his own. Power can be a great temptation, son. But I need nàå tell ye about that, do I?”

Surprised, Kelson glanced at Conall and then back at Caulay.

“Conall?”

“Ach, I dinnae mean to cast a shadow on yer cousin, lad. But Sidana is a fair marriage prize, an’ could give her husband a fair claim to Meara. With the right persuasion, from the right man, her brothers might even be moved to abandon their claims.”

Kelson chuckled grimly and shook his head, running a finger along the rim of his cup.

“I’m trying to avoid that kind of persuasion, Caulay,” he said softly. “I don’t want to have to march into Meara the way my father and grandfather did, and solve things with a sword. But I don’t intend to give up what’s lawfully mine, either.”

Caulay’s bearded face clouded and he dropped his gaze to stare into the depths of his goblet. “That may be the only way, son,” he whispered darkly. “Young Ithel wants a throne. He won’t be content to rule over an exile court in Laas, once his mother is gone.”

“You speak as if that might be imminent,” Kelson breathed, gently reaching out to read the truth of Caulay’s words. “Is Ithel plotting something?”

“I dinnae know particulars, I dinnae care to know.” Caulay took a long pull at his wine and shook his head. “It’s only some rumors I’ve heard. What young man does not have ambition? I dinnae care to say more.”

Chilled, Kelson nudged his cup aside and stared at Caulay. The old man was telling the truth, as far as he went, but what were the rumors he had heard? If Ithel of Meara was actively plotting a revolt…

“I need to know, Caulay,” he murmured, as he touched his wrist and started trying to Mind-See. “If you know something — “

“I know nothing!” Caulay whispered, eyes flashing as he yanked away his wrist. “An’ if ye press me for nothing, then — “

The skirl of pipes began outside the hall just then, and Caulay broke off and shook his head apologetically, taking another deep draught from his cup. While Kelson searched for a tactful way to reapproach the subject, two pipers marched in from the far end of the hall, preceding a white-robed old man brandishing two evergreen boughs like bushy swords. Conversation died away as they entered, even the rowdier of the clansmen putting aside their cups to brush caps in salute as the old man passed. The women standing curtseyed, and even the children serving table stopped where they were to render appropriate respect.

“Kinkellyan, the chief bard,” Dhugal murmured in his ear, as the old man came between the two pipers and continued toward them. “This could be very important. Stay seated for now, but pay very close attention.”

As the man reached the lowest step of the dais and stopped, crossing the boughs over his head in salute as he bowed, the music ended and Dhugal stood, raising a cup in answering salute to the man in white.

“Bright moon and starshine on thy path, noble bard. The MacArdry and all his kin welcome Kinkellyan to the hall of Transha.”

The old man inclined his head and murmured a phrase Kelson did not quite catch, sweeping the narrow boughs in his hands to either side as if to open an embrace. Kelson thought he had heard his name, but he could not be sure. Dhugal replied with an answering phrase in the border tongue, then bowed and glanced at his father. Old Caulay seemed to have forgotten his previous agitation, and bowed low over his place at table as he, too, raised his cup in salutation.

“Kinkellyan offers you his bardic blessing and asks that you be afforded the enduring friendship of the clan,” Dhugal murmured to Kelson out of the side of his mouth. “The MacArdry has accepted on your behalf. Stand up and bow, and then do whatever seems appropriate after Kinkellyan and I have finished.”

As Kelson obeyed, Dhugal bowed to his father and left the table, descending the dais to enthusiastic hammerings of fists on tabletops by all his kinsmen. Kelson’s men looked mystified, except for old Ewan.

In slow, almost ritual mime, Dhugal took the boughs from the old bard and bowed again, then crossed them in saltire above his head and pivoted slowly on the balls of his feet until he faced Kelson, bending to lay them that way on the floor as the pipers skirled a few introductory bars. The tempo changed as he straightened and set his hands on his hips, rising again on the balls of his feet, and Dhugal began to dance.

Kelson felt his own feet stir as he watched, for the pipes seemed to beckon almost magically. For just an instant, as Dhugal moved from the first quarter to the second, his eyes locked with Kelson’s in a linking so profound that memory surged across the link almost as surely as if Dhugal, too, had been Deryni and deliberately sent his thought winging into Kelson’s mind — the two of them, half a lifetime ago, facing one another over crossed swords, not evergreen boughs, treading out the measures of the dance Dhugal now performed as it was meant to be done. All at once Kelson knew what Dhugal had meant — do whatever seems appropriate — and he found himself edging out from behind the table and down off the dais to where Dhugal spun and leaped.

The pipers never faltered as the king came onto the floor. Kelson could sense the expectation of the audience all around, some pleased, some thoroughly mystified, but the old bard looked not at all surprised, though he raised a white eyebrow. Dhugal was just finishing the first set of measuring steps around the ends of the boughs, pivoting and rocking, with first one arm and then the other raised above his head, but when he saw Kelson ease into the quarter which was about to be opposite him, he grinned and gave a nod, setting balled fists on his hips to repeat the first set as he completed the figure. Kelson caught the very first step of the repeat by letting his feet carry him as they had so many years before, mirroring Dhugal a little stiffly at first, but then with growing confidence as those in the hall, clansmen and lowland knights alike, looked on in astonishment.

As they shifted into the next set of figures, beating out a more emphatic rhythm as they danced within the quarters instead of all around the edges, feet never touching the branches. Kelson could sense that throbbing link again, melding his movements with Dhugal’s. With rare abandon, he let his world shrink down to flying feet and evergreens and Dhugal’s joyous grin. He was only dimly aware when the men and women around them started clapping and stamping in time to the music, urging them on, sharing the magic which had nothing to do with being Deryni.

Kelson was panting with exhaustion by the time they began the final set of figures, but he did not falter, springing lightly from quarter to quarter, heel and toe, until finally the rhythm changed, the music ebbed to a single sustained note, and he and Dhugal were bowing to one another on opposite sides of the evergreen cross, hands set on hips. The hall went wild.

The clansmen and their women continued to cheer as the two grinning young men half-collapsed against one another, both of them gasping for breath. Other than Ewan, most of Kelson’s other retainers looked stunned, though a few had relaxed enough to join in good-naturedly, not the least of whom was Baron Jodrell. Conall sat sullenly between him and Ewan, his arms folded and lips set in grim disapproval, but at the center of the table the MacArdry chief was beaming, his earlier agitation apparently forgotten. As Dhugal and Kelson stumbled up the dais, arm in arm, he held out a newly filled cup in both hands.

“Air do slainte!” he cried, the others taking up the shout as Dhugal and then Kelson drank deeply from the cup. To your very good health!

The cheering subsided as Dhugal held up an arm for silence, and he was still a little breathless as he turned Kelson to face his people, one arm still around the king’s shoulders.

“Kinsmen, this is my foster-brother. Kelson,” he said with a grin. “As you can see, he is a brother of our blood, as well as one of my choosing. That he is also my king is a great joy to me, and I freely give him my allegiance as lord as well as brother and kinsman. Will you honor him the same, for my sake?”

The renewed shouting and cheers were all the confirmation Dhugal needed. As Kelson stood back, pleased, still panting from the exertion of the dance and wondering just how he had managed to bring them around — these dour mountain folk who were usually so slow to admit a lowlander to their midst — Dhugal turned and knelt at his feet, slipping his joined hands between Kelson’s and touching them to his forehead in homage.

In ragged succession, Dhugal’s borderers joined him in salute, sinking to one knee in their places. A few even smiled, inasmuch as any borderer did when obliged to follow lowland custom. A handful remained dour and grim, but all of them knelt. The rarity of the concession was not lost on Kelson.

“My brother, I thank you,” Kelson said, smoothly raising Dhugal and signalling the rest of them to rise. “And to you, my border kinsman, my profound thanks as well. Please believe that I understand the honor you have done me. And if there be some of you who yet have your doubts about this upstart lowland lord who comes among you, I cannot blame you. Nor will I try to change your opinion by my words. My actions, I hope, will speak for me, in that I shall always strive to be your true and gentle lord.”

His own men pounded on the tables in approval, but Kelson held up his hand again for silence.

“But though I be lowland born, yet am I a borderer like yourselves, by choice and chosen blood, as my brother Dhugal has said. I would assure you, therefore, that whenever possible, I shall place the considerations of the clan above my own concerns, an’ it be not against the interests of the other folk I have sworn to protect and defend. In token, therefore, I ask that you host me not as king tonight, but as kinsman, and that you join with me in toast to our noble chief: The MacArdry — long may he guide his children in peace and plenty. Air do slainte!

It was the one border phrase Kelson could remember, and he blessed old Caulay for having refreshed his memory earlier, but it produced the desired response. This time there was no restraining the men of Transha. The hall erupted in echo of the traditional border toast, even the most dour of the old chieftains raising their cups with more thoughtful expressions. Soon the pipers struck up another dance tune and the floor filled with other dancers eager to tread a few steps with their new young kinsman. Some of the girls were very pretty. Kelson answered their first few invitations with laughing good humor and an honest attempt to follow, but the dance with Dhugal had exhausted both his knowledge and his energy. He soon had to bow himself out and retreat to the safety of his place by the chief. Dhugal remained on the floor.

Caulay was jovial company for what remained of the evening, but he downed three cups of wine to every one of Kelson’s and quickly began to show the effects. Any serious return to their discussion was impossible under the circumstances, so they were soon reduced to rambling exchanges about the dancers, Dhugal’s escapades and prospects for the future, and an increasingly maudlin tendency on Caulay’s part to dwell on his failing health. By the time people began falling asleep at table and bedding down in the hall for the night. Kelson had managed to diminish the effect of his own alcoholic consumption to a dull buzz, but Caulay was on the verge of passing out. Dhugal was less steady on his feet than Kelson, but not really drunk, either.

“I think he’s about had enough, don’t you?” Kelson murmured, when Dhugal returned to the table to refill his cup during a piper’s slowly skirled lament.

Dhugal looked down at his father, steadying himself on the edge of the table as he watched old Caulay bobble and grin, then signalled to a gillie who towered at least a head and a half above either him or Kelson. The man scooped up his chief with no more effort than Kelson might have picked up a three year old, and carried him tenderly out of the hall and up the newel stair with the two young men following behind, Dhugal with his arm linked in Kelson’s for stability. When they had gotten the old man to bed and the gillie had gone, Dhugal sank down in a window seat and sighed, glancing up at Kelson with a tired grin.

“Well, you certainly left your mark on Transha tonight. The clan will be talking about you all winter — and speaking well, too.”

Kelson smiled and leaned against the window embrasure, tossing his bonnet to the seat beside Dhugal. The climb to the laird’s chamber had finished clearing his head, and now the considerations of earlier in the evening came flooding back. To have won the confidence of the clan was a fine thing, and part of what he had set out to accomplish, but he still had not learned all he needed to know about Caulay’s Mearan kin. And if Ithel of Meara was plotting…

“I wonder, will they speak well of me when they remember that I’m part Deryni?” he mused, trying to decide how best to approach what he wanted to ask. However he phrased it, Dhugal was going to be either frightened or insulted.

Dhugal frowned. “What difference does it make? And what makes you think of it now?”

“It isn’t all a bad thing, you know — being Deryni,” Kelson continued, testing. “You saw that when I put that trooper to sleep so you could sew up his arm. It does have its positive uses.”

Dhugal swallowed with an audible sound, suddenly far more sober than he had been, not seconds before, all the gaiety gone.

“Why do I have the sudden feeling that something very scary is about to happen. You’re warning me, aren’t you?”

“Not — exactly.” Kelson glanced down at Dhugal’s upturned face, then over at the sleeping Caulay.

“Dhugal, I’ve never even been tempted to take unfair advantage of a friendship before,” he said softly, “but damn it — he hasn’t told me everything he knows.”

“What do you mean?”

Kelson shook his head. “Oh, I don’t mean to imply a deliberate deception. I think he just doesn’t want to get involved — and one can hardly blame him. Sicard is still his brother, after all. Unfortunately, Sicard is also the father of a boy who may just try to take away my throne — and Caulay hinted of conspiracies at dinner, just before he clammed up.”

“Surely, you’re not suggesting he’d keep such knowledge from you, if there really were a danger?” Dhugal asked.

“I don’t know,” Kelson replied. “I do know that your father has information I may need — and that I have the means to take it, if I must, without his knowledge and without hurting him.”

“With magic,” Dhugal supplied. His face had stiffened to a taut mask as Kelson spoke, and now the honey-amber eyes reflected cold resentment, as well as a little fear.

“Kelson, I can’t stop you,” he continued, after a long, slow breath. “If that’s what you’re determined to do, there isn’t a thing I can do to prevent it.”

“I know that. That’s why I’m asking if I may. He wouldn’t remember it,” Kelson added. “He need never even know I talked with him tonight.”

“And if you had to use what you learned against him?” Dhugal asked.

Kelson sighed. “I hope to God it never comes to that,” he murmured, eyes downcast. “You know I would never deliberately do anything to hurt you or your family. But if information that I gained had to be used to stop a war, to save innocent lives — well, what would you do?”

Only after a long pause did Dhugal’s answer come: halting, reluctant — and resigned.

“I suppose I — would do what I had to do,” he whispered.

They have set up kings, but not by me:

they have made princes, and I knew it not.

— Hosea 8:4

I would do what 1 had to do.

Dhugal’s words put responsibility squarely back on Kelson — where it had always rested, with the other burdens of the Crown, but this particular responsibility was unique to a king endowed with magic. Kelson found himself wondering whether his father had ever had to make such a demand of a friend. Somehow he could hardly imagine Brion using his powers for much of anything, even though he knew his father had slain the Marluk with magic and obviously had taken the necessary measures to ensure that his legacy passed to Kelson.

But Haldane magic was not the same as that derived from being born Deryni — and perhaps that difference was the source of some of Kelson’s uneasiness just now, for he had the limitations as well as the benefits of both sorts. The Haldane legacy came full-blown to each successive male heir in the senior royal line, its potential sealed by the previous king and triggered in the heir by ritual whose essential elements apparently had altered little in nearly two hundred years. It was of Deryni origin, to be sure, but it was a somewhat artificial construct, so far as Kelson had been able to learn, crafted by the great Saint Camber for the defense of Cinhil Haldane against mad Imre, to end the Interregnum, and perpetuated in Cinhil’s descendants ever since.

Such magic dealt primarily with protection — holding and keeping what was Haldane. But it was power to be called up without training and without real understanding, a compendium of set spells whose use and, indeed, very existence generally became apparent only when the need arose — difficult to call to mind of one’s own inclination. A few casual skills there were of Haldane origin, like Truth-Reading and extending one’s physical endurance, duplicating some Deryni functions, but the more subtle and satisfying uses of magic — and the ones most open to abuse — lay within the province of Deryni only. Indeed, most of the magic readily accessible to Kelson came from his Deryni blood, not Haldane sources: mostly what Morgan and Duncan had been able to teach him about that aspect of his heritage — and much of that still lay in the realm of theory.

Now his meager experience with the two of them must be melded with the impersonal knowledge at his beck and call from Haldane sources, and techniques chosen to fit the very personal situation here before him. Several times in the past two years he had watched Morgan do this kind of thing — and had done it himself under Morgan’s guidance once or twice — but this was different: himself, alone, questioning someone he cared about — not some hostile prisoner, from whom the truth must be dragged by force. With Caulay’s natural discretion already lowered by the wine. Kelson was not too concerned about the actual .procedure, but he was concerned about alienating Dhugal. The friends he could trust, who were not afraid of him, were few and precious.

“If it should come to that, then I suppose I’ll have to do what I have to do,” he finally whispered, meeting Dhugal’s eyes miserably. “That’s one of the more unpleasant parts of being king. In the meantime, I’m afraid this is something I have to do.” He paused a beat. “You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to. You can leave, or I could — put you to sleep, blur the memory. Neither of you has to remember.”

Dhugal’s jaw tightened visibly, the sun-amber eyes scared and a little desperate.

“If that’s what you want, I’ll — bow to your wishes, of course, but — dammit, Kelson, I won’t let myself be afraid of you! God knows, I don’t understand what you’ve become, and if you’d rather I didn’t watch, I — I’ll let you put me to sleep or whatever you feel you have to do. I don’t want to leave, though.”

The courage and blind trust blazing in Dhugal’s face as he looked up precluded all further discussion. Kelson’s grateful “Stay, then,” was more mouthed than said, but Dhugal understood. His shaky smile and Kelson’s quick, answering grin were all the further comment necessary. Together they moved back into the room where Caulay slept. Kelson no longer worried.

The old man snored on obliviously as Kelson sat down on the right side of the bed and drew a few deep breaths to compose himself, centering as Morgan had taught him. He did not touch Caulay, for he did not wish to alarm Dhugal in these early stages. Dhugal, initially skittish, claimed a stool on the opposite side of the bed and settled down to watch; but gradually even he responded to the calm and stillness radiating from the king. Like Kelson, his breathing soon slowed to a shallow, even cadence, nimble surgeon’s fingers intertwined passively in the lap of his kilt, thumbs brushing tip to tip.

Reassured, Kelson shifted attention from his own slow breathing to that of Caulay, gently spreading his right hand across the old man’s forehead and letting his thumb and little finger rest lightly on the closed eyelids for a few seconds. He could sense the blur of the alcohol as he sent his consciousness cautiously into Caulay’s, but he quickly bypassed that to make the necessary connections for what must be done, closing his eyes as he felt his way through wine-drugged dreams.

“Listen only to me, Caulay,” he whispered.

Dhugal’s tiny start of surprise caused Kelson to glance up momentarily, and instinctively he sent a tendril of reassurance in the other’s direction. He did not think Dhugal sensed it on any conscious level, but the young border lord seemed to relax again almost immediately, releasing a guarded sigh as he leaned forward to gaze at his father’s placid face.

“Stay deep asleep and hear only my voice,” Kelson went on, returning his attention to the old man. “You can hear every word I say, even though you’re asleep, and you’ll want to answer my questions as fully as you can. Do you understand?”

“Aye,” came the blurred highland voice.

As Dhugal glanced up at him in wonder. Kelson sat back and gave him a faint smile, crossing his arms casually on his chest.

“He’s going to do just fine,” he murmured to Dhugal in an aside. “That’s very good, Caulay. Let’s talk about your brother, first of all. Do you know where Sicard is right now?”

Caulay grimaced in his sleep. “Aye.”

A precise answer to the question asked, but nothing volunteered. Loosening control a little. Kelson reframed his question.

“Good. And where is that?”

“Ach, I suppose he’s in that keep o’ his in Laas — he an’ his schemin’ wife,” Caulay said. “I didnae like her from the day I first set eyes on her, but he would marry her.”

His voice was more animated now, the tone so casual and glib that he might have been back at table, confiding opinions over a cup of good ale, except that his eyes were closed.

“The Lady Caitrin?” Kelson asked.

“Aye. Cate Quinnell — an’ she callin’ herself a princess!” Caulay went on contemptuously. “They’ve become a brazen lot, an’ that’s for sure — high an’ mighty, where they think ye cannae see them. ‘Tis said they keep court as if she were a queen, and not upstart pretender.”

Kelson nodded and relaxed control just a little more. He did not like the implications of what the old man was conveying, but the delivery was just about perfect.

“As if she were a queen, eh?” he repeated softly.

“Weel, surely ye knew, lad — an’ ye must nàå allow it tae go on. They say she takes liberties due only a sovereign. She that steals yer homage also steals yer honor.”

Kelson could sense Dhugal bristling indignantly, but he stayed him with a gesture. This was not the time for righteous outrage. If Caulay was using homage in its legal sense, the situation in Meara was even more serious than he had been led to believe. Homage implied the granting of land in return for service — the military service of knights. If Caitrin of Meara was receiving homage as suzeraine of Meara —

“Caulay, what liberties has she taken?” Kelson asked, glancing at Dhugal’s stunned face.

“She swears knights tae her service, wi’ the promise o’ land when Meara is free again,” Caulay replied promptly. “An’ new knights hae been made. Even the two boys hae been knighted, an’ they younger than yerself!”

Kelson felt his own anger rising to match Dhugal’s, and he had to push it down with a conscious effort.

“Who knighted them?”

“My brother,” came Caulay’s response, though not quite so promptly, this time. “I wouldna’ hae thought it possible — my own kin, that swore faith tae yer father, God bless ‘im. I couldnae believe it mysel’, when I heard the news. Young Ithel brags that he is a knight now, and will one day be Prince of Meara of his own account. Would he hae died at birth! He is nàå true MacArdry, an’ that’s for sure!”

“I see.” Kelson probed gently for a physical image of the upstart Ithel. “Tell me about this Ithel, then. I want to know everything you can remember.”

And in Culdi, Alaric Morgan prepared to enter his own kind of grim, dark concentration, opening a red leather case half the size of his fist and dumping out a handful of polished cubes carved of ivory and ebony. They clicked against each other and the table top with solid, satisfying snicks as he set them down, reflecting dark and light as Morgan brought a single candle closer on the table before him.

Quickly he arranged the cubes in the traditional pattern: four white in the center, forming a single larger square; the four black set one to each corner, not quite touching. The champion’s signet on his right hand gleamed as well, as he poised his fingertips above the center of the white square, but he ignored it for the moment as he set his thoughts in order.

The odd black and white dice were called Wards in the parlance of those who knew about such things, named, like the most secure perimeter fortifications of a castle, for their function of defense. To set wards was to create a magical sphere of protection encompassing the area defined by the four points at which the individual wards were placed, containing the energy within and restraining the entry of disruptive forces. Such protection was all but essential when one intended a magical operation such as Morgan planned — for to reach Kelson at such distance, and without prior preparation, would require that Morgan place his body in deep trance, oblivious to physical sensation or danger, while his mind ranged forth in search of the king.

“Prime.”

As he spoke the nomen of the cube in the upper left comer of the white square, he touched it with his fingertip and sent power into its matrix. Instantly the cube began to glow from deep within — milky, opalescent white.

“Seconde.”

The process was repeated with the cube at the upper right, with similar results.

“Tierce. Quarte.”

He was halfway through his preparation, the four white cubes forming a square of ghostly white light. He could feel the power drain. Slowly and deliberately he drew deep breath: tangible cue to trigger the reversal of polarities from white to black, positive to negative, male to female, the other side of the balance. The pull this time would be subtly different, slightly more difficult to channel, but well within his abilities. Breathing out softly, he brought his fingertip toward the black cube resting near the upper left of the white square.

“Quinte”

A tiny spark jumped between his fingertip and the cube just before they touched, green-black fire kindling from within. Quickly, before his momentum was lost, Morgan shifted his attention to the upper right black cube, bringing his forefinger nearer.

“Sixte.”

Again, the eerie glow.

When the process had been repeated for Septime and Octave, all eight of the cubes shimmered with internal light, four white and four black. Now for the mating of opposites, the balancing of energies to build the watch-towers.

Rubbing a hand across his eyes, Morgan sighed and picked up Prime, shifting his balance points again and readjusting control as he brought the cube near its black counterpart, Quinte. He could feel the tug of the opposites attracting as he closed the distance, the black cube almost seeming to rise that last fraction of space to meet the white as he spoke the word of power.

“Primus.”

The two cubes fused in a single, silvery grey oblong. One down. Breathing deeply, Morgan pushed the completed first ward a little to one side and plucked Seconde from its fellows, mating it to Sixte.

“Secundus.”

Again, the silver-glowing rectoid.

When he had completed Tertius and Quartus, he set the four wards on the floor around his chair like tiny, glowing towers and sat down again, feeling for the balance points in his mind a final time before he set things into motion. Commanding now, he pointed to each of the wards in turn and spoke the words, sensing the surge as the elements meshed and flared.

“Primus, Secundus, Tertius, Quartus, fiat lux!”

It was like suddenly being inside a tent of pale, silvery light. The very air around him seemed to shimmer. As he lowered his arm and sat back in his chair, he could feel the wards like an insulating cocoon, shielding and protecting.

Satisfied, he adjusted the candle again and laid his hands along the arms of his chair, positioning the signet on his right hand to catch the light. It was a tangible symbol of the faith binding friend to friend, protector to sovereign; the golden Haldane lion etched on the curve of the gold-set onyx oval seemed to stare at him in the dimness. Morgan used it now as a focus, willing himself to still and center, conjuring the king’s face over the lion’s.

He could feel his breathing slowing, his pulsebeat steadying, and gradually his vision began to narrow until only the ring was in his gaze. Doggedly he held Kelson’s image before his mind, letting his eyelids droop lower, lower, until they closed and the image of Kelson alone remained. Awareness of his body receded as the mental image sharpened, and as he stretched his senses northward, all his concentration was centered on the ring, the face, the mind.

After a long while, almost at the limits of perception, he at last sensed what he had come to find.

And in Transha, immersed in his questioning of Caulay and the concentration needed to maintain control, Kelson pushed aside the first vague brushing at his mind. He and Dhugal listened with horrified fascination as the old man wove a tale of treachery far more widespread than either of them had dreamed.

But as Caulay reiterated the rumors he had heard of knights gone over to the Mearan Pretender and of Ithel Quinnell’s growing popularity, a hint of Morgan’s urgency began to penetrate — though not its source, at first. The king tensed as it brushed for the first time at a conscious level, momentarily shutting out Caulay’s rambling as he tried to track it down. When it proved too elusive, he laid a hand on the old man’s wrist, shaking his head.

“Enough, Caulay. Hush for a minute,” he whispered. He closed his eyes to listen better.

Nothing. Then the lightest of feather-brushes. He sensed it might be Morgan, but even when he turned all his concentration toward picking up the next touch, he could not be sure of more than the touch sensation.

“What is it?” Dhugal whispered, leaning closer on his stool. “Is something wrong?”

Carefully, Kelson shook his head, trying not to lose the all too tenuous contact hovering at the edge of consciousness.

“Not here,” he murmured. “Someone’s trying to reach me, though — very far away and very faint. And it’s urgent.”

A little catch of breath from Dhugal’s direction, and the sense of awe and apprehension mixed. Then: “Do you know who it is?”

Kelson nodded slowly, still straining to make it clearer. “Morgan, I think, I can’t — quite — pull it in.”

“Morgan? But you said he was in Culdi.”

“He is, so far as I know. And at this range, for me even to be aware of this much is incredible.”

Slowly he opened his eyes to look across at Dhugal, though he kept tenuous touch with the continuing call. The sense of urgency persisted, as did the growing conviction that the source was Morgan. After all he had done already. Kelson knew he had no chance of bringing the contact through on his own, but there just might be another way. It was much to ask, however.

“What is it?” Dhugal breathed. “Why are you looking at me that way?”

“Did you mean what you said before, that you wouldn’t let yourself be afraid of me?” Kelson countered.

Dhugal turned a little pale beneath his coppery hair, and Kelson could sense the queasy apprehension rising in his chest.

“What are you going to do?” Dhugal whispered. “No, make that, ‘What are you going to do to me? You need me for something, don’t you? To help you reach Morgan.”

“Yes.” Kelson glanced briefly at the sleeping Caulay. “I need one or both of you to augment my strength. His might be enough, but I’d like you in the link as well.”

Dhugal swallowed hard, making no attempt to hide his fear.

“M-me?”

With a sigh. Kelson managed a none-too-patient nod. He was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on reassuring Dhugal and still maintain whatever contact he had with whoever was trying to reach him, but a slightly different approach was already taking shape in his mind.

“It’s the not-knowing that’s the worst, isn’t it?” he guessed. “You see Caulay, obviously unconscious, and you’re afraid of what might happen to you — and that you wouldn’t even know. Loss of control.”

“I — suppose so.”

Nodding again. Kelson stood and came around the end of the bed, staying Dhugal with a gesture when he eased off the stool and started to back away.

“Let’s try something a little different from what I originally had in mind, then, “ he said, climbing onto the stool and motioning for Dhugal to come behind him. “This shouldn’t be nearly as frightening. I need physical contact to make my link with you, but there’s no reason you can’t control that instead of me. It will make my part a little trickier with you completely conscious, but I’m willing to give it a try, if you are.”

“What do I have to do?” Dhugal replied warily.

“Just stand behind me and put your hands on my shoulders. Let your thumbs rest on the back of my neck.”

“Like this?” Dhugal whispered, as he gingerly obeyed.

“That’s fine.”

Kelson took Caulay’s flaccid left hand and cradled it against his knee, then glanced over his shoulder as he straightened.

“Now come a little closer, so I can lean against you for support. It’s going to seem like I’ve fallen asleep — rather like what I did to Bertie yesterday — and I don’t want to fall off the stool. Don’t laugh!” he added, as he sensed Dhugal’s surprise. “I really am going to be somewhat at your mercy.”

He could feel Dhugal’s whole body tense behind him. Then, in a very faint voice:

“Kelson, I’m not sure I can do this.”

“Yes, you can,” he said patiently. “Dhugal, there’s absolutely no danger. If you should freeze up, which is most unlikely, the worst that can happen is that I won’t make the contact. Now, trust me, all right?” He reached back to touch Dhugal’s forearm in brief reassurance. “Take a few deep breaths to relax now, and try to let your mind go blank.”

He followed his own instructions and felt Dhugal’s cautious response.

“That’s right. Another deep breath now, and let it out slowly. Close your eyes. Imagine all the tension flowing out of your body as you exhale. Let yourself drift now,” he continued, as Dhugal edged into light rapport. “You’re doing just fine. Soon I’m going to bring your father into the link, but if he can’t provide enough power I’ll need to draw from you as well. You may not even be aware of it. At most, you’ll feel a slight sort of a tickling sensation in your head. Breathe again now, deeply….”

While he let Dhugal continue settling, Kelson turned his attention briefly to Caulay, reaching out tendrils of control as Morgan and Duncan had taught him and tying in the potential. He had not expected it to be enough, so he was not disappointed. At least he was able to confirm that it was Morgan he was seeking, and that Morgan sensed a mutual effort to bring the contact through. He could feel Dhugal’s untapped potential towering at his back, fiercely supportive but still a bit too tentative for comfort, and knew he would have to go a little farther than he had told Dhugal he would.

Gently he reached out with his senses and brushed Dhugal’s mind, keying the triggers which would enable him to slip Dhugal into a light control trance despite what he had said, for he could not afford to have Dhugal falter in midcontact. Gradually Dhugal’s head nodded lower, lower, until finally his chin was resting against the top of Kelson’s head, though he was not truly asleep — only drifting in a placid, twilight state.

After another few heartbeats. Kelson turned his attention back to the waiting contact, opening his mind to fill with Morgan’s message.

Well done, my prince, came Morgan’s whispered thought in his mind. I really wasn’t certain I could reach you. Who else is in the link?

Caulay and Dhugal, Kelson replied. And Dhugal is still partially conscious, so try not to let anything surge, or he’s going to feel it and scare himself to death pulling out.

He caught the impression of laughter, like tinkling silver bells, and then a more sober note.

A brave lad and a true friend, Morgan sent. Why don’t you bring him back to Culdi with you?

I’m needed already? Kelson queried.

Aye. Cardiel asked me to contact you. He and Arilan have in mind to promote Istelyn to the See of Meara, and they’d like your official opinion. I told them I thought you’d approve, but you ought to do it in person.

The logic of the request was apparent, and the importance of the summons beyond question, but Kelson sensed something more, vague and less pleasant, lurking beneath the surface. Dhugal stirred, perhaps sharing some of that uneasiness, and Kelson had to tighten his control just a little.

What’s wrong? he asked. What is it you haven’t told me?

Someone tried to kill Duncan earlier this evening — merasha on the dagger.

What?

One of his own retainers — hardly more than a boy, really. Unfortunately, he’s dead.

And Duncan?

As his own shock and concern reverberated in the link, he could feel Dhugal tense and try to withdraw. Relentlessly he clamped down on the controls, determined to hold the link just a little longer, even if doing so frightened Dhugal.

He’s all right! Morgan’s reassurance came lancing through. A bad slash on his palm that I can probably heal in the morning, and the expected aftereffects from the drug, but no permanent damage. Just get back as soon as you can.

The emotion behind Morgan’s thought was controlled, but very powerful. Despite Kelson’s attempt to buffer its intensity, Dhugal recoiled at the alien sensation; the link began to quiver. No longer trusting the luxury of worded communication. Kelson sent agreement and an urgency to break contact for Dhugal’s sake — and was out of the link, as much pushed as of his own volition. As he twisted around to grab the trembling Dhugal by the wrists, he continued to catch the ragged after-echo of Duncan’s pain as it had come through Morgan’s perception — only now it was coming from Dhugal.

“Stop it!” he whispered harshly, giving Dhugal a shake and trying to force reason past the panic. “Look at me, Dhugal! Take a deep breath and listen! Let it go! You’re all right! Duncan is all right. Will you — “

As his mind probed at Dhugal’s, bright pain seemed to explode behind his eyes, rebounding against his swiftly raised shields and somehow echoing back to Dhugal with even greater force. Dhugal cried out, doubling up and sinking to the floor despite Kelson’s attempt to support him, then lay there sobbing blindly — dry, wracking heaves as he gasped for breath, rocking in Kelson’s arms.

Kelson was stunned. As he held the shuddering Dhugal and tried to comfort him, he could find nothing to account for the reaction. With the breaking of the link with Morgan, Dhugal should have felt nothing further.

But when Kelson at last tried another tentative probe, the reason became abundantly clear.

“Shields!” he whispered, withdrawing as quickly as he could and thrusting Dhugal far enough away to stare at him in shock. “Mother of God, Dhugal, where did you get shields? Can you hear me, Dhugal? You’ve got shields! Dhugal, are you all right?”

Groggily, Dhugal uncurled and managed to sit up, holding his head with one hand and leaning against Kelson’s knee for support. Kelson did not press him for further response, only waited while Dhugal got his bearings and gradually raised his head, dragging a sleeve across his tear-stained face. His gaze was still a little glassy as he looked up at the king, and he seemed to be having trouble focusing.

“Dhugal, what happened?” Kelson breathed.

Dhugal made a brave attempt at a smile. “I was about to ask you the same question. God — my head hurts!”

“Somehow you managed to pick up some of what Morgan was sending me,” Kelson whispered. “Then you slammed down shields on the link. How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Shield. Most humans can’t. Everything was fine until Morgan told me about the attack on Duncan, and the merasha.”

“What’s merasha?’ Dhugal asked blankly.

“Oh, sweet Jesu, of course you don’t know. It’s a drug. I don’t know where it comes from. But it muddles Deryni senses so that we — can’t use our magic. I’ve never had it used on me, but Morgan has — and now Duncan. And I know it was used to make my father vulnerable to Charissa’s magic, so she could kill him.”

Dhugal shivered. “It sounds terrible.”

“So was what happened when you tried to back out of the link! And you’ve got shields, for God’s sake! He doesn’t,” he stabbed one hand toward the sleeping Caulay in a gesture of frustration, “and you didn’t seem to, either, until we started getting that rebound from Duncan. What the devil happened? Can you remember anything at all?”

Dhugal rubbed at his temples and winced. “I can’t think with you yelling at me.”

“I’m not yelling at you, I just have to know what happened,” Kelson said, a little less emphatically. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“I scared the hell out of me, too.”

Cautiously Dhugal took a deep breath and let it out slowly, not looking at Kelson as he tried to ease himself back to memory of the pain.

“It’s still mostly a jumble,” Dhugal finally went on haltingly, “but I do remember that after you stopped talking, I got sort of — drowsy.”

“That was my fault,” Kelson muttered. “I confess I did a little more than I’d told you I was going to. But that shouldn’t have made you react the way you did. What else do you remember?”

“I — have a vague impression of General Morgan laughing. … Something about bishops, too — and — and then a terrible pain in my head.”

“That must have been Duncan and the merasha,” Kelson said, nodding. “Somehow, you got farther into the link than I thought — just enough to channel some of the emotion. I wasn’t expecting shields, though. Caulay doesn’t have them.”

“He doesn’t have my knack with animals, either,” Dhugal countered, almost a little irritated, “and he used to be as good a tracker as Ciard.” He paused. “Maybe it does have something to do with the Second Sight, though. Maybe — maybe shields go along with that.”

“Maybe,” Kelson replied.

But Dhugal’s comment about the animals had struck a responsive chord in Kelson, so that the part about the Second Sight barely even registered. He recalled his father telling him how Morgan could charm deer to the very gates of the city if he wanted to, and some passing mention he remembered of Morgan’s sister Bronwyn being able to call the birds from the sky. If their ability came of being Deryni, then what about Dhugal? Dhugal was also good with animals — and that would certainly account for the shields.

“Let’s try this again,” he said, slipping his hands to either side of Dhugal’s head before the other could object. “Try not to fight me. This is the only way we’re going to find out more about what we’re up against.”

But Dhugal gasped and tried to pull away at once as Kelson’s first probe clashed against the shields again.

“God, what are you doing to me?”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Kelson answered. “Try to relax. I’ll ease up while you do, but you’ve got to help me. Don’t fight me, dammit! The more you struggle, the more it’s going to hurt!”

But the pain of Kelson’s probe had already pushed Dhugal beyond reason again, contorting him into a shuddering fetal ball. Kelson tried several approaches, but the shields refused to budge. He could also sense Dhugal’s heartrate rising dangerously. He would have to stop.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, as he withdrew altogether. “God, I wish I knew where you got those shields!”

He doubted Dhugal had heard him, but he kept repeating his apology while he waited for Dhugal to come around, kneading the rigid shoulders until finally Dhugal stirred, uncurling enough to turn frightened, pain-dulled eyes on him.

“I’m sorry,” Kelson said again. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I really am sorry. Are you all right?”

Dhugal nodded groggily and sat up with Kelson’s help, lifting a hand in reassurance.

“It isn’t your fault. It’s mine. I did try to do what you asked, but it hurt so much — “

“I know.” Kelson glanced away, reviewing everything one more time, then shook his head and sighed.

“Well, it isn’t going to do us any good to just sit here and make apologies to one another. It’s no one’s fault. I certainly wish I didn’t have to leave for Culdi tomorrow, though.” He raised an eyebrow hopefully. “I don’t suppose you’d consider coming with me?”

“Because of — what just happened?”

Kelson nodded.

“I can’t.” Dhugal swallowed and turned half away, fiddling with a fold of his kilt. “It’s my father. Kelson. You’ve seen how he is. Winter’s just beginning. I couldn’t leave him here alone.”

“He wouldn’t exactly be alone,” Kelson ventured. “Your sisters are here, and he has a whole clan family. Or is that really the reason?”

Dhugal drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, avoiding Kelson’s eyes. “That’s most of it. If he dies — no, make that when he dies — I’m going to be Chief of Clan MacArdry, as well as Earl of Transha. I have responsibilities to my people. It — makes things very difficult if the new chief isn’t around when the old chief passes.”

Chilled, Kelson glanced up at the bed towering above them, though he could not see its occupant.

“Caulay’s dying?”

“I doubt very seriously that he’ll last out the winter,” Dhugal said quietly. “He looks strong, but his heart — well, let’s just say that if he were a horse, I probably would have put him down months ago. There’s — something wrong in his brain, too. He couldn’t even talk for a while after he lost the use of his legs, though that came back after a few months.”

“I’m truly sorry.”

“So am I.” Dhugal gave a resigned sigh. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t change anything. I doubt even your Deryni healers could have done much for him. The least I can do is be here at the end, if that’s possible. Of course, if he does last out the winter, I have another problem. Come spring, my place is at your side, leading the MacArdry levies.

“But we’ll worry about that then, if it happens,” he concluded brightly. “As for the other, let’s not worry about that until then, either, shall we?”

With a helpless shrug. Kelson rose and helped Dhugal to his feet.

“If you wish. Much as I’d like to have you at court through the winter, I certainly can’t fault your reasons for staying here. I don’t suppose there’s any real urgency about — what’s just happened. Whatever’s going on in your head has probably been that way for some time, so I doubt much will change by waiting until spring to find out more.”

He and Dhugal moved silently back into the embrasure of the window seat, where Kelson pushed one of the moveable lights farther open and looked out to sea, inhaling deeply of the salt air as Dhugal stood beside him.

“Strategically, nothing much is going to happen until spring either,” the king continued, after a few seconds. “Look out there. The storms are already brewing. In another month, the rains will more than double the travel time in this part of the kingdom; in two, the snows will have doubled it again. Even your cousin Ithel, as much as he may want my throne, can’t move any kind of effective army under those conditions. No, we have the winter to decide how to handle this. There may be some minor local disturbances, but no serious threat for at least five months.”

Grim-lipped, Dhugal glanced back into the room, at the great bed wrapped in shadows and the man snoring noisily beneath the sleeping furs.

“When there is a threat, I shall be there, my brother,” he said softly. And he held up his right hand with the faint scar etched across the palm.

The gesture moved Kelson more than almost anything else which had happened that night — and there had been many moving moments. Wistfully he raised his own right hand and matched the faint scar across his own palm to the one on DhugaTs. The memory of the making of those scars came flooding back all in an instant, as if the two of them stood once more by the sacred well, high on a wind-scoured hilltop at the edge of Candor Rhea. Kelson had been ten, Dhugal nearly nine.

“Are you sure you really want to?” Dhugal had asked, as they washed their grimy hands in water from the well. “My people count an oath as strong as blood, when blood has been shed. And what will your father say?”

“I don’t care what he says, after it’s done,” Kelson had replied. “He can’t undo it, can he?”

“No. Nothing can undo it unless one of us is dead.”

“Then we don’t have to worry,” Kelson had said with a grin, “because you and I are going to live forever, aren’t we?” He paused a beat. “Does it hurt much, do you know?”

Dhugal had looked a little greenish under his freckles.

“I dunno,” he confided. “My brother Michael made blood-oath with his friend Fulk when they were younger than we are, and he said it hurt terribly — but I think Michael makes things up to scare me sometimes.” He swallowed. “It’s only a little cut, after all. If we’re going to be knights, we have to learn not to be afraid of getting wounded, don’t we?”

“I’m not afraid,” Kelson had retorted, handing Dhugal his silver-mounted dagger. “Here. Do it!”

He had actually been very much afraid, and so had Dhugal, but he had not allowed himself to flinch as Dhugal’s inexperienced hand drew the blade across his flesh. Fascinated, Kelson held his wrist and watched the blood well in his palm, only dragging his eyes from it when Dhugal laid the black-carved hilt of his own dagger across Kelson’s bloody fingers. The pommel had clasped a water-pale amethyst, and he remembered the blood staining it a darker hue as he drew the blade across Dhugal’s palm in a wound to match his own.

“Say the words after me,” Dhugal had whispered, clasping his bloody hand to Kelson’s and looping a handkerchief to bind them. “I take you as my brother, of blood and of life.”

“I take you as my brother, of blood and of life,” Kelson had repeated.

“I call to witness the four airts — those are winds,” Dhugal added.

“I call to witness the four airts,” Kelson agreed.

“That so long as I have breath, I will stand by my brother with my life and my honor….”

With a little smile, the adult Kelson clasped his free hand around their joined ones and nodded.

“I’ll expect you in the spring, then, my brother,” he said quietly, not wanting to break the mood. “Do your filial duty through the winter, and keep the peace here in Transha for me, and then come to me at Culdi as soon as the passes are clear.”

“I will, my lord,” Dhugal whispered. “And God keep us both safe until then.”

They only consult to cast him down from his excellency: they delight in lies: they bless with their mouth, but they curse inwardly.

— Psalms 62:4

By special request of the Archbishop of Rhemuth, the bishops at Culdi met in closed convocation early the next morning. In Duncan’s absence, Istelyn was drafted to serve as secretary for the proceedings. No one was more surprised than he when Cardiel proposed him as the next Bishop of Meara.

To the relief of Cardiel and Arilan, support for Istelyn’s candidacy quickly grew. Once the stunned Istelyn’s praises had been sung by a bemused Archbishop Bradene, who had more cause than any other man to know Istelyn’s work, hardly a prelate in the room did not join actively in his support, for Istelyn’s nomination provided an elegant solution to the Mearan problem. By noon, when the entire community met for High Mass, Archbishop Bradene was able to announce a unanimous decision from the pulpit. With few exceptions, the news was received with relief and general approval.

One of those who did not approve of the bishops’ choice was Judhael of Meara, though his public reception of the news was gracious and obedient. As soon as was seemly after Mass, however, he tapped discreetly on the door of his patron, Creoda of Carbury. The bishop’s secretary admitted him at once.

“You could have warned me,” he said, when the secretary had shown him into Creoda’s presence and the formalities had been observed.

Sighing, Creoda motioned Judhael to take a seat across from him, staying the priest-secretary with a similar gesture. Judhael sat. He was a youngish-looking man of ramrod-straight carriage, with hair gone prematurely silver, in stark contrast to his clerical black. The pale, sea blue eyes measured Creoda accusingly, the hands also betraying his agitation as he played with a ring on his right hand.

“These things happen,” Creoda muttered. “If it’s any consolation, you reacted precisely as you should have. Cardiel sprang the recommendation on us at an early meeting this morning. There was no way to warn you between then and Mass. I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” Judhael worried at his ring a moment longer, then glanced aside at the fire in the stone fireplace. The silver signet on his hand was more befitting a secular lord than a cleric.

“What happens next, then?” Judhael asked. “Is this the end of it? Will the king ratify Istelyn’s appointment?”

“I don’t know, to all three questions,” Creoda replied. “Istelyn has been in the king’s favor for several years, so I doubt there will be any objection on the part of His Majesty. That does not necessarily spell an end to things, however.”

“No?”

Creoda snapped his fingers in the direction of the secretary and held out his hand for the folded square of parchment which the man immediately produced. Judhael sat forward expectantly, but Creoda took his time unfolding the missive.

“This came late last night,” the bishop said, holding it at arm’s length and squinting at the text before handing it over to Judhael. “The gist of it is that our brother in Saint Iveagh’s is prepared to support you, and awaits the guide who will escort him to freedom.”

“And how much is that support worth, now that someone else has been chosen for the See of Meara?” Judhael said bitterly, as he scanned the closely penned script.

“It will be as useful as it needs to be,” Creoda replied. “At very least, he can pull the ecclesiastical factions together for the reunification of Old Meara.”

“You really think he still wields that much influence?”