The name they had given the boy was Royston Royston Richardson, after his father and the dagger he clutched so fearfully in the deepening twilight was not his own. Around him in the fields of Jennan Vale, the bodies of the dead lay stiffening among the rows of newly ripening grain. Night-birds hooted in the deathly silence, and wolves yipped in the hills away and to the north.
Far across the fields, torches were being lit in the streets of the town, beckoning the living toward what slim comfort numbers might afford. Too many dead of either side lay cold at Jennan Vale tonight The battle had been brutal and bloody, even by peasant standards.
It had begun in the middle of the day. The riders of Nigel Haldane, uncle to the boy-king Kelson, had approached the outskirts of the village just past noon, royal lion banners billowing crimson and gold in the noonday sun, the horses sweating lightly in the early summer heat. It was only an advance guard, the prince had said. He and his troop of thirty were merely to scout a route for the royal army’s march toward Coroth to the east no more. For Coroth, rebellious Duchy Corwyn’s seat of local government, was in the hands of the insurgent archbishops, Loris and Corrigaru. And the archbishops, aided and supported by the zealot rebel leader Warin and his followers, were urging a new persecution of the Deryni: a race of powerful sorcerers who had once ruled all the Eleven Kingdoms; the Deryni: long suppressed, long feared, and now personified by Corwyn’s half-Deryni Duke Alaric Morgan, whom the archbishops had excommunicated for his Deryni heresy but three months before.
