The Legends of Camber of Culdi Trilogy

by Katherine Kurtz

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m afraid I pushed too hard. Is everyone else all right? Do you realize what happened?”

  “You linked in with something bigger than you could handle,” Cullen said gruffly. “What was it? Do you know?”

  “You mean you didn’t see?”

  “See what?” Rhys asked. “I knew you were experiencing something—but until you started shaking, all I saw was candlelight reflected on that black water.”

  “I couldn’t see anything either, Father,” Evaine agreed.

  “Oh.”

  Camber swallowed down a surge of nausea and let that sink in, finding it increasingly difficult to think coherently in his exhaustion. He tried to straighten up more, but his fatigued body refused to obey. Partially abandoning that fight, he let himself slump back against Joram again and closed his eyes, making a conscious effort to organize his thoughts.

  Rhys’s hand touched his forehead, and he felt the cool touch of the Healer’s mind against his, but he shook his head and opened his eyes again.

  “I’ll rest in a moment, Rhys—I promise. I got what I went for, though, and you’ll need the information before I let myself collapse. Joram, if you’ll release the wards, Evaine can get a map and pen. I have Ariella’s troop strengths and deployment, and I think I’ll have just about enough strength to make those notations before I have to sleep.”

  He gestured weakly with a hand which seemed almost not to belong to him, so heavy was his fatigue. Rhys took Joram’s place, supporting him against the table, while Joram raised his arms to release the wards. As the silvery hemisphere dissolved away, the chill of the room assaulted them. Instantly, Evaine was unlocking the door to the sleeping chamber and rushing through.

  Rhys and Cullen slowly walked Camber to his chair beside the fire, where Joram wrapped another robe around him. Cullen, when he had seen Camber safely ensconced, went to the earl’s desk and brought back a map board. Evaine stood holding pen and ink beside a seemingly unconscious Camber. Cullen glanced at them all in concern.

  “Is he all right?”

  Rhys moved his fingers from his patient’s pulse point to the temples and closed his eyes briefly, then nodded and motioned for Cullen to lay the map board across Camber’s lap. As Evaine put the pen in her father’s hand, Joram brought a lighted candle from the mantel and held it close.

  Camber opened his eyes and took a deep breath.

  “All right. Her main strength is here, and here, and here.” The pen glided across the parchment, marking encampments and troop deployments.

  “I’d say that close to a thousand men, most of them mounted, have already come through the Arranal Canyon approach and are now camped here, at Coldoire. Another eight hundred are here, at the foot of the Cardosa Defile, where she herself plans to join them tomorrow. They plan to rendezvous near Iomaire two days from now. Be sure that Jebediah studies this aspect in particular.”

  As Cullen and Joram nodded agreement, Camber closed his eyes and took another deep breath. His hand shook a little as he again dipped the pen in the ink which Evaine held.

  “Now, this is also important. She has eighty extra knights here.” He indicated a location. “And here. She’s also considering a new foot route through this pass, which can accommodate several hundred men. If she uses it, we’re vulnerable here and here, even if Sighere assists us. She has reports of his troop movements about a day’s ride west of Iomaire, by the way.

  “One last thing—she has a small body of men, perhaps as many as thirty of them, who seem to be some kind of elite bodyguard, or special shock troops, or something on that order. But they’re more than that; there’s something special about them that I wasn’t quite able to read—only that Ariella seemed very pleased with herself about them. It may simply be that they’re Deryni. I’ll try to go back over that part in the morning, after I’ve slept, and see if I can remember anything else. They’re quartered with her in Cardosa, for now, along with another five hundred of mountain cavalry.”

  His pen moved to the mountain city and drew a circle, with the figure 550? in it. Then his hand relaxed and he almost dropped the pen. Evaine rescued it as he leaned back in the chair and let out a deep sigh.

  “Is that all of it?” Joram asked.

  Camber nodded and closed his eyes. “All that’s important. More details later. Sleep now …”

  As his voice trailed off, his entire body relaxed and he was asleep in a single breath. When Cullen removed the support of the map board from his lap, Camber slumped even deeper into the chair, his light, even breathing the only sound in the stilled room.

  Rhys reached across and felt for a pulse, then glanced at his brother-in-law.

  “He’s exhausted, but he’s only asleep—not in a coma. He’ll be all right when he’s rested.”

  Joram gave a relieved sigh. “Good. In the meantime, we ought to get this map to Jebediah and the others. Can you and Evaine stay with him? He probably ought to sleep under wards, too.”

  “We’ll do what’s necessary,” Rhys replied, slipping his arms under Camber’s. “Just help me get him to the bed before you go, will you?”

  As Evaine ran to turn back the bedclothes, Joram picked up his father’s knees and helped Rhys carry him to the curtained bed. There they laid him down gently, Evaine unfastening his belt and starting to remove his shoes and stockings as Rhys escorted Joram and Cullen to the door. When the two priests had gone, and Rhys had bolted the door behind them, Evaine glanced up at her husband, looking tired but content as she tucked the last of the blankets around her sleeping father’s form.

  “I’ve seen him this way before, Rhys. I’m sure he’ll be fine in the morning.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve worked with him on these kinds of things before,” Rhys said, checking his patient’s pulse again while he peered briefly beneath a slack eyelid.

  “On occasion,” Evaine admitted. “Don’t you approve?”

  “You know I wouldn’t dream of interfering, even if I didn’t approve,” Rhys replied with a grin, sitting back wearily on the edge of the bed as he watched his wife rummage in the purse at her waist. “I know how important your work with your father is to you—as important, perhaps, as my healing call is to me. Besides, I know that you take reasonable precautions.”

  “We try,” she said with a droll smile.

  Pulling out a small black suede leather pouch, she dropped to her knees beside the bed and began undoing the thongs which bound the end closed. When she dumped the contents on the bed, eight polished cubes came tumbling out, four white and four black. She glanced up at him as she began sorting them.

  “Will you work the wards with me?”

  “Of course.”

  Slipping to his knees beside her, he watched as she arranged the cubes in the necessary pattern: the four white ones in a square, all of them touching; the black ones at the four corners of the square so formed, each near but not in contact with its closest white neighbor.

  “Go ahead and start,” Evaine said in a low voice. “These are mine. You shouldn’t have any trouble centering in.”

  With a nod, Rhys drew a deep breath and laid the fingertips of his right hand lightly on all four white cubes, closing his eyes briefly while he found the balance point with these particular cubes. Then he withdrew all but his index finger, to touch the cube in the upper left-hand corner of the white square.

  “Prime,” he said softly.

  The touched cube began to glow with a ghostly, opalescent light.

  “Seconde.” He touched the cube to the right of the first one, and it, too, began to glow.

  “Tierce.” The cube below the first cube came to life.

  “Quarte.” As the last white cube lit, the four seemed to form a single square of milky light.

  Rhys sighed and sat back on his haunches, watching serenely as Evaine drew a deep breath and brought her finger down on the first black cube. The glowing white square reflected off her hand and cast a mellow, moonlike glow on her
calm face.

  “Quinte.”

  Her low voice seemed to chime deep in the cube, which shone now with the iridescence of an ebon butterfly wing.

  “Sixte.”

  The second cube, at the upper right, lit with the same quiet fire.

  “Septime. Octave.”

  As the last two black cubes were activated in rapid succession, Rhys came up on his knees again and picked up Prime, extending his empty left hand under his right arm to lie easily on the blanket. Evaine laid her left hand in Rhys’s, then picked up Quinte and brought it toward his Prime. So joined, hand to hand, they also joined the two cubes, pouring in defensive energy as together they spoke the union nomen:

  “Primus!”

  A minute click vibrated through both their fingers as the two cubes touched and fused; and then they were holding a single, oblong rectoid which gleamed with a metallic brightness. Evaine laid it on the blanket and picked up Sixte as Rhys took Seconde. She closed her eyes as they brought Sixte and Seconde together:

  “Secundus!”

  Camber stirred a little in his sleep, perhaps unconsciously sensing the power being raised at his side, but he quickly settled down again as his daughter and son-in-law brought Septime and Tierce to:

  “Tertius!”

  Finally, “Quartus” was formed of Quarte and Octave. Of the four silvery oblongs now lying on the bed, Rhys took the last two and set them on the floor behind him, Tertius to his left, toward the head of the bed, and Quartus to the foot. Then, as Evaine moved around to the other side to place Primus and Secundus, Rhys sat down at the head of the bed beside his father-in-law, laying a sleep-deepening hand on Camber’s forehead as Evaine paused at the foot of the bed to activate the wards.

  Facing toward the first of them, she raised her arms heavenward and threw back her head for a moment, eyes closed, then opened them and pointed to each of the wards in succession as she spoke their names and the words of power:

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

  A silvery canopy of light sprang up around them with her final words, its edges defined by the limits laid out by the ward components. Evaine smiled as she came to join her husband, taking the hand he held out to her and touching it tenderly to her lips. Rhys sighed contentedly and leaned back against the headboard, pulling her into his lap with an arm around her waist. They had just settled into a comfortable position, she with her head smuggled in the hollow of his shoulder, when suddenly she giggled.

  “A giggle at a time like this?” he whispered.

  She pulled away to peer at him mischievously. “My love, you’re going to giggle, too, when I tell you.”

  He raised one eyebrow in question, the corners of his mouth curving up in anticipation of her explanation, as she brushed his lips with hers and laughed again.

  “I was just sitting here, thinking about cleaning up Father’s dressing room in the morning, and I remembered that, in the excitement, I dumped everything down the garderobe—including the Haldana necklace!”

  “Surely you’re joking!”

  Evaine giggled again and shook her head. “And that means, dearest husband, that someone is going to have to go wading in the middens tomorrow and find it.”

  Rhys shook his head incredulously and drew her closer in amused disbelief.

  “I knew things had gone far too smoothly,” he chuckled, nuzzling her ear. “Now all we have to decide is who’s going to do it. Let’s see—who do we know who needs a little humbling?”

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  BETHANE

  SUMMER, 1100

  With “Bethane,” we shift more than a hundred years to the timeframe of Morgan, Kelson, and the rest of the familiar characters of the CHRONICLES OF THE DERYNI. This particular story sprang from two sources: a brief reference in Deryni Checkmate to the summer when Alaric Morgan fell out of a tree and broke his arm; and a request to do a story about witches for an anthology called Hecate’s Cauldron. I’d never actually referred to old Bethane as a witch, but she certainly fulfills the usual stereotypes about crones and cauldrons and the like. Besides, I’d always been curious about her. Her brief appearance in Deryni Checkmate sketched just enough information to be enticing, and asked far more questions than it answered.

  Who was Bethane? Who was Darrell, her husband? What happened to him? What happened to her, to make her the way she was? She wasn’t always an old hag, living in the hills and eking out a miserable existence from sheep and the offerings of the locals for concocting the odd love potion or practicing folk medicine. She’d obviously had some contact with Deryni, but was she Deryni herself, though ill-trained, or was she something else, like Warin de Grey?

  So I melded the two ideas—Alaric’s tumble from the tree and the mysterious old woman in the hills, twenty years younger than when we saw her in Deryni Checkmate, though already an eccentric old hag—and turned the characters loose. I found out more than I’d bargained for about Bethane, her husband and his associations, and another Deryni I hadn’t expected to see in this context; and got yet another glimpse of those dark times of anti-Deryni persecution that had only just begun to ebb to a livable level by the time Alaric Morgan reached young manhood.

  BETHANE

  Old Bethane shaded her eyes with a gnarled hand and peered out across the meadow with a frown. She had seen the approaching children before. Two of them were sons of the Duke of Cassan; she didn’t know about the other two. This time, the four were racing their shaggy mountain ponies across her meadow at a mad gallop, beginning to scatter the scraggly sheep she had spent all morning collecting.

  A low growl rose in her throat as she saw one of the boys lean down and whoop at a grazing ewe and her lamb. The ewe bolted in terror and lumbered out of the pony’s way, the lamb scampering after, and Bethane lurched to her feet, brandishing her shepherd’s crook at the girl child, who was almost upon her.

  “Here, now! You stop that!”

  The girl’s pony stopped stock still, but the girl continued on over the animal’s head, legs all akimbo and skirts flying, to land in the grass with a thump as the pony whirled and retreated, bucking and squealing. Bethane grabbed the child’s upper arm and hauled her to her feet, giving her a none-too-gentle shake.

  “Got you now!” Bethane crowed. “What’s the matter with you, riding through here like you owned the free air and frightening an honest woman’s sheep? Well, speak up, girl! What do you have to say for yourself?” As the girl raised wide blue eyes in astonishment, more stunned than hurt, the three boys came galloping toward her. The oldest looked to be twelve or so, though he carried himself like a soldier already. The other two were several years younger, one of them pale blond like the little girl.

  “You let my sister alone!” the blond boy shouted, yanking his pony to a halt and glaring at Bethane quite fiercely.

  “You’d better not hurt her!” the older boy chimed in. “She didn’t mean any harm.”

  Bethane laughed, almost a cackle, and shook her head. “Not so fast, young masters. I’m owed an apology first.” She glared at her captive. “What’s your name, girl? What’s the idea of chasing my sheep?”

  The girl, perhaps five or six, swallowed visibly, not even glancing at her brother and the other two boys, though the hand of the eldest rested on the hilt of his dagger.

  “I’m sorry, grand-dame,” the girl said in a small voice. “We didn’t know the sheep belonged to anyone. I mean, we knew they weren’t Duke Jared’s, but we didn’t think they’d been herded. We thought they were just grazing free.”

  Bethane did not allow her expression to soften, but she did relax just a little inside. Perhaps the children had not come to torment her, after all.

  “Oh, you did, did you?” she muttered. “Who are you, anyway?”

  The eldest boy drew himself up a little haughtily in the saddle and gazed down at her from his advantage of height. “I am Kevin, Earl of Kierney.” He nodded toward the other brown-haired boy. “This is my brother, Lord Dun
can, and that’s Lord Alaric Morgan, Bronwyn’s brother. You’d better let her go,” he added, a trifle less belligerently.

  “Oh, I’d better, eh? Well, I’ll tell you one thing, young Earl of Kierney. You’d better learn some manners, if you expect anyone to respect you for more than that high-sounding title you bear. What’s your excuse for chasing my poor little ewes?”

  As the young earl’s mouth gaped she could tell he was not often spoken to in that manner—his brother moved his pony a little closer and swept off his leather hunt cap in a polite bow.

  “Please pardon us, grand-dame. We are all to blame. It was thoughtless on our part. How can we make amends?”

  Slowly Bethane released the little girl’s arm, studying her and the three boys a little suspiciously. What was there about these children that raised her hackles so? Something fey, something she had not sensed in a long time …

  But, no matter. Hitching up her greyed and tattered skirts, she leaned against her shepherd’s crook and continued to eye them sternly, determined not to speak until all four had backed down from her gaze. She did not have long to wait.

  “Very well. Apology accepted. And to balance accounts, you can help gather up my sheep now, since you helped scatter them.”

  The blond boy nodded, no trace of resentment in his look. “A fair recompense, grand-dame. We’ll see to it at once.”

  For the next little while, the children applied themselves diligently to the task at hand, eventually rounding up all the sheep they had scattered and even a few Bethane had missed. When they had finished, they spread their noon meal under a large tree across the meadow and settled down to eat. The little girl invited Bethane to join them, but the old woman shook her head wordlessly and retreated to her cave, overlooking the meadow. She wanted no such exalted company. Besides, the oldest boy, Kevin, obviously did not like her much. Only the little girl seemed genuinely concerned about an old widow woman’s feelings, even bringing up a napkin full of fresh-baked bread and savory cheese when she and her companions were finished eating. She laid it on a smooth rock and made a graceful little curtsey before heading back down the hill without a word.