The Legends of Camber of Culdi Trilogy

by Katherine Kurtz

  “All right, then. I think there’s time to get this started tonight. It’s still a two-day ride from Cor Culdi to Saint Mary’s, so you’re going to have to move if you hope to get there before she does. Jeb, we’ll need the plainest harness you can find for him—black, if we have a choice. Niallan, try to find him some good, lightweight provisions that he can carry without being weighted down. I don’t want him having to stop at public inns. Joram, I want to work with you until they get back, so we can establish a long-range link for contact at set times. I wish we’d had time to do that with Evaine, but—no matter. Are you game?”

  Joram smiled, knowing the flurry of activity was at least partially designed to take his father’s mind off his anxiety.

  “You still manage to think of everything, don’t you?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  But these two things shall come to thee in a moment in one day, the loss of children and widowhood: they shall come upon thee in their perfection for the multitude of thy sorceries, and for the great abundance of thine enchantments.

  —Isaiah 47:9

  The week had been interminable for Evaine, all but a few short hours at the beginning bleak and numb with loss. She had known Rhys was in danger when she left her beloved Sheele on Christmas Eve. She had feared for him as Joram told her of the destruction of Saint Neot’s and helped them to pack. Rhys had gone to Javan’s aid, but Evaine knew he had not trusted Tavis. The situation appeared to be fast approaching a crisis point. God alone knew whether they would all survive.

  But she could not let herself be paralyzed by fear or indecision. Nor could she rely on husband, father, or brother to see her through this crisis. She counted it a miracle that Joram had even been able to come and warn her in person, especially after what he and their father had witnessed at Saint Neot’s. They were doing their best to protect those entrusted to their care; she must see to the safety of those within her charge.

  The servants at Sheele would not long be safe in Deryni employ, she decided. Accordingly, she paid and dismissed most of them, then left a favored few the gift of the manor, for she was fairly certain she would never be back. Four loyal young men-at-arms she kept in service—bachelors, all, for she would not risk others’ families in what might lie ahead. The children were bundled in their warmest clothes, precious keepsakes hidden away beneath Sheele’s Portal with a few of the scrolls she had been meaning to return to the keeill, and then the Portal was locked and sealed to all but those of blood relation. The few sumpter horses they allowed themselves must carry food for their journey, for they dared not stop at inns.

  In addition, unbeknownst to Joram, she sent Queron into the hills to find and warn Revan of what was happening, for she could not bear to let that loyal friend of so many years merely pine away in solitude, waiting faithfully for orders which never came. She assured Queron that she would be safe; her child was not due for another month. Queron was uneasy about leaving her, but finally he obeyed. He did not know that she had not told Joram he was going.

  Her apprehension about Rhys did not diminish during the night, but by midday she seemed to sense an easing. In the sunshine after lunch, she had been laughing with her daughter as they rode along, she on a favorite bay palfrey and Rhysel cantering happily on her matching pony beside one of the younger guards. The baby Tieg was perched in front of Ansel, who had shed his clerical attire in favor of mail, leather, and a sword; the child chortled with glee as he tried to count the sumpter horses following their train, though he could not get past three without giggling. Death was the last thing Evaine was prepared for on this sunny Christmas afternoon.

  His end had not been sudden, she realized; only her realization that he was dying. The knowledge struck her like a physical blow, driving her breath from her lungs and almost making her lose her seat in that first instant of stark awareness. She pulled up sharply on the palfrey’s reins and clung to the velvet covered pommel, her face ashen. Ansel immediately thrust the protesting Tieg into the arms of one of the guards and raced to her side.

  “What’s wrong? Is it the baby?”

  “No—Rhys!” she managed to gasp.

  Frantic, terrified that she had lost him already, she thrust herself down into trance and tried to search her senses for his plight—winced under the sharp, skull-crushing blow which had rendered him instantly unconscious, followed the gradual ebbing of all other sensation around him, a slipping into darkness where even she could not follow.

  An odd, wrenching sensation twisted her orientation even as she tried to touch him. Then he was even farther away—Dhassa?—and slipping farther than mere physical distance, and she could only catch a faint echo of her father’s anguish, her brother’s, even of Jebediah’s—but no longer any more of his.

  She blinked and looked up, amazed that the sun still shone coin-bright in the winter sky, and saw by Ansel’s stricken expression that he, too, had felt something of her shock. Then she buried her face in her hands and wept.

  She remembered little, felt little, in the next few days. Later, she would recall riding endlessly, eating tasteless food when it was placed in her hands, and falling into deep, troubled sleep when they would bed down for the night.

  Times there were, especially in the beginning, when all of them would race wildly down a snow-choked road, throwing up great gouts of ice and mud; and other times when they would sit their horses in some forest stillness, seemingly for hours, and Ansel would become very nervous if anyone coughed or a horse whinnied.

  After a few days, the wild rides and forest waitings ceased, and they saw few travellers. Snow fell nearly every night, which slowed them, but kept others off the roads, for the most part. In those early days of her bereavement, she hardly spoke or made a move which Ansel did not direct. Ansel, fearing for her safety and the unborn child’s, if she should fall in her condition, managed to obtain a covered, two-horse litter for her to ride in. It was not until dusk on Monday, the last day of the year, that she at last began to be aware of her surroundings again.

  She apologized for her withdrawal over supper that night, playing a little with the children and, after they dozed, querying Ansel and the men-at-arms for news while they all huddled around a well-shielded campfire. But when she learned that they were but a few hours from Trurill and her son, she bade them press on. Taking the children into her litter, she lulled them to sleep with a song and the gentle, swaying motion of the conveyance as they journeyed on, later unbraiding her golden hair and brushing it loose down her back as her Aidan liked to see it. The guards had taken up brands to light their way, and their torchlight cast a glaring, ruddy glow on the new-fallen snow.

  They were within an hour of dawn, with russet streaks beginning to finger upward from the eastern horizon behind them, when they made the turnoff toward Trurill. But now, as they approached the castle itself, it was as if another dawn stained the sky before them. As they topped the rise before descending into the rich, narrow valley which was the castle’s demesne, Evaine held aside the curtains of the litter and peered aghast at the flames licking upward on the early morning breeze. Trurill Castle was burning!

  With a gasp, she pulled herself to a sitting position and swung her feet to the ground. Ansel, sitting his horse uncomfortably at the side of the litter, squinted at the burning structure uncertainly, then leaned down in alarm to take Evaine’s arm and steady her as she lurched to her feet beside the litter.

  “Evaine, have a care!”

  Shakily, she clung to his stirrup leather, her face terrible in the torchlight, her hair rising like a halo on the wind.

  “Aidan is down there!” she cried, past tears already in the stillness of her horror. “Ansel, we must find him! They wouldn’t hurt him, would they? He’s just a little boy.”

  But she knew, as she said the words, that her son’s youth would have made no difference to marauders. If prisoners had been their goal, then there was a chance that Aidan was still alive, even though she could not sense him with her mind. But
if the raid had been a retaliatory one, then they would have spared no living thing—family, servants, animals—nothing!

  For what seemed an eternity they stood there, she and Ansel both searching with their Sight for any remaining marauders. Thomas, who was hardly older than Ansel, left his torch with one of his fellows and rode quietly down into the valley. He was gone for some time. When he returned, his face was pale, his leggings and boot darkened along one side where, by the look and smell, he had been sick. He did not want to meet her eyes as he drew rein before her and the others crowded near.

  “Well?” she whispered. “Are they all gone? Is it safe to go down?”

  The man swallowed noisily and looked as if he might be sick again.

  “My lady, don’t go down there. It’s no fit place. It’s nothing you want to see.”

  Slowly Evaine went rigid, hardly daring to ask further yet unable not to.

  “Did you find my son?” she asked. “Did you find Aidan?”

  “Please, my lady, don’t go. They were butchers who came to Trurill.”

  “And Aidan?” Evaine insisted, striding to his horse and laying her hand on the reins as she stared up at him.

  The man bowed his head, a sob catching in his throat. “I couldn’t tell, my lady. It was too dark to see faces. Mercifully, too dark.”

  With a little whimper of dread, she seized his near boot and pulled it out of the stirrup. “Get off. Give me your horse. And stay here with the children until we send it’s safe.”

  As she spoke, the man was obeying, jumping off the animal on the other side and scurrying around to make a stirrup of his clasped hands. Ansel gaped at her, shocked, and urged his horse closer.

  “Evaine, is this wise, in your condition? The child—”

  “What of my other child, my firstborn?” she countered, struggling to raise her bulk into the saddle and settling there with a sigh of relief. “Aidan may be down there. And if he is, he may still be alive. I have to find out.”

  With a shake of his head, Ansel grabbed a torch from one of the guards and moved out in front of her. “All right. Thomas, you and Arik stay here with the litter and the sumpter horses. You can begin moving down into the valley as soon as it’s a little more light, but don’t bring the children inside until I tell you it’s all right.”

  Thomas, who had no desire to see the castle again, nodded vigorously. “Aye, m’lord. You don’t want these little ones to see what’s down there.”

  The children, seven-year-old Rhysel and the baby Tieg, peered sleepily out of the litter, and Evaine blew each of them a kiss.

  “Stay here with Thomas and Arik, darlings,” she said tightly. “They’ll bring you to Mummy as soon as they can.”

  Young Rhysel, golden-haired and wise for all her seven years, gazed up at her mother guilelessly. “Are you going to look for Aidan, Mummy? I don’t think he’s down there.”

  “We’ll see, Rhysel,” she managed to murmur, though her heart sank at the implication of her daughter’s words.

  Then, with a slight wave to the children, she was gathering the reins of Thomas’s chestnut in her cold-numbed hands and kicking the animal into a painful trot down the slope to the valley below, Ansel scurrying to get in front of her in case her horse should slip. Behind them came the other two attendants, each bearing his torch, the four of them making a tight little knot of shadow and fading brightness as they picked their way down the hillside far faster than it was safe to go.

  The first light of true dawn was just beginning to stain the snow around the castle as they approached the gatehouse, but already they could see some of the previous day’s gruesome work. Outside the walls, six or eight mail-clad bodies lay in silent, snow-shrouded heaps where they had been thrown off the castle walls to die on the rocks below. Amid the splintered floes of ice in the moat, several more bodies floated just below the surface, and in one place a bloated face was lodged beneath a clear patch of ice, the eyes open and staring in death. Evaine controlled a shudder and pulled her cloak more closely around her as she urged her horse to take its first steps onto the lowered drawbridge.

  The attackers had burned the castle, in addition to their other bloody work. Timbers of the guardroom above the gatehouse had collapsed in a still-smouldering tangle, nearly blocking one half of the gateway, but it was inside that the fire had done its major work. The roof of the tower keep and great hall were still smouldering, and the barracks, which had been built of timber against one curtain wall, was nothing but a charred heap of support beams, and still burning. The barracks door, barred from the outside, still stood in its jamb, mute evidence of the fate of those who had been inside. Bodies dotted the castleyard, each given a merciful shroud of new snow during the night, but the snow had not been able to cover the cloying stench of burned flesh hanging heavy in the air, or the scent of blood.

  With grim determination, Ansel swung down from his horse and began checking the closest bodies, the hand on the hilt of his sword increasingly white-knuckled as he and the two guards found death after death, each more grisly than the last.

  Several of the men had been stripped and dragged behind horses, so that there was scarcely an unbroken bone or a scrap of skin intact on the cold, bloody bodies. A venerable, silver-haired old priest had had his hands and feet cut off and his eyes gouged out, and had been left to die of blood loss in the snow—which was, perhaps, one of the more merciful forms of death.

  In the kitchen yard, Ansel came upon the bodies of two servant girls who had been raped and then split open from crotch to breastbone with swords. One of them had been big with child, and the dead infant lay in a pool of congealed blood beside its mother, nearly cut in two by the same blow which had ended her life.

  He was violently ill at that, retching repeatedly onto the snow until there was nothing more in his stomach to vomit up. As he regained control of his rebellious gut, wiping his face with a handful of clean snow to try to clear his head, he thought he had seen the worst. Then he spotted a thin young form standing more or less upright in the yard before the stable. Somehow he knew it was Aidan, even from that distance and in the dim light.

  He whipped off his cloak and managed to wrap the small, naked body in its folds before Evaine saw him, to ease the pathetic little form from the stake which had impaled it and lay the boy out on a clean patch of snow. Only the face was unmarred, the pale golden hair riffling slightly in the cold morning breeze which began to rise even as Evaine fell heavily to her knees beside her son. Though the eyes were closed, at least sparing her that, the body was frozen in the configuration of its terrible death, the white skin of chest and limbs criss-crossed with the marks of the scourging he had suffered before his murderers went on to other sport. From this angle, Evaine could not see the damage done by the stake, but Ansel was not quick enough to place his body between her and the implement of her son’s death, and he saw her blanch as she glanced at the bloody wooden upright and saw the slick of his blood frozen around the base.

  He could not bear to look at her as she bent over the boy, her golden hair shifting like a pale, metallic curtain around them as she took the still-beautiful face between her hands and stared at the closed eyes. Still fighting down a terrible sickness of heart as well as of body, he looked away, another part of him wondering why Aidan had been done to death in this manner, and here, in the stableyard.

  Then, in the shadows at the entry to what had been the stables, he saw why. Stunned, his jaw working convulsively in his effort to maintain control, he rose and crossed slowly to the stable doorway. Now he knew what had happened to Adrian MacLean.

  If the captors of the castle had been brutal with Aidan and the castle’s garrison, they had been savage with the castle’s lord. They had beaten him, like Aidan, but that was the very least of the atrocities to which they had subjected poor Adrian. He had been stripped and flogged, branded with hot irons over a great deal of his torso, and even his eyelids deftly removed so that he must see every further act of wanton cruelty
to the bitter end. They had tied ropes around his wrists and ankles and lashed him to the uprights of the stable entrance, hoisting him off his feet so that he hung spreadeagled a few feet off the ground. Whether they had castrated him before or after opening his belly to let his innards spill out, Ansel could not tell.

  In a terrible flash of insight, he guessed at their intentions: degradation and torture for the lord of the castle, both in his own person and by being forced to watch the torture and slow death of the boy they had taken for his son—for Aidan and the still-missing Camber MacLean were similar enough in appearance to be brothers rather than cousins.

  With a hoarse cry of outrage, he crossed the remaining steps to the stable entrance and drew his sword, to begin hacking at the ropes which bound Adrian’s ankles and wrists. When the last rope was severed, and the frozen corpse fell to the bloody ground below, he turned and raced back to where Evaine still knelt with the body of her dead son cradled against her swollen abdomen and began hacking at the stake, his breath sobbing in his lungs, until the stake was chopped in two and lay in a pile of wood chips and blood-reddened snow. Then he sank to his knees and wept, his hands braced on the quillons of the sword and his head bowed in bitter grief.

  When he looked up, Evaine was recovered sufficiently to begin looking around dazedly. Bartholomew, the oldest of their men-at-arms, had removed his cloak and spread it over Adrian’s body. Damon, the other guard, was checking a pair of corpses lying near the ruined gatehouse, but then Ansel saw him look up at the raised portcullis and freeze for just an instant, then scramble to his feet and gaze upward into the shadows with a look of new horror on his face.

  “Lord Ansel!” the man’s cry came, almost strangled in its emotion.

  Ansel lurched to his feet and ran to Damon’s side, following his upturned gaze high among the smouldering beams of the collapsed guardroom floor. A pair of naked legs dangled, the toes flexing jerkily on one bruised and bloody foot. Up a little higher, he thought he could see a small white hand outstretched at an odd angle, the fingers cramped and clawlike and also twitching.