Dhugal grinned and nodded, turning his gaze idly back to the door. “I think so.” He paused a moment, then went on. “When do you think they’ll come for us?”
“I have no idea.”
“Will they still want to burn us, do you think?”
Kelson sighed. “I don’t know that, either. We can’t allow that, though, even if we have to kill every one of them to prevent it.”
“Aye, you’re right.” Dhugal stretched his legs out in front of him and sighed again. “I wonder if learning who you are will make any difference.”
“Do you really think they’ve even heard of me?” Kelson returned.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone’s heard of Kelson of Gwynedd.”
“Not if they’ve been cut off from the rest of civilization,” Kelson replied, “and that’s certainly possible, judging by what the countryside looked like, where you and I went into the river. I have no idea where we are, but I can’t imagine such a devotion to Saint Camber surviving, after all these years, in any place you or I have been.”
“Hmmm, that’s probably true.”
“And remember the armor in the tombs? Some of that looked old enough to be from Camber’s time. I don’t know what we’re dealing with, Dhugal, but it’s different from anything we’ve ever encountered before.”
Just how different was about to be made abundantly clear, as the bar lifted on the other side of the door and both young men scrambled to their feet.
“Th’ Quorial will see ye now,” said Bened-Cyann. “Ye’d best come quietly.”
Sunlight flooded the room beyond, also revealing the bowmen, poised as before, and men waiting with ropes to bind their hands.
And in a royally appointed tower room at Rhemuth Castle, Rothana of Nur Hallaj waited for another binding—a band of polished gold to bind her finger, rather than ropes. It was her wedding day, and at noon, she would marry Conall Haldane and become Crown Princess of Gwynedd.
It would be soon. She tipped her head backward as a tiring woman finished lacing the back of her pale damask gown, letting another put the final touches to her hair, unbound and shimmering nearly to her hips in a rich, blue-black ripple. Tears started to well in her eyes, threatening to smudge the careful lines her little Jacan maid had painted at the base of her lashes to emphasize the long almond shape of her eyes, but Rothana sternly bade the tears recede.
She had cried enough in the past three weeks. She had no tears left. She had nearly made herself ill in the beginning, though she had dared tell no one the cause of her misery. Father Ambros knew by now, of course, but he would tell no one. Even he had agreed that her decision, while not the one that would have eased her heart, gave noble tribute to a lost love as well as to royal duty.
She reminded herself again that what she was doing she did by her own choice, for the sake both of Kelson’s memory and of the kingdom whose queen he had asked her to be. It helped, but only a little. The day before, witnessed by Mother Heloise, she had signed the documents necessary for Archbishop Cardiel to release her from her vows—the last such formality. Neither abbess nor archbishop had pressed her for her reasons, and she had volunteered none. It would only have served to reopen wounds she was trying very hard to close. Afterwards, with only Cardiel and Conall’s mother and brothers present, she and Conall had exchanged betrothal vows, and he had given her a ruby ring.
“It’s time, my lady,” said Sylvie, her maid, bringing her coronet and veil.
The fragile silk was as pale as sunlight and nearly transparent, shot with fine gold, its circular hem picked out in tiny seed-pearls. Queen Meraude had worn the veil to marry Nigel, nearly twenty years ago, and had given it to Rothana the night before, tears in her eyes, with the whispered hope that Rothana’s marriage with Conall might bring even half the joy that Meraude had known in her marriage with Nigel. Rothana would have preferred a less revealing veil done in the Eastern manner, such as that to which she was accustomed, but she would not have dreamed of adding to Meraude’s grief by declining the gift. The veil floated almost like spider silk as Sylvie let it settle over Rothana’s head, just brushing her shoulders all around. The coronet Sylvie set on her brow to hold the veil in place was the same she had worn for Kelson’s knighting; but Rothana tried not to think about that. She was about to become a princess of Gwynedd and would one day be its queen. She was wedding the land as well as its future king.
“You look beautiful, my lady,” Sylvie whispered, holding up a mirror. “The prince will be so proud!”
Rothana made herself smile and nod.
“Thank you, Sylvie.”
She glanced down at the ruby on her finger, the only jewel she owned save her coronet, and twisted at it nervously as she raised her eyes toward the room’s single window. A shaft of sunlight illumined the prie-dieu where she had spent so many hours in the past few weeks, and she stood up slowly, folding the front of her veil back from her face.
“I’ll be with you very shortly, ladies,” she said, moving toward it in a rustle of damask. “Please wait for me outside.”
She sank down on the kneeler and crossed herself, bowing her head over clasped hands until she was sure they were gone and she was alone. Only then did she pull the folded lump of a lace-edged handkerchief from her bosom and close it between her hands, fingertips pressed against her lips as she bowed her head again.
Dear, dear Kelson, she mused, closing her eyes to picture his face as she had seen it last, ’tis time to say good-bye. You taught me that there is a duty beyond faith and brought me to love this kingdom you had loved so well. You taught me the honor I might do it and you, by agreeing to become its queen. I set aside my own desires, and gladly, for the chance to rule at your side.
She opened her eyes and cocked her head with a sad wistful-ness as she unfolded the linen square, uncovering Sidana’s ring, and laid a forefinger across its circle.
And now you are gone, as she who first wore this ring is gone; and I can never be your queen, just as she can never be your queen.
But I can still be Gwynedd’s queen, Kelson, as I told you I would be, and I can be a queen for our Deryni. I think you would want that for this land. Will you mind terribly if I am also Conall’s queen, as well as Gwynedd’s? He needs me, Kelson. And I think he is not made of the same stuff that you were made of, though I shall try to see that he does his best.
And so, farewell, my lord and my love. I go now to wed a different Haldane than either of us had planned. And if I am to be true to him, as I know you would wish, then I must say goodbye to what might have been.
She swallowed back the last tears, then rose, dry-eyed now, to move around the prie-dieu and into the window embrasure. One of the hinged panes of the mullioned window was ajar, and she pushed it farther out. The moat sparkled far below, sunlit and still, and she paused only to press the ring to her lips a final time before tossing it out in a long, curving arc, to disappear with hardly a splash.
When it was done, she closed the shields on her mind as she closed the window of the room, for she was not ready to share that intimacy with her husband-to-be—not yet. But her head was high as she turned to go to her bridegroom, for she was a princess of Nur Hallaj, bred to her duty. There would be no more tears.
She had light, gentle words for her maids as she joined them in the corridor, indulging them while they fussed with her veil and train and straightened errant strands of hair. She was calm and resigned as she let herself be led to the chapel royal, where the marriage would take place.
Mother Heloise was waiting at the church door—all of her “family” that could be summoned on such short notice. Later, there would be a more formal ceremony, but for now, this must suffice. Rothana knelt to kiss the abbess’ hand a last time and receive her blessing before taking the old woman’s arm to walk down the short aisle.
Queen Meraude, her brother Saer, and Conall’s younger brothers, Rory and Payne, were waiting with the archbishop, all in Haldane crimson for the affair, and Conall himsel
f looked eerily like Kelson, just before he turned to watch her approach. He wore a sumptuous tunic of quartered crimson and gold, powdered with tiny lions, Kelson’s lion brooch clasped at his throat and the Haldane sword bright and potent at his waist. Rothana smiled as she put her hand in his.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Do no secret thing before a stranger: for thou knowest not what he will bring forth.
—Ecclesiasticus 8:18
“Since it was a Haldane king who rescinded Saint Camber’s canonization, and Haldane kings have allowed the persecution of his people to continue, you should understand why your mere identity does little to incline us to leniency, Kelson Haldane. Your circumstances are lamentable, but a sacrilege still has been committed, whether or not you intended it.”
The speaker was a thickset individual in his potent mid-forties, previously identified as one Brother Michael. He was also the spokesman for the Quorial, which Kelson and Dhugal had learned was the eight-person governing body of the village, called Saint Kyriell’s. The man had an unquestionable air of authority about him, dark eyes gazing unwaveringly out of a fleshy but powerful face. The hands toying with a quill pen were square and callused with hard work and made the pen look very fragile. He bore a token tonsuring, a small but precise shaven area no larger than two fingers in breadth, but the rest of his hair was long and drawn back in a thin, tightly plaited braid, untouched by grey. His garb was the same as that of the deceased Sagart—a dark grey hooded robe and scapular girt with a knotted cord of red and blue—and Kelson had concluded that he, like Sagart, must be one of the priestly coisrigte.
One of the guards standing to either side of Kelson and Dhugal asked a question in the quick, staccato dialect that even Dhugal could not understand, and that sparked another round of heated debate among the four men and four women of the Quorial—which also included Bened and Jilyan, who were eventually revealed to be brother and sister. An archer called Kylan, another soldier whose name neither Kelson nor Dhugal caught, and two older women, perhaps in their fifties or sixties, also sat on the Quorial, as well as a young girl called Rhidian, who looked to be barely into puberty. Like the other women, she, too, wore a grey robe, but no wimple, her straight brown hair caught in a tidy knot at the nape of her neck.
Kelson had no idea how long the interview had been going, though he knew it must be several hours by now. Since his and Dhugal’s arrival, the circle of sunlight streaming through the smoke-vent above the hall’s central hearth had crept some distance across the floor of beaten earth. By the angle of the beam of sunshine, he judged it must be just past noon, but the windowless hall was dark and gloomy, lit only by torches. A workmanlike lattice of well-hewn rafters supported a tightly thatched roof, low overhead to keep heat from dissipating in cold weather, and the plastered walls were whitewashed to make the most of the torchlight. Just in front of the low stools where Kelson and Dhugal sat, the members of the Quorial were ranged behind a long trestle table, raised one step on a low dais.
The folk of the village had gathered to hear the proceedings, too—some fifty or sixty strong, seated on long benches just behind the prisoners—likely most of the inhabitants of Saint Kyriell’s, Kelson suspected. Nearly all of them wore at least something that was grey, and some were dressed in it exclusively. That oddity, added to Brother Michael’s presidency over the Quorial, lent a religious aura to the gathering that made Kelson more than a little uneasy.
Nor were he and Dhugal really certain what was actually happening. Brother Michael had informed them that they were not precisely on trial, but it was as close to one as either king or border lord wanted to come. Much of the proceeding was carried on in the quick, slurred dialect that only Dhugal understood even vaguely, so he and Kelson had to maintain constant rapport—difficult enough without physical contact—for the king to have any notion what was being said. That was doubly disturbing, since several of the men involved in their initial capture testified at length and went on to describe the damages done to the tombs in great detail.
It sounded worse, the way they told it, than what Kelson and Dhugal remembered doing. Eventually, the two were given the opportunity to repeat their stories, but they could read nothing beyond the solemn expressions of their captors other than the impression that all of them acted in what they believed to be justice regarding the seriousness of the crimes committed. It was not until Kelson had finished his third testimony, reiterating his innocence of malicious intent, that he realized someone was Truth-Reading him.
Dhugal! Someone else in here is Deryni! he sent, just before slamming his shields fully closed.
Dhugal gave a physical start, though he covered it very well with an apparent coughing fit for diversion, and Kelson ventured a wary probe in the direction of the dais. The entire area had become vaguely blurred to his psychic sight. At least one of the Quorial was Deryni and was shielding the others.
“We are aware of what you are,” the girl Rhidian said, speaking for the first time. “We have known since you entered.” Her voice was lower-pitched than Kelson had expected, and her eyes were a pale amber-brown, almost straw-colored. “And now you know, because we have chosen to reveal it, that some of us are Deryni as well. That you are Deryni only makes our decision more difficult, however, because the fact remains that you have committed a crime against our people that customarily demands the death penalty. And yet, we recognize now that you intended no sacrilege in the tuam coisrigte.”
Kelson drew a deep, careful breath. Rhidian was the source of most of the shielding he now perceived over the dais. That she and at least a few of the others were also Deryni only made his and Dhugal’s decision more difficult, too—for if they must try to fight their way out of here with magic …
But perhaps there was another option. If Rhidian had read the truth of their statements …
“We therefore grant you an alternative to the stake,” Rhidian went on, her eyes never wavering from Kelson’s. “A chance not only to win your freedom, but to redeem your Haldane line in the eyes of Saint Camber.”
She paused, as if waiting for him to speak, but Kelson did not know what to say. When it became obvious that she was not going to speak until he did, Kelson glanced at Dhugal, taut and also waiting for him to make the next move, then coughed and returned his attention to the girl.
“Do you speak for the Quorial, my lady?” he asked softly.
She inclined her head slightly. “I do.”
“May I ask if you also claim to speak for Saint Camber?”
No emotion showed on her calm, childlike face, but several of the others murmured aside to one another and shifted uneasily in their seats.
“We are the Servants of Saint Camber,” Rhidian said after a short pause. “We have kept his memory and veneration in secret for nearly two hundred years. We do not claim to speak for him, but we believe that, from time to time, he speaks to those who trust in him and he makes his will known.”
“I see,” Kelson said. “And has he made his will known to you concerning us?”
“No, but I have undergone the cruaidh-dheuchainn and seen his face,” Rhidian said enigmatically. “If you would be pardoned for what you have done, you must do the same.”
What’s a cr—whatever she said? Kelson sent to Dhugal.
I dunno and I don’t think I want to find out, Dhugal returned. Some kind of trial?
“You have seen his face,” Kelson repeated aloud, trying to buy a little time. “How, if I told you that Dhugal and I have already seen Saint Camber’s face from time to time?”
The murmur of consternation that rippled through the audience and the Quorial threatened to drown him out, so Kelson did not attempt to say anything more. After a moment, the commotion died down and Rhidian looked at him again, with a disturbingly discerning gaze coming from a child.
“If you were so bold as to tell me such a thing,” Rhidian answered, as if there had been no interruption, “I would say that you must prove your claim upon your body, by submi
tting to the cruaidh-dheuchainn, the periculum, the ordeal.”
“And what is that?” Kelson returned.
“A ritual procedure. You will see, in due time.”
Uneasy, Kelson swallowed.
“And why must we undergo this—ordeal?” he asked. “You’re Deryni. You know that I’m not lying about our contacts with Camber.”
“You are not lying, no,” Rhidian answered. “You believe that you speak the truth. But the mind can deceive. Our way is surer. When you recount what you experience in the cruaidh-dheuchainn, we will know whether your contact has been genuine.”
“And what if we refuse to go through the cru—the ordeal?”
“Not the two of you, but you alone, Kelson Haldane.”
“No!” Dhugal spoke up. “If it’s to be only one of us, let me go! He was badly injured. I’m stronger.”
As Rhidian’s glance flicked to him, then to the others of the Quorial, Brother Michael shook his head.
“No. It must be the Haldane.”
“Why?” Dhugal demanded. “I’ve felt Camber’s presence, too.”
“So you believe,” Michael said impatiently. “However, it is out of the question.”
“And how,” Kelson interjected, “if I were to refuse?”
“Then you both would burn for your crimes,” Bened spoke up, “though it would grieve us to consign fellow Deryni to the fire. But the desecration of Sagart’s tomb demands a sacrifice in recompense—either by the flames or by the cruaidh-dheuchainn.”
“He will not refuse,” Rhidian broke in smoothly. “He is the Ard Righ, the high king, duly anointed and consecrated, oath-bound to protect his own. Honor demands that he not place his own safety over that of his vassal or allow his vassal to take a place of danger in his stead. Furthermore, if everything else is as he claims, then Kelson Haldane can, indeed, restore the Blessed Camber to his rightful veneration.”
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