In the King's Service Page 2

  He shook his head, heaving a sigh, and the two women exchanged troubled glances.

  “He isn’t a bishop yet,” Michon said, in a darkling tone that suggested the matter might not be the foregone conclusion everyone else was assuming.

  Sief shot him a sharp glance, but his reply was unexpectedly mild.

  “No, he isn’t. And it won’t happen tomorrow, or even next week. But whatever happens to Alexander Darby, there must be no trail that leads back to any of us. Just keep that in mind.”

  Michon gave a noncommittal shrug, and Sief went on.

  “In the meantime, we have more immediate matters to discuss. I gather that all of you are now acquainted with the recommendation regarding the young Duke of Corwyn?”

  He jutted his chin toward the document lying between Seisyll and Vivienne, who both glanced at it with some distaste.

  “He isn’t the duke yet,” the latter said, looking faintly disapproving. “Not until he turns twenty-five, and has proven his loyalty to Donal of Gwynedd.” Her fair brow furrowed. “Are we really proposing that he be fostered to the Duc du Joux? And would the king allow him to go?”

  “I believe he could be persuaded,” Sief replied. “And what better haven for a known Deryni who is destined for a ducal coronet in Gwynedd?”

  “It’s true,” Seisyll agreed. “Besides, Gwynedd has no other Deryni of high rank—and the current Duc du Joux has spent a lifetime cultivating the perception that he is the most harmless of Deryni. He would pass that survival skill to young Ahern—as he did to Morian ap Lewys,” he added, with a nod to Sief. “I daresay that your wife’s brother would not be where he is today, a trusted officer of the Crown of Gwynedd, if he had not learned to be circumspect regarding what he is.”

  “Morian also has his father’s intelligence and gifts,” Michon pointed out. “Say what you like about Lewys ap Norfal, but he was one of our best and brightest—alas, lacking in self-restraint.”

  “Are you suggesting that young Ahern de Corwyn is similarly gifted?” Sief asked.

  Michon shrugged. “I do not know. Stevana de Corwyn was very much cast in the mold of her father and grandfather. Keryell went against our instructions in seizing her, in marrying her by force, but he, too, carries a strong bloodline. Once Ahern has come into his inheritance, I would hope to see him spend some time at Nur Sayyid, perhaps—or even at Rhanamé or at Djellarda with the Knights of the Anvil. But he is only eleven now. Time enough for that.”

  “Indeed,” Barrett said. “Where is he now?”

  “Back in Coroth, since Twelfth Night,” Michon replied. “Keryell sent him and his sisters to the Orsal’s court for several years after their mother died. You’ll recall that Sobbon is cousin-kin to Keryell’s mother. Among all those von Horthy children, I doubt Sobbon much noticed three extras.”

  “Was there not a prior marriage,” Dominy said thoughtfully, “and a son by that marriage?”

  “Cynfyn,” Vivienne supplied promptly. “His mother was a daughter of one of the Torenthi dukes. But he died young, leaving Keryell without an heir—a riding mishap, while returning from his knighting.”

  “Which was what impelled Keryell to go seeking a new bride and a new heir,” Michon supplied, shaking his head. “Unfortunately for us, his loss coincided with the passing of Stevana’s grandfather, Duke Stiofan—and the rest, as they say, is history.”

  “What of the daughters?” Vivienne asked, a frown furrowing her fair brow.

  Seisyll shrugged. “After Ahern, the eldest—Alyce is her name—is heiress presumptive to Corwyn—though I’m sure that Keryell has set aside dower lands for her, in her own right. Her brother will be the next duke, when he turns twenty-five.”

  “Unless, like Keryell’s previous heir, he suffers a fatal mishap,” Barrett pointed out. “These things do happen.”

  “Aye, of course they do,” Seisyll said. “Which is why the king will have a say in whom she—and her sister, too—eventually wed. He will not gamble with the fate of a duchy so rich as Corwyn, in case Ahern should not inherit.” He swept them with his gaze. “This means that the king must approve their eventual marriages—which eliminates any suitor from Torenth, for Donal would never consent to Corwyn lands passing into Torenthi control. One of the Forcinn states, perhaps.”

  “He could always pack them off to a convent,” Sief murmured.

  Dominy glanced at him frostily. “With your Jessilde, Sief?”

  “It was her choice,” Sief shot back.

  “As if you gave her any other!”

  “Peace!” Seisyll interjected. “We have often done things we would rather not have done. Never forget that we serve a higher cause than our own desires.”

  His admonition left a tense silence in its wake, only lifting as Michon cleared his throat.

  “On a more constructive note, I suggest that we return to the recommendation regarding young Ahern,” he said. “His position, when he comes of age, will be of immense importance—but only if he can, indeed, convince the king that he is worthy to take up the title of his great-grandfather.”

  “And pray that it no more passes through the female line,” Seisyll muttered. “I, for one, shall be greatly relieved when he’s grown and married and has an heir. At least Stevana had a boy, God rest her, and blood is blood. . . .”

  Chapter 1

  “Is it not a grief unto death, when a companion and friend is turned to an enemy?”

  —ECCLESIASTICUS 37:2

  FAR from where the Camberian Council sat in secret session, crafting their careful, deliberate plans for the future of their race, the wife of one of its members lay propped amid the pillows of their curtained and canopied bed and waited for the nurse to bring her infant son for feeding. Two days after his birth, Lady Jessamy MacAthan was feeling far stronger, but both the pregnancy and the delivery of this latest bairn had taken more out of her than any of her previous children, even the stillborn ones.

  Of course, she was older than when she had birthed any of the others—past forty now—and with a growing history of miscarriages and stillbirths. She had not even been certain she could conceive again, much less carry a child to term.

  But this child was important, destined for a secret but very special role in the future unfolding for Gwynedd and its kings to come. It was too soon to tell precisely what young Krispin’s magical potential would prove to be, but his parentage ensured that he would be no ordinary boy.

  The nursery door opened, and Mistress Anjelica brought in the fretting, wiggling bundle that was her son, shushing and cooing over him as she laid him in his mother’s arms.

  “He ’ s very hungry, milady,” the woman said, as Jessamy put him to her breast.

  “Yes, I can see that,” Jessamy replied, smiling. “And greedy, too. He’s like a wee limpet. Thank heaven he hasn’t any teeth! But you needn’t sit with me. I know you must have things that need doing. Are the girls asleep?”

  “Yes, milady.”

  “Good. I’ll call you when we’re finished.”

  She readjusted the child in the hollow of her arm and settled back to let him feed as the nurse retired, allowing the sweet lethargy of his suckling to drift her into idle remembrance, wondering what Sief would say, if he were ever to penetrate past her shields to learn the truth—though Jessamy would resist him to the death, were he ever to try.

  She had never wanted or intended to marry Sief, who was sixteen years her senior. But her mother had died when she was but ten, and the loss of her father the following year had left her in the hands of guardians who insisted on the match: powerful Deryni, who had feared what Lewys ap Norfal’s daughter might become, and had sought to minimize the danger by seeing her safely wed to one of their own. Though she had never come to regard Sief with more than resigned acceptance, she loved the children he had given her; and she had learned to live with the arrangement because she must, and to wear the façade of a dutiful wife, because outward compliance allowed her at least an illusion of freedom here at the
court of Gwynedd—if only Sief knew how free. Her love of her children was one of the honest things about her life, as was her affection for the queens she had served here in Rhemuth for the past thirty years.

  By now, memories of any other home had mostly receded to a distant blur, dangerous though it was to be Deryni in Rhemuth. Even before Rhemuth, her parents had never stayed long in one place, lest their Deryni nature be discovered—and Lewys ap Norfal had never been good at hiding what he was for long. Had they lived in Gwynedd those early years, she now thought it unlikely that Lewys would have survived long enough to sire any children. Even so, he had been notorious among his own kind, and had met his end attempting magic usually deemed impossible, even among the most accomplished of their race.

  Putting an end to that nomad existence, Sief had brought her to Gwynedd’s capital immediately after their hurried marriage, giving the care of his frightened child-bride into the hands of the king’s daughter-in-law, the gentle and sensitive Princess Dulchesse, who had been the wife of then-Crown Prince Donal Blaine Haldane.

  That pairing, at least, had prospered, for the two women had liked one another from the start. Dulchesse, but one-and-twenty herself and already six years married, had yet to give her husband an heir, but she had gladly taken the orphaned Jessamy under her wing and assumed the role of elder sister and surrogate mother, giving her the fierce protection of her royal station as the still-hopeful mother of kings. Indeed, in all but name, the princess had been functioning as Gwynedd’s queen for all her married life; for Roisian of Meara, King Malcolm’s queen, had withdrawn to a convent the same year Dulchesse came to court. The rift had come the previous year, after Malcolm was obliged to lead an expedition into rebellious Meara and execute several members of Roisian’s family. One of them had been Roisian’s twin sister.

  Alas for Sief, placing his young bride in the household of the crown princess had not turned out at all as he expected; but by the time he realized that he had become the victim of feminine solidarity, it was too late to change his mind.

  “You may be certain that I shall school her to a wife you may be proud of, my lord,” Dulchesse had told the disbelieving Sief, on learning that he planned to allow Jessamy but a year’s grace before consummating their marriage, “but you shall not touch her until her fourteenth birthday. She’s but a child. Give her the chance to finish growing up.”

  “Your Highness, she is a woman grown,” Sief had protested. “She has begun her monthly courses—”

  “Yes, and if she should conceive so young, you are apt to lose both wife and child. You shall wait.”

  “Your Highness—”

  “Must I ask the king to tell you this?” she retorted, stamping her little foot.

  Before such fierce determination, Sief had been left with no recourse but to bow before the wishes of his future queen.

  Accordingly, Jessamy had been allowed to spend those stolen days of extended girlhood as a pampered pet of the princess’s household, acquiring the skills and graces expected of a knight’s lady and carefully beginning to craft the façade that she hoped would protect her in the future. For Sief had warned her, on that numb journey from Coroth, that her very life would be in danger, were it to be discovered at court that she was Deryni.

  “The king will guess,” he had told her. “I know he has surmised what I am, though we have never spoken of it openly. But others will not be so tolerant, should they even suspect what we are.”

  “If it is so dangerous,” she had replied, “then why do you abide in Rhemuth?”

  “Because my work is there.”

  When he did not elaborate, she had dared to lift her chin to him in faint challenge.

  “Did they order you to serve the king?”

  His cold appraisal in response had caused her to drop her gaze nervously, pretending profound interest in a strand of her pony’s mane.

  “Jessamy, I shall say this only once,” he had finally said in a very low voice. “I know that your father set certain controls in place to protect you, as I—and others—have also done. But to protect you fully would be to leave you helpless.

  “Therefore, I must trust you in this, and trust in your good sense and the training you have received. I know it was not your wish to marry me, but I cannot think that you resent that enough to wish me dead, and yourself as well—which would very likely be the outcome, were we discovered. You know that I tell you only the truth. This is for your protection as well as my own.”

  Indeed, there could be no doubt that he did speak the truth—her powers confirmed that—and it never, ever occurred to her to betray him, little though she cared for her situation. Nor was she ever tempted to unmask any of the other Deryni who passed through the court from time to time—though, as her affection for the crown princess grew, she came to realize that she would act against even her own kind, should they pose any danger to the royal family.

  But for better or for worse, most of the other Deryni she detected were old acquaintances of her father, a few of whom had even been present in Coroth on that fateful night. Instinctively, she gave them wide berth. The ones who came to worry her far more were the ones she could not detect.

  Recognition of this deficiency in her abilities made her determined to rectify it, though she dared not go to Sief for the training she knew she needed. Fortunately, her studies with her father had been sufficiently advanced that she was able to shield her true intentions from Sief and begin formulating her own plans for the future, though she knew that she needed to know more. Unfortunately, she was still a child, albeit an exceedingly well-educated one for her age and sex. But at least Sief mostly left her alone for those next three years.

  Once she had settled into the routine of the royal household, she had begun looking for ways to further her education—at least the conventional part of it. When she let it be known that she possessed a fair copy hand and read and spoke several classical languages, she soon found herself being summoned to the royal library to assist in cataloging the king’s manuscript collection. There she came to the especial attention of Father Mungo, the aged chaplain to the royal household, who was taken with her learning and her willingness to learn (and most assuredly did not know that she was Deryni), and soon began giving her private tutorials.

  She shortly discovered that both the king and the crown prince frequented the library on a regular basis—and thereby gained permission to spend time there whenever her duties permitted. Further honing of her esoteric talents would have to wait until she could figure out a way to gain access to teachers, or at least to texts, but in the meantime, Father Mungo’s lessons and her own explorations in the royal library filled the time and gave her more tools for later on.

  But she had known that her reprieve must end. On the day of her fourteenth birthday, on a sunny morning in early autumn, she was obliged to stand with Sief before the Archbishop of Rhemuth and reaffirm her marriage vows, in the presence of Malcolm and his new queen, the Lady Síle, Donal and Dulchesse, and all the royal household, for Sief was well regarded at court, and all agreed that he had shown remarkable forbearance in waiting three years for his bride. Reassured by Dulchesse, and gently briefed regarding what to expect when Sief finally came to her bed, Jessamy had endured her wedding night with reasonable grace.

  She had conceived within months, shortly after the new queen was delivered of a prince christened Richard. Her own firstborn, a boy also named Sief, would have been a playmate for the new prince, but the infant died hardly a week after birth. Jessamy had not yet turned fifteen.

  More pregnancies had followed at barely two-year intervals after that: a succession of mostly healthy girls, stillborn boys, and early miscarriages. The ones who did not survive were allowed burial in a corner of the royal crypt, for the childless Dulchesse began to regard them as the children she would never have. Queen Síle had also come to mourn Jessamy’s losses—and Dulchesse’s barrenness—and buried several children of her own, in time. The three women had visite
d the little graves regularly until Queen Síle’s death, the same year as King Malcolm’s. Dulchesse, finally queen at last, had died but two years ago. Now Jessamy laid flowers on the other women’s graves as well as those of the children, sometimes in the company of the new queen, Richeldis, who had quickly borne King Donal his long-awaited heir.

  For Jessamy herself, there had been only a few pregnancies after the birth of Jesiana, her nine-year-old, and only one brought to term until Krispin: yet another girl, now four, called Seffira, whom Jessamy loved dearly. Though Sief was mostly indifferent to his daughters, his desire for a son was still strong, and he continued to visit her bed on a tiresomely regular basis, despite the apparent waning of her fertility. Sometimes she wondered whether her own antipathy had kept her from quickening—especially when this latest child had been so easy to conceive. Young Krispin, however, had been greatly desired—though not in the sense that her husband supposed.

  His very begetting had been profoundly different from any of the others—no resentful and resigned yielding to marital duty, but welcome fruit of a well-planned series of quick, focused couplings that were timed to the most propitious few days of her monthly cycle, accomplished quite dispassionately amid briefly lifted skirts in a shadowed upper corridor of the castle, where others rarely went—or bent over a library table, or braced against a hay bale far at the back of the royal stables, surrounded by the warm, dusty fragrance of lazing horses. Her pulse quickened at the very thought of those days, though it was the daring of what she had done rather than lust that excited her.

  Within days she had known she was with child, and thought she could pinpoint exactly when conception had occurred, though she let Sief think that it had come of their usual, more conventional conjugal encounters. The memory stirred a pleasant aching in her loins, quite apart from the soreness after birth, intensified by the sweet suckling of the babe at her breast.