The Bastard Prince Read online

  Masking her pleasure, she moved a little closer to the table stacked with books and ran a finger along a spine stamped with gold. Donal knew she could read and write, but he had no notion that her passion for learning probably surpassed his own—one of the many legacies of her beloved parents. That she had put it aside in a greater cause, he probably would never know. All her recent years had been spent trying to absorb the practical knowledge and training to enable her to function as she did now.

  “Pretty words, Master Donal,” she said softly, a smile still playing at her lips as she glanced up at him. “But if you think to deter me from my errand with compliments, I must warn you that I will not be swayed. I come at the queen’s behest. My lady bids me bring her the book of Lady Kyla’s poetry, whose binding was to be repaired. Is it ready?”

  Ducking his head in happy affirmation, Donal scurried over to the wide library table and sorted quickly through several stacks, finally selecting a vermilion-bound volume from among the rich jewel-tones of leather bindings.

  “Aye, here it is.” He burnished the book’s spine against a sleeve, then held it out for her inspection as she came nearer. “Brother Lorenzo brought it back only yesterday.”

  As she took the book from him, it was no difficult thing to brush his hand with hers. The instant of contact reinstated controls used several times before, sufficient to forestall any possible interference.

  “Thank you, Donal,” she whispered. “The queen will be pleased. Now go back to work and have a lovely dream.” She briefly closed her hand around his slack one, still poised from having given over the book. “Remember only that I came to fetch this. Go now.”

  He turned without a word and went back to his desk, settling on his stool to gaze dreamily out the window, his chin propped on one hand, a grey-mottled quill slack in his other. As she opened the library door to slip back out, he was already sinking into the pleasant memory of an old daydream—a gentle fantasy just wishful enough to ensure that the fastidious Donal would never dream of mentioning it to anyone, even a prying Custodes confessor. Pleasant enough for Donal, harmless enough for both of them, and far less intrusive than other measures she might have employed to divert his notice of whatever he might hear from the room next door.

  The corridor outside was still deserted as she closed the door quietly behind her. She cast with her powers in both directions, but no one was about. Hugging close the volume of poetry that was her ostensible reason for being in this part of the castle at all, she moved silently to the next door to the left. She already knew the room beyond was unoccupied, but as she gently turned the latch and slipped inside, she wondered what she would do if someone were assigned permanent quarters here. The location would be ideal for some avid scholar.

  As she always did, she breathed a faint sigh when she had eased the door closed behind her, her visual inspection confirming that the small, lime-washed chamber remained disused. A sheen of dust blurred the surfaces of the table and chairs set before the cold hearth in one corner, and the mattress on the simple bed remained folded up against the head, hard against the wall to the right of the door. Despite the austerity of the room thus stripped, she could almost imagine the man who briefly had occupied this room and guarded what it contained, even though she had never met him.

  His name had been Etienne de Courcy, and only a handful of men and women knew, or would ever know, how he had aided the Haldane cause. Because he had been loyal to King Javan, the great lords had executed him following the coup that put Rhys Michael on the throne, but they had never guessed that he was Deryni; never guessed that it was he who had spirited away the Deryni wife and daughter of a slain Healer during those first hours of confusion.

  And though he might have stayed with them in safety, it had been Etienne’s own choice to return, his powers and memories blocked, to let himself be captured, tortured, and eventually killed rather than risk that the great lords might discover how Deryni had been inserted into the midst of Javan’s court. For that, and to keep this avenue open, Etienne de Courcy had given his life. Guiscard, his elder son, had also died in the Haldane cause, fighting at the side of King Javan.

  Breathing a silent prayer of thanksgiving for the lives of both de Courcys, two more martyrs for the survival of her race, Rhysel moved quietly into the center of the room, trying to disturb the dust as little as possible. Stepping onto the only square flagstone for a full arm’s length all around, she braced her feet and bowed her head over the book clasped against her breast. As she let fall her shields, she felt the powerful tingle of a Transfer Portal under her feet, and she drew on the Portal’s power as she warped the energies.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Miss not the discourse of the elders: for they also learned of their fathers, and of them thou shalt learn understanding, and to give answer as need requireth.

  —Ecclesiasticus 8:9

  Many miles north and east, a fair-haired youth assigned to keep watch beside another Portal leaned back in his chair and chewed thoughtfully at the feathered end of his quill. As he glanced casually in the direction of the Portal, briefly probing, the hazel eyes went a little unfocused. Though baptized Camber Allin MacLean, he had been known as Camlin since childhood, to distinguish him from the illustrious and now sainted MacRorie kinsman in whose honor he had been named. At twenty-two, exactly the age of the king, he somewhat resembled Camber’s son Joram, in whose exile household he now resided—except for the tough white scars scribing both wrists, front and back.

  He could remember a time before the scars, half a lifetime ago. Memory of the scarring itself was mercifully blurred, though he knew, from later conversations with those who found him, that he had been nailed to the timber portcullis of his father’s burning castle. Within the range of atrocities committed that day at Trurill, crucifixion had been one of the milder examples; at least Camlin had survived.

  Most at Trurill had not, including his father. Appallingly tortured and maimed by his captors, the dying Lord Adrian MacLean had even been compelled to watch while they impaled the boy they had mistaken for his son and heir—young Aidan Thuryn, cousin and fosterling of his house, beloved elder brother of the same Rhysel whose arrival was expected later today.

  Dazed with shock and disbelief, the eleven-year-old Camlin had been witness to all of it, shivering with terror in a pitifully inadequate hiding place beneath the kitchen stairs. The raiders, when they finally found him, had assumed him to be a mere squire, and had settled for stripping and scourging him before dragging him out to the castle gate to crucify him, just before they set fire to the castle and rode away. A snowstorm had saved him from the fire; and the slain Aidan’s mother and younger brother had arrived in time to save Camlin his life and at least the limited use of his hands.

  He grimaced as he laid down his pen and massaged gently at the knotted scars on his right wrist, gazing unseeing at the empty Portal square as he fondly remembered “Aunt” Evaine and little Tieg. He still wondered how they had done it, for a Healer’s gifts normally did not begin to manifest until age ten or so. Tieg had been only three at the time and totally untrained; and his mother, though a powerful Deryni, had been no Healer at all. How had she managed to harness and channel her young son’s healing potential and effect even a clumsy healing of injuries that should have left Camlin crippled, if he survived them at all?

  Of course, she had been Saint Camber’s daughter. And perhaps her years of working with her Healer husband, the unsurpassed Rhys Thuryn, had given her some special insight; though so far as Camlin knew, no other Deryni had ever duplicated her feat—or Tieg’s.

  He couldn’t even bring himself to resent that the result had, not been perfect; it should not have been possible at all. Because of the scarring, he would never again possess sufficient wrist strength to wield the sword that should have been his birthright; but since his father’s murderers believed him dead as well, and one of the great lords now possessed the lands that should have passed to Camlin, that question was moot a
t best.

  What he could still wield with fair panache was a pen—so long as he did not wax too wordy. Even here, in the underground sameness of the sanctuary, changes of weather outside made his wrists ache, and writing for too long almost always had its price. Some days, even the effort of lifting a cup to his lips produced such excruciating pain that he must seek a Healer’s easing.

  Such physical limitations encouraged an economy of words that, of necessity, must cut to the heart of any question. His growing proficiency in this regard had impressed even the most demanding of his very exacting teachers here in the haven. In a rare flash of old rivalries among the Deryni religious orders, the Gabrilite-trained Dom Rickart and Dom Queron avowed that Camlin was acquiring an almost Michaeline militancy in his sharpness of reasoning; Joram and Bishop Niallan, who had been Michaelines, professed that this was no bad thing. Whatever the middle ground might be, Camlin was building a useful niche for himself, here in the close-knit environment of the sanctuary, at last able to begin giving back something to those who had given him so much.

  Smiling wistfully, he picked up his pen again and returned to his work. For something to do while he took his turn at monitoring the Portal, he had been annotating Bishop Niallan’s history of the Haldanes since the Restoration, begun shortly after the death of King Alroy.

  The piece in progress dated from just after King Javan’s death—Tieg Thuryn’s transcription of the eyewitness memories he had read from Etienne de Courcy before blurring other memories and blocking Etienne’s powers. It was one of the few inside accounts they had of the events surrounding the great lords’ seizure of power and the person of the then-Prince Rhys Michael Haldane, and it still chilled Camlin to read it: the cold-blooded treason, masterminded by trusted ministers and so-called men of God, that had seen the prince’s aide brutally murdered before his eyes, another loyal lord slain while trying to escape, and a third so gravely wounded that he later would die of his wounds, though it took him several pain-racked months.

  Etienne himself would never know that, of course. Not for the first time, Camlin found himself wondering what kind of loyalty would make a man like Etienne choose to go back to certain capture, probable torture, and almost inevitable death. Camlin was sworn to the Haldane cause, and to a prince he had never met, but he doubted he would have had the courage to do what Etienne had done …

  Shaking his head, Camlin made a note to inquire further on a reference to a particular Custodes knight, then skipped over Etienne’s rationale for returning. An indecipherable word jumped out at him, and he bent closer to puzzle it out. Tieg’s handwriting was clear enough, but his spelling sometimes bordered on the whimsical. Camlin put it down to laziness; Tieg maintained that a Healer had better things to do with his time than worry about exact spellings, so long as his meaning was clear. Camlin countered that proper spelling helped convey proper meaning, and so the debate continued. It was an ongoing but good-natured dispute that had occupied the pair of them increasingly as Tieg grew into young manhood. Camlin had just set his pen to another correction when the door to the outer corridor eased open.

  “’Lo, Camlin,” came a low-voiced greeting, as Tieg himself slipped inside. “Uncle Joram said I should relieve you, if you’re ready for a break.”

  Camlin smiled and laid his pen aside as he turned around. Tieg’s voice had broken only a few months ago, and though the change had not been unexpected, Camlin still found himself listening for a familiar boyish treble, not this deep-voiced young man.

  Tieg seemed to grow visibly from week to week. Yet a few months short of his fourteenth birthday, he already stood half a head taller than Camlin, who was not short, and his hands looked to belong to a far larger individual. A spattering of freckles across his nose still reinforced a first impression of boyish innocence, but the hazel eyes were wise far beyond his years.

  His attire likewise proclaimed his emerging adult standing. Though Healers usually did not qualify until about the age of eighteen, Tieg had already earned the right to wear full Healer’s green—at least here in sanctuary. Recently, in imitation of Dom Queron and Dom Rickart, he had also begun pulling back his wavy reddish hair in a four-stranded Gabrilite braid—a capital offense outside these walls, if the wearer was Deryni, and even humans sporting such a braid risked having their heads shaved. The law also allowed for human transgressors to be flogged to unconsciousness, if circumstances suggested that the offense had been meant to show support for Deryni. Fortunately Tieg rarely ventured outside the sanctuary, and never in green or wearing a braid.

  “Well, you’re looking very official today,” Camlin said, restraining a grin. “Did Joram really send you, or did you just get bored?”

  Tieg chuckled and shook his head, looking down sheepishly. “He didn’t exactly send me—but I guess I did get bored. They’re busy talking about levies and supply lines and the strategic weaknesses of Rhemuth Castle. I don’t mind relieving you, though.”

  “Well, it’s very kind of you to offer, but I think I’d just as soon stay a while longer and finish what I’m doing. I’m not that tired.”

  “No, but your hands are,” Tieg replied. Looking faintly smug, he came over to catch up Camlin’s two wrists in his big Healer’s hands. “When are you going to stop trying to mask your pain, when you know I can do something about it?”

  Camlin caught his breath as Tieg probed gently at the scarring on one of his wrists, then exhaled softly and closed his eyes, almost going boneless as blessed healing poured into swollen tissues and dissolved away his discomfort. He had never felt a Healer’s touch like Tieg’s, and he wondered whether it had anything to do with his blocking talent.

  “I don’t think so,” Tieg said aloud, answering the unasked question. “Dom Rickart told me one time that, back when he first started his training, one of the oldest brothers at Saint Neot’s had something of the same feel, but Dom Queron says he detects a little of my father’s flavor.”

  He shrugged as he shifted his attention to the other wrist. “I haven’t had contact with that many other Healers, so I really couldn’t say. And unfortunately, I’m afraid I don’t remember very much about my father.”

  Only half listening, Camlin let the bliss of Tieg’s healing wash all around him as the second wrist was eased. He wondered how Tieg did it. He could only compare it to the feeling he sometimes got when meditating, when he thought he had made a better than usual connection with the rhythm of the Spheres. Bishop Niallan had suggested that perhaps Camlin was tapping into the energies that sometimes called one to a life of contemplation and prayer. Camlin was not certain he had such a calling, but many aspects of such a life were definitely appealing—and suited to his physical limitations.

  “I remember your father fairly well,” he said, reluctantly dragging his focus back to the here and now. “Of course, I was only eleven when he died.” He sat back in his chair and let his healed hands rest easily in his lap. “I really liked Lord Rhys; everyone did. I wish I’d had the chance to know him as a man.”

  “So do I,” Tieg said softly.

  The very tone of his words conveyed several shades of meaning, but before their conversation could digress into useless conjecture on what might have been, a faintly discordant surge in the local energies rippled at the edges of consciousness.

  “Rhysel’s coming,” Tieg said, instantly refocused as he turned away to move closer to the Portal.

  Catching a little of Tieg’s sudden tension, Camlin also got to his feet. The permanent Wards built into the sanctuary Portal were supposed to prevent unauthorized access, but solo Portal duty always put him a little on edge, on the chance that magical protections must be augmented with physical force. It was not likely—the Portal’s defenses probably would hold against any psychic trickery most intruders might try, at least until help could be summoned—but Camlin’s Deryni abilities were not particularly strong, never mind that his hands would be all but useless in any physical altercation. Still, that first instant of temporary d
isorientation upon arrival would render any newcomer vulnerable as well.

  She was there even as he thought it, not looking vulnerable at all, the sheer psychic impact of her sudden presence making Camlin recoil a step even as he drew a startled breath. For all that both he and Tieg towered over her, she was cool and self-possessed, golden eyes scanning and assessing over the book she clasped to her breast. Even in the drab, colorless gown worn by the queen’s maids, with her spun-gold hair mostly covered by a white kerchief, Camlin thought her quite one of the loveliest creatures he had ever seen—though here, in the cloistered seclusion of the sanctuary, he had to admit that his experience was somewhat limited.

  “What’s happened?” Tieg demanded, as her look of concentration shifted to a worried smile. “You weren’t expected for hours. Does this mean there’s news?”

  Sighing, she stepped from the Portal niche to deposit her book on the table where Camlin had been working.

  “More like intimations of disaster, I’m afraid. Hello, Camlin. I don’t know whether we can move fast enough or not Messengers from Eastmarch arrived at Court this morning with news that Torenthi forces have taken Culliecairn, up by the Eastmarch-Tolan border. Then a Torenthi herald arrived. It seems that Miklos of Torenth intends Culliecairn as a christening present for Marek of Festil’s new son. The king leaves for Eastmarch in the morning. This could be Marek’s bid for the throne.”

  Camlin could only stare at her, openmouthed. Tieg had gone a little pale beneath his freckles, obviously fathoming far better than his elder cousin what the news meant in more immediate terms.

  “It’s too soon,” Tieg muttered. “Dear God, we’d better tell Uncle Joram. He’s with Ansel and Jesse. They’ve only just begun compiling troop commitments for six months from now.”