The Bishop’s Heir (30 page)

“A briar rose, I think,” Kelson said, smiling, “with proper thorns, I'll warrant. But no matter. Aunt Meraude will be a suitable companion, I'm sure. Father Duncan, would you take her, please?”

“Of course.”

“And as for our other unexpected guest,” Kelson went on, with a glance back at the sullen Llewell as Duncan withdrew, “you'll be proud to learn that it was your son Conall, who captured him, Uncle. His name is Llewell. He's been a little belligerent from the start, so I think he'll want closer guard. No cell, though. He's a noble hostage, not a criminal.”

Kelson took a few more minutes seeing to the disposition of his other prisoners and to the provisioning of his men and horses, then went with Dhugal and Morgan into the hall. While all three of them washed down mouthfuls of venison pasties with mulled ale, he gave a hastily gathered privy council his impromptu acccount of the venture. Dhugal was beginning to nod over his food by the time they finished, and even Morgan was beginning to slow down as food filled empty stomachs and ale lulled aching muscles. Within the hour, after scheduling a formal meeting of the full council for the following afternoon, Kelson dismissed the court and retired for the night. The torches in Rhemuth hall burned late that night as Nigel and the others tried to digest what the king had told them.

Kelson woke with the dawn, however—not yet fully refreshed, but unable to sleep longer. He felt the need to do
something
, but there was nothing he could do until Caitrin replied to his demands. He sat in a window and watched the snow fall for a while, hoping he might ease himself back into drowsiness, but he only grew more restless. After a while he gave up the notion of sleep and got dressed, pulling on plain grey breeches, boots, tunic, and fur-lined overrobe.

Like a silent ghost he prowled the precincts of his castle, inquiring after the men and horses that had returned with him from Ratharkin, checking on his prisoners and hostages, and breaking his fast with Morgan, who was also unable to sleep into the day. When he returned to his own apartments a few hours later, still on edge, he found Dhugal also awake and dressed, wondering where he had gone.

“I couldn't sleep,” Kelson told him. “I talked to Morgan, but that didn't seem to help much. I thought I might pay a visit to my father's tomb before the council meeting. Sometimes doing so helps me clear my head—almost as if I could still ask him for advice. Would you come with me?”

They chose the most common-looking horses they could find in the royal stables, for Kelson did not want his going to be noticed. Cloaked and closely capped, as much for anonymity as for warmth, they rode the half mile to the cathedral along silent, nearly deserted streets and alleys. The weather held cold and clear; the snow was still mostly white from the previous night when they dismounted in the cathedral yard. Their breath fogged on the air before them as they made their way through a slype to skirt the northern side of the cloister garth, Kelson bounding up steps to a side door, Dhugal hobbling a little stiffly from the still-painful bruise on his thigh.

“I used to hate this place,” Kelson said as he led the way down the south aisle. “The royal crypt, I mean. Archbishop Cardiel has done a lot to make it more bearable in the two years he's had the cathedral, but it's still a little creepy. Did I ever bring you here before?”

“If you did, I don't remember.”

“You'd remember.” Kelson paused to open a high, gilded brass gate far enough for himself and Dhugal to slip though, then pulled it to behind them. “I suppose the best part about it is that it's one place where I can almost always be sure I'll not be disturbed,” he continued. “Such places are rare when one is king.”

Dhugal allowed himself a noncommittal grunt as they followed the corridor around a left-hand turn and started down a flight of marble steps, hanging back to ease his aching leg. By the time he reached the bottom, he found Kelson already kneeling beside an ornately carved sepulcher, head bowed in prayer; so he eased himself to a sitting position on the lowest step and breathed a prayer for his own father's soul. When he finished, he glanced around the dimly lit chamber, noting the rows of stone sarcophagi and the smooth marble of the walls. The stylized stone effigy atop the tomb where Kelson knelt was snowy-new and stiff, very little like the King Brion whom Dhugal remembered.

“I suppose this is the way most people will remember him,” Kelson remarked, when he had crossed himself and stood to glance back at Dhugal, one hand lingering on the stone king's hand. “The stern Lord of Justice, who kept the peace for nearly fifteen years.” He sighed and glanced at his feet. “It isn't the way I like to think of him, though. My father laughed a lot, but King Brion—well, he did what he had to do, as king. Kings don't get to laugh as much as ordinary folk. That's but one of the things I've learned in these three years I've worn the crown.”

Dhugal nodded and glanced around the subterranean chapel again with idle interest, remembering the old king's kindness to a confused young page of eight, still fresh from the less sophisticated ways of his father's highland hall. Like many eight year olds, Dhugal's command of his rapidly growing body had been intermittent, with disastrous results the first time he was required to serve the high table. Only the king had refrained from laughing when Dhugal tripped and sent a tray of steaming pheasants and gravy skittering and sloshing down the steps of the royal dais.

The memory merged with recollections of old Caulay seated in the hall at Transha, training his own fosterlings with the same sort of firm but loving discipline that Dhugal had enjoyed at Brion's court, and Dhugal started to smile. The smile faded as he glanced again at Brion's effigy, however; for the man at Transha was only newly dead, and the shock of his passing was unnumbed by the passage of years. Dhugal could feel the tears threatening to well up in his eyes, despite the fact that, in some ways, old Caulay's death still seemed quite unreal.

“It's all right to miss him, you know,” Kelson said softly, reading his mood, if not his thought. “I still miss my father, after all this time. I cried when it happened, too. And sometimes late at night, when I'm feeling especially alone and burdened, I still cry.”

Dhugal had all he could do to swallow, not daring to look at Kelson lest he loose a whole floodgate of ill-timed grief. He focused on one of the torches burning in a brass cresset instead, forcing himself to raise his eyes to the chapel's vaulting.

“This isn't such a creepy place,” he managed to say, in an awkward attempt to change the subject. “It's rather nice, actually.”

Kelson gave him a sympathetic smile, well aware what his foster brother was trying to do and hardly blaming him.

“It's only been this way the past year or so. All the stone facing on the walls is new.” He gestured casually toward the nearest stretch of burnished marble as he moved toward it. The slap of his open palm against the stone made Dhugal start.

“There are tomb niches carved in the living rock behind here,” he went on. “It used to be that only kings and queens were buried in free-standing tombs like my father's. Other members of the royal family were simply wrapped in their shrouds and laid to rest on the shelves in these walls. They didn't rot for some reason; they just dried out and eventually crumbled away—something about the air, I'm told. I'd hold tight to my mother's hand and hide my eyes when my parents brought me here to pray on feast days. The fellow behind this wall, in particular, used to scare me half to death.”

Ready to seize on any topic in preference to his own grief, Dhugal rose to approach the panel Kelson was touching.

“
Dolonus Haldanus, Princeps Gwyneddis, 675–699
,” Dhugal read, stumbling a little over the fine, archaic script. “
Filius Llarici, Rigonus Gwyneddis. Requiem in pacem
.” He glanced at Kelson in question. “Prince Dolon—didn't his own father execute him?”

Kelson nodded. “And his younger brother as well. It was thought at the time that they were plotting treason.”

“Were they?”

“Who knows?” Kelson glanced at the next row of wall inscriptions. “His brother is over there. I can remember being terrified of the two headless skeletons. My nurse told me that their father had cut off their heads because they displeased him.”

“What a thing to tell a child!”

Kelson grinned. “I think I'd been especially trying that day. Still, it was years before I gained a more objective perspective.” He glanced back at his father's tomb wistfully.

“That wasn't my most frightening experience down here, though,” he went on softly, not sure whether he should risk frightening Dhugal as well by recounting the old nightmare. “It happened the night before my coronation.”

“My father heard rumors.…” Dhugal said cautiously.

Kelson smiled and moved back to Brion's sarcophagus, leaning both hands along the edge.

“I'll bet he did. Well, I shan't go into details that might alarm you overmuch, but as you may know, Morgan wasn't here when my father died. He was in Cardosa.”

“And came back the day before the coronation,” Dhugal supplied.

“That's right. My father had been buried for over a week by then: my mother's doing—she hates Morgan for being Deryni. Anyway, as I talked with him and Father Duncan that afternoon, it soon became apparent that—well, something we needed to make my kingship complete had been buried with my father.”

“Then you
did
open the tomb!” Dhugal breathed, wide-eyed with horror. “My father said there'd been rumors of vandals—”

“We weren't responsible for that part,” Kelson countered. “We think it was Charissa or her agents, trying to discredit Morgan and Father Duncan. We were looking for the Eye of Rom.”

As he brushed a strand of hair behind his right ear, exposing the crimson gemstone, Dhugal nodded.

“I remember him wearing that.”

“Aye, I never saw him without it. But when we opened this,” Kelson tapped the stone cover of the sarcophagus with one hand, “it wasn't my father inside—or, it was, actually, but it didn't look like him. We thought someone might have switched bodies at first, so we started searching the rest of the chapel. I wasn't strong enough to push back these stone lids by myself, so Morgan and Father Duncan did that part. I had to look in the tomb niches. It—wasn't pleasant.”

“I—don't think I understand,” Dhugal said in a small voice. “You mean, it was your father's body in the coffin after all?”

Kelson nodded. “I still don't totally understand, but apparently Charissa had placed some kind of a—a binding spell on the body, which also changed its appearance. Father Duncan got rid of it, but he said that—” He hesitated as Dhugal got an odd, tight look on his face. “He said that Father's soul had also been bound up in the spell somehow … that he hadn't been … entirely free. I've frightened you again, haven't I? I'm sorry. It still bothers you to hear me talk so casually about magic, doesn't it?”

Dhugal managed to swallow, forcing himself not to avoid Kelson's gaze, but it was true.

“Yes,” he whispered. “I don't want to be afraid, but I guess it's an old reflex. And when you talk about souls being bound up—”

“That isn't the usual kind of Deryni magic,” Kelson said in a low voice, laying a gloved hand on the other's shoulder. “That's dark magic—and you have every reason to fear it, as I do. What I do—and what Morgan and Father Duncan do—is of the Light. I
know
there's no evil in it. Would I endanger my soul?—would I endanger
yours
?—if I thought it was evil?”

“No. Not if you knew. But what if you're wrong?”

“Was my father wrong?” Kelson asked. “You knew him, Dhugal. Was Brion an evil man?”

“No.”

“And is Morgan evil? Is Father Duncan evil?”

“I don't think so.”

“Is Bishop Arilan evil, then?”

“Arilan? Arilan's Deryni?”

As Dhugal's jaw dropped, Kelson nodded slowly.

“Arilan. And you are one of less than a dozen men who know that,” he replied. “I'm told he comes from very, very old Deryni lineage, long hidden away—and he probably knows more about magic than Morgan, Father Duncan, and myself combined. I'm in awe of him—but I know he isn't evil.
Loris
is evil; and he isn't even Deryni.”

“I—won't argue with you on that count,” Dhugal murmured. “It's just that—” He passed a hand across his eyes in futile attempt to clear a growing fuzziness from his vision, suspecting that his treatment at the renegade archbishop's hands had taken a more serious toll than he had thought. “I'm sorry. I'm afraid I'm not thinking very clearly.”

“No need to apologize,” Kelson replied. “You've been through a lot in the last week or so, and you're still not well. I should have had Morgan and Duncan see you, instead of bringing you here.”

A flicker of even greater foreboding supplanted Dhugal's burgeoning discomfort, and he looked up at Kelson with a sick, queasy sensation in the pit of his stomach.

“You mean, to heal me?”

“Yes.”

“But—” He swallowed painfully. “Kelson, I'm—not certain I'm ready for that yet.”

“Because of what happened in Transha?”

“Yes,” Dhugal admitted. He rubbed both hands across his eyes. “God, my head is throbbing. I can't think.”

“That's why I'd like to have them take a look at you,” Kelson replied. “They might be able to heal your injuries without touching your shields, you know. And maybe you won't react the same way you did with me.”

“Maybe. For now, however, I—think I might prefer to let nature take its course, if you don't mind. I'll be all right.”

“If that's what you want,” Kelson said. “They may ask you themselves, though. I haven't told Duncan about Transha yet, but Morgan may have. He knows.”