Saint Camber (2 page)

But Camber was ill at ease, for he knew that the last Festillic chapter had yet to be written, nor would it be written so long as Ariella lived, and Imre's bastard with her. All the winter long, there had been no word out of Torenth, though all knew that to be her place of refuge. She was biding her time. The child would have been born by now. Soon, soon, she would make her move. Perhaps she was beginning, already.

And in a high solar room of a castle called Cardosa, remote in the mountains between Torenth and free Eastmarch, the woman in question stood before a tabled map of the Eleven Kingdoms and plotted her revenge. A babe suckled at her breast, but she paid him no mind as she stared at the map and sprinkled water from her fingertips onto the lands of Gwynedd, the while muttering words beneath her breath, her mind locked on one ill-willed purpose.

Each day for a week she had worked her magic now; soon she would see its fruition. Her army was gathering, even as the spring rains washed the mountain passes clear of snow and bogged the plains her enemy must cross to try to stop her. Soon, soon, she would make her move. Then the upstart Haldane priest would wear the Gwynedd crown no more.

C
HAPTER
O
NE

By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone
.

—Proverbs 25:15

Rain was falling steadily in the city of Valoret. It had been falling for the past four days, unseasonable for June. Outside the precincts of the royal keep, the cobblestone streets ran with mud and flood-borne refuse. Standing pools of rain and mud rose higher with each hour, threatening and sometimes inundating the doorsills of shops and houses.

Inside the keep, it was spirits which were dampened instead of mere physical surrounds. Chill, moisture-laden air rose foully from the middens through walls and garderobe shafts to rot the rushes underfoot in the great hall and waft among the rafters. Though fires blazed on three enormous hearths, their heat could not warm the icy apprehensions of the handful of lords assembled there.

No formal summons had gathered them. King Cinhil had been avoiding structured councils of late, much to the dismay of his would-be advisors. The men who now sat around a table before one of the side fireplaces were the same who had placed Cinhil on the throne six months before—men who now feared for the king they had made—feared for all whose safety and well-being they had thought to ensure by ousting a Deryni tyrant and restoring a prince of the old, human line to Gwynedd's throne.

They were an odd assortment—all, save one, of the same race of sorcerer-magicians whose scion had lately ruled Gwynedd:

Rhys Thuryn, the young Deryni Healer, bending his shaggy red head to study a map whose strategies he did not really understand.

Jebediah of Alcara, Deryni Grand Master of the militant Knights of Saint Michael and acting commander in chief of King Cinhil's army—if the king could be persuaded to use that army to proper advantage.

Alister Cullen, the graying, ice-eyed Vicar General of the Michaeline Order, and Jebediah's technical superior, also Deryni, leaning with hands clasped behind his head to study a cobweb high in the beams above him—though the seeming casual posture concealed a tension shared by all of them.

Guaire of Arliss, young and earnest, and sole human member of the group. Heir in his own right to a considerable fortune, he was one of the few men of the last regime to retain a position in the court being formed under the new king.

And of course, Camber MacRorie, Earl of Culdi—chiefest Deryni of them all.

Camber had aged but little in the months since the Haldane Restoration, neither appearance nor manner betraying his nearly threescore years. The silver-gilt hair still gleamed bright in the light of torch and fire, and the clear gray eyes showed only a few new wrinkles at the corners. In all, he was as fit as he had been in the last decade—hardened and refined, if anything, by the privations and adversities all of them had endured since making their decision to replace the anointed king of Gwynedd.

But Camber, kingmaker that he was, was no more at ease than the rest of his colleagues. Though he had not wished to alarm them, Deryni or human, he suspected that the rain which fell so unceasingly outside was more than ordinary rain—that the enemy who had eluded them last year at the moment of triumph plotted still more grave offenses from afar; that the coming encounter on the field of battle, no longer to be postponed by winter snows and the enemy's indisposition, might be fraught with far greater dangers than steel and spear and arrow. The rain could be but a warning token.

He had confided his suspicions about the weather to the gentle Dom Emrys, Abbot of the Gabrilites—one man who might know for certain whether such things were possible, even for Deryni. The Order of Saint Gabriel was renowned and respected, even among humans, for the purity of its discipline, for its preservation of ancient wisdom and teaching of the healing arts.

But even Dom Emrys, that pale paragon of Deryni calm and sagacity, had only been able to suggest a way by which Camber himself might explore the question further—and that way was not without its dangers. Camber was familiar with the procedure at which Emrys hinted, but he had not yet brought himself to use it. He wished there were some less-hazardous method of investigation.

A movement at the table caught his eye, and Camber tuned back in on the conversation which had been continuing around him. Jebediah had been leading a discussion of their military preparedness, and was cursing the weather anew as he pushed troop markers around on the map. His scarred fingers were surprisingly agile on the delicate markers.

“No, even if Jowerth and Torcuill do manage to get through, I don't see how we can field more than five to six hundred knights,” he said, replying to a question Rhys had raised. “That includes all the royal levies, the Michaelines, and few dozen more from the other military orders. Perhaps twice that many mounted men-at-arms. For foot and archers, say, five hundred and two hundred, respectively. We'd have more, but most of the main roads are flooded out. Many of the men we could ordinarily count on won't be able to reach us in time to do any good.”

Rhys nodded as though he actually understood the significance of the numbers, and Guaire studied his clasped hands, understanding all too well.

Camber reached out to shift the map board to a better angle.

“What's our most accurate estimate of Ariella's strength, Jeb?”

“About half again what we've committed, so far as we can tell. Her mother was related to the royal house of Torenth, you know. She's drawing heavily on those ties. Also, it apparently isn't raining east of the Lendours.”

“Which means,” Guaire began tentatively, “that if we could get our men together and get through those mountains—”

“We could meet Ariella somewhere in Eastmarch.” Jebediah nodded. “However, getting the men there is the key problem.”

Guaire toyed with one of the extra map markers. “What about one of your Deryni Transfer Portals? Might that be a way to get some of our extra men there?”

Alister Cullen, the Michaeline vicar general, shook his steel-gray head. “We daren't use magic that openly, Guaire. Cinhil has made his feelings all too clear on that subject, of late. Besides, the men we need most are the foot soldiers from the outlying regions—humans, almost to the man. After just escaping the yoke of a Deryni tyrant, I doubt they'd willingly cooperate with any Deryni working, no matter how benign.”

“You make it sound, well, ominous,” Guaire murmured, “as if there were something sinister about your Deryni powers.”

His expression was very serious as he spoke, until he realized the irony of those words coming from his human lips and became aware of how far he, himself, had come in his estimation of the Deryni. Faint amusement registered in the eyes of the men around him, not unkindly, and Guaire colored a little in embarrassment.

Camber chuckled sympathetically.

“It's all right, Guaire. That's how
many
humans view our powers. And between the humans who distrust us because we're Deryni and the Deryni who distrust us because we deposed a Deryni king in favor of a human one, I suppose we're lucky to have the support we do.”

“And if Cinhil doesn't unbend a little,” Cullen snorted, “the two peoples are going to be driven even further apart. One wrong word from him could lose us half our army between dawn and dusk.”

Rhys, who had been listening without comment, leaned forward and prodded the map.

“So, what can be done about it? And what about the more immediate crisis? Do we even know for certain where Ariella will launch her attack?”

Jebediah nodded thoughtfully. “Alister and I have come up with three likely locations, Rhys, two of them fairly close together. If Sighere sides with us and brings his Eastmarch levies to join us, we can eliminate one of the three.”

He bent over the map and began moving markers again, and Camber permitted his attention to wander to the dancing fire, slipping back into his own private reverie.

Cullen's comment about Cinhil had struck a sobering chord. Cinhil's growing rigidity was becoming a major problem, and Camber himself was having to bear more and more of the king's resultant uneasiness.

Cinhil, immature in many ways, despite his forty-plus years, had waxed philosophical in the months since his coronation, increasingly believing that his acceptance of the Crown had been a mistake. He was a priest, not a king, despite the archbishop's dispensation of his priestly vows. Had he not forsaken those vows and left the priesthood, and compounded that sin by taking a wife, there would not now be the two tiny heirs, ill-starred twins, the elder sickly and frail, the younger fair and healthy, but with one deformed foot to remind his father forever of the sinfulness of his begetting.

Cinhil saw the infants' condition as a sure sign of divine wrath, the withering hand of God smiting that which should have been most dear, because Cinhil had deserted God's priesthood.

And who was to blame, in Cinhil's skewed perspective, shaped until a year ago within the walls of an abbey? Why, Camber, of course. Was it not the powerful Deryni earl who had induced Cinhil to forsake his vows and take the throne? What more natural than that Cinhil's resentment should fester even now within his breast? Weighed against God's anger, of what possible importance was a token loyalty to the Earl of Culdi—even if that man
was
one of the few who stood between him and oblivion?

Camber glanced away from the fire to see his daughter, Evaine, crossing the hall. Though heavily muffled against the chill in a fur-lined mantle, still she was slender and graceful as she made her way across the rush-strewn hall. Revan, her young clark, picked his way carefully after his mistress, his usual limp even more pronounced from the dampness.

Evaine's face was worried, her blue eyes stormy beneath the coiled hair, as she bent to kiss her father's cheek.

“How fares the queen?” Camber asked in a low voice, leaning back from the table so that they would not disturb the others' discussion.

With a sigh, she turned to dismiss Revan, who was waiting attentively a short distance away, and watched him limp across the hall to join several pages huddled by the opposite fireplace. Her pretty brow furrowed as she bent to her father's ear again.

“Oh, Father, she is so unhappy. Revan and I have spent the past hour and more with her, but she will not be cheered. 'Tis not right that she should be so listless and depressed, almost a full month after the birthing. Her labor was not difficult, and Rhys assures me that her physical injuries are mended.”

“Unfortunately, 'tis not physical hurt which torments our little queen,” Camber replied, so low that Evaine had to bend very close to hear him. “If the king gave her even a small part of his attention—but, no, he must brood on his imagined sins, and condemn himself and all around him for—”

He broke off as loud voices caught his attention in the corridor outside the far entrance to the hall. One of the voices was his son Joram's; another, angrier one was the king's.

But there were two additional voices—a man and a woman—and the woman's voice was high-pitched and nearly hysterical. All conversation at the table ceased as the king and Joram and two strangers entered the hall and began to cross the dais.

The woman was slender and fair, and even younger than Evaine. The man, husband or brother by his bearing, was obviously a military man, though he wore no sword in the royal presence.

The royal presence was flashing warning signs which should have been apparent to anyone. The Haldane eyes were hard with anger, the lines of the proud body taut with forced control. Joram was a sober splash of Michaeline blue against the crimson and sable of Cinhil's kingly garb, looking as if he wanted to be anywhere but at the king's side.

Cinhil drew his hand away in distaste as the woman threw herself on her knees and reached up in supplication.

“Please, Sire, he has done nothing! I swear it!” she sobbed. “He is an old man. He is sick! Have you no pity?”

“There is no pity in this one!” the man broke in angrily, jerking her to her feet and thrusting her behind him protectively. “How can there be pity in an apostate priest, who wages war on innocent old men? What are you, Haldane, so to decide the fate of your betters?”

In the same breath, the man's hand moved in the pattern of an arcane attack, casting a blinding flash which lit that end of the hall as if the summer sun had come inside. Instantly, all at the table were on their feet and running toward the king, Jebediah and Guaire drawing swords as they ran. Evaine hiked up her skirts and dashed frantically after her father and Rhys and Alister Cullen.

Time seemed to stand still in the afterimage of that flash. The atmosphere grew thick with the huge exchange of energy on the dais, as both Joram and Cinhil countered the assault. The would-be rescuers moved with limbs seemingly encased in lead, trying desperately to reach the king.