The King’s Justice (18 page)

“It gets harder each time, doesn't it?” Kelson murmured, setting the box beside the blown-out candle.

“No, I just get more tired.” Morgan sighed again and managed a smile. “It's never been easy, though, and this particular talent was never meant to be used regularly over this kind of distance—at least not this often.”

As he closed his eyes and began to run the beginning steps of yet another fatigue-banishing spell, trying to will away his growing headache as well, Kelson interrupted his train of thought with an explosive sigh.

“
Damn
Sicard!” the king muttered under his breath.
“God
, how I wish this stupid war were over!”

Lethargically, Morgan nodded and tried to regain the track of his spell, surrendering to an uncontrollable yawn. When, as he tried to keep from putting head down then and there and simply passing out, he nearly knocked the ward cubes off the table, Kelson reached across to seize a handful of his tunic.

“Are you all right?”

Morgan nodded yes, but he could not seem to make his eyes focus on Kelson's face.

“Just a little after-reaction,” he murmured, and yawned again. “It's been building over the past week. I don't sleep well after these sessions.”

“And of course you wouldn't dream of telling anyone, would you?” Kelson released him only long enough to come around and hoist him to his feet, royal hands set firmly under one elbow.

“Too much fatigue-banishing, isn't it?” the king went on indignantly, as he read the evidence at close range and propelled Morgan toward the camp bed set opposite his own. “And you were about to do it again, weren't you? Well, you're going to sleep tonight if I have to fight you every step of the way.”

Morgan managed a wry smile as he let Kelson help him to the bed, but his knees all but buckled under him, and he lay down far faster than he had intended.

“No fight, my prince. I'll save that for the Mearans,” he promised, a groan escaping his lips as he opened his mind to the king and let the pressure go.

“That's right,” Kelson whispered, touching fingertips lightly to Morgan's forehead. “Release it all and sleep. You've done enough for a while. You aren't the only Deryni around here, you know. In the future, I'm going to insist you let me share more of the burden.”

Not if it impairs you
, came Morgan's groggy protest, only barely sensed, even mind-to-mind.

We'll discuss it when you're rested properly
, Kelson replied.
Now go to sleep
.

And Morgan did.

They moderated their contacts with Duncan after that, letting Kelson carry the link alone from time to time and alternating the energy drain so that neither was too depleted from any single operation.

Meanwhile, the uncertainty of the tactical situation only increased, and frustration along with it.

“How can we fight an enemy we bloody never see!” Kelson complained, as they skirted the mountains west of Droghera and headed north, still encountering only token harassment from isolated war-bands. “Having two thousand men doesn't do us a lot of good if we can only use a few hundred at a time.”

Nor, as they penetrated deeper into the Mearan heartland, was the enemy's increasing scorched-earth policy reassuring.

“We haven't any real provisioning problem just now,” General Remie reported at a staff meeting one evening, as he and Kelson's other key commanders gathered outside the royal tent. “As long as we can find forage for the animals, we can feed the men until, say, Midsummer or a little later with what we're carrying. This large an army moves slowly, though. I wonder whether we might not be better off to take a lesson from the enemy and break into smaller, more manageable warbands. In this part of the country, we could do it with very little danger, and far more effectiveness.”

The general staff thought it a fine idea, and Kelson agreed. By the next morning, the army had been parcelled out among four semi-autonomous commanders: Duke Ewan, Generals Remie and Gloddruth, and Morgan, Kelson riding with the latter. By the end of the day, the war-bands had dispersed half a day's march apart, stretched across the line of advance. Regular couriers kept the units in touch, and skirmishes with the formerly phantom enemy began to yield more definite results, and to produce more desperate countermeasures.

“I'm afraid we're going to see more and more of this,” Morgan said to the king, one sultry June morning when they had been gone from Rhemuth for a full month.

They were riding a track through yet another field burned to keep it from Haldane use, approaching the outskirts of what once had been a prosperous village of some size. The stubble still smoldered to either side of the track, but smoke curled from behind soot-smudged walls and reeking roofs as well.

“I think this is the worst so far,” Kelson agreed.

Thus it had been for the past week, enemy devastation no longer confined to ruined fields and ransacked storehouses, as in the beginning, but now being extended to the very citizenry of Meara. Each day had found the Haldane warbands passing through more gutted villages and towns, peopled by ever more pitiful refugees—common folk, the ultimate losers in any war—who must try to scratch out a living after both sets of soldiers were gone, and cared little what king sat on what throne, so long as they and their children might live unmolested and without hunger.

Kelson could feel the eyes of the survivors upon him as he, Morgan, and a small escort rode into the town, Jatham leading with the bright Haldane banner. A lancer unit had already swept in ahead of them to secure the area and deal with any enemy stragglers, and the townspeople were beginning to appear in doorways and windows. An old man spat at the sight of them, and a hollow-eyed woman suckling a baby at her breast glared at Kelson from the shattered doorframe of a burned-out cottage.

Sick at heart, Kelson lowered his eyes in helpless shame for his warrior caste, wishing there were any other way than war to keep the peace.

“This is almost the worst part of war,” he murmured to Morgan, as they let their greathorses pick their way through the rubble-strewn street. “Why do the common people always have to suffer for the folly of their masters?”

“A grim but constant trapping of war in every time, my prince,” Morgan replied. “If we were as desperate as the Mearans apparently are becoming, we might well—”

Suddenly he stiffened and broke off, standing in his stirrups to peer ahead.

“What's wrong?” said Kelson, following his gaze.

At the end of the street, a score of lancers' mounts waited by the foot of steps leading to the entrance of a modest but noble church, the building giving way to cloister walls and a domestic range off to the left. The wall was breached in several places, a gate of iron grillework dangling crazily from its hinges, and smoke curled lazily upward from the cloistral buildings beyond.

“I don't like the looks of that,” Morgan murmured, as several agitated-looking lancers on foot came out a shattered postern door.

As one, he and Kelson set spurs to their mounts and moved out at the trot, splitting to either side of Jatham and the standard and clattering on with their escort trailing raggedly behind. The troop had regained some semblance of order by the time they reached the foot of the steps, but the faces of the lancers turning to acknowledge were tight-jawed and grim. One of the younger men had sunk to a crouch to put head between knees, near to fainting, and their officer raised a tight-lipped and outraged face as Morgan reined to a halt, grabbing at the horse's headstall to keep from getting stepped on. Behind them, a greenish-looking Conall stumbled out ahead of Roger, the feisty young Earl of Jenas, who looked as if he cheerfully could have killed the first person who crossed him.

“What's happened?” Morgan demanded, swinging down from his mount and pulling off his helm.

The lancer captain shook his head, handing off the reins of Morgan's horse to one of his men and steadying Kelson's as the king also dismounted.

“Something for that traitor Trurill to be very proud of, I suppose, Your Grace. It's a convent—or was. What else is there to say?”

“How do you know it was Trurill?” Kelson asked, as he also removed his helm and pushed back his mail coif. By his tone, and the casual ease with which he cradled the helm under his arm, Morgan guessed that the implications obvious to a man more battle-seasoned than Kelson simply had not yet registered with the seventeen-year-old king. That Kelson might
not
fully understand apparently had not yet occurred to Roger, either, for the young earl charged blithely on to give the king the answer he had asked for.

“Oh, it was Trurill, all right, Sire,” Earl Roger said, contempt for the name so thick in his words that Morgan could almost taste it. “The sisters don't know anything about coats of arms, but one of the monks described him to a fare-thee—Conall, goddammit, if you're going to be sick, do it somewhere else!” he snapped, suddenly clamping a gloved hand on the prince's nearer forearm and giving him a stiff shake. “These things happen!”

“What—
things?”
Kelson demanded, stunned, not wanting to believe what he was starting to realize. “Are you saying—”

“Kelson, they—raped the sisters,” Conall whispered, too numb with shock to object to the liberty Roger had taken with his royal person. “They—even killed some of them. And they d-desecrated the church! They—”

“They rutted in the aisles and they pissed on the High Altar, Sire!” Roger said bluntly, outrage smoldering in his eyes. “There isn't any pretty, noble way to say it, because there isn't anything pretty or noble about it—or about men who would do such a thing. If you've never seen something like this before—well, it's probably time you did, just so you know the kind of animal you're dealing with in Brice of Trurill!”

Roger's outburst left little doubt in Morgan's mind what they would find inside. Tightly leashing his own anger, he passed the earl his helm, with its telltale coronet of rank, and bade the ashen Kelson do the same, catching an all-too-vivid preview from the man's mind as their hands brushed in the transfer.

Quickly he and the king shouldered between Roger and the now shaking Conall and climbed the glass and stone-littered steps. The distraught cries of the injured and bereft floated on the still air with the stench of smoke and blood and excrement as they neared the shattered doors. But even the Deryni imaging that Morgan tried to relay was not sufficient to prepare Kelson for what lay inside.

Rape was a crime at no time condoned by any knight or other man of honor, much less the desecration of a holy place—though the former occurred all too often in time of war for it to be regarded as uncommon. The rape of Saint Brigid's, then, as Morgan soon discovered the place was called, was all the more despicable because the chief victims had been nuns, whose consecrated status generally preserved them from the fate more often meted out to their secular sisters.

“We begged them to spare us, my lord,” one of the blue-robed women told Morgan, sobbing, as he and Kelson paused in one of the less-damaged side chapels, currently commandeered as a hospice for the injured. “We gave them the foodstuffs they asked for. We emptied our storerooms to them. We did not dream they would violate the sanctuary of the church to—to take their pleasure of us.”

“Beastly, savage men!” another agreed, her anger at odds with her physical attitude of prayer as she knelt and watched a tattered and bruised old monk give Extreme Unction to a sister sprawled motionless in the doorway leading from church to cloister garth. “Like animals they were! May God forgive them for what they've done, for I never shall, and it cost me the bliss of paradise!”

Once past his initial, disbelieving shock, Kelson weathered the inspection reasonably well, he and Morgan passing all unrecognized among the survivors, if somewhat suspiciously received—though that was for being men, as much as anything. In the minds of most, Kelson's crimson brigandine with its golden lion apparently linked him vaguely with Haldane service in some way—perhaps a squire or young man-at-arms, by his age, or aide to the courteous, fair-haired lord in black and green—but that was all. And Morgan's own armorial bearings would not be expected to be familiar to a tiny community of women tucked away in the foothills of southern Meara.

“Oh, they were highborn lords as well as common soldiers,” came the unanimous accusation of all questioned, with little variation. “Most of them wore fancy armor such as your own.”

Others recalled border tartans and leathers, and eyed Kelson's border braid with some suspicion.

“Could you describe any of the tartans, or the designs on shields or surcoats?” Morgan always asked. “Even colors could help us identify who they were.”

But most were too cowed, or too dazed, or both, to recall any truly useful details, and both Morgan and Kelson were reluctant to attempt Deryni persuasion under the circumstances. Not until they took their questioning into a corner of the ruined garden did the pattern of response shift.

There they found what at first appeared to be merely a repeat of the same grim story: a hysterically sobbing young girl with masses of curly blond hair who cowered in the arms of another at their approach. Both wore the pale blue habit of novices of the order, though the latter was decently coiffed. Neither looked to be above sixteen.

“Oh, what does it
matter
who he was?” came the unexpectedly defiant reply of the coherent one, as she raised a tear-streaked face to glare angrily at the two armored men. “He told her he was sick and tired of having to knuckle under to arrogant bishops and priests, and that he was going to show them he was a man.

“A man—ha!” Outraged fire flashed in her dark brown eyes. “Big, important man, to rape an innocent woman!
She
had nothing to do with these bishops who supposedly offended him. Now her betrothed will
never
have her!”