The King’s Justice (40 page)

“Watch Loris!” Morgan bellowed, blocking a blow to his head and cleaving a Mearan knight through the shoulder as, unable to do anything himself, he watched Loris toss aside the crozier and begin pulling and kicking bundles of kindling out of his way, tearing at them with his gloved hands in order to reach his prey.

Dhugal saw the new danger, too, and set his charger bolting toward the flames, counting on surprise to give him some advantage. With Ciard and several other MacArdry men at his back, as well as a few Haldane knights, he managed to penetrate deep into the thinning Mearan host before his momentum was broken. As he fought like a wild man, Ciard and the others fanning out to help him cut through the defending episcopal troops, he could see his father's face contorted with pain, blood running down his tortured body from several wounds—and Loris, working his way ever nearer his helpless victim, eyes wild, gauntleted right hand drawing a long dagger in triumph as he all but gained his prize.

“Lor-i-i-i-s!” Dhugal screamed.

Loris' abandoned mount bolted past with mane and tail aflame as Dhugal gained the outer perimeter of the pyre. Dhugal's horse reared and screamed, shying from the flames. Loris' once-white cope was streaked with soot, smoldering along one edge, his mitred helm discarded, only a few feet now separating him from his weakly struggling victim.

“Lor-i-i-i-s!”

Brutally, Dhugal raked his spurs along his horse's sides, trying to force it to leap the flames, but the animal reared up with a squeal of defiance, pawing the air and nearly going over backward, all but pitching Dhugal himself into the flames. Nor did Loris, clambering over the rough kindling, even glance at him, though Dhugal's men, scrambling after him on foot now, seemed to spur his progress, and more Haldane knights were drawing rein and dismounting also, having routed the last of Loris' men.

“Loris, damn you, no!” Dhugal swore, panting as he wrenched the horse's head around and again demanded the jump, this time flat-blading the beast across the rump to underscore his determination.

Again, the animal refused, this time exploding in a series of mighty bucks that cost Dhugal the grip on his sword and nearly his seat, showering burning kindling inside the ring of fire as well as without. The commotion distracted Loris' single-minded advance toward his prey, but only momentarily. As his cope snagged on a bundle of kindling and he had to stop to rip it free, staggering, he spared but a single glance for Dhugal before lurching on, the dagger still gleaming in his hand, rising above his head.

Only an instant remained. Dhugal's men would not reach Loris in time to stop him, and Loris knew it. All too clearly, Dhugal saw the blade drawing back to strike, the look of numb disbelief on his father's face, that rescue should fail by so little. In desperation, Dhugal grabbed a handful of mane and sent his mental command into the horse's panicked mind, knife-sharp, demanding obedience regardless of the cost.

“Lor-i-i-i-s!”
he cried, as the animal gathered itself in a shuddering, terrified leap and launched itself across the wall of fire surrounding Duncan—and died in midair as its mighty heart gave out with the strain.

The horse was dead meat under Dhugal even before it landed, legs all akimbo, but Dhugal somehow managed to throw himself clear just before impact and get a hand on Loris' cope.

“God
damn
you, Loris!”

His desperate wrench at the handful of linen was just enough to deflect the killing blow. Instead of plunging into Duncan's heaving chest, Loris' stroke skittered harmlessly along the stake with a shower of bark and stopped against a branchlet.

The archbishop howled with outrage as the younger, slighter Dhugal began grappling with him for possession of the blade, the two of them rolling over and over in the rough kindling, both crying out when burning brands connected with bare flesh. Roger, Earl of Jenas, was one of the two Haldane knights who finally pounced on Loris and overpowered him, twisting the arm with the dagger until Loris screamed in agony.

“Drop it right now, or I'll break your arm!” Roger demanded, wrenching the dagger out of Loris' hand.

Ciard hurried to help his young master to his feet, brushing glowing embers from leather as his companions scrambled over Dhugal's dead horse to assist in securing the prisoner. The scattered fire was beginning to die out.

“Father?” Dhugal breathed, as he pulled away from Ciard to stagger toward the stake.

Duncan raised his head at the sound of Dhugal's voice, still hardly comprehending, in his pain, that he was still alive.

“Dhugal—” He winced and gasped as Dhugal's unsteady approach jarred glowing sticks of kindling against his raw and bloody toes. “Dear God, I thought I'd never see you again.”

“Did you think I could let you die?” Dhugal answered.

Duncan shuddered and shook his head as Dhugal began urgently shifting debris out of the way to reach him, Ciard assisting. Bright blood seeped from around the arrow in Duncan's shoulder, and from his other wounds, and he moaned as Dhugal reached him, closing his eyes and shrinking from Dhugal's touch as gloved fingers brushed the shafts protruding from shoulder and upper thigh. Dhugal was estimating the damage, quickly surveying the other injuries, noting the nailless fingers and toes with a sibilant intake of breath. He stripped off his gauntlets as Ciard attacked the shackles binding Duncan's arms around the stake behind him, but Duncan shook his head when Dhugal would have made a closer examination of his wounds.

“No!
Merasha!
” he warned weakly, dully noting Roger helping to support him under his left arm as Ciard picked at the shackle locks with the point of a border dirk. “Tell Alaric—important—”

But the exertion cost too much, after what he had already been through, and he mercifully passed out. And when the locks did not yield quickly enough to Ciard's manipulation, Dhugal set his hand on one and sent his mind into the stiff, dust-clogged mechanism, not caring, in that moment, who saw the result and learned what he was.

“Lord Dhugal?
You?”
Roger gasped, as the first one gave, though Ciard did not bat an eye.

As the second sprang open, setting both of Duncan's wrists free now, and Ciard and Roger caught Duncan's dead weight between them, Loris craned in his bonds just in time to see Dhugal open the ankle fetters with a touch.

“A Deryni! Oh, God, you're Deryni, too!”

Dhugal hardly spared Loris a glance as he helped Ciard and Roger ease Duncan into a careful carry-hold, avoiding the protruding arrows.

“That's right, Loris. I'm Deryni. Bishop Duncan is my father. And you'd better pray he lives,” he added.

“So the Deryni heretic has himself a Deryni bastard!” Loris muttered, before one of Dhugal's borderers cuffed him into silence. But his outburst partially covered the astonished doubletakes of those others who had not known.

Dhugal did not even care, as he helped Ciard and Roger ease his father's limp form down off the kindling around the stake, that the revelation would be the talk of the camp before nightfall.

Meanwhile, the battle around them had not abated, only moved on to other venues as Kelson's army shattered the Mearan command and routed the surprised Mearan levies. Once the enemy was in retreat, Kelson employed the same tactics he had used at Talacara, albeit on a larger scale, his highly mobile lancers and heavy cavalry gradually cutting off and isolating groups of Mearan warriors for slaughter or surrender, mounted archers backing them to reinforce the options.

Morgan, seeing Loris foiled by Dhugal's amazing feat of heroism, made it his special mission to run Gorony to ground—and managed to restrain both himself and his men from doing the traitor-priest any serious harm once he was finally taken. And it was Kelson himself who led the band of knights that eventually brought Sicard to bay.

“Give it up, Sicard!” Kelson shouted, as Sicard wheeled his tired greathorse in a tight, snorting circle, he and his men searching frantically for an escape route.

A score of knights remained to Sicard, two-thirds the number in Kelson's band, some of them men of rank, minor lords in their own right. Wary and desperate, they milled around him in a tight, well-ordered ring, facing outward. And though they bristled with weapons, and appeared ready enough to put up a last fight to the death, Kelson decided there had been enough killing for one day and determined at least to attempt some more moderate solution.

“I said, give it up!” Kelson repeated. “Your cause is lost. You cannot hope to escape, Sicard. If not for yourself, then surrender for the good of your men, whose only crime is loyalty to the wrong leader.”

Sicard was bleeding from half a dozen painful wounds, his face sickly pale as he slowly removed his helmet and tossed it aside, but he raised his eyes defiantly to Kelson, his blood-streaked sword a little wobbly in his hand.

“I cannot do that, Haldane,” he said softly, weaving slightly in the saddle. “I swore an oath to my liege lady—that I would defend her cause to the death.”

“Do you seek your death, and the deaths of these men, then?” Kelson asked. “For if you persist in armed defiance, you shall have it.”

“Then, face me in single combat!” Sicard blurted. “I am not afraid to die. If I win, I go free. If not …”

Coolly Kelson surveyed his foe. Though he could almost pity the man, Sicard MacArdry had already cost too many lives. While he pursued Sicard, the fighting had diminished to only a few odd pockets of desultory skirmishing, but the dead and wounded of both sides lay all too thickly on the plain of Dorna. And if, by some freak of physical endurance, the older and more experienced Sicard managed to wound or kill him—

“No, Sicard,” he said at last.

Sicard seemed almost unable to comprehend what he had just heard. Blankly his gaze flicked over the surrounding knights to Ewan and the other Haldane nobles gathered around the king, to the Haldane standard spilling over Ewan's gloved hand, limp and motionless in the stifling summer stillness, to the bright sword resting on Kelson's armored shoulder.

“What do you mean—
no?”

“I mean
No
, I will not give you single combat,” Kelson said quietly.

“Not give—but—”

Despair flickered in Sicard's dark eyes as the full implications of Kelson's statement registered. Breathing harder, he turned his horse a full circle on its haunches, glancing desperately at Kelson's officers for some appeal. But the swords and lances leveled at him and his men did not waver, and he found only hard-eyed resolution on the faces of Kelson's knights.

“I—will not surrender,” he finally said. “You will have to take me by force.”

“No,” Kelson said again, even more quietly than the first time. And then, over his shoulder, as he quietly sheathed his sword, he added, “Archers, attend. And someone bring me a bow.”

Sicard's face went grey, and his men began murmuring urgently among themselves as Kelson also removed his helmet and gauntlets and handed them to a squire.

“You—you can't
do
that!” Sicard rasped.

“Can I not?” Kelson replied, not looking back toward the scout working his way closer with a bow and a quiver of arrows, or the troop of mounted archers that followed, interspersing themselves between the knights ringing Sicard and his men.

“But, there are conventions of war—”

“Oh? I had not noted a marked observation of conventions by the Mearan army,” Kelson said. “Or can you have been unaware that the Duke of Cassan was tortured while a prisoner under your protection?”

“He was
Loris
' prisoner!” Sicard protested.

Without answering, Kelson took the bow the scout brought him and kneed his horse a few mincing steps to the right, to stand sideways to the Mearan commander as he tested the string.

“But you—you can't just cut me down like a dog,” Sicard said weakly.

“Indeed?” Kelson said, calmly laying an arrow across the bowstring. “Sicard, I can and shall cut you down
precisely
like a dog, if I must. For, like a rabid dog, you have ravaged my lands and slain my people. Now, will you and your men surrender, or must I do what I would rather not?”

“You're bluffing,” Sicard whispered. “What will the world say, if the great Kelson Haldane cuts down an enemy in cold blood?”

“They will say that a traitor was executed for his treason, without further endangering honest men,” Kelson replied. Raising his bow arm, he began a slow, smooth draw.
“I
say that enough lives have been spent on you and your misguided cause. Are not three of your own children sufficient price to pay?”

“Three?”
Sicard gasped. “Ithel—?”

“Is dead,” Kelson said, as he sighted down the shaft at Sicard's heart. “I hanged him and Brice of Trurill yesterday. Now, throw down your sword. My arm is getting tired. And archers, if I have to shoot him, and his men do not immediately surrender, stand by to cut them down the same way. What's it to be, Sicard? If you say no, I let fly.”

The head of the war arrow leveled at his heart gleamed dead black in the afternoon heat, but it no longer held the dread it once had. Numbly Sicard stared at the man who had now killed both his sons, as well as bringing about the death of his only daughter. It had all been for naught.

Then, as the Haldane archers nocked arrows, maneuvering their horses for clear shots at his men, Sicard MacArdry slowly raised his eyes above Kelson, toward the western hills and the queen he had lost—he, who had dreamed of a throne beside his Mearan queen—and whispered a single word.

“No.”

Before any of his men could utter a word, Kelson's arrow took him cleanly through the left eye—a last-second change of target, lest Sicard's armor deflect the barbed arrowhead and prolong Sicard's final agony. The Mearan consort died without a sound, sword falling to the sand from lifeless fingers, toppling silently until his body hit the ground in a clash of armor. The sound seemed to release his men from their awed and stunned observation of the act; and as Kelson took another arrow and his archers began choosing targets, a murmur of protest rippled among the Mearan knights, quickly dying as all eyes fastened on the king.