The Harrowing of Gwynedd

by Katherine Kurtz

  “Well, at least Tieg’s little problem is solved,” she said with a smile and a faint chuckle, her usual balance restored. “Tavis, you can unblock my horrid child whenever it suits you—years from now, if you think the lesson would do any good.”

  “Oh, he didn’t mean any harm,” Tavis said. As casually as he had blocked Tieg, he reached down and touched him again. “He was showing off for his mum—wanted to make her proud, do what the grownups can do. He seems to be quite good at observing Deryni power in operation and then picking up on what to do. Isn’t that how he decided he was going to help you heal Camlin?”

  Evaine shrugged and smiled. “I suppose it is. But you weren’t on the receiving end.” She turned suddenly shy eyes on Sylvan. “Which is more than we can say for you, isn’t it, Sylvan?—though at least Tavis knew what he was doing. Talk about baptism by fire—I take it they’d briefed you before I came barging in with instant field experience?”

  As Joram nodded, the Healer in question managed a weak, tentative chuckle.

  “I’m sure I haven’t realized all the implications yet,” he ventured, “but I’ll certainly do everything I can to help. It’s a pleasure to see you again, Lady Evaine. I only wish that Rhys—” He flushed and ducked his head, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’m not thinking clearly yet. This is all quite—extraordinary.”

  “Yes, it is.” She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, not letting her gaze stray to the left, and the three new tombs—or think about Tieg.

  “But you mustn’t be shy about mentioning Rhys,” she went on resolutely. “I miss him more than I can ever tell you, but I’m not going to break down and cry at the sound of his name. He’s the reason we knew to look for the talent in you—and I’m sure he would have been pleased to find that you share this somewhat dubious honor.”

  She was not sure what he would have thought of Tieg also sharing it, but she was not about to raise that point just now. In the back of her mind—and Tavis, at least, must be abundantly aware of this—the fear persisted that they might eventually want to use Tieg in the baptizer scheme, if it proved impractical to use Tavis—though Sylvan surely would be suitable, wouldn’t he?

  Gregory snorted, recalling her to the immediate discussion.

  “And I’m the one Rhys did it to first! I still say that if we’d told Sylvan about it from the start, we could have saved a lot of needless to-ing and fro-ing, looking for someone else who could do it. But everybody was so damned secretive about it.”

  Joram chuckled, reaching across to clasp a hand briefly to Gregory’s shoulder.

  “There you go, second-guessing us again, Gregory. You know why we’ve kept the search close to our chests. If the regents got wind of this, we’d ruin all chance of using it to protect our people.”

  “And the subject of regents brings us back to Valoret,” Queron said archly. “I know we’ve all been a little busy, thanks to young Tieg, but I wonder whether anyone has thought to enlighten Evaine about what happened there besides Ansel’s rather unfortunate altercation with a blade?”

  One look at their faces told her she had not heard the worst of it. As she turned to look at Joram, her brother sighed and laid his hand on hers, answering mind to mind rather than with words.

  Mission accomplished, in five out of six cases, he sent, with some unfortunate complications. Don’t ask needless questions; just read what happened.

  The foreboding that clutched at her heart was well merited. As she slipped into familiar rapport with Joram and let the information come, she was horrified to learn of the casual and cold-blooded murder of Giesele MacLean. And the hue and cry sure to be raised by the witnesses to Ansel’s and Tavis’ bloody escape promised dire dangers to all Deryni and their sympathizers.

  “I’m pretty sure I wasn’t recognized,” Tavis said, as Evaine emerged from trance and opened her eyes, “but we have to assume that Ansel was. And we left a trail of blood leading straight to the Portal—which, you can be sure, they now know is not a garderobe.”

  Gregory shook his head, setting his hands stubbornly on his spread knees, pale eyes burning in red-rimmed lids.

  “Deryni in the castle! The regents will have apoplectic fits. You can guess who’ll get the blame for the poor girl’s murder.”

  “But, why should Deryni want to kill her?” Evaine protested. “What could we possibly have to gain? And why spare her sister? There’s no motive.”

  “According to the regents, when have Deryni ever needed motives to justify their nefarious deeds?” Joram replied. “The question simply won’t come up. Just as it will never be pointed out how convenient it was that all the regents were absent from Valoret tonight, so that none of them could be blamed—since they did have a motive. God knows how they planned to cover it, if we hadn’t blundered into their little plan.”

  “Probably, they would have tried to claim she simply died in her sleep,” Tavis offered. “People do, sometimes, you know. But then we obliged by showing up and giving them a much more useful explanation.” He sighed and propped his elbows on his knees, eyes closed, massaging his temples with hand and stump. “God, what rotten luck! If we’d asked in advance what would help them most, we couldn’t have done more!”

  “Well, you could have let yourselves get caught,” Jesse said mildly, raising an eyebrow and one corner of his mouth in bitter smile as Tavis’ head snapped up to stare at him aghast. “Of course I’m being facetious. But you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. There’s no way you could have known any of it was going to happen. Certainly no one has said it was your fault. And you did manage to block Richeldis and the rest of them. That certainly counts for something.”

  Exhaling softly, trying hard to convince himself that he really believed it, Tavis nodded, curving his lips in the bleak semblance of a smile that fooled no one, not even himself.

  “I’d argue that things might have gone differently if we’d spent less time with Elinor and Jamie, or gone to the girls’ room first, but you’re right. It isn’t useful to anyone for me to try to second-guess, after the fact.” He set his stump into the palm of his hand and rested his forearms on his knees, bowing his head. “I still have to wonder what they’ll consider a decent interval, before they marry Richeldis off to that MacInnis sprat.”

  Evaine suppressed a shudder, knowing it would happen exactly as Tavis suggested—and grieving for the thirteen-year-old Richeldis—though at least the girl would be alive.

  “It’s a story I fear we’ll be hearing more and more in the next months,” Evaine whispered, “of Deryni heiresses being married off to the regents’ favorites. And the tale also will be told of how Deryni assassins came through a secret Portal and murdered Richeldis’ sister—and would have murdered her as well, had they not been startled from their most foul deed by the timely intervention of the regents’ loyal guards.”

  “No one startled anyone until we were almost back to the Portal,” Tavis said indignantly.

  “No, but that isn’t the way the regents will tell it,” Joram replied. “Even if Ansel wasn’t recognized, Deryni will look bad. They’ll say that the Deryni assassins attempted to flee the way they had come, one of them being grievously wounded in the process—but their trail of blood led the loyal guards to that most fiendish of Deryni devices—a hitherto unsuspected Portal, most treacherously disguised as a garderobe.”

  “Which eliminates our only way of getting into the castle now, doesn’t it?” Jesse said.

  Tavis nodded. “Trying to use that Portal right now would be suicide. You can bet they’ll have at least a dozen men guarding it. And if they don’t destroy it outright, as soon as they find a Deryni who can do it, they’ll at least block it up. Either way, it can’t be used again—and that finishes any further contact with Javan.”

  “What about Javan?” Queron asked. “You don’t think they can connect him with anything that happened tonight, do you?”

  Tavis shook his head. “I shouldn’t think so. A lot depends on what u
se they make of their Deryni, for questioning people. But I made him promise he’d go right to bed after he left us, and stay there. So if he followed my instructions, they shouldn’t really have any cause to suspect him.”

  “Please God you’re right,” Joram murmured. “I don’t envy him the next day or two.”

  “Aye, poor lad,” Evaine said. “Now he really is alone.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  For thou indeed mayest be tyrant over unrighteous men, but thou shalt not lord it over my resolution in the matter of righteousness either by thy words or through thy deeds.

  —IV Maccabees 2:58

  Being alone in a general sense was one of Prince Javan’s least concerns just then, as his Deryni allies discussed his fate at Saint Michael’s, for he did not yet know the isolation that the night’s events eventually would bring him. Like most princes, he was accustomed to being alone—or to being surrounded by courtiers and servants and household, which was practically the same thing.

  Left motherless from a very tender age, he and his brothers had been reared by a succession of competent but stodgy servants and tutors, most of them of advanced years. The little princes had one another, but theirs was not a happy childhood. King Cinhil was not demonstrative by nature and, after his wife’s death, found it increasingly difficult to take much part in the upbringing of children whose very existence was an embarrassment to his former priestly status—especially when Javan’s lameness daily proclaimed God’s displeasure over Cinhil’s abandoned vocation. Far easier to let others take over the running of the royal nursery, preparing the eldest ultimately to succeed his father—which at least was a justification for his existence—and keeping the others in reserve, quietly out of the public eye, where Cinhil would not be reminded of his failure.

  The king’s attitude mellowed as the years passed, but the young princes’ exposure to outsiders still was restricted and closely monitored, ostensibly for safety’s sake. Until shortly before Cinhil’s death, when the sons of the future regents began to attend occasional sessions in the royal classroom, even commerce with other children was rare; and the friendship that grew between Javan and his Healer, Tavis O’Neill, was truly unique. Cinhil thought he was doing what was best for his sons, shielding them from the harshness of the world he once had renounced and then been forced to re-enter, and never realized that, in fact, their benificent isolation left them most pitifully lonely.

  Nor had the princes’ seclusion eased much after Cinhil died, though all three boys were long past the age when such rigid supervision was strictly necessary for their personal safety. Two of the more somber personal realities of royalty—the lack of privacy and the lack of true companionship—had been most emphatically underlined when the regents decreed that Javan and his brothers henceforth should have separate households. “To encourage them to mature on their own,” Archbishop Hubert had informed the accession council, in the smooth, pseudo-pious tone that Javan had come to loathe.

  The real reason, Javan had long suspected—and his Deryni friends concurred—was to keep the royal brothers shut away from outside ideas and divided among themselves, so they would never develop any independent thinking or even compare notes on how they thought princes ought to be treated. Events of the months immediately following Alroy’s coronation certainly tended to support that theory. With the twins’ twelfth birthday and completion of their formal classroom schooling, all their favorite tutors and even occasional classmates gradually disappeared from court, along with most of the Deryni, replaced by professional courtiers and retainers from the regents’ families and favorites, who seemed to be everywhere. And Tavis’ forced flight, just after Christmas, had left Javan most isolated of all, for only with Tavis had the prince dared to carefully explore the powers he was developing—for which the regents would kill him, if they only knew.

  Not that Javan’s isolation gave him any more privacy than he had known before. He was almost never alone. Such official engagements as he was permitted were almost always in the company of one or the other of his brothers or one of the regents, always with a plethora of attendants. Most evening meals turned into semistate occasions, taken in the great hall and surrounded by functionaries of the regents’ growing court.

  Outings to ride or hunt in the surrounding countryside were hardly less formal, altogether too rare, and almost always accompanied by at least one regent and a host of hangers-on. The officers of Javan’s tiny personal household were hand picked by the regents. Regent Hubert even appointed Javan’s official confessor, who was himself confessed by the archbishop.

  And whether Javan was engaged in the “state” duties designed to make him think he was participating in the process of governing, or trying to fill his “free” time in ways which would not arouse either the disapproval or suspicion of the regents, his constant companion was a clever, tow-headed young squire named Charlan, who was attentive to the point of often being underfoot. Charlan served him at meals, dressed him and attended to his personal toilette, sparred with him in the exercise yard, partnered him at Cardounet or other indoor games, and slept on a pallet at the foot of his bed. Charlan even prayed with him when Javan retreated to the chapel as the one refuge where he could have a few minutes almost alone, though the squire never intruded beyond his mere presence.

  Not that praying displeased the regents—or its gradual increase, as Javan realized it was permitted. On the contrary, Javan found that the regents interpreted this pastime as a growing inclination toward a religious vocation, following in the footsteps of his late father. Such a vocation for this middle son surely was to be encouraged—for if Javan could be persuaded to enter the religious life, that would remove him from the succession, clearing the way for the biddable Rhys Michael to succeed Alroy, if Alroy died before producing an heir.

  Javan did not disabuse them of their notion. He did gain much from daily attendance at Mass and the frequent observation of other religious devotions, when his schedule permitted, but what he gained was not always what the regents thought. And sometimes, Charlan gained more than he realized, too, for the centered stillness produced by prayer in squire and prince alike often afforded Javan an unsurpassed opportunity to tamper with his watchdog’s mind.

  Oh, Javan liked Charlan well enough, if he had to have a constant shadow, chosen by the regents, for the young man was only a few years older than himself, and had a wry, easy sense of humor that helped to pass the time. He was also well educated and conversant with most of the court gossip that went on in the castle—information he readily shared with his young master.

  But Charlan had also told Javan quite openly that one of Earl Murdoch’s agents held weekly interrogations of all three of the principal royal squires, always with a Deryni sniffer present to Truth-Read the sessions. Which meant that anything Javan said or did in front of Charlan was as good as said or done in front of the regents themselves, whether or not Charlan meant to betray his prince’s confidences—unless Javan blurred the squire’s memory, of course, which was precisely how he had covered his several secret meetings with Tavis. Javan was becoming fairly confident in his ability to carry out reasonably sophisticated tampering—though Tavis had warned him that using his fledgling powers without real need was senselessly risky and that princes must not flaunt their powers, whether political or esoteric. Javan believed him.

  Neither sort of power was to give Javan much success in finding out what happened to Tavis and Ansel that night, however. He realized rather quickly that something must have gone wrong, for he heard the faint echoes of swordplay in the King’s Tower shortly after midnight—an altercation that surely must involve his friends, though he dared not let on that he knew. For an hour thereafter, the corridors of Valoret Castle had resounded to the sounds of running feet and shouted orders. His one cautious attempt to ease his door ajar and ask a passing guard about it had produced only a polite but inflexible request, bordering on a command, to go back to bed, all was under control.

  Nor wa
s Charlan any more successful in gaining information, when Javan sent him out an hour later to fetch them a snack—and Charlan was as curious as he. Charlan returned under guard, with bread, cheese, ale, and a tale of nearly having his ears boxed for venturing out after being told to stay put. The continued presence of two guards outside suggested that the story was true, and Truth-Reading confirmed it. Javan’s own, more authoritative attempt to question those guards only produced a grim, taciturn sergeant who assured him in even stronger terms that all was under control—and if Javan persisted in asking questions and did not go back to bed, he might consider himself temporarily under house arrest, prince or no prince.

  Javan did not have to feign his indignation, though he backed down, nonetheless. He learned later that he had not been singled out in this, for both his brothers had received identical treatment, but he still resented it. It also meant that the situation was serious, and the frightened castle garrison were taking a holding action while they awaited further direction, the regents presumably having been informed and summoned back to deal with the crisis. Knowing the probable cause of the crisis, Javan did not fear for his own safety or that of his brothers, but he spent an uneasy remainder of the night worrying about Tavis and Ansel, only dozing fitfully when Charlan finally insisted he at least lie down.

  Even hints of what actually had happened did not come until late the next morning, when Javan at last was summoned to the regents’ private withdrawing room beyond the great hall, no reason given. Javan left his rooms with some foreboding, for Squire Charlan pointedly had not been invited.

  “Can’t you tell me anything?” Javan demanded of the guard assigned to escort him, as they headed down the stairs to cross the castle yard. He had dressed carefully in a conservative tunic and cloak of nondescript greys, and he pulled the fur collar of his cloak closer against the wind as they stepped outside.