“Father Nivard, are you here?” Meraude called, glancing around and then entering.
Jehana followed somewhat more timidly. The room was whitewashed, flooded with light from two tall, west-facing windows, and deserted. Between the windows, whose heavy red damask drapes were swagged back behind iron finials, a wide reading desk displayed a variety of open books and unfurled scrolls and leaves of parchment, bespeaking research in progress. A heavily sculpted fireplace dominated the wall on the left, breaking the expanse of bookshelves and scroll-cases and pigeonholes lining most of the rest of the walls. A painted interlace design of mostly blues and greens arched above the fireplace and the windows, the green picking up the paving of greenish Nyford slate inside the embrasures and on the windowsills.
“No one seems to be here,” Jehana said cautiously. “Good heavens, it’s been years since I’ve been in this room.”
Smiling breezily, Meraude led the way in, slipping behind the desk to cast an eye over the books and documents spread thereon.
“Has it really? I thought this was one of Brion’s favorite rooms.”
“Oh, it was. Perhaps that’s why I’ve avoided it since he died.”
“Well, there’s no better place, if you want to vet prospective brides,” Meraude said brightly, settling down in the chair behind the desk to look more closely at a genealogical chart laid out on vellum. “It appears that Father Nivard was researching the same thing. Here’s the Ramsay lineage, all sketched out. Nigel must have put him to work on it.”
Jehana came over to cast her gaze briefly over the chart, then stepped up into the airy brightness of the left-hand window embrasure where, in the first several years of her marriage, she and Brion sometimes had spent idyllic summer afternoons, reclining lazily amid hillocks of fat cushions while they read to one another from verse and legend and sipped at chilled wine and sometimes took their pleasure of one another. Sweet memories of the place came flooding back, making her ache for his caress as she had not in all the nearly eight years of her widowhood, but also enfolding her like a mantle of comfort and peace.
She felt her breath catch in her throat, and she glanced down into the stable yard below, to distance herself a little; but to her surprise, the old memories no longer brought pain, as they once had done; merely fond nostalgia. The difference surprised her, for always before, such thinking had only stirred up old sorrow for his loss—and her fears, now that he was gone. She let a little of the sweetness linger as she stepped down out of the embrasure and allowed her fingers to brush along some of the volumes shelved near the fireplace, remembering the pride her husband had taken in the royal collection.
It was not all Brion’s work. Assembling the library had been the work of many Haldane kings and princes. King Donal, Brion’s father, had achieved scholarly competence in several areas of interest, despite an active and successful military career, acquiring many of the volumes and documents now deemed among the rarest in the royal collection; and even before Donal’s time, the royal library at Rhemuth had been said to house one of the finest collections of ancient texts in all the Eleven Kingdoms.
Brion had been more partial to the arts of war and diplomacy than those of the written word, but he had continued the family tradition of literary acquisition; and unlike many a predecessor similarly drawn to more active pursuits, he had even made the time to read many of them—though he had never been a scholar, and subtle learning had always come hard for him, and he had been impatient to sit for as long as a scholar should have done.
Still, if only in his somewhat limited fashion, Brion had loved learning, and instilled a love of learning in his son, and spent many a contented hour here. As Jehana wandered along one of the bookshelves nearer the fireplace, fingering a ragged-looking volume here, brushing the dust from a scroll-case there, she noted some of the titles that had brought her husband pleasure: Carmena Sancti Bearandi, a favorite of hers as well, written by one of Brion’s distant ancestors.
And on another shelf, some of his favorite military treatises: Historia Mearae, Liber Regalis Gwyneddis, Bellum contra Torenthum, a bound volume of Reges Gwyneddis post Interregnum. Seeing the latter, she wondered who would eventually add an account of Brion himself to the chronicle of post-Interregnum kings. He had been a good and a wise sovereign, for all that his dabblings in forbidden arcana had imperiled his soul, and she hoped the historians would be kind to him.
Sighing somewhat wistfully, she turned to survey the rest of the room. Meraude was still bent avidly over the Mearan genealogy, tracing out lines with a careful finger as she consulted one of the open references. More bookshelves lined the wall opposite the fireplace, beyond Meraude, with a further band of the painted interlace running above, just beneath ceiling level. To the left, hard in the corner of the room, another red damask curtain of lesser proportion than the window draperies suggested the presence of a garderobe beyond, though she remembered none in this room.
Mildly curious, she walked over to the curtain and drew it back. The cubicle beyond was the standard L-shape of most garderobes, with the latrine shaft cut into the outer wall, but the stonework looked new, neither plastered nor whitewashed. She would have given it no further notice, deeming it an alteration made by Kelson in the years since his father’s death—except that, as she let fall the curtain, her eye caught just an impression of an arched opening in the wall common to whatever room lay beyond the library.
Memory could supply no immediate recollection of what that room might be, nor of any passageway between the two. Puzzled, she caught back the curtain again and looked more closely. There was, indeed, a keystoned arch set into the wall, but it was filled with cut-stone. Probably an architect’s ploy to relieve weight on the wall, then, meant to be plastered over; she was sure there had been no doorway here in Brion’s time. But when she reached out absently to touch the stones, just before turning away a second time, her hand encountered—nothing.
Only barely did she suppress her start of surprise—though what had made her even try to touch it, she had no idea. Cautiously she reached out again, recoiling when, in that split second before she could actually jerk back her hand, her fingertips seemed to disappear into the very stone, as if they were penetrating fog or smoke.
She clutched clenched fingers to her suddenly pounding heart—though they did not hurt—willing herself not to panic. Thoughts of what and why and how tumbled together with the certainty that magic was responsible for the illusion, but oddly enough, her usual reaction of fear and distaste was mingled with a dispassionate curiosity. She could not fathom the purpose of any magic so oddly cloaked—in a garderobe, of all places!—but the fact that it had to be of Kelson’s doing gave her odd reassurance.
She considered whether she might have imagined what she felt—or had not felt—whether the emotion of returning to the library for the first time since Brion’s death might have triggered her imagination; but when she contemplated touching the wall again, she could not bring herself to do it. She was certain, however, that the garderobe had not been here in Brion’s time—though it appeared to be a perfectly ordinary privy. The niche in the outer wall was, indeed, real, as was the wooden seat set atop the latrine shaft. And it certainly smelled like a privy.
“Meraude?” she said over her shoulder, in an admirably calm tone. “Could you come here a moment?”
She backed out of the niche and held the curtain aside as Meraude came to peer past her, half a head shorter than she.
“What is it? Are you ill?”
“No, I’m fine. I just don’t remember this being here. Would you please touch that wall?”
Meraude looked at her strangely, then reached out and touched the wall.
“What’s wrong with the wall? Jehana, it’s just a new garderobe. I think it was built over the winter. Father Nivard probably got tired of going down the hall. Or maybe Kelson did. Actually, if you’ll pardon me, I think I’ll use it myself,” she added, slipping past Jehana with a grin and pulling the curtai
n back into place. “Did I tell you that I think I may be pregnant again?”
Her announcement left Jehana standing in stunned bemusement as Meraude chattered on from behind the curtain about when a baby might come, and how nice it would be for little Eirian to have a playmate—she was hoping for another little girl—and then whether Nigel eventually might be persuaded to let her bring Conall’s former leman and her daughter into their household.
“The child is our granddaughter, after all,” Meraude said, as she came out from behind the curtain and gave her skirts a shake. “From what I’ve been able to learn of the mother, she’s a rather fetching country maid—sweet and unassuming. Vanissa, she’s called. If she’s suitable and willing, I thought I might make a place for her in my household, perhaps as a seamstress.”
She hooked her arm through Jehana’s and began drawing them both toward the door. “Conall did provide for them, of course—his daughter will never go hungry—but I would so love to have my granddaughter here at court, where I can watch her grow up. She’ll be nearly three, by now—just a year younger than Eirian—and I’ve already missed so much of her life!”
Jehana made vague agreement that little girls were dearly to be cherished, pushing back bittersweet memories—all too few—of the longed-for daughter who would have been Kelson’s sister—born too soon to live more than a few hours. And after Rosane, there had been no more children, either sons or daughters. . . .
“I don’t expect it to be easy, of course,” Meraude went on. “You know how Nigel feels about anything to do with Conall. And the child’s name doesn’t help: the mother calls her Conalline. Understandable enough, I suppose, from her point of view, but it’s unfortunate. Still, if I can get Nigel to accept her, maybe he’ll soften his attitude regarding little Albin. He does love little girls—he positively dotes on Eirian. . . .”
Only when they had gone, Meraude chattering happily and Jehana in something of a daze, did Father Nivard emerge from the room beyond the Veil, briefly survey the materials on his desk, then disappear behind the Veil again.
Jehana spent the remainder of the day in somewhat distracted conspiracy with Meraude, watching the four-year-old Eirian play in the garden with the cook’s cat and her litter of kittens while mother and aunt contemplated strategies for softening Nigel’s attitude regarding his grandchildren. In the course of the afternoon, Jehana learned that Meraude had actually discovered the whereabouts of Conall’s daughter and her mother, with the connivance of Rory, and was contemplating a casual ride in that vicinity in the very near future.
“It’s fortunate that the child was a girl,” Meraude observed, as she wound yarn onto a ball, from a skein Jehana was holding. “With the benefit of a gentle education, the natural daughter of a prince can hope to make quite a good marriage. After all, blood is blood, especially when it’s royal. And if I could once move her and her mother to court, and Nigel got used to seeing the child with Eirian before he realized who she really was, I think he’d come around. I thought I might ride out to have a look at the pair of them in the next few days. I don’t suppose you might consider coming along? I’m not very good at plotting behind Nigel’s back, and I should welcome the company of a sympathetic co-conspirator.”
On that, at least for the moment, Jehana declined to commit herself, much though her heart went out to both Conall’s children, for any eventual placement of little Connaline at court would pave the way for Albin to join her—along with his very dangerous mother, for whom Kelson still was pining. While Jehana could not fault the young woman for attempting to keep her son from becoming any kind of threat to Kelson’s throne—and even felt pity for her treatment at Conall’s hands—Rothana still was Deryni.
True, her return to a religious vocation seemed genuine—though Jehana still had her doubts about whether a Deryni could properly have a religious vocation, notwithstanding that both civil and canon law now recognized the clergy status of men like Denis Arilan and Duncan McLain. Rothana’s place among the Servants of Saint Camber was not bound by traditional religious vows, however, for the Servants themselves were not a traditional religious order. In fact, Jehana had suspicions that they, too, were Deryni, or at least tainted by the Deryni, since they called themselves in honor of the long-discredited Deryni saint, even now being restored to respectability, and by her own son.
But at least Rothana’s affiliation with the Servants kept her far from Rhemuth most of the time. And her intentions for a religious life for her son, coupled with Nigel’s adamant refusal to acknowledge the boy, meant that mother and son probably would remain safely tucked away with the Servants, notwithstanding Kelson’s contrary wishes for both of them. Jehana little cared how Rothana brought up her child; but if Meraude succeeded in making a place at court for little Conalline, Albin might be next—which, inevitably, would bring his mother to court more often. And until Kelson was safely wed to a proper queen, that presented an ongoing danger.
Jehana supped quietly with Father Ambros and Sister Cecile that evening, as was her usual custom; but after evening prayers, as she prepared for bed, she found herself again considering her experience in the library that morning. She had not allowed herself to think about it earlier, refusing to let it intrude on the more pleasant distraction of discussing children, which she loved; but now, as she let a maid brush out her hair, the soothing monotony of the ritual let her relax, and the memory came drifting back—but not, strangely, in any threatening way.
“Thank you, Sophie, you may go,” she said, when the maid had finished brushing, and had plaited her hair in a loose braid.
The girl dipped her a quick curtsy and departed, leaving Jehana to sit for a long moment gazing into her mirror. She would be forty in a few months’ time. Even in the candlelight, she looked her age. There was very little grey yet threading the auburn hair—mainly, a faint frosting at the temples that was not at all unattractive—but the fine lines around the smoky green eyes told of the toll the years had taken since Brion’s death. She was not so painfully thin as she had been, a few years before, so that she no longer had to bind a ribbon through her marriage ring to keep it from slipping off her finger, but there still was not enough flesh on her bones.
She pinched at her hollow cheeks to bring some color to them, then made a face at herself—she who, at home in Bremagne, had once been regarded as a great beauty. Then she shook her head and turned away with a sigh. After a moment, following another, more resolute sigh, she rose and wrapped herself in a dark cloak over her night shift, pulling up its hood to hide her bright hair. Before leaving, she took up a lighted candlestick from her dressing table, pausing to look down the corridor in both directions before emerging, the candle’s flame shielded behind one hand. Her soft-soled slippers made no sound as she padded softly to the turnpike stair at the end of the corridor to descend several flights.
She was not sure what she planned to do. Quite probably, the library would be locked at this hour. And she certainly did not wish to rouse Father Nivard, whom she suspected of being Deryni. Even were she so disposed, she had no idea where his quarters lay. What both frightened and drew her was the knowledge that she herself might have the resources to deal with the lack of a key.
The thought of actually doing so sent a thrill of fear and guilt through her, and she closed one hand around the little crucifix she wore around her neck as she emerged at the level where the library lay and peered cautiously out of the stairwell. The corridor was sparsely lit by a torch at either end, but as deserted as the one she had just left, for the hour was late, and this area housed no living-quarters.
Breathing a tiny sigh of relief, she continued on toward the library. The door was closed and locked, as expected, but at least no light showed beneath it. She glanced again in either direction, then continued on a few paces, looking for a door to the adjacent room, but there was only the arched outline of a doorway now blocked up, just visible in the wavering light of her candle.
Then, it must be through the li
brary, if she meant to carry through with her intention; but she must have a closer look at that very strange arch beside the garderobe. Returning to the library door, she again cast a guilty glance toward either end of the corridor, then crouched down and set her candlestick on the floor, laying her hands on the lock as she took a deep breath, asking God’s forgiveness for what she was about to do. It was one of the less alarming of the abilities she had discovered within herself in the past few years—the power to move small objects simply by willing them to move—and she told herself that tonight’s indulgence was in a good cause.
As the tumblers of the lock shifted beneath her hands, she rose to ease the door softly inward, knocking over the candlestick in her hurry to slip inside before someone came. The mishap extinguished the candle, but she snatched it up with a little gasp and scurried into the sheltering darkness of the room. Time enough to find flint and steel when she was sure no one had seen her. Pulse throbbing in her temples, she closed and locked the door, then pushed back her hood and turned to stand for a long moment in utter darkness, back pressed against the solid oak, feeling lightheaded and almost giddy as she strained her ears for any sound.
None intruded, save the pounding of her heart. After a moment, she recovered enough presence of mind to finger her candle and candlestick, making sure the two were still secure. The room was pitch-black, but she remembered its layout well enough to make her way carefully across it, half a step at a time, until she fetched up gently against the writing desk and then edged far enough around it to reach up and gently move aside the drapes in the left-hand window embrasure. The moonlight flooding into the room revealed that someone—presumably, Father Nivard—had returned to the room since her visit of the morning, for the books on the desk were now stacked neatly, scrolls rolled up, the vellums gone. She glanced nervously in the direction of the presumed garderobe, but its curtain still obscured whatever might lie beyond, besides a privy.
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