Camber the Heretic

by Katherine Kurtz

  Was it truly possible?

  She realized she had been holding her breath, and she let it out slowly. It was worth a try.

  “All right, darling. You can help Mummy. You hug Mummy’s arm tight and watch Camlin and think about helping him. All right?”

  “I do it,” he said simply, shifting around to peer over her shoulder, chin settling dreamily against her upper arm.

  Against all logic, she quested for the Healing paths and found them, drew her son into ever deepening rapport, felt out the same kind of link she had forged so often with Rhys in his Healing work. Against all logic, she felt the Healing energies stir in response to her touch!

  The sensation was like what she had felt a thousand times, over the years, as she worked with Rhys. Only this was her direction and Tieg’s power; she was a conduit of control and guidance through which the Healing energies were ready to flow. They could do it!

  She knew that Ansel and the servants were staring at her, but she paid them no mind. She shifted Camlin’s wrist in her hands and boldly pressed her fingertip into the bloody entry wound, while her son looked on in confident fascination. She felt the increased flow of blood around her fingertip, hot and vital with life; the hard reality of the bones of wrist and arm; the ligaments and tendons torn by the nail which had rent the flesh and forced the bones apart—and Tieg’s amazed observation of all of this, clinical, but with all a child’s naïveté and trust in the ability of his mother to make everything right. She shifted a portion of her mind and felt Tieg’s energy flowing through her fingertip and into the wound—Healing energy, of the same kind which had been Rhys’s and was now their son’s.

  She moved the wrist with her other hand and felt the bones shift back into place, sensed the flesh and sinews mending under her very touch as she slowly drew her fingertip out of the wound and it closed behind her retreat. She turned the wrist and drew her fingertip through the exit wound on the back of the forearm, and it, too, closed. Some faint scarring he would have to remind him of his ordeal, besides the scarring of mind which would take other Healing, for she had not the skill to Heal him as cleanly as Rhys could have done, but at least the bones were knit, the angry wounds closing.

  Ansel had watched her and Tieg in amazement during the first part of the operation, but as he realized what they were doing, he unwrapped the other wrist and swabbed it as clean as he could for their next attention. Now she touched those wounds and Healed them, too; laid her bloody hands on the striped and stretched chest to ease the strain of muscles pulled almost to the point of collapse; erased the marks of the scourge.

  The demand on her concentration was becoming very intense, and she was aware of the drain on Tieg’s energy, as well; but when she bade Bartholomew shift the unconscious Camlin in his arms so that she might assess the damage to his other side, and would have let it Heal on its own, Tieg gave her a deeply reproachful look.

  Smiling despite her fatigue, Evaine eased the weals on Camlin’s back and buttocks, on the lean, well-muscled legs, then washed his blood from her hands and reached out with what little strength remained to touch his memory, blurring the details of what had happened until he should reach a time and place in which he might deal with them. When she had finished, her patient slept more easily, wrapped in the warmth of several cloaks. Tieg was curled up at her side, also asleep once the physical Healing was done, with a thumb in his pink mouth and a beatific expression on his freckled face. Gently she disengaged from her son’s mind, gathering him in her arms to hold him in mindless gratitude before giving him over to Damon to return to the litter. As Bartholomew took the now peacefully slumbering Camlin, Evaine sat back on her heels with a sigh, easing the small of her back with both hands. As she relaxed her own controls, she felt a little shudder in her womb, and then a quick but strong cramp. She tensed, but the pain was almost too quickly gone.

  “Are you all right?” Ansel asked, taking her arm in alarm as he saw the pain flash across her face.

  Quickly she assessed her condition, then nodded tentatively.

  “Seem to be. I think my other Healer-child was protesting the strain on her mother. She’s done that before. When Tavis lost his hand, I was only a few months pregnant, but I had to leave the room where Tavis was. I guess she didn’t like his disharmony.”

  Ansel signalled Thomas and Arik to come in with the litter, then sent Damon and Bartholomew to search for any other survivors in the keep while he scouted the rest of the yard.

  After a while, Bartholomew and Damon returned with an armful of heavy cloaks and blankets and the body of a thin, white-haired old woman, simply but richly clad. There was no mark upon her; she might have died in her sleep, so composed was the expression on her face. As Damon laid her on one of the blankets which Bartholomew spread, Evaine came and stood beside her.

  “Aunt Aislinn, my father’s sister,” she said in a low voice. “Where did you find her, Damon?”

  “In the solar at the top of the keep, my lady. The room had been breached, but they never touched her. I can only think she must have died from the smoke, before they broke in.”

  “Or else her heart just stopped,” Evaine murmured. “She could have chosen that way, knowing death was near, and the form it might take.”

  She shook her head and drew a fold of blanket across the old woman’s face. “She was the Dowager Countess of Kierney, Damon—grandmother to the castle’s lord and a very great lady. Are you sure you found no trace of any other noble ladies? Lord Adrian’s wife and sister should have been here, since Aislinn and the children were.”

  “We’ve found nothing yet, my lady. Do you want me to keep looking?”

  She did, but before she could tell him so, she glanced around the yard to see whether Ansel needed him. Ansel was checking on the litter, which had been drawn up in an angle of the inner wall that would afford no view of the carnage if the children woke and sneaked a look between the curtains. Arik, Bartholomew, and Thomas were piling up unburned timbers and other combustibles in the center of the yard. She stared at them for several seconds before their intention registered.

  “Ansel, what are they going to do?” she gasped, running to his side as fast as she could in her condition and grabbing his arm.

  “I told them to do it, Evaine. We can’t take our dead with us, we can’t bury them in the frozen earth, and we can’t just leave them here for the wolves and the elements. It’s cleanest this way, under the circumstances.”

  She knew he was right, but she could not keep the tears from starting again. Blindly she stumbled to where her firstborn’s body lay still wrapped in Ansel’s cloak, knelt and uncovered the still-beautiful face to stroke the fair hair off the smooth, untroubled brow. Like this, with his tortured body hidden from her sight and only the angelic face to meet her gaze, she could almost believe that he had died at peace like Aislinn.

  She clasped her hands and tried to pray, longing for the presence of father or brother to add their prayers to hers to speed Aidan on his way, and wishing that there could be something more than a funeral pyre to mark the passage of all these victims of senseless brutality, but she knew that was not possible. This time, her blessing must suffice—and who better to give her son farewell than the one who had borne him, nursed him, taught him, loved him, and now must let him go? She could not even begrudge the fact that young Camlin lived, while her son had died—for anyone who had survived what Camlin had, deserved his life.

  She prayed then, and bade him Godspeed, and by the time Ansel came to take the boy and lay him on the pyre, she could stand aside and watch dry-eyed as her nephew lifted the small, blanket-wrapped form, knowing that it was but a broken shell, that Aidan was not there.

  They laid Adrian and Aislinn on either side of him—MacRorie kin all, although of different names—and then she joined her hand and mind with Ansel’s to start the cleansing blaze.

  She thought herself well in control until another cramp rippled up her abdomen and she felt the warm, familiar rush of her
water breaking. The snow beneath her feet took on a pinkish hue.

  She gasped with the surprise of it, though she knew well what it was; and now a frightened human urgency began to supplant the cool Deryni sorceress. The baby would be born within a few hours, almost a full month early, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. They were stranded in this ruin of death and torture now until she could deliver. And for this birth, she would have no gentle Rhys to ease her labor and Heal her pains, nor even a midwife to attend her. She wondered whether Ansel or any of the other men had ever even seen a baby born.

  The men lost no time in finding her shelter. She would not go into what was left of the stable, with Adrian’s blood still frozen on the snow outside, and they would not let her stay within sight of the funeral pyre still sending its greasy column of smoke upward on the morning breeze. They finally compromised on an alcove underneath the kitchen stair, which could be curtained off with blankets and made reasonably secure from the cold, for snow had begun to fall again.

  A small fire was built, and the litter unhitched from the horses and brought inside, but Rhysel was awake and hungry, impatient to be allowed out. Evaine could not permit that, of course, but she did visit with her daughter while she ate breakfast, and had Ansel wake Camlin and Tieg long enough for them to eat a little, too, before sending all three children back to sleep inside the litter.

  Evaine settled down to the business of labor then, losing track of the time as her pains grew closer together and the morning wore on. Ansel stayed with her most of the time, trying to absorb a little background on basic child delivery between her pains. The guards continued the grisly business of bringing the rest of the dead to the pyre. All through the morning Evaine could hear the crackle of the flames as they consumed each new offering.

  It was near noon when the guards’ voices took on a different note, and then Arik came bursting into the enclosure without even pausing to ask permission.

  “My lady, my lady, look what we’ve found! They were hiding in the middens!”

  She could have wept for joy to see the two dirty, bedraggled women who came into view behind Arik. They were her missing kinswomen. Fiona, small and dark and quick, gave a little cry and threw herself across the enclosure into Evaine’s arms, shaking her head and laughing as if she could not believe what she saw. Mairi, wife to the slain Adrian, stood silently beside Bartholomew and let him support her arm, her gaze distant and unfocused, even when Fiona finally came and led her gently to a little stool beside Evaine. Evaine did not have to ask what Mairi had seen.

  The men went out gratefully then, to continue with their work and to keep watch, and Evaine and Fiona passed the time by talking. While Fiona washed herself and the compliant Mairi of the stench of the middens and changed both their clothes for dry ones which Ansel soon brought, she told Evaine of how she and Mairi had watched the horror of the day before from their solar window, then had managed to climb down a garde-robe shaft after the attackers torched the keep. The spunky old Countess Aislinn, too infirm to navigate the narrow space with them, had volunteered to stay and cover their absence, if the marauders gained the solar room before the fire did—for they had heard the screams of the men trapped in the barracks below, and knew that it was only a matter of time before the flames reached them, as well. The two of them had huddled in the middens all that terrible night, praying that they would not be discovered; and sometime during those awful hours, Mairi had withdrawn into her grief.

  All afternoon Evaine’s labor continued, as Ansel and the guards kept watch outside, and Fiona kept Evaine talking about Healing Camlin and her love for Rhys and anything else she could contrive to keep her mind from the pain. Always before, Evaine had had Rhys to speed her labor and ease its discomfort; this time she must let nature take its course. By the time the baby was born, just at dusk, both mother and newborn daughter were exhausted. Ansel let them rest until it was fully dark and made everyone eat a substantial meal; but then he had to insist that they move on.

  With Evaine in the litter with Tieg and the baby, Rhysel on her pony, and Camlin and the two other women mounted before Ansel and two of the guards, they set out from Trurill at last. All through the night and into the day they rode, twice avoiding patrols of the new Earl of Culdi’s men and stopping only to feed and water the horses and rotate riders. Toward dusk, however, Ansel realized that they had picked up an escort, far back on the road.

  He did not tell Evaine of it, but she knew. She reached back with her mind and sensed their cold, brutal presence, somehow knowing them to be of the same ilk as the men who had tortured and killed her son. She hated them, and was impotent in her hate, drained as she was by the Healing of Camlin and the birth of her child. Ansel pushed on, but the road worsened as the light faded, and now he began to worry in earnest, for their pursuers were gaining, slowly but inexorably, and the litter was slowing them greatly. As they slowed even more for the litter-bearing horses to negotiate a particularly treacherous down-hill section of the road, slick with mud and ice, Ansel drew rein alongside the litter and put out a hand to steady it. Evaine’s face, as she drew aside the curtains and peered up at him, was pale and gaunt-looking.

  “They’re gaining on us, aren’t they?” she asked.

  “I hoped you hadn’t noticed,” he said.

  With a deep breath, she assessed her condition and decided that she just might be able to sit a horse now. It seemed their best chance to lose their pursuers, and this might be their only opportunity. With all of them on horseback, and pushing hard, there were several narrower tracks which they might take from here which would get them to the safety of the monastery by dawn or a little later. But they must lose their pursuers first, or risk leading them right to their only refuge.

  “I’ll ride, then,” she said, pulling the baby from her breast and drawing her cloak around herself as she swung her feet down from the litter. “If we leave the litter here, we can make better time, especially in the dark.”

  Instantly Ansel was leaping down into the mud to support her as she tried to stand and staggered, instead.

  “Don’t be a fool! You’re in no condition to ride,” he muttered. “Do you want to kill yourself?”

  She gestured for Damon to come and help her as she began unbuckling one of the traces on the lead litter horse.

  “Of course not. But I don’t want us to be taken, either, and I don’t want to lead our pursuers to our only refuge. We’ve seen what they do to Deryni in this part of the country. Damon, you and Thomas unhook the litter and rig the horses so they can be ridden. The baby and I will ride with Fiona.”

  “Don’t you think you at least ought to ride with me or one of the other men?” Ansel asked. “I don’t know whether Fiona can catch you, if you start to fall.”

  Fiona, let down from the horse where she had been sitting with Arik, came running over to support Evaine under one arm and take the baby from her.

  “She won’t fall,” Fiona said, “and I won’t let her. The horses can carry two women more easily than a man and a woman. It’s the only logical way.”

  Ansel looked dubious, but he sensed that Evaine would not be budged, once her mind was made up—and they could make better time without the litter. After assessing the mounts they now had, he chose the largest and most smooth-paced of them for Evaine and Fiona, then had Arik switch his deeply padded travel saddle for the harness arrangement on the sumpter horse’s back, knowing that Arik could ride bareback. The children were parcelled out among Arik, Damon and himself, and Mairi was put on the second sumpter horse, following alongside Thomas. Bartholomew brought up the rear with Rhysel’s pony in tow.

  They kept a slow pace at first; but when Evaine appeared to bear up reasonably well, they pressed on more quickly. Just at dark, a light snow began to fall, covering their tracks; and shortly after that, they passed through a succession of forks in the road which they hoped would further discourage pursuit.

  Evaine felt herself begin to hemorrhage, a little af
ter that, and held onto consciousness by only the barest of threads, her strength taxed more and more with each mile they completed. But she would not, dared not, tell Ansel and risk having him slow their pace and face possible capture. Better to die on the road than chance what those others had suffered at Trurill.

  They did, indeed, lose their pursuers during that long night of flight through the new snow, as the date turned to the second of the new year and the cold increased. They rode through the darkness with but two brief stops for rest and meager rations, as much for the horses’ sake as for their riders. Evaine continued to insist that she was doing well enough.

  She would not get down from her horse the second time, though, for she had seen the blood staining the dark suede of the saddle seat the first time she got down—though Fiona and Ansel had not—and she knew that she must not let the others know. Instead, she sat nodding in the saddle and gave the baby suck from there, her voluminous cloak muffled closely around her and snowflakes resting unmelting in the rich golden hair which spilled from her hood and around the baby’s face.

  They rode on then, and Evaine slipped back into that twilight state which she had found to be the only way she could keep from passing out entirely from her growing weakness. She was hardly aware of the passage of the hours or the miles after that, but they reached Saint Mary’s in the Hills just after dawn.

  She managed to bring herself back to awareness briefly as they drew rein in the abbey yard, all her being rejoicing to see Joram running to meet them across the virgin snow. She stayed in the saddle just long enough to give the baby safely into the arms of a waiting monk, felt Joram’s hands on her waist to lift her down, but then the world began to spin.

  The next thing she knew, she was lying someplace warm and dry, snuggled under the reassuring weight of several soft blankets. She could feel the warmth of a friendly fire on the right side of her face. The aroma of something eminently edible wafted past her nostrils. She had been bathed and dressed in a clean garment while she lay unconscious—she suspected Fiona’s hand in that—and as she flexed an ankle experimentally under the blankets, still not opening her eyes, she was reminded abruptly of the abuse to which she had been forced to subject her body in the past few days. A quick assessment reassured her that she had stopped bleeding, however, and that her general condition was far better than she had feared.