“Welcome aboard, my lord,” the man said. “Would you like to take a turn at the tiller?”
Alaric’s eyes got round, but he came immediately to place both hands on the weathered oak, moving at Kirby’s direction to stand between the man’s two burly arms.
“Can you feel the pressure of the current?” Kirby asked. “She’s got a heavy touch in this weather, but she’s a good ship, very responsive.”
Alaric concentrated, letting his hands move with Kirby’s in fine response to the waves, and thought he felt what the helmsman was talking about. He grinned as he glanced up at the man, then murmured his thanks and ducked out to let Kirby resume full control.
“Thank you, Master Kirby, but it might be best if you did the steering.”
The adults chuckled at that, the captain clapping him on the shoulder in good-natured approval. Soon a cabin boy began bringing out cups and a jug of ale, and then folding canvas stools, so the men could take their leisure, but Alaric politely declined their invitation to join them, excusing himself to explore the ship instead. The crew were mostly friendly, some of them aware of what he had done to assist with loading the grey mare below. He headed down to see her, spending a few minutes stroking both horses, but it was stuffy belowdecks, so he soon went back topside to scan the distant shoreline once more.
He soon learned that, once the cargo was safely stowed and the sail was set, there was very little for the crew to do when they were not on duty, so many of them were relaxing on deck, a few fishing off the sides. He could see a lookout up in a little cage atop the mast, and two more at the bow, but the frantic activity attendant on getting the ship under way had ceased. The men-at-arms had settled to sit with backs against the forward deck platform, except for one who was retching over the side.
“Some men just don’t take to the sea,” one of the sailors told him. “It isn’t their fault. He’ll feel better, once we anchor for the night. Lucky for him, this is a calm sea today.”
Alaric found himself wondering what it would be like if it were not a calm sea, but he decided to say nothing, lest he damage his credibility as a sailor. After a while, he found an out-of-the-way spot to sit at the base of the afterdeck platform, with a view of the shoreline crawling by. There he settled down and pulled out the Koltan extract that Viliam and Jernian had given him, and spent the rest of the afternoon puzzling out the first few lines. They dropped anchor that night in a tiny bay tucked into the coastline at Trevas, dined on a hearty fish stew and crusty bread washed down with ale, and sailed again shortly after dawn.
This became part of his routine for the next few days: morning sword drill on the main deck with Llion and Xander and the men-at-arms, and sometimes his father, then several hours immersing himself in Koltan. Occasionally, one of the sailors would give him a fishing line to hold, but he never caught anything, and concluded that fishing actually was rather boring. One afternoon he spent several hours with one of the sailors learning about simple splices and knots.
He also visited the cargo hold at least once each day to check on the grey mare, usually wheedling an apple from the ship’s cook to split between the mare and the dun gelding. On the third day out, after a stop at the Carthmoori port of Kilchon, he looked up from his reading to see Henry Kirby, the steersman, towering above him.
“Do you read for pleasure, young sir, or has your knight set lessons for you?” Kirby asked casually.
Alaric gave the man a wry smile. “For pleasure, though some of this is hardly pleasant. I don’t suppose you read Torenthi.”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Crouching down, Kirby reached across to angle the manuscript toward him. “We trade with Torenth, so I had to learn the lingo. And if you want to be a master one day, and captain your own ship, you learn to read it as well as speak it. Is this Koltan you’re reading? Don’t tell me you play cardounet?”
“Yes, and yes,” Alaric said in surprise. “Friends in Coroth copied out part of the beginning of his Basic Strategies—and tried to translate it for me. But I don’t think their Torenthi is as good as they’d like it to be. We played a lot, though, while I was there. And I’m much better now than I used to be.”
“May I see that?” Kirby asked. “Do you mind if I sit?”
Shaking his head, Alaric handed over the piece of vellum, which Kirby studied for several minutes. Then:
“This is useful, as far as it goes. A pity they didn’t have room to copy more for you.” Kirby looked up. “Would you like a match? I have a board and pieces in my cabin. It’s a game that seafarers play a lot.”
“Thank you, but I doubt I’d be much challenge for you,” Alaric said, though he was pleased to be asked.
“Nonsense. If you don’t play, you can’t learn. Let me get my board. We’ve time for a match before I must go back on watch.”
Without waiting for an answer, Kirby unfolded himself and went below. Across the deck, Llion had been watching, and smiled and nodded as he caught Alaric’s eye. But the boy was given no opportunity to contemplate that for very long, because Kirby emerged very quickly with a small cardounet board under one arm and a leather pouch in that hand.
“Here we go,” he said, folding back to a cross-legged seat beside Alaric and plopping the board between them. “You probably aren’t used to pieces like mine, but you can help me sort them and set up.”
He pulled apart the drawstrings and upended the bag over the board, spilling out an assortment of black, white, and brown tiles, which he quickly began sorting. As he did so, Alaric soon saw that the brown tiles were actually suede leather backings for black or white tiles, which all had symbols painted on them to represent the traditional pieces.
“I suppose you’re used to fancy game pieces carved like the figures they represent,” Kirby said, as he began sliding the white tiles into position on his side of the board. “These are easier to play with at sea; they don’t slide off the board as easily in weather. And frankly, it keeps your concentration sharper, because you must pay more attention to the pieces.”
The explanation made sense, and Alaric immediately pitched in to help, first turning all the rest of the brown tiles, then sliding the black ones onto his side of the board, for Kirby clearly had already chosen the white side.
“I’ve taken the white, so that you don’t have to waste time deciding what first move you would make,” the helmsman said, looking up at him when the board was set. “And no reading my mind,” he added casually. “Fair is fair.”
With that comment, he sent his war-duke over the front of the white line to challenge Alaric’s archers.
This opening move, plus the allusion to his Deryni powers, put Alaric on the defensive at once, though there had been no hostility in Kirby’s statement; only an acknowledgment of fact, that seemed not to bother the helmsman in the least. It did, indeed, take more concentration to keep the pieces straight without the shapes to remind him which was which—and Kirby did not coddle him or give him extra advantages. As he had said, fair was fair.
Kirby trounced him handily in their first match, and in the second, and the third. But each time, Alaric learned something new. Sometimes he was able to answer one of Kirby’s moves with a move of his own that came straight from Koltan, which always brought a smile to Kirby’s lips and a nod of approval. The helmsman was a good player and a good teacher, and pointed out the boy’s mistakes in constructive and sometimes even humorous ways.
“Now, that was fairly pathetic,” Kirby said sympathetically, taking Alaric’s war-duke after Alaric had moved the piece directly into the potential path of one of Kirby’s knights and then not covered it in his next move. “When you’re a real duke, you’ll need to look ahead better than that.”
“What?” Alaric yelped. Then: “Oh,” he said, breathing out with an exasperated sigh.
“But you won’t forget that again, will you?” Kirby said.
They played a
gain the next day, and the next, sometimes on deck and sometimes down in the cabin, by lamplight. The pair became a regular sight on deck, when Kirby was not on duty: the shaggy-haired helmsman and the towheaded lad young enough to be his son, with heads bent over the cardounet board.
Kenneth was glad to see him so occupied, and he and Llion would watch the pair for hours from up on the afterdeck, as the ship continued westward along the rocky coast, calling at the ports of Kentar and Dunluce and finally rounding the Point of Kentar to enter the Eirian Estuary. High above, on the point, the Abbey of St. Ultan’s looked down on the sea, and they put in briefly at the abbey’s tiny harbor to take aboard two monks of the Ordo Verbi Dei, bound for Nyford.
And to Nyford they came, at midday the next day, tying up at the quay along the northern bank of the Lendour River where it met the Eirian. The groom in charge of looking after the horses aboard had asked Alaric to stand by when they offloaded the grey mare, for it was uncertain how she would react after nearly a week at sea.
It was well that they had taken the precaution, because the mare all but exploded as the groom tried to lead her from the hold, nearly going over backward and into the water as her hooves hit the ramp and she skidded, screaming.
Fortunately, Alaric was waiting nearby, and immediately slipped in beside her to grab the headstall and haul her down, crooning endearments all the while. He became airborne a few times, but he hung on doggedly as she gradually danced to the end of the ramp and onto the stone paving of the quay. At the same time, Kenneth and Llion came down the passenger gangplank and rushed to assist him, Xander right at their heels. No one noticed, until the mare had stopped dancing, that a party of mounted men had ridden up quayside, their leader robed in episcopal purple and wearing the flat, broad-brimmed hat of a bishop.
“You there! Back off, all of you! Take your hands off my horse!” the bishop cried, his voice rising on an angry note as he gestured for two of his men to take charge of the animal. “Why, don’t tell me it’s the Earl of Lendour? What an unpleasant surprise.”
Kenneth whirled to confront the speaker, his heart sinking as he recognized Oliver de Nore, the Bishop of Nyford, who of all the men in the world probably hated Kenneth Morgan and his son more than any other.
“Yes, I’m Lendour,” Kenneth said defiantly. “And you probably have my son to thank for the fact that your horse is not now in the bay, or hobbling on a broken leg.”
Startled, de Nore turned his attention to Alaric, who was doing his best to become invisible while being separated from the mare, who still was rolling her eyes and dancing on the slick cobbles.
“So,” de Nore breathed, furious, “the Deryni spawn of the Deryni witch. Did you lay hands on my horse, boy?”
“She was frightened. She might have hurt herself. I only meant to help,” Alaric replied, taken aback, though he kept his head high.
“Help?” de Nore repeated. “Help?” He paused to draw a deep breath, then: “You have ruined her,” he said in a low, dangerous voice. “She is contaminated by the mere contact with your Deryni cursedness!”
“Then, I’ll take her off your hands!” Kenneth snapped, as Llion reached Alaric and seized him by the upper arms, pulling him back from the growing altercation. “I’ll buy her. I’ll give you twice what you paid for her, whatever that might be!”
De Nore’s eyes narrowed as he glared back at Kenneth, and his men stirred uneasily all around him.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he muttered, low and dangerous. “But, no. There’s a better use for a horse ruined by the likes of your devil-spawn son. I shall give her to feed the poor.” Alaric gasped. “There are plenty of worthy poor in Nyford. Gareth, fetch me a compliant butcher from the town market!”
“No!” Alaric shouted, squirming unsuccessfully to escape from Llion as one of the mounted men immediately wheeled to trot off in the direction of the town. “No! You can’t! Papa, stop him! He can’t!”
“Can I not?” De Nore backed his horse a few steps as his men interposed themselves between him and the boy—and the boy’s father, who had gone white. “The horse is my property, Kenneth Morgan Earl of Lendour!” he said coldly. “You are an officer of the king’s law, and the law says that I can do whatever I please with my property—and today it is my pleasure to provide some free meat for the poor of this town.”
“My lord, be reasonable,” Kenneth said desperately. “Choose another horse. There’s another in the hold. Take that one, and give me the mare.”
De Nore had begun to laugh now, obviously enjoying the moment. “But this isn’t about just any horse, dear Morgan,” he said. “It’s about this horse, which your son cares about, and which has been sullied by his filthy Deryni powers. I can’t touch him, but I can do whatever I please with my own property.
“So it pleases me to watch him suffer, the way his mother made my brother suffer—or at least a little of the way my brother suffered. Can you even imagine what that must have been like for him, trussed up naked like an animal and thrown headfirst into that well to drown?”
“It was the king’s judgment, Bishop!” Kenneth retorted. “Not my son’s, and not even my wife’s.”
“But it was your wife’s filthy Deryni testimony that condemned him!”
“No, it was the law that condemned him. It was his guilt that condemned him,” Kenneth snapped.
“He is no less dead,” de Nore said, with a dismissive shake of his head. “My brother cannot have been guilty of the crimes with which he was charged. Ah, here’s my man with that butcher. Come here, Butcher, I have work for you.”
The soldier sent to fetch the man had carried him on the crupper behind him, and let him down onto the ground before de Nore. The man looked around curiously before turning his attention to the bishop, then pulled off his cap to bow over it.
“My lord?”
“Yes, Butcher, I wish to make a gift of meat to the poor of Nyford,” de Nore said, pointing at the grey mare, which now was standing quietly with two of de Nore’s men at her head. “Put that horse down, here and now, and then you can take away the meat.”
The butcher glanced at the mare, then did a double-take. “I don’t understand, Excellency. Is the horse injured, or unsound? She looks a fine specimen to me.”
“I wish to have it butchered. Just do it.”
“But, my lord—”
“Just do it!” de Nore snapped. “Or do you wish to forfeit your right to ply your trade here in Nyford?”
The butcher sighed and shook his head. “As you say, my lord.” Then he began walking toward the mare, drawing his butcher’s blade from a heavy leather scabbard at his waist, but holding it close against his leg.
Alaric tried not to look, still struggling in Llion’s arms and now held by several more of his father’s men, but Llion leaned down to whisper in his ear.
“You cannot stop this, my lord, and neither can your father,” he said. “But do not let de Nore see you cry. Don’t ever let him see you cry! Can you do that?”
His words were like a jolt of icy water, instantly sobering the boy. Red-faced and breathing hard, he quit struggling and straightened, his eyes narrowing in sheer hatred for the man who was ordering this thing. If he had had the killing use of his powers, de Nore would have toppled from his horse at once, blasted by the very magic he so feared.
But Alaric had no such use of his powers yet. He was Deryni, heir to incredible magic, but he was still only a boy, barely eight years old.
Mercifully, the butcher knew his business, and his knife was sharp. The mare only tossed her head once as the blade slit her throat, more startled than frightened—and then confused, as blood spurted from the silky grey neck, gushing onto the cobbles and spreading beneath the mare’s dainty hooves until she slowly sank to her knees, to her side, and then was still. So quickly was it over.
The momentary silence was almost palpabl
e as, for a long moment, Alaric returned his gaze to the bishop, willing him nothing but ill. Then he shrugged off Llion’s restraints and turned on his heel to go back aboard the ship, Llion following close behind him. Kenneth, also glaring at the bishop, walked slowly across the several yards that separated them and stopped a few paces away. Xander accompanied him, a hand on the hilt of his sword.
“Be assured,” Kenneth said to de Nore, “that the king will hear of this.”
“My dear Earl of Lendour, I have done nothing wrong,” de Nore replied, leaning casually against the high pommel of his saddle and smiling faintly as he gazed down at the other man.
“And on this day, you have done nothing right,” Kenneth retorted. “That was pure spite, against a child who was not even born when your brother met his fate. And it was senseless cruelty against one of God’s innocent creatures.”
“The boy is Deryni,” de Nore said coldly. “His very touch is corruption. And he laid his hands on my property, polluting it beyond redemption.” He glanced at the crumpled grey mass nearer the water, sprawled in a pool of congealing blood. “At least it will feed the poor.”
“You sanctimonious bastard!” Kenneth’s voice was low, dangerous. “You had best have a long talk with your confessor, because you will surely answer for today’s work when you stand before the Judgment Seat!”
De Nore sat upright in his saddle, a look of cold disdain contorting his features. “How dare you?”
“Ask yourself that question,” Kenneth retorted. “And do not expect God’s mercy, when you had none for that poor, dumb beast!”
“How dare you?!” de Nore repeated, as Kenneth turned on his heel and stalked back toward the ship, Xander at his heels. “How dare you?!”
Kenneth was shaking with fury as he and Xander went back aboard. They found Alaric with Llion in their cabin, with the boy weeping in the young knight’s arms.
“How could he do that, Papa?” the boy sobbed. “He just—murdered her, for no reason!”
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