The King's Deryni

by Katherine Kurtz

  Alaric glanced toward the head of the hall, where this year’s crop of new pages were already garbed in their Haldane tabards and waiting to the left of the throne, looking both excited and nervous, though they had already endured the most frightening part, by speaking directly to the king. Brion, meanwhile, was receiving several new squires being promoted from the pages’ ranks.

  “Only three new pages this year,” Nigel muttered, with a glance aside at Alaric. “And look at them. Were we ever that green?”

  Alaric controlled a smile and shrugged. “I suspect we were, sir. I was. And you were a prince, so I just assumed that you knew what you were doing.”

  “Big assumption,” Nigel replied with a wink, again peering up the hall, where his brother was receiving another squire, this one accompanied by a knight in a red court robe with heraldic adornments. “Hello, who’s this? Can you make out the device?”

  Alaric followed Prince Nigel’s gaze and nodded. “Yes, sir, it’s the Earl of Rhendall and his heir,” he said confidently. “I met them briefly before court. Our new squire, the future earl, is called Saer de Traherne. He seems keen enough. Carries himself well. I understand that he’ll be here for a few years. There’s also a sister around here somewhere, but I don’t see her just now. I believe she’ll be joining the queen’s household. The new queen.”

  “Saer de Traherne, eh? I wonder if he’s any good with a sword.”

  “I expect you’ll find out, soon enough,” Alaric replied. “I assume you’ll continue training with the squires?”

  “Of course. One is always learning.”

  “Well, then.”

  As the king spoke with the Earl of Rhendall, and Queen Jehana helped young Saer don his Haldane livery, Duke Richard made his way back to where Nigel and Alaric were waiting, along with a senior squire carrying Nigel’s furled personal banner.

  “You’re next,” he said to his nephew. “Are you ready?”

  Nigel straightened and tugged resolutely at the hem of his over-tunic. “Ready, sir.”

  At the head of the hall, the duty herald stepped to the front of the dais and rapped with his staff against the oak boards. The banner-bearer moved into position at Alaric’s right and shook out the scarlet silk to reveal Nigel’s crowned golden demi-lion. Richard and Nigel fell in behind them.

  “Sire, His Royal Highness the Prince Richard Haldane Duke of Carthmoor begs leave to approach the throne with business to present before Your Majesties.”

  At the king’s nod, the herald lifted his staff in summons. Taking his lead from the banner, Alaric lifted the sheathed sword with its spurs looped over the hilt and processed down the length of the hall, Richard and Nigel right behind him. The crowd parted before them as they came. Alaric moved slightly to the left and halted, the banner halting to the right, as Richard and Nigel came to the bottom step of the dais and stopped.

  “Your Majesties,” Richard proclaimed, “I have the honor to present my nephew, the squire Nigel Cluim Gwydion Rhys Haldane, as a candidate for knighthood.”

  Brion tried to maintain a serious expression, but he kept fighting an exuberant grin as he answered, “We are pleased to receive him. Let the candidate be invested with the spurs.”

  That was the signal for one of the new pages to bring a red velvet cushion to set before Nigel on the bottom step. As the prince knelt, the other two came to take the spurs from the sword Alaric held, kneeling then to affix them to Nigel’s heels. The boys obviously had been well rehearsed, for they did so with little difficulty, even though the straps were new. They then drew back to stand with the other pages.

  Brion rose at that, turning to draw the Haldane sword from the jeweled scabbard that Jiri Redfearn held. He cocked the blade over his right shoulder as he turned to his brother, glancing aside at the two queens, who had also come to their feet. Duke Richard had moved to Brion’s other side, and stood proudly as the king lifted the sword in salute before bringing it down to touch Nigel’s right shoulder.

  “In the name of the Father, and of the Son”—the sword lifted to descend on Nigel’s left shoulder—“and of the Holy Spirit”—the blade lifted to touch the crown of Nigel’s head—“be thou a good and faithful knight. Amen.”

  Alaric, holding the sword with which Nigel would shortly be invested, clutched it to his breast as a shiver ran along his spine. He had witnessed many a knighting, but the words never failed to thrill him. His grin mirrored the king’s as Brion kissed the holy relic in the sword’s pommel, then passed it back to Jiri and offered his right hand to his brother to raise him up and embrace him.

  “Arise, Sir Nigel, and be invested with the further symbols of your new rank.”

  He turned then to his new queen and his mother, who jointly girded Nigel with the white belt. When that was done, Alaric moved without prompting to present Nigel’s sword to the king, who in turn presented it to his brother. Nigel kissed the hilt before slipping it into its hangers on his belt. He then dropped to his knees again and offered his joined hands to his brother and king, who took them between his own as Nigel recited the traditional words of fealty:

  “I, Nigel Cluim Gwydion Rhys, knight and prince, do become your liege man of life and limb and earthly worship. Faith and truth will I bear unto you, to live and to die, against all manner of folk, so help me God.”

  “And I, for my part, will be a faithful liege unto you, Nigel Cluim Gwydion Rhys,” Brion replied, “giving justice and protection for so long as you keep faith with me. So help me God.”

  With that he released Nigel’s hands, then seized his shoulders and raised him up in an enthusiastic embrace, for the brothers were and always had been close. The cheers of the court resounded among the great hammer beams in affirmation as Brion drew his brother onto the dais with him, where he then proceeded to knight two more candidates. Alaric retreated to stand with the other squires.

  • • •

  AT the feast that followed, though Alaric dutifully did his shift of service as a junior squire, he was also free to indulge in the more pleasant aspects of a major feast day at court. Dancing followed the feasting, with the king and queen often leading the dances, and Alaric found himself often called onto the dance floor. Mostly, though, he was all but monopolized by Princess Silke.

  He had seen but little of the princess since the previous spring, for she had taken up with her new sister-in-law on Jehana’s arrival, and Alaric had been away for much of that time. Now fifteen, she seemed to be putting aside many of her childhood pastimes, though she still had time for Alaric, and drew him onto the floor yet again to partner her in one of the more raucous dances.

  “I’m not entirely certain I like this business of acting like a lady,” she confided after the dance, as she pulled him into a shadowed and less trafficked corner of the hall to cool down.

  Alaric snorted. “Well, you certainly look like a lady, especially tonight. And you do seem to be enjoying your friendship with the new queen.”

  “Oh, it isn’t Jehana who’s the problem. It’s dear Maman. Now that I’m a woman, she has started to talk about marrying me off to some horrible Llanneddi prince. She’s terrified that I shall end up like poor Xenia.”

  “What, married to some Torenthi scoundrel?” Alaric said lightly. “I don’t think they have many of those in Llannedd.”

  “No, silly. Dead in childbed—or worse, wed to some ancient prince who is only interested in my bloodline.”

  He took her hand in his and pressed it to his lips, smiling. “If I were a Llanneddi prince, I would be interested in more than your bloodline, fair princess.”

  “Well, you’re a Corwyn prince,” she said pertly. “Or a duke, which is almost the same thing. Come to think of it, wouldn’t that set the cat among the pigeons, if I were to marry you?”

  He shook his head, chuckling. “You know that could never be, princess, even if our hearts were so inclined.”
<
br />   “Why not? You’re certainly noble enough. And my brother is very fond of you. I am fond of you.”

  He looked at her in astonishment, suddenly aware that she was half-serious.

  “Silke, you know what I am,” he whispered. “Even if the king approved, even if he wanted it, the people would never accept me as your husband. The Church would never accept it. You’re the king’s sister. Your life is not your own.”

  “Is it not?”

  In emphatic reinforcement of her words, Silke seized his face between her hands and kissed him hard, pressing him farther into the shadows. As she opened her mouth to his, probing with her tongue, he found his arms embracing her, his taut body beginning to answer her urgency. But then, of a sudden, he remembered who and what he was, and who she was, and pulled away to lean against the wall, trembling.

  “Silke, you mustn’t do that,” he breathed. “We mustn’t.”

  “Would it be that terrible?” she returned.

  “No, but we mustn’t. We really mustn’t.”

  She sighed and leaned against the wall beside him, face flushed. “I know that,” she whispered. “Oh, Alaric, take me away from all this!”

  “Silke, you know I can’t. . . .”

  Very soon after that, the newly knighted Sir Justis Berringer spotted them and approached to bow and extend his hand to her in shy invitation. “Princess, would you care to dance?”

  She put on a proper smile and nodded her assent, also giving Alaric a cool nod of thanks as she returned to the floor on Sir Justis’s arm. Alaric prayed that no one had seen Silke’s momentary indiscretion, and determined not to let it happen again.

  Nor was Sir Justis the only young knight with courting on his mind. A little later, now watching moodily from one of the window embrasures, Alaric spotted Prince Nigel partnering a vivacious, dark-eyed girl in a gown of burnished bronze, with a glossy mane of chestnut curls tumbling down her back. She was almost of a height with Nigel, who had changed from his knighting attire to a short tunic of royal-blue velvet worked around the hem with a border of running lions. As the pair passed closer to him, twirling and springing in the pattern of the dance, Alaric became aware of a familiar presence easing in to stand beside him.

  “Pretty little thing, isn’t she?” Llion murmured, close beside his left ear.

  Alaric turned to see Llion and Alazais, who had not been at court that morning but must have arrived only recently, for both were still in travel cloaks.

  “You’re here.”

  “Only just,” Llion replied, easing Alazais’s cloak from her shoulders and then removing his own, for the great hall, crowded with dancers, was warm after the out-of-doors. “The road south from Morganhall was icy, worse than we’d been led to expect. I had wanted to be here for Nigel’s knighting.”

  “Well, it was much like any other knighting,” Alaric replied. “Except that Nigel is a prince, of course. I think he’d be popular with the court even if he weren’t royal. We did seem a few short on pages and squires, though.”

  Alazais leaned in to kiss her husband lightly on the cheek and took her cloak from him. “If you two don’t mind, I think I’ll leave you to discussing male things while I pay my respects to Queen Richeldis.”

  Llion caught her hand and kissed it fondly, then turned back to Alaric as she headed along the side of the hall toward the dais where the old queen sat amidst the new maids of honor. Across the hall, the young queen was still on the floor with her handsome husband.

  “So, not many pages and squires, then?” Llion said, guiding Alaric toward one of the bench seats.

  “Only three new pages. And four squires, I think. I was at the back of the hall while that was going on, waiting in Nigel’s knighting party. But one of the squires has come from the Earl of Rhendall’s court: his son and heir, as it happens.”

  “Ah, yes. Saer de Traherne. I knew he was coming; and his sister, too, I think. Is she one of the young ladies attending the queens?”

  Alaric shook his head. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Well, it’s always good to have more ladies at court,” Llion said. “And Nigel seems to be enjoying himself. Or, Sir Nigel, as I suppose we should say now.”

  “He’s danced with that one several times,” Alaric said. “And many others.”

  “Yes, now that the king is married, I suspect his brother may have begun to think about a wife of his own,” Llion said.

  “Llion—” Alaric drew a deep breath to steel himself. “Llion, I have to tell you about something. I did a stupid thing. Well, maybe not stupid, because I don’t think it was entirely my fault, but I let it happen.”

  Llion raised an eyebrow in surprise, then glanced out at the crowded hall.

  “Do you want to go elsewhere, so we can have some privacy?”

  At Alaric’s nod, Llion rose and headed out of the hall, Alaric following at his heels. When they had gained the seclusion of a stairwell, Llion turned to face his charge. “Well?”

  Sheepish, feeling like an errant child—though what had happened most certainly was adult—Alaric told him about the incident with Silke, leaving nothing out. “I didn’t lead her on; I didn’t. At least I don’t think I did. But if anyone saw us . . .”

  “If anyone saw you, I’m sure it will be all over court by morning,” Llion said baldly. “With luck, no one noticed and this will come to nothing. You do realize that you put yourself in a situation that would have been easy to misconstrue?”

  Alaric nodded miserably. “I didn’t realize she felt that way. And I do feel sorry for her. In her own way, she’s as constrained by her blood as I am.”

  “She is,” Llion agreed. “She’s a princess of the royal blood, sister of a king. That very much limits whom she can marry.”

  Alaric shrugged, waggling his head back and forth in a yes-and-no gesture. “I understand that. But I really didn’t do anything wrong . . . did I?”

  “If you’re certain you didn’t, why are you feeling so guilty?” Llion countered.

  Sighing, Alaric ducked his head. “Are you going to tell the king?”

  “Should I?”

  “He should know, if we were seen and people begin talking.”

  “Let’s wait and see if anything is said,” Llion said after a beat.

  Chapter 43

  “A violent man enticeth his neighbour, and leadeth him into the way that is not good.”

  —PROVERBS 16:29

  TO Alaric’s very great relief, his brief moment of indiscretion with the king’s sister seemed not to have been noticed, and Silke did not mention it or even seek private conversation with him again. For his part, Alaric avoided situations that might place him in much scrutiny and threw himself back into his training. Fortunately, the weather made that easier.

  Later in January, while the kingdom lay deep in the grip of a wet and miserable winter, the king betook himself on a private mission to Arx Fidei with Jamyl Arilan, to attend the Candlemas ordination of Jamyl’s brother Denis. Rather than subject Alaric to a return to the site of Jorian’s execution, he took his new squire, Saer de Traherne, for it seemed the better part of valor not to bring a known Deryni into the abbey’s sacred precincts. Taking Saer also provided an opportunity for king and squire to get to know one another better, and for Brion to better assess Saer’s strengths and weaknesses, set apart from his martial skills.

  As for Alaric, the king gave him leave to travel to Culdi with Llion, for his cousin Duncan’s thirteenth birthday. While they were there, Alaric told Duncan about Jorian’s execution, begging him not to pursue his notion to seek ordination himself.

  “But it isn’t just a notion,” Duncan said, during one of their several conversations late at night in Duncan’s quarters. “I’m beginning to think I’m called, don’t you see? It isn’t something that I deliberately set out to pursue.”

  “Then, don’t
pursue it.”

  “But I’m not sure I have any choice,” Duncan countered. “I know I could have quite a satisfactory life as a duke’s son and, eventually, as a duke’s brother. But I don’t think that’s enough. There’s something more that I’m meant to do. Don’t you ever get that feeling about your future role as Duke of Corwyn?”

  Alaric did, actually, though sometimes it was hard to reconcile his future rank with the very difficult task of growing into the job. He continued to press Duncan during his stay at Culdi, but when he and Llion left a week later, he suspected that his arguments had fallen on deaf ears.

  They were back in Rhemuth by early in March, when the land had begun to green and spring was becoming more than just a hinted promise of better weather to come. To the relief of all concerned, no untoward incident had marred the ordination at Arx Fidei this time. Jamyl’s brother was now Father Denis Arilan, gone into post-ordination retreat for a month, and both the king and his party had returned.

  “I saw no sign of what had happened in November,” Saer was telling the other squires that first night back, as Alaric allowed himself to drift closer to the conversation. “I’d heard about it, of course; Arx Fidei isn’t that far from my father’s lands. But it must have been a horrible way to die, even if the man was”—he glanced aside uneasily as Alaric quietly joined their number—“even if he was . . . what he was.”

  “Just say it, Saer,” Fanton Murchison said coldly. “De Courcy was Deryni. He knew the penalty, if he got caught.” His venomous glance at Alaric left no doubt about how he felt about the incident, or about any Deryni.

  “Fanton, you are an ignorant git,” Alaric muttered, with fury in his eyes. “And I hope you cannot imagine how horrible it was.”

  With that, he turned on his heel and stalked from the room, well aware that he probably would always have to contend with such sentiment. As for Arx Fidei, he suspected that his return probably was inevitable, if Duncan persisted in his apparent intention to seek holy orders.

  But that was for the future, and perhaps Duncan would change his mind. He did not know why Jorian de Courcy had been discovered, but he could only hope that Duncan would be more fortunate, if he did decide to pursue the priesthood.