Cinhil eased down on the chair and unbuckled his sword belt, letting the weapon slide to the carpet beside him. Fatigue washed over him like a physical thing as he let his shoulders relax, almost dulling his realization of what Joram had just said.
“Is that intended as a sop to my scruples about your magic?” he asked, in a tone which did not expect answer. He stripped off his gauntlets and slapped them halfheartedly against his knee, wincing at the pressure against abused muscles. He heard Cullen sigh.
“Cinhil, I know how you feel about it, but I thought you understood why it was necessary. It would be useful if we can all wake up rested and sane in the morning. I cannot guarantee that, unless we can ensure that there will be no arcane meddling while we sleep. The watch-wards will provide that insurance.”
Cinhil looked up, biting off a tart retort.
“My understanding and my approval do not necessarily coincide, Father Cullen. I comprehend the reasons for your actions, but do not ask me to sanction them.”
“But you’ll not forbid them?” Joram asked.
“No, I’ll not forbid them. That’s what you would have me say, isn’t it? I have no more wish than the next man to die before my time. However, I prefer to know nothing else of your methods.”
“Very well, Sire. I’ll complete the arrangements and not trouble you again.”
With a curt bow, Joram gathered his belongings and left. Cullen stood silently for a moment, while Cinhil stared at the carpet, before gesturing toward a campstool.
“May I join you for a few minutes?”
“If it pleases you.”
“Hardly a cordial invitation, but under the circumstances I’m grateful even for that.”
He hooked the stool closer with a booted toe and straddled it, settling onto its seat with a soft clash of well-oiled mail. Cinhil watched him with a mixture of curiosity and annoyance, wondering what further the Michaeline thought he could say to him, but Cullen only gazed back at him expectantly.
Irritated, Cinhil pushed back his own coif, ruffling silver-winged hair with a hand which trembled with fatigue. In exasperation, he lowered his head into both hands, mailed elbows resting gingerly on aching thighs.
“Well, Father, what is it? I’m exhausted and angry and, quite frankly, frightened. I haven’t the patience to argue with you, or to indulge in an evening of soul-searching or mind-stretching.”
Cullen shifted position, to the jingle of mail against leather. “Nor have I, the night before battle. We all need our rest. But I sense that something is disturbing you—something more than your annoyance that Deryni powers must be used or your fear that we may all die tomorrow. I saw you talking with Father Alfred. I also saw that you seemed to derive little comfort from his counsel. I thought an older man might be better able to ease your heart. We are almost of an age, you know.”
Cinhil closed his eyes, not certain he wanted to go in the direction Cullen was leading.
“I am quite satisfied with Father Alfred as my confessor.”
“I’m sure you are. He’s a fine, capable young priest. Were he not already in your service, I would be greatly tempted to lure him away from you for my staff, when I become a bishop.
“But he is also young enough, almost, to be your son, Cinhil; and he has little experience dealing with the forces which you and I, for different reasons, must learn to cope with. I offer myself not as a confessor but as a friend. We are alike in many ways. Could not our likenesses help to bridge our differences?”
Cinhil swallowed, not daring to look up. He knew what Cullen was asking. It was a reiteration of the offer he had made a few days earlier, when they had talked about sharing the respective joys and woes of royal and episcopal duties. He wanted it, in many ways; he needed such a friendship. But there was that about Cullen, about all Deryni, which frightened him still—especially tonight, on the eve of battle, when God knew what powers might be unleashed in his name when the dawning came.
It was the not-knowing that frightened him most—the dreadful suspicion that the Deryni might serve another Master, to the damnation of all their souls. Suppose that all he had seen and heard was sham, staged for his benefit, to beguile him into believing their powers were benign? In the monastery he had heard tales of the atrocities committed under the Festils—their blasphemies and abominations, not the least of which was Ariella’s incestuous union with her own brother. And what might he not have heard, sheltered as he had been?
He shuddered a little at that, glancing up quickly to see whether Cullen had noticed, but the vicar general only gazed at him expectantly, ice eyes seemingly lit by sunlight at their depths, in as open and hopeful an expression as Cinhil had ever seen on the weathered face.
Almost, and Cinhil reached out to him. Almost, and he surrendered to the temptation to trust—to open up, to put his faith in another person, to confide his fears and sorrows, all his misgivings about himself and the world which had been thrust upon him.
But the moment quickly passed. He could not do it—not now, here, tonight, surrounded by all those other Deryni, by Camber and his allies. He dared not trust Cullen. Not yet.
With a sigh, he shook his head and threw his gauntlets on the floor beside his sword. His eyes, as he looked up at Cullen at last, were red-rimmed and almost teary.
“I thank you, Father Cullen, but it grows late and I ache in every bone. If you will only keep me informed of any change of plans, that will be sufficient for now. I wish to retire early.”
“As you wish, Sire.”
With downcast eyes, the vicar general picked up helm and gloves and stood, glancing guardedly at the king. He started to speak again, but then he merely bowed and strode out of the tent without a backward glance.
Cinhil sat very still for several minutes after he had gone, wondering.
His discomfiture did not ease, even after supper. Though he cleaned himself, and heard Vespers, and readied himself for bed, sleep would not come. For hours, it seemed, he tossed and fretted on his pallet, dozing fitfully, dreaming horribly when he did. At one point, he even roused himself and lit a rushlight for a time, staring mindlessly into its feeble flame while he tried to school his thoughts to tranquility and his body to rest.
Finally, in the dark of early morning, several hours before he might expect the dawn, he got up and dressed in his riding leathers, omitting mail and other armoring in favor of comfort. Wincing as he pulled boots onto saddle-aching legs, he waved Sorle back to his pallet outside the entryway when the squire came to investigate his movement. He paused to strap a dagger at his waist, for he supposed it was not proper for a king to go totally unarmed within a military camp, then threw the great black cloak around his shoulders and secured it at the throat, drawing the fur-lined hood close to his head. Then he slipped outside the pavilion to prowl the encampment. The soreness in his muscles eased as he got his circulation going.
He was not challenged. Word went before him, from his own pavilion guards, that the king walked the camp, and wished to do so alone and unheralded. But he did not go unnoticed. He could feel the guards’ eyes following his progress as he went, knew they must be relaying word of his passage to their fellows ahead in some manner unknown to him—though he knew it was not magic, since most of them were human.
When he headed toward the crest of the ridge, to look out at the enemy watch-fires, one of the guards detached himself from his fellows and followed at an unobtrusive distance. Cinhil ignored the man as he slipped into the shadow of a tree trunk and gazed out across the empty plain.
The silence was profound. That was what struck him first. Even the normal night sounds of the countryside seemed muted. Horses whickered and stamped their feet softly in the hollow behind him, and guards’ harness clinked nearby as they shifted and paced in the night chill.
Far in the distance he could hear cattle lowing in their pens, and that reminded him that this was part of Gwynedd’s heartland, the real reason for their presence here tonight. The moonlight turned the pl
ain to a sheen of silvery frost, dew on spring wheat and tender grasses. A shudder went through him as he imagined that plain tomorrow at this time, with the carnage of battle staining its soil. He realized that he had never seen the grim reality of violent death on such a scale.
He turned away at that, wrapping himself more tightly in his cloak as he picked his way back down the slope. Eschewing the watch fires of the guards, he made his way among the picketed horses until he found his Moonwind and Frostling. Both of the animals raised their heads to whuffle greeting, and the gray butted a velvet nose against his chest in rough affection. For a long moment, he buried his face in the warm neck, losing himself and his worries in the scent of soft, dampish horse while he scratched Frostling behind the ears.
But such creature comforts did not last long. Soon his restless feet and mind took him back into the main encampment, to slip quietly and somewhat stiffly with the morning damp along the silent tent rows and mounds of equipment. Almost unconsciously, he found himself drawn toward the main Michaeline pavilion—the one assigned to Alister Cullen. He wondered whether the vicar general was sleeping better than he had been able to do, wondered whether he himself might now be sleeping soundly, had he taken the hand which Cullen had offered in friendship.
Then he realized that there were low voices coming from inside the pavilion.
He glanced at the sky. The blackness told him that it was still several hours until dawn, and the stars pinpointed the hour even more precisely—it could not be more than the fourth hour past midnight.
He paused in the shadows to listen, slowly becoming aware that the voices emanating from the pavilion were not just random conversation. Sometimes they spoke in unison, with an eerie cadence which raised the hackles at the back of his neck, haunting both in its strangeness and its near familiarity. Other times, one voice or another spoke alone. He could not identify the owners, but one of them could only be Cullen himself.
He closed his eyes briefly and tried to pick out words, but to no avail. That part of him most easily frightened began to imagine demons in the shadows—eerie hobgoblins of doubt that picked and clawed at all his confidence.
What were they doing? Who was in there? Did they perform some arcane Deryni ritual of which they knew he would disapprove? Was that why they worked this way in darkness, when all the rest of the camp was asleep? Had they thought to hide it from him, thinking that he, too, slept obliviously?
No hesitation remained in his mind. He had to find out. Glancing around casually to see whether any of the guards had marked his presence in the shadows, he used his heightened awareness in mental quest—no one even seemed to be thinking about him.
One final glance around him, and he was on his way, gliding across a short stretch of open moonlight to crouch in the darkness at the side of the pavilion where an overlap of canvas was laced with leather thong rather than sewn. His pulse was racing by the time he got there, and for the first few seconds he could hear nothing but the pounding of the blood in his temples, the beating of his heart.
He took a deep breath, soft, and willed himself to relax. After a moment, he found the courage to raise numb fingers to the overlap of the tent fabric, to part it and peer through fearfully.
The interior was dimmer than he had expected. At first, his moon-dazzled eyes could see only that a number of men were within—a dozen or more of them, most kneeling with their backs to him.
One man, Cullen by his profile, stood with his back to the others at the far end, candlelight flaring from behind his body as he bent over something that looked like a chest or table covered with white. Another man, golden-haired, waited with bowed head at Cullen’s left, and Cinhil thought it must be Joram.
As Cinhil’s eyes adjusted to the inside light level, he recognized another head of quicksilvered gold—Camber, without question—and another head of wiry red—the Healer Rhys. As Cullen straightened, the other men looked up at him, and Cinhil realized that they were the majority of his war leaders: Jebediah, Bayvel de Cameron, Jasper Miller, young Jamie Drummond and Guaire, Earl Sighere and two of his three sons, and a handful of Michaelines whose faces but not names he remembered.
But he had no time to ponder that. For close upon that recognition came his realization of the reason for Cullen’s vaguely familiar yet unfamiliar silhouette: Cullen was wearing priestly vestments, but they were of the deep, Michaeline blue—not a usual liturgical color—with the Michaeline cross bold on the orphrey in silver and red and gold. Mass vessels could now be seen on the table, which Cinhil at last realized was a portable altar.
Confusion flooded Cinhil’s mind at that. He had expected to surprise his Deryni allies at some arcane working of magic, but he had not thought to find that magic so familiar. He felt a tight constriction across his chest and in his throat, a welling of old, ill-repressed emotions, as Cullen raised the chalice with a sacred Host above it and spoke words hallowed by a millennium of usage:
“Ecce Agnus Dei: ecce qui tollis peccata mundi.”
“Domini, non sum dignus,” the others responded softly, in unison. Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst come under my roof. Speak but the word and my soul shall be healed.
Cinhil bowed his head and swallowed, closed his eyes, letting the timeless and well-loved words float over and around him. Even on the lips of a Deryni, especially on the lips of a Deryni like Alister Cullen, the words had meaning, substance, reassurance which could sustain him through whatever might befall.
He opened his eyes to see Cullen passing the chalice to Joram, who bowed and then sipped from it. Then, leaving the chalice with Joram, Cullen turned to take another vessel from the altar and begin moving among the men, distributing Communion. Joram followed close behind and allowed each man to drink from the chalice he held, wiping the rim after each use with a linen cloth.
So the rumors were true. Cinhil had heard that the Michaelines sometimes gave Communion under both species, both bread and wine, but he had thought that confined to use within the Order only. Here, there were those who were neither Michaeline nor even clergy—Camber and Rhys and Guaire and the other laymen—and they were participating in the same manner as the Michaeline brethren.
But enough of this. He must leave before he was discovered. If nothing more was amiss than irregular communion practices, then he was quite unjustified in what had now become simple eavesdropping.
He had glanced aside to be certain that no guard had approached while he watched, when he was suddenly aware of a shadow falling across his viewing slit. His head snapped back in alarm, but it was too late. Cullen’s tall form blocked the light, and he could feel the vicar general’s eyes boring through the now-thin-seeming fabric of the pavilion wall, freezing him in his place like a trapped bird.
“You would have been welcome to join us openly, Sire,” the voice said in a not-unkindly tone. “There was no reason to crouch in the cold and dark. All brethren in Christ are welcome at His table.”
He could not seem to move. As Joram, too, stepped into view at Cullen’s left, Cinhil was aware of hands untying the lashings of the flap through which he had peered, and then of Jebediah and Jasper Miller withdrawing the flap, disclosing him there for all to see.
He could feel his cheeks burning with shame beneath his beard, knew that he had been caught red-handed. What must they think? What would they do to him?
He was not given time to brood on it. Hands firm but gentle pulled him to his feet and ushered him into the pavilion, there to lead him into their midst and bid him kneel.
He knelt, mortified, head bowed and eyes closed in a futile attempt at escape. He could hear Cullen and Joram continuing their rounds among the others, their low-voiced Latin phrases and the responses of the communicants, but he dared not look up. He was huddled in the presence of God, intruder on a rite he had not initially been invited to share. He felt guilty, devious, as if he had been caught in the midst of some unclean act. His heart caught in his throat as he realized that someone—it had to be Cul
len—had stopped in front of him.
“Ego te absolvo, Cinhil,” the voice whispered. He felt a light touch on his bowed head. “Be welcome at the Lord’s table,” Cullen continued in a more normal tone. “Will you share this Eucharistic Feast with us on the morn of battle?”
Cinhil opened his eyes, but he could not bear to raise his eyes higher than Cullen’s knees.
“D-Domine, non sum dignus,” he managed to stammer.
“‘Thou art a priest forever,’” Cullen replied in a whisper.
Cinhil felt a wrench of conscience at that, but when he looked up, fearfully, Cullen’s sea-ice eyes were warm and reassuring, the way they had been the night before, in Cinhil’s pavilion.
Cullen removed a fragment of Host from the vessel in his hand and held it out to Cinhil.
“Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam,” Cullen murmured, placing it in Cinhil’s trembling hand.
Cinhil nodded, unable to make the appropriate response, and raised it to his mouth. It was a piece of ordinary bread, not the formal, unleavened stuff customarily used, but it was the most extraordinary thing he had ever tasted. He swallowed, overcome with emotion, as Joram paused before him with the cup.
“Sanguinis Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam,” Joram said softly.
As he put the cup to Cinhil’s lips, Cinhil dared to look up at him, but there was no trace of anger or resentment on Joram’s face. Cinhil drank, and the sip of wine sent his spirit soaring. He bowed his head and lost himself in mindless contemplation for the next several minutes.
It was not until the others were rising around him, most of them to bow slightly to him before leaving the pavilion, that he came back to full awareness of his surroundings and his circumstances.
Cullen and Joram were putting away the last of the altar things, starting to remove their vestments. Camber was leaning on a large trunk to Cinhil’s left, Rhys standing quietly beside him. All four of them were studying him, though he could not seem to catch any of them staring.