As he looked out at the rain again, remembering what it had cost him to truly believe what he had just said, Dhugal snorted and turned away, shoulders rigid with rebellion.
“I understand what you’re feeling,” Duncan said, after a few seconds. “In some ways, you may be right. It may well be that God was testing me—and that I did, indeed, fail. For a while, after I heard she’d died, I used to think so. But now I wonder if there wasn’t another reason He brought me and Maryse together. He still wanted me for His own, but—maybe that’s the only way you could be born.”
“Me?”
As Dhugal turned to stare at him aghast, Duncan smiled gently.
“You’re so like Alaric sometimes. He’s another who doesn’t like to think he’s been the subject of Heaven’s special attention. Ask him sometime, if you don’t believe me.”
“Well, it does take some getting used to.”
“Why? Don’t you think God has a plan for each of us?”
“Well, of course,” Dhugal said uncomfortably. “But only in a general sort of way. We have free will.”
“To an extent,” Duncan agreed. “But what was my will, set against the will of God, Dhugal? He wanted me to be His priest. I’m not sure I ever had a choice in the matter—not really. Not that I mind,” he added. “Not now, at any rate, and not for many years—though I certainly minded after your mother’s death.
“But there’s a certain heady comfort in knowing one has been chosen, warts and all. I don’t know why He wanted me so badly, but other than that one brief flare-up of rebellion—which may have been all in His plan anyway—I’ve been content in His service. No, more than content. He’s brought me joy. And one of my greatest joys, though I didn’t know it for a long, long time, is that He let me sire you—and all without compromising His honor.”
Dhugal, much moved, turned awkwardly to gaze out the window again, all but blinking back tears.
“What about His laws?” he asked after a moment. “The ones that forbid Deryni to seek the priesthood.”
“Laws are written by men, Dhugal, even if God inspires them. Sometimes men misunderstand.”
Dhugal glanced sidelong at his father.
“What if Maryse hadn’t died, though? Would you still have become a priest? For that matter, did she know what you were?”
“That I was Deryni? Of course. I told her that afternoon, before we were wed.”
“And she didn’t mind?”
“Did she mind? Of course not. To her, it was the same kind of odd but useful talent as the second sight some of your borderers have—just a bit more diverse. I’m not sure she ever quite understood what all the fuss was about, though she knew it could mean my death if I were discovered. The border folk have always been a mystical people. Perhaps the terrible persecution of Deryni in the lowlands never quite reached the same proportions in the borders and highlands.”
“Aye, that’s true enough,” Dhugal agreed. “But you haven’t answered my other question. What would you have done, if she hadn’t died?”
Curiosity about what might have been, loyalty to the mother Dhugal had never really known—Duncan could hardly fault his son for any of that, but neither could he really give an answer. How was he to explain, without shattering whatever idealism might remain to this keen-eyed young man who had already lived so much and in such adversity?
“I honestly don’t know, Dhugal—and believe me, I asked myself the same question many times in those early years.” He twisted the bishop’s ring on his hand as he went on. “The reality is that it would have been several years, at least, before the bitterness between our two clans had died down enough that we could acknowledge our marriage openly. Maryse’s pregnancy would have been seen as a dishonor to her clan, even if she’d told her mother we were really married—which she may have done, since it was your grandmother who saw that you eventually got the cloak clasp I’d given Maryse as a bridal token. And there’s no telling how long it might have been before she could get word to me. As it was, she never did.”
He sighed. “In any case, because of the circumstances, you probably would have been brought up as a son of her mother, regardless—the easiest immediate way to cover up a daughter’s increasingly apparent indiscretion and save the honor of the clan. You were old Caulay’s grandson, after all, even if you weren’t his son. And he’d just lost a son. In time, when anger eventually cooled between the two clans, there would have been no problem acknowledging the marriage and you.”
“And would you have?” Dhugal persisted.
Duncan shrugged. “We’ll never know, will we? I entered the university at Grecotha in the fall, as planned. Not to have done so would have aroused suspicion—and besides, I loved the academic life. But I delayed taking my vows, waiting for the bad blood between the clans to dissipate.
“Then, when I heard the news the next summer—that she’d died of a fever—there was no reason not to go ahead and make my profession, no reason to suspect you even existed. I grieved and I raged at heaven over the injustice of it, but life went on. I was tonsured at Michaelmas, and soon the memory of my brief flirtation with a secular life had taken on the aspect of a pleasant but fleeting dream.” He looked directly at Dhugal, catching the amber eyes with his blue ones. “Does it bother you that I can’t say, ‘Yes, Dhugal, I definitely would have acknowledged the marriage and the son I didn’t know I had?’”
“I—suppose not,” Dhugal said in a small voice. “As you said before, we’ll never know.” He swallowed noisily and raised his chin higher, but he could not sustain eye contact.
“There’s something else I have to ask, though,” he said. “And in light of how things have turned out, perhaps it’s even more important.”
“I’ll answer if I can, son.”
“You went ahead and made your vows. You became a priest. But you knew you were Deryni.”
“Well, of course, but—”
“Why do you continue to deny what you did, then, and what you are?” Dhugal blurted, turning to gaze at his father with the uncompromising eyes of youth. “You’re Deryni and you’re a priest. And you’re a good priest! You’ve proven by many years of faithful and righteous service that the two are not incompatible. There were Deryni priests before the Restoration, for God’s sake, and they were good ones, too!”
“That’s true,” Duncan whispered.
“Then, why don’t you admit it? Why keep playing these games of not answering either way? What can they do to you?”
Duncan could feel his heart pounding like a battering ram at the walls of his chest and he prayed Dhugal would drop the line of questioning.
“There are a great many things they could do, son.”
“But they won’t. They didn’t. Some of the bishops know, and all of them surely suspect. You heard Wolfram today! And they knew it before they elected you a bishop.”
“Yes, and Edmund Loris knew, too,” Duncan retorted, fists clenching involuntarily as the memory of the renegade archbishop’s tortures loomed unbeckoned in his mind’s eye. The nails had grown back on his fingers and toes, and his other wounds had healed, but the nightmare of being chained to the stake, with the flames leaping up around him, beginning to lick at his flesh, would be with Duncan McLain until the day he died.
But the invoking of Loris’ name had brought Dhugal back to the reality of what could happen, for it was he who had fought his way through the fire and Loris’ men to save his father. Dhugal gasped as he realized what memories he had stirred and he shifted his gaze out to the rain again.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I have no right to ask that of you. I’m new to knowing what I am. You’ve had to live with it all your life. It has to be your decision. It’s just that Morgan and Kelson are able to be so open—”
“And you’d like to be, too, wouldn’t you?” Duncan replied softly. “I know, son. Believe me, I’ve thought about it often, but—”
He broke off as Morgan stepped into the opening of the alcove, cle
aring his throat to announce his presence.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Morgan said. “Duncan, had you forgotten we have some important further business with Bishop Arilan?”
Duncan blinked and shook his head. He had not forgotten, but he was not looking forward to it. Dhugal and Kelson did not know it yet, but tonight was the night that Morgan and Duncan had agreed Arilan should expose the two young men to merasha for the first time. The very notion made Duncan’s stomach queasy, for Loris had given him the drug when he fell captive of the renegade archbishop the summer before. It acted only as a sedative in humans, but even a minute amount could render a Deryni totally incapable of using his powers. Morgan, too, had cause to know merasha’s dangers from bitter firsthand experience, but it was important that both Dhugal and the king experience its disruptive effects in a safe, controlled setting before they chanced encountering it in less favorable circumstances. There was no antidote, but sometimes the effects could be minimized or made to work somewhat positively, if the subject was familiar with them.
Back in the supper room, Kelson was already seated at the now-cleared table before the fireplace, Nigel across from him—for they had agreed that the king’s uncle should be present, as regent, since the king would be incapacitated for the rest of the night. Dhugal glanced questioningly at Kelson as he sat down at Kelson’s left and his father sat beside him, but the king only shrugged as Morgan took a place on Kelson’s right. Arilan came back to the table with a tooled leather flask in his hands and an odd, tight expression on his face.
“I apologize if this may seem a bit abrupt,” the Deryni bishop said, sitting opposite the two younger men and ignoring their expressions of apprehension as he set the flask on the table between them. “However, I have my reasons. Sire, I doubt you saw this flask on the day your father died—or that you remember it, if you did. You should, though. This is what killed your father.”
CHAPTER TWO
Open thy mouth, and drink what I give thee to drink.
—II Esdras 14:38
“This is what killed your father.”
Arilan’s words pierced like steel in the hearts of the four present who had known Brion Haldane intimately. Kelson’s face drained of color, grey eyes like dead coals in a death-white mask. Nigel gasped soundlessly, stricken, in that instant looking uncannily like the beloved elder brother who had died in his arms. Duncan crossed himself in horrified disbelief. Only Morgan responded with action, half coming to his feet to lunge between Kelson and the bishop, an open hand stretching toward Arilan’s throat.
“Don’t touch me, or you’ll regret it!” Arilan snapped, not even flinching as Morgan’s hand pulled up in a fist a hair’s breadth from his face. “Sit down. You’d think I killed Brion. Actually, neither did this—though it’s what enabled him to be killed in the way he was. Surely you guessed it was merasha that made him vulnerable—or do you think I somehow had something to do with it?”
As Morgan drew back and sat down, not trusting himself to speak, Duncan slowly exhaled and glanced at Arilan, a hand staying Nigel, whose mouth was working, but without words coming out.
“No one is making any accusations,” Duncan said carefully, at the same time bidding the others, with his mind, to keep silent while he sought an explanation. “Though I think it occurs to all of us, now, that you could have done. I assume that’s the flask that Colin of Fianna shared with the king that day. We never learned how merasha got into it, however.”
Arilan sat back with a snort of derision, crossing his arms on his chest. His lean, handsome face, blue-jowled this late in the day, looked a little satanic as the shadows came and went in the flickering firelight, and his deep blue-violet eyes were nearly the color of his cassock in the dimness.
“Don’t be absurd. If you’ll recall, Nigel, it was I who first told you that Colin said he’d gotten it from a mysterious lady.”
“Then, where did you get the flask?” Nigel countered. “We searched high and low for it, but we never found a trace. Colin said he guessed he’d lost it on the ride back from the hunt.”
Arilan nodded. “And so he did. Only, I was the one who ‘lost’ it for him. I knew, the moment I reached Brion’s side and saw that he was dying, that he’d gotten merasha in him from somewhere—and I’d seen him drinking with Colin only minutes before.
“So I waylaid Colin in the courtyard after we got back, while everyone was milling around and seeing Brion’s body brought into the great hall, and I relieved him of the flask—which was, indeed, the source of the merasha. He never remembered that part of our conversation, of course. I left it to the rest of you to draw the correct conclusion that Charissa had been the giver of the deadly gift—something I couldn’t tell you then, or even about the merasha, without betraying that I was Deryni.”
“I—assume there was nothing you could do to save my father, either,” Kelson finally said, speaking for the first time. “I don’t want to believe that you could have done something and didn’t, just to protect your precious identity.”
Arilan glanced down at his clasped hands. “Kelson, I will not deny that I have been guilty of that accusation on more than one occasion. The nightmares I suffer because of it are worse than you can possibly imagine and only a foretaste of the answering I shall have to make one day before a higher Judge. But your father’s blood is not on my hands. The damage already was done by the time I got to him. I doubt that even a Healer could have saved him—if we still had qualified Healers.”
“Is that the truth, or are you just saying it to placate me?” Kelson replied, daring to turn his Truth-Reading ability on the Deryni bishop for the first time.
Smiling gently, quite aware of the feather-light probe, Arilan shook his head and opened his hands in a gesture of submission.
“I have told you only the truth, Kelson,” he breathed. “There was nothing I could have done for your father save to prolong his agony a few more minutes. He would not have chosen that, I think. You were there. You know how he suffered.”
“Aye.” Kelson swallowed down the lump rising in his throat and looked away for a few seconds, shutting himself off from the mental query of Morgan and even Dhugal’s timid attempt to comfort. He tried not to look at the flask still on the table before him.
“So,” he finally said, risking a glance at Arilan again. “You’ve had the flask all this time. Why bring it out now?”
“I think you know.”
Very deliberately, Arilan reached into his cassock and pulled out a small, stoppered glass vial, which he set deliberately beside the flask.
“It’s time you faced the thing that can set all your powers at naught, Sire,” he said. “You’ve never experienced merasha disruption directly. Nor has Dhugal. For Deryni fortunate enough to receive formal training, it’s an important part of that training, because even though merasha is probably the single most devastating substance that can be employed against our powers, an informed subject can sometimes minimize the effects and even use some of them to his advantage. Duncan can attest to that, I’m sure.”
Tight-lipped, Duncan nodded, covering one of Dhugal’s hands with his own, and Kelson shifted an accusing glance to Morgan.
“Alaric, did you know about this?” he demanded.
Morgan drew a deep breath and let it out audibly.
“Not about the flask, no. Duncan and I had discussed with Arilan the need to expose you to merasha before you left on your summer progress. We had agreed that tonight was the logical time to do it. I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t want you to be apprehensive about that when you needed all your concentration for the hearing this morning. As you may have gathered, however, I was not expecting him to produce the very merasha that Brion was given. That was a foul blow, Arilan.”
Arilan spread both hands in a gesture of conciliation. “For that, I apologize. I had not realized the wounds were still so raw. But it seemed a vivid way of underlining why it’s important they face merasha. In that, at least, I believe I have mad
e my point.”
“Amply,” Kelson muttered. He picked up the stoppered vial and held it to the light, conjuring handfire with his empty hand to see it better. Through the greenish glass, he could just make out the shadow of a clear liquid filling it halfway. He shivered as he put it back down and quenched the handfire with an impatient closing of his fist.
“So, that’s merasha.”
He glanced uneasily at Dhugal, who looked even more apprehensive than he himself felt, then made his gaze continue on around the table to Duncan, solemn and sympathetic, no doubt remembering his own most recent brush with the drug, to Nigel, who was trying hard not to transmit his dry-throated fear to the rest of them, full of dread even though he was not being asked to endure the testing, past the inscrutable-looking Arilan, and on, at last, to Morgan.
“I think I would have preferred some time to get used to the idea, Alaric,” he said softly, managing to keep most of the reproach out of his voice. “You could have told me.”
“Forgive me,” Morgan murmured. “I misjudged. We did talk about the advisability of doing this—one night late in the fall, as I recall. Dhugal, you were there. But I suppose you put it out of mind when I was unable to procure any merasha on my own. The need is no less important for having been postponed, however. It’s vital that you know what you could come up against and how to deal with it.”
“What’s the urgency?”
“Because you aren’t a child any more, my prince,” Morgan said a little sharply. “Because in three days’ time, you’ll be knighted. For those who will never wear a crown, that’s the official seal of manhood. It makes you fair game for those who might have spared you before, because of your youth—especially as your talents become more widely known. When you go on progress, and especially when you meet the Torenthi legates in Cardosa, you’ll be particularly at risk.”