The Bastard Prince

  “Right away, my lady.”

  As she turned to deal with her daughter, she saw that Stacia, too, had rallied to necessity and training and was tearfully entrusting her baby to Murray’s eldest daughter, with instructions to take the bairn upstairs to her bower and stay out of the way.

  “I have to be strong now, for my da,” Stacia told her mother tremulously, lifting her chin and wiping away her tears on the edge of a sleeve. “He raised me tae be his heir. He’d be shamed if he thought I couldnae take care o’ his men—of my men.”

  In the din of milling horses and clanking armor and shouting and moaning men, the two made a tiny island of calm as, arms around one another’s waists, they began to head purposefully toward the great hall. Behind them, the messengers chosen to carry word to Rhemuth swung up on fresh mounts and galloped out the castle gates.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Therefore pride compasseth them about as a chain; violence covereth them as a garment.

  —Psalms 73:6

  The Eastmarch messengers exhausted a succession of mounts in the days that followed, galloping into Gwynedd’s capital less than a week after the taking of Culliecairn. Almost incoherent with exhaustion, the pair made their initial report to a hastily gathered handful of Gwynedd’s royal ministers, then were whisked away for further interrogation in private by Lord Albertus, the Earl Marshal, and certain members of his staff. The king was told of their news, but was not invited to join the impromptu meeting now in progress in Gwynedd’s council chamber.

  “Aside from the military implications, this is going to raise certain practical complications,” Rhun of Sheele said, sour and suspicious as he sat back in his chair. “For one thing, the king is going to want to go.”

  Lord Tammaron Fitz-Arthur nodded patiently. As Chancellor of Gwynedd, it was his duty to preside over meetings of the king’s council when the king was not present—and in fact, he presided even when the king was present—but formalities hardly seemed necessary with only four of them seated around the long table.

  “Of course he’ll want to go,” Tammaron said. “It’s only natural that he should wish to do so—and were the decision up to him, there would be no question. There’s a risk involved, of course. Not only might he be killed, but he might be tempted to assert his independence. However, I believe that both possibilities pale beside the very real prospect that this is the challenge we’ve been hoping to postpone.”

  At Tammaron’s right, quietly imposing in his robes of episcopal purple, Archbishop Hubert MacInnis nodded his agreement, one pudgy hand caressing the jeweled cross on his ample breast. Those who did not know him well saw what he wanted them to see: an affable if oversized cherub, ostensibly godly and devout, rosy face framed by fine blond hair cut short and tonsured in the clerical manner, tiny rosebud lips pursed in a languid pout.

  But the apparent innocence of the wide blue eyes was deceptive, and the cunning mind behind them had contrived the death of more than one person who stood in his way. In the last decade, the Primate of All Gwynedd had become the single most powerful man in the kingdom.

  “This is damnably inconvenient, if it is the challenge,” Hubert muttered sullenly. “Damn, why couldn’t they have waited even another year? A second son would make all the difference.”

  “You’re assuming that the queen carries another son and not a daughter,” said the archbishop’s elder brother, Lord Manfred MacInnis, seated across from Hubert. He was a beefy, red-faced man in his mid-fifties, muscled where Hubert was merely fat, his sunburned hands scarred and callused from years of wielding a sword. “I wouldn’t worry so much about potential heirs as I would about the man who wears the crown right now. If this is the challenge we’ve been dreading, ’tis we and the present king who will have to meet it. And if he can’t do that, not even another prince will be enough to ensure the continuance of the Haldane line in power—and us as the power behind the throne.”

  It was no more than a simple statement of fact. The men seated around the table, the core of the Royal Council of Gwynedd, had been virtual rulers of Gwynedd for six years now, since plotting the slaying of the sixteen-year-old King Javan Haldane in an “ambush” far to the north—blamed on Deryni dissidents—and simultaneously masterminding the coup that put his brother, Rhys Michael, on Gwynedd’s throne, though king only in name.

  The cost had come high, for the hollow crown this youngest Haldane prince had never sought. Not alone had he lost a beloved brother and king, but the shock of the sudden and brutal slayings surrounding the coup at Rhemuth had caused his young wife to miscarry of their first child—a supreme irony, for eventual control of an underage Haldane heir had been a large part of the ultimate purpose behind the coup.

  The new king had not truly comprehended the scope of his captors’ ambitions in the beginning. It was horror enough that he must fall under their control. Drugged nearly to senselessness during the coup itself, he had been kept drug-blurred for some months thereafter, all through the public spectacle of his brother’s burial and then the sham of his own coronation.

  Only when he had been safely crowned did they make their intentions clear—and underlined their demands with threats of the most abhorrent nature concerning the fate of his queen if he did not comply. He had been spared to be a puppet king and to breed Haldane princes who, in due course, would fall totally under the sway of the great lords—and under the sway of regents, if their father made himself sufficiently troublesome that he must be eliminated before a tame heir came of age.

  Fortunately for all concerned, especially the king, the prospect of another regicide became less and less likely as the first few months passed. Though dispirited at first, the new king gradually seemed to become reconciled to the inevitability of his situation, allowing himself to be shaped as the docile and biddable figurehead they required.

  Compliance slowly bought small indulgences. Once the king ceased to be argumentative or to display stubborn flashes of independent thinking, permission was granted for him to attend routine meetings of the council. A satisfactory history of behavior at council meetings earned him the privilege of presiding over formal courts, though always closely attended and working from a carefully rehearsed script. Very occasionally, the queen and later their young son were allowed to appear at his side on state occasions. After the first year or so, when it appeared that he had accepted the restrictions placed upon him and decided to make the most of royal privilege, they had even allowed him to resume his training in arms, against just such a threat as now seemed to be materializing. The queen’s new pregnancy seemed to confirm Rhys Michael’s capitulation, though there were some seated around this table who still had reservations.

  “Let’s get down to specifics,” Tammaron said. “This hardly comes as any great surprise, after all. We’ve been aware of increased Torenthi troop movements up along the Eastmarch border since last fall.”

  Several of the others nodded their agreement, and Rhun muttered something about having warned them long before that.

  “It’s just the sort of beginning we might have expected,” Tammaron went on. “A test incursion into—”

  The door to the council chamber slammed back without preamble to admit Paulin of Ramos, black-clad and predatory looking as he stalked into the room. The mere presence of the Vicar-General of the Ordo Custodum Fidei produced no dismay, for he was as heavily involved in intrigue as the rest of them, and one of the architects of their rise to power, but he had been expected to remain with his brother Albertus, questioning the messengers.

  “A Torenthi herald has just arrived under a flag of truce,” Paulin announced, flouncing angrily into his usual place to Hubert’s right. “The man demands an immediate audience of the king and declines to reveal his business except in the king’s presence.”

  “Do you think he comes from King Arion?” Manfred asked.

  “No, I do not. I thought so at first, but the Torenthi arms on his tabard are differenced. The black hart is gorged of a coronet. Th
at’s Arion’s brother.”

  “Miklos!” Rhun muttered.

  “And the Eastmarch messengers claim that Miklos was behind the taking of Culliecairn,” Tammaron said, enlightenment dawning on the angular face.

  “Precisely,” Paulin agreed. “I’d say that the timely arrival of Miklos’ herald tends to confirm their story. The question now becomes, is Miklos acting alone, or for King Arion, or for Marek of Festil, as he has in the past?”

  Uneasiness murmured around the table at that, for the prospect of an eventual Festillic bid to take back the throne of Gwynedd had loomed with increasing probability since 904, when Cinhil Haldane, the present king’s father, had ended a Festillic Interregnum of more than eighty years by ousting and killing the unmarried King Imre. There it might have ended, except that Imre’s sister, the Princess Ariella, had been carrying his child when she fled. Later legalists had tried to claim that the royal pregnancy derived from a dalliance with one of her brother’s courtiers, by then conveniently dead, for mere illegitimacy was not necessarily a bar to inheritance in Torenth, but everyone knew that Imre was the father.

  The child born of this incestuous union the following year had been christened Mark Imre of Festil, though he now went by Marek, the Torenthi form of his name, and was accorded the title of prince among his Torenthi kinsmen. The House of Festil was descended from a cadet branch of the Torenthi royal line—Deryni, all—and Torenth had provided troops for Ariella’s unsuccessful attempt to take back the throne lost by her brother. Following her death in that endeavor, her son and heir had been brought up among the Deryni princes of Torenth, biding his time until conditions were right to make his own try for his parents’ throne. Prince Marek now was twenty-three, a year older than his Haldane rival in Rhemuth, recently married to a sister of the King of Torenth and lately the father of a son by her.

  “I would think it very likely that Marek is, indeed, behind this,” Tammaron said thoughtfully. “Having said that, however, I am not altogether certain we can assume that this is a serious bid to take back the crown. Marek is yet unblooded. He has an heir, but just the one; and many’s the infant that dies young.”

  “Yet Culliecairn has been taken,” Manfred pointed out.

  “Yes, but I suspect Miklos has done it on Marek’s behalf,” Tammaron countered. “And I seriously doubt that King Arion supports it. He certainly doesn’t want a war with us right now, because he hasn’t got adult heirs yet either.

  “No, I would guess this to be a drawing action, almost a field exercise, to see what we’ll do. Marek hasn’t the support to make a full-scale invasion and won’t until his heir is of age. I think he wants to flex his muscles and size up his enemy—and perhaps test to see whether it’s true, that the King of Gwynedd is not his own man.”

  “Which means,” Hubert said, “that the king must be seen to be his own man, and a competent one, by riding with an expeditionary force to free Culliecairn. I’ll grant that there is some small risk, if he should take it in his head to actually try to lead,” he added, at the looks of objection forming on several faces. “On the other hand, he knows full well that if he should meet his death in such a campaign—for whatever reason—young Owain would become the next king, with the certainty of an actual and open regency until the boy reaches his majority.”

  “I can’t say I’d mind a ten-year regency,” Manfred said, grinning as he leaned back in his chair.

  “No, but the queen would,” Tammaron said. “And she’d sit on the regency council by right. Would her brother sit as well, Hubert? He’s the boy’s uncle; it’s customary.”

  “The king, ah, has been persuaded not to name his brother-in-law to the regency council,” Hubert said, pretending to study a well-manicured thumbnail. “Something about concern for the young man’s health, I believe—the strain of the office, and so forth.”

  “And it won’t be a strain to keep him on at court?” Rhun said archly. “If I’d had my way, he would have been killed six years ago.”

  Hubert favored the younger man with a droll smile. “Fortunately for him, dear Rhun, you were away supervising another killing at the time. But rest assured that Sir Cathan understands the precarious nature of his position and will do nothing to jeopardize his access to his sister. Nor will she do anything that might endanger his life—or even worse, from her perspective, force us to forbid her access to her son. So long as both of them maintain the utmost discretion and circumspection, I am content that Cathan Drummond should remain in the royal household, if only for the sake of appearances. Besides that, his presence reassures the queen, who will bear stronger princes if her mind is at ease. ’Tis a small enough inconvenience, I think—and one that is open to immediate reassessment, if either of them should abuse the privilege.”

  Rhun snorted and shook his head. “I’d still rather he were dead.”

  “That’s as may be, but at very least, nothing must happen to him during the queen’s pregnancy. Do I make myself quite clear?”

  “You do.”

  “Good. Because whatever else happens, she carries the second Haldane heir, our backup for Prince Owain. Worry about that, if you insist upon worrying about something. Whether or not the king survives this current crisis, Michaela could die in childbed—or worse, the child might die. And if the king should die, whether on a campaign into Eastmarch or as a result of his own folly, the shock could cause her to miscarry again; it happened before.”

  “Aye,” Tammaron breathed. “So all Haldane hopes ultimately hang on one small four-year-old.”

  “Precisely. For that reason, and to prevent the boy being brought untimely to the crown, I rather think that the king, his lady wife, and her brother will continue to do whatever we require of them.”

  Hubert’s words brought nods of agreement. That the king was a devoted father was hardly any secret, but of the five men seated around the council table, the archbishop perhaps knew the king best of any of them. Though Tammaron and Rhun had been among the original regents appointed to rule Gwynedd during the minority of King Alroy, Rhys Michael’s sickly eldest brother, it was Hubert who, because of his office, had been in a unique position both to interact with the three Haldane princes himself and to require detailed reporting from the priests who were the princes’ teachers and confessors.

  Nor had his influence ended with the end of the regency. For it was also Hubert who, with Paulin of Ramos, had been responsible for the plot that eventually put Rhys Michael on the throne. Accordingly, Hubert’s opinion held weight in proportion to his physical size, among these men who shared with him the governing of Gwynedd.

  “Well, then,” Manfred said, “I suppose we’d better let the king receive Prince Miklos’ herald.”

  “Indeed, yes,” Hubert replied. “I’d already informed him of the news from Eastmarch. Before court is convened, I shall be certain that he understands both the political and personal implications of any independent action he might contemplate and that he knows precisely what is expected of him.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.

  —I Corinthians 15:34

  Following Hubert’s second briefing, the king could harbour no illusions regarding what was expected of him. As he dressed for Court, however, he reflected that he probably understood the implications of the coming audience far better than any of his great lords supposed.

  Still a little stunned, nonetheless, he considered his situation as he crossed the fronts of a clean white shirt his body squire had just put on him, stuffing the tails into the waist of close-fitting black breeches and then holding out his arms for the sleeves to be fastened at the wrists.

  At least the afternoon was mild, not at all like that other June, when his brother Alroy lay dying and his brother Javan had come back to Court, forever changing the destiny of the fourteen-year-old Prince Rhys Michael Alister Haldane. Seven years had passed since then, and Rhys Michael had been king for six of them—king in name, at least.
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  For now he knew, though he had not wanted to believe it at the time, that Javan’s own great lords had conspired to be rid of him, the king they could not control, and to set Rhys Michael in his place. It had cost the youngest of the Haldane princes his innocence and the lives of his brother and the child who would have been his own firstborn son. It had also cost him his freedom for the future and sentenced whatever further progeny he might engender to a life dictated by the great lords. As King Rhys, he now came and went at their behest, all but worn down by the intervening years of subjugation, both physical and mental, with even the thought of further resistance almost battered into resignation and acceptance of what they required, if he wished to survive.

  This latest development might not set too well with their long-range plans, though. Already, a faint pang of hope had flared in his breast, where he had thought all chance of deliverance nearly stifled.

  He had a fair idea what the waiting Torenthi herald would say, based on Hubert’s briefing and the news brought earlier by the Eastmarch messengers. The seizure of Culliecairn, with its castle and garrison and town, could not be tolerated. Culliecairn guarded the Torenth-side entrance to the Coldoire Pass, the most direct route through the northern Rhelljan Mountains between Eastmarch and the Torenthi Duchy of Tolan. Hubert had already mentioned the likelihood of an immediate campaign to free Culliecairn, even conceding that it probably would be necessary for Rhys Michael to go along. The king had been forbidden to make any official commitment without first clearing it with his advisors—which rankled, as such constraints always did; but the developing scenario also reminded Rhys Michael most pointedly that he was still an anointed king.

  At least they had never forbidden him to look like a king. Indeed, they demanded it, whenever they trotted him out for some state occasion that required his official presence. The great lords approved of keeping up appearances. The body squire kneeling at his feet had given his boots a final buff with a soft cloth and now was buckling golden spurs to his heels.