“I can and will do it, my lady,” Kelson said.
Kelson, no! Dhugal sent.
The subject is closed, was all Kelson sent in return.
“Restore Saint Camber?” Jilyan asked skeptically.
“And undergo your—ordeal, if that will win our freedom. I have faith that Saint Camber will not desert me now, after all we’ve been through together,” he added, far more confidently than he actually felt.
“So be it, then,” Brother Michael said. “You will be conveyed to a place of preparation, where you may bathe and meditate. The ritual will begin at sunset.”
Kelson nodded. “May Dhugal accompany me in that, at least?”
Bened started to object, but Michael shook his head and held up one hand.
“After the ritual bath, yes,” he agreed. “And he may keep watch with the brethren while you are apart for the cruaidh-dheuchainn. That much we grant you, because you are both Deryni.”
“Thank you,” Kelson said. “One further request—might we, perhaps, have something to eat?”
This time, it was Jilyan who spoke up.
“A strict fast is customary, to sharpen the senses, but you may have bread and water. Personally, I would advise water only, knowing what you must endure. Young MacArdry may eat, if he wishes.”
“I’ll fast with my blood-brother,” Dhugal said stubbornly, though Kelson murmured that it was not necessary.
“Very well, then,” Brother Michael said, standing. “Kelson Haldane, have we your oath, as king and knight—” He touched the spurs lying on the table in front of him, “—that neither you nor your companion will attempt to escape until the cruaidh-dheuchainn is completed?”
“By Saint Camber, I swear it,” Kelson said.
“And you guarantee young MacArdry?”
“Yes.”
“On your oath?”
“On my oath as king and knight.”
“So be it, then,” Brother Michael said. “Let the candidate and his companion be escorted to the place of preparation.”
The sun was sinking low on the horizon, promising an early sunset behind the mountains, as Morgan and Duncan drew rein with Ciard and Jass to make camp for the night. The air was thin and cold, and men and horses were spent. They had lost the track of the underground river around noon, and everyone’s spirits had flagged as the afternoon wore on and they found no further sign.
“We’re not going to find that river again,” Morgan said to Duncan, after he had picked halfheartedly at the stew Ciard made and then gave up on trying to eat it. Jass was seeing to the horses and equipment, and Ciard was cleaning up the supper things.
Duncan, sipping listlessly at a cup of mulled ale, shook his head and set the cup aside, resting his chin on one knee.
“I have to agree. I don’t like admitting to defeat any more than you do, but I’m afraid we’ve about reached the end of our resources.”
Morgan sighed. “Do you think it’s worth one last cast tonight, just to try once more to pick up some trace? If we could even find bodies—”
Duncan shook his head and breathed out heavily, not wanting to consider that eventuality any more than Morgan did, though even bodies were better than simply never knowing.
“I don’t know, Alaric. I’m so tired, I can’t think straight. This mountain air’s given me a headache. They can’t possibly be alive, though, after so long—can they?”
“I doubt it.”
Morgan closed his eyes briefly, his gryphon signet pressed against his lips, then pulled Kelson’s champion ring out of the front of his tunic and looked at it thoughtfully, dangling it on its leather thong. Duncan, watching this, raised one eyebrow.
“What is it?”
Ruefully, Morgan shrugged. “Probably nothing. I was just thinking how a person’s essence permeates something closely associated with him, like this ring. It won’t do, of course, because it’s here and Kelson is—somewhere else. But maybe we could link into something one of them was wearing. At least it would be a focal point to cast for—to find their bodies.”
“But if it worked, then we’d know,” Duncan replied.
“Yes.”
After a few seconds, Duncan scooted a little closer.
“All right. What did you have in mind?”
“I was afraid you’d ask that,” Morgan replied. “It has to be something they wouldn’t have lost in the accident. Maybe their Saint Camber medals.”
Duncan shook his head. “I don’t know if the medals would have a strong enough connection. They hadn’t worn them long enough.”
“Sidana’s ring, then,” Morgan said. “Kelson hasn’t been without that for the past year. The emotional attachment ought to be strong enough.”
“That’s true,” Duncan agreed. “Shall we cast for that, then?”
Morgan sighed. “Might as well. Do you want to call the men, or shall I?”
For answer, Duncan tossed the rest of his ale on the fire and got to his feet.
“Ciard, when you and Jass are finished, would you please join us? We have some work to do tonight.”
And in Rhemuth, she who most recently had worn Sidana’s ring sat at her wedding supper and listened to her new uncle toast her and her bridegroom.
“I drink to the bride, the fair Rothana,” Saer de Traherne said with a grin, lifting his cup in salute. “I welcome her to our family, and I wish her and Conall many happy years, abundant good health, and a bonny son before a year has passed! Slainte!”
Rothana blushed and stared into her goblet as the toast was repeated and drunk, very aware of Conall’s eyes upon her as he, too, drank. Archbishop Cardiel, Bishop Arilan, Mother Heloise and a few of the other Sisters of Saint Brigid’s, and half a dozen of Conall’s friends and some of their wives had been invited to the modest wedding supper, so that perhaps two dozen were assembled to wish the couple well. The feast was restrained, because of Nigel’s mortal illness, but even Meraude had taken leave of his bedside for the afternoon and sat on Conall’s other side in the queen’s chair, making polite conversation with those around her.
More toasts followed Saer’s, some of them increasingly ribald; but not long after that, as the sunlight turned long and slanted coming through the narrow windows, drawing toward dusk, Meraude sat forward in her chair and caught Rothana’s eye, her near hand resting on Conall’s forearm.
“Well, it’s been a long day for your bride, my son,” she said softly, smiling at Rothana, “and it promises to be a long night for both of you. Daughter, shall we bid Nigel good-night before I see you to your bed?”
“Of course, Maman,” Rothana whispered, keeping her hands steady as she set her goblet aside and rose with Meraude. Fortified with wine, she was even able to set maidenly modesty aside enough to give Conall a nervous, self-conscious smile as she added, “I shall await your coming, my lord.”
“The wait will seem like eternity, my lady,” he murmured. “Until then.”
But as he caught her hand and pressed his lips to her palm, lingering long enough to caress it with his tongue, she suddenly could feel the eyes of nearly everyone in the room upon them.
“Not here, my lord, I beg you,” she whispered, the hot blood rising in her cheeks. “It—is not seemly.”
“Not seemly, to kiss my wife’s hand in farewell?” he replied softly.
“Really, Conall,” Meraude chided him gently. “Have a care for your bride’s feelings.”
Smiling, Conall released Rothana’s hand and sat back, taking up his goblet again. She could feel the power in him as his hand and then his eyes finally released her, and she was still blushing—and berating herself for it—as she let Meraude lead her gently from the room, the wedding guests all rising to drink her health again as she passed.
She thought about Conall as she followed Meraude up the stairs. She had needed no Deryni abilities to sense his ardor. That had been apparent from their first private conversation. He had not yet been fully endowed with the Haldane powers then, so he had invi
ted no true melding of their minds. Nor, once he was so empowered, would she have suggested it, for such an intimacy would have been considered only marginally appropriate before they were married, despite what she and Kelson had shared.
But she had no reason not to trust Conall. Repeatedly, the reasons he had given for his suit had stood the tests of her Truth-Reading, brief and seldom though those forays had been. Conall desired her with mind and heart as well as body, and truly was determined to make her a loving, kind, and faithful husband. And she, for her part, though her heart still mourned the loss of Kelson, found that her body was coming to answer the urgings that her mind found proper, for her own sake as well as the sake of the land and the young man, so like Kelson in many ways, who soon would be its king.
“I think my son is very much in love with you,” Meraude said softly, linking her arm in Rothana’s as the two of them reached the top of the stair and turned along the corridor that led toward her and Nigel’s apartments. “You aren’t too nervous about your wedding night, are you? I know you had never intended to marry.”
Rothana kept her gaze averted as Meraude opened the door to the royal suite and stood aside to let her enter.
“Marriage has no aversion for me, Maman,” she answered quietly. “It was not to escape marriage that I took vows with the sisters.”
“And yet,” Meraude said, cocking her head quizzically as she leaned against the closed door, “you chose ultimately to be Conall’s bride rather than God’s. Understand that the outcome pleases me more than I can say, my dear, especially with Nigel—”
She broke off, a dolorous expression shadowing her face for an instant as she glanced farther into the darkened chamber where her husband lay, and Rothana gently laid a hand on her arm in compassion.
“I am so sorry, Maman,” she whispered. “I will try to be a good daughter to you.”
Smiling bravely, Meraude lowered her eyes. “You could never be anything but a joy to me, Rothana,” she said, “though I must confess, I always thought it far more likely that you would one day be my niece rather than my daughter.”
Folding her hands quietly before her, Rothana ducked her head, wishing the older woman were not so perceptive.
“Had Kelson lived, Maman, that might well have been,” she said softly. “God did not will it so.”
“Then you were going to marry Kelson,” Meraude replied, sounding a little surprised. “Why, then, once he was gone, did you decide to marry Conall? He’s my son, and I love him, but it’s a poor mother indeed who does not recognize her child’s faults. He may well turn out to be a fine man, but he is not Kelson.”
“Does it matter?” Rothana said bleakly, hugging her elbows as she moved farther into the room where Nigel lay unconscious.
“I think it does.”
When Rothana said nothing, Meraude went on.
“Why did you do it? Your vocation seemed so strong when you first came to us. To abandon that vocation for marriage, and then to have one’s intended die before one could be wed—most women would take that as a sign that God did not intend to share her with any human spouse.”
“Ah, but I am not ‘most women,’ Maman,” Rothana murmured. “I am Deryni; and your son is Haldane, and far more than any merely human spouse. When I was contemplating marriage with Kelson—and that is all we ever did; we made no promises before he left—he made me understand that, whatever personal possibilities lay between us, he was already wedded to his land, and Gwynedd needed a Deryni queen.”
“Gwynedd had a Deryni queen,” Meraude said quietly. “Her name was—is—Jehana, and she did not even deign to come to your wedding.”
“And God help me,” Rothana retorted, “if I should ever be like her, at least in the matter of my race! I owe a duty to my people, as well as to my wedded lord. And if my wedded lord should—be some other than the one I first had thought, why, the duty continues.”
“And so, loving Kelson, you have married Conall,” Meraude breathed.
“Can you name me a more loving memorial, Maman?” Rothana countered. “Not that I should have married Conall—and so soon!—but that I should have married the man who eventually will be king, and make me Gwynedd’s queen, Gwynedd’s Deryni queen, to carry out the dreams the two of us shared.”
After a long silence, Meraude nodded slowly.
“You are a very brave young woman, Rothana,” she said. “But will you be a happy one?”
Rothana lowered her eyes. “With God’s grace, I shall be content, Maman. I—cannot honestly say that I—love Conall, but I care for him. And I care for the awesome task he is being given, to rule this kingdom—and I have come to love that. Perhaps I shall come to love him as well. In the meantime, I think he loves me—and I know he needs me. It is more than many couples are given.”
Smiling sadly, Meraude slowly nodded. “For all our sakes, I wish it had been otherwise, child. For all our sakes.” She glanced into the room where Nigel’s canopied bed loomed in the gathering darkness, then gently took Rothana’s hand.
“Come, child. We must say good-night to Nigel and then see you to your bridal bed. ’Twill soon be dark.”
Kelson, too, waited for the night, soaking neck-deep in a tub of steaming water and trying to relax. He wished Dhugal were with him, but their captors had taken the young border lord off to another bath chamber, though they had reassured Kelson that he might see Dhugal briefly, just before they were taken to Saint Camber’s shrine.
At least the hot bath was soothing, a welcome palliative to the natural anxiety that was slowly building over the mysterious ordeal to come. Kelson found himself becoming drowsy, though he roused with a start every time an attendant came with an ewer of hot water to warm up his bath. The steam rising eerily from the oaken tub diffused the last rays of daylight coming through a small window set near the ceiling, oppressive but for the chill it kept at bay—for the high mountain air was cooling rapidly as sunset approached, and winter had not yet surrendered its grip on the land. The scent of herbs also mingled with the steam, sweet and pungent by turns, burned on a small brazier tended by a silent man in grey; and from somewhere out of sight, a pleasant tenor voice chanted Psalms in oddly inflected Latin.
“Sunset approaches.”
Brother Michael’s voice, nearly at his right ear, startled Kelson out of what had been close to actual dozing, and water sloshed out of the tub before he stopped his reflex drawing back. The chanting had died away without his noticing, and the man tending the brazier was gone, though a rushlight now burned beside the brazier. Only Michael remained in the room, almost spectral in the steam, holding a large, thirsty-looking towel between himself and Kelson. Kelson rose and let Michael wrap him in it as he stepped from the tub, allowing himself to be guided to a stool where the monk proceeded personally to dry his hair with a second towel and then comb the tangles out of it, all in silence.
“Do you wish your hair left loose, or would you prefer the g’dula?” Michael asked, when it finally lay shining and damp on Kelson’s shoulders. Kelson remembered hearing the term before, and guessed that it must be their term for a border braid.
“Is that what you call the braid?” Kelson asked. “A g’dula?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll have the g’dula, then,” Kelson said. “I’ve worn it for several years now, but we simply call it a border braid. I notice that most of your men wear one.”
Michael only bent to begin sectioning off the damp black hair for braiding, all but forbidding unnecessary conversation. Kelson ventured a faint, deft probe, but the man seemed surrounded by fog. Not precisely shields, but whatever it was seemed no more amenable to probing than shields would have been. Kelson decided it might be some side effect of the religious discipline these people apparently practiced, or that Michael was Deryni, or both—or neither.
He drew back into his own thoughts while Michael finished, standing when the monk picked up what he took to be another of the grey robes so many of the people seemed to be wear
ing. But it was a cloak only, hooded and voluminous, with slits in the sides for his arms to go through. Michael held out the cloak between them as he had held the towel, clearing intending to offer no further clothing.
“Those who enter the shrine of the Blessed One go as they came into this world,” Michael informed him, “that no distractions of the outside world might intrude upon the encounter with the Holy.”
The cloak was warm, at least. Kelson held it close around his body as Brother Michael led him from the bathhouse, for the air outside was cold. He had also been allowed a pair of sandals, but the soles were very thin. He could feel every pebble on the path from the bathhouse to the church, and the way was lined with the folk of the village bearing torches, singing a hymn he felt he should have been able to recognize but could not. They fell in behind as he passed.
The church was set hard against the side of the mountain, and a grey-robed Dhugal was waiting for him at the door, with the rest of the Quorial all around him. Dhugal knelt to kiss Kelson’s hand in homage, also using the brief contact to send a quick reassurance that could not be overheard by the others.
Try to get our medals back, and I’ll do my best to use them as a focal point to maintain contact and send you power, he sent, as he looked up and also spoke words aloud. “I pray thee, Sire, a blessing.”
“Fear not,” Kelson replied, laying his hand briefly on Dhugal’s head, and with far more conviction than he felt. “The Blessed Camber knows his own and will not forsake me. Brother Michael,” he went on turning away from Dhugal, “I should like to wear my Saint Camber medal, if I may. It gives me comfort. And the earring that you took from me is a potent symbol of my kingship. I should like to wear that, too.”
“That cannot be permitted,” Michael said firmly.