“That’s the sedative?” Morgan asked.
Duncan nodded. “Aye, nothing unexpected. A good, stiff dose, but they’ll need that. Dhugal, I think you’re familiar with this one.”
Dhugal, trained as a battle-surgeon, sniffed at the cup Duncan held out to him, frowned, then gingerly touched a fingertip to the liquid and then to his tongue, grimacing at the taste.
“Aye, I know it. We won’t wake before morning, and that’s for sure. Next to a Deryni, it’s the best thing I know to knock out a patient so you can work on him. They don’t feel much.”
“And neither will you,” Arilan said, taking the cup from Duncan and setting it back in the center of the table. “Nor will you want to.”
He glanced at Kelson, then at Morgan and Duncan, finally sparing a look and a smile for Nigel, who bit back a grimace of apprehension and clasped his arms across his chest, one nervous hand massaging the opposite bicep.
“Whenever you’re ready, then, gentlemen,” Arilan said quietly. “Actually, why don’t you go first, Kelson, so we don’t have to watch both of you at once? I know you don’t much trust me right now, so Alaric can monitor. I’d recommend you have a very modest taste first, so you can experience the subtler effects, and then toss it off as neatly as you can. In this concentration, it has a particularly nasty aftertaste, as I’m sure Duncan can attest. I suspect this is similar to the strength Loris and Gorony used on him.”
If Arilan had intended his words to be reassuring, he failed utterly, for Kelson had seen the end result of Duncan’s ordeal—and of his father’s. Picking up the merasha-drugged goblet of his own volition was one of the most difficult things he had ever done.
This is what killed your father! his fear screeched at him, even though he knew it was not true. You will taste his death again!
His hand trembled as he brought the cup to his lips, and he had to steady it with his other hand. Try as he might to prevent it, images of his father’s death began crowding into memory—the well-loved face contorted with pain and bewilderment, the chest heaving for breath—and sometimes the face was his own. Sternly he told himself that he was not his father, but dread continued to scurry just at the edges of awareness, constantly dipping deeper into that well of vague and even more soul-chilling fears that every man has, that would always resist reason.
But to counter it, he could feel support all around him: magical bolstering, the likes of which his father had never known—the quick, timid caress of Dhugal’s mind, backed by Duncan’s, and then the more powerful surge of Morgan’s exhortation for courage, as the Deryni duke laid his hand on the back of Kelson’s neck. He could sense Arilan’s mind only sketchily, though what did come through was benign, but even Nigel, all potential and no power as yet, displayed a fierce glow of fortitude that was another source of comfort.
Heartened, Kelson tipped the cup to taste of the temporary death of mind, barely testing with the tip of his tongue. Unlike his father, he would not really die. Surely he could endure this tempering ordeal, so that his father’s death might not have been in vain.
The wine was pungent and tart. Arilan had been right about it going sour. It was not yet vinegary, but almost—probably not a Fianna varietal, but it would have been a good vintage red, four years before. He knew his father had approved. He wondered why it had not lasted better.
Perhaps it was the merasha, he decided, as he ran his tongue across his lips. Perhaps the old merasha had changed it, as it lost its potency. Odd, but the tip of his tongue suddenly felt a little numb. And as he swallowed, the sharp tang of the turning wine left a bitter aftertaste at the back of his tongue—not unexpected, in light of what Arilan had said. He swallowed again and became aware of a faint buzzing that started in his throat and quickly spread to the back of his head.
“Drink it down now,” Morgan murmured, suddenly at his right ear, standing now to rest both hands on his shoulders. “You might as well avoid the worst of the transition. Fast is better, believe me.”
Kelson might have argued with Arilan, if only because he resented the Deryni bishop’s highhandedness in this entire matter, but not with Morgan. He could feel an unpleasant tingling already extending into his lips and down his arms. He raised the cup again in hands that were fast losing sensation.
“All of it, in one big gulp,” Morgan urged, as Kelson set it to his lips.
Kelson managed it in two, almost immediately fighting nausea as the sour wine hit his stomach. But it was not the wine that made him want to retch. He knew that with a cold, gut-cramping fear, triggered by yet another image of his father dying, that would not respond to the rational awareness that he was safe here, among friends. Morgan took the empty goblet before he could drop it, but then all his senses began shutting down and he was alone—more alone than he had ever been, even before he came into his powers.
His vision began to blur, tunneling down something like the way it did when he was going into trance for a very deep working. Only, instead of letting him focus inward, the tunnel kept closing in, constricting, shutting him off from both outward and inward sensation until he was blind.
And blind with his powers as well as his eyes. He tried to open his mouth to ask if anyone was still there, but the movement made his stomach churn—though not enough, unfortunately, to heave up what was lying there like a belly full of coals, sending jerky streamers of fire into all his limbs.
“Kelson, can you hear me?” a voice said, close in his ear, its sound like the rasp of rusty metal against his raw nerves.
He managed to nod, but he had to close his eyes to do it—which didn’t matter, since he couldn’t see anyway. A vague, faraway part of him knew his hands were gripping the edge of the table for dear life, his only anchor in the world now inaccessible to him, but what touched his face, clamping his head between, might have been tongs of fire, had he not somehow sensed they were Morgan’s hands.
“Keep your eyes closed, take a deep breath and let it out, and try to concentrate only on my voice,” Morgan commanded. “Your shields are nearly gone. Try not to resist what I’m about to do. This isn’t going to be pleasant for either of us, but I’ll show you what’s happening and how to make the best of it.”
Kelson could not have disobeyed, had his soul’s salvation depended on it. The touch of Morgan’s mind was far worse than the touch of his hands. All he remembered of the next hour or two was screaming—though they told him, later, that he had uttered not a sound.
He supposed they had finally given him Arilan’s sedative, at the end, because when he finally woke, it was the next morning, and Jatham, his senior squire, was rousing him for Sunday Mass, and his head hurt worse than any hangover he could ever remember having or even hearing about.
“God, how did Duncan function at all?” Kelson whispered, hardly even able to lift his head as he waited for Jatham to fetch Morgan. “The merasha disruption, on top of everything else they did to him!” He shifted one arm over his aching eyes to shut out the light. “And my father! I doubt he even knew what was happening to him.”
Dhugal, stirring from the cot where he had slept at the foot of the king’s great bed, groaned as he managed to raise himself far enough to clamp both arms around one of the bedposts and look muzzily in Kelson’s general direction.
“You mustn’t let yourself dwell on it,” he said, “just as I mustn’t let myself think about what my father suffered. It does no good. What’s important is that we’ve learned what can be done if we ever have to face merasha again—God forbid!”
But though it was their resolve not to dwell on such troubles, both of them did—until Morgan’s arrival shifted their attention to more practical concerns.
“We have to go to Mass this morning, Alaric,” Kelson replied, when Morgan suggested that a day in bed would do both young men far more good than attendance at any ritual. “Cardiel will be reading the tribunal’s dispensation from the pulpit. Dhugal should be there.”
Morgan could not fault that reasoning, though he
warned both of them that any immediate relief he might bring them was but a temporary measure, cautioning that only another good night’s sleep would really complete their cure. After applying what healing measures he might, he underlined his advice by going back to bed himself.
At least Cardiel’s announcement proved popular. After Mass, dozens of well-wishers flocked around Dhugal and the king to offer their congratulations, for the young border lord had made himself well-liked at court in the past year and more—and doubly so, now that the social onus of bastardy had been laid to rest. A contingent of Dhugal’s borderers, come to Rhemuth to attend his knighting two days hence, cheered him as he and the king left the cathedral, though Ciard O Ruane, Dhugal’s aged gillie, was quick to observe—and to point gleefully out to his clansmen—that both their young chief and the king apparently had over-celebrated the night before, judging by their bleary eyes and aversion to light and loud noises.
Neither Dhugal nor Kelson disabused them of that notion, of course. Even were it not expected that all those to receive the accolade should retire early that evening, before plunging into the two-day round of ceremonies and festivities officially marking the event, a hangover gave both of them added excuse to seek seclusion. By the time they had crossed the castle yard and mounted the steps to the great hall doors, only Jatham was still with them, for the clansmen and young warriors who had buzzed around them after Mass or accompanied them back to the keep had drifted on about their business. Besides, Jatham, too, was a candidate for knighthood two days hence, and had his instructions from Morgan, though he did not know the true reason for them.
No ceremony attended the entry of king or border lord into the great hall, though individuals noted the king’s passage with informal salute when he passed nearby. Jatham led them briskly down the left side of the hall, intending to take them via a back stair and avoid the more direct and populous route that skirted the gardens—for the previous day’s storm had brought a glorious, sunny day, unusual for March, and half the court had repaired to the garden to enjoy the unseasonable warmth.
The sunshine had also brought Nigel’s duchess, Meraude, down from the ladies’ solar for the afternoon, to stitch and read with two companions in the good north light. Meraude’s baby daughter Eirian dozed placidly in a basket at her mother’s side. The Princess Janniver tended the baby from time to time, sad-eyed and wistful beneath her mane of yellow curls—Janniver, whom Kelson and his men had been too late to save from dishonor at the hands of Mearan rebels the summer before, now rejected by father and betrothed and left no refuge save the court of Gwynedd. But the other young woman—
Kelson made himself draw a deep breath and tell himself again that the other one was no more for him than Janniver was. At just seventeen, Rothana of Nur Hallaj was beautiful in a dusky, eastern way that made Kelson’s knees weak if he thought about it too long. Her breeding was impeccable, for she was a princess of the Forcinn and Richenda’s kin by marriage, but she was also Sister Rothana, a novice nun of the Order of Saint Brigid, even if her vows were not yet final.
She was also Deryni, perhaps as powerful and certainly as self-willed as Morgan’s Richenda, if less thoroughly trained—which made her doubly fascinating to a Deryni king now more than a year a widower from a marriage never consummated and being pressed increasingly by family and royal counselors to take another bride.
At least Kelson had managed to postpone that inevitability for the moment, ostensibly out of respect for his slain first bride. But to avow that he still mourned his lost Sidana carried less and less weight as the months passed. He continued to wear the ring he had given her—a narrow gold band with a ruby-eyed Haldane lion carved on a facet pared from the top—but it bespoke habit rather than conviction, more than a year after Sidana’s death. Nor had he worn black for her since returning from his Mearan campaign the previous summer, other than to observe the anniversary of her death, in January.
He had met Rothana on that campaign, while he scoured the Mearan borderlands for traces of his dead bride’s rebellious elder brother. He had first seen her in the desecrated ruins of her abbey as she tried to comfort the weeping Janniver—pale blue habit smudged with soot and her heavy, blue-black hair escaping from a braid as thick as a man’s wrist. Though Rothana herself had been untouched by the raiders, at least in body, her Deryni senses had amplified the terror and humiliation of those around her and left a uniquely Deryni anger.
But the psychic cost to Rothana had not occurred to Kelson, most interested just then in finding out who had been responsible for the attack. That night, after setting his guards and returning to the abbey church where the remaining sisters had set up a hospice to care for the injured, he had wanted to use his powers to read Janniver’s memory of the attack and perhaps identify her assailant. But Rothana had held that to be too intimate a contact with the already violated princess and had forbidden it—though she did agree to read the memory herself and transmit to Kelson the information he required.
Only, when she did, she had also given him a taste of the rape from Janniver’s point of view, with all its hurt and humiliation and anguish. It had not been pleasant. Kelson himself was yet a virgin, for a variety of tiresome but practical reasons that seemed valid to him, as king, but occasionally he had wondered, since that night, whether the intense psychic experience of reliving Janniver’s ordeal would unman him when the time came for his own sexual initiation. He had been taught to believe that rape and the act of love were as different as night and day, but until he knew for certain, from his own experience, his imagination sometimes inspired far more apprehension than confidence.
That Rothana had been the one to trigger that apprehension made Kelson even more wary where she was concerned—especially since it was her shadow-face and form that occasionally intruded, all unbidden, on the increasingly erotic fantasies that he, like most eighteen-year-old males, experienced in his dreams. There were other faces, to be sure, but none whom he could identify as living, breathing women.
That only made the apprehension even more concrete, for Rothana was a living, breathing woman—and vowed to God. Despite that avowal, something more frighteningly personal and intense than the violence of Janniver’s rape had also surged across their brief psychic link. Both of them had been denying it all winter, with only indifferent success, neither willing to admit or accept that the attraction was mutual.
“Good afternoon, Kelson,” Meraude said, she and both girls rising to make him dutiful curtsies as Kelson and his companions approached—though Rothana kept her dark eyes primly averted to the scroll she had been reading, as was seemly for a female religious in the presence of three virile young men just coming into their prime. Janniver dared a glance at them, but she blushed prettily and retreated all in a fluster when Jatham eased a little closer to his master’s side—and to her—and tried, unsuccessfully, to keep from smiling.
“Why, Aunt Meraude, what a pleasant surprise,” Kelson said, suddenly aware of the chemistry between his soon-to-be ex-squire and the princess and making an effort to be courtly, despite the ache behind his eyes. “Pray, ladies, be seated. I see that the spring sunshine has brought out the flowers.”
His frankly appreciative survey of the three of them left no doubt that he was not talking about flowers that grew in the castle gardens beyond.
“Why, here’s a fair rose of Rhenndall,” he went on, with a bow flourished in Meraude’s direction, “and Mary bells, to honor our Blessed Lady.” He gave restrained and proper salute to Rothana’s pale blue habit. “And surely here is a golden jonquil, Princess, unless I disremember all my lessons in botany. Dhugal, have you ever seen fairer blossoms? Or you, Jatham?”
As a blushing Janniver ducked her head and fumbled for a hank of yarn in her embroidery basket, Jatham knelt to retrieve one that tumbled from her lap.
“Never, Sire,” he breathed. “’Tis the loveliest bouquet that I have ever seen.”
“Why, my lords, you shall turn our heads with such
flattery,” Meraude scolded, though she could not keep the mirth from her eyes. “Besides, ’tis far too early for most flowers.”
“But not too early,” Rothana said, lifting her eyes boldly to Kelson’s, “to ask His Majesty about the greenery for the basilica tomorrow. May I speak with you for a moment in private, Sire?” she continued, touching his sleeve as she brushed past to lead him away from the others. “Please to come into the next window with me and look into the garden, where I may point out what might be useful. At this time of year, the possibilities are somewhat limited, but there are a few that might suit. After all, it is not fitting that young men should keep their knight’s vigil before an unadorned altar.”
She had said all in a low voice, so that only he and their immediate company could hear; but, by the time they were well into the next window bay, Kelson was certain that every eye in the hall must have turned to observe their withdrawal. Nor were they safe from curious eyes in the garden itself.
“Come and pretend you are looking at the garden, my lord,” Rothana murmured, setting a finger against the glass and only watching him sidelong. “I have something I must ask you that could not be said before the others—though, with your head still smarting from the test of merasha, perhaps we should delay until another time.”
Kelson swallowed nervously and moved closer, though he was careful not to touch her, dutifully pretending to follow the discourse she was not giving about flowers and such.
“Did Meraude tell you that,” he asked, “or is it that apparent?”
“Why, both, my lord. I should be dull-witted, indeed, if I should fail to recognize such aftereffects in one of our race.”
“I see.” He made himself draw a deep breath to steady out both the noted aftereffects and the effect she was having on him.