Kurtz, Katherine - King Kelson 01 - The Bishop's Heir

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THE BISHOP'S HEIR

PROLOGUE

And he put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and was clad with zeal

for a cloak.

- Isaiah 59:17

Edmund Loris, once the Archbishop of Valoret and Primate of All Gwynedd,

stared out to sea through the salt-smeared windowpanes of his tower prison and

allowed himself a thin smile. The rare display of self-indulgence did nothing

to diminish the fury of the wind shrilling at the ill-fitted glass, but the

letter secreted in the breviary under his arm gave its own grim comfort. The

offer was princely, befitting even the exalted status he had enjoyed before

his fall.

Exhaling softly of his long-hoarded bitterness, Loris bowed his head and

shifted the book to hold it in both hands, wary lest the gesture seem to make

it too precious in the eyes of his jailers, who could look in on him at any

time. For two years now they had kept him here against his will. For two years

his existence had been defined by the walls of this monastic cell and the

token participation permitted him in the life of the rest of the abbey: daily

attendance at Mass and Vespers, always in the company of two silent and all-

too-attentive monks, and access to a confessor once each month - seldom the

same man twice, and never the same one any two months in succession. Were it

not for one of the lay brothers who brought his meals, whose fondness for

intrigue Loris had early discovered, he would have had no contact whatsoever

with the outside world.

The outside world - how he longed for it again! The two years spent in

Saint Iveagh's were but an extension of the outrage which had begun a full

year before that, with the death of King Brion. On just such a chill November

day as this had Brion Haldane met his doom - blasted from life by the hell-

spawned magic of a Deryni sorceress, but leaving an unexpected legacy of

forbidden powers to his son and heir, the fourteen-year-old Kelson.

Nor had young Kelson hesitated to seize his unholy patrimony and use it

to overturn almost everything Loris held sacred, not the least of which was

the Church's stand against the use of magic in whatever form. And all of this

had been done under the guise of his "Divine right" to rule and his sacred

duty to protect his people - though how a king could justify consorting with

the powers of evil to effect that protection was beyond Loris' comprehension.

By the end of the following summer, with the help of the Deryni heretics

Morgan and McLain, Kelson had even managed to turn most of Loris' fellow

bishops against him. Only the ailing Corrigan had remained true - and his

faithful heart had given out before he could be subjected to the humiliation

Loris finally endured. The rebel bishops actually believed they had done a

great kindness by allowing Loris to attend the travesty of a trial at which

they stripped away his offices and banished him to a life of forced

contemplation.

Bitter still, but heartened by the prospect of a chance to set things

right, the former archbishop tapped the edge of his book lightly against his

lips and thought about its secret contents - yet another communication from

folk with similar cause to feel uneasy at what the new king had wrought. The

wind whining in the roof slates of Saint Iveagh's sea-girt towers sang of the

freedom of the open seas whence it came, bearing the tang of salt air and the

cries of the wheeling gulls that circled the abbey during all but the darkest

hours of night, and for the first time since his imprisonment, Loris allowed

himself to hope that he, too, might soon be free. For many, many months, he

had feared never to taste freedom again except in death.

Oh, he was not fool enough to think there would not be a price - but he

could afford to promise anything, for now. With care and craft, he might play

more than one side to his advantage, perhaps eventually becoming even more

powerful than before his fall. Then he would make himself the instrument of

God's retribution, driving the cursed Deryni from the land once and for all.

And the Deryni taint was in the very blood of the king - perhaps in all

the Haldane line, not in Kelson alone. In the very beginning, Loris had

thought Kelson's forbidden magic strictly the legacy of his Deryni mother -

that poor, conscience-hounded lady who even now kept strict seclusion in

another remote abbey, praying for the soul of her Deryni son as well as her

own and devoting her life to penance for the evil she carried. She had

confessed her guilt before them all, that solemn day of Kelson's coronation,

prepared to sacrifice life and even soul to protect him from the sorceress who

had already been responsible for his father's death.

But Queen Jehana, though she had the will, had not the power to fight

Kelson's battle for him; and in the end, the young king had had to face the

challenge with his own resources - prodigious resources, as it happened,

easily equal to the challenge, but frightening in their implications. While

granting that his mother's Deryni blood might have made its contribution.

Kelson had publicly claimed sacred right as the source of his newfound

abilities. Loris had feared otherwise, even at the time, for he remembered

stories about the boy's father.

In fact, the more Loris thought on it - and he had had ample time for

that in the last two years - the more convinced he became that Brion and

hitherto unsuspected Deryni ancestors were as much to blame for Kelson's

condition as Jehana. The full extent of the taint could only be guessed.

Certainly both Brion and his father before him had harbored Deryni at court

from time to time. The detested Morgan and McLain were but the most recent and

blatant of many such - and the latter a priest all the while, hypocrite to the

core - on both of whom Loris wished only the vilest of fates, for the two

were largely responsible for his present situation.

As for Brion, who could deny that the late king once had faced and

killed a Deryni sorcerer in single combat? Loris, then but a parish priest of

rising prominence, had heard of the incident only at second and third hand,

but even in the first throes of public jubilation at the king's victory, he

had been chilled by the recurring suggestion that Brion's opponent, father to

the woman eventually responsible for his death, had fallen not alone to

Brion's sword but to strange powers wielded by the king himself. In the

taverns for months afterward, haunted eyewitnesses with tongues loosened by

ale whispered fearfully of magic worked upon the king by young Morgan before

that fateful confrontation - the unleashing of awesome forces which Brion said

were benign, the royal legacy of his father - but even that admission cast

grave suspicions on the king, so far as Loris was concerned. Though a man of

honest if rigid religious conviction, he was not naive enough to concede that

purity of intent and fervence of faith - or Divine favor to an anointed king -

had been Brion's salvation, though he kept his misgivings to himself so long

as Brion lived.

Now Loris knew that only power such as the Enemy himself wielded could

have given Brion victory against such odds, and over such a foe. And if that

power had been granted, or even merely released, by one of the accursed

Deryni, then its source was clear: an evil legacy from years of dark alliance

with that unholy race. The double inheritance of evil from Brion and Jehana

was doubly damning in their son. Kelson was beyond redemption, and must be

eliminated.

Nor, by the same logic, were Brion's brother Nigel and his brood to be

spared - for though uncontaminated by Jehana's blood, still they, like Kelson,

traced their ancestry back through the generations of Haldane kings who had

carried forward some other variant of Deryni curse from the time of the

Restoration. The land must be freed of this evil, cleansed of the dark Deryni

taint. A new royal line must be raised to rule in Gwynedd - and what better

source, and who with better legal claim, than the old royal line of Meara,

human to the core, one of whose supporters even now offered assistance to

Gwynedd's rightful Primate, if that Primate would support Mearan independence?

With a shiver, Loris slipped his breviary into the breast of his

homespun woolen robe and drew his meager cloak around his shoulders - he, who

had worn fine linen and silk and furs before being deprived of his office! Two

years of the sparse, simple fare of the Fratri Silentii had pared a handspan

from an already trim waist and honed the hawk-like features to even sharper

definition, but the hunger which gnawed at Loris now had nothing to do with

physical appetites. As he laid one hand flat against the window glass, his eye

was caught by the amethyst on his finger - sole reminder left him of his

former rank - and he savored the words of the letter next to his heart.

Meara will bow no more to a Deryni king, the missive had said, echoing

his own determination. If this plan meets with your approval, ask shriving of

a monk named Jeroboam who shall come within the week to preach, and be guided

by his advice. Until Laas....

Laas. The very name conjured images of ancient glories. It had been the

capital of an independent Meara a hundred years before the first Haldanes came

to Gwynedd. From Laas, sovereign Mearan princes had ruled as proudly as any

Haldane, and over lands by no means less fair.

But Jolyon, the last Mearan prince, had sired only daughter? by the time

he lay dying a century before, and the eldest, Roisian, was only twelve. To

prevent the rending of his lands by avaricious guardians, regents, and

suitors, Jolyon willed his coronet and the hand of Roisian to the strongest

man he could find: Malcolm Haldane, newly crowned King of Gwynedd, a respected

former adversary.

But Jolyon's final act found little favor with Meara's native sons; the

prince had read his nobles well. Before Malcolm could even bed his young

bride, dissident Mearan knights abducted both of the queen's sisters and

proclaimed the elder, Roisian's twin, Meara's sovereign princess. Malcolm put

down the ensuing rebellion in less than a month, capturing and hanging several

of the ringleaders, but he never did locate the stolen princesses - though he

encountered their heirs many times in the years which followed. He moved

Meara's territorial capital from Laas to the more central Ratharkin the

following summer, both for greater ease of administration and to lessen the

importance of Laas as a symbol of former Mearan sovereignty, but the ancient

city remained, from time to time, a rallying point for cadet lines of the old

royal house which waxed with each new generation and as swiftly waned whenever

Haldane expeditions swept into the principality to quash the beginnings of

revolt - and execute pretenders. Malcolm and his son Donal were scrupulous

about their periodic "Mearan housecleaning," as Donal called it, but King

Brion had taken such action only once during his reign, shortly after the

birth of his own son. The venture, while necessary, had been so personally

distasteful that he had avoided even considering the need for a repeat

campaign a generation later.

Now Brion's softness was likely to cost his son a throne. The current

Mearan Pretender had no cause to love King Kelson, for she had lost a husband

as well as a child the last time a Haldane flexed his strength in Meara. It

was even rumored in Meara that an impassive Brion had watched the baby prince

put to the sword - a lie promulgated by Mearan dissidents, though it was true

that the child had died. Soon afterward, the self-styled Princess Caitrin of

Meara, descendant of Queen Roisian's twin, took as husband and consort the

ambitious younger brother of one of Gwynedd's earls and disappeared into the

mountains to breed rebellion and more pretenders - until Brion's death brought

them out of hiding. It was one of Caitrin's agents who had contacted Loris.

Sighing, Loris pressed his nose against the glass of his prison and

watched an autumn squall-line crawl toward the shore from the northwest, well

aware that many would regard what he was about to do as treason. He did not.

It was a means to an end. If he had learned one thing in more than half a

century of service to his faith, it was that the integrity of Holy Mother

Church depended upon temporal dealings as well as spiritual ones. Higher

loyalties than those binding him to any temporal lord bound him to his future

course, for as bishop as well as priest he was duty-bound to root out evil and

corruption. Inevitably, the source of that corruption lay in the devil's brood

called the Deryni.

The Deryni must be eradicated - every last one of them. The time was

past for leniency, for trying to save their souls. Though Loris' mind recoiled

at the thought of raising hand against an anointed king - Kelson, whom he

himself had crowned - the thought of not raising hand against a servant of

darkness on the throne repelled him even more.

The boy had put on a bold charade, but blood would always run true, in

the end. For the sake of every soul in Gwynedd, the Deryni heresy must be

stamped out - and Edmund Loris would use whatever means he must to accomplish

that end.

CHAPTER ONE

He made him a lord of his house, and ruler of all his substance: to bind his

princes at his pleasure.

- Psalms 105:21-22

The Bishop of Meara was dead. In more stable times, that fact might have

elicited little more than academic interest on the part of Duke Alaric Morgan,

for his duchy of Corwyn lay far on the other side of Gwynedd, well beyond the

reach of any Mearan prelate's influence. Bishops there were whose passing

would have meant a personal loss to Morgan, but Carsten of Meara was not one

of them.

This is not to say that Morgan had regarded Carsten as an enemy. On the

contrary, even though the old bishop had been of a very different generation,

bred in an age when fear of magic had made far greater men rabid in their

intolerance of such as Corwyn's Deryni duke, Carsten had never succumbed to

the open hostility displayed by some. When, on the premature accession of

Kelson Haldane to the throne of Gwynedd, it had become increasingly clear that

the young king was somehow heir to magical abilities which the Church had come

to condemn as heretical over the years - powers that Kelson intended to use

for the protection of his kingdom - Carsten had retired quietly to his

episcopal holdings in Meara, rather than choose between his fanatically anti-

Deryni archbishop and his more moderate brethren who supported the king

despite the questionable status of his Deryni soul. The king's party had

eventually prevailed, and the deposed Archbishop Loris languished even now in

the secure Abbey of Saint Iveagh, high in the sea cliffs north of Carbury.

Morgan himself thought the sentence far too lenient to balance the harm Loris

had done human-Deryni relations by his venom, but it had been the

recommendation of Loris' successor, the scholarly Bradene of Grecotha, and was

actively supported by the majority of Gwynedd's other bishops.

No such majority prevailed in the consistory Morgan now watched in the

chamber below, assembled in Culdi to elect old Carsten's successor. The

unexpected vacancy in the See of Meara had touched off old, old controversies

regarding its tenure. Mearan separatists had been agitating for a Mearan-born

prelate for as long as Morgan could remember, and had been agitating in vain

through the reigns of at least three Haldane kings. This was the first time

that young Kelson had had to face the ongoing argument, but with the king less

than a fortnight past his seventeenth birthday, it was not likely to be the

last. Even now, he was addressing the assembled bishops in the chamber below,

outlining the factors he wished them to consider in weighing the many

candidates.

Suppressing a cough, Morgan shifted forward on the hard stone seat in

the listening gallery and eased aside the heavy curtain to peer down. He could

see only Kelson's back from this angle, stiff and formal in a long scarlet

court robe, but Conall, Prince Nigel's eldest son and second in line to the

throne after his father, was visible in profile to Kelson's right, looking

very bored. The bishops themselves seemed attentive enough, but many of those

watching from the tiered benches along the walls wore stormy faces. Morgan

could identify several of the principal aspirants to the vacant Mearan See.

"We wish, therefore, to reassure you that the Crown will not interfere

unduly in your election, my lords," the king was saying, "but we enjoin you to

consider well the candidates who shall come under your examination in the

coming days. The name of the individual eventually chosen matters little to

us, personally, but the peace of Meara matters a great deal. That is why we

have spent this past season progressing through our Mearan lands. We recognize

that a bishop's principal function is to provide spiritual guidance - yet we

would be naive in the extreme if we did not also acknowledge the temporal

power wielded by the incumbent of any such office. All of you are well aware

of the weight your opinions carry in our own secular deliberations."

He went on, but Morgan released the curtain with a bored sigh and folded

his arms along the railing, allowing his attention to drift as he laid his

head on his crossed forearms and closed his eyes.

They had gone over all of this before. Morgan had not been along on the

royal progress, having business of his own in Corwyn, but he joined the king

as soon as word arrived of old Carsten's death. His first night back in the

royal entourage. Archbishop Cardiel had briefed him on the political

ramifications and acceptable successors, while Kelson listened and Duncan

occasionally added .his own observations. Duncan was down there now at

Cardiel's side, poised and attentive in his clerical black - at thirty-one,

young even to be serving as a bishop's secretary, much less an incipient

bishop himself, though he had shown sufficient promise even a full five years

ago to be appointed the then - Prince Kelson's chaplain and given the rank of

Monsignor.

Not that Duncan would be Carsten's successor - though many might have

feared that, had they known of his impending change of status. Fortunately,

most did not. The bishops knew, of course. Cardiel had determined to make

Duncan his assistant even before Carsten's death, and had spearheaded his

election as one of the first items of business when the convocation convened a

few days earlier.

But partially because Duncan's secular status already presented

complications in the deliberations ahead, and partially because he wished to

delay his formal consecration until the following Easter, no public

announcement had yet been made. Duncan's very presence at the convocation,

ostensibly as secretary for the proceedings, had been enough to raise eyebrows

among the Mearan clergy and lay observers in attendance.

Nor did Mearan uneasiness spring from the fact that Duncan, like Morgan,

was Deryni - though the Deryni question had certainly presented problems of

its own in the beginning, and doubtless would continue to be a factor of

varying importance. For nearly two centuries, no known Deryni had been

permitted ordination to the priesthood. Discovery that Duncan was Deryni and

had been so ordained had sparked a panicked flurry of ecclesiastical

speculation as to how many other Deryni might have served in the clergy

secretly, to the possible detriment of uncountable human souls to whom they

might have ministered - and how many might be serving now? No one knew how

virulent the infection might be, if Deryni consorted unbeknownst with decent

Christian folk. The very thought had sent men like Edmund Loris into near-

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THEBISHOP'SHEIRPROLOGUEAndheputonthegarmentsofvengeanceforclothing,andwascladwithzealforacloak.-Isaiah59:17EdmundLoris,oncetheArchbishopofValoretandPrimateofAllGwynedd,staredouttoseathroughthesalt-smearedwindowpanesofhistowerprisonandallowedhimselfathinsmile.Theraredisplayofself-indulgencedidnothing...

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Kurtz, Katherine - King Kelson 01 - The Bishop's Heir

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