By Divine Right
© 2015 by Patrick W. Carr
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Ebook edition created 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-44126-533-3
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by LOOK Design Studio
Cover photography by Aimee Christiansen
Author represented by The Steve Laube Agency
The Exordium of the Liturgy—
The six charisms of Aer are these:
For the body, beauty and craft
For the soul, sum and parts
For the spirit, helps and devotion
The nine talents of man are these:
Language, logic, space, rhythm,
motion, nature, self, others, and all
The four temperaments of creation are these:
Impulse, passion, observation, and thought
Within the charisms of Aer, the talents of man,
and the temperaments imbued in creation
are found understanding and wisdom. Know and learn.
The unaccustomed fatigue that weighted my arms and legs and filled my head with sand should have warned me, but I didn’t yet suspect I’d already been in the city that morning. I stepped out of the small windowless room I shared with Gareth into early dawn in the city of Bunard. The view from my vantage point in the watch barracks of King Laidir’s tor would never compete with those higher up, but even so I looked down on most of the city. Only the towers of the four cathedrals at the north end of the nobles’ quarter rose above me.
A hint of orange, like the first tentative swipe of a painter’s fire, lit the sections of the city divided from each other according to station and income by the broad gray flows of the Rinwash River. Farthest south, I could just make out the poor quarter, a warren of wooden buildings in a constant state of disrepair populated by those whose livelihoods it was my duty to curtail.
A hint of movement, perhaps a cart hauling vegetables across one of the massive arched stone bridges spanning the Rinwash, drew my gaze north to the lower merchants’ quarter. The sprawl of modest homes was filled with simple tradesmen whose lives were defined by the goods they provided to the city of Bunard and the kingdom of Collum it ruled. Somewhere down in their crowded midst lay the home that had birthed me, but not the family. Only stone and wood endured.
Closer to the tor still, came the upper merchants’ quarter. The houses were still quite close together, but they commanded more space, and if lights burned in them at this early hour it would be by the servants’ bidding, not the owners. The master merchants, those who often held partial gifts, had amassed fortunes large enough that their owners almost wielded power on a level with Laidir’s nobles. All they lacked was a title.
I began my descent, unable to avoid catching sight of the nobles’ quarter, closer to the tor than any save the cathedrals of the four orders, their estates here in the city only slightly less massive than their keeps perched high on the hills and mountains of the lands
governed by the king. In Bunard, each estate sat on an acre or more of land, separated from its fellows by suspicion and high granite walls.
Directly below my perch I looked almost straight down to the wide stretch of the Rinwash that separated Laidir’s seat from all others, a thousand-year-old reminder of the continent’s divine order. I descended the tor and set my feet toward the guardroom, where my superior, Jeb, would be waiting to give me my duty assignment for the day.
I nodded to the guard at the door.
“Going back into the city already, Willet?” Actus asked.
I squeezed my eyes shut and groped for a response that would conceal my ignorance. “Drawing double duty always makes me wonder what I did to displease Aer.”
“Agreed.” The answer came in a clear tenor that didn’t match the grizzled face and graying hair that went with it. “I didn’t know you had drawn it as well.”
Oh, Aer, where
had I been?
I nodded without answering and moved past Actus into the domed rock cavern at the base of Laidir’s tor that housed the city watch and the prison cells justice demanded.
I stopped to check my clothes for blood once I’d passed from Actus’s view, pulling my cloak around to examine the edges before I rolled my wrists to check my sleeves. I breathed a silent prayer of relief. They were clean.
“What’s the matter with you, Willet Dura?” a voice called. “Hurry up. You’re late.”
I straightened myself and my clothes and reported. The question, like so many from the captain, didn’t require an answer.
Jeb looked me up and down, his huge hands flexing as they always did whenever their owner was in thought. Like the rest of us in the watch, Jeb bore scars from the last war with Owmead nine years prior. What made him different was that all of his scars seemed to be on his flesh, a fact that made me jealous enough to dislike him on a regular basis.
“You’ll be with me, Dura, since you’ve already seen the body. Congratulations—you don’t have to sneak around on this one.”
I nodded, trying not to look surprised, before I demurred. “Shouldn’t someone else go, Captain? I’ve never investigated a killing before.”
Jeb barked, a sound meant to convey amusement, but only a deaf man would call it laughter. “No one said anything about murder, Dura.”
A shock of fear went through me as I realized my blunder. As quickly as I could, I blinked and shook my head as if trying to clear the cobwebs of too little sleep. “Someone’s dead and you’re going out. I just assumed . . .”
“Willet Dura, you are a reeve,” Jeb said. His face wore the smile of someone enjoying the opportunity to provide correction. “You can’t afford to assume anything, and you wouldn’t be investigating this if it was a murder. He died because he was old. You’re there to talk to the priest. I don’t like priests, especially from the Merum order. All those robes and chants annoy me.” He clenched a scarred fist with knuckles that had been forged from something harder than bone and the sound of popping crackled in the air.
I shook my head, not understanding. “Why does a priest need to be there?”
Jeb’s long face, his lantern thrust forward, registered the faint disgust a teacher might wear with a slow student. “Because he was gifted, Dura.”
As we left the watch, fear banished the remainder of my fatigue. Jeb didn’t know yet that the old man had been killed, but as much as I tried to deny the knowledge myself, I knew otherwise. For nine years—along with countless others both within the king’s watch and out of it—I’d borne my share of wounds from the last war. Some spoke seldom and regarded strangers with suspicion. Others were assaulted by memories so real that they took up weapons to fight phantoms from the past, their war cries high and plaintive and alone. The responses to the horrors of war were as unique as the men who waged it.
But some few were like me—night-walkers, men who left their beds without thought or volition to wander the streets of the city and return before awareness dawned. Most tried to deflect the attention it brought behind jokes or offhand comments regarding sleeplessness, or even admission, but we all shared the fear that came with the knowledge that our minds were in some fundamental way broken by the war.
Even there I felt a twinge of jealousy, wishing my night walks were simple enough to afford me some camaraderie with my fellows. But
the morning after every night walk there would be a report of a killing in Bunard, and sometimes there was blood on my cloak or sleeves.
It had taken me a year to piece together the fabric of reason I hoped was the truth, and during the last eight years I’d secretly investigated every such murder that had happened in the sleeping hours of the night. Most of the time there was enough evidence to exonerate me.
Most of the time.
Doubt can eat a hole right through a man.
We crossed two bridges in succession and came to the higher merchants’ section, riding south along the main street until we could just see the next bridge over the Rinwash. Already, I could hear the sounds of enterprise coming from the smithies, cobblers, and countless other crafts that fed and equipped the city.
The old man’s body lay close to the entrance of a side street, little more than an alley, really, his arms and legs splayed as if he’d been a marionette and someone had cut all his strings at once. I stared, but nothing about the body looked familiar. I had expected it—recollection was always denied to me. Still, whispers of self-suspicion ghosted across my mind. A Merum priest, his red stole of office stark in the subdued light of dawn, consoled a blond-haired man who looked to be in his midtwenties.
“How am I supposed to care for my family?” the man asked. I could tell by the way his voice rose toward the end that it wasn’t the first time he’d asked the question.
“You’re young,” the priest said. “If you cannot provide for them through music, you can still learn a trade. Every man and woman has a talent, some more than one.”
The young man jerked as if he’d been slapped. “Stupid priest,” he snarled. “My father was the king’s musician. Who will pay me as a musician when the gifted are available? And who takes a twenty-four-year-old apprentice?” He shook his head in disgust, his blond hair lashing the air in futile strikes, before he walked away.
Jeb barked a laugh. “Poor kid. He’ll have to live life like the rest of us
gnath
.”
I blinked at Jeb’s use of the crude term for the ungifted, and I saw the Merum priest straighten in surprise. The epithet was usually reserved for use by the nobility. For a moment, the temptation to join in Jeb’s derision threaded its way through my thoughts before I pushed it down. The blond-haired man had never expected anything
from life but his father’s blessing and gift. He wasn’t prepared for life without it.
I turned and gave the priest the bow and greeting that had been instilled in me during the years I’d been a postulant. “May Aer be with you.”
His eyes widened. “Were you a priest?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Almost, but I had to go to war.” I saw his brows knit with curiosity, but I had no desire to dredge the past, and I waved his unspoken questions away. “It’s a long story, without a good ending.”
The priest nodded, his brown hair lifting a bit in the early morning breeze so that it framed his earnest face like a halo. “The orders will have to alert their sister houses in the other kingdoms to be on the lookout for a free gift of beauty.” He started as if he hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should be consoling Ian’s family instead of complaining, but gifts going free instead of being passed down are rare, and this is the second one this month.” He shrugged. “It’s a lot of writing.”
The word
rare
caught my attention. Before the kings and queens of the north cooperated with the church on curtailing gift stealing hundreds of years ago, the gifted had lived in danger. Now, stealing a family’s gift carried an absolute death penalty. It didn’t matter your station or your connections, if you were caught stealing a gift, you died—and quickly. “How often does a gift go free?”
The priest shook his head at me. “Once every couple of years someone will hang on too long and their heart will give out or they’ll have a stroke before they can manage to put their hands on an heir.” He held one hand palm up. “Sometimes there’s an accident, but even then the holder has to die so quickly that they can’t perform the rite of blessing and pass on their gift.” He looked at the old man lying in a heap before turning his back to leave. “I have letters to write.”
A crowd had begun to gather, and Jeb worked his way around, getting close so that each onlooker got a visceral sense of his size. The dust around the old man was undisturbed. He hadn’t been dragged there. Had I been wrong? I didn’t know whether to feel disappointed or relieved. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be like other men, with nothing more than the occasional meaningless night walk to remind them they’d been in the last war. What would it be like not to live in fear of yourself?
I had almost put my suspicions to rest when I noticed the boots on the man’s feet. The gifted weren’t always rich. It depended on how pure the gift and how well the one holding it could utilize it to turn a profit, abilities more aligned with a man or woman’s talent and temperament rather than their gift. The old man’s boots were solid and well made, but not luxurious. Boots like them could be found on any moderately successful merchant, but the heel of this one had a nail that had worked loose.
I stepped up onto the wooden porch and knelt by the body. Putting my hand against the grain of the pine, I pushed my thumbnail against the surface. It left a well-defined scratch. Working quickly to avoid Jeb’s notice, I pulled the old man’s boot from his foot and pressed it against the wood of the porch. It left a rectangular indentation in the pine, as if a craftsman had used a punch on the wood.
Replacing the boot, I got down on my hands and knees and looked across the porch, my nose pressed into the grit and grain. The wood wasn’t new, and there were scratches and gouges aplenty, but none of them matched the mark left by the boot nail.
Jeb barked at me from above. “What are you doing, Dura? Where’s the priest?”
I scrambled up and took a step back. Sometimes when Jeb was annoyed he’d hit the source of that irritation. “He left, sir,” I said. I didn’t bother to answer the first question.
“Sir,” I said when Jeb turned away, “there’s something here you need to see.”
He looked at me as if he couldn’t decide to ignore me or not. “What?”
I pointed to the old man’s boot and sped through my suspicions as quickly as I could. Jeb closed in on me until my eyes were as close to his chin as his. “Listen to me, Dura. You do what I tell you. I brought you here because you know how to speak the language of the church. You’ve been pleading to work the deaths in the city for years, but it’s not going to happen.”
I nodded. “Yes, sir.” I kept my voice low. People who corrected Jeb in public recuperated in private. “But if you’ll just look at the boots.”
“You want me to treat this as a murder because some old fool didn’t take care of his boots before he died? Do you know what kind of hornet’s nest a gifted’s murder would stir up?” He leaned back to take a better look at me. “The church and the king would
be all over us.” He pointed at the old man’s form. “This man’s killer doesn’t exist because he dropped dead from a stroke,” Jeb hissed. “Get out of here.”