King Javan’s Year (54 page)

That evening, after confirming that Lord Ainslie had no objection to the addition of two more deputies, Javan had Lord Jerowen draw up the necessary warrants—first the official ones naming Sir Jason and the Prince Rhys Michael Alister Haldane as deputy commissioners for Grecotha; then a third, private one, he hoped never to be used, charging Sir Jason with the prince's safety and giving him absolute authority for anything short of capital force to keep said prince in line. Javan hoped and prayed that the latter document would never be needed, but he knew he must take precautions to protect his only heir. He also would miss Jason's company and counsel in the next few months—but at least he knew his brother could not be in better hands.

Almost before Javan realized, the next week was past and Rhys Michael was away. To ensure that the prince did not take advantage of his greater freedom to send or receive letters from Culdi and Michaela, Javan decided at the last minute to send along Sir Tomais as his brother's aide, since the young knight had served previously as the prince's squire and knew all his patterns for mischief.

“I'll keep an eye on him, Sire. Don't you worry,” Tomais assured him.

Actually, Javan became far more worried as he watched them ride out—but not about Rhys Michael. As they headed out that bright September morning, led by Tomais bearing the princely banner, Rhys Michael was in prime Haldane form, straight and proud in the saddle, gaily clad in the royal blue of the heir, flanked by Jason on one side and Lord Ainslie on the other. A party of scribes and clerks made up nearly a dozen more, with a score of household cavalry to escort them.

And behind them rode Paulin of Ramos with a half dozen of his
Custodes
knights, ostensibly summoned to attend on a dying brother at
Arx Fidei
. For the extra safety afforded by numbers, the two parties would ride together as far as the abbey, after which the princely party would continue north toward Grecotha. Javan was glad to see Paulin go—and even more glad when he received the first message from Jason after passing
Arx Fidei
, confirming that Paulin's party had turned off at the abbey without incident, and the rest of the royal commission were proceeding on their way.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY

But a sore trial shall come upon the mighty
.

—Wisdom of Solomon 6:8

Within a week, word had come of the safe arrival of Lord Ainslie's party in Grecotha, with assurances from Sir Jason that Rhys Michael's behavior was a credit to his House. At home, Javan allowed himself to relax a little, as the dog days of summer encouraged lazy afternoons and a general slowing down of the work of the Council.

Meanwhile, once he had heard that Rhys Michael's situation seemed to be well in hand, Javan decided that the time had come to resolve the
merasha
question. Guiscard had been ready for some time, only awaiting the king's instructions. On the evening they selected, Javan quit supper early with the pretense of the headache Joram had recommended, sending for one of the court physicians to bring him a strong sedative.

The man left a few minutes later, convinced that the king had drunk it down and was sleeping peacefully. In fact, the cup still containing the sedative was pushed to the back of a little table beside the royal bed. Javan was sitting in the middle of the bed, boots and belt removed and his feet tucked under him, watching Guiscard empty the contents of a twist of parchment into a second cup he had filled from a pitcher set close beside it.

As he stirred it with a finger, Charlan came in from the other room with a silver goblet and filled it as well. Guiscard's father remained in the outer room, ostensibly working on documents that the king required for the morrow, but actually to ensure with a Deryni's skills that no one intruded on the king's sleep.

“That must not be the
merasha
,” Javan said, scrunching closer as Guiscard finished stirring the second cup and sucked the drips off his finger, making a sour face.

“Nope, the sedative. Ugh, that's bitter! But a proper Healer concocted this, because I don't know exactly what our eager court apothecary put into that one.” He indicated the rejected cup. “And aside from the fact that
merasha
is a liquid, not a powder, I'd never, ever stir it with my finger. It works fastest if it's introduced directly into the blood—from a Deryni pricker, a sword-edge or arrowhead, whatever—but even getting it on the skin can be dangerous.” He reached into the pouch at his belt and pulled out a small brown glass vial stoppered with cork. “This is the
merasha
.”

Javan stared at the little vial in Guiscard's hand, wondering that something so small could bring all a Deryni's dread powers to naught.

“Do I—drink it?” he whispered.

“In wine,” Guiscard replied, handing the vial to Charlan. “But first you're to experience it the way the
Custodes
usually administer it.”

At his nod, Charlan carefully removed the cork to reveal two slender slivers of silvery metal stuck into the underside, close beside one another. One pale droplet shivered between the needles where the points nearly met.

“Is that supposed to be a Deryni pricker?” Javan breathed.

“Dom Rickart says it will do the same job,” Guiscard replied.

Unsmiling, he sat down on the king's right and reached across to take his left hand, turning the palm upward as Charlan got a better grip on the needle-tipped cork.

“You've seen this done before, Sire,” Guiscard murmured as Charlan dipped the needles into the brown vial again. “The discomfort will be minimal, at least from the needles. I've asked Charlan to do this, so I don't risk dosing myself as well.”

“It's that potent?” Javan whispered.

“It is for Deryni—and maybe for Haldanes.”

With that, before Javan even realized what was happening, Charlan also grasped his hand and jabbed the needles hard into the palm. Javan gasped at the sharp bite of pain, remembering other needles stabbing into flesh beside a pool where a holy man offered cleansing to those touched by the Deryni taint.

He tried to keep his breathing steady and calm as Charlan pulled the needles out and Guiscard closed his hand to contain the blood and the drug and the pain, but after only a few breaths he began to feel vague tendrils of chill radiating up his arm.

“Guiscard?” he whispered as a wave of dizziness made him reel, suddenly disoriented. At the same time, the chill in his arm spread rapidly to the rest of his body, beginning to fuddle all his perceptions.

“
Damn
,” Guiscard muttered under his breath, enfolding him with one arm and setting his other hand across Javan's forehead. “I'd hoped this wouldn't happen. Give me whatever control you can and let me try to show you how to channel this.”

His mind surged across the bond of flesh even as he spoke, and Javan could not have stopped it even if he wanted. He could feel his shields disintegrating, falling away in tatters, new waves of dizziness and even nausea engulfing him so that he could hardly bear Guiscard's touch. He tried to reach out for his powers, but only chaos met him. A roaring filled his ears, blocking out all other sound, and the room seemed to begin undulating around him. He closed his eyes to block it out. He dared not imagine how anyone could actually function while enduring this.

You can level out some of it
, came the thought, unbidden, in his mind.
Turn the energies this way. You can survive this!

Somehow he realized what he was being told and thought he almost understood how to do what was being asked. But another part of him was gibbering with terror and knew that if his enemies did this to him, he was doomed.

“All right, I think that's the best we can do,” he heard a voice saying, though he had to concentrate on every word to make sense of it. “We might as well get on with the worst of it. Charlan—”

Through the roaring in his ears, he could hear the dim
clink
of glass against metal. Then his head was being tilted back and metal pressed against his lips.

“Drink it down, Sire,” he heard Guiscard's voice murmur. “That's it. Just one more swallow. Try to remember the taste at the back of your tongue. That's a distinctive characteristic of
merasha
when it's taken by mouth.”

If he had thought the first dose was bad, the second was indescribable. He had taken only about three swallows, but the drugged wine lay in his stomach like molten lead. He wanted to retch it up, but even that seemed to require too much effort. Pressure had focused behind his closed eyes, churning, throbbing, passing quickly through mere discomfort into true pain that curdled and boiled just beneath the top of his skull.

The agony of it made him want to scream, but a hand across his mouth prevented it. His body began to arch against the hands restraining it, his limbs going into spasms. He kept thinking it could not possibly get worse—but it did. And worse beyond that.

Some distant part of his body that really belonged to someone else finally began swallowing, gulping great swallows of something that slid down his tortured throat like molten snow. He choked and coughed, but someone commanded him to keep swallowing, and he could not disobey.

But then, far too slowly, the anguish was receding under ever-darkening waves that brought a gradual sinking, though oblivion was laced with flashes of nightmare shadow that persisted for many lifetimes. Finally, mercifully, he slipped into utter emptiness.

Consciousness returned some time later to the accompaniment of a throbbing in his head and a sick, queasy stirring in his stomach. Candlelight beating at his closed eyelids intensified the pain, and he moaned as he raised one arm to lay across his eyes.

The sound summoned someone to sit down beside him on his right, slightly depressing whatever he was lying on, tilting him slightly downward on that side. Even that slight movement intensified the pain throbbing behind his eyes and set new nausea churning in his empty stomach. As he curled onto his side, reflexively clutching at his gut with the arm that was not shielding his eyes, he could feel a strong arm shifting under his head, lifting it slightly. The movement severed the last shred of control that was keeping him from throwing up, and he found himself retching into a basin that somehow was exactly where it needed to be.

A soft cloth was wiping across his mouth when he was done, the basin somehow removed. And as he collapsed weakly onto his back again, he forced his eyes to open and focus on his benefactor—and recoiled in an instant of sheer, mindless panic as his eyes beheld the black habit and haloed lion-head badge of a
Custodes
monk.

“Easy!” a somehow familiar voice said, though Javan could not quite seem to put a name to the tanned face with the short-cropped
Custodes
tonsure. “It's Jesse. You're going to be fine. Unfortunately, you seem to have acquired a Deryni aversion to
merasha
as well as an affinity for handling Deryni powers.”

Javan's relief that it was Jesse washed through him like a wave of comfort, leaving him weak and helpless. He could not remember ever feeling so miserable before, even that time Tavis had made him ill to lure Rhys to them. A part of him decided that he deserved to suffer thus, that he was being punished for his part in Rhys' death.

“Here, now,” Jesse murmured, brushing a tanned hand across his burning forehead and obviously able to Read exactly what was going through Javan's mind. “Don't do this to yourself. That wasn't your fault. You did what you thought you had to do. Rhys' death was an unfortunate accident.”

Somehow, though he had told himself otherwise for nearly four years, Javan began to believe the poised young Deryni who kept whispering reassurance and easing thoughts with the words, past shields still hopelessly in tatters. He let the man raise him long enough to give him something cool to drink, swallowing obediently, letting the other's mind enfold his and soothe his pain. Eventually he slipped into blessed sleep.

He woke again at midmorning to a golden flood of sunlight pouring through the open balcony doors of his sleeping chamber, still feeling fragile but with his headache now diminished to a dull ache behind his eyes. Jesse was gone, and Charlan was laying out fresh clothing. The young knight smiled as he saw that his master was awake, nothing in his expression indicating that he was aware of anything untoward having occurred during the night. Javan decided that Guiscard must already have made the necessary adjustments to their human ally's memory, now that the crisis was past.

And it did seem to be past. Javan closed his eyes briefly and tested first at his shields, then at his ability to cast out with his senses, and found all intact, if a little stiff, like sore muscles after too strenuous a physical exertion, if mental abilities could be likened to the body.

He opened his eyes and sat up slowly, stretching carefully and glancing out the window as Guiscard also came into the room.

“How late is it?” Javan asked.

“Nearly noon. You had a rough night of it.”

Javan snorted. “Somehow I knew that.” He blinked again, bracing himself before swinging his legs over the edge of the bed to cool the soles of his feet against the stone floor.

“You know, I think it might have been better to wait until winter to try this,” he said to Guiscard. “I thought I was burning.”

“You could have done it in a snowbank and it wouldn't have helped,” Guiscard said, handing him a goblet.

“What's this?”

“Just water. I'd advise drinking a lot of it in the next day or two, to flush the last of the drug out of your body. I've also drawn you a cool bath in the next room. If you think you're up to it, an appearance downstairs probably wouldn't go amiss. Etienne's managed to come up with a query regarding those documents he was working on last night that makes it pointless to have the Council meet this afternoon, so you don't have to face that prospect. You might try a few rounds at the archery butts, if the thump of the arrows wouldn't bother your headache too much.”