King Javan’s Year (76 page)

After a few minutes, the sound of desultory fighting in the corridors outside intruded on the taut silence of the Council chamber. Hubert rose, his quick breathing telling of his tension as he came to stand with his hands on the back of Rhys Michael's chair. The
Custodes
knight went to the doors at the end of the room and listened with his ear against the wood, the sword that had killed Tomais again in his hand. Tammaron was sitting at the prince's left again, though his dagger now lay on the table in front of him.

Rhys Michael considered trying to snatch it, but he didn't know what good it would do except maybe get him killed—or another of his men killed, for now he did not think they meant to kill him. Besides, the grip of Hubert's potion was now so strong that he did not think he could summon the will even to stand without assistance. He found himself leaning his head against the back of his chair and closing his eyes, even though the posture put him closer to Hubert's profane hands.

He thought it must have been close to an hour before a knock at the door jarred him from the troubled half sleep into which he kept drifting. Hubert had returned to his chair at Rhys Michael's right and now got to his feet. The sound also roused the
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knight, who had been sitting on a stool pulled close to the doors, sword in hand, his ear set against the wood to listen. Now, as Rhys Michael tried to make his eyes focus, the man smiled grimly and shot back the bolt on the door, though he stepped aside with sword still at the ready as he let the door swing inward.

But the big man who appeared in the opening with a bloody sword in his fist was all too familiar from the day before—Richard's castellan, Sir Gideon, a wide grin splitting his bearded face as he pushed past the
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knight to salute first Richard and then Hubert with a flourish.

“All secure except for his Highness' apartments, your Grace, my lord,” he reported. “We believe that the Healer and Sir Sorle are there with the princess.”

“Mika?” the prince whispered, eyes wide. As he labored to get his feet under him and stand, Tammaron was already at his side with a hand on his arm, both supporting and restraining.

“Now, your Highness,” Hubert purred. “Harming the mother of a future King of Gwynedd is the last thing any of us would wish. However, I fear for the contamination she may suffer by the continued presence of a Deryni in your household. Perhaps you would care to accompany us as we go to relieve her of this danger.”

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-TWO

And the revolters are profound to make slaughter, though I have been a rebuker of them all
.

—Hosea 5:2

Javan broke into a lurching run, dragging the woman and child with him. Albertus and the
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knights were already wheeling to circle around to the right and down, where the slope was less steep, apparently intending to cut off the Michaelines at the ford just below the pool.

But the newcomers could not be Michaelines, even though the blond man riding at their head clearly was intended to be taken for either Joram or Ansel MacRorie.

“Saint Michael and MacRorie!” the men shouted, brandishing swords and spears and spurring their mounts forward, the white crosses of the outlawed order gleaming on their breasts.

As the Michaelines who could not be Michaelines began splashing into the river, the horses plunging chest-deep across the ford, Javan pushed Birgit and the little Carrollan into the arms of the nearest of Revan's disciples and dashed for his own horse. Right now, he wasn't sure who the men were, but he knew they were no friends. And the unarmed folk gathered here to hear Revan preach, many of them women and children, were about to be crushed between the two converging forces—and Javan, too, if he did not get back to the protection of his own lines.

“Who
are
those men?” he demanded of Queron, as he struggled to mount from the downslope and the Healer gave him a leg up. “Warn Joram! Try to get these people out of here. We've all been set up!”

He was spurring his horse up the hill then, heading toward his banner, for Guiscard and Charlan and about a dozen of the Haldane lancers were plunging straight down the slope to rescue him. The
Custodes
were nearly to the ford. Robear and the rest of the lancers had fallen in behind them, apparently positioning to back them or contain them, depending on what happened when they met the men in blue.

Except that the
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knights obviously had never intended to confront the men in blue. Just before they reached the ford, the
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knights wheeled and charged back into their erstwhile allies, their heavier horses carrying them well into the more lightly mounted lancers. Robear managed to survive the first engagement, but Javan saw Bertrand go down in a roiling confusion of sudden and treacherous combat.

“It's a trap!” Javan screamed as he reached the relative safety of Guiscard and his banner.

Above them, looking down on him, he could see Paulin calmly sitting his horse beside Rhun, flanked by Rhun's four knights. The scope of the betrayal suddenly became very clear. Eliminate both a troublesome king and the embarrassment and possible deception of Revan and his Baptizer cult, and blame it all on the Deryni and the Michaelines.

Fighting to control a mount now fractious with eagerness for battle, Javan weighed the odds and possible intentions of the dual opposition. Surprise now past, the lancers seemed to be more than holding their own with the
Custodes
, but the false Michaelines were even now falling on Revan's helpless followers down by the pool.

“Come away, Sire!” one of his lancer captains shouted. “We mustn't divide our strength.”

He was right. Javan dared not go back down. With a grimace of regret, he drew his sword and wrenched the cream stallion around to pull it back on its haunches, circling the sword above his head and then thrusting it in the direction of the treacherous
Custodes
.

“No quarter to traitors!” he cried. “To Robear—and watch your backs!”

But as the cream stallion sprang forward, part of Javan mourned for the helpless folk he was leaving to their fate. Down at the pool where Revan had preached a reconciliation of humans with Deryni, the first of the false Michaelines were already churning through the shallows, leaning down with swords and spears poised.

A venerable old man with a white beard was one of the first to fall, skewered by a Michaeline spear and then trampled under the hooves of nearly a dozen horses as the marauders began butchering their quarry. Javan had thought Revan and the others on their way to safety, but as he looked back over his shoulder he suddenly saw the preacher just at the edge of the pool with several of his disciples, flailing about him with his olivewood staff and even knocking an attacker from the saddle. Sylvan was in the water beyond him, trying to get a child to safety.

Horrified, Javan pulled up slightly and let most of his lancers pound past him. Guiscard and Charlan were also hanging back, but urging him to come on. Revan's followers were scattering, their screams shrill and terrified as the blue-clad horsemen cut them down. Javan could not see Queron or Ursin's family, but he suddenly spotted Tavis running toward the water, where Sylvan was still trying to get children and old folk on their way to safety. Something about Tavis seemed odd.

Then Javan realized that the Healer was still blocked and was trying to reach the only other man who could restore his powers. He pulled to a full halt and stood in his stirrups, for if Tavis decided to use those powers to strike back—

Sylvan was knee-deep in the water, a child in his arms, trying to outrun a horseman bearing down on him with a short spear aimed at his back. Tavis reached Sylvan and tried to push him aside just before the horseman forced his mount between them and buried his spear in Sylvan's chest, also slicing a deep gash in the child's arm. His killer paid, for a bolt of verdant lightning from Tavis' hand lifted him clear out of the saddle, dead before he hit the water; but Sylvan's blood was already blossoming around both bodies like some obscene flower as they sank.

From the shore, swinging at another blue-clad rider with his staff, Revan screamed, “No!” for he had seen the stab of lightning, as had dozens of others. But rather than loosing more of his magic, Tavis now began searching quite single-mindedly for the child who had been in Sylvan's arms, probing the bloody water until he brought the weeping, hiccoughing youngster to the surface by a handful of curly dark hair.

Blood was streaming from a gaping wound in the little girl's upper arm, and Tavis pressed sleep upon her with his stump even as he gathered her to his breast, holding her close with his handless arm while his Healer's hand clamped over her wound, already starting to work on the Healing as he began staggering from the water.

The false Michaelines were backing off all around him, milling uncertainly, for no one had warned them that Revan's hitherto aggravating but presumably harmless scam down by the river really
was
a Deryni plot.

But cringing terror was already shifting to outrage in Revan's followers, as they realized that the preacher had lied to them. Not
all
Deryni who came within his sphere of influence gave up their powers. How much else had been a lie? The great Tavis, whose conversion had provided such inspiration for so many, was still Deryni. Deception! Betrayal! The Deryni
were
the scourge of humankind, and this Deryni must pay—and Revan, for having betrayed them!

Almost all the bodies littering the corridors of the castle wore Haldane livery. Rhys Michael was cowed and frightened as he was hustled up the main stair and along the corridor toward his suite. Resistance was not possible. Tammaron and Richard flanked him, each with a hand locked around one bicep. The
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knight who had murdered Tomais was following them, which made the prince more than nervous, and Hubert and Gideon preceded them, the traitorous archbishop vast in his robes of episcopal purple.

The prince was still reeling over what had happened just as they left the Council chamber. The gentle and soft-spoken Jerowen Reynolds was dead. Udaut and half a dozen guards had been taking the prisoners away to alleged incarceration when the three made a bold bid for freedom.

Jerowen had fallen almost immediately in the scuffle, brutally slain by one of the guards—why had he tried it? He was not a warrior. Baron Hildred had taken a dreadful wound. Almost miraculously—or perhaps it was blind luck—Etienne de Courcy somehow had managed to dash into a stairwell and escape, Udaut and his men in hot pursuit. The speed of it all had stunned the prince and left him sick with apprehension despite the drugs blurring his reaction, for he very much doubted that the bookish Etienne could manage to remain free for long—or that his pursuers would spare him, once they found him.

They rounded the final turn leading to his suite, Rhys Michael stumbling a little as they hurried him along. Ahead, past Hubert's bulk, he could make out
Custodes
soldiers where Haldane guardsmen should have been—four of them aimed with deadly little recurve bows, barbed war arrows already nocked to their weapons, lounging casually along the wall as they awaited instructions. An officer and six more men in Richard Murdoch's livery were drawn up just outside the door.

All of them came to attention as Gideon trotted ahead to speak to the officer, drawing him slightly aside. As they began to confer in low tones, Richard joining them, the
Custodes
knight behind Rhys Michael glided in to take Richard's place on the prince's right, laying a heavy hand on the royal shoulder.

Revulsion made Rhys Michael stiffen despite the drugs that were supposed to keep him tractable, but he knew he did not have the strength or the will to put up any serious resistance. He could not stop these men; he could barely stay on his feet. He briefly considered trying to cry out, to warn Mika and the men inside, but taking such initiative required far more effort than he thought he could summon. His sigh of numb resignation caused his
Custodes
minder to slip deftly behind him and lock his shoulders and throat in the circle of his left arm, a gloved right hand coming in to clamp lightly but firmly over the prince's mouth.

“Not one move or sound, Haldane, or you're out,” the man said quietly.

Though conversational enough in tone, the words sent a chill through Rhys Michael's body, for he had heard that voice and those very words before. Utter despair seized him; now he knew the truth of the allegations he had scoffed at when Javan made them—that his abductors had been
Custodes
—for surely the
Custodes
knight now holding him had been his principal keeper during his captivity. It also meant that his abduction had indeed been part of a larger plan of treason whose full scope only now was unfolding.

Ahead, Hubert and Tammaron were moving in to the left of the door, Gideon to the right, as the archers ranged themselves directly in front of it, two standing and two crouching before them. Richard's men filled in crescents to either side with swords drawn—though there was no way that Oriel or Sorle was going to get past the archers. Rhys Michael did not want to watch, but he knew that he must, and that his captors wanted him to watch, and that whatever they did to try to intimidate him, he must remember this when he eventually found a way to pay them for their treachery.

“Your Highness?” Tammaron called, knocking at the door. “Your Highness, it's Tammaron. Is Master Oriel with you? There's been an accident.”

It was the one appeal that a Healer could not refuse, and doubly treacherous because Tammaron had never before been linked with the active conspirators.

“Master Oriel, we need your services,” Tammaron called again, after repeating his knock on the door. “The prince has taken a bad fall. They think there are bones broken.”