The King’s Justice (34 page)

He whoofed as a horse shouldered him into another, nearly knocking him down, but it was one of his own men. Grabbing onto the stirrup, he let the horse shield him as its rider wheeled, lifting him away from another attacker. And drawing deep breath, he braced himself and set his call.

Dhugal, leave NOW and ride for Kelson!
he sent across the din of battle, driving the order ruthlessly into his son's mind.
Do whatever you have to do, but GO! You can't save me
.

At the same time, he set another magic in force, raising the image of a wall of fire roaring in the midst of the men between himself and Dhugal, ostensibly driving toward the astonished and horrified Loris and his death squad, but also cutting Dhugal off from even trying to rejoin him—or Loris' men from preventing Dhugal's escape.

He could not hold it long, but he hoped it would be long enough. It died as the attackers closest to him recovered their composure and closed on him with renewed vigor, Loris screaming imprecations and almost frothing at the mouth.

“It's only a Deryni trick!” he heard Gorony roar. “Take him! He can't hold it if you press him!”

And press him they did. He could not see whether Dhugal was obeying him, but he renewed his physical fighting with all the strength he could muster, laying about him with his sword, inflicting as much damage as he could. They might, indeed, take him, but he would make them pay dearly for him. Perhaps they would even kill him. Better that, than to be taken by Gorony and Loris, though he could not deliberately seek his death.

Apparently they were not going to oblige him, however. They had him spotted now. He lost his shielding horseman, though he quickly fell in with two McLain men on foot and they tried to fight as a unit. Several times, when one of the attackers pressing closest to him
could
have killed him—and Duncan killed one of
them
without a second thought—they did not close for that fatal blow, though they killed one of his McLains. They had their orders to try to take him alive; he could read it in their eyes.

Finally someone dealt him a ringing blow to the back of his helm, and a shield slammed into his back. They tripped him as he staggered, and more swarmed in to pummel at his helm and set his ears to ringing. The chinstrap of his helmet gave, and a sword hilt smacked him above one ear as the helm came off.

As his vision began to grey at the edges, and he felt them wrenching the sword from nerveless fingers, someone hit him again at the base of the skull, very precisely. Pain exploded behind his eyes and then along every nerve ending of his body, just before the blackness swooped in on him. Then there was nothing.

Dhugal was already making the most of the opportunity Duncan had bought him so dearly, when he felt the last of the link with his father dissolve. He had reeled under the force of the order Duncan sent, both from its sheer strength and the action it required, but there was no question of disobeying. As the Mearans closest to him faltered, momentarily panicked by the fire suddenly roaring in their midst, he jerked his horse's head around to bolt through an opening their indecision had created, half a dozen of his clansmen at his heels. He would not let himself think about what his father's sudden silence meant, though he refused to believe that Duncan was dead.

Nor was there time to explain what he must do, to the few men who managed to stay with him as he fled. Ciard looked at him as if he were crazy when he frantically led them away from the Cassani banner, and the three others surely thought him a coward for running away, leaving their commander to be killed or taken. Until his dying day—which would be soon, if he could not pull this off—he would remember the look of disgust on old Lambert's face when, as he rode, he wrenched off his helm, with its telltale earl's coronet, and cast it away, shouting at them to follow.

They followed, though, flanking him and covering his rear, he and the four of them cutting a grim swath as they raced south and west, away from the heat of battle. They followed, but Dhugal knew he would be a long time regaining their respect—if he
ever
did.

For nearly an hour, they galloped like men possessed, playing a deadly game of evasion, not slowing until the horses were nearly spent and Dhugal
knew
he had eluded the last pursuing Mearan skirmish band. But when, as they pulled up in a defile to let their horses blow, he threw away his targe and even his MacArdry tartan and ordered them to do the same, he almost had a mutiny on his hands.

“Just
do
it!” he snapped, stripping off his earl's belt and the badges of his chiefship as well. “We're not out of this yet. If a Mearan patrol catches us, and thinks we're important, this will all have been for nothing. We've got to pass as common soldiers.”

“You insult the term, laddie,” Ciard muttered, though he dutifully removed his plaid with the rest and tossed it contemptuously across a bush. “Even the commonest solider will not leave his commander to his death, if he be a man of honor!”

The remark wounded Dhugal, already feeling lower than the dust beneath his charger's hooves, but he made himself harden against reacting as he peered back the way they had come and saw their chance to ride on.

“I can't discuss it now, Ciard,” he murmured. “I'll try to explain later. Are you coming or not?”

“We ‘common' soldiers will stay by our liege,” Ciard said, “even if he doesn't deserve it.”

“I said
later!”
Dhugal snapped, eyes flashing warning.

They followed again as he led them cautiously out of the defile and toward the south again, but he could feel their loathing like a physical pressure at his back, beating against the growing numbness of not knowing what had happened to Duncan. When they reached a place of greater safety, if he could get them to listen, he really would try to explain. But meanwhile, he must decide how he was going to stretch his untrained powers far enough to obey his father and warn Kelson—which was out of the question until well after dark, when the sleeping king might be more accessible to his inexpert probe. And he did not know whether he could stay alive that long.

His most immediate duty, then, was to stay free until it was time to try. Until then he could only keep riding, closing the physical distance between himself and the king—and putting more distance between himself and the man who, unknown to the men who followed him, was his father as well as his commander.

His father, meanwhile, was in more desperate straits than even Dhugal dreamed. Duncan was not dead, but he almost wished he were. His first awareness, as he fought his way back to consciousness through the red fog of pain reverberating inside his skull, was of hands plucking at his body, removing his weapons and armor—and someone forcing his jaws apart.

“Make sure he swallows,” he heard a familiar voice say, just behind his head, as bitter liquid sloshed into his mouth.

Gorony! And there was
merasha
in the drink!

Sheer survival instincts jolted Duncan instantly back to full consciousness. Despite the pounding in his skull, he threw his head violently to one side and spat out what was in his mouth, at the same time arching his body in a desperate effort to break free.

Rough hands only slammed his shoulders back against the ground and pinned him. All he could see, as he thrashed and struggled to escape, were hard-eyed men in mail coifs and blue-crossed white surcoats, and hands bringing a cup toward his face again.

“No!”

He sprayed his captors with the next mouthful, but they only forced another past his lips. He tried to close his throat against it, determined not to swallow, but someone jabbed him expertly in the solar plexus. His reflex gasp sucked part of the drink into his windpipe, setting him to choking and hacking, but some of it went down. He gagged and tried to bring it back up again, but a gloved hand clamped across his mouth and nose so that he could not even breathe, another clamping down on carotid pressure points.

He was still fighting them as his vision began to go grey and his limbs started twitching. Worse, he could feel the
merasha
extending its insidious tendrils to undermine his control.

“One more time, I think, Father,” the hated voice said in a mocking tone, as hands once more forced his jaws apart and bitter liquid filled his mouth. “You're
going
to swallow it.”

And with perceptions blurring from the drug, and his nose pinched shut as they continued to pour, he found himself helpless to resist. His body was convinced that he was suffocating. To his horror, his throat contracted several times in painful swallows. The drug in his stomach was an icy serpent, relentlessly extruding coils of disruption into his system.

They let go of him at that, laughing cruelly among themselves as he curled, coughing and choking, on his side, cradling his forehead in his hands. As his perceptions blurred worse with every heartbeat, scenes of another dealing with Gorony and
merasha
rose in his clouding memory.

Gorony in a burning chamber beneath Saint Torin's Abbey. And a stake set ready to burn any Deryni heretic hapless enough to fall into his clutches.

Only it had been Alaric who was Gorony's helpless prisoner that time, and Duncan who had managed to save him from the fire. Even drug-fogged, Duncan knew that there would be no reversal of roles this time, with Alaric to save
him
. Unless Dhugal somehow managed to work a miracle, Alaric would not even know about Duncan's predicament until Duncan was dead.

Hands rolled him onto his back at that, efficiently stripping him to his breeks and twisting his bishop's ring off his finger. He was helpless to stop them; could hardly even turn his head without being overcome with waves of nausea and dizziness. They did not even bother to restrain his arms as a new white-clad figure stepped into his range of vision at his feet and stared down at him. Wispy grey hair showed around his head like a halo, and his blue eyes blazed with triumph above the blue cross on his breast. He smiled as Gorony handed him the bishop's ring, turning it several times in his fingers before slipping it on his hand next to the one he already wore.

“So, my elusive Deryni priest,” Edmund Loris said quietly. “I believe it is time we spoke of many things. You and your Deryni colleagues have caused me a great deal of trouble. I intend to return the compliment.”

“I don't much like what I had to do today,” said one of those Deryni colleagues.

Morgan was standing in the doorway of the tent he and Kelson shared, where not so long before he had finished interrogating the last of the forty Mearan officers. Across the square, the fruits of his labor dangled, still twitching, beside the long motionless bodies of Ithel and Brice.

Kelson, picking joylessly at his sparse camp fare at the table behind Morgan, pushed his plate away with a snort of disgust.

“Do you think
I
did?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know?” Kelson repeated, aghast.

Morgan glanced aside at the king's reaction, then coolly returned his gaze to the gallows tree outside, where a burial detail was waiting to cut down the four executed officers. No one knew better than he that those particular men had deserved to die for their excesses against the Mearan citizenry, but he resented the fact that Kelson had forced
him
to judge them.

Kelson caught an echo of that resentment and stood up abruptly, crossing to pull a curtain angrily over the opening, shutting out the sight.

“Does that really help?” Morgan asked.

Kelson wilted visibly, clinging to the edges of the closed curtains and bowing his head.

“I should have let Ithel and Brice see a priest first, shouldn't I?” he whispered.

“It would have been a noble gesture,” Morgan answered.

Kelson sighed miserably and raised his head, eyes bright with tears he refused to let himself shed.

“Henry Istelyn was not allowed that grace,” he said, not looking at Morgan. “Do you—do you think he will go to hell because he died unshriven?”

“Do
you
think that a just and merciful God would condemn His faithful servant, simply because he was not permitted to observe the outer form required for salvation?” Morgan countered.

At Kelson's quick headshake, he went on.

“By similar reasoning, I think we can safely assume that if Ithel and Brice were truly contrite over the crimes for which they were executed, God will not condemn them wholly out of hand.” He paused to take a cautious breath. “In the future, however, and just in case I'm wrong, I might suggest that mercy is as admirable in a king as it is in Our Lord—and mercy need not clash with justice. It would have cost you nothing to at least give them a few moments to prepare for death—though I know why you refused, in the case of Ithel and Brice.”

“Would you have?” Kelson asked.

“I don't know,” Morgan said honestly. “That was not my decision, so we shall never know.”

“What about the other four?” Kelson asked, clasping his hands behind his back and awkwardly turning halfway between Morgan and the curtained entryway. “I should have allowed
them
the last rites.
You
would have.”

“Yes. And, in fact, I
did
allow it, since that
was
my decision—though I would that no part of the decision had been mine.”

“What?”

Kelson looked up in shock.

“You told me to select the guiltiest four for execution, my prince,” Morgan said quietly. “I did so. But when you gave me their deaths, you also gave me the authority to determine the circumstances of their deaths, within certain limits. I gave them five minutes with Father Laughlin.
Then
I had them hanged.”

“As
I
should have ordered,” Kelson added, biting at his lip. “You don't have to say it.”

“Have I said anything, my prince?”

Kelson swallowed hard and bowed his head again.