Childe Morgan Read Free

The king, however…
    Jaws clenching in disapproval, Oliver glanced up at the dark silhouette of Rhemuth Castle looming against the sky beyond the cathedral. Despite civil and canon law that seriously curtailed the rights of Deryni in Gwynedd, Donal Haldane was known to turn a blind eye to the letter of the law when it suited him, and had kept more than one Deryni in his employ and even in his friendship during his long reign. Some even whispered that the dead boy had been Donal’s bastard son, gotten on the Deryni wife of one of his former ministers of state who, rather conveniently, had died very soon after the boy’s birth. Since both mother and son were now dead as well, it served no useful purpose to dwell on that , but it could explain why the king had dealt so severely with those responsible for the boy’s death.
    Not that many would dispute the sentence meted out to Sepp’s two lay accomplices, who probably had been the instigators. The king had ordered them gelded and then hanged, for they had buggered the boy quite viciously before throwing him into the well to drown. And Sepp, because it had been his suggestion thus to dispose of the evidence of the others’ crime, had been stripped and flogged for his betrayal of the boy’s trust, then flung down the selfsame well as the victim, to share the fate he himself had decreed.
    There it might have ended, had Sepp been a layman like the others. But as a priest, Father Septimus de Nore had been entitled to benefit of clergy—which meant that his part in the matter ought to have been heard in the archbishop’s court, not the king’s—and that , Oliver could not forgive. Nor could he forgive the woman who had uncovered his brother’s guilt: a Deryni, and therefore to be despised. Though both she and the king had been swiftly and justly declared excommunicate for their part in the trial and execution of a priest by secular authority, both had been reinstated in the good graces of the Church with unseemly haste.
    Oliver had witnessed the first such reconciliation—achieved by the threat of Interdict for the entire kingdom, if the king did not capitulate. Oliver had been present on that Maundy night when the king made his formal act of submission before the archbishop: the ritual declaration of contrition and acceptance of the penitential scourging that preceded the lifting of his excommunication. Some variation on this eventual outcome had always been a foregone conclusion, since a king dared not long remain adamant in his defiance of ecclesiastical prerogatives.
    Less appropriately, the now-deceased archbishop had also been persuaded to lift the excommunication of the Deryni woman, but a few weeks later—and she had since been wed to one of the king’s loyal supporters, and borne him a son.
    â€œStaring at his grave won’t bring him back, you know,” said a low voice behind Oliver. “You do this every year, my lord.”
    Grimacing against the rain, Bishop Oliver turned to cast a sour glance at Father Rodder Gillespie, his secretary and general factotum. Cassock-clad and huddled, like the bishop, in a fur-lined cloak with oiled hood and shoulder capelet, the younger man looked as miserable as Oliver felt, bedraggled and chilled to the bone.
    â€œI do it, dear Rodder, because my brother lies still in his grave and unavenged,” the bishop said bitterly, “and because those responsible for his death still prosper. The king has many fine, strapping sons, and the woman who denounced my brother will have her son presented at court later today. I was praying for justice.”
    â€œAnd I have been praying for your good health, as you stand in the rain like a child of no good sense!” Rodder retorted, laying a proprietary arm around his superior’s shoulders and drawing him toward the open doorway of the passage that led away from the abbey churchyard. “Please, my lord. You must come