CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

But these two things shall come to thee in a moment in one day, the loss of children and widowhood: they shall come upon thee in their perfection for the multitude of thy sorceries, and for the great abundance of thine enchantments.

—Isaiah 47:9

The week had been interminable for Evaine, all but a few short hours at the beginning bleak and numb with loss. She had known Rhys was in danger when she left her beloved Sheele on Christmas Eve. She had feared for him as Joram told her of the destruction of Saint Neot’s and helped them to pack. Rhys had gone to Javan’s aid, but Evaine knew he had not trusted Tavis. The situation appeared to be fast approaching a crisis point. God alone knew whether they would all survive.

But she could not let herself be paralyzed by fear or indecision. Nor could she rely on husband, father, or brother to see her through this crisis. She counted it a miracle that Joram had even been able to come and warn her in person, especially after what he and their father had witnessed at Saint Neot’s. They were doing their best to protect those entrusted to their care; she must see to the safety of those within her charge.

The servants at Sheele would not long be safe in Deryni employ, she decided. Accordingly, she paid and dismissed most of them, then left a favored few the gift of the manor, for she was fairly certain she would never be back. Four loyal young men-at-arms she kept in service—bachelors, all, for she would not risk others’ families in what might lie ahead. The children were bundled in their warmest clothes, precious keepsakes hidden away beneath Sheele’s Portal with a few of the scrolls she had been meaning to return to the keeill, and then the Portal was locked and sealed to all but those of blood relation. The few sumpter horses they allowed themselves must carry food for their journey, for they dared not stop at inns.

In addition, unbeknownst to Joram, she sent Queron into the hills to find and warn Revan of what was happening, for she could not bear to let that loyal friend of so many years merely pine away in solitude, waiting faithfully for orders which never came. She assured Queron that she would be safe; her child was not due for another month. Queron was uneasy about leaving her, but finally he obeyed. He did not know that she had not told Joram he was going.

Her apprehension about Rhys did not diminish during the night, but by midday she seemed to sense an easing. In the sunshine after lunch, she had been laughing with her daughter as they rode along, she on a favorite bay palfrey and Rhysel cantering happily on her matching pony beside one of the younger guards. The baby Tieg was perched in front of Ansel, who had shed his clerical attire in favor of mail, leather, and a sword; the child chortled with glee as he tried to count the sumpter horses following their train, though he could not get past three without giggling. Death was the last thing Evaine was prepared for on this sunny Christmas afternoon.

His end had not been sudden, she realized; only her realization that he was dying. The knowledge struck her like a physical blow, driving her breath from her lungs and almost making her lose her seat in that first instant of stark awareness. She pulled up sharply on the palfrey’s reins and clung to the velvet covered pommel, her face ashen. Ansel immediately thrust the protesting Tieg into the arms of one of the guards and raced to her side.

“What’s wrong? Is it the baby?”

“No—Rhys!” she managed to gasp.

Frantic, terrified that she had lost him already, she thrust herself down into trance and tried to search her senses for his plight—winced under the sharp, skull-crushing blow which had rendered him instantly unconscious, followed the gradual ebbing of all other sensation around him, a slipping into darkness where even she could not follow.

An odd, wrenching sensation twisted her orientation even as she tried to touch him. Then he was even farther away—Dhassa?—and slipping farther than mere physical distance, and she could only catch a faint echo of her father’s anguish, her brother’s, even of Jebediah’s—but no longer any more of his.

She blinked and looked up, amazed that the sun still shone coin-bright in the winter sky, and saw by Ansel’s stricken expression that he, too, had felt something of her shock. Then she buried her face in her hands and wept.

She remembered little, felt little, in the next few days. Later, she would recall riding endlessly, eating tasteless food when it was placed in her hands, and falling into deep, troubled sleep when they would bed down for the night.

Times there were, especially in the beginning, when all of them would race wildly down a snow-choked road, throwing up great gouts of ice and mud; and other times when they would sit their horses in some forest stillness, seemingly for hours, and Ansel would become very nervous if anyone coughed or a horse whinnied.

After a few days, the wild rides and forest waitings ceased, and they saw few travellers. Snow fell nearly every night, which slowed them, but kept others off the roads, for the most part. In those early days of her bereavement, she hardly spoke or made a move which Ansel did not direct. Ansel, fearing for her safety and the unborn child’s, if she should fall in her condition, managed to obtain a covered, two-horse litter for her to ride in. It was not until dusk on Monday, the last day of the year, that she at last began to be aware of her surroundings again.

She apologized for her withdrawal over supper that night, playing a little with the children and, after they dozed, querying Ansel and the men-at-arms for news while they all huddled around a well-shielded campfire. But when she learned that they were but a few hours from Trurill and her son, she bade them press on. Taking the children into her litter, she lulled them to sleep with a song and the gentle, swaying motion of the conveyance as they journeyed on, later unbraiding her golden hair and brushing it loose down her back as her Aidan liked to see it. The guards had taken up brands to light their way, and their torchlight cast a glaring, ruddy glow on the new-fallen snow.

They were within an hour of dawn, with russet streaks beginning to finger upward from the eastern horizon behind them, when they made the turnoff toward Trurill. But now, as they approached the castle itself, it was as if another dawn stained the sky before them. As they topped the rise before descending into the rich, narrow valley which was the castle’s demesne, Evaine held aside the curtains of the litter and peered aghast at the flames licking upward on the early morning breeze. Trurill Castle was burning!

With a gasp, she pulled herself to a sitting position and swung her feet to the ground. Ansel, sitting his horse uncomfortably at the side of the litter, squinted at the burning structure uncertainly, then leaned down in alarm to take Evaine’s arm and steady her as she lurched to her feet beside the litter.

“Evaine, have a care!”

Shakily, she clung to his stirrup leather, her face terrible in the torchlight, her hair rising like a halo on the wind.

“Aidan is down there!” she cried, past tears already in the stillness of her horror. “Ansel, we must find him! They wouldn’t hurt him, would they? He’s just a little boy.”

But she knew, as she said the words, that her son’s youth would have made no difference to marauders. If prisoners had been their goal, then there was a chance that Aidan was still alive, even though she could not sense him with her mind. But if the raid had been a retaliatory one, then they would have spared no living thing—family, servants, animals—nothing!

For what seemed an eternity they stood there, she and Ansel both searching with their Sight for any remaining marauders. Thomas, who was hardly older than Ansel, left his torch with one of his fellows and rode quietly down into the valley. He was gone for some time. When he returned, his face was pale, his leggings and boot darkened along one side where, by the look and smell, he had been sick. He did not want to meet her eyes as he drew rein before her and the others crowded near.

“Well?” she whispered. “Are they all gone? Is it safe to go down?”

The man swallowed noisily and looked as if he might be sick again.

“My lady, don’t go down there. It’s no fit place. It’s nothing you want to see.”

Slowly Evaine went rigid, hardly daring to ask further yet unable not to.

“Did you find my son?” she asked. “Did you find Aidan?”

“Please, my lady, don’t go. They were butchers who came to Trurill.”

“And Aidan?” Evaine insisted, striding to his horse and laying her hand on the reins as she stared up at him.

The man bowed his head, a sob catching in his throat. “I couldn’t tell, my lady. It was too dark to see faces. Mercifully, too dark.”

With a little whimper of dread, she seized his near boot and pulled it out of the stirrup. “Get off. Give me your horse. And stay here with the children until we send it’s safe.”

As she spoke, the man was obeying, jumping off the animal on the other side and scurrying around to make a stirrup of his clasped hands. Ansel gaped at her, shocked, and urged his horse closer.

“Evaine, is this wise, in your condition? The child—”

“What of my other child, my firstborn?” she countered, struggling to raise her bulk into the saddle and settling there with a sigh of relief. “Aidan may be down there. And if he is, he may still be alive. I have to find out.”

With a shake of his head, Ansel grabbed a torch from one of the guards and moved out in front of her. “All right. Thomas, you and Arik stay here with the litter and the sumpter horses. You can begin moving down into the valley as soon as it’s a little more light, but don’t bring the children inside until I tell you it’s all right.”

Thomas, who had no desire to see the castle again, nodded vigorously. “Aye, m’lord. You don’t want these little ones to see what’s down there.”

The children, seven-year-old Rhysel and the baby Tieg, peered sleepily out of the litter, and Evaine blew each of them a kiss.

“Stay here with Thomas and Arik, darlings,” she said tightly. “They’ll bring you to Mummy as soon as they can.”

Young Rhysel, golden-haired and wise for all her seven years, gazed up at her mother guilelessly. “Are you going to look for Aidan, Mummy? I don’t think he’s down there.”

“We’ll see, Rhysel,” she managed to murmur, though her heart sank at the implication of her daughter’s words.

Then, with a slight wave to the children, she was gathering the reins of Thomas’s chestnut in her cold-numbed hands and kicking the animal into a painful trot down the slope to the valley below, Ansel scurrying to get in front of her in case her horse should slip. Behind them came the other two attendants, each bearing his torch, the four of them making a tight little knot of shadow and fading brightness as they picked their way down the hillside far faster than it was safe to go.

The first light of true dawn was just beginning to stain the snow around the castle as they approached the gatehouse, but already they could see some of the previous day’s gruesome work. Outside the walls, six or eight mail-clad bodies lay in silent, snow-shrouded heaps where they had been thrown off the castle walls to die on the rocks below. Amid the splintered floes of ice in the moat, several more bodies floated just below the surface, and in one place a bloated face was lodged beneath a clear patch of ice, the eyes open and staring in death. Evaine controlled a shudder and pulled her cloak more closely around her as she urged her horse to take its first steps onto the lowered drawbridge.

The attackers had burned the castle, in addition to their other bloody work. Timbers of the guardroom above the gatehouse had collapsed in a still-smouldering tangle, nearly blocking one half of the gateway, but it was inside that the fire had done its major work. The roof of the tower keep and great hall were still smouldering, and the barracks, which had been built of timber against one curtain wall, was nothing but a charred heap of support beams, and still burning. The barracks door, barred from the outside, still stood in its jamb, mute evidence of the fate of those who had been inside. Bodies dotted the castleyard, each given a merciful shroud of new snow during the night, but the snow had not been able to cover the cloying stench of burned flesh hanging heavy in the air, or the scent of blood.

With grim determination, Ansel swung down from his horse and began checking the closest bodies, the hand on the hilt of his sword increasingly white-knuckled as he and the two guards found death after death, each more grisly than the last.

Several of the men had been stripped and dragged behind horses, so that there was scarcely an unbroken bone or a scrap of skin intact on the cold, bloody bodies. A venerable, silver-haired old priest had had his hands and feet cut off and his eyes gouged out, and had been left to die of blood loss in the snow—which was, perhaps, one of the more merciful forms of death.

In the kitchen yard, Ansel came upon the bodies of two servant girls who had been raped and then split open from crotch to breastbone with swords. One of them had been big with child, and the dead infant lay in a pool of congealed blood beside its mother, nearly cut in two by the same blow which had ended her life.

He was violently ill at that, retching repeatedly onto the snow until there was nothing more in his stomach to vomit up. As he regained control of his rebellious gut, wiping his face with a handful of clean snow to try to clear his head, he thought he had seen the worst. Then he spotted a thin young form standing more or less upright in the yard before the stable. Somehow he knew it was Aidan, even from that distance and in the dim light.

He whipped off his cloak and managed to wrap the small, naked body in its folds before Evaine saw him, to ease the pathetic little form from the stake which had impaled it and lay the boy out on a clean patch of snow. Only the face was unmarred, the pale golden hair riffling slightly in the cold morning breeze which began to rise even as Evaine fell heavily to her knees beside her son. Though the eyes were closed, at least sparing her that, the body was frozen in the configuration of its terrible death, the white skin of chest and limbs criss-crossed with the marks of the scourging he had suffered before his murderers went on to other sport. From this angle, Evaine could not see the damage done by the stake, but Ansel was not quick enough to place his body between her and the implement of her son’s death, and he saw her blanch as she glanced at the bloody wooden upright and saw the slick of his blood frozen around the base.

He could not bear to look at her as she bent over the boy, her golden hair shifting like a pale, metallic curtain around them as she took the still-beautiful face between her hands and stared at the closed eyes. Still fighting down a terrible sickness of heart as well as of body, he looked away, another part of him wondering why Aidan had been done to death in this manner, and here, in the stableyard.

Then, in the shadows at the entry to what had been the stables, he saw why. Stunned, his jaw working convulsively in his effort to maintain control, he rose and crossed slowly to the stable doorway. Now he knew what had happened to Adrian MacLean.

If the captors of the castle had been brutal with Aidan and the castle’s garrison, they had been savage with the castle’s lord. They had beaten him, like Aidan, but that was the very least of the atrocities to which they had subjected poor Adrian. He had been stripped and flogged, branded with hot irons over a great deal of his torso, and even his eyelids deftly removed so that he must see every further act of wanton cruelty to the bitter end. They had tied ropes around his wrists and ankles and lashed him to the uprights of the stable entrance, hoisting him off his feet so that he hung spreadeagled a few feet off the ground. Whether they had castrated him before or after opening his belly to let his innards spill out, Ansel could not tell.

In a terrible flash of insight, he guessed at their intentions: degradation and torture for the lord of the castle, both in his own person and by being forced to watch the torture and slow death of the boy they had taken for his son—for Aidan and the still-missing Camber MacLean were similar enough in appearance to be brothers rather than cousins.

With a hoarse cry of outrage, he crossed the remaining steps to the stable entrance and drew his sword, to begin hacking at the ropes which bound Adrian’s ankles and wrists. When the last rope was severed, and the frozen corpse fell to the bloody ground below, he turned and raced back to where Evaine still knelt with the body of her dead son cradled against her swollen abdomen and began hacking at the stake, his breath sobbing in his lungs, until the stake was chopped in two and lay in a pile of wood chips and blood-reddened snow. Then he sank to his knees and wept, his hands braced on the quillons of the sword and his head bowed in bitter grief.

When he looked up, Evaine was recovered sufficiently to begin looking around dazedly. Bartholomew, the oldest of their men-at-arms, had removed his cloak and spread it over Adrian’s body. Damon, the other guard, was checking a pair of corpses lying near the ruined gatehouse, but then Ansel saw him look up at the raised portcullis and freeze for just an instant, then scramble to his feet and gaze upward into the shadows with a look of new horror on his face.

“Lord Ansel!” the man’s cry came, almost strangled in its emotion.

Ansel lurched to his feet and ran to Damon’s side, following his upturned gaze high among the smouldering beams of the collapsed guardroom floor. A pair of naked legs dangled, the toes flexing jerkily on one bruised and bloody foot. Up a little higher, he thought he could see a small white hand outstretched at an odd angle, the fingers cramped and clawlike and also twitching.

With a bellow for Bartholomew to attend them, Ansel began scrambling over the smouldering debris of the fallen timbers, accepting a leg up from Damon as he climbed. He reached a point where he could swing up on the portcullis, using its wooden crossbars as a ladder; but as he drew nearer to what he had seen from the ground, he almost faltered in his climb.

Vaguely he was aware of Damon and Bartholomew watching from below, of Evaine joining them, her face upturned in dumb amazement, but he dared pay them no more attention than that, for there was life above him, tenuously held, but there.

The marauders had crucified Camlin MacLean, Adrian’s son. Ansel might not have recognized him, had he not known the boy so well from summers spent at the same family retreats. They had nailed him to the portcullis, hammering heavy spikes through the slim wrists and into the dense timber backing of the portcullis grid, before hoisting it aloft and setting the gatehouse afire. And of course, before that, they had stripped and beaten him and perhaps committed other atrocities upon his young body that Ansel could not see, though he could guess at what might have been done.

There the marauders had left him to die, barely standing on tiptoe on one crossbar of the portcullis until fatigue should force his legs to give way and the full weight of his body hang suspended from his arms, gradually to collapse the chest and suffocate him.

But they had not reckoned on the action of the fire in the gatehouse above, sending the timbers crashing down around their victim, and they had not reckoned on young MacLean’s massive will to live. For somehow the boy had managed to swing his left leg up and over one of the fallen beams, to support the bulk of his weight there instead of on his arms, and to brace the other knee against a second beam. The pain must have been excruciating, for he would have had to dangle with his full weight on his arms until he could work up enough swing to gain the support of the fallen beams, and every tiny movement would have been agony.

There would have been danger of burning, too, though the fire did not seem to have gotten terribly near. In fact, the warmth from the fire was probably what had thus far saved the boy from dying of exposure. What a miracle of coincidences seemed to have conspired to save at least this one young life amid the other carnage!

Ansel gained the boy’s side and touched the bruised forehead, probed, felt the answering, groggy response of dim awareness. With a few orders snapped to the men waiting below, he sent Bartholomew to find tools for somehow removing the nails from the boy’s wrists, while Damon came aloft to locate the portcullis mechanism and slowly begin lowering the grille to the ground. Working quickly, Ansel cleared away as much as he could of the debris that might interfere with the smooth descent of the portcullis, finally hooking one arm through the grillework and supporting the boy’s body with the other.

The boy moaned and passed out fully as his weight was shifted, but Ansel knew that it was for the best. It took nearly a quarter hour to free him, once the portcullis reached ground level. By the time they had wrapped him in Damon’s cloak and Bartholomew had carried him into the lee of a wall, out of the wind, he had begun to regain feverish consciousness. Evaine had torn strips from the edge of her under-shift while they worked to get him down, and had bandaged the mutilated wrists, but blood was soaking through. While Bartholomew stripped down to his tunic and held the cold little body close against his chest for warmth, Ansel and Damon began rubbing the boy’s legs and upper arms in an attempt to restore circulation. Evaine knelt beside them and gently touched the boy’s brow, but he tossed his head and nearly threw off her hands.

“Can you help him?” Ansel asked, laying another cloak over the boy’s bruised and blood-streaked torso.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “He has a great will to live, but I’m not a Healer. Camlin, can you hear me? Camlin, listen to me,” she insisted, as the swollen eyelids flickered open and then were closed almost immediately with the pain of returning consciousness.

Damon unstoppered a water flask and held it up, and she nodded.

“Just a little for now, Camlin,” she whispered, bracing herself to reach out with her mind and take hold of the pain as the boy managed several tortured swallows.

Camlin gave a few pathetic whimpers, but slowly he began to relax under Evaine’s touch and she knew that she was getting through, that there still remained a will to help, as well as a will to live. More forcefully, she reached out and intensified her hold on the edges of his mind, nodding a little in confirmation as his shields slipped a little further and he responded.

“Camlin, can you hear me?” she whispered. “Is the pain a little less?”

Slowly, painfully, the boy opened his eyes—eyes so like Aidan’s—his breathing ragged and tentative from the strain of overtaxed chest muscles, but apparently with his discomfort at least a little controlled.

“Aunt Evaine,” he managed to croak. “Can you make it stop hurting? Is Uncle Rhys here?”

With a pang of grief, Evaine shook her head slightly. “No, he can’t be here right now, Camlin. I’ll do what I can for you, though. Do you think you can go a little deeper into trance for me? We’ve got to clean your wounds, and it’s going to hurt much more unless you can really let me take control. Will you let me do that?”

As the boy gave a little nod and closed his eyes, she pushed her link with him, feeling his shields yield and drop in obedience to her touch. Gently she eased him into deep, painless sleep, such as any skilled non-Healer might command with the patient’s assent, then slowly began unwrapping the wounded wrist nearest her.

Bartholomew, who still held the boy in his lap, turned his head away as blood began to flow again.

Ansel had gotten the little medical kit from his saddle and was opening a small flask of the pungent green fluid which Rhys used to clean wounds. He shook his head as he handed her a square of linen saturated with the fluid.

“Is it really any use?” he asked despairingly. “Can he possibly live, other than as a useless cripple? Look at the angle of his hand. Those nails just tore him up.”

Biting her lip, and not wanting to accept that he was probably right, Evaine began swabbing out the wounded wrist, probing with cautious fingertips into the wounds themselves, where fresh blood pulsed from both openings faster than her cloths could blot it up. It was not until she had changed blood-soaked bandages several times, and had about decided that she could do little else than that to help his wrist, when she became aware of what was almost a ghost-brush of a presence. She glanced aside to see three-year-old Tieg peering owlishly at Camlin over her right shoulder.

“Tieg! Oh, for heaven’s sake, you’re supposed to be asleep!”

As she glanced at Damon, who was still chafing Camlin’s cold feet and legs, she sighed and pressed her fingers firmly over the wounds on either side of Camlin’s wrist, ignoring the blood which continued to stream down her own hands.

“Damon, take him back to the litter, please. He’s too young for this.”

“No! Not too young!” Tieg protested, clutching his mother’s arm and clinging even more doggedly when Damon started trying to dislodge him. “No! Tieg help!”

Again, Evaine felt that odd prickling at the edge of her mind, a presence like Rhys’s, but not his.

Tieg?

Startled, she shook her head for Damon to let go, then looked at little Tieg more intently. The boy stopped squirming and immediately slipped his chubby arms around his mother’s neck, delivering a moist kiss to her cheek.

“Tieg help Mummy,” he informed her gravely, hazel eyes meeting her blue ones in a forthright gaze. “We fix Camlin, huh, Mummy? We fix, like Daddy does.” The surge of accompanying Healer’s energy, unfocused and untrained but nonetheless present, almost made her think they could.

Was it truly possible?

She realized she had been holding her breath, and she let it out slowly. It was worth a try.

“All right, darling. You can help Mummy. You hug Mummy’s arm tight and watch Camlin and think about helping him. All right?”

“I do it,” he said simply, shifting around to peer over her shoulder, chin settling dreamily against her upper arm.

Against all logic, she quested for the Healing paths and found them, drew her son into ever deepening rapport, felt out the same kind of link she had forged so often with Rhys in his Healing work. Against all logic, she felt the Healing energies stir in response to her touch!

The sensation was like what she had felt a thousand times, over the years, as she worked with Rhys. Only this was her direction and Tieg’s power; she was a conduit of control and guidance through which the Healing energies were ready to flow. They could do it!

She knew that Ansel and the servants were staring at her, but she paid them no mind. She shifted Camlin’s wrist in her hands and boldly pressed her fingertip into the bloody entry wound, while her son looked on in confident fascination. She felt the increased flow of blood around her fingertip, hot and vital with life; the hard reality of the bones of wrist and arm; the ligaments and tendons torn by the nail which had rent the flesh and forced the bones apart—and Tieg’s amazed observation of all of this, clinical, but with all a child’s naïveté and trust in the ability of his mother to make everything right. She shifted a portion of her mind and felt Tieg’s energy flowing through her fingertip and into the wound—Healing energy, of the same kind which had been Rhys’s and was now their son’s.

She moved the wrist with her other hand and felt the bones shift back into place, sensed the flesh and sinews mending under her very touch as she slowly drew her fingertip out of the wound and it closed behind her retreat. She turned the wrist and drew her fingertip through the exit wound on the back of the forearm, and it, too, closed. Some faint scarring he would have to remind him of his ordeal, besides the scarring of mind which would take other Healing, for she had not the skill to Heal him as cleanly as Rhys could have done, but at least the bones were knit, the angry wounds closing.

Ansel had watched her and Tieg in amazement during the first part of the operation, but as he realized what they were doing, he unwrapped the other wrist and swabbed it as clean as he could for their next attention. Now she touched those wounds and Healed them, too; laid her bloody hands on the striped and stretched chest to ease the strain of muscles pulled almost to the point of collapse; erased the marks of the scourge.

The demand on her concentration was becoming very intense, and she was aware of the drain on Tieg’s energy, as well; but when she bade Bartholomew shift the unconscious Camlin in his arms so that she might assess the damage to his other side, and would have let it Heal on its own, Tieg gave her a deeply reproachful look.

Smiling despite her fatigue, Evaine eased the weals on Camlin’s back and buttocks, on the lean, well-muscled legs, then washed his blood from her hands and reached out with what little strength remained to touch his memory, blurring the details of what had happened until he should reach a time and place in which he might deal with them. When she had finished, her patient slept more easily, wrapped in the warmth of several cloaks. Tieg was curled up at her side, also asleep once the physical Healing was done, with a thumb in his pink mouth and a beatific expression on his freckled face. Gently she disengaged from her son’s mind, gathering him in her arms to hold him in mindless gratitude before giving him over to Damon to return to the litter. As Bartholomew took the now peacefully slumbering Camlin, Evaine sat back on her heels with a sigh, easing the small of her back with both hands. As she relaxed her own controls, she felt a little shudder in her womb, and then a quick but strong cramp. She tensed, but the pain was almost too quickly gone.

“Are you all right?” Ansel asked, taking her arm in alarm as he saw the pain flash across her face.

Quickly she assessed her condition, then nodded tentatively.

“Seem to be. I think my other Healer-child was protesting the strain on her mother. She’s done that before. When Tavis lost his hand, I was only a few months pregnant, but I had to leave the room where Tavis was. I guess she didn’t like his disharmony.”

Ansel signalled Thomas and Arik to come in with the litter, then sent Damon and Bartholomew to search for any other survivors in the keep while he scouted the rest of the yard.

After a while, Bartholomew and Damon returned with an armful of heavy cloaks and blankets and the body of a thin, white-haired old woman, simply but richly clad. There was no mark upon her; she might have died in her sleep, so composed was the expression on her face. As Damon laid her on one of the blankets which Bartholomew spread, Evaine came and stood beside her.

“Aunt Aislinn, my father’s sister,” she said in a low voice. “Where did you find her, Damon?”

“In the solar at the top of the keep, my lady. The room had been breached, but they never touched her. I can only think she must have died from the smoke, before they broke in.”

“Or else her heart just stopped,” Evaine murmured. “She could have chosen that way, knowing death was near, and the form it might take.”

She shook her head and drew a fold of blanket across the old woman’s face. “She was the Dowager Countess of Kierney, Damon—grandmother to the castle’s lord and a very great lady. Are you sure you found no trace of any other noble ladies? Lord Adrian’s wife and sister should have been here, since Aislinn and the children were.”

“We’ve found nothing yet, my lady. Do you want me to keep looking?”

She did, but before she could tell him so, she glanced around the yard to see whether Ansel needed him. Ansel was checking on the litter, which had been drawn up in an angle of the inner wall that would afford no view of the carnage if the children woke and sneaked a look between the curtains. Arik, Bartholomew, and Thomas were piling up unburned timbers and other combustibles in the center of the yard. She stared at them for several seconds before their intention registered.

“Ansel, what are they going to do?” she gasped, running to his side as fast as she could in her condition and grabbing his arm.

“I told them to do it, Evaine. We can’t take our dead with us, we can’t bury them in the frozen earth, and we can’t just leave them here for the wolves and the elements. It’s cleanest this way, under the circumstances.”

She knew he was right, but she could not keep the tears from starting again. Blindly she stumbled to where her firstborn’s body lay still wrapped in Ansel’s cloak, knelt and uncovered the still-beautiful face to stroke the fair hair off the smooth, untroubled brow. Like this, with his tortured body hidden from her sight and only the angelic face to meet her gaze, she could almost believe that he had died at peace like Aislinn.

She clasped her hands and tried to pray, longing for the presence of father or brother to add their prayers to hers to speed Aidan on his way, and wishing that there could be something more than a funeral pyre to mark the passage of all these victims of senseless brutality, but she knew that was not possible. This time, her blessing must suffice—and who better to give her son farewell than the one who had borne him, nursed him, taught him, loved him, and now must let him go? She could not even begrudge the fact that young Camlin lived, while her son had died—for anyone who had survived what Camlin had, deserved his life.

She prayed then, and bade him Godspeed, and by the time Ansel came to take the boy and lay him on the pyre, she could stand aside and watch dry-eyed as her nephew lifted the small, blanket-wrapped form, knowing that it was but a broken shell, that Aidan was not there.

They laid Adrian and Aislinn on either side of him—MacRorie kin all, although of different names—and then she joined her hand and mind with Ansel’s to start the cleansing blaze.

She thought herself well in control until another cramp rippled up her abdomen and she felt the warm, familiar rush of her water breaking. The snow beneath her feet took on a pinkish hue.

She gasped with the surprise of it, though she knew well what it was; and now a frightened human urgency began to supplant the cool Deryni sorceress. The baby would be born within a few hours, almost a full month early, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. They were stranded in this ruin of death and torture now until she could deliver. And for this birth, she would have no gentle Rhys to ease her labor and Heal her pains, nor even a midwife to attend her. She wondered whether Ansel or any of the other men had ever even seen a baby born.

The men lost no time in finding her shelter. She would not go into what was left of the stable, with Adrian’s blood still frozen on the snow outside, and they would not let her stay within sight of the funeral pyre still sending its greasy column of smoke upward on the morning breeze. They finally compromised on an alcove underneath the kitchen stair, which could be curtained off with blankets and made reasonably secure from the cold, for snow had begun to fall again.

A small fire was built, and the litter unhitched from the horses and brought inside, but Rhysel was awake and hungry, impatient to be allowed out. Evaine could not permit that, of course, but she did visit with her daughter while she ate breakfast, and had Ansel wake Camlin and Tieg long enough for them to eat a little, too, before sending all three children back to sleep inside the litter.

Evaine settled down to the business of labor then, losing track of the time as her pains grew closer together and the morning wore on. Ansel stayed with her most of the time, trying to absorb a little background on basic child delivery between her pains. The guards continued the grisly business of bringing the rest of the dead to the pyre. All through the morning Evaine could hear the crackle of the flames as they consumed each new offering.

It was near noon when the guards’ voices took on a different note, and then Arik came bursting into the enclosure without even pausing to ask permission.

“My lady, my lady, look what we’ve found! They were hiding in the middens!”

She could have wept for joy to see the two dirty, bedraggled women who came into view behind Arik. They were her missing kinswomen. Fiona, small and dark and quick, gave a little cry and threw herself across the enclosure into Evaine’s arms, shaking her head and laughing as if she could not believe what she saw. Mairi, wife to the slain Adrian, stood silently beside Bartholomew and let him support her arm, her gaze distant and unfocused, even when Fiona finally came and led her gently to a little stool beside Evaine. Evaine did not have to ask what Mairi had seen.

The men went out gratefully then, to continue with their work and to keep watch, and Evaine and Fiona passed the time by talking. While Fiona washed herself and the compliant Mairi of the stench of the middens and changed both their clothes for dry ones which Ansel soon brought, she told Evaine of how she and Mairi had watched the horror of the day before from their solar window, then had managed to climb down a garde-robe shaft after the attackers torched the keep. The spunky old Countess Aislinn, too infirm to navigate the narrow space with them, had volunteered to stay and cover their absence, if the marauders gained the solar room before the fire did—for they had heard the screams of the men trapped in the barracks below, and knew that it was only a matter of time before the flames reached them, as well. The two of them had huddled in the middens all that terrible night, praying that they would not be discovered; and sometime during those awful hours, Mairi had withdrawn into her grief.

All afternoon Evaine’s labor continued, as Ansel and the guards kept watch outside, and Fiona kept Evaine talking about Healing Camlin and her love for Rhys and anything else she could contrive to keep her mind from the pain. Always before, Evaine had had Rhys to speed her labor and ease its discomfort; this time she must let nature take its course. By the time the baby was born, just at dusk, both mother and newborn daughter were exhausted. Ansel let them rest until it was fully dark and made everyone eat a substantial meal; but then he had to insist that they move on.

With Evaine in the litter with Tieg and the baby, Rhysel on her pony, and Camlin and the two other women mounted before Ansel and two of the guards, they set out from Trurill at last. All through the night and into the day they rode, twice avoiding patrols of the new Earl of Culdi’s men and stopping only to feed and water the horses and rotate riders. Toward dusk, however, Ansel realized that they had picked up an escort, far back on the road.

He did not tell Evaine of it, but she knew. She reached back with her mind and sensed their cold, brutal presence, somehow knowing them to be of the same ilk as the men who had tortured and killed her son. She hated them, and was impotent in her hate, drained as she was by the Healing of Camlin and the birth of her child. Ansel pushed on, but the road worsened as the light faded, and now he began to worry in earnest, for their pursuers were gaining, slowly but inexorably, and the litter was slowing them greatly. As they slowed even more for the litter-bearing horses to negotiate a particularly treacherous down-hill section of the road, slick with mud and ice, Ansel drew rein alongside the litter and put out a hand to steady it. Evaine’s face, as she drew aside the curtains and peered up at him, was pale and gaunt-looking.

“They’re gaining on us, aren’t they?” she asked.

“I hoped you hadn’t noticed,” he said.

With a deep breath, she assessed her condition and decided that she just might be able to sit a horse now. It seemed their best chance to lose their pursuers, and this might be their only opportunity. With all of them on horseback, and pushing hard, there were several narrower tracks which they might take from here which would get them to the safety of the monastery by dawn or a little later. But they must lose their pursuers first, or risk leading them right to their only refuge.

“I’ll ride, then,” she said, pulling the baby from her breast and drawing her cloak around herself as she swung her feet down from the litter. “If we leave the litter here, we can make better time, especially in the dark.”

Instantly Ansel was leaping down into the mud to support her as she tried to stand and staggered, instead.

“Don’t be a fool! You’re in no condition to ride,” he muttered. “Do you want to kill yourself?”

She gestured for Damon to come and help her as she began unbuckling one of the traces on the lead litter horse.

“Of course not. But I don’t want us to be taken, either, and I don’t want to lead our pursuers to our only refuge. We’ve seen what they do to Deryni in this part of the country. Damon, you and Thomas unhook the litter and rig the horses so they can be ridden. The baby and I will ride with Fiona.”

“Don’t you think you at least ought to ride with me or one of the other men?” Ansel asked. “I don’t know whether Fiona can catch you, if you start to fall.”

Fiona, let down from the horse where she had been sitting with Arik, came running over to support Evaine under one arm and take the baby from her.

“She won’t fall,” Fiona said, “and I won’t let her. The horses can carry two women more easily than a man and a woman. It’s the only logical way.”

Ansel looked dubious, but he sensed that Evaine would not be budged, once her mind was made up—and they could make better time without the litter. After assessing the mounts they now had, he chose the largest and most smooth-paced of them for Evaine and Fiona, then had Arik switch his deeply padded travel saddle for the harness arrangement on the sumpter horse’s back, knowing that Arik could ride bareback. The children were parcelled out among Arik, Damon and himself, and Mairi was put on the second sumpter horse, following alongside Thomas. Bartholomew brought up the rear with Rhysel’s pony in tow.

They kept a slow pace at first; but when Evaine appeared to bear up reasonably well, they pressed on more quickly. Just at dark, a light snow began to fall, covering their tracks; and shortly after that, they passed through a succession of forks in the road which they hoped would further discourage pursuit.

Evaine felt herself begin to hemorrhage, a little after that, and held onto consciousness by only the barest of threads, her strength taxed more and more with each mile they completed. But she would not, dared not, tell Ansel and risk having him slow their pace and face possible capture. Better to die on the road than chance what those others had suffered at Trurill.

They did, indeed, lose their pursuers during that long night of flight through the new snow, as the date turned to the second of the new year and the cold increased. They rode through the darkness with but two brief stops for rest and meager rations, as much for the horses’ sake as for their riders. Evaine continued to insist that she was doing well enough.

She would not get down from her horse the second time, though, for she had seen the blood staining the dark suede of the saddle seat the first time she got down—though Fiona and Ansel had not—and she knew that she must not let the others know. Instead, she sat nodding in the saddle and gave the baby suck from there, her voluminous cloak muffled closely around her and snowflakes resting unmelting in the rich golden hair which spilled from her hood and around the baby’s face.

They rode on then, and Evaine slipped back into that twilight state which she had found to be the only way she could keep from passing out entirely from her growing weakness. She was hardly aware of the passage of the hours or the miles after that, but they reached Saint Mary’s in the Hills just after dawn.

She managed to bring herself back to awareness briefly as they drew rein in the abbey yard, all her being rejoicing to see Joram running to meet them across the virgin snow. She stayed in the saddle just long enough to give the baby safely into the arms of a waiting monk, felt Joram’s hands on her waist to lift her down, but then the world began to spin.

The next thing she knew, she was lying someplace warm and dry, snuggled under the reassuring weight of several soft blankets. She could feel the warmth of a friendly fire on the right side of her face. The aroma of something eminently edible wafted past her nostrils. She had been bathed and dressed in a clean garment while she lay unconscious—she suspected Fiona’s hand in that—and as she flexed an ankle experimentally under the blankets, still not opening her eyes, she was reminded abruptly of the abuse to which she had been forced to subject her body in the past few days. A quick assessment reassured her that she had stopped bleeding, however, and that her general condition was far better than she had feared.

Returning alertness had brought the brush of other minds in the immediate vicinity, both strange and familiar, so she opened her eyes. She found herself lying on a narrow bed before a cheery hearth. The room’s ceiling and walls were plastered and whitewashed, the exposed beams oiled to a dark, mellow finish. A black-robed monk sat on a stool to her right, stirring a cup of something which was the source of the enticing aroma. Another monk stood behind—she knew he was the abbot. On her other side, Joram knelt with his pale head bowed, in the black of the stranger-monks instead of his familiar Michaeline blue, and with a priest’s stole around his neck. Behind him, she could see Fiona departing with a basin and armful of rough, grey towels.

Joram looked up then, aware by Sight that she was conscious. Before she could say anything, he was sliding an arm behind her neck and shoulders and raising her head so the monk could begin spooning broth into her mouth. When she would have protested, both men merely shook their heads stubbornly and the monk pressed the spoon to her lips. She gave in at that, obediently swallowing each spoonful of the warm, fragrant stuff which the monk presented. When she had finished the last drop, the monk rose and departed without a word, the abbot accompanying him. As Joram eased her back onto her pillows, she turned her head to gaze at him fondly.

“One might think someone were dying,” she said with a faint smile. “That stole is not at all reassuring.”

“I’ll take it off, if you promise not to need it,” he replied, taking her hand and kissing it gently.

She closed her eyes briefly and nodded, then smiled again. “I’ve never been able to tell for certain when you’re joking, you do it so seldom,” she said. “Will you take it off, though?”

“With your promise,” he said doggedly.

“Given.”

“That’s more like it.” He pulled off the offending stole with his free hand and touched it to his lips, then draped it over the blankets covering her, as if to include her in its protection. Then he took her hand in both of his and held it close against his chin.

“Sweet Jesu, Evaine, I was frightened for you! You were so pale when you rode in. Fiona said the birth was not particularly difficult, but you lost so much blood! You should never have ridden so soon or so far.”

“It was necessary,” she said.

“Well, at least you’re going to be all right now. The shock might have killed you, though. And where is Queron?”

“I sent him to Revan, before we left Sheele.”

“To Revan? In your condition, with the baby’s birth so near?”

She gave a little shrug, wincing at the pull of sore muscles. “At the time, I didn’t know it was that near. Is the baby all right?”

He nodded. “Everyone’s sleeping. Ansel told me what happened, while Fiona and Brother Dominic cleaned you up.”

“Brother Dominic?”

“The one who was feeding you soup. He’s the infirmarian. They haven’t any Healer, of course.”

“No, I suppose not.” She took a deep breath and let it out with a little sigh. “What about Alister?” she asked softly, using that name from habit, even though there was no one else in the room.

“Safe at Dhassa, for the nonce,” Joram breathed. “I’ll be in contact with him tonight and let him know you’re safe. Your instincts about avoiding capture were sound, by the way—in more than a general way. The regents outlawed the whole family the day after Christmas. I suspect that’s why Trurill was hit—that and the overzealousness of the MacInnis clan. Anyway, Alister and Jebediah are waiting at Dhassa for news of the new synod at Ramos, before they come to join us. The new archbishop and his minions have already laicized all Deryni priests, suspended the bishops who wouldn’t cooperate, and forbidden any future ordinations of Deryni to the priesthood.”

She glanced at the stole lying across her blankets, then looked back at her brother. “I infer that you don’t accept the laicization.”

“What do you think?” he returned, the set to his jaw and the hard fire smouldering in the grey eyes telling her all she needed to know about that.

She smiled. “Understood. You mentioned a new archbishop—Hubert?”

“Who else? Niallan and Dermot got away with us to Dhassa, but Hubert must suspect that’s where we went, because Rhun has put the city under siege. Kai and Davet Nevan were killed in the cathedral on Christmas Day, the same as—”

He bowed his head as his voice broke off, for he had not meant to speak of that, especially to her, but she pressed his hand in reassurance and brought her other hand across to pat his arm.

“I know, Joram. It’s all right to talk about it.”

“Evaine, I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “God knows, we tried to save him, but with no Healer.… It was such an awful, senseless, tragic—”

“Hush, I know,” she murmured. “It wasn’t your fault. Do you think I didn’t know that? Do you think I didn’t feel it, when he died?”

She blinked back the beginnings of tears and stared up at the ceiling until she could go on.

“We won’t be able to stay here indefinitely,” she said more briskly. “We don’t want to endanger the good monks who have so kindly sheltered us. Have you any plans beyond all of us meeting here?”

Joram nodded, also regaining his equilibrium. “Ansel and I are to begin setting up a Portal here as soon as we can. We’ll go to our old Michaeline sanctuary, where we took Cinhil. The Order has abandoned it now, but supplies were laid in months ago. With the Portal there set as a Trap, we should be safe enough, at least for a while.”

“I can think of far worse places for exile. It will seem almost like home. You said you were going to set up another Portal here, though—you and Ansel can’t do it alone.…”

“If you’re thinking to offer to help, don’t,” he said gently. “We’d thought to have Queron, but we’ll manage with some of the others instead. Fiona’s fairly adept, as I recall, and we can use Camlin, too, if he’s up to it.”

She turned her face away slightly to stare at the ceiling again, biting her lip.

“Did they tell you about Aunt Aislinn and Adrian and—Aidan?” she whispered tremulously.

Joram nodded. “And how you healed Camlin. It was a miracle, Evaine!”

“No, it was Tieg,” she amended, turning her eyes back to his. “He’s a Healer, like his father. He—” She swallowed noisily, barely fighting back the tears. “Oh, Joram, his father would have been so proud of him!”

She could not hold back the tears after that, and sobbed in Joram’s arms for a long time while he stroked her hair and murmured childhood endearments, gradually establishing the rapport to share all that had happened to both of them since their last meeting. When she finally regained control and opened her eyes, Joram was still there at her side—and the monk Dominic, with another cup of soup.

“I can’t,” she protested weakly. “There’s too much to do.”

But Joram was adamant. “The only thing you have to do for a few days is to get well,” he said, with that firm set to his jaw which she knew so well. “Now, cooperate with Brother Dominic and eat. Ansel and I will take care of everything until you’re strong enough to help.”