The Harrowing of Gwynedd (2 page)

The close darkness fitted her mood—bleak and weary, especially this early in the morning. She had slept but little after she and Joram finished their work of the night before. Only the two of them knew what lay this deep beneath the Michaeline haven that they once again called home, as they had some twelve years before, when upholding the rights of a now-dead king. The secret of that knowledge would be guarded by every resource at their disposal—and the resources of Evaine and her kin were by no means inconsiderable, as the regents of the present king had cause to know full well. Still, caution mingled with uneasiness as Evaine quietly rounded the last corner.

Different light shimmered cool and opalescent across the doorway she approached, parting like a curtain at her gesture, but she allowed herself only the faintest of smiles as she pushed at the narrow door beyond and felt it move beneath her hand—acknowledgment of a thing working as it should, rather than any real satisfaction, for what lay within the tiny cell was a source both of hope and of dread.

I'm here, Father
, she whispered, though she would not look at him until she had closed the door behind her. She had not been alone with him since she and Joram brought him from Saint Mary's, two days before.

She crossed herself as she turned, still wrenched anew to see him laid out thus, the blue-clad body shrouded from head to toe with a veil of white samite. Her hands shook as she lifted the part of the veil covering his own dear face and carefully folded it back. She did not cry, though. She had no tears left for crying.

Camber. Camber Kyriell MacRorie. Father Camber. Father
.

Lovingly Evaine recited his true names in her mind as she sank to her knees beside his body, the fingertips of folded hands pressed hard against her lips to stop their trembling.

Oh, Father, do you know what they've done? They called you Alister Cullen, and bishop, for these last twelve years
—
and Saint Camber, for more than a decade. Now there are those who want to ruin both good names. They're calling you traitor and heretic, using our young king's regency to enrich their own coffers
.

She shook her head as she gazed at him, finding but little comfort in the knowledge that he no longer need play at anyone's conception of who or what he ought to be. He had worn the Alister Cullen identity for the last twelve years and more of his life, and vestiges of it remained—and would, even to the grave. The fine, silver-gilt hair capped close to his head was tonsured in the manner his alter-ego had favored, but both men had loved the white-sashed cassock of rich Michaeline blue. And the smooth, roundish face now dimly illuminated by her handfire was wholly his own.

He looked more austere in death than he had seemed in life, even as Alister, but the well-loved face was peaceful in its repose, the agonies of those final moments all but erased by some small, secret satisfaction evinced in a gentle upturn of lip discernible only to close intimates.

Well, the regents shall have their reward in the end, God willing
, she mused.
What do they know of truth, who twist and mold it to their own ends? Traitor and heretic you are none, nor ever were, for all that such declaration serves their evil purposes. Alister Cullen you are no more, though remaining priest forever. Saint, I know not. But you were and are my father, my teacher, my friend
.

She bowed her head at that, closing her eyes against the sight of him dead, and wished she could close her mind to memory as well—of finding him in the snow, nearly a week before, his own shape upon him, his quicksilver head pillowed on the breast of the dead Jebediah, their life's blood mingled and frozen on the icy crusts surrounding them.

But though “Alister Cullen” appeared to be as dead as Jebediah, Evaine had come to believe he had not died at all, but lay bound in a deep and powerful spell, thought by most magical practitioners to be only the stuff of legends. The coolly polished Deryni adept part of her warned that such speculation might be mere denial, an unrealistic refusal on her part to accept the inevitability of his death; but the loving daughter, so recently bereft of husband and first-born son as well as father, kept whispering seductively,
What if? What if?

Help me know what to do, Father
, she breathed, raising her head to look at him again after a few seconds.
I don't know where you are now. If you really are
—
gone beyond my reach
—
then it is my fervent prayer that you abide in the Blessed Presence, as your beautiful soul most certainly must merit
.

But what if you aren't really dead? Is that only my loving wish, to keep you with me a little longer, or does some part of you truly cling to life as we mortals know it, so that we really
could
somehow bring you back to us
?

She felt a fluctuation in the shields behind her and then the soft breath of the door opening and closing for another presence. Joram set his hand on her shoulder as he knelt beside her for a moment, golden head bowing in a brief prayer for the man who had sired both of them. Then he crossed himself in a brisk, automatic gesture and turned his gaze full upon her, grey eyes meeting blue.

“Ansel is waiting for you to relieve him,” he said quietly. “The others will be expecting us at Dhassa.”

Sighing, Evaine gave him a nod and rose as he, too, got to his feet.

“I suppose it
is
time we began picking up the pieces,” she murmured. “I've indulged my grief quite long enough.”

Joram managed a taut smile. “Don't be too harsh with yourself. You've lost a husband and a first-born son as well as a father. I'd be the first to agree that grieving overlong begins to be self-indulgent to the point of selfishness, but the loss does need to be acknowledged.”

“Yes, well, I think I've done that rather thoroughly. Now it's time to make plans for the future. I can't do anything about Rhys or Aidan, but Father …”

“I wish you wouldn't.”

“Joram, we've had this discussion before.”

“That doesn't mean I have to like your conclusion.” He sighed and set his hands on his hips.

“Look. He lived a long, full life in his own right. By taking on Alister's identity twelve years ago, he had another full, productive life, at an age when most men are about ready to meet their Maker. He was seventy-one, for God's sake, Evaine. Why can't you just let him be dead?”

“But what if he wasn't ready to die?” she retorted.

Joram snorted, shaking his head bitterly as he turned his gaze to the shrouded body.

“How like Father, to presume to take that decision out of God's hands!”

“How is it presumption, if God gave him the means to continue, and it harms no one? His work was unfinished.”

“All men leave work unfinished when they die. Why should he be any different?”

She grinned, despite the weight of their conversation. “Are you going to tell me that he
wasn't
different?”

“We both know that he was,” Joram breathed. “That isn't the question.”

“Then, what
is
the question?”

He sighed. “It's the same question he asked himself, when Rhys was dying. By then, he was fairly confident that he could work the spell—and it
might
have spared Rhys until a Healer could be brought. But he also feared that a spell powerful enough to hold back Death might have its own terrible cost, to the subject as well as the operator. He would have been willing to accept the risk to himself; but he decided that no one has the right to make that decision for another soul.”

“But no one else was involved in Father's spell,” Evaine reminded him.

Joram nodded. “That's true. But again, the spell is powerful. If Father is still alive in some strange, mysterious way, who's to say he wouldn't rather stay that way? Who are we to try to bring him back?”

She glanced down at the body before them, then drew the veil of samite over his face once more. Farther down the veil, she could still see the slight bulge of the hands—not just folded peacefully on his breast, the way they had folded Jebediah's, but slightly curved—just—so. That he had
tried
to work the spell to hold back Death, she had no doubt. Whether or not he had succeeded, they would not know until they attempted to reverse it and bring him back. But she believed he would want them to try.

“Joram, I know this isn't an easy question,” she said quietly, not looking at him. “But when have we ever expected easy answers? Actually, we aren't considering one question at all, but several. First of all, if he tried the spell and failed, then he's merely dead, and nothing we do will make any difference—so it doesn't hurt to try.

“But if he
is
under the spell, then there are three distinct possibilities. Either we bring him out of it and restore him—which, presumably, is what he would have wanted, so he can carry on his work. Or we bring him out of it and he dies anyway—which at least releases him to the normal cycle of life and death. Or we
can't
bring him out of it, and things stay the same.

“But we can't just leave him here, in limbo, not knowing whether we could have made a difference. And what if he's somehow trapped in his body? We certainly couldn't bury him, not knowing.”

Joram nodded grimly, unable to refute that argument, at least. “The last is certainly a factor,” he agreed. “I can't imagine anything much more terrifying than regaining consciousness in a tomb and realizing you'd been buried alive.”

“I can,” Evaine murmured, not looking at him. “Being bound to a body that really, truly,
is
dead—decaying.”

Joram shook his head and suppressed a shiver. “There's no sign of
that
, at least. It's something more than just the cold, too. Almost as if Rhys—as if one of the Healers had put a preservation spell on it,” he amended awkwardly. “Jebediah's body—isn't in this condition.”

“No, and the real Alister's body isn't in this condition, and there
was
a preservation spell on
him
,” she said quietly. “But Death-Readings were done on Alister and Jebediah. We
know
they're dead.”

Sighing, Joram nodded. “And we couldn't Read Father,” he murmured. “
Ergo
, he isn't dead. Or it
could
just be the blocks he would have set, to preserve the identity of his alter-ego—”

“From us?” Evaine interjected. “Joram, it isn't that there's nothing to Read. It's that something won't
let
us Read. He knew we would be there soon. Do you really think he would have cut us off that way?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.” She looked at him oddly. “Something else is bothering you, though.”

Joram cleared his throat, looking decidedly uncomfortable—but in a different manner than before.

“Well, yes. How can I explain this to you without sounding as if I think it's true?” He cocked his head at her, searching for just the right words.

“Do you remember how, when everyone thought Father had been killed and they wanted to canonize him, we didn't dare produce his body, for fear it would be discovered that Alister had died instead of him? The bishops said he had been ‘bodily assumed into heaven,' and used that as part of the rationale for declaring him a saint. But if saints aren't taken directly into heaven, what other thing sometimes happens to their bodies?”

“They don't decay,” Evaine breathed. “They remain incorruptible.”

“Exactly. And right now, his body is incorruptible—for no logical reason that we can offer.” Joram glanced at the shrouded body with a mixture of disbelief and awe.

“Evaine, what if he really
is
a saint?”

C
HAPTER
O
NE

Every purpose is established by counsel
.

—Proverbs 22:18

“I have to tell you that burying those three men was one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do,” Joram confessed to their Dhassa compatriots an hour later—though he tried not to think about that fourth body he had just left, hidden beneath the chapel where the other three lay. “I know we must put our grief and outrage behind us now, and move on to the more constructive measures we all know they would have wished, but I won't even pretend that can happen overnight. For now, we're going to have to take it a day at a time—and maybe even hour by hour, when things get particularly difficult.”

He was pacing back and forth beside a table in Bishop Niallan's private quarters in besieged Dhassa, drawn and gaunt-looking in monkish black instead of the now-dangerous blue of the Michaelines—though he had worn his former habit the day before, to honor two of the three men he buried. The pale cap of his hair, tonsured now in the manner of any ordinary priest, shone like a halo as he paused where a beam of weak winter sunlight filtered through an east window. Niallan, seated at the head of the long table, resisted the urge to cross himself in awe at the pent-up power smoldering in Saint Camber's son, though he, like Joram, was Deryni and fully capable of not a little power himself.

So were most of the other men ranged around the bishop's table—all, in fact, save the younger man at Niallan's immediate left, who also wore episcopal purple. Dermot O'Beirne, the deposed Bishop of Cashien, had thrown in his lot with Niallan on that fatal Christmas Day a fortnight before, when everything else seemed to fall apart. The regents' assault on Valoret Cathedral, given color of authority by the young king's active presence and participation, had put an end to Alister Cullen's brief tenure as Archbishop of Valoret. It had also put an end to any subsequent hope of tempering the regents' increasingly anti-Deryni policies via the established Church hierarchy. Indeed, one of the most notorious of the regents now occupied the primatial throne, and had suspended and excommunicated both bishops at Dhassa as one of his first official acts.