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Fur-lined boots and her husband’s hooded robe could not keep the haven’s chill from Elinor MacRorie. It had come to live in her bones on the night Cathan’s bloody body had been returned to their quarters in Valoret, like a broken toy King Imre had tired of.
The cold had pushed out her last vital warmth, the child they’d conceived before Michaelmas. Elinor had hoped for a daughter. She now counted herself lucky to have been attended by the court Healer, lucky to have not sickened further on the numb ride to Caerrorie, lucky to have survived whatever Imre’s men intended for her father-in-law’s house.
Elinor pulled her robe tighter around her throat, the same way she pulled her rage close and silent.
In this quiet after Compline, the corridors of the haven were unlit. She used handfire because she could. Her MacRorie in-laws might call her magic scant—so little that she might as well be human in their eyes—but she had enough for common uses.
She had seen that the Joram who came back to the chapel after meeting with Camber was not Joram. Camber and Evaine had lied to her, of course, telling her that she was imagining things, probing her shields to see if they might do a little rearranging to keep poor, dear, stupid, nearly powerless Elinor complacent and compliant.
The library door needed only the touch of her fingertips to swing open, exhaling the gentle scent of paper, leather, and wax. Flickers of light suggested a lamp burned somewhere deep within the maze of shelves… yes, she could hear gentle breathing and the slow turn of pages.
She would stay to the edges then. No need to disturb whoever studied here. Elinor was practiced in the art of tactful invisibility, and she cared very little what book she chose, if only the words could pin her mind to the page through another sleepless night.
Even so, she needed a moment to peruse the shelves for something that was neither military tactics nor theology. This section’s leather spines felt like dust beneath her fingers. That one’s spines were emblazoned in a gilt alphabet she could not read.
“Who goes there?”
The voice was low, gentle, and inevitably masculine.
Elinor froze, putting out her handfire with a thought. There was nothing wrong with her being here, but having to put herself in the way of another Michaeline or MacRorie herding her this way and that—keep Elinor out of the way, keep Elinor busy, let Elinor take charge of Megan and the children, let Elinor sew tunics for the new king—filled her with a dread that curled her fingers into claws.
Steps and light came nearer. She felt books against shoulder blades—she would not cringe against the shelves, though she wished for the ability to sink into them and vanish.
Behind the light was a man, shapeless in the gray habit that meant a person here was nobody of importance. His face, framed by dark hair and the rough beginnings of a beard, had the set of early middle-age, yet was oddly free of lines.
He did not speak.
“I didn’t mean to disturb you.” Elinor’s voice shook, to her shame. Keep Elinor out of danger.
“Nor I, you.” He stared at her with an expression too bland to be hostility or even curiosity. “Are you the Lady Evaine of whom my captors speak?”
“No. My name is Elinor. Evaine’s brother was my husband.” Her mind squeaked that captors should alarm her, but this man seemed neither dangerous nor imprisoned.
“I am called Benedict.”
He is the new king-to-be. Elinor dropped an awkward curtsey, not low enough to balance how her heart seemed to plummet to her stomach and back again. “Your Grace. I did not mean—”
“No. Call me not grace. This is a fantasy of your brothers. I am but a simple monk and no desire to be other than that.”
“You are the Haldane heir.” Before she drew breath for a second sentence, she saw in his expression the way she felt when any of the endlessly competent MacRories told her that she was grieving, that she must stay busy, that Cathan would want her to do, feel, rest, hurry, pray, accept, be anything other than the rage and betrayal she felt.
“So I am told. What book did you seek?”
She shook her head, uncomfortably aware that her hair was unbound as a maiden’s. “History, I suppose. I can’t imagine the Michaelines have much of poetry.”
“Nor can I.” Brother Benedict beckoned with his lamp. “Your brothers have assigned me such a mighty stack of history books that I think I might spare one.”
Joram and Rhys had, indeed, piled a long oak table so high with books that Elinor wondered how they expected their king-to-be to learn the art of kingship before he or Imre died of old age. “Take your pick,” he said.
Elinor plucked the top book from the nearest stack—a hefty tome bound in crimson leather and blazoned with a lion, rampant. The Chronicles of Bearand the Great. “Was he the last king before… before the Festils…”
“No. That was my great-grandfather, Ifor. I know nothing of him, you see. My grandfather was little more than a babe when his family was slaughtered. He spoke of it to me only once… of seeing throats slashed and his youngest sister spitted on a sword. It was not a thing to gossip about over dinner.”
“No.” A shiver ran through Elinor. Cathan’s bloody body… but she had not had to watch him die. If Imre had tried to take Davin or Ansel, she would have sprung at him with nails and nail scissors and meager Deryni power.
“I did not want to shed more blood. I thought myself a man of peace.”
“So did my husband. He went to Imre’s chambers as a friend. He emerged as a corpse.”
The words hung in the air between them, stark and blood-stained.
“You will know us by the trail of our dead,” the king-to-be said softly.
“Before that, Imre executed fifty of my father-in-law’s tenants over the death of a lord nobody will ever miss.” Some might say it was forty-nine, for Cathan had saved young Revan and kept him in their household, but one had been a pregnant girl, her child stillborn. Cathan had spared himself no detail of that disaster.
“And so your father-in-law settled on this mad plan to make me king.”
“Earl Camber found his retirement dull.” Her voice cracked on the final word. Dull was everything she longed for, everything she had lost. Lovely dull mornings, playing with her children. Sweet-scented dull afternoons, embroidering with Princess Ariella’s ladies while a minstrel played ballads. Sparkling dull evenings of court protocol. Passionate dull nights, when love in Cathan’s arms was a thing to be counted on.
“If I may impose… would you sit and tell me about Lord Camber? Were I to understood him better, I might be able to make him comprehend that I am best fitted to God’s priesthood, not to earthly kingship.”
Looking at the slight figure in his shapeless, colorless robe, Elinor had to agree. This was not a king. Camber would make him one, as Camber had made her a fool and a widow, as he had made Cathan a dead man walking in Imre’s court, as he had made the Michaelines outlaws, as he had left her sons with no lands to inherit while Culdi was attainted.
She settled herself into a high-backed chair, arranging Cathan’s robe to hold off the external chill. The pool of light from the king-to-be’s lamp pushed at the darkness with little conviction. This conversation wanted a warded circle, but she had neither the tools nor the power to build one, nor did she know what the king-to-be would make of such a thing.
Elinor lifted her chin, pushed her shoulders back, and breathed deeply. “Camber is a man accustomed to having influence.”
“So he must be, as an earl.”
“As an earl, he has responsibilities, which can be delegated to any competent steward. As a courtier, he had influence. He spent almost thirty years at the elbow of King Blaine, and his fancy of retiring to Caerrorie to be a scholar did not stop him from writing long letters to my husband about how he would not venture to tell him how to guide Imre, but…” She waved a hand.
The king-to-be nodded. “I will not tell you this, but here, let me tell you in detail what I am not telling you. I saw my grandfather do such, in negotiating cloth prices.”
“Camber will rule Gwynedd through you.”
“There is no reason to doubt that. Why can he not take the crown for himself?”
Elinor’s gaze met wide, frank pale eyes. “Camber also believes in things. God. The Church. The divine right of kings. His own humility. If he puts the last Haldane on the throne, he is righting what is wrong.”
“I cannot trade the cloister for a nest of vipers.”
“Three months ago, I was happy with my husband. I believed my brother to be no worse than ambitious. Princess Ariella was my dear friend. I expected to celebrate Christmas at a glittering court and welcome a new babe in the summer at Culdi. I have traded all I have except my sons to put you on the throne of Gwynedd, and I was not asked what I thought of the bargain.”
The king-to-be flinched under the lash of her words. “Nor was I.”
His mild response added fuel to her anger. “Then tell Camber that you will not be king. Let him dig in your grandfather’s bloodline for some other heir.”
“There is none. The Haldanes had terrible luck with generation after generation, the crown going to the youngest living son. Perhaps we are cursed not to rule Gwynedd after all.”
“Tell him that. Make him send you back to your cloister.”
“Where I would be grabbed by the king’s men and martyred on the spot. Do you think I have not considered it?”
“Go to a religious order outside Gwynedd, then.”
“It would be but a matter of time before some other puppet master found me and either killed me or dragged me into his schemes. Once discovered, I may never have peace again.”
“Then what does all this posturing that you do not wish to be king do for you?” Some frozen edge of her heart chipped as she asked, for she remembered his expression when she called him king.
The king-to-be sunk his face into his hands. “It staves off the day I must drink from a cup I did not ask for. It allows me to believe in my own humility. It allows me to believe in God.”
“You do not believe in the divine right of kings?”
He raised his head, flexing his fingers. “I have never felt anything special in these hands, save when I raised the Host in the mass.”
In the distance, a bell tolled. “It is the call for matins,” he said. “Will you pray with me, Lady Elinor?”
***
The second night, Elinor’s stride through the corridors of the haven was more purposeful. Beneath Cathan’s robe, she had not changed from her hastily dyed black gown; nor had she unbound her hair from beneath a married woman’s wimple. The Chronicles of Bearand the Great felt no heavier than one tiny pouch, newly hung from her girdle.
Brother Benedict had made no promise to meet her, but when he looked up from his pile of books, his unlined face showed no emotion at all.
“You have tired of Saint Bearand.”
“Saint Bearand has given me an idea. There is a way for us to speak in more privacy. May I?”
“I have not yet prevented any of your house from doing as you wish.”
That stabbed at Elinor’s bruised heart. “If you object after I show you what it is, there will be no more talk of it. I promise this.”
She loosened the strings of the unfamiliar pouch—a thing found after digging amidst the abandoned belongings of Cathan MacRorie. The haste in which the family had fled their home had proved to be both a curse and a blessing. She was desperately short of every sort of plain wool, lavender, balms for her son’s scrapes and bruises, and three sorts of oil—but she had these.
Eight cubes the size of dice tumbled onto the scratched oak table to nestle in the space between stacks of leather-bound tomes. Four cubes were black, four white.
“These are used to make a sort of bubble where nobody can interrupt us or hear what we say. I have not tried to use them in half a dozen years. I am not sure if I can. And I won’t try, if you would rather not.”
Expression flickered in Brother Benedict’s pale eyes. “Show me?”
Elinor arranged the cubes with the four white ones in a square and the four black ones set at each corner. Drawing a deep breath to help focus her power, she touched the upper left white cube and said quietly: “Prime.”
For the space of two breaths, it remained inert. Then a pale glow shimmered from its interior, slowing diffusing to light the entire cube.
“This is your Deryni magic?”
“Yes. It’s just… will and power. I haven’t very much power.”
Brother Benedict set a thin finger to the upper right cube. With this set partly attuned to her, the touch was like a fleeting caress on her neck—a thing she would not say aloud. He stared at the cube, furrowing his brow with concentration, and said aloud: “Seconde.”
The cube glowed white.
“Curiosity is not even a sin,” he said softly. “Had I not been curious what news strangers brought of my grandfather, we would not be here.”
Elinor breached all propriety by touching a finger lightly on his wrist, reaching with her mind to probe his, only to encounter… shields. Brother Benedict’s shields were as firm as Cathan’s when he wished to be left alone with his own misery.
It was, at least, simpler to not admit that rudeness. “Shall we complete the wards?”
When the joined pillars were settled in their places around the table, creating a dome of pale silver that extended just beyond the lamp light, Elinor admitted to herself that she could not have finished the ritual without this man. Cinhil Haldane—no, he did not wish to be called that.
“What was your name before you took vows?”
“Nicholas Draper. It was but a temporary garment, a boy’s play suit, put off when I reached adulthood.”
So she could not call him by that. She squared her shoulders and forced herself to focus on the matter at hand. “The doings of Saint Bearand did not bore me. They gave me an idea.”
“Everyone in your house is full of ideas.”
That slap might best be ignored. “Again and again, the text mentions distant cousins and connections by blood to other houses. Do you recall King Augarin?”
“Not personally.” He shook his head. “He was the first king of a united Gwynedd, I know that much. His first three sons died without living heirs, leaving the youngest to inherit.”
“There were five sons, not four. I wish to know what happened to the sons of Gurerric, the eldest. If there’s an unbroken male line, that gives an alternative Haldane claimant to the throne. There must be some chronicle that traces his line.”
But he might not have shields. This discovery changed everything—Nicholas Draper surely had Deryni blood, or else there was some basis to Earl Camber’s belief in the divine right of the Haldane line. She had thought little of the matter either way—she and Cathan lived at court because the court was there, the Festils ruled by right of conquest and Deryni power—and did not entirely wish to be confronted with it now.
“It will not save me,” the man said. “As long as I live, I am the better claimant to the throne.”
“You might still go into hiding. You might stay here and live a life of prayer.”
He rose to pace and had bumped himself on the shining dome of the wards before she could warn him. “I helped make this?”
“I could not have made it without you.”
“That is, you see, my abiding weakness. Immersed in prayer and silence, I was curious only about the nature of God. Out here…” he gestured broadly. “All of you feed my curiosity. I want to know how the little cubes work. I want to understand the workings of Gwynedd. I wish in every way to have no duty but to God, and yet I wonder whether I might wield earthly power as God would deem better than these pestilent Festils. The devil whispers in my ear, and his guise is golden-haired MacRories.”
“Did you never wonder this before you entered the cloister?”
“I did not. My world was wool and linen. I knew my call to the priesthood so young that I had no name for it.”
If he was in his forties, as everyone seemed to believe, he had been praying in a monastery since she, Elinor, was a small child. She had grown into her duty to marry well, counted herself fortunate in being allowed to choose between a pair of handsome young men rather than being traded to an old one for her brother’s ambition, and borne children while this man trod a daily routine of prayer and self-denial.
“A second claimant might allow you not to marry,” she ventured so quietly that it came out as a squeak.
“Or it might lead to civil war the moment it became known that I do not wish to make heirs of my body.” He gestured to the stacks of books. “I have not studied for nothing. Your family gambled everything when they abducted me. The fate of Gwynedd hangs on my being an obedient sheep who dons the raiment of the shepherd.”
“Or you might let Camber put you on the throne, then rule as you wish.”
His fist slammed into the table. “That of all things is the temptation I recoil from. If I become Cinhil Haldane, if I know myself as king by right of blood, I have cut myself off from everything I ever wished or chose to be. How can God both require this of me and turn his back on me?”
“Marriage can be wonderful.” Bitterness coated her tongue at the words. Marriage had been wonderful until this very year.
“There are many wonders in the world that I have foregone for my vows to God. If I am foresworn to the Most High, what other vows might I not break?”
“You could have chosen not to cooperate at all.” With shields so firm, Nicholas Draper could surely have repelled any effort of Camber’s to coerce him. “Sit in your chamber, refuse to speak, let your guardians talk past you until their throats are sore.” She had done it herself as a girl, refusing even meals, until some toy was restored to her.
“I pray for the certainty to martyr myself thus.”
“You do not have it?”
“I do not know what test this is!” He buried his face in his hands once more. “Am I to recognize that myself and my vows are less than the fall of a sparrow to God? Am I called to something greater or tempted by something lesser? Am I meant to hold firm and leave the multitudes killed by King Imre to God’s hands? Or is it my duty to save them while damning myself?”
Elinor opened her mouth to argue or to give comfort—and realized she did not, in that moment, know which she wanted to do. To reverse all this, to be back in the rose-scented days of summer, when Imre was Cathan’s dear friend and no more than minor troubles clouded her days… that was what she wanted.
And it could not be done. If she supported this man’s resolve to never be king, she made all of her losses into nothing. If she urged him to accept the burden laid unwillingly upon him, she was no better than any MacRorie, bending a man’s will to an end he had never agreed to.
Distant bells interrupted her thoughts. “Would you pray with me again, Father?”
***
There was no further reason to go to the library in the depths of night—Elinor could solve neither Nicholas Draper’s problems nor her own—and yet she went, and yet he was always there, barricaded behind his piles of books.
After that first experiment with wards, she never tried to set them again. They spoke of little things—of the endless torrent of words from Camber and Joram and Rhys and the beautiful Evaine, all insisting he must live up to their opinions of themselves, but also of the daily routine of the haven, the make-dos and improvisations of the women in this citadel of men, of the Michaelines’ list of eligible human maidens and its pointlessness when only one such maiden was already here. (She was Megan de Cameron, Camber’s ward, who had lived with Elinor’s household because guardianship was a responsibility that could be assigned to any competent steward.)
Nicholas read to her from his books. The little of history deemed necessary for a gentle-born girl had been heroic ballads. Now she listened to talk of borders and diplomacy and strategies—first, with ears that let the king-to-be’s gentle voice soothe her without regard for meaning, then with growing understanding.
At the end of the first week, she brought her sewing. Megan could be trusted with simple seams and hems and even fill-in embroidery, but Elinor’s own hand was needed for the details of the golden Haldane lion being stitched into a crimson velvet surcoat.
“I cannot wear such a thing,” he said, shaking his head. “It is ostentatious.”
“It is what kings wear. It doesn’t stand for your taste, but for the puissance of your crown.”
“Does King Imre go clothed in velvet and gold?”
Elinor swallowed a laugh accompanied by bile. “Imre layers himself in velvet and silk and gold and pearls and ermine until he seems no more than a naked rat beneath his finery.” She had once thought him handsome. She had once enjoyed the lavish fashions of the court at Valoret. In her trunks there still lay the white velvet and cloth-of-silver gown she should have worn to Yule Court.
“So might I seem also.”
“A simple garment with your arms is no great matter. What did we read two nights ago, about how enemies perceive a king?”
He sighed. “Enemies look at too plain a court as a sign that the treasury is depleted and the king weak. To turn his nobles against him will be an easy matter. But I do not agree with this—”
“I can refuse to embroider any more after this one. One for your coronation is not too much.” Elinor found his constant fretting and questioning an irritant but also a strange relief, like leeches attached to drain a fever. Cathan had moped, but he did not question anything Imre or Camber or anyone asked of him. Had he but questioned Imre’s friendship the little bit necessary to retreat to Caerrorie or Culdi and devote himself to managing their lands…
“I have agreed to nothing, and yet all is under way to see me crowned.”
“They know you will agree. Cinhil.” She used the most unwanted name deliberately but could not bear to watch his reaction.
When they prayed together that night, Elinor was certain she saw a faint golden glow surrounding Cinhil’s head, like the halos when Deryni flared their shields. It might be no more than that—but shields in the presence of God made no sense.
Nor did anything change. They read together. Cinhil prayed and celebrated mass and subjected himself patiently to the endless lectures of the MacRories and the Michaelines. He did not break, nor did he rebel. He simply postponed capitulation, like a maiden refusing to admit herself to be with child until labor pains forced the truth on her.
“You enjoyed being married,” Cinhil said one night. Elinor had moved on to sewing simple dark garments for him—that much, she had been able to achieve.
“I did. I was fortunate. I had two suitors, both young and puissant. It was not difficult to give my heart to one.”
“What is it like? To… give your heart?”
“I enjoyed Cathan’s attention. I thought of him when he was not there.” It would be indelicate to say to any man, much less to a cloistered priest, how she had enjoyed Cathan’s touch and Cathan’s kisses. “We are… he was… Deryni can bond on a level of minds. It can make a happy marriage closer.”
“Surely it then must hurt more to lose a husband you have bonded with thus?”
Any answer must come out as a sob. Elinor reminded herself that Cinhil always had questions, on the simplest and least tactful of things, asked in all innocence. “I don’t know. I have no comparison. I know only that some corner of my soul was ripped from me and buried with my husband.”
“When the sacrament of marriage says two will be made one flesh… does it then extend to being one soul as well?”
This, at least, was a theological problem. Cinhil liked those. He could turn them in his hands like one of the puzzles of interlocking rings given to children, examining every angle before concluding that he could see no solution.
“I feel that it does. And yet there were days when I felt that I did not understand Cathan at all. Those shields, like you have, can be used to shut a person out.”
“My ancestors, sainted and unsainted, took more than one bride if their first queen could not give them living heirs. If two are one soul, I do not see how that could be so.”
The thought of ever marrying again was so repugnant that Elinor’s fingers knotted in her thread firmly enough to break it. “It is not a thing I understand.”
When the silence between them had stretched so far that if it were a ribbon, it would fray asunder, she asked a question that had weighed on her since she became certain of Cinhil’s glow when he prayed. “What is it like to be a priest?”
“How can I make you understand what it’s like to live a life totally devoted to God?”
“How do you know that mine is not devoted to God, in its own way?”
He twitched a little. “I did not mean… but you think of worldly things constantly. You were at court…”
“I did my duty and was fortunate my burdens were light. I continue to do my duty.” Elinor left unsaid that her burdens now felt both unbearably heavy and so entirely shapeless that she was not sure they existed outside of imagination and habit.
“It’s as though you’re shielded in a soft, golden light, floating about a handspan off the ground, and you’re safe from anything that might try to harm you, because you know that He is there, all around you. It’s as though—you reach out with your mind and grasp a beam of sunlight, yet even as you grasp it, it’s all around you. You…”
She let the rhythm of Cinhil’s words wash over her, for the more interesting phenomenon was that the halo she had seen in prayer returned now, a richer gold than the lamp light. A finger on his wrist confirmed that his shields were down—she was no longer rude enough to probe further—so the glow was not shields, not in any Deryni sense.
Before she could withdraw her hand, that golden glow washed up her finger, bringing a strange and unfamiliar peace with it. She was neither grieving nor happy—she was floating, cocooned, immune to pain, enfolded in a solemn joy that asked nothing of her beyond that she simply be.
Some impossible time later, she felt hot tears on her cheeks and realized Brother Benedict had stopped talking.
“You cannot give this up.”
“Earl Camber tells me this is the sacrifice I am called to make.” He wiped her tears with the rough sleeve of his gray robe. “Why do you weep?”
“I felt it. So much peace. I can’t… everything…” She meant to say her grief hurt more sharply now, but this was not true. She both feared to think of grief and was tempted to probe it, like poking a sore tooth with her tongue, to make sure that the pain was still there.
He folded his hands in his lap. “If you can feel it… is it sinful pride that I believed it was the gift of being a priest?”
After matins, surrounded by gentle snoring in the room she shared with Megan and her boys, Elinor stormed the heavens for an answer. Cinhil must rule; Brother Benedict must keep that glow, that peace.
If God answered her prayers, she could not hear him past her inner clamor. Or perhaps he dwelt in the patches of emptiness, and all sound was lost in those voids.
***
If she could have asked anything over the next nights in the library, it was for Brother Benedict to pray continuously with her hands clasped between his.
She did not ask it. He needed to speak of his studies, his internal conflicts, his endless futile resistance to the barrage of pleas from Camber, from Camber’s children, from the head of the Michaelines, from all the competent men who could not solve the problems of Gwynedd without loading them on this one reluctant priest.
Two days before Christmas they told him, in gruesome detail, what Imre did to the humans of Gwynedd. Recounting it, he wept in her arms as if he were no older than Davin.
“The vows I swore say this is no business of mine. What was done to my grandfather’s sisters and brothers… but over and over and over, spilling the blood of innocents. When is it enough?”
She waited until he was settled back in his own chair and could speak without a sob before asking the question that had plagued her for days. “Why do your vows forbid taking action? The Michaelines are both knight and priest.”
“Were I a Michaeline, I might take up sword to right injustice, at the command of my superior. As a king, I take upon myself the decision. I declare myself the most important person in the realm and set myself to get heirs who will partake of my importance solely by virtue of their blood. In the mass, I say Lord, I am not worthy, but if I take the crown, have I not declared myself worthy of God’s special merit?”
“You are more like Camber than I realized.”
“I am nothing like Camber.”
“Has he told you that he was studying to be a priest when he was called back to Culdi to be his father’s heir?”
Cinhil nodded. The faint shadow of lines showed at the corner of his gray eyes—the legacy of wrestling his conscience where once he had known only peace. His hair and beard were almost wild now, and when he turned his back, the white patch of his tonsure was now hidden in new growth.
“He did not abandon the priesthood easily—”
“So he says,” Cinhil said impatiently. “Yet he did it as soon as the letter bearing the news was unfolded in his hand. Camber’s agony of spirit lasted only long enough to figure out where his advantage lay.”
That, Elinor could hardly disagree with. “Perhaps. The similarity of which I speak, you will not like. It pains me to say it…”
“Your honesty is a virtue I cherish in you.”
“You, like Camber, wish to have influence, while leaving responsibility to others.” She wanted to turn her face away, but honesty compelled her to meet Cinhil’s gaze. “You are content to storm the gates of heaven, praying for God to right the injustices of the world, but you will not reach out your hand to take the scepter and crown that would allow you to mend them yourself.”
“Greed for worldly power is a sin.”
“So is sloth.”
He hid his face behind a hand, as was his wont when challenged. “I have always been diligent in my duties.”
“So have I. It did not save me from being torn from my old duties and given new ones.”
“I am but one man. To take up the mantle of kingship—”
“Everyone around you is but one person. Do you think them all mired in sin, when they take up the cause of restoring the house of Haldane?”
He was silent long enough that she knew he wanted to say yes. She knew, also, that he would berate himself for pride in calling the Michaelines a sinful order. Everyone agreed that the Vicar General, Alister Cullen, was a man of surprising gentleness for such a role. Cinhil himself had remarked that Father Cullen seemed to listen to him, while all the others talked over and past and around him.
“Once I agree to be king, my connection to God will be forever changed.”
She could barely bring herself to look at him, so great was the anger roiling within her at those words. I did not agree to be a widow. And it feels like God has abandoned me except when we pray together. Why are you and Camber the only people here who get to choose?
Cinhil jerked as if he’d heard that thought. “Will you pray with me on this, Lady Elinor?”
***
The mood in the haven lightened the next day. Elinor knew, without anyone saying outright—for who would pass on political news to stupid Elinor, who sewed and tended children all day—that Cinhil had accepted his responsibility to be king.
When a page in Michaeline blue called her to follow him, she thought little of it. He guided her to a room in the part of the haven where men made important decisions, so of course, it was full of men, most of them in blue, though Camber was there as well.
So was Cinhil, newly barbered, his neat dark beard and hair making him almost identical to the painting over the fireplace of some past Haldane king. He wore a claret-colored robe that she remembered stitching. He was… elegant. Handsome, even. The very model of a sober prince, nothing like the self-effacing monk she had met in the library three weeks earlier.
“There you are, Elinor,” Camber said, forcing a smile. “What have you been getting up to?”
“Father-in-law?” She looked from Camber to Cinhil, then to the other men in the room, all of whom seemed to be undressing her from her widow’s black. Cinhil seemed to want to meet neither her eyes nor Camber’s.
“Our Haldane prince says he will marry only if the bride is you. A widow of not even a month. Surely there is some mistake, but he says there is not, so we have called you here to explain.”
Elinor wiped damp hands on her skirts. Her throat was dry. She could not—
“Earl Camber, as I have told you, the Lady Elinor is my choice. I have determined I cannot rule without her. It is not your business, nor any man’s, to demand why.”
“You have gone from monk to high-handed prince in a single day,” Camber said with a snort.
“It has taken three weeks and more.” Cinhil came forward to bow before Elinor. “I know your grief is still fresh, but if I am called to new duties, I believe so are you. Will you be my queen?”
“She is a widow,” Joram interrupted. “She could be with child by Cathan still—”
“You know I am not,” Elinor snapped.
Camber shook his head. “Beside the point. Cinhil is to marry Megan de Cameron. She is amply suitable.”
Elinor’s rage uncoiled. “You would send a pretty girl to support a prince so steeped in conscience? She would be nothing more than a royal brood mare.” She had known for what use Megan was intended. She should not feel so ready to slap her father-in-law. But it was wrong—Cinhil would bore and frighten the girl with his endless circling crises of conscience.
“How is it that you know each other well enough to contemplate this choice?” Camber demanded.
She raised her chin. “What answer would satisfy you that we do?”
“You have your heart set on a crown?”
“No more than you do.”
Joram stepped up. “What about Davin and Ansel?”
“What about them? My son Davin will be Earl of Culdi if we win, attainted if we do not.” Elinor pulled her voice down from its climbing pitch. Calm might not convince Camber, but emotions surely would not. “My sons will doubtless be loyal courtiers to their half-brothers, as my husband was to Imre and you were to Blaine.”
She felt faint gold tendrils of peace entwine her hand as Cinhil squeezed it. I have agreed to marry the Haldane heir. Everything—her life with Cathan, her future life with Cinhil—seemed remote. She had always stood here in this room, surrounded by arguing men who thought they could reason her fate into a shape they liked better.
They allowed her to sit when she swayed on her feet. Cinhil stood behind her chair, one hand on her shoulder. He poured her wine after the first hour of arguing. He backed her refusal to leave after the second.
At the end of the third, the argument petered out. Elinor Howell MacRorie was a woman of good birth and proven fertility, still young enough at twenty-three to fill a royal nursery. She could not possibly be pregnant by her first husband, and this was widely known at court. Widows had been given in marriage again as quickly as this before, if it was certain they were not with child. She was free to marry and had consented, as was required by the Church.
“I’m sorry,” Cinhil said when they had all gone. He brought her another glass of wine.
“You surprised me.”
“I did not know, until they told me I must marry a girl barely in her teens, that I could not contemplate marrying anyone but you.”
“What if I had refused?”
“When you said that your only peace came from praying together… I believed you would not.”
But I only thought that. No woman could refuse to marry the king. To be the mother of kings was a sacred duty.
“I am still grieving for my first husband.”
“I am still grieving for my vocation. Perhaps we can help each other.”
***
In the chamber she shared with Megan and her sons, all of whom were absent at their pursuits as if this were any other day, Elinor unpinned her black wimple. If she were to wed tonight, her widow’s garb had no further purpose.
The face that confronted her was paler and thinner than it had been a month ago. The full lips and tilted nose that approached beauty when her cheeks were plump seemed now like a child’s drawing. Her hazel eyes seemed larger beneath brows so pale as to be barely visible. Letting down her coronet of golden braids could conceal the damage of grief—
She looked at the wide band of cloth in her lap, barely visible against the equally dark fabric of her gown. Her marriage with Cathan could not be undone as easily as a length of linen.
“Aunt Elinor!” Megan de Cameron exclaimed as she burst through the door. “It is said that you are to marry the Haldane heir. This surely can’t be—”
“It is. Are you disappointed?”
Megan picked up the comb from the table and busied herself with unplaiting Elinor’s hair. “I would rather marry Jamie Drummond, if Uncle Camber will let me.”
He was once my suitor. It was as simple as that. Let little Megan trade the prospect of a loveless crown for a gentle and doting husband. Let Elinor take up the burden of being queen.
“If you are to marry the Haldane, you can’t be all in black.”
“I have gowns in my trunks.” Elinor took the comb so that Megan could bounce away to rummage through trunks she’d left unopened since she looted them for shifts and other unmentionables… no, since she’d found Cathan’s warding cubes.
“This one—I can’t remember if you ever wore it—”
The gown Megan held up was white velvet and cloth of silver, trimmed in pearls. A gown fit for a princess… Elinor had worn it only once, briefly, when she prepared for a Yule court that turned deadly to her husband.
I cannot. The fabric of her discarded wimple protested beneath her hands. It was entirely ridiculous that Imre could destroy the meaning of a gown for her, that he could simply take her life and happiness because his ancestor had killed a legitimate king of Gwynedd—
“It needed the right occasion,” Elinor said. “I cannot think of a better.”
***
Half an hour before midnight, two women sitting in the listening gallery of the haven’s chapel peered repeatedly through the viewing slits as they waited for hour to arrive. Below, most of the inhabitants of the haven had gathered in the chapel—MacRories and priests and Michaeline knights—and the chapel itself shimmered with the light of many candles. Racks of holly twined candles had been set along the faceted walls—despite Elinor’s being the bride, it had been among her tasks to prepare them. She herself had smoothed the rectangle of Keldish carpet at the foot of the steps, where her husband-to-be would be recognized as heir to the throne of Gwynedd.
She had been spared the task of dressing the altar with evergreen boughs, for the Michaelines were territorial about their jewel box of a chapel, and the bride must have her time to be bathed and anointed with perfumes.
She wore the dress from the disastrous Yule ball, hastily pinned and stitched to fit her more gaunt frame. Her golden hair, washed and brushed smooth, was coiled in a jeweled snood under its crown of rosemary and holly—for she came not to the altar as a maiden.
Evaine, beside her in a blue gown, simmered with disapproval that was at odds with the hushed anticipation below. Davin and Ansel, recruited to carry the silver circlets that would be used until Cinhil could be properly crowned in Valoret, had been dispatched downstairs under the eye of two young Michaelines.
“Cinhil’s choice has nothing to do with my loyalty to your brother,” Elinor said mildly.
“Nor with your loyalty to us, it seems. Will the boys even remember their father?”
“They will remember no more and no less than if I’d stayed a widow forever. Davin is just five, Evaine. He doesn’t know anything except that this is an adventure. Let him have his peace.”
It was midnight. It was Christmas Day. As the door was thrown open and the processional cross appeared, Elinor tried to steady her mind on the meaning of the birth of the Christmas King.
When her sons appeared in the procession, carrying their crown-laded pillows, it was all she could do not to cry. She could not see their expression as they took their position beyond the ceremonial carpet, beside their grandfather and a similarly aged man in archbishop’s attire. Archbishop Anscom of Valoret, her startled memory supplied. We are either betrayed or in very good hands indeed.
Cinhil, in the red surcoat she had embroidered for him, stood through the readings and psalms of Christmas. From the tilt of his head, she guessed he had eyes only for the One on the Cross above him. Was he gathering strength or questioning his decision?
Following the Gospel, Archbishop Anscom said a few words about the burdens and sacrifices of salvation, the joy of innocence, the need for new beginnings. Did Cinhil’s ramrod posture sag beneath the weigh of what he had decided?
For so long that she lost track of the ceremony, Elinor entertained the possibility that the resolute Cinhil of this morning had been an illusion. He would weep, he would refuse, he would run from the chapel—and all of everything would be for nothing.
“Dost thou, then, wish release from these vows, my son?” the archbishop asked. Elinor sucked in an unsteady breath.
“Not for myself, but for the sake of my people, Your Grace.” Cinhil’s voice reverberated in the tiny chapel. “I am the last of my royal line. If I shrink from my… my responsibilities, my people will suffer longer under the tyrant’s heel. Though I entered into my former life whole-heartedly, I am convinced that I may better serve God’s purpose by taking up my birthright and my crown, to free my people from the bondage of conquerors and restore just rule.”
“We thank thee for they former service and release thee from thy vows. Ego te absolvo…”
While the archbishop recited the words of formal release, Elinor shook out her heavy skirts and glided toward the stairs, Evaine behind her. It was time. She knew—and told herself not to care—that all eyes were on her as she walked down the aisle to join her bridegroom.
He, for his part, did not turn to look at her. His gaze remained fixed on the cross. But his hand stole out to clasp hers, and a faint tendril of something—peaceful gold mixed with trembling silver—wrapped her in a fog that kept away the memory of the first time she had stood before an altar to wed.
“I, Cinhil Donal Ifor Haldane, only begotten son of Alroy Haldane who was known in life as Roy Draper and his wife Nellwyn, wittingly and of deliberate mind, having forty-three years completed in this April past, contract marriage with the honorable and noble Elinor Howell MacRorie, widow of Cathan MacRorie, and take said lady for my wife and spouse, all others for her forsake, during her and my lives natural, and thereto I plight and give her my faith and troth.”
His voice shook at only three points, and when she raised her eyes from their joined hands, he was at least looking at her. Not with a smile as Cathan had done—but not with dread or despair. Let us comfort one another.
She stumbled on her own vows only when she called herself widow of Cathan MacRorie and again at Cinhil’s string of royal names. From here, there was no turning back—but there had never been, not since she accepted Cathan’s suit six years ago. Her duties were defined by the decisions of men. She chose only in the interstices of their demands.
Let us comfort one another. The thought this time seemed to come from outside her memory, as Cinhil slid a narrow gold band onto her wedding finger, promising to worship her with his body and to endow her with all his worldly goods (which might be nothing or a kingdom’s treasury, depending).
He was gazing into her eyes now as his fumbling fingers handed her crown of holly to Evaine, then undid her snood, letting her coils of golden hair fall to her waist. The silver circlet he set in place of the holly and rosemary seemed strangely cold. Princess of Gwynedd.
Elinor’s trembling did not stop until she swallowed her sip of communion wine, dissolving the more familiar wafer. Princess of Gwynedd. Cinhil Haldane’s wife.
Where her wedding breakfast with Cathan had passed in a blur of excitement, tonight’s wedding feast seemed to drag. Cinhil was solicitous, if not precisely merry—he blushed at the toasts from Rhys and Camber, but he did not fall back into his shrinking, monkish silence.
Elinor had no bawdy jokes to blush at as Evaine put her to bed. “You know how all this goes, I imagine,” her sister-in-law said coldly.
“I know how to do my duty. Evaine—”
“You can’t help what you are.”
Cinhil was brought to her in his nightrail, looking weak in the knees. They were tucked in together, Archbishop Anscom blessed the nuptial bed, and then the party trailed away to continue elsewhere.
“The thing that comes next…” Cinhil started.
“Consummation.” Elinor propped herself on one elbow to look at him more closely. His skin had a faint sheen of sweat. “I’m not a virgin. There is no bloody sheet to inspect in the morning. No one will know if we consummate the marriage tonight or a month from now.”
He shook his head quickly. “Thinking about it will only make it seem more impossible. I just wish I knew where to begin.”
“Do you know nothing of intimacies between men and women?”
“I have been among priests almost my whole life! Who here is fit to educate me on such a topic?”
Elinor rummaged through the faces of people in the sanctuary, then realized with most of them Michaeline priests, this was a futile endeavor. Joram was a priest. Rhys was unwed, though presumably he knew the mechanics as a healer. Camber… the thought of listening to Camber explain how to deflower a maiden sent her into gut-clenching torrents of laughter.
When she gasped out “Camber… you could have been told of women’s secrets by Camber,” Cinhil joined her in helpless laughter, until they lay panting amid twisted sheets with their foreheads together.
“Earl Camber is, no doubt, not only the realm’s greatest intellectual, courtier, and magician, but also its greatest lover.”
“All the while, having come to his marriage bed with his own regrets for giving up his priestly vows,” Elinor added thoughtfully.
“Do you think he would have admitted it?”
Elinor shook her head. “By now, he has forgotten anything but that he reasoned himself into doing the expedient thing.” She stroked her hand across Cinhil’s chest, inside the loose neck of his shift. “I know how this is done, if you will let me show you.”
There was knowledge she could not bring herself to use, not yet, not with Cathan barely a month buried—but what she did was enough to guide Cinhil in what he must do, until he lay across her, panting and sweat-soaked, a reluctant smile replacing what had, a moment before, been a rictus.
“That… it is like pain and pleasure all bound together… and at the end… I find myself dizzy. Is it thus for women as well?”
“It can be.” She shifted beneath him, so that his weight did not crush her.
“But it was not this time. Will you show me how to make it so?”
She moved his hands away from her body. “Another time. We will… another time. I can’t right now.” And then she burst into bone-wracking sobs—for the satisfaction she had not received, for the memory of everything lost with Cathan, for the dead who had brought her here, for everything that made Elinor, Princess of Gwynedd, wife of Cinhil Haldane foreign to everyone she’d intended to be.
After a while, she let Cinhil hold her—awkwardly at first, then with more assurance as he rubbed her back and murmured words that were probably a litany.
When Camber looked in, much later, he saw Cinhil and Elinor snuggled together, her head on his shoulder. He did not see—nor would he have looked for—any tears.