Free Camber of Culdi by Katherine Kurtz Page B

have a chance. And it’s not as if they’ve even done something wrong. They just happen to live in the wrong village. The Truth-Readers know that they’re innocent.”
    Guaire snorted derisively. “You don’t have to convince me. I’m on your side. But you know the answer to that argument as well as I—probably better. What does a Deryni king care for the lives of a few dozen peasants, when a fellow Deryni has been killed? Especially when the peasants are human, and the Deryni was of the nobility.”
    â€œHe was a rotten man, Guaire, and you know it.”
    â€œGranted, he was a rotten man. But he was still Deryni, and of the nobility, and his murderer has not come forth or been found. Imre is simply following the law set down by his grandfather. Fifty human hostages against the life of one Deryni—it’s about even, as far as Imre is concerned. Back in the days of the original coup, it was the price one had to pay for conquest. Today—Well, apparently it’s the price Imre feels he has to pay to hold the conquest for his descendants.” Guaire snickered, a lewd glint in his eyes. “At least, that’s the theory. He’s not likely to have any descendants, at his rate.”
    Cathan looked at Guaire sharply and was about to probe further on the meaning of that last comment, when the trumpeters raised their instruments and blew a preliminary fanfare. From the opposite end of the hall, a double line of guardsmen in formal brown and gold cleared a swath through the center of the room and took up their stations behind the twin thrones. Then the trumpets were raised once more, the golden notes reverberating across the hall as the door fanned apart to disclose the king: Imre of Festil, by the Grace of God King of Gwynedd and Lord of Mooryn and Meara. At his side stood his sister, Ariella, six years his senior and yet unwed.
    The two posed in the doorway for effect until the fanfare had died away, light glowing around their heads in arcane splendor, as High Deryni were wont to appear on formal occasions. Then, with a nod of acknowledgment, they began to pass slowly toward the thrones at the opposite end of the hall, courtiers and their ladies bending like wheat in the breeze of the royal couple’s passage. Whatever might be their other faults, no one could say that the scions of the Deryni House of Festil did not know how to maximize an entrance.
    Imre himself was a striking young man, for all that he was of small stature and relatively few years. Shorter by half a head than most of the men in the room, yet he still cut a regal figure as he and his sister traversed the hall. On his head was a tall crown of gold filigree set with rubies, cunningly wrought to add unobtrusive inches to his height and blazing in the glow of his nimbus of power. His hair was of a deep chestnut hue, cropped shoulder length, surrounding lively brown eyes which bulged slightly in a pleasant, albeit somewhat vacant, face. A short, skin-tight tunic of brown velvet revealed every line of the hard, young body and emphasized a pair of well-turned legs encased in brown silken hose; he wore leather dancing slippers on his feet. A gold-and-amber cloak lined with red fox brushed the floor behind him as he mounted the two steps of the dais, and bright gems winked on slender fingers and at throat and ears.
    On his arm walked his sister, Ariella, every inch his match and more in beauty and sheer visual splendor. Gowned in dark brown velvet stamped with gold, the perfection of her form was captured in a supple flow of color from neck to wrist to slippered toe, save where the neckline made a plunging V to caress the curve of her breasts. A tawny jewel lay a-tremble in the hollow of the cleft; a tumble of chestnut curls cascaded negligently over one shoulder where they had escaped from beneath her coronet and veil.
    Her quick hazel eyes missed nothing as she and her royal brother took their places on the