Free The Quest for Saint Camber by Katherine Kurtz Page A

was a candidate for knighthood two days hence, and had his instructions from Morgan, though he did not know the true reason for them.
    No ceremony attended the entry of king or border lord into the great hall, though individuals noted the king’s passage with informal salute when he passed nearby. Jatham led them briskly down the left side of the hall, intending to take them via a back stair and avoid the more direct and populous route that skirted the gardens—for the previous day’s storm had brought a glorious, sunny day, unusual for March, and half the court had repaired to the garden to enjoy the unseasonable warmth.
    The sunshine had also brought Nigel’s duchess, Meraude, down from the ladies’ solar for the afternoon, to stitch and read with two companions in the good north light. Meraude’s baby daughter Eirian dozed placidly in a basket at her mother’s side. The Princess Janniver tended the baby from time to time, sad-eyed and wistful beneath her mane of yellow curls—Janniver, whom Kelson and his men had been too late to save from dishonor at the hands of Mearan rebels the summer before, now rejected by father and betrothed and left no refuge save the court of Gwynedd. But the other young woman—
    Kelson made himself draw a deep breath and tell himself again that the other one was no more for him than Janniver was. At just seventeen, Rothana of Nur Hallaj was beautiful in a dusky, eastern way that made Kelson’s knees weak if he thought about it too long. Her breeding was impeccable, for she was a princess of the Forcinn and Richenda’s kin by marriage, but she was also Sister Rothana, a novice nun of the Order of Saint Brigid, even if her vows were not yet final.
    She was also Deryni, perhaps as powerful and certainly as self-willed as Morgan’s Richenda, if less thoroughly trained—which made her doubly fascinating to a Deryni king now more than a year a widower from a marriage never consummated and being pressed increasingly by family and royal counselors to take another bride.
    At least Kelson had managed to postpone that inevitability for the moment, ostensibly out of respect for his slain first bride. But to avow that he still mourned his lost Sidana carried less and less weight as the months passed. He continued to wear the ring he had given her—a narrow gold band with a ruby-eyed Haldane lion carved on a facet pared from the top—but it bespoke habit rather than conviction, more than a year after Sidana’s death. Nor had he worn black for her since returning from his Mearan campaign the previous summer, other than to observe the anniversary of her death, in January.
    He had met Rothana on that campaign, while he scoured the Mearan borderlands for traces of his dead bride’s rebellious elder brother. He had first seen her in the desecrated ruins of her abbey as she tried to comfort the weeping Janniver—pale blue habit smudged with soot and her heavy, blue-black hair escaping from a braid as thick as a man’s wrist. Though Rothana herself had been untouched by the raiders, at least in body, her Deryni senses had amplified the terror and humiliation of those around her and left a uniquely Deryni anger.
    But the psychic cost to Rothana had not occurred to Kelson, most interested just then in finding out who had been responsible for the attack. That night, after setting his guards and returning to the abbey church where the remaining sisters had set up a hospice to care for the injured, he had wanted to use his powers to read Janniver’s memory of the attack and perhaps identify her assailant. But Rothana had held that to be too intimate a contact with the already violated princess and had forbidden it—though she did agree to read the memory herself and transmit to Kelson the information he required.
    Only, when she did, she had also given him a taste of the rape from Janniver’s point of view, with all its hurt and