"Katherine Kurtz - Kelson 1 - The Bishop's Heir" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kurtz Katherine)

THE BISHOP'S HEIR
PROLOGUE
And he put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and was clad with zeal
for a cloak.
- Isaiah 59:17
Edmund Loris, once the Archbishop of Valoret and Primate of All Gwynedd,
stared out to sea through the salt-smeared windowpanes of his tower prison and
allowed himself a thin smile. The rare display of self-indulgence did nothing
to diminish the fury of the wind shrilling at the ill-fitted glass, but the
letter secreted in the breviary under his arm gave its own grim comfort. The
offer was princely, befitting even the exalted status he had enjoyed before
his fall.
Exhaling softly of his long-hoarded bitterness, Loris bowed his head and
shifted the book to hold it in both hands, wary lest the gesture seem to make
it too precious in the eyes of his jailers, who could look in on him at any
time. For two years now they had kept him here against his will. For two years
his existence had been defined by the walls of this monastic cell and the
token participation permitted him in the life of the rest of the abbey: daily
attendance at Mass and Vespers, always in the company of two silent and all-
too-attentive monks, and access to a confessor once each month - seldom the
same man twice, and never the same one any two months in succession. Were it
not for one of the lay brothers who brought his meals, whose fondness for
intrigue Loris had early discovered, he would have had no contact whatsoever
with the outside world.
The outside world - how he longed for it again! The two years spent in
Saint Iveagh's were but an extension of the outrage which had begun a full
year before that, with the death of King Brion. On just such a chill November
day as this had Brion Haldane met his doom - blasted from life by the hell-
spawned magic of a Deryni sorceress, but leaving an unexpected legacy of
forbidden powers to his son and heir, the fourteen-year-old Kelson.
Nor had young Kelson hesitated to seize his unholy patrimony and use it
to overturn almost everything Loris held sacred, not the least of which was
the Church's stand against the use of magic in whatever form. And all of this
had been done under the guise of his "Divine right" to rule and his sacred
duty to protect his people - though how a king could justify consorting with
the powers of evil to effect that protection was beyond Loris' comprehension.
By the end of the following summer, with the help of the Deryni heretics
Morgan and McLain, Kelson had even managed to turn most of Loris' fellow
bishops against him. Only the ailing Corrigan had remained true - and his
faithful heart had given out before he could be subjected to the humiliation
Loris finally endured. The rebel bishops actually believed they had done a
great kindness by allowing Loris to attend the travesty of a trial at which
they stripped away his offices and banished him to a life of forced
contemplation.
Bitter still, but heartened by the prospect of a chance to set things
right, the former archbishop tapped the edge of his book lightly against his
lips and thought about its secret contents - yet another communication from
folk with similar cause to feel uneasy at what the new king had wrought. The
wind whining in the roof slates of Saint Iveagh's sea-girt towers sang of the
freedom of the open seas whence it came, bearing the tang of salt air and the