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

cries of the wheeling gulls that circled the abbey during all but the darkest
hours of night, and for the first time since his imprisonment, Loris allowed
himself to hope that he, too, might soon be free. For many, many months, he
had feared never to taste freedom again except in death.
Oh, he was not fool enough to think there would not be a price - but he
could afford to promise anything, for now. With care and craft, he might play
more than one side to his advantage, perhaps eventually becoming even more
powerful than before his fall. Then he would make himself the instrument of
God's retribution, driving the cursed Deryni from the land once and for all.
And the Deryni taint was in the very blood of the king - perhaps in all
the Haldane line, not in Kelson alone. In the very beginning, Loris had
thought Kelson's forbidden magic strictly the legacy of his Deryni mother -
that poor, conscience-hounded lady who even now kept strict seclusion in
another remote abbey, praying for the soul of her Deryni son as well as her
own and devoting her life to penance for the evil she carried. She had
confessed her guilt before them all, that solemn day of Kelson's coronation,
prepared to sacrifice life and even soul to protect him from the sorceress who
had already been responsible for his father's death.
But Queen Jehana, though she had the will, had not the power to fight
Kelson's battle for him; and in the end, the young king had had to face the
challenge with his own resources - prodigious resources, as it happened,
easily equal to the challenge, but frightening in their implications. While
granting that his mother's Deryni blood might have made its contribution.
Kelson had publicly claimed sacred right as the source of his newfound
abilities. Loris had feared otherwise, even at the time, for he remembered
stories about the boy's father.
In fact, the more Loris thought on it - and he had had ample time for
that in the last two years - the more convinced he became that Brion and
hitherto unsuspected Deryni ancestors were as much to blame for Kelson's
condition as Jehana. The full extent of the taint could only be guessed.
Certainly both Brion and his father before him had harbored Deryni at court
from time to time. The detested Morgan and McLain were but the most recent and
blatant of many such - and the latter a priest all the while, hypocrite to the
core - on both of whom Loris wished only the vilest of fates, for the two
were largely responsible for his present situation.
As for Brion, who could deny that the late king once had faced and
killed a Deryni sorcerer in single combat? Loris, then but a parish priest of
rising prominence, had heard of the incident only at second and third hand,
but even in the first throes of public jubilation at the king's victory, he
had been chilled by the recurring suggestion that Brion's opponent, father to
the woman eventually responsible for his death, had fallen not alone to
Brion's sword but to strange powers wielded by the king himself. In the
taverns for months afterward, haunted eyewitnesses with tongues loosened by
ale whispered fearfully of magic worked upon the king by young Morgan before
that fateful confrontation - the unleashing of awesome forces which Brion said
were benign, the royal legacy of his father - but even that admission cast
grave suspicions on the king, so far as Loris was concerned. Though a man of
honest if rigid religious conviction, he was not naive enough to concede that
purity of intent and fervence of faith - or Divine favor to an anointed king -
had been Brion's salvation, though he kept his misgivings to himself so long