Count Scar - SA by C. Dale Brittain, Robert A. Bouchard Read Free Book Online

he joined the duke when founding this house of ours. Just two months before his end he visited our dear and glorious Master at his place of retirement to discuss the matter. Abbot Caspar, the dean, myself, and several other senior officers joined them there one day and heard all about it. The gift was to establish a memorial for the souls of his dead wife and son, as well as his own, and would have been generous enough to establish an entire new daughter house! But the good old Count Bernhard died suddenly before the firm arrangements for the larger part of this gift could be completed, though title to certain very seemly lands had already passed to us. After a decent interval, our man who was then serving as capellanus at Peyrefixade approached our patron's granddaughter, the new countess, to see if she intended to carry through what her grandfather had proposed to undertake. She demurred, though she did go so far then as to make a modestly handsome gift of her own in order to establish anniversaries for her grandfather and the others I have mentioned."
    "A few months later, however, her seneschal called upon our father the dean to inform him apologetically that half the annual profits from the mill at Riveau-Noir, which the old count had long remitted to our Order in their entirety, would no longer be coming to us." Provost Balaam took up a feather and swept it lightly over the countess's image, murmuring once more. Her image vanished, and the deeply lined face of a man of about fifty, with intelligent, sad eyes, slowly replaced it. "Several such visits and announcements followed over the succeeding months. Soon it became evident to the brother then serving as capellanus to the countess's court that her consort, Lord Tnierri, was prevailing upon her to look on our Order with far less favor than her family had formerly shown."
    He passed the feather across the parchment once more and the seneschals image also dissolved, as the elegant magic patterns shifted the soot to form the face of a courtier in a velvet hat, a fine-boned man with a subtle expression. "Such situations are not uncommon from time to time between an established house and the new heir belonging to a family whose heads have traditionally been patrons, as you know. But it was nonetheless highly distressing. We reasoned with the countess, of course, and for a time we thought the matter had been amicably settled. Then in the autumn we learned to our distress that the countess and her consort were now contemplating bringing a formal dispute before the duke—and if that did not answer, the king!"
    "Yes, even I heard those rumors. But no one in the cloister knew any particulars, so it was hard to be sure how much was real."
    "Oh, it was real enough. They intended to contest all the lands and other properties that the good old count had managed to convey to us just before his death, and even some of his previous patronage as well. Nothing formal had been done in the case at that point, but we received positive information that the entire matter would be placed openly before the duke when the countess and her consort attended his winter court. But the countess, heaven rest her, died first."
    "Heaven rest her indeed." One must say this, or be thought to have presumptuously assumed that the hand of God had intervened in our behalf. "But aside from the fortuitous aspect of the misfortune occurring just at the time, how is our Order's interest affected now?"
    "It is affected because there is a rumor that some form of Magic Arts may have been employed to cause the accident. And that has caused whisperings, and sometimes more than whisperings, in circles where anything to our discredit would be far from unwelcome."
    "But surely the brother who was on the scene at the time must have investigated at once, if magic appeared to be involved! What did he find?"
    "He was given little chance to discover anything. The countess's consort sent him away from Peyrefixade the very