In the King's Service by Katherine Kurtz Read Free Book Online Page A

the cathedral crypt.
    At least we’ll not have to contend with pious monks, Michon retorted. And it will take a few days or even weeks to prepare the tomb.
    Risky, still.
    But needful, Michon replied. I did not like what I sensed.

Chapter 3
    “Yet shall he be brought to the grave, and shall remain in the tomb.”
    —JOB 21:32
     
 
 
 
 
 
GIVEN that the deceased had been one of the king’s most senior ministers, no one thought it unusual that he was accorded a funeral all but semi-state in its dignity. Indeed, as a single muffled bell tolled its summons in the cathedral tower the next morning, a sizeable segment of the court came to pay their respects to the king’s good servant, Sir Sief MacAthan, cruelly betrayed by a treacherous heart while still rejoicing in the birth of his long-awaited son.
    His widow led the mourners on behalf of that son, along with three of the dead man’s daughters who knelt like stair-steps beside the coffin now closed and covered with a heavy funeral pall: the two little ones, Jesiana and Seffira, and an older girl christened Jessilde but now called Sister Iris Jessilde, whose rainbow-edged white veil and sky-blue robes proclaimed her a novice nun of the royal Convent of Notre Dame d’Arc-en-Ciel, just outside Rhemuth.
    The fourth and eldest of Sief’s surviving daughters was not present: Sieffany, who lived many days’ ride to the west with her husband and young family. Contentedly wed to a son of Michon de Courcy, Sieffany might have heard the news by now—Jessamy had caught a glimpse of Michon himself, as she entered the cathedral. But even if Sieffany knew, her attendance at the funeral would have been far too dangerous even to consider; for only through Deryni auspices could she have learned of the event so quickly, and only by the use of a Portal could she have reached Rhemuth in time. In the prevailing climate regarding Deryni, it was best that humans were not reminded that such things even existed.
    That had not deterred some of those now assembling. From where Jessamy sat behind her daughters, black-gowned and heavily veiled, she was able to single out several whom she recognized as being friends of her father’s, all those years ago, some undoubtedly come by way of Portal—little though the rest of the mourners would realize that. She knew of several Portals in and around Rhemuth. One lay within the precincts of this very cathedral.
    Strangely enough, she found that the presence of these men no longer frightened her the way it once would have done. She wondered whether she still frightened them. For her own part, she found that with Sief’s death had come a lightening of many of the constraints by which he had bound her—or by which she had felt herself bound—and her status as a grieving widow would give her added protection that had not existed while Sief still lived. Let them think what they liked—that she was the renegade daughter of a renegade Deryni—but she would take many secrets to her grave, just as her husband was taking his secrets to his.
    The muffled bell ceased its tolling, the last strike lingering on the silence. At the thud of a verger’s staff on the floor in the west, the congregation rose as the king’s council and then the king himself entered the cathedral, all of them in black, the black-clad queen and her ladies also in dutiful attendance. Following them came the cathedral choristers, who began the solemn chant of the introit: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. . . .” Then the processional cross and torch-bearers, a thurifer, and finally the celebrants for the Requiem Mass now beginning, the archbishop himself to preside.
    Jessamy waited until the king’s party had reached the transept crossing before tottering to her feet. Having risen from childbed to be present, she was content to let observers think she was weaker than she was, affecting to lean on the arm of the maid who had accompanied her. She had