However, the meaning was clear enough. Kelson caught the worried look shot across to Duncan, saw the priest’s lips tighten in anger as he realized what Derry had told. Charissa was coming. Derry had sighted her entourage from the bell tower. They had perhaps ten minutes before the ultimate confrontation.

The prayers for the king ended without Kelson having heard a word of them, and the two prelates again led him before the high altar, this time so that he might prostrate himself preparatory to the consecration.

The choir began to sing another anthem as Kelson laid himself prostrate on the carpet before the high altar. The long ivory mantle covered all but his head and the tips of his boots as he lay there. All his clergy knelt around him, their lips moving in prayer.

Kelson clenched his clasped hands even tighter and prayed for strength, feeling the icy touch of foreboding at the back of his neck, trying to tell himself he would be safe, that he could stand against whatever the Shadowed One chose to try against the rightful King of Gwynedd.

The hymn ended, and the prelates raised Kelson to his feet and divested him of the ivory mantle. Then, as the four knights with the canopy moved into place, Kelson knelt once more on the altar steps to receive the marks of chrism that would make him the rightly anointed King of Gwynedd.

Morgan watched proudly as Kelson was anointed on head, hands, and breast, tried not to be anxious about the presence he knew was even now approaching the cathedral. As the anointing concluded, and the choir broke into the strains of another hymn, Morgan strained to hear what was happening outside, stiffened slightly as the sounds of liturgical ceremony were joined by the ghostly echo of steel-shod hooves ringing cold against the cobbled street outside.

Kelson rose to be invested with the symbols of his office. Priests fastened the crimson jeweled robe of state around his shoulders, touched his heels with golden spurs. As chain mail clanked against naked steel beyond the heavy doors of the cathedral, Archbishop Corrigan took the Ring of Fire from Duncan, murmured a blessing over it, held it aloft for an instant, slipped it on Kelson’s left forefinger.

Then he motioned Morgan forward with the Sword of State.

It was the moment Morgan had been waiting for, for even with the Ring of Fire on Kelson’s hand, there could be no magic until Kelson was sealed by the Sign of the Defender. Making his way to Kelson’s side, he unsheathed the great sword and gave it into Corrigan’s hands, watched anxiously as the archbishop prayed that the sword be ever used to dispense justice.