It had begun at midday. The riders of Prince Nigel Haldane, uncle to the boy-king Kelson, had approached the outskirts of the village just past noon, royal lion banners billowing crimson and gold in the noonday sun, the horses sweating lightly in the early summer heat. It was only an advance guard, the prince had said. He and his troop of thirty were merely to scout a route for the royal army’s march toward Coroth to the east—no more.

For the city of Coroth, seat of local government for the rebellious Duchy of Corwyn, was in the hands of the insurgent archbishops, Loris and Corrigan. And the archbishops, aided and supported by the zealot rebel leader Warin and his followers, were urging a new persecution of the Deryni: a race of powerful sorcerers who had once ruled all the Eleven Kingdoms; the Deryni: long feared, long suppressed, and now personified by Corwyn’s half-Deryni Duke Alaric Morgan, whom the archbishops had excommunicated for his Deryni heresy but three months before.

Prince Nigel had tried to reassure the folk of Jennan Vale. He had reminded them that the king’s men did not plunder and pillage in their own lands; young Kelson forbade it, as had his father and Nigel’s brother, the late King Brion. Nor was Duke Alaric a threat to the peace of the Eleven Kingdoms—even if the archbishops had ruled otherwise. The belief that the Deryni as a race were evil was superstitious nonsense! Brion himself, though not Deryni, had trusted Morgan with his life, time and again, and had so esteemed the Deryni lord that he had created him King’s Champion, over the objections of his Royal Council. There was no shred of evidence that Morgan had ever betrayed that trust, then or now.

But the Vale-folk would not listen. The revelation of Kelson’s own half-Deryni ancestry at his coronation the previous fall, though unknown even to Kelson before that day, had opened the door of distrust for the royal Haldane line—a distrust that had not been eased by the young king’s dogged support of the heretic Duke Alaric and his priest-cousin, Duncan McLain, now revealed as Deryni himself.

Even now it was rumored that the king still protected Duke Alaric and McLain; that the king himself had been excommunicated as a result; that he and the hated duke and a host of other Deryni planned to march on Coroth and break the back of the anti-Deryni movement by destroying Loris and Corrigan and the beloved Warin. Why, Warin himself had predicted it.

So the local partisans had led Prince Nigel’s troops the long way around Jennan Vale, luring them with the promise of ample water and grazing for the royal armies that would follow. In the fields green with half-ripe wheat and oats, the rebels had fallen on the troops in ambush, cutting a swath of death and destruction through the surprised royalist ranks. By the time the king’s men could disengage and retreat with their wounded, more than a score of knights, rebels, and warhorses lay dead or dying, the lion banners stained and trampled amidst the ripening grain.