In a Time of Treason - Hardcover

Keck, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765313219 ISBN 13: 9780765313218

Publisher: Tor Books, 2008

Synopsis

David Keck captivated readers with In the Eye of Heaven. Now, he continues the gripping story of Durand Col, a man at the heart of a nation divided.
 
Fighting under the banner of Lord Lamoric, Durand and his companions thwarted a mad duke’s ambition and saved the crown. They have spent the winter counting their last pennies in their master’s gloomy hall and wondering what the coming season will bring.
 
One thing seems certain: the peace they forged cannot hold. Too many barons have plotted against the king, too many strongrooms are empty, and no one truly believes that a simple vote will long deter the brooding Duke of Yrlac.
 
With the advent of spring, the king rails against traitors and flings mad edicts across the land. There is open rebellion in the North. And, the Duke of Yrlac steps over the border of Lamoric’s homeland.
 
Even as Durand fights at Lamoric’s side, his loyalties are increasingly torn. As a knight of Lamoric’s household, he cannot stray far from his master’s wife—the one woman he can neither have nor forget—while siege and sorcery conspire to bring him closer to treason.
 
Can his loyalties survive his divided heart? Can the land of his birth survive the forces that tear it asunder? Can love and loyalty endure in a time of treason?

About this title

About the Author

A native of Canada, David Keck lives in New York City with his wife, the editor and novelist Ann Groell.

Reviews

Equal parts historical fiction and epic medieval fantasy, the second volume of Keck's trilogy (after 2006's In the Eye of Heaven) finds heroic liegeman Durand Col and his liege, Lord Lamoric, invited to the court of King Ragnal to reaffirm their homage oaths along with other noblemen. They get there late, only to find that the paranoid ruler has imprisoned the earlier arrivals and begun a bloody campaign to eradicate traitors. Fleeing, Col finds himself once again battling the opportunistic duke of Yrlac, but the greatest treason of all is perhaps Col's hopeless love for Lamoric's wife. Combining meticulous detail and grand-scale storytelling, Col's mud-covered, flea-ridden adventure succeeds in large part by avoiding the conventions and clichés that doom so many comparable fantasy epics to mediocrity. The less than satisfying ending, however, isn't so much a conclusion as a pause before what should be a momentous third and final novel. (Feb.)
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Chapter 1

 

Durand Col peered up into the vault of Heaven. At long last, the weather had broken, and now was his chance to escape.

His heart jumping, Durand plunged into the gloom of the old stable. His gelding stood with mud to its belly but still looked fit to travel. He would talk to Coensar. He would bid the others goodbye. And he would go. Beyond the narrow yard of Burrstone Walls the roads were drying. With a little luck, he could put Deorwen and Lamoric and the whole mess behind him.

He turned back to the castle yard just as the Heavens opened and the rain thundered down.

“Hells,” he said.

Luck and the weather were not on his side, and so this would be another day to avoid Deorwen, and another hour to keep from Lord Lamoric’s hall. He had a winter’s practice at both.

As he stared into the drenching sky, a voice startled him, close and croaking out, “Durand Col, it is the day and hour of the Accounting. . . .”

It might have been the Voice of Doom, but it was only Father Odwy, the manor priest. The dour old man scowled up at Durand, rain streaming from a beard long enough to tuck in his belt. He was already turning before Durand could make an excuse. The old devil loved his rituals.

“Father, I am sure that one knight more or less will make no—”

A piping whistle escaped the man’s nose and he set a pair of prodigious fists on his hips. “You are the one called Durand, yes? You are part of His Lordship’s household. A knight, I’m told. And every man of the lord’s household must attend before we may begin. It is the Custom. Every man if he must be carted or carried. You’re meant to have been at supper. We’ve already prayed the Sunset. You, sir, are wanted in the bloody hall.”

As the fearsome priest spun on his heel, Durand shot a glance toward the castle gates. He could make out a glimpse of light and freedom from beyond the walls—and the guard pacing across it.

Burrstone Walls made a man feel small. The locals said there were giants at the founding of the ancient pile: chill kings who slipped off into the Halls of Silence in the days before the High Kings came east. It certainly had the look of a giant’s tomb. Whoever built the place had hollowed a stone hill by the river, and now the gutted heart of the old hill was the castle’s long courtyard—more a quarryman’s pit than a yard. Where Durand stood at the bottom of it all, he might have been a worm on the floor of a stone coffin, squinting up through a crack in the lid.

He had spent the winter Moons sleeping on damp rushes in the manor buildings that huddled at the bottom of this stone tomb: the seat of Sir Lamoric, debtor Lord of Burrstone Walls.

Shaking his head, Durand followed the priest.

 

 

The feasting hall of Burrstone Walls was a dank cavern of a place. As Durand stepped in, the assembled household turned his way: This is what had become of the glamorous knights of last autumn’s Red Knight game. Towering Sir Ouen, built like carthorse, with his gilded leer and haystack beard. Stalwart Guthred the shield-bearer, scowling round the thick knuckle of his prodigious nose. One-eyed Sir Berchard, bald and bearded as an innkeeper, with tales of a hundred battles. Sneering Badan, a balding wolf in knight’s breeches. And Coensar, Durand’s captain—like a father since Durand left home. These were men who had saved a kingdom and caught a rebel in his own trap. All sitting like owls in this dripping barn of a hall, waiting on Father Odwy’s Accounting.

At the head of the hall, Lord Lamoric fidgeted, and Coensar raised an amused eyebrow at Durand’s entrance.

At least, Durand thought, Lady Deorwen was not there.

Odwy had hauled tables into a horseshoe with Lamoric trapped in the lord’s seat at the top and himself standing in the middle of it all. Durand slid onto the heel of one bench by one-eyed Berchard. “Still here, are you?” said the grizzled knight. “Ain’t seen you sit down to supper in a fortnight. You—”

Father Odwy twisted and managed a hard look that clapped the old knight’s jaw shut as surely as a good slap. Again the priest’s nose was whistling. “It is time,” he said, smearing the rain from his face with broad fingers. “The men of the household are gathered. The bailiff and reeves have been feasted, meat and wine.” He turned to three squat men at the opposite table. All three grunted a nod.

For a few moments then, there was silence—and dripping. As the silence stretched, the priest raked his sheep-yellow beard and, finally, raised a tufted eyebrow at Lamoric.

“Father, don’t wag your bristles at me. I’ve been pacing this old barn since the Paling Moon, and from the first moment—” But Lamoric stopped himself, taking a breath.

“It’s my turn, is it?” he said.

“Lordship,” croaked the priest.

Lamoric covered his face. “How does it run? What am I to say?”

“By the Silent King of far Heaven . . .” the priest began.

Lamoric raised his hand, and turned to the three villagers. “By the Silent King of far Heaven, by his Queen, by the Warders at the Bright Gates, by the Champion, by his lance, by the chains of the Chainbreaker, by the Maiden of the Spring this Lambing Moon, reeves and bailiff, you must swear to speak no falsehood on this day of the Accounting.”

The priest nodded, turning to the first of the villagers. “Odred the Miller, bailiff to His Lordship’s manor of Burrstone Walls?”

“Aye,” the man grunted. “I swear.”

“Odric, dock master, reeve of Burrstone Landing?”

“Aye, Father. Lordship,” said the next. “I swear it.”

“Odmund, formerly quarryman, now reeve of Burrstone Pits?”

“As you say,” said the last. “I swear.”

“Odred, Odric, and Odmund, Father?” asked Lamoric.

The priest let Lamoric’s question pass and pressed on. They kissed a massive Book of Moons to seal their oaths, planting their lips on a patch of the heavy cover burnished to a high shine by a thousand Accounting oaths.

And the muttered account began.

It was the Lambing Moon, the eve of First Waning, and so the reeves and the bailiff numbered the spindly additions to Lamoric’s flock and enumerated those that had frozen; they announced that a very few calves were expected; they reported that the winter crop in all fields “’twixt Pit and the Burrstone Coppice” had flooded, frozen hard, and would need plowing under for reseeding. It went on.

Durand kneaded his face. All winter, Lamoric had been pacing Burrstone Walls like a dog in a kennel. He was trapped and smothered in the backwater fief. They all were.

The year before, the young lord had planned to show the great ones of the kingdom that he was more than the spoiled second son of the Duke of Gireth. Fighting as the nameless “Red Knight,” he’d led his hand-picked band of men from tilt to tilt until they were fighting before the king at the cliffs of Tern Gyre. But, at Tern Gyre, there had been more at stake than one man’s reputation. In the end, Lamoric and Durand and the others managed to scotch a rebellion. The king kept his crown, and the rebel duke—Radomor of Yrlac—was left to slink home, looking like a fool.

The whole adventure ought to have made their fortunes, but times were hard for kings in Errest, and Lamoric had only kept the Burrstones through weighty loans from his elder brother in Acconel. And with grim winters like these, a hundred years must pass before Lamoric could repay the debt.

The game was over. A pauper lord could not keep a troop of knights. The men must spring from him like fleas from a dead hound.

“And last night,” mumbled Odred Miller, bailiff to Burrstone Walls, “Odwin’s lad Gil saw the frogspawn in the quarry at Burrstone Pit.”

Lamoric twisted in his chair. “Frogspawn?”

Odred Miller grunted affirmation.

Lamoric turned to the priest. “Why in Heaven’s name would this man—Odmund Miller?—report the carnal activities of these creatures to me?” They had ridden to Tern Gyre. They had fought the Duke of Yrlac and saved the Evenstar Crown for the king anointed by the Patriarchs. “Are we keeping a flock of amphibians for—”

“Frogspawn is the customary sign, Lordship. In the pit. Frogspawn being seen, the villagers will make the teams ready for the Plow Chase. The children climb down to look for it. This year the Chase comes later than most, but tomorrow Walls, Pits, and Landing will set their best teams against each other to—”

“I see.”

“And this is Miller Odred. Miller Odmund died in my father’s day, buried with his quern and apron in the last years of old King Carondas.”

Lamoric mashed his hands over his eyes. “A man to be envied, that Odmund Miller.” The reeves and bailiff exchanged glances: a slow matter involving much blinking of dark eyes.

The list went on. “The damp spoiled the seed rye in Burrstone Walls, the great quarry at Burrstone Pits has flooded to one fathom’s depth at the place of deepest delving,” said one reeve.

“I find that I cannot br...

Edition details

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0765313219
• ISBN 13: 9780765313218
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352