Spoiler and reading-order note: this is the fifth book about Kelson, after Deryni Rising, Deryni Checkmate, High Deryni, and The Bishop’s Heir, and it picks up four months after that last one ends. Read the first trilogy before this, or at least Deryni Rising. This review gives away the plot of The King’s Justice and the ending of The Bishop’s Heir.
King Kelson Haldane spent four books being the merciful one. In The King’s Justice he quits, and watching him do it is the best character work Kurtz has given us so far.
The book opens in May 1124. Kelson is seventeen and about to march an army into the province of Meara, where Queen Caitrin, the Mearan Pretender, is leading a violent secession. She has an ally in Edmund Loris, the former Archbishop of Valoret, the anti-Deryni fanatic who slipped away after Kelson spared him at the end of the original trilogy. Caitrin supplies the soldiers and Loris supplies a holy war against the Deryni, which gives Kelson a rebellion and a crusade to put down at the same time. With the king gone from court, his uncle holds the realm and an assassination plot starts to form behind him.
The first third is slow. Kurtz introduces a crowd of characters in a stretch of meetings and ceremonies, and I started to worry this would turn into the late Anne McCaffrey problem, where a Pern or Talent book hands you a dozen threads and no reason to care about the pattern. It does not go that way. The setup has a purpose, and around the one-third mark Kurtz opens the throttle and holds it there until the last page.
The army splits. Kelson and Morgan chase Caitrin’s son, Prince Ithel, through the south, and every village Ithel leaves behind (the rapes, the burning) feeds Kelson’s anger. In the north, Duncan and Dhugal hunt Loris and Caitrin’s husband, Sicard MacArdry, who keep slipping out of reach. Then Loris catches Duncan. He tortures the Deryni bishop and mutilates him to force a confession of heresy, and the stake is ready when Dhugal reaches Kelson across the distance and tells him where Duncan is. Kelson marches his army through the night and arrives with Loris about to light the fire. Kelson and Morgan shield Duncan with their own powers, and Dhugal is the one who pulls him free. Kelson corners Sicard, who refuses to surrender. When the city falls, Loris and his aide, Monsignor Gorony, are executed.
The Duncan sequence kept me holding my breath. Kurtz has shown she will kill almost anyone, and after Checkmate’s body count I was sure she meant to kill him here. She doesn’t, though what she puts him through is hard to read.
Kelson drives all of it. At the end of The Bishop’s Heir he watched his intended bride murdered in front of him by a Mearan prince, and the king in this book carries that. He gives the rebels no mercy because he cannot afford another rebellion, and the book lets us see the cost of that choice in his decisions. Kurtz does not pretend it is clean.
The ending makes the point. The last of Caitrin’s line is her brother Judhael, a priest who had betrayed Kelson. Kelson is ready to show him mercy and makes a move toward it. Judhael is honorable enough to know it cannot be done, that a living claimant is a banner for the next rebellion, and he accepts that he has to die. It is a quiet, brutal scene and a touching one, and it gives the title its meaning: justice here is something the king has to carry out whether he wants to or not.
The Locus readers’ poll in 1986 ranked it sixth among fantasy novels, ahead of Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree, and I understand why. The tone is dark. It contains rape, torture, and summary execution, and the book treats all of it seriously. Some of the meetings and mind-reading sequences still stretch the pace in the early going.
This is my favorite of the series so far. The Bishop’s Heir sets the rebellion up and this book finishes it, so the two read as a single story, while the next book goes somewhere else. If you have read the first trilogy and care about Kelson, Morgan, Duncan, and Dhugal, you will care a great deal about what happens to them here.
9.5/10