Behold the Dawn (37 page)

“Then leave! Leave
now
!”

Marek’s eyes, wide and surprised, found Annan’s through the doorway, and Annan had just enough time to see the lad slam Douglass’s back against the door of a cell and break free of the jailer’s bear grip. They both fell to the ground, Marek scrambling once again for his sword. Douglass rolled over and grabbed the lad by the ankles, his own sword coming up once and falling against Marek’s head. The lad jerked stiff, then collapsed.

“Behind you!” Mairead shouted, and Annan turned in time for Hugh’s lowered shoulder to crunch against his ribcage. Air exploded from his lungs. The shoulder he had injured in Acre struck the damp stone of the floor, and he felt something pop within the healing tissue.

Fighting for a breath that refused to come, he rolled onto his back, hands rising to protect his face.

“Hold him!” Hugh rasped.

One of Esmè’s knees dropped onto Annan’s chest. Fingers closed themselves in his throat. Mist the color of bruise and ash swam before his vision, filled his ears, clogged his senses.

Somewhere in the background, he could hear Mairead screaming for Marek to come, screaming they would kill him.

Then the pitch of her cries changed. And then they went silent.

His heart stopped beating. A crackle, like lightning against water, seemed to chase the blood from his veins.

“Turn him around!” Hugh demanded.

The weight of Esmè’s knee lifted from his chest. His grip on Annan’s throat released for a moment only to be replaced by the crook of his elbow as he hauled Annan onto his knees and shoved him around.

Mairead lay flat on the bed where Esmè had dropped her, her hands clutching the neckline of her bodice. Hugh stood over her, facing Annan, his hand clamped on her neck, holding her down. “Now,” he panted, “witness.”

Annan’s eyes fell closed. Fire filled his body.

Esmè looked over his shoulder to check on the jailer behind them. And in that instance, Annan smashed his elbow into the knight’s ribs, yanked himself free of the collaring elbow, and lunged for his sword. He spun to his feet, both hips thudding pain. He hefted the sword like a
poleax
and swung almost before Hugh realized he had gotten free. The blade’s honed edge caught bone just beneath the shoulder joint and cleaved through. Hugh shouted and fell beside his severed arm, his torso divided in half, even unto his breastbone.

Annan left him choking on wet curses and writhing in the flow of his own blood like the filthy worm he was. He would be dead within moments.

Slowly, he lifted his eyes to Mairead’s. She had sat up and was huddled against the cold of the wall. Her chin trembled.

He coughed against the ache of his throat and took one stuttering step toward her.

And then the rest of the noises he had been forcing into the back of his brain suddenly swelled into the clatter of weapons and booted feet. And voices: “Lord Hugh!” “Sir Esmè?” “They are in the Countess of Keaton’s cell.”

That
voice he knew. He swung his aching body around to see armed men choking the passage. Four burst through the cell door and took in the scene at a glance. “Don’t move!”

He lifted the sword in front of his face. His breath rasped its way out of his mouth as two of the knights charged.

“Let us return to St. Dunstan’s, Marcus Annan,” said the voice of Gethin the Baptist, and Annan looked at the hooded figure standing in the doorway, crucifix gleaming against his chest in the torchlight.

He had just enough time to see Gethin smile before the knights closed in. A rush of air heralded the crashing of something cold and hard against the back of his skull.

Mairead gasped as Annan staggered forward and fell to one knee. In the moment when his attention had been distracted by the voice from outside the cell, one of the knights had struck him with the flat of his blade. The guards fell upon him, tearing his sword from his grip, twisting his arms behind his back. He rumbled in pain, like a wounded lion, but he didn’t fight. His head nodded, his chin brushing the collar of his tunic.

She pushed away from the wall and flung herself at him. “No! Don’t kill him! God, my God—don’t let them kill him!”

The nearest man-at-arms, a lanky Syrian with a wind-chapped face, caught her before she could reach him. Her fingers tore at him frantically. Had Hugh been right after all? Would they cut Annan down before her very eyes?

The man-at-arms muttered a curse in French and clamped both of her hands inside his larger one.

“Annan—!”

He tried to bob his head up and turn in her direction, the muscles of his arms straining. Someone hit him across the face, but that only seemed to clear the grog from his head. His face came up, blue eyes glaring death. The man-at-arms hit him again, and this time he sagged. “Scottish filth.”

Beneath its tentative covering of congealing flesh, Mairead’s wounded side pulsed.

“Fear not, Countess. They only take the precautions his reputation requires.”

She flinched. It was the Baptist. The same Baptist whom Annan had risked his life to save? He had let these soldiers do this? He had betrayed them? She strained against the Syrian who held her, and at a motion from the monk, the man released her hands.

She stared at the Baptist. “I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

Two knights hooked their hands under Annan’s arms and dragged him from the cell.

Her heart hurled itself against her ribs. “Where are they going?”

“I will show you.” The Baptist stepped forward, hand outstretched, then stopped, seeing for the first time Hugh’s body where it lay behind her.

She didn’t follow his gaze. She didn’t want to see. He was dead. That was all that mattered. Never again could he touch her.

“Well,” said the monk. “Perhaps he knows a thing about justice after all.” Falcon-sharp eyes lifted to meet hers, and he smiled. “That is most encouraging.”

A cold worm wriggled down the back of her bodice. “What do you mean?”

He came one step closer, scooped her up in arms that were shockingly solid, and carried her from the cell, his broken gait jostling her with every step. They passed through the cellblock, crowded as it was with soldiers. Marek, still unconscious, had been dragged into a cell.

The Baptist did not pause. They reached the stairs, and he started climbing, dragging himself up one step after the other. They kept going until they reached the main level, found another set of steps and climbed again. And again.

At every level, at every open window, she heard the restless sounds of an army gathering for battle. They passed an unshuttered eastern window, and she shivered at the rim of evanescent gray against the black horizon. Jaffa would be under siege ere dawn.

They reached the third floor, and Bishop Roderic’s voice broke through the increasing buzz from beyond the city walls.

“What is the meaning of this? How did he get within these walls? How? Tell me
how
!”

“We meet again, Father.” Annan’s voice was throaty, hoarse. By the sound of it, Esmè had come near to crushing his windpipe.

“Aye, we meet again, tourneyer. Though I doubt circumstances such as these were in your plans.”

“Not my plans, Bishop. Veritas’s.”

The bishop paused fully long enough for the Baptist to complete two steps down the hallway. “What?”

Another voice offered, “A monk by that name came to our quarters. He told us a man had forced his way into the dungeon.”

“Monk? What monk?”

The Baptist rounded the corner of the doorframe and stopped, feet spread. Bishop Roderic, clad in
cassock
and yellow shawl, stood beside a huge central chair of scarlet and oak. Annan was on his knees between the men-at-arms who had borne him hither.

“This monk, Bishop,” said the Baptist.

All four men snapped around to look. Annan started up at the sight of Mairead in the Baptist’s arms, but he was forced back down. He quivered under the pressure of the men-at-arm’s hands.

“Who are you?” Roderic demanded. One hand darted for the jeweled crucifix upon his breast; he rubbed it as if he thought it some kind of charm.

The Baptist shrugged, his broad chest shifting against Mairead’s side. “I am called many things.” He nodded to the soldiers. “
They
know me as Veritas.”

Roderic panted. “Is this true?”

The Baptist continued, uninterrupted, with a gesture to Annan. “He would know me as something else. And she—” He hefted Mairead a little in his arms. “Ask the Countess of Keaton who she knows me as.”

Roderic’s pale eyes darted to her. A hunger filled them—a desperate, fearful hunger. She faltered. This man was an enemy, and the Baptist... she had thought the Baptist was a friend. Her eyes crept to where Annan knelt, his eyes closed. Nay, the Baptist was no friend.

“Speak!” Roderic thundered.

She raised her chin and stared into the bishop’s face. “He is the Baptist.”

His Grace jerked as if he had been shot. “That cannot be.”

“Can’t it?” The Baptist laughed. “Do not fear me, Bishop. Everything I have done has been to bring to you the one man in all the earth who knows where to find Matthias of Claidmore.”

Roderic stirred. His fingers dropped from the crucifix and gestured to the soldiers. “Leave us.” The hand remained aloft. “But first, give me a sword.”

The indicated man-at-arms hesitated, then gave him the hilt of his one-handed sword. The Baptist stepped out of the doorway to let them pass and kept walking until he reached one of the long windows flanking Roderic’s throne. He dropped Mairead to her feet and turned away without a second glance.

She buried her hand in the ruddy folds of the curtain and braced against the windowframe.

Outside, red burned into the wispy gray of the skyline. An armored horse galloped through the street beneath, and in the plains beyond the walls, the bedlam of a thousand instruments—conch horn and
shawm
,
nakers
and cymbal—began their rhythm. And below, as if the whole city had suddenly ignited with the same spark, the Christians began to fidget, to call, to worry.

She turned away. Her hand trembled as she lifted it to cross herself.
Heaven preserve us—from the wicked that oppress us, from our deadly enemies, from those who compass us about…

Annan knelt on aching hips, his eyes closed, head bowed, listening to Gethin’s laughter. How far they all had fallen. He had known this moment was coming. He had waited for it, tried to brace himself against the base treachery of it. But it still felt like a mace shattering his bones.

“I have baited your trap for you, Bishop,” Gethin said.

Annan opened his eyes to find the Baptist extending a hand in his direction, as if introducing nobility. “Gethin—”

In front of them both, Roderic stood, sword hanging at his side, chest heaving. Behind him, the howl of war—the clangor of iron, the thunder of war mares’ feet, the screams and the drums of the Moslem hordes—rose with the sun.

Roderic stared at Annan, his face twisting. “The very first time I saw you, I knew in the marrow of my bones you were dangerous. How I knew it, I cannot tell, but I did. And I was a fool to ignore it!”

Annan let his lids fall half closed. The bishop
still
didn’t know how deeply they were all sunk in Gethin’s treachery, still didn’t understand how vast a web had been spun by his sins from long ago.

“But I will ignore it no longer.” The bones of Roderic’s sword hand jutted against his skin. “Your perfidy has come to an end, Sir Knight. Now it is your fate in my hand, and not the other way around. You
will
give me Matthias of Claidmore, and we will put an end to this.”

In the corner, enveloped in the aureole of morning light, Mairead stirred.

Laughter, cold and bitter, rose in Annan’s mouth. “Nay, Bishop.
That
battle is one that neither you nor the Baptist will win.” He glanced to where Gethin waited in passive assurance.

Roderic flung his arm in Mairead’s direction. “Deliver him to me, and I will spare the countess’s life.”

She didn’t flinch, but her knuckles burned white within the blood-red folds of the curtain. She bit her lower lip, and Annan’s chest tightened. “Matthias is dead.”

Gethin folded his arms into his sleeves. “Nay. He is not.”

Roderic hissed. “Mark me and mark me well.” The skin of his face, grayer even than usual, drew taut across his cheekbones. “If Matthias of Claidmore is not on his knees to me—even as you are now—before the Christians have departed Jaffa, I will give your wife over to Lord Hugh.”

Annan growled. “Lord Hugh’s dead.”

“Then I will kill her myself!”

“Nay, you will not!” His breath quickened.

“God help me, tourneyer, I will tempt you to ever hazard my wrath again!”

Annan levered his good leg under his body and lunged. Blood thundered in his head, blearing his vision, blocking his hearing, threatening to plunge him once more into darkness.

The bishop’s sword flashed up defensively, and suddenly Mairead was between them. Her slender arm held Annan back as she faced the bishop. “Your Grace, I beg you! Don’t do this! It is I you want—it has always been me! Let him go—”

“Silence! If you beg mercy, then look to your husband, not to me.”

She turned to Annan, her warmth pressing against him. “Annan—don’t do it. Not for me. Please.” Her chin trembled.

“Mairead… I’m sorry—” Sorrier than he could ever tell. He had failed her. It was
his
enemies they had been running from all this time, had they only realized it.

Roderic grabbed her wrist from where it lay on Annan’s shoulder. He jerked her up beside him and pointed to her with the sword. “Her life is nothing to me. Nothing.” A tangle of veins throbbed in either temple. “I will kill her in an instant. Do you understand that?”

She stood with one arm close to her side, her lips parted, her eyes huge. And yet, she shook her head. She didn’t even know what it was they wished to trade her life for, and still she shook her head.

His heart hammered in his ears. He loved her. He admitted it. He loved her enough to die for her without a second thought. But did he love her enough to surrender, at long last, St. Dunstan’s and all its secrets?