Devil's Bargain (15 page)

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

S
ioned walked abroad the morning after her interview with the queen—unwisely, any number of people would have told her, but she had a desperate need to be away from the court. She could feel the various currents of tension in the city, enmities as strong as any between Christian and Muslim: between parvenu and
pullani
, French and English, Pisan guard and Genoese garrison. They had been at each other’s throats since Richard left there. A single spark could set any of them off; only by a miracle and by Eleanor’s will did they keep such peace as there was.

The market was bustling on this fine chill morning, merchants doing a brisk trade among the many nations—though seldom, be it noted, the French. The bulk of them had gone to Tyre without pay from their own king and without the loan of pay from the English king. Those few who remained roamed about in packs, trading remnants of Saracen loot for bread and cheese and bad wine.

“So why aren’t you in Tyre with the rest of the French king’s dogs?” an English voice drawled from inside a tavern.

Sioned had paused to admire a bolt of silk in a cloth merchant’s stall. The tavern was across the narrow street from it, crowded with soldiers who had been away from the battlefield too long. They were looking for fights with one another now, since the infidel declined to engage in warfare in the dead of winter.

The Englishman was sitting near the door. The Frenchman was farther in, but Sioned had no difficulty in hearing his voice: it was pitched to carry. “Better a king’s dog than his catamite.”

The snarl that rose at that was remarkably like a dog’s, and came from more than one throat. The Englishman had friends. They were not all English, either: Sioned glimpsed livery of the Italies—Pisa, she supposed, if the men who wore it had risen up on Richard’s behalf. The others, near the men from France, must be Genoese; one even carried the crossbow that was the famous weapon of his city. And what he was doing with that on a supposedly peaceable ramble through the taverns, Sioned would have dearly liked to know.

The snarl swelled to a growl. Words mattered little by now; all either side wanted was a fight. She heard the rumble and crash of tables overturned and pottery flung at walls and floor. Someone loosed a shout of glee, which broke in a dreadful gurgle.

She was completely mad to do what she did: not to turn and run like a sensible woman, but to kilt up her skirts and run toward the brawl. Trousers would have served her better, and her sword and bow better yet, but she had something that no one in the tavern had. She raised it as she ran, gathering it inside her, all the powers of the elements mingled in a net of magic.

When dogs fought in the king’s camp, men flung water on them to cool their rage. Sioned flung magic. It struck like a gout of cold seawater, flinging combatants apart, swirling in a gust of sudden wind.

When the wind died, the tavern was quiet. The brawlers had fled. Bystanders picked themselves up, nursing bruises and
murmuring in confusion. “An angel,” one of them said. “An angel came and stopped the fight.”

None of them spared a glance for Sioned in her plain gown and woolen mantle—save one. He was a
pullani
, maybe, or a Gascon, dark and slight; his coat of boiled leather was much worn and rather too large for him.

He seemed as harmless as an idle soldier could be. And yet something about him raised her hackles: a look about the eyes, a subtle tension in the body. He saw her; he knew her. He had marked her in memory.

A shiver ran down her spine. That was no Christian, and no soldier of the West, either. Even as she stirred, uncertain whether she would move toward him or run away, he melted into shadow and was gone. The last glimpse she had of him was strange: not dark but light, as if he were clothed in white.

Sioned started like a cat. The watcher had vanished. Someone else stood directly behind her—someone slight and dark and by no means a Frank. Her dagger was at his throat and a bead of blood welling scarlet from it before she recognized his face. “Mustafa!”

Richard’s most loyal infidel stood utterly still. He wore tunic and hose like a Frank, and a hat instead of a turban, but he was most definitely not the man she had seen in the tavern. That one had raised her hackles on sight. This one made her feel safe. There was no other word for it. When he was there, she need have no fear of shadows.

Mustafa’s face was unwontedly somber, his ready smile nowhere in evidence. His eyes were wary, scanning the street and the tavern. He shifted a fraction; she realized that her back was to a wall, and he stood between her and whatever might come.

“You saw him, too,” she said.

He nodded. “You weren’t wise to use magic here,” he said. “The ones who watch, they notice. They’ll remember.”

“I may be safe,” said Sioned. “The queen thinks she’s bound me to her.”

“No one is safe,” Mustafa said, “where that one sends his hunting hounds.”

“That one?”

“We don’t name him here,” Mustafa said. He laid a hand on her arm: for him, a rare liberty, and a sign of great disturbance of mind. “Come with me.”

She was not minded to linger in that place where the Assassin had been. In her mind she would use that word. He could not be the first who had seen her in all her time in this country, but he was the first of the Master’s servants that she had seen. And he knew that she had seen him. He had allowed it, most likely. To frighten her? To threaten? Even, perhaps, to warn?

Mustafa led her through ways of the city that she had not seen before, down dark and twisted alleys that reminded her that one of the towers of Acre was called Beelzebub. Part of her wondered, rather wildly, what she was doing following this Saracen through such places, but she trusted him—however irrational or even dangerous that trust might be. In that respect, maybe, she was like her brother. When she gave trust, she gave it excessively.

The ending was somewhat of an anticlimax: a postern of the citadel and a passage that, after a staircase or two and a door that yielded to his persuasion, she recognized as leading to the ladies’ solar. She rounded on him in perfectly unreasonable anger. “I thought you were leading me somewhere interesting!”

“I was leading you somewhere safe.” He seemed to remember that he was still gripping her arm: he let go.

She was not about to let him melt away as the Assassin had. She caught him and held on, stopping him where he stood. “You’re supposed to be with Richard. What are you doing here?”

“Keeping you out of mischief,” he said.

“Did my brother send you?”

He shrugged in the complex manner of the east, speaking volumes with a gesture. “He didn’t prevent me. It seems I came just in time. I should have been quicker.”

“But why—”

“Don’t use magic again here,” he said, “no matter how strong the temptation.”

“Why?”

He tried very hard to slip away. She was too strong for him. “Tell me. Or I’ll drag you into the ladies’ bower and let them have their will of you.”

He blanched. “I can’t tell you here—the walls can hear.”

“Whisper it,” she said, relentless.

He sighed vastly, but he bent toward her ear. His whisper was barely to be heard. “Because of her. Because the more everyone underestimates you, the safer you will be.”

“You think so?” She kept her voice down, but not to a whisper.

He set his lips together. “Please let me go, lady,” he said.

“Why? Where will you go?”

“Not far,” he said. “I promise.”

She sensed the truth of that. He was greatly troubled for her. “You know something,” she said.

He shook his head. He was not denying it, but neither would he speak. With a hiss of frustration, she let go his arm. He did not disappear as she had expected; he shifted instead, until he had established himself in her shadow.

It seemed she had herself a guardsman. She resented it less than she might have expected. Whether his unease gave birth to hers, or whether she also had had a burst of prescience, she was surprisingly glad of his presence.

He slept across her door that night. One of the ladies who shared the room squeaked with alarm when she saw a man on the floor, but the other two regarded him with lively interest. He was pleasing to the eye in his dark, slender way, and his eastern manners delighted them: he seemed to them a perfect image of a courtly nobleman.

Sioned did nothing to disabuse them of the notion that her brother had sent one of his squires to protect her. It was true,
in its way; certainly Mustafa belonged to Richard, and he was at least as adept in the arts of war as a Frank of his age.

She heard him through the snoring of her bedmates, breathing softly and regularly. His sleep would be light, like a cat’s: alert for the slightest hint of danger. She wove wards through that wariness, shaped to guard him even as they heightened his senses.

It was a quiet night, free of threats if not of fear. In the morning, a brow raised here and there at the sight of Sioned’s new shadow, but it was hardly polite to remark on him. Even Henry, who recognized Richard’s pet Saracen, simply nodded as if in satisfaction, and went about his business.

They would leave that day for Tyre, sailing on one of Richard’s galleys. Sioned was horrified to discover how much baggage she was expected to bring with her. “A lady of fashion never travels light,” Joanna said, laughing at her expression.

“But I don’t have maids or a retinue or—”

“Now you do,” said Joanna. She was enjoying this much too much.

She crooked a finger. A procession of ladies advanced into the solar, led by the redoubtable Blanche herself. There were only half a dozen when Sioned stopped to count them, but in that first moment of shock, they seemed an army.

“Joanna,” said Sioned. “I can’t—”

“You must,” her sister said. “It’s only practical. Or do you think that you can look after all your gowns and jewels by yourself?”

“One maid for that, surely,” said Sioned, “but—”

“A single maid shames the rank and dignity of a princess. And,” said Joanna, “she’d be sorely taxed to manage that princess’ wealth.”

“But I don’t have—”

“No,” Joanna conceded, “but you have the resources of a king at your disposal. Our brother asked that we give you all the pretensions to which your royal lineage entitles you. You needn’t keep them afterwards—unless of course you want to.”

“I would never want such a thing,” Sioned said with heartfelt sincerity.

Joanna set her lips together and carefully refrained from comment. Instead she said, “Think of it as a battle. You’re fighting for all of us, and for the Crusade.”

That was one way of thinking about it—Sioned could grant her as much. “But, Joanna, I can’t have this many women following me about!”

“You can and you must,” Joanna said implacably. “Now, what is this thing you’re wearing? Blanche! Did I not instruct you to see that she was properly attired?”

“I’m not in Tyre yet,” Sioned began, but none of them was listening. They had her comfortable traveling clothes off her before she could mount any useful resistance, and restored her to the excruciating elegance of court fashion. There was no walking sensibly in those tiny and exquisite shoes, even if she would be allowed to soil her silken train in the common streets. She would be taken to the ship in a litter and carried aboard like an eastern lady, wrapped and bound as securely as a bale in a caravan.

It was war, as Joanna had reminded her, and this was a battlefield. She set herself to endure it, for her brother’s sake if not for her own.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

R
ichard’s ship sailed into Tyre with all its banners flying. Sioned, trammeled in royal estate, still managed to be on the galley’s deck as they came to harbor in that ancient city. She had been aware of it from far out to sea. Even in a country so full of magic and so weighted with age, this place was old. Old as Nineveh, old as Tyre: poets had sung of such things even in Gwynedd where she was born.

Now she was here, on this island that the great Alexander had bound to the land with his causeway, looking up at towers that had stood since the dawn of the world. She had been afraid that the age of the city would crush her. Yet as she came to it, it welcomed her. It drew her in; it bade her rest in the warmth of its arms. And that, she had never expected—not in this city of enemies.

This was a city much less burdened with darkness than Acre or Jaffa or Caesarea. It was not a city of light—it was too old and world-weary for that—but evil had no power over these stones. Maybe it was that they were still so much a part of the sea. The cord that bound them to the land was narrow, and
there were great wards on it: wards that Alexander himself had set, or Alexander’s mages.

They were still making the purple here, the dye so rich and so rare that in older days it had been reserved for kings. She caught the stink of it on the wind as she was carried off the ship, a sharp reek of the crushed shellfish from which it was made.

“The stench of wealth,” the captain said. He had taken a liking to her, perhaps out of sympathy for her trapped expression. “Here of all places, there’s no mistaking where the money comes from.”

“It’s not evil,” Sioned said. “Just strong.”

“Strong it certainly is,” said Henry. He seemed to be trying not to breathe too deeply. “Do you think Conrad is using it as a weapon?”

“They say he’ll do anything that serves his purpose.”

While they spoke, the ship had been settling along the quay. The captain excused himself; Henry had to withdraw among the men, to set them in order and to oversee the unloading of the horses that he and his two companion knights had brought. Sioned was left alone except for the flock of her maids, not one of whom had an intelligent word to say. They were chattering like starlings. Almost, vindictively, Sioned called up the spell that would have made reality of the semblance.

She caught herself before she succumbed to the temptation. For temptation it was, and not entirely born of her own heart, either. She raised the guard that she had let down on sight of Tyre, and wove the wards more tightly.

Mustafa was in her shadow again. She had not seen him come, but his presence reassured her considerably. He had squire’s livery now, with the king’s device, and so many weapons about him that the wards hummed in protest. They could stand fast against cold iron, but they did not like it.

The ship was moored, the men drawn up in ranks, as much as the deck would allow. Their eyes turned toward her.

Her rank was highest, her position most dignified. She must disembark first, with only a company of guards ahead of her.
She had been instructed in proper deportment: she allowed herself to be helped down off the deck, although she was perfectly capable of doing it unassisted, and let herself be bundled into a chair. Her maids would walk: fortunate women. She, the princess, must not set her delicate foot on the common earth.

Conrad had not met them or sent a delegation to greet them. He would have an excuse, she was sure, but it was a slight, an insult to the king whose envoys she and Henry were.

That would be dealt with. She, shut in the curtained chair, choking on the heavy perfume that had been favored by the last inhabitant, could only grit her teeth and endure. Her spirit at least was not bound; it was keenly aware of the streets of the city, how they ascended gradually and with many turns and doublings toward the citadel. She heard the hum and bustle of people in those streets, and the tramping of feet: her bearers’ closest, her guards’ farther away. Henry and his knights rode behind, a slow clopping of hooves, with now and then the clang of steel shoe on paving stone.

Her maids’ chatter had barely paused with their advent on dry land. They had been babbling since Acre, so steadily and incessantly that it was, in its way, a protection.

Sioned was not yet so far gone as to listen to their nonsense. It was gossip again: follies and scandals, and a heated debate over the best way to arrange a wimple.

When at long last the chatter died, it heralded a halt in the procession. Sioned could feel the loom of the citadel, the heart of all that was here: ancient, rooted in the rock. The clash of spears, the challenge of guards, seemed somehow trivial before the power of that place.

Henry answered the challenge in his clear voice, pleasant but with an edge of steel. She half expected him to be turned away, but the guards let them all through.

They passed under the echoing arch of a gate and into a stone court. Sioned’s chair lowered to the ground. It was all she could do not to leap out of it. She waited instead and impatiently for Mustafa’s slim brown hand to part the curtain and for him to assist her to her feet. After so long in confinement,
she needed the supporting hand: the light was dazzling, her body stiff from sitting.

When she could see again, and when her legs were steady under her, Henry had come to relieve Mustafa of his post. Mustafa retreated softly into his favored place in her shadow. Henry, at ease in the light, smiled at her and said, “Are you ready? The battle waits.”

She drew a breath and nodded. The courtyard was ringed with armed men, all of them standing still, watching. Her own guard seemed terribly weak and small, her knights a pitiful number.

She had magic. She had Richard’s strength behind her, the thousands of his army, and the threat of his wrath. She lifted her chin. They were all staring at her. The court in Acre had called her beautiful. Certainly her maids had done their best to make her so. She only had to think that she was—to know that when men looked at her, they were captivated.

It was alarmingly easy. If she had ever been baptized a Christian, she would have had to confess to the sin of pride. She contented herself with a resolution to end this game quickly and return to her wonted and unpretentious self.

Whether it was her beauty or his own curiosity that drew him out, Conrad came striding through the ranks of his guards. He was a dark man, not young, not tall, not particularly good to look on; what beauty he had was marred by the pocks and scars of an old sickness. And yet there was strength in him, and a steely determination that made him, if not beautiful, then certainly difficult to forget.

He bowed over Sioned’s hand. Henry he barely acknowledged; the rest he left to his men. “Lady,” he said. “Where has your brother been hiding such a jewel?”

She bit her tongue on the quick rejoinder, lowered her eyelids and watched him through the lashes. The corner of her mouth turned up just a fraction, because he would have been shocked to know what she was when she was not playing the demure princess.

He tucked her hand under his arm. “Come, lady,” he said. “Be welcome in my city.”

She dipped in a curtsey, but not too low: she was, after all, a king’s daughter, and he but a marquis with pretensions. He seemed to take no umbrage. Maybe it was true, then, that a woman could do whatever she chose, if only she was beautiful.

What Conrad’s court lacked in sparkle, it gained in martial spirit. The French were indeed here in force, with Hugh of Burgundy at their head. So too were too many of the knights of Outremer, and some of the Germans who still remained.

Hugh did not recognize Sioned. She had not expected such satisfaction as she felt when Conrad presented her to him, and at first he did not recall her name; then it dawned on him. His expression was most gratifying. Shock; astonishment. A flash of fear, as clear as if he had spoken the words. What knowledge had she brought with her? What secrets was she privy to? Did she belong to Richard, or to Eleanor?

So: he was afraid of the queen, too. Sioned began to wonder if Eleanor’s terror, like her own beauty, was an artifact; if there honestly was nothing beneath it.

She brought her thoughts firmly to order and smiled at the duke. He could not manage a smile in return, although he had the wits to kiss her hand.

She was discovering the uses of silence. People had a compulsion to fill it. They raised whole edifices of conversation, while she had only to nod and occasionally smile, or frown if the occasion called for it. Hugh betrayed no secrets—yet—but several of his barons let her know that, as irked as they were with Richard, they had seen no more pay for their army from Conrad than they had from the English king; the King of France, safe in Paris, had sent nothing at all. “I do swear,” said one, “that my men will take whatever they can get, and gladly enough, if only they get something.”

She nodded; she smiled. She tempted them to new spates of words.

The ladies did not like her. That was a hazard of beauty; she had learned as much in Acre. When the men flocked about her, they ignored the ladies who belonged to them, or who had ambitions in that direction.

Sioned took note of them. Most were women of this country; chief of them was the royal lady of Jerusalem, the famous beauty, Isabella. She was everything that Sioned was not: tall, fair, with hair the color of beaten gold and skin as white as milk. The blood of the old Crusader kings ran strong in her. She was half a head taller than her husband, Conrad, and half again as broad.

Her sister Sybilla had been as much a fool as the man she had chosen to be consort and king, the beautiful idiot Guy de Lusignan. This younger sister hid behind beauty as Sioned happened to be doing, but when Sioned met those wide-set blue eyes, she saw there an intelligence quite as keen as her own.

Isabella was no fool, and no empty chatterer, either. She left that to her ladies. If she was jealous of the attention that Sioned had drawn, she did not show it. She studied it and Sioned; she kept her counsel.

This was a mind as keen as Conrad’s. Sioned could not tell whether it was friendly or hostile. She thought it might be reserving judgment.

Henry had left her side to move among the court, scouting the battlefield. He crossed Isabella’s path, engaged in conversation with a knight from France with whom he had struck up a friendship on the Crusade. The lady’s eyes followed him as if drawn irresistibly.

He was as lovely as she, and in much the same mode, tall and fair. From where Sioned stood, seeing them briefly side by side, caught in a shaft of light, they were like images in a shrine.

Conrad moved in between them, intentionally or otherwise: a shadow, dark and stunted. Sioned shivered. For a moment he had no face, no living semblance, only the lightless dark.

Someone was babbling at her, heaping her with flattery, calling her a glory among women. She fixed her eyes on her feet and bit her tongue until she tasted blood.

At last she was allowed to retreat from the field. A servant was waiting, offering not only a room crowded with maids and baggage and a bed which she need not invite anyone to share, but a bath.

The maids declined, protesting that it was a sin to bathe in winter. Sioned leaped at the chance to be clean and briefly free of her entourage. They would have hovered and fretted and been conspicuously bored, but she sent them on ahead. She did not need to press them overly hard. They were as weary as she.

As she had hoped, the bath here was in the eastern style, and had been decently maintained—at Princess Isabella’s insistence, one of the servants told her. “A blessing on the princess,” she said, and meant it.

When she was clean, she went up to her room, attended by the servant and the silent, all but invisible Mustafa. She met one or two people on the way, but nearly everyone was in the hall. There were stretches of hall and stair, barely lit by lamps or torches, in which she and her tiny escort were the only signs of human life.

They were not the only things that moved there. Spirits she expected; the world was full of them. But this place quivered with shadows. Most were harmless, drifts of darkness passing through, ghosts or memories from long ago. A few raised her hackles. They watched as she went by, eyeless, faceless, but intensely aware of her.

She warded herself as best she could. The less of the truth they saw, the better. She turned her every outward thought to her body’s comfort: how clean and sweet it was, and how beautiful, and how she would break even more hearts tomorrow, and make even more ladies jealous, and what a wicked pleasure that would be.