Devil's Bargain (24 page)

“I should like to see you crowned king in Jerusalem, my lord,” Giacomo said.

“Most likely I’ll be crowned in Acre,” said Conrad, “but who’s to stop us from doing it again when we have Jerusalem?”

He was frankly lighthearted. Even when he came to the bishop’s house and found the bishop gone to bed and the tables being cleared away, and not a scrap or a morsel to spare for a poor starving lord, he only laughed. “No, don’t drag his grace out of bed,” he said to the servants, “nor the cook, either. Maybe when I get home, my lady will finally be out of the bath.”

They pressed a cup of wine on him, which he drank down for courtesy; much warmed and rather tipsy, he forayed again into the night.

The moon was higher, but the dark seemed deeper. It coiled in the streets, with a dank scent about it, like sea fog. Tendrils of it crawled in Conrad’s wake, dimming the light of the servant’s torch. The walls of houses and shops closed in; the streets seemed ever narrower, winding and twisting and knotting upon one another.

Very occasionally they met other passersby, shadowed figures hastening toward light and safety. None of them offered a threat, or likely recognized the lord of the city wandering alone but for a single servant.

He came round a corner not far from the citadel, walking quickly now for his stomach was in open revolt, and ran headlong into a pair of men in monks’ cowls. They recoiled; Conrad cursed under his breath, favoring a foot that had been trampled.

One of them peered at him in the torchlight and mimed broad delight. “My lord! What good fortune. We were just looking for you. A letter’s come, it’s very urgent, see—Brother Iohannes here, he has it, safe in his breast.”

Conrad frowned. Giacomo was close at his back with the torch, which had begun to gutter and smoke. A gust of that smoke blew suddenly into his eyes; he coughed, gagging a little, but when he tried to retreat from the smoke, Giacomo stumbled against him. The monks drew in closer, the silent one fumbling in his robes.

Inadvertently, as it seemed, the three of them had trapped
him. His hand groped for his dagger, but Giacomo was in his way, catching at him, tangling him in his own mantle.

He never saw the blade that killed him. It stabbed up from beneath, under the breastbone and into the heart. His last sight in the world was of Giacomo’s face; his last word a question: “Why?”

“Power,” said Giacomo, “and glory.”

Conrad was dead before Giacomo had said the last of it. Giacomo let him fall sprawling in the street, and spat on him. “That for love,” he said. “That for a lifetime of groveling. I sold your soul for Paradise.”

“And you shall have it,” said the monk who had not spoken before.

Giacomo could not answer: the point of a dagger just touched the membrane of his heart. With a small grunt, the monk thrust it home.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SIX

S
ioned fell headlong into her cold and barely breathing body. Someone was shaking it, slapping it, and shouting at it, which was a tremendous annoyance. She fended him off with a buffet of wind and a gust of temper.

The temper was stronger than she had meant. He flew backward and struck the wall with sickening force.

She scrambled out of the knotted bedclothes, heart in throat. He was conscious but badly winded; his face was greenish pale. She breathed strength into him and soothed his bruises as she could, reassuring herself that there was nothing broken.

She opened her mouth to speak, brimful of apologies, but he forestalled her. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t be sorry. I lost my wits; I of all people, who should know better. You were as near dead as made no difference. I should have known what it was, and been wiser than to startle you out of it.”

“I had already come back,” she said. “It was over—what I was taken to see.” Even as she said it, the memory flooded and nearly drowned her. “I have to go. I can’t stay. I have to—”

“Tell me,” he said.

She did not know if she could, but once she got the first words out, the rest came in a rush. Every moment was as vivid as if she lived it anew. She saw more this time, sensed more: more darkness, more foreboding. Part of that was simply that she knew how it ended, but some was greater clarity of understanding. She knew who had done this. She could guess why.

Ahmad’s face stilled as he listened, emptying of all expression. When she had told him all she knew, she left the rest to him: to speak or to be silent.

Dawn grew grey in the silence. The light of the nightlamp dimmed and paled.

The hour of prayer had come and gone, and he had done nothing about it. That shocked her a little. He was a good Muslim always, in all his observances.

The sun was nearly up when at last he spoke. “This is a terrible thing. It changes too much; sets too many forces at odds. And it is my fault.”

“How can it be your fault?” she asked him.

“I . . . made a bargain,” he said.

“With the jinn?”

“Before that,” he said. “With the Old Man of the Mountain.”

Her breath hissed between her teeth. “You, too? What did you sell him? Your soul?”

“I hope not,” Ahmad said. “There is a price, but he has yet to name it. When the time came for him to take it, he said to me, I would know.”

Sioned’s head was aching. She forced herself to think clearly, to see everything that there was to see—and not to indulge in a fit of anger that he had kept this from her for so long.

When she could trust her voice and her powers of reason, she said, “I’m sure he wants you to think you had something to do with it—but I don’t believe this is the price. It’s too convenient for too many people, and it serves your cause too well. Whatever he wants of you, it’s not your ease or benefit.”

“This isn’t the price,” Ahmad said. “This is the thing I paid for. I told him the name of the one I hated, and the reason for
the hatred. The rest I left to him. This guilt is on my head; this debt of the spirit is mine to pay.”

“I don’t think so,” she said stubbornly. “I have guilt—somehow I was supposed to prevent it, or change it, and I turned my back. You did little to alter anything, except maybe to make it happen faster. Even that is my fault, since you did it for me.”

He glared at her, but suddenly his face lightened; he laughed, if painfully. “We are clever, aren’t we? We take the woes of the world on our shoulders.”

“This is true,” she said. “I caused this: your guilt; the marquis’ death, though my bones tell me he was marked for it long before I set foot in Tyre.”

“We are all at fault,” said Ahmad. “We can’t stay any longer. My brother is going to be wanting me beside him as the Franks tumble in disorder.”

“My brother would probably prefer that I lose myself at the ends of the world,” Sioned said, “but he’ll have to suffer my presence regardless. After I go to Tyre.”

That took him aback. “Tyre! Are you mad?”

“Probably,” she said. “But Henry is there, unprotected.”

“They’ll kill you. They already believe that you committed murder; then you vanished in the midst of a phantom battle. Now their lord is dead, and you can wager that he was found with an Assassin’s cake in his hand. If you show your face, they’ll rend you limb from limb.”

He spoke sense—altogether too much of it. But she thought now that she understood the jinni’s message. It had not been about Conrad; it had been about Henry. “I have to go,” she said.

She waited for him to thunder, “I forbid it!” But he knew her too well for that. He went quiet instead, lifted himself up with a soft groan, and greeted the servant who had come in with kaffé and new bread and a bowl of fruit stewed in honey with cloves and cinnamon.

The man’s eyes were fixed on the toes of his slippers. Sioned realized that her only garment was her hair. She reached for the first thing that came to hand: one of the coverlets from the bed.

She was hungry—starving. Gods knew when she would eat again. Hakim was still refusing to look at her. She wheedled him into a smile, though not into raising his eyes; he was pleased to fetch the things she asked for.

Ahmad still had not said anything. His bath was ready; usually she shared it, and a grand sharing it was, but today she let him go to it alone. She could have left then, and maybe should have, but she wanted to bathe, too: a ritual cleansing, as it were, before she faced what she must face.

He was gone a long time. She began to suspect that he had seized the opportunity to escape without an open quarrel, but also without farewell. Her temper had risen to a fair pitch when he reappeared, clean, tidy, and dressed to travel.

She was still naked under the wrapped coverlet, with her hair in a tangle and a last bite of bread on its way to her mouth. He would have been well within his rights to regard her with disgust, but there was no such thing in his eyes. “I couldn’t go,” he said. “Not without a word.”

“Good,” she said, biting it off.

“Will you not consider coming with me? I’ll deliver you safe to your brother, and together we can find a way to save your cousin in Tyre.”

She shook her head. “It will take too long. Just let me go. I’ve got an army of the jinn; what harm can an army of men do to me?”

“Too much,” he said grimly. “Sioned—beloved—”

“Don’t you have a war to fight?”

“Not with you!”

They both stood astonished at his vehemence. For lack of anything better to do, she pulled him to her and kissed him, then thrust him away—truly away, through walls of worlds, into his camp that waited for him somewhere in the hills of Syria.

She had caught him off guard, or she could not have done it. It left her weak but not incapacitated: testimony to the training that she had had and the strength that she had gained—and her sheer outrageous luck, that she could have done this without disaster the first time she ever attempted it. Even sending
him from warded place to warded place was dangerous. She could have destroyed them both.

But she had not. He was safe in his camp. He did not come roaring back as she had half dreaded. It seemed that he saw the sense in what she had done, once she had done it—or else he was too stark with rage to muster a counterattack.

There was a bath waiting, and clothes that were suited to a lady of the Franks. She must summon the jinn to protect her. Then she must go—but not before she had done one further thing.

Safiyah was in the room where they most often studied magic, the library with its trove of treasures. She had her small black servant with her; he was writing down words as she instructed, learning the language of magic as Sioned also had done. She finished the lesson before she acknowledged Sioned’s presence: a courtesy to the pupil, and one that Sioned had known to expect. Fortunately for her sense of urgency, the lesson had been nearly done.

Then at last, having praised the child for his diligence and dismissed him to do as he pleased, Safiyah turned her attention toward Sioned.

Sioned had nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide, but she still felt like a child brought to account for a transgression.

Safiyah did not flay Sioned alive for her many sins. She simply said, “If you die, my lord will not be able to live.”

“Your lord is a strong man. He has kin, wives, children, to all of whom he is devoted. He’ll survive; he’ll go on. He won’t die.”

“Nor will he live,” Safiyah said. “Life will be a burden, dragging itself out from day to day, until death is a blessing.”

“Time heals grief,” Sioned said.

“Not when souls are torn apart,” said Safiyah.

“What shall I do, then?” Sioned demanded. “Shut myself in a cave and never come out?”

“Be careful,” Safiyah said. “Be as sensible as you can. Remember that men are not as strong as we are, for all their loud protestations to the contrary, and that while you could carry on, he could not. He loves you with all his heart, child, and without you he would have no heart left.”

“Whereas I had none to begin with,” Sioned muttered.

Safiyah’s lips twitched. “We are colder than they, and harder. We’re fiercer, too, and stronger in defense of what we love. You love your kin, and that is right and proper. Of course you must protect them. But protect yourself, too—for his sake.”

“I can promise to try,” said Sioned.

“That will do,” Safiyah said. “Come back to us, child, when the world changes again. You have kin here, and people who love you. Remember that.”

Sioned’s throat was tight. She had come expecting a reprimand, and received only understanding. It was almost too much to bear.

She had no words to say. She took the thin hands and kissed them, and embraced the frail body—so strong within, so fragile without—and left before she lost her composure altogether.