Devil's Bargain (25 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SEVEN

M
ustafa should have left Tyre as soon as he had delivered Richard’s message, but it was late and he was tired, and whatever the marquis’ faults, he treated royal messengers well. There was food that a Muslim could eat, and a sleeping place in the hall—though before he could claim that, a page tugged at his sleeve.

The lord Henry had a room to himself, and servants who were his own, and guards to keep him there. But he could bring a guest in, offer him such hospitality as a man could accept whose religion did not allow him to drink wine, and give him sleeping room if he would take it.

“Do you know where she is?” Henry asked when it was polite to speak of anything but trivialities.

“I know that she escaped from here,” said Mustafa, “and that someone—or something—provided a diversion while she did it.”

“It’s said the Assassins came for her,” said Henry, “or the Assassins’ demons. But I would never believe that of her.”

“It wasn’t the King of the English,” Mustafa said.

“She was meeting a man in the city,” Henry said. His tone made Mustafa’s eyes sharpen. “They said it was an Assassin—that she was performing foul rites with him, and plotting destruction. I think . . . it was someone she knew, and someone she maybe . . .”

Mustafa was not one to betray secrets, but he was moved to tell this man the truth. “It was the lord Saphadin. I went to him when she was captured; I told him what I had seen. He would have come for her, and taken her where she would be safe.”

“Saphadin?” Henry looked as if Mustafa had struck the wind out of him. “The lord Al-Adil? The sultan’s brother? God’s bones!”

“You never suspected?”

“I didn’t—” Henry raked fingers through his close-cropped hair. “She ran off with
him
?”

“Would you rather she had stayed and been executed?”

“No!” Henry snapped in an unwonted fit of temper.

“Then you can be glad that she’s safe. I’m sure she is that—wherever she is.”

“He could save her,” Henry said, sinking down onto the bed, weighted with gloom. “He could sweep in with armies of God knows what, and carry her off like a knight in a song. And what could I do? I sat here, not even chained. I would have let her die!”

Mustafa had no comfort to offer, except to remind Henry of the truth. “She didn’t die. You would have if you’d tried to stand between the marquis and his prey.”

Henry was little comforted, but at least he was quiet. He did not move or speak as Mustafa retreated to a corner for his evening prayer, then spread a blanket and lay on it, determined to get what sleep he could.

He was uneasy. It was nothing he could put a name to, nor did it have anything to do with the city itself. This was something different. Something was stirring. Maybe Conrad had awakened it when he cast blame on the Assassins.

Conrad had not been at dinner. He was waiting to dine with his lady, people said. But Isabella was in a strange mood this
evening. Mustafa had seen her before she went up to her rooms, seen how odd her expression was, as if she walked in a dream. He had paid no attention to it then; he had been preoccupied with finding Henry.

As he lay in the corner of Henry’s room, the memory began to haunt him. Dark had fallen beyond the walls; the night was deep and preternaturally quiet. The revelry in the hall had died early. He tossed on his blanket.

Henry had gone to bed; he was motionless behind the curtains. His breathing was deep and regular. If he was not asleep, he feigned it well.

The door was barred, the window too small for even Mustafa’s narrow body. He was imprisoned here until the guards without chose to let Henry go.

It had been terribly foolish of him to trap himself here when he could have been in the hall, free to come and go. He could only wait and try to pray, and hope that whatever was in the air, it would not harm him or the man in the bed, who had begun, very softly, to snore.

A sudden tumult brought Mustafa staggering to his feet. He had slept a little after all; his mind was thick with fog. People were shouting, screaming, crying. He strained to catch words amid the babble. When he succeeded, at first he did not believe what he heard. “Conrad! Conrad is dead!”

Henry lurched through the curtains of his bed, as bleared and astonished as Mustafa. He had slightly more presence of mind: he hammered on the door until the bolt shot back and a wild-eyed guard peered in. “We’re going out,” Henry said to him.

There was a breathless pause. Mustafa would not have been surprised if the guard had gutted Henry with his pike, or if he had slammed the door shut and refused to open it again. But the man either had the habit of obedience, or was wise enough to be afraid of Henry’s hot blue glare. He scrambled back out of the way before Henry ran him down.

The hall was in an uproar. Henry cut through the crowd with his bulk and the power of his rank; Mustafa clung as close as he could. They mounted the dais, man and shadow; Henry raised his voice in a bellow that overwhelmed the lot of them.

His gimlet eye fixed on one man who seemed most distraught, but who had found his way to a sort of calm. “Tell us,” Henry said.

Word by word, Henry got it out of him. The marquis had gone to dine with his friend the bishop, but that was long hours ago. His squire at last had gone looking for him, and had stumbled over him, sprawled in the middle of a street. There was a black dagger in his heart and a cake clutched in his hand, still warm—though that was impossible; the corpse was stone-cold.

The squire had paused for a fit of hysterics, which had brought out the watch. Where they had been while their lord was stabbed to death, God knew—or Satan; for this was surely the handiwork of his servants. They were making up for lost time now, having sent a man to the castle with the news while they brought the lord’s body back more slowly.

Half the city seemed to have followed them. It sounded like a storm coming, a long low rolling sound shot through with shrieks and wailing. The hall was silent, listening. Eyes rolled white; faces were stiff with fear.

“
She
did it,” someone muttered. “She came back—she and her allies. She finished what she started.”

One instant Henry was on the dais, listening as intently as the rest. The next, he was down among the throng, fingers clamped about the man’s throat. “No woman’s hand was in this,” Henry said in a low growl that managed to reach the farthest edges of the hall. “Least of all hers. She was an innocent, condemned by one man’s jealousy. You can thank the Lord God that some good angel came to her rescue.”

The man gasped for breath. His face had gone an ugly shade of crimson. Henry raked his glare across the hall. “There will be no more lies spoken in this place. I take command here until the
succession shall be settled; I bid you therefore withdraw and wait, all but the marquis’ personal guard and the members of his council. When morning comes, there will be orders and dispositions. For now, take what rest you can. You will be needing it.”

Henry was an affable young man, with an easy manner and a light touch with the servants. But when he took command, men obeyed before they could think to resist. The hall cleared with remarkable swiftness and not a word of grumbling—though Mustafa was sure there would be plenty of that once men were out of Henry’s sight.

He did not consider himself dismissed. He was invisible in Henry’s shadow. Someone would have to get word to Richard, but he was not offering himself for the task.

Nor did Henry ask him. He called for a courier, and when one came, wide awake and dressed to ride, he had prepared a letter by his own hand, brief and to the point:

To my lord Richard, King of the English, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, and all the rest of it: Conrad is dead. We suspect Assassins. I’ve taken command here. Come if you can, or send someone with power to speak for you. But whatever you do, do it quickly.

He signed it with a flourish and sealed it with the ring that he wore, which he had taken from a Saracen emir. It was not a Muslim thing, nor yet a Christian. Mustafa thought it must be of old Rome: a tiny and perfect carving of a running stag.

The courier took the letter, bowed over it, and tucked it securely in his satchel. He did not wait to be dismissed.

Henry had already turned away from him. The marquis’ body had come home at last, borne on a hastily cobbled bier—it proved, beneath the silken coverlet that must have been torn from some wealthy citizen’s bed, to be a wooden door, taken no doubt from that same citizen’s house.

Conrad was most certainly dead. The cake in his hand had finally gone cold, and the dagger was still in his heart, thrust up from beneath the breastbone.

Somewhere, women were wailing, loudly mourning the dead. But not here. Not his lady, who came to stand over him.

She had taken time to dress and to paint her face, so that she was the image of a royal lady, as flawless as if carved in ivory. She looked long at the body of her husband, but did not touch it. Her face wore no expression.

No one ventured to speak while she stood there. They were all eyeing this lady who carried in her the right to the throne of Jerusalem. Already eyes were sharpening, glances darting, as men weighed one another, reckoning their chances.

When she looked up at last, her gaze came to rest on Henry. He was watching her quietly, but Mustafa did not see any such heat in him as radiated from her. He must know that she wanted him: she had been as open about it as she dared in front of so jealous a husband. Did he know how strong that wanting was?

Most likely he did not. He bowed over her hand, courteous as always, but there was no passion in his glance. “Lady,” he said, “please accept my condolences. If there is anything you wish, any command—”

“Find the ones who did this,” she said. “See that they pay.”

“Certainly we shall do that, lady,” Henry said.

She looked hard at him, as if searching for more; he met her gaze with cool politeness. Her shoulders sagged visibly. She raised her hand to her brow; she swayed.

He caught her before she fell, and assisted her to a chair. Servants brought wine and cool cloths and wafts of perfume.

It was artfully done, but it did not touch Henry’s heart. She gave it up soon enough and let the council settle to business. There was a funeral to arrange—quickly in this climate—and policy to decide, beginning with the securing of the city against attack.

Mustafa had come round to a decision of his own. He was not needed here, nor were they saying anything that he needed to hear. He would be more interested to know what people were saying outside of this hall and in the city. Conrad’s death altered the balance in this precarious country—though in which of several directions, he could not be certain.

Just as he began to slip away, a new commotion brought all eyes to the door.

Wherever she had been, it seemed to have agreed with her. She had a bloom on her, and a light in her eyes that made Mustafa blink, dazzled—and he was not a man for women. She was dressed in Frankish fashion in cream-pale linen and violet silk; her veil was a drift of mist over her elegantly coiled and plaited hair. There was just a hint of paint on her face, of kohl about her eyes.

She did not come alone. Her guards wore Frankish mail and white surcoats without device. They were tall and broad as Franks could often be, with pale stern faces within the coifs of mail. But their eyes were not Frankish eyes, nor indeed were they mortal at all. They were the precise and burning blue that lives in the heart of a flame.

Mustafa resisted a powerful urge to fall down on his face. These were great lords of the jinn, or he had no eye for magic. And she . . . she had grown. She had been a fair apprentice of the art when last he saw her. She was considerably more than that now.

None of the Franks could see what Mustafa saw. They believed the illusion: that she came escorted by men of their own kind. It both reassured them and deterred them from seizing her and executing the late marquis’ sentence.

Henry leaped up from his seat with a complete lack of self-consciousness and ran to pull her into his embrace. There was passion; there was the fire of the heart.

She returned the embrace with every evidence of gladness and deep relief, but it was the gladness of kin restored to kin. She was the first to free herself, to hold him at arm’s length and smile. “I’m glad beyond words to see you well,” she said.