Devil's Bargain Read online

  He was gone for rather more than a week, but as he had promised, the path through the grove continued to lead to Safiyah’s tent and Sioned’s lessons. Sometimes Sioned heard odd sounds without, and had a strange sensation, as if she sat on both solid earth and the rocking, swaying bed of a wagon. Her stomach did not like that at all; but there was an exercise to settle it, a small magic that worked well and was simple to maintain.

  “Living in several worlds at once,” Safiyah said, “can be disconcerting to say the least. But one grows accustomed to it. You already see with the eyes of men and spirits. Now you see how we lay world on world.”

  “Not so much see,” Sioned said wryly, “as feel it in my rump. How many senses did you say there were?”

  “Why, infinite numbers,” Safiyah said, “but for now, the mortal six will do well enough. Six senses, seven souls. You’ll master those. After that, we’ll see.”

  She could be infuriatingly cryptic, but Sioned was learning to read her, a little, and to know when it was wise to be patient. She bent to the book that she had been reading, and willed the world to be steady beneath her. When she was done, she walked out of the tent into a grove of oranges outside of Jaffa.

  Richard did not go to the rescue of Ascalon. Saladin continued to pull it down at his leisure, then went to Ramla and proceeded to do the same again. Richard sent scouts to spy on the sultan’s depredations, but himself stayed in Jaffa, fortifying it and plotting the campaign against Jerusalem.

  The army, having rested and celebrated its victory, was growing bored. Pilgrims were flooding the port below the newly strengthened citadel, demanding to be fed and guided and entertained—and the ships that brought them proved irresistible temptation to homesick soldiers. A remarkable number reckoned that, having won Arsuf and taken Jaffa, they were done with their Crusade: “What’s Jerusalem to us? We fought a good war. We did our bit for God’s country. If we sail now, we’ll be home by winter, and well settled in by spring planting.”

  Just when the trickle of deserters showed signs of swelling to a flood, a ship sailed in from Acre. It bore the usual cargo of foodstuffs, trade goods, and pilgrims, but it also carried a rare and deadly treasure: the king’s mother. She had his sister with her, and his queen, but they were dim and clouded stars to her great burning sun.

  Richard, who had been out pursuing his favored pastime of hunting Turks, rode in at a headlong gallop with half a dozen heads jostling at his saddlebow. She had declined to set foot on shore until her son was there to offer her a proper greeting. He, who knew her well, brought his golden stallion to a rearing, clattering halt at the very end of the quay, vaulted from the saddle to the deck, and dropped to one knee in front of the queen.

  A month in Acre had refreshed her remarkably. There was color in her cheeks and the faint curve of a smile on her lips, as she stood looking down into her son’s face. “You look well,” she said.

  “And you,” he said, grinning up at her. “You look splendid. When did you decide to come? Why didn’t you send a message? What—”

  “All in good time,” she said, still smiling. “I hear you’ve rebuilt the citadel. Is there a place in it for me?”

  “Always,” he said, taking her hands and kissing them. He sprang to his feet. “Come and see!”

  He would have taken her on his horse if she would have allowed it, but between age and dignity she declined. He greeted his sister with a strong embrace and barely glanced at his queen, calling in a battlefield bellow for horses, litters, and escort for their majesties.

  Sioned felt Eleanor’s coming like the approach of a fire, a searing heat on the boundaries of her magic. That great queen took in the prospects with a basilisk eye, had the clerks and the quartermasters summoned, and set to work contending with the army’s troubles.

  Richard heaved a sigh—of relief, one could suppose. Sioned was considerably less glad. The desertions would stop and the army would find means to pay its troops; that went without saying. Eleanor’s iron will would make sure of that. But what else it might do—if she discovered what Sioned had been doing since she came to Jaffa . . .

  For the moment the queen was thoroughly occupied with her son’s affairs. Sioned hoped to be as invisible as poor meek Berengaria—assisted by her duties in Master Judah’s service. But there was one meeting she had to see; one risk she had to take.

  The lord Saphadin was gone nearer two weeks than one—time enough to see Eleanor arrive and settle in the city. He came back in no more or less state than he had been keeping since he became his brother’s particular envoy to Richard. His camp was pitched in the grove outside the walls, where Richard’s men could watch him and his own men could mount their defenses. He raised his banner over his gold-tasseled tent, and came to Richard in the hour before the day’s meal, bringing with him a train of gifts for the queens as well as the king.

  Sioned noticed those gifts. A pair of desert falcons for the king, and a pair of hunting hounds to match them, with gilded trappings. For Berengaria a bolt of silk embroidered with flowers. For Joanna a dozen golden pots in which grew roses from Damascus. And for Eleanor a necklace of gold and lapis and carnelian, hung with images that Sioned recognized. They were amulets of Egypt, charms against the evil eye, against demons, against curses and ill-wishings.

  It was a beautiful thing, not vastly endowed with power, but he met the queen’s eyes as his servant presented it in its box of carved cedarwood. The fire of magic in him was heavily damped, so that if Sioned had not known better, she would have thought him a mortal man with a faint—a very faint—hint of power. Perhaps Eleanor suspected something: she searched his face as she accepted his gift, sitting in silence while the two queens and their ladies exclaimed over the pendant images of silver and gold and copper. He regarded her with a carefully bland expression, the expression of a seasoned diplomat, pleasant but opaque.

  She lowered the lids over her eyes, bowed her head a degree, and said coolly, “I thank you for the gift, sir infidel.”

  He bowed as a prince should to a queen. Richard, oblivious to the undertones, sprang up from the throne in which he had been holding audience. “My good friend! I’m glad to have you back again. Shall we give these gifts of yours a run before dinner, then? Come, let’s see if they’re as closely matched as you claim!”

  He swept Saphadin away with him—with relief that was palpable, and grand good humor. Sioned had meant to efface herself as well, but curiosity held her there among the anonymous faces of the court. She was watching Eleanor.

  The queen had moved to dismiss the page with the box, but in midmotion she paused. She beckoned instead, and took the box into her lap, examining the charms and amulets one by one. The stones gleamed as she turned the necklace this way and that. There was something . . .

  It was a message. The little sparks and flickers of magic strung together into a sense as clear as words. A warning: Dare no dark magic here. Serve the light if you must serve any power. We are on guard against you.

  Did she understand? That she understood something, Sioned could see. But she had not seen what Saphadin was—he had made sure of that.

  She said nothing, gave no sign that would tell Sioned more. She beckoned to the page again and said, “Take this to the king’s treasury. Put it with the rest of his jewels.”

  The boy obeyed her with alacrity, as pages learned to do under Eleanor’s tutelage. Sioned followed him, but not to retrieve the necklace. She had thinking to do, and questions that she meant to have answered. Richard would engage the lord Saphadin for the rest of that day, but Saphadin’s eldest wife would be where she always was when Sioned went seeking her. She would answer; that was her duty. Was she not a teacher?

  Safiyah was not in the grove. The path that Sioned had walked every day led to a row of trees laden with ripening fruit. There was no sign that a tent had ever been pitched here.

  Sioned refused to give way to frustration. The lord Saphadin’s camp was protected, which it had not been before. She co
uld pass; she knew the spell that let her walk through without breaking the wards. They sang below the threshold of hearing; they would send word to the one who had cast them that she was in the camp.

  There were no women here. Nor was there any message, any track that she could follow, to find her teacher.

  Sioned considered the number of things that she could do. The most sensible of them was to return to the citadel and join in the daymeal. The most dutiful would be to seek out Master Judah and place herself at his disposal. That in the end was her choice, not because she was a saint or a loyal servant, but because it would engage her mind. Grinding herbs, mixing potions, seeing to the odd soldier or servant who came wandering in with a sore eye or a cut hand or a toothache, absorbed her completely.

  Darkness took her by surprise. Her sight had been dimming for some time; someone had lit lamps, but they were not near as bright as daylight. She squinted as she wrote out the label for the last pot of salve. When that was done, she set the pot on the shelf with the rest of its fellows, cleaned the pen and put away the ink and straightened, stretching out the kinks in her neck and back.

  Her stomach growled. She had completely forgotten dinner; there would be nothing but leavings now, but one or two of the cooks had been known to set a dish aside for her.

  She had been working in the portion of Master Judah’s tent that was closed off from the rest but open to the air, and she had been alone since she began. When she came through the back of it into the larger space, there was a lone physician making the rounds of the sick—dysentery, mostly, and recurrent fevers—and a cowled monk praying over one who was dying. She drew no notice to herself, but slipped out softly into the scented night.

  It was no longer summer, though a westerner would hardly have called it autumn. The days were still breathlessly hot, but the nights had begun to cool perceptibly. She shivered a little, less with cold than with the pleasure of air that did not sear the skin like heated bronze.

  Any camp of soldiers was a redolent thing, but the physicians tents’ were upwind of the privies, not far from the sea. The fragrance here partook of earth and greenery, ripening fruit, and sea salt, and only a little of overcrowded humanity. Master Judah taught cleanliness by example; soldiers who came here, drawn as much by the absence of stench as by the need for a physician’s services, often went back to their companies with a somewhat less jaundiced attitude toward the necessity of bathing. Some even ventured the eastern luxury called soap, and found it remarkably pleasant.

  Sioned found the cooks still up and about. Master Jehan, who was an artist with a stewpot, had saved a bowl of his latest creation for her. With the last of the day’s bread and a lump of pungent cheese, it was thoroughly satisfying. “New spices?” she asked as she savored it.

  “New undercook,” Master Jehan said. “He’s half a Saracen. He claims they eat like this in Africa, where the king’s black-eyed boy comes from.”

  “Mustafa?” she asked. “I should ask him. This is lovely.”

  Master Jehan shrugged. “It’s not bad. It could use a little more savory and a little less sweet.”

  She forbore to argue. He was the master, after all. With a full belly and a reasonably contented mind, she turned toward her solitary bed.

  He was waiting for her. That was altogether unexpected—so much so that when she saw the lamp lit in the smaller tent that she had so lately left, and the turbaned figure sitting by it, she wondered what had brought Mustafa there at so late an hour.

  But it was not Mustafa. This was a taller man, somewhat, and considerably older, and although she had no complaints of his looks, he was not the hawk-faced desert beauty that Mustafa was. He had a book in his lap, one that she had borrowed from Safiyah, but he was not reading it. He was gazing into the lamp’s flame.

  When he raised his eyes to her, the flame burned in them, clear and steady. His smile was a part of it; it warmed her immeasurably.

  She had all but forgotten that she had been hunting for him earlier. The urgency was gone; it seemed vain and faintly foolish now to take him to task for giving Eleanor a gift that would arouse her suspicions and possibly turn her magic against him or his brother. Even his wife’s absence—need that signify anything but that Safiyah had other concerns than the teaching of a single thickheaded pupil?

  Sioned needed sleep. Tomorrow she would be passionate again, and indulge in indignation. Her tent beyond this one, the bed that waited, lured her irresistibly. But he had drawn her, too, back among the shelves of salves and the boxes of bandages.

  She greeted him politely, bowed to the dignity of his rank, and said, “My lord. Are you indisposed? Is there some medicine that you need?”

  “I’m well, lady,” he said, “and I ask your pardon for keeping you from your rest. It is only . . . I have a thing to say, and it seemed best to say it soon, and not wait for a more proper time.”

  “About Eleanor?”

  He lifted a shoulder in the suggestion of a shrug. “I know I don’t need to warn you against her. But are you wary enough?”

  “I would hope so,” said Sioned a little stiffly.

  “I’ve insulted you,” he said with what seemed to be honest regret. “I didn’t mean to do that. It’s only . . .”

  “She is subtle,” Sioned said, “and I’m terribly young yet. I know that. She’s dangerous. But she doesn’t know what I am—I’ve kept my head down where she is, always, and let her pass over me. It seems safer somehow.”

  He nodded with perceptible relief. “Yes, it is safer. I . . . should greatly dislike to see you harmed.”

  Her cheeks were warm, but her heart was cold. There was something she should say—but she could not. She could not tell this man what bargain Eleanor had made.

  This was an outlander, an enemy. And yet it was a sensation close to pain, to keep silent; to let him go away in ignorance of the plot against his brother.

  Magic drew its own lines, created its own bonds of nation and kinship. The magic in her did not want to see this man as an enemy. He was of her own kind—her heart’s, her magic’s kin.

  Still she did not speak. She protected her true enemy and concealed the truth from her true friend. She would pay for that.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Time was when Mustafa without a war to fight would have been a lost and useless thing. But since he came to Richard, his gift for languages had served him remarkably well. Richard trusted him, Allah knew why, and kept him close through all his interactions with the folk of Islam. He was notably more preoccupied now than he had been on the march, kept at his translating from dawn until long after dusk. When he was done, he had no thought for anything but to fall asleep—it hardly mattered where.

  Richard’s servants looked after him, kept him clean, saw that he had fresh linen in the mornings and a bath every evening. They were all handsome boys, big and fair as the king was said to like them. Sometimes Mustafa wondered where that left him: dark, slight, dwarfed among all these foreigners. The deserts of Morocco bred beauty, but seldom endowed it with size.

  Not, to be sure, that he wanted to be a great hulking creature like these nobles of the Franks. He was more than content with himself. And so, it seemed, was Richard. He used his servant ruthlessly, but Mustafa never felt that he was a mere and mindless instrument. Richard would add a phrase or two, or a glance or a smile, to the speeches that Mustafa rendered into the languages of the east: Arabic of course, Greek, Turkish, Armenian, and the odd dialect of Egypt or Syria or the Arabian desert. Richard knew what he had in Mustafa, and was visibly glad of it.

  A day or two after the lord al-Adil came back from his prudent retreat, Richard went hawking in the hills above the sea. It was a very early morning, up and out before dawn, and he took only a few hardy souls for escort, reckoning to be back in Jaffa by full morning. He did not need Mustafa for that, but Mustafa had been unable to sleep.

  So, it seemed, had the singer Blondel. Richard did not raise a brow at either of them, but Mustafa was aware of
the chill in the air, which was more than early autumn in this part of Syria could account for.

  It did not matter to him. He had a favorite hawk, a desert falcon, small but swift, which the king’s chief falconer was so kind as to look after for him. It was good to see the fierce little creature again, to feel the grip of claws on his gauntleted fist before he bade it shift to the padded perch on his saddlebow. He took a place not too far from the king, but not too presumptuously near. Blondel, with his lute in its case but no falcon to hunt for him, rode just behind Richard, defying anyone else to displace him.

  No one did. Newcomers would cross him, but anyone who had been with Richard through the Crusade had learned to let the singer be. He was Richard’s and only Richard’s. He cared for nothing and no one else.

  The hunting was good—so much so that they had gone rather farther than they had intended, out of sight of the city and into a stretch of tumbled hills. They dismounted there to drink from a spring that bubbled up from the rock, to eat such provisions as they had brought in their saddlebags, and to share a brag or six. No one troubled to post a guard. Mustafa thought of it, but fast riding and fresh morning air and the rising of warmth with the day made him lazy.

  Richard, having eaten and drunk with good appetite, spread his cloak on a flat stretch of ground and lay on it. Blondel tuned his lute. The others gathered to listen, or were already snoring in the sun. The horses, hobbled, nosed about for what grazing they could find. Only the falconers were honestly awake, tending the birds in a curve of rocky hillside, sheltered from the wind.

  Blondel’s voice was sweet, whatever one might think of his disposition. Richard smiled as he drowsed. Mustafa took note of the words of the song, which were in the language of the south of France, swift and liquid, with a hint about it of strong sunlight and thyme-scented hillsides. Someday he would see those hills, he thought sleepily. Someday he would—