The Dagger and the Cross (20 page)

Ysabel, it seemed, had taken it into her head to run away.
Again, and rather more successfully than she had before. Now she was found. She
had Simeon’s whelp with her, and Simeon adding his voice to the din, and Ranulf
looking bone-weary and saying nothing. “You could have been killed!” her mother
screamed at her, not for the first time from the looks of it. “You could have
been kidnapped, taken by slavers, dragged away in chains. Anything at all could
have happened to you!”

“But it didn’t,” Ysabel said with that perfect confidence in
her own righteousness which could drive any self-respecting adult wild. “I was
with Akiva. We prayed at the Wailing Wall, and then we went to the Temple, and
then we went to the Mount of Olives. They shut the gates while we were there.
We found a place to sleep, and stayed there till Aimery found us. No one ever
laid a hand on us.”

“I’ll lay a hand on you,” her mother said grimly. “Right
where it will do the most good.”

Simeon’s agreement was palpable. He had Akiva by the ear.
The boy wore an expression of resignation, and even a glimmer of repentance. “Father,
you did give me leave.”

“I gave you leave? To stay out all night and make me tear my
hair with worry, I gave you leave?” Simeon shook him till he yelped. “And you
almost a man. A girlchild, nine summers old, running away like a whipped puppy,
I can see that. But a boy almost a man—”

“I made him do it,” Ysabel said staunchly, if not wisely. “He
only went to look after me, because I wouldn’t go back.”

“All the worse,” said Simeon. “A man should know when to
disregard a child’s whim.”

“A child,” gritted Joanna, “even a girlchild, ought to know
better than to do such a thing to begin with.”

“Just so,” said Simeon. “And for that shall you be punished.
Come, sir. We have presumed on these people’s kindness long enough.”

Akiva came with a fair semblance of meekness, but Aidan,
unnoticed in the doorway, marked the flash of his eyes. There would be trouble
later. Witchfolk trouble.

Oh, no, there won’t.

Akiva went green. Aidan smiled amiably at him and went on in
his mind, Yes, I’m here, and I’ve heard as much as I need to hear. Shall we
discuss it with my brother, or would you prefer to suffer your punishment—your
well-earned punishment—in silence?

That cowed him, though there was spirit enough in him to
make him grin when his father, dragging him through the door, saw who moved
aside to let him pass. Simeon was quite as startled as Akiva had been. Aidan
laid a finger on his lips. Simeon ducked his head, muttered a reverence, and
departed, with his son half running to keep pace.

Joanna had started on Ysabel again. Ranulf sat in a chair
and lowered his head into his hands. Aidan knew the look of a night’s hard
hunting and a morning’s hard fretting. And none of them had sent word to him.

Of course not. They were like everyone else: careful of his
grief, sparing his temper.

That was cooling at last in this blessed human uproar. Aidan
left the concealment of the doorway and came into the solar. Joanna’s tirade
wound down. Ysabel stared wide-eyed, with the first sign of apprehension which
she had deigned to show. She had not heard what he said to Akiva, because he
did not wish her to; nor known that he was there. Ranulf raised his head and
put on a smile of welcome. It was not too ill done, all things considered. “My
lord. Aidan?”

“Aidan,” he said. He looked from one to another of them. “She
did it again, did she? You should have told me. I could have found her for you.”

Joanna shook her head. It was more tiredness than negation. “I
suppose I should have. It didn’t seem wise at the time. And, as you see, we
found her. Or Aimery did. He kept his head when all the rest of us lost ours,
and tracked her down.”

Ysabel opened her mouth, but shut it again. Aidan looked her
up and down. “What did I tell you the last time you did this to your mother?”

She hung her head. She did it, he well knew, to hide the
rebellion in her eyes.

“Well?” he prompted her.

She mumbled something.

“Louder,” he said, relentless.

“You said you’d give me a hiding I’d never forget!”

He winced at the volume of it. “So I did. So I shall. If you
wanted to stay the night with me, you should have asked.”

“I couldn’t. They would have said no. You would, too. I had
to get away from all of you.”

Just as he had fled his own house, not two hours before. She
saw that; she put edges in it and turned it to stab.

He caught her power’s hand, lightly but inescapably.

“I am grown,” he said, soft, for her and her alone to hear, “and
I have gone where any of my kin may know to find me. Nor do I grieve my mother
for doing it.”

“It’s not fair!”

“Life isn’t,” he said, still softly, still holding her power
at bay. “Come here, Ysabel.”

She did not want to, but there was no escaping the bond he
set on her. She dragged her feet, she would not look at him, she came at last
within his arm’s reach. His hand flicked out. She gasped at the sting on her
cheek. “That,” he said, “is the merest prick of nothing next to the pain you
gave your mother. And it is to remember by.”

He had never struck her before, though she had had her share
of spankings at home. She was as appalled as if he had taken a whip to her. He
would not let her know that he was almost as shocked. His temper was never as cool
as he had thought.

She stood with her hand to her cheek, too stunned even for
tears. He quelled the stab of pity. He pitied her too often, indulged her too
shamelessly. And this was how she paid him.

“Remember,” he said. “Any wound you deal for failing to
think, or for thinking only of yourself, harms far more than you alone. If you
cannot think of others when you act, then you should not act at all.”

She shrank under his words. When he stopped, she asked
faintly, “Are you going to tan my hide?”

“Do I need to?”

She drew a shuddering breath, choking on the tears she would
not shed. “It wouldn’t hurt as much as this.”

“Then this should be sufficient, shouldn’t it?”

She sniffed loudly, but she nodded. There was no deception
in it. Ysabel was a canny little witch, but she was honest.

“Now,” Aidan said. “Apologize to your mother and your
father, and promise us all that you’ll behave yourself hereafter. Beginning by
doing whatever your mother tells you to do, and not arguing.”

o0o

Ysabel went to take a bath and put on a clean kirtle, and to
be obedient to her nurse. Ranulf had fallen asleep with his head on the table,
pillowed on his folded arms. Joanna regarded him with slightly exasperated
affection. “He’ll be the very devil to rouse,” she said, “and worse if I let
him sleep there and get a crick in his neck.”

“I’ll carry him to bed,” Aidan said.

Her incredulity only lasted for an instant, before she
remembered. Even then she widened her eyes at the sight of Aidan, barely taller
than Ranulf and half as broad, taking him up as easily as if he had been a
child.

“Almost,” Aidan grunted, steadying that solid bulk, adding a
touch of power to make it light. Then indeed he was easy to carry, hardly
heavier than Ysabel. Aidan laid him in his bed, and with Joanna helping, eased
him out of boots and cotte. He never stirred except to bury his face in the
pillow and sink deeper into sleep.

Joanna drew the coverlet over him and smoothed his hair as
if he had been one of her sons. “Poor man, he tramped the city all night, worried
sick and doing his best to pretend he wasn’t. I thought he was going to cry
when Aimery brought the little beast back.”

“She won’t do it again,” Aidan said, “for a day or three.”

“Haven’t I heard you say that before?” Joanna herded him out
of the bedchamber and eased the door shut, leaning against it, pushing her hair
out of her face. “God. Six of them. Seven now. Why haven’t I gone insane?”

“You ask me?”

She met his smile with a weary grin. “That one is the worst,
I have to confess. When the others get into trouble, it’s journeyman-class
trouble. She is a master.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why? It’s not your fault.”

But it was. Her eyes met his. Human eyes, but otherwise
exactly like her daughter’s. The same bright impulsive spirit. The same
suggestion of summer thunder.

He was not supposed to love her. He was Morgiana’s now, and
that bond would endure past the world’s end. But before Morgiana won him, there
was Joanna. She had borne the only child he had yet begotten, the only one he
might ever beget. That she was well and contentedly married, that she had borne
numerous children since, mattered not at all. Age and childbearing and the
duties of a baroness in Outremer had not changed her. She was still Joanna;
still the sullen-sweet, impetuous, headstrong child who ran away from her
husband and loved a witchborn prince.

She shook her head, reading him as effortlessly as if she
had power. “We can’t,” she said. “It’s too long past. There’s too much world
between.”

“And time.”

She smiled, half sad, half tender. “I suppose I’ll envy you
someday. When I feel the years creeping up on me. When I see the dark at the
end of them.”

“Don’t,” he said.

She reached as if to touch him, but let her hand fall short.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I know.”

“But I did.” She pulled herself up, bracing her sorely taxed
back. He did not even think. He set his hand on it. He took the pain, as much
of it as his poor talent could take.

She was warm, human-warm, cooler than he, both more solid
and more fragile. His fingers flexed against the solidity of her.

She eased away from him, carefully, with rigid control. “Thank
you,” she said.

That was not what he wanted to hear. What he wanted, she
could not say, nor should he try to make her. It was past, as she said. Cruel
to linger; cruel to force her to remember.

Cruel also to run away as her daughter had, because he could
not bear it. She wanted him there, for all the pain it cost her. He wanted to
be there. He stayed for that, longer than he should; taking strength from her,
and giving it, in equal measure. Even yet, with all that was between them, they
could heal one another.

It was late when Aidan came back to his own house, later
than he had intended. His people went about their business with laudable
industry. The message had gone to Millefleurs to summon the levies from the
demesne and bid them meet their lord in Acre. Those who were in Jerusalem did
what they might to prepare for the march. It was all in perfect and impeccable
order.

Gwydion’s doing, and Morgiana’s. Aidan found them in the court
of the fountain, sitting together, doing nothing that was not proper between
brother and sister. And yet at the sight of them his heart twisted.

Gwydion reached out with more than hands, enfolding him in a
warm, invisible embrace. Morgiana came more tangibly, as if they had never
parted in a quarrel and then spent the night and the day apart. Her mouth was
sweet; sweeter than he remembered.

He came up from the kiss, dizzy and dazzled. She laughed and
drew him to the fountain’s rim, set him down by his brother, sat on his other
side with her arm about him. There between the two of them, he should have
rested.

But he could not. He tried to hide it; to hear what they
said. Nothing of great consequence. Gwydion had been in the city, had gone to
the Temple and spoken with the knights who ruled it, and then, to be courteous,
had spoken also with the Knights of the Hospital in their great house and
hospital near the Holy Sepulcher, where they had gathered to mourn their Grand
Master. “The Hospitallers speak well of you,” he said.

“The Templars less well, I’m sure,” said Aidan somewhat
dryly.

“Well enough,” said Gwydion, amused, “though you have been
known to refer to them as ‘those hotheads in bloody crosses.’”

“They are,” Morgiana said. “That Master of theirs, and that
idiot who calls himself king—they are a pair, and no mistake. Allah could
hardly have done a greater favor to my lord Salah al-Din than He has done in
giving him such a pair of enemies.”

“Fortunately they are not all he has to face.” Gwydion leaned
lightly against his brother, comfortably, as one who knows where his proper
place is. “I told the knights of both Temple and Hospital that I would be
fighting in the army of Outremer, if its king will have me.”

“You know he wants you,” said Morgiana.

“He does,” Gwydion said, “when he’s not being persuaded that
I’m after his crown. If he requires an oath to that effect, then he shall
receive one. I can hardly refuse to defend the Holy Sepulcher while I am here
and it is in danger, even
if
my knights would allow it. But I will never
undertake to be made its chief Defender.”

She regarded him past Aidan’s silence, not surprised, never
that, but somewhat awed. “You are as zealous in the Crusade as any mortal fool.”

“How can I not be? It’s my Crusade as much as theirs; my
holy places which are about to be overrun.”

She frowned, troubled. “That is the heart of it, isn’t it?
Whose holy places, and how they shall be taken or held. I thought better of
you. I thought you would see sense, and leave while you could.”

“Why? Because I never in my life began a war, and never
sought one out that did not come to me?”

“I never called you a coward.”

“I never thought you did. But this is a war which has come
to me, above all that I have ever fought. How can I turn my back on it?”

“It’s a mortal war.”

“It is holy war.”

That silenced her. In the silence, Aidan rose from between
them. Her body against his, Gwydion’s body bracing it on the other side, were a
white pain. They never noticed. He hid it too well; they cared too little to
see. He said something of going to look in on his mamluks. They nodded, already
dismissing him, moving back together to continue their colloquy.