The Dagger and the Cross (35 page)

What Marco was trying not to remember was how the real Aidan
had seemed to him. Frightening, yes, but as a stallion is, or a leopard:
because he was so dangerous and so unpredictable, and so beautiful. Marco
wanted to hate him. Marco also wanted to fall down and worship him.

They often hate what they long for most.
Akiva was
with her, watching as she watched, though keeping half of himself for walking
through the human city.

Humans are strange,
Ysabel said. Marco made her head
ache. She clung to him out of sheer stubbornness. He was not thinking about the
pope’s letter, but even if he had been, he would not know where it was. No more
would his father. He was very sure of that. But Brother Thomas knew. Brother
Thomas was the one who had done it.

Ysabel had to stop and gather in her power, or it would
flame itself all over Jerusalem. She was almost caught up with the ones she
followed. They had gone into the house.

Into nothingness.

She reeled. They were gone utterly between one step and the
next. There was not even a hint of them left.

“Wards,” Akiva said in her ear. He looked as white and
shaken as she felt. The street was crowded; they moved out of the jostling and
cursing into the lee of a doorway.

“Wards,” Akiva said again. “As strong as I’ve ever seen. But
I’ve never seen wards quite like these. Can you hear the buzzing behind them?”

She could. It set her teeth on edge. She could almost have
thought that the buzzing had words in it: a ceaseless, droning monotone,
repeating nonsense over and over.
Hic haec hoc haec hoc haec hie haec...

She tore herself out of the trap. Her people’s wards were like
glass, or like walls of light. They repelled, gently but inexorably. A touch
slid off them. These sucked one in, tried to make one think as they thought,
round and round and round.

“I don’t think we should stay here,” Akiva said. His voice
was faint. He was quite unabashedly afraid.

She set her chin and her will. “We have to. How can we know,
otherwise?”

“We can tell Prince Aidan when he comes back. Or Lady
Morgiana. They’ll know what to do.”

Ysabel shook her head stubbornly. “That’s cowardice.”

“You can call it that if you like. I don’t want my mind
undone. I’m too young, Ysabel. I haven’t got all my strength yet.”

He was talking about Ysabel, too; and not hiding it very
well. That was how much these wards had shaken him: they had made him forget
how to build the wall about his own mind. She was obstinate, he thought, just
to be contrary.

Which was true, and which stung. “All right then,” she said
angrily. “Be a coward. I’m going into that house.”

His breath caught. “You can’t.”

“I can.”

He seized her, which he had never done before, and shook her
so hard that her teeth rattled. Then he let her go. “You can be stupid,” he
said with temper to match hers, but bottled up, held down hard, until it was
absolutely quiet. “You can be as much of an idiot as you could ever want to be.
But not here. Not at your father’s expense.”

She stared at him. There were words in her, but they were
too many. She could not find one that would do.

“Your father,” he said, striking at her with it. “Think of
him for a moment, if you can. Suppose you go to that house. Suppose, by the
devil’s luck, you get in. What do you do then? You won’t be able to use your
power. You can’t hide for long. The one who raised the wards will catch you. He’ll
know what you are. He’ll hold you just exactly the way he holds the pope’s
letter, where your father will never be able to find you. What will it do to
him to lose you as well as his lady? Have you even stopped to think of that?”

She had not. “They’re priests. They won’t hurt me.”

“Do they need to? They can hold you. They can snare you with
their wards. Then they can use you against your father.”

“They won’t know. How can they? I’m just a girlchild,
sneaking about where I shouldn’t.”

“All they have to do is look at your eyes.”

That was brutal, and it stopped her cold. She looked at
Akiva. His eyes were so dark that the difference did not show at all. Until he
shifted, and they flared.

She could not hide even as well as that. Not without power
to help her. They would see, no matter what she did, and know. Then they would
have everything they needed to break the prince and his kin.

“But we have to do something!” she cried.

“We wait,” Akiva said. “We watch. We know who they are now;
we can tell our kin.”

“No,” she said. “Not them. Not yet. It’s too much explaining,
for nothing. When my father comes back...”

Akiva did not agree at first, but then he thought about it. “We
can’t do anything until he comes, after all,” he said. “Our human kin will only
fret, and want to know how we did it, and probably punish us.” He nodded,
deciding. “We wait and we watch, and we keep quiet.”

“And
if
it turns out that we can do anything, we do
it.”

Akiva opened his mouth, closed it. “If it’s sensible, and
unavoidable. Only that.”

“Of course,” Ysabel said. She meant it. Mostly.

He looked hard at her. After a moment he shrugged and
sighed. He was learning, was Akiva.

Joanna had had enough of Jerusalem. She liked it not too
badly when everyone was there and court was in session and there was more to do
than go over and over the same fruitless maunderings. Now there was not even a
caravan to lighten the monotony. Every intelligent caravan master was avoiding
the Kingdom of Jerusalem since Saladin had raised the jihad.

A woman as pregnant as she was should properly be so deep in
herself and her baby that she hardly noticed the world at all. Joanna had never
been a very proper woman. She was losing sleep, she was losing her desire to
eat, she was losing her temper at anything and everything.

“Acre,” she said in mid-pace, turning ponderously to face
Simeon. “I’m going to Acre. Elen is there; there’s still a bit of trade in and
out; and I have Ranulf’s estates to look after.”

Simeon regarded her calmly. “Acre is rather less well
defended than Jerusalem; and it’s a surer target. The Saracen will strike for
it if he breaks through the army.”

“How can he? Saladin can’t come any closer than Tiberias.
They’ll hold him there, or harry him up and down the border.”

“One should allow for contingencies,” Simeon said.

“So I shall. Acre has one escape that Jerusalem can never
have: it faces on the sea.”

Simeon sighed. “You will do what you will do. But if you go
to Acre, the rest of us go with you.”

“What if the Saracen attacks?”

“As you say. We turn to the sea.”

Joanna was trapped in her own net. “So,” she said. “Come
with me. Show me how much trouble you’ll all be. Delay me till I’m like to
scream. It won’t matter. I’m going to Acre.”

Simeon said nothing. He had no need. Prudence was no part of
Joanna’s intention. All she wanted was escape.

At least it would be a different sky. And preparing for the
exodus preoccupied her wonderfully. It even made her forget for whole minutes
at a time that she was too heavy with pregnancy to be traveling. Not even her
mother had reminded her of that. As Margaret knew all too well, Joanna would
only have been the more determined to prove them wrong.

She would not try to ride. That much sense at least she had.
She hated riding in a litter, but for the baby’s sake she would suffer it. Lady
Margaret had hired a midwife and named her Joanna’s maid. Joanna, undeceived,
let the woman be. It could not hurt to have her there, and it would keep people
quiet. For herself, she intended to have her baby in her own house in Acre as
she had had every one of the others, and at the hands of the one who had been
with her for every child but Aimery: Zoe the Byzantine, whom she first met in
Aleppo, and who had come back to Outremer with her and become friend as well as
physician.

Zoe would have plenty to say to a woman who tramped the roads
in the middle of a war, at eight months pregnant. She would have had more to
say to one who trusted to any other power than her own, to bring that baby into
the world.

o0o

Joanna would have reckoned that her own company of
men-at-arms was enough to protect them even in as unsettled a country as this
had become. Lady Margaret did not agree. She would not go; Jerusalem was her
city, and she was not about to leave it. But neither would she leave her
daughter to her folly. “I have found companions for you,” she said the day
before Joanna was to go—a good week later already than Joanna would have liked.
“A small caravan from Jerusalem to Acre, with troops to guard it. Its master
owes me a favor. This will be part payment of it.”

Joanna could not find anything to say. Margaret was a
daughter and an heir of the House of Ibrahim in Aleppo, although her father had
been a baron of Jerusalem; that, in the world of trade, made her a princess of
a house of queens. She could outmaneuver and outbargain Joanna at every step of
the way. That she had not offered more than token resistance to Joanna’s
idiocy, meant that she did not choose to; this doubled escort was small enough
price to pay for her acquiescence.

o0o

Ysabel, having found her father’s enemies, was hardly minded
to leave them now. Who knew what they would do without anyone to watch them?
But her mother was set on going to Acre. There was no budging her.

Ysabel did not learn what her grandmother was up to until
the very last moment. Until, in fact, they were all together in their caravan,
with Joanna in her hated litter in the middle of it and all their goodbyes
said. As they began to move, a second, slightly larger caravan came up behind
them. At first Ysabel knew simply that the two companies had decided to travel
together as their like often did, for safety and for company. It was Akiva who
pointed out the one who led the second caravan.

She did not know his face. An ordinary enough face, fleshy
with prosperity, with a grizzled beard to give it authority. But his mind—she
almost shouted aloud. No need after all to wish she had remained behind. Their
enemy was riding with them to Acre.

She found his son near enough to him, dangling at the heel
of a portly monk. Young Marco was not ill to look at, if somewhat weedy and
awkward. His mind was as blurry as ever, and as weak in hiding what it thought.
He was half excited, half afraid. He knew very well whose kin they were riding
with. He shared his father’s confidence that they could not know what part the
Secos, father and son, had had in their kinsfolk’s discomfiture, but he went in
imminent, delicious dread of their finding it out.

Brother Thomas would be furious. He did not know. Neither of
the Secos had told him, and Brother Richard said that he had not seen fit to.

Brother Richard warded himself better than either of the
others, but it was not the wall Ysabel had run afoul of when she first found
the conspiracy. That was still in Jerusalem. Maybe Brother Thomas; maybe
someone else she had not learned of yet. Morgiana would be interested to know
how many humans had escaped her hunt. She would want to kill them all,

Ysabel might be willing to let her. The merchant was a sly,
smug, horrible creature. He actually smirked when he came to pay his respects
to the ladies, though he did it where he thought no one could see. Guillermo,
his name was. Guillermo Seco. Ysabel committed it and his face to memory beside
her remembrance of his mind. It was shielding now, but haphazardly, and—that
thought was as clear as if he had said it aloud—only because the damned fools
of monks had made him swear to do it. He was ignorant. He thought Brother
Richard might be able somehow to tell if he slacked off too badly.

Brother Richard could no more read another man’s mind than
he could fly. He could shield his own mind, to be sure, and do it well. There
was no profit in trying to break the wall. It was not as strong as the one in
Jerusalem, but it was quite as dangerous. Even being near it taxed her will to
stay away from it.

o0o

It was not so far to Acre, if one had a falcon’s wings, or
relays of fast horses. In a caravan, in summer’s heat, with wagons, and women
in litters, it took the better part of a week. They dawdled, for a fact. Every
day they had news from here or there. Saladin was massing on the eastern
borders. Guy was mustering his army near Nazareth. Castles and cities that had
been scant enough on fighting men already, now stripped themselves to the bone.
The whole country held its breath and waited for word to come that there had been
a battle.

There was even, once, a message from their own kin, brought
up from Jerusalem by a servant who had been left behind. No news in it to speak
of. Just that they were well, and there had been no fighting, apart from a
skirmish or two.

Joanna was not fit for human company for hours after that,
between missing her husband and missing Aidan and fretting over the letter she
had had from Aimery. There were no secrets in it; she read it to Ysabel.
Aimery
de Mortmain to the Lady Joanna de Hautecourt Lady mother, I am well I hope you
are well and the baby is well and the children are staying out of trouble. I am
with Count Raymond every day, but he lets me ride sometimes with Father or
Prince Aidan. They are well Prince Aidan hasn’t yelled at the king even once.
He says that I shoot well. I shot a gazelle yesterday. We had it for dinner.
Tomorrow, maybe, we hunt Saracens.

That was all there was room for on the parchment. Aimery had
written it with his own hand: it wobbled in places, and the spelling was, as
Joanna thought and Ysabel heard, inventive. Joanna was proud that he could
write at all. Most young lords could not, still less in decipherable Latin.
Something of his lessons had stayed with him. Joanna glared at the letter,
furious, because it made her want to weep.