The Dagger and the Cross (47 page)

“And well you ought to be,” he growled at her.

She grinned and pulled him out of the room.

“Now?” he cried. “I have to begin it wow?”

“When better?”

He had a mouthful of answers for that, but she gave him time
to utter none of them. He did get out a curse. “Witch!”

She only laughed.

Ysabel peered warily round the door. Gwydion was gone, which
meant that his servant and his squire were gone as well, and Simeon with them,
though he would not have gone easily. There was only Akiva, curled in a knot on
his mat, a bundle of blanket with his curly head at the top of it.

It was quite an ordinary sleep by now, or Gwydion would
never have left him to it. She set down what had given her an excuse to come
here, the bowl of bread and cheese covered with a cloth, and sat on her heels
beside it.

Akiva was changing so fast that she could almost see it.
Suddenly his nose almost fit his face, and his eyes were not quite too big for
it, and his chin made human chins seem wide and clumsy. He was not getting
pretty, she decided. No more than Gwydion or Aidan were. He was growing
beautiful.

She would never let him know she thought it. He was almost
awake. His nose twitched, catching the scent of cheese and new bread. She drew
her brows together in the beginning of a frown.

He opened his eyes. Sleep made them soft and blurred, but
his mind was clear enough. She watched him focus all in an eyeblink, like a
hawk. He saw her. He reckoned where he was, and when he was, and what had put
him there. He sat up a little dizzily. His stomach growled.

“The king was hungrier than you are,” Ysabel said as Akiva
wolfed down his breakfast. “He ate so much that he even made Mother happy. That’s
what power does, he says. You should have eaten after you did your healing, and
then you should have slept. You’d not have been as sick then.”

“I didn’t think I’d done that much,” Akiva said between
bites. He reached for the bottle she had brought. It was almost all water, but
there was a little wine, and an herb or two that Gwydion had told Cook to put
in it. Akiva grimaced at the taste, but he drank it.

“It’s odd,” he said. “I didn’t feel as if I was sleeping at
all. More that I was dreaming, the way trees do, and growing, and mending where
I needed to. I felt you there. You kept me from fading, did you know that? You
gave me strength to feed on until the king came. It’s a gift, like healing, but
different from it. Your father has it, too. He’s like fire. He warms more than
himself.”

“Sometimes he burns,” Ysabel said. She filched a bit of
bread and nibbled on it, for something to do. “You look all well. The king says
you are. He says you’ll want to rest for a day or two until all your strength
comes back, but there’s nothing wrong with you.”

Akiva stretched. His bones cracked; he made a face. “Did I
grow again while I was asleep?”

“A whole inch,” said Ysabel.

He believed her, for a moment, until he saw the glint in her
eye. He glared. “Just you wait till it happens to you.”

“I wish it would. I’m tired of being a baby.”

“Well,” he said. “Girls grow faster than boys.”

“I don’t want to grow,” she said, contrary. “I don’t want to
change. I wish I could be grown up without having to go through all the
awkwards in between.”

He looked at her. His eyes narrowed. “You could do that,” he
said. “You could make it happen.”

She could. She saw it inside. One willed thus, and so. One
made this change, and that.

She hugged herself, shivering. She could, but she did not
want to. She thought that it might be a Sin. Children grew the way they did
because God made them that way. If they grew themselves too fast, who knew what
would happen?

Akiva was changing fast enough, and none of it was his
doing. He was like a colt, all legs and awkwardness, but the grace was coming
through. He walked to the bed and back, unsteady at first, then more sure of
himself. He turned, feeling the way his body moved. A smile broke out on his
face. “I feel so strong,” he said.

“That’s because you were so weak for so long.” Ysabel
offered him his coat. He put it on over his long linen shirt.

He needed to rest then. It surprised him; he was as angry as
Akiva ever got. Ysabel bullied more breakfast into him, and more of Gwydion’s
potion. They helped more than a little, but he stayed where he was, sitting on
his mat with his back against the wall.

After a while Ysabel said, “I did a little hunting while you
were asleep.”

He was not about to be distracted that easily, but he raised
his brows. “Did you find anything?”

“I think they’re here,” she said. “All of them. And the pope’s
letter. The trader’s son spends a lot of time trying not to think about it.”

Akiva did not, as she had half expected, try to see what she
spoke of. His mind was tender yet, and not inclined to stretch itself. “We
ought to tell your father,” he said.

“What makes you think I didn’t?”

He looked at her.

Her cheeks went hot. “So. I didn’t want to do it without
you.”

“You should have,” he said.

“When? They were all too busy with you.”

He had to admit the truth of that. “They’ll know now. That
all the grownfolk are here. Their walls will be higher than ever.”

“But now we know where to look. I think we should go
ourselves, and see what we can see.”

“Without telling anyone?” Akiva frowned. “That’s not wise.
Remember what happened the last time we did it.”

Ysabel did not want to, but it was hard to stop, with Akiva
showing her wherever her power looked.

“I think,” he said, “that we should go to your father now,
and tell him. He doesn’t know. My lord king didn’t take it from my mind, or
anything else but what he needed to heal me. He’s scrupulous, is my lord.”

“So is my father,” Ysabel said. “He won’t even read humans
if he can help it. Morgiana says he’s foolish. But she doesn’t steal thoughts,
either, except when she’s being shouted at.”

Akiva stood up again. “Maybe we should tell the king first.
He’s less likely than either of them to get angry and kill someone, and then be
sorry after.”

“No,” said Ysabel. “It’s my father’s grief, and my father’s
right. He should know first. He’s wiser than people give him credit for. He won’t
do anything hasty.”

Akiva was not at all sure of that, but he granted that she
was more likely to know what her father would do. He let her lead him to the
fire of power that was Aidan.

o0o

Guillermo Seco was not by nature a nervous man. It was his
boast and his pride that, whatever befell him, he greeted it with a calm face
and a steady mind.

His son, unfortunately, took after his mother. A silly,
flighty woman, much given to excesses of religion. Seco had taken her for her
dowry, and for her family that was one of the greatest in Genoa; once she gave
him an heir, he was more than pleased to leave her to her moaning and praying.

Marco had her looks at least: her fine fair skin and her big
brown eyes. It was Seco’s misfortune that the boy also had her propensity for
foolishness. She would have seen him happily into an abbey in Genoa, and most
of her dowry with him, had not Seco sailed headlong from Outremer to pluck both
boy and dower free. Small thanks he had had for it, either. Marco sulked and
pined and affected to loathe the slightest whisper of commerce. Seco had dared
to cherish a hope or two in this conspiracy which they had entered, taking the
boy with him against the others’ wishes, but now it was evident that the
attraction had been not hope of riches and revenge, but calf-eyed infatuation
with the monk who had forged the pope’s letter.

Now this Brother Thomas was in Tyre, attending the pope’s
legate, and there was no reasoning with Marco. “Why can’t I see him?” the boy
whined. “I don’t have to stay long. I can just talk to him for a little. Shouldn’t
he know that the witch-king is here, and his brother and the Assassin, too?”

“I doubt very much,” Seco said tightly, “that he can be
ignorant of it.”

“Then maybe he’ll know what to do.” Marco was shaking, God
knew what for, whether eagerness or sulkiness or plain fear. “I tell you,
Father, there are more witches here than we’ve been told of. That Jew’s whelp
in the caravan—”

Seco had heard all he ever wanted to hear of the Jew’s whelp
in the caravan. Incessantly. For months. Ever since the caravan left Jerusalem.
He had long since given up trying to reason with Marco. He cuffed the boy to
stop his babble, ignored the boy’s black glare, and said, “What your monk will
do, I hardly care. I care more that the witches have come, and they will be in
no forgiving mood. If they discover what part we had in their discomfiture...”

“They know,” said Marco. “The whelp knows. I tell you,
Father. He
said
so. He haunts me. Night after night I dream of him. I
pray, I hang myself with holy relics, and still he comes. Still he besets me.
He
knows,
Father.”

Seco considered another blow, but something in his son’s
face made him pause. “How can he know? Your monk said that we would be
protected.”

“Yes, but were we? The witches were gone to the war. Did you
keep on defending yourself as you were instructed? I tried, but it was, is, so
hard. It makes my head ache.”

“Well, then,” snapped Seco. “If he knows, why hasn’t he done
something about it?”

“Maybe he can’t,” Marco said. “He’s a young one, after all.
Maybe he needed to wait until the others came to help him.” He fretted from one
end to the other of the room, wringing his hands like a woman, plucking at his
beardless chin. “They’ll hunt us, I know it. They’ll find us. They’ll eat our
souls.”

Seco despised him. But months of his nonsense had not
lessened it; and Seco himself was uneasy. Not because of Marco, he told
himself. Marco was an idiot. Still, even an idiot need not be wholly blind.
Seco had seen the witch-king and his brother in the city, and the Assassin
riding beside them, fair and strange and terrible amid their human slaves.
There was no mercy in those bloodless faces; no compassion in those eyes.

He was not unduly concerned for his soul. His skin, however,
and his livelihood: those, he feared for.

Marco did not need to know that Seco had spoken with the
monks, Thomas the sour-faced saint and portly Richard both. They had refused to
tell him where the pope’s letter was. No more had they consented to do as he
proposed—he who was, after all, the fount of this conspiracy.
When the
Constable comes,
they had said,
we will consider it.
As if there
could be anything to consider beyond what Guillermo Seco intended: what they
had all agreed to do, long ago in Acre, once the pope’s letter was taken and
forged and read. Messire Amalric was coming, they said, as perfectly immovable
as ever Mother Church could be. He had set in train the gathering of the king’s
ransom; now he would come to Tyre, then and only then would they do aught but
sit and wait.

Messire Amalric had come. Yesterday, in the morning. He had
sent no word to Guillermo Seco; no reply to the message which Seco sent. Seco
could argue that there had been no time. He knew that there had been no desire.
He who had conceived this plot was closed off from it by those who had come
after.

Marco dithered about the cell of a room that was all even a
rich man could find in thronged and costly Tyre. Thomas had succeeded well with
him: he was in abject terror of the witches and their spells. Now and again he
crossed himself, muttering nonsense.

He stopped, quivering. “Father, let me go to Brother Thomas.
Let me warn him at the very least. He’s in terrible danger. If they find him—if
they catch him—”

Seco would be delighted to feed him to them. Sneering,
sanctimonious fool. What he wanted was no secret. He would thwart the witches
for the pure joy of it. And if they found and seized him, he would play the
holy martyr for all that he was worth.

What Seco wanted was simple. The others did not intend to
let him take it.

He was not their menial. Let them thwart him as they would.
He would do it in spite of them.

He rose, breathed deep. His heart was thudding under his
breastbone. He was not a young man, nor a brave one. But for his skin’s sake,
and for his son, who though a fool and a witling was still his only heir, he
could do what he must do.

Seco left his son at home, telling him that he had an
errand, which was true enough. The boy, commanded to remain where he was,
sulked but did not argue. It was not the first time Seco had left him so. He
prayed, the servants said, and read from his book of saints, and played the
perfect little priest.

Let him do it now to his heart’s content. Seco intended to
win him free from this war-mad country, and a fine weight of gold with him, to
recover what they had lost in the debacle of Acre. Outside of Brother Thomas’
power, away from the reeking holiness of Outremer, perhaps at last Marco would
learn that he was never born to be a priest; he was a merchant’s son of a long
line of merchants, and his sons would be merchants after him.

Yes, Seco thought as he jostled through the streets. Sons
for his son. They would go back to Genoa; they would survey the prospects; they
would find Marco a wife. Someone pretty enough to fire his blood, practical
enough to look after his house, and fecund enough to present him with a family.
And rich. That, of course.

He shook his head at himself. Marco’s mooncalf moods were
infecting him; he was building castles before he had the land to set them on.

But this was what he had intended from the first. Or part of
it. The others thwarted him; or dreamed that they did. Cowards, all of them.
They would sit with folded hands and do nothing while all hope of profit passed
them by.