Behold the Dawn (31 page)

“What’s he here for?” Was this the hand of God, then, that he should stumble upon Father Roderic and his nest of vipers, when his search was only yet begun?

The other man shrugged. “To oversee the defense and all that, I suppose. Though we were doing not so bad on our own, methinks.”

“Did he come alone?”

“You mean is His Majesty with him? Nay. The king’s more interested in Mohammedans than he is in fortifying dusty Antioch.”

Annan leaned across the table, forcing his eyes to focus. “What about Roderic’s lieutenants? A Norman and a Templar?”

“The Norman, Hugh de Guerrant?”

“Aye.” Despite his effort to maintain a level tone, his voice rumbled.

The man gave him a long look. “I haven’t seen aught of him here. And if you’re thinking you’d like to engage him in a little test of strength, then it’s well for you he isn’t. They don’t make many finer knights than he.”

“Too bad he’s not less of a knight and more of a Christian.”

“Could be. But if you’ve a quarrel with the nobleman, then I’d warn you twice over not to challenge him.” He sniffed and returned to his ale. “Anyway, I saw one of his men reporting to the bishop only this morning, saying the earl wouldn’t be here.”

Annan’s skin burned. “One of Hugh’s men?”

“Aye, though I’ve not heard if he’s staying for the demonstration tomorrow. Probably will, I expect. I know I would, if’n I was in his saddle and had the opportunity. Right?” The knight gave a wink and nudged Annan’s arm with his elbow.

“Aye.” Annan pushed away from the table, seeing vaguely that the innkeeper’s wife had stepped into his path, awaiting payment for the meal.

He had no way of knowing if this messenger of Hugh’s was the same who had tried to kill Mairead. But the stutter of his heart told him that it was, that it must be. Whatever winds had blown the man here had blown him into Annan’s waiting arms, and right now that was assurance enough.

His companion leaned his head back to see Annan’s face. “And have you changed your mind about plying that brawny arm of yours after all, friend knight?”

“Aye.” Annan started for the door. “I have.”

Mairead opened her eyes to a haze of gray. Her lips parted to release a breath, and the fist of pain that hovered relentlessly in her foggy dreams battered her left side. The air, rich with the taste of rain, caught in her throat and tangled with her whimper.

“Lady.”

She hadn’t realized her whole body had been jostling, rocking gently from front to back, until it stopped in concert with the voice. It was a familiar voice, friendly, despite the high pitch of its worry.

Above her head, sounds of movement, of creaking wood and the brief clang of metal, reached her. A horse snorted and stamped a foot.

“My lady?” Footsteps brought the voice alongside her head, and this time she recognized its tentative tone.

And then she remembered. Her side burned with pain, and she managed to slide a trembling hand across her stomach until she found the wrinkle of the bandage that swelled beneath her left armpit.

“Don’t—don’t.” Marek’s fingers slipped beneath the coverlet to catch her hand before she could press the wound. He moved her hand back to her stomach and pulled the blanket all the way up to her chin. “You’re going to be just fine.”

She made herself open her eyes, and this time she was fully aware of her eyelids’ great weight and the scrape of grit against her eyes. “Annan—”

Marek’s face shaded her gaze from the gray light of the clouded sky. “He’s not here.” He smoothed her hair back from her face, inviting the cold sting of the wind against her skin.

She blinked and turned her head enough to see mottled crags, striped here and there with the green of cypresses. They were somewhere in the hills, in a day that bespoke of rain, herself on a pallet rigged with a horse on either end. The drowsy face of the bay charger given to Annan by Lord Stephen blinked at her from above her feet.

But Annan did not ride its saddle.

“Where is he?” The question thrummed in her chest, the words thrusting past her lips. A painful blackness threatened for a moment to wash out her vision, and she clenched her eyes. “Marek—?”

“He’s… gone to find the man who did this to you.”

“Why?” But she knew why. Annan had gone because he was driven to go. Because by entering his life, she had perhaps brought greater pain to him than all the unspeakable horrors of the years gone past.

“I don’t want him to go…” Tears, welling from the pain of her side and the pain of fears laid bare by her injury, bled at the corners of her raw eyes.

“I know.” Marek’s hand was warm on her shoulder, even through the thickness of the coverlet. “I told him. But he’ll come back. He always does.”

She shook her head, but she didn’t have the strength to speak the thought that filled her head: He couldn’t come back every time. And when the day came when he didn’t come back… she would spend the rest of her life, however long it might be, knowing she had been unable to save him from the darkness. She had been unable to save him from himself.

The tears flooded from her eyelids, falling warm upon her cheeks and turning cold in the breeze.

“Don’t cry, lady. Please—you’ll hurt yourself.”

But she had to cry. What else besides her tears did she have left to bring before Heaven’s throne?

A knight clad in the blue livery of the earldom of Guerrant galloped toward his enemy, spear couched beneath his arm, shoulders hunched in readiness for the impact.

From where he sat his horse between two striped tents, Annan watched. His chest tightened and, inside the confines of his helm, his breath echoed with an intensity that burned deep within his nostrils.

Only minutes earlier, this man, this minion of the accursed Hugh de Guerrant, had raised his helm in respect to Bishop Roderic, and in that instant Annan had no more doubts that he had found Mairead’s would-be murderer. Whether or not it was the hand of God that had led him here, he knew not. But one way or another, here they were, together in the same place, in the same time.

The knight, toes forced down in his stirrups and his whole body braced for the impact, spurred his horse’s side. The animal’s stride lengthened, and the two combatants crashed one into another, lances splintering.

The blunted end of the murderer’s spear caught his opponent in the shoulder and flung him from his horse. The man landed hard, facedown, and lay there a moment, windless, while his conqueror waited until he was helped from the field. As a squire ran to catch the riderless horse, the victor trotted to the purple-shrouded dais that bore Father Roderic and his company.

Annan’s fingers closed round the axe that lay across his saddlebow. Sweat stood out on his limbs, trickling its heat down his chest, infecting his blood.

It was time. And he was ready.

Chapter XXII

LORD HUGH’S LIEUTENANT—a Norman who had been with Hugh since childhood, as far as Roderic knew—had acquitted himself well. Better than well, in fact; he had swept the field before him. Not one knight had been able to challenge him.

Whatever Bertrand had done to displease Hugh must have been unpardonable for Hugh to have deprived himself of such an able soldier. Roderic rose from his cushioned seat of honor at the front of the dais and applauded against the back of his hand. Hugh’s loss was about to become Roderic’s gain.

In the absence of Brother Warin, Roderic’s need of a new lieutenant was growing most inconvenient. Bertrand’s crime against Hugh, whatever it may have been, was about to become the means to his promotion. Roderic’s lip curled. What would Master Hugh think of that development?

For now though, plots and successions would have to wait. Roderic stepped to the front of the box and lifted his hands to still the crowd’s excitement.

“Yeomen!” He raised his hands higher still. “Your silence, please. Come forward, Sir Bertrand!”

The knight’s chest rose beneath the black griffin de Guerrant. He approached, lance raised before his face in a salute.

The crowd’s murmuring swelled, changing from adulation to alarm. Across the meadow, a lone knight galloped, the raindrops dashing against his helm.

Roderic’s limbs jerked taut, his speech freezing in his throat. He had walked among the greatest political leaders of the world for too long not to hear the silent scream of danger that flew before the strange knight. The hair on his arms prickled; gooseflesh rose and pinched his skin.

Almost before Bertrand could turn his head to see through the eye slits of his helmet, the knight was upon him. The knight’s right arm rose behind his head, the blade of his axe glinting against the raindrops.

Time slowed. All Roderic could hear was the beat of his heart. His vision faltered. He watched, mouth still parted, wanting to believe this was just another specter raising itself from the red murk of the dreams that had haunted him since Acre. But it wasn’t.

The knight cut Bertrand down without slowing and without looking back. As he galloped past, the silver of his blade dull with blood, he turned his head in Roderic’s direction, and behind the faceless, expressionless mask, Roderic could feel the man’s gaze burning into his.

The crowd broke, most of them rushing to Bertrand’s headless body. As if they could help
him
. A few of the mounted knights gave chase to the unknown assassin. But they would not catch him. Roderic could not even begin to hope they might catch him.

Realizing his arms were still lofted, he cinched them around himself and tried to pretend his bones did not feel as though they were trying to melt into the tightness of his muscles.

“Your Grace?” The clipped Syrian accent of Sir Alard, the Antiochan noble who stood at his side, might have been a mace against a rock wall.

Roderic gritted his teeth. His eyes did not leave the swift trail of the knight’s gray courser galloping into the anonymity of the city.

Sir Alard gripped Roderic’s sleeve. “Who was he? Do you know who he was?”

Roderic could feel the pinch at the base of his skull that would clamp into a vise by the time he reached his quarters. “Marcus Annan.”

“Who?” Alard darted a look after the group of horsemen who were giving chase.

Roderic caught up his robes. He should never have agreed to this barbaric exhibition. Alard released his arm and said no more, probably because he thought that was where the matter ended.

But what could he possibly understand? Nothing!

The heat of anger and the cold of fear clashed in Roderic’s stomach, churning his innards into nausea. How could Hugh have erred to such a colossal extent? For all Roderic knew, Hugh might have stolen off with Mairead of Keaton and left Annan to seek revenge on whom he might. Or mayhap
this
was the mistake for which Bertrand had been dismissed?

His blood turned to sludge beneath his skin, and he stopped, halfway down the dais’s hollow-sounding steps, and cursed them both.

“Your Grace?” Alard, close behind him, leaned forward.

“Be still, you fool!”

“Ah… Yes, your Grace.”

Roderic stalked to where Odo held his bay mare in readiness. Earlier that morning, as he appeared before a cheering crowd, he had held his trailing robes up from the dew-wet grass. Now, he hardly cared if they were ruined forever.

Not waiting for his escort, he mounted the mare and whipped her forward. He was no longer safe in Antioch, that was clear. And he had no intention of ignoring Marcus Annan’s all too clear warning. As soon as he could gather his entourage, he would be leaving.

His spur gouged the mare’s side. He would return to Jaffa and to Richard. Perhaps, after all, he would be safest in the middle of a war.

After his parting with Bishop Roderic in Jaffa, and all the revelations their severance had entailed, Brother Warin had discovered he no longer believed in the cause of the Crusade. He had wanted to believe—had wanted to fight for it, even unto the shedding of his last drop of blood.

But he couldn’t.

The tourneyer Annan had been right. Though God Himself must shudder at the infidel occupation of His blessed Holy Land, He could never want it rescued by men such as led this Great Crusade. This Kings’ Crusade.

And so Warin had left behind Jaffa, his brother Templars, his King, and his dreams of winning back the Temple of the Holy City.

He had set his face toward the northern ports, in order that he might leave unnoticed. Tonight he had made it almost as far as Lattakieh.

Full darkness had fallen only minutes before, forcing him to dismount. His footfalls and those of the horse walking behind him were muted in the sandy bank of the Orontes River. He listened to them, hearing the sand sliding beneath his feet. The wind soughed through the leafy branches overhead, whispering to itself,
tsking
its displeasure at this stranger in its midst.

At that moment, Warin had never felt more alone.

Footsteps, no more than three spans away from where Annan’s head lay in the sand of his bedding place, yanked him up from the beginning fog of sleep. His reflexes wrenched him to his feet and his dagger into his hand before the intruder could take another step.

The man’s horse reared and tore its reins free from its master’s restraint. Before the intruder could turn, Annan’s arm clamped across his chest, pinning his arms to his sides. He slammed his blade against the man’s throat, hard enough to bruise but not break skin.

“In the name of God—” The man, a knight judging from the grate of mail armor against Annan’s forearm, lunged forward. His words were strangled with frustration and surprise. But some halfway familiar note made Annan’s sword arm freeze, his blade hovering over the knight’s windpipe.

He blinked, trying to shake off his exhaustion long enough to think. All day, he had ridden, fleeing the posse of knights who had given chase after he had slain Hugh’s lieutenant that morning. He tightened his grip across the man’s chest. “Who are you?” His voice was hoarse. He hadn’t spoken to anyone since the previous night in the inn.

“A soldier of the Temple.” The knight eased his hand toward his sword. “A Crusader. Kill a Crusader, and you risk eternal damnation.”