Roman (6 page)

“I think it best we go now, before Wynn becomes more enthusiastic about exercise, don't you?”

She smiled her agreement and let him lead her back to the safety of her own cage. Unlike the tiger, Isra felt afraid of the open, of the unknown. Princess was fierce, fearless, a man-eater.

Then the thought of the man she had killed in Damascus came charging through her memories; the worst of all the things she had seen and done and been forced to do in the past three years swirled in her mind, causing her face to flush with blood and her heart to pound.

And she wondered if, even though it was Roman Berg who pulled her into the cell, it was she who was leading him to damnation.

* * *

Roman shut the door behind Isra. There was no bolt on the inside, but he was confident enough in Wynn's rule over his subjects that there was nothing to fear from the creatures milling about the gallery beyond the wooden barrier. He went to the table near the cot and unrolled the map he'd brought earlier. The table's surface was not wide enough for the chart, so he spread it on the clean, rough stone floor, tucking one curling side under the legs of the table. He placed the toe of his right sandal on the other end of the map. Isra came to sit above him on the pallet, her feet tucked to the side and one slender arm holding her while she leaned over the diagram.

“We are here,” Roman said, pressing the index finger of his left hand in approximately the middle of the continent. Then he reached up to the tabletop, breaking off a long, curling piece of cooled yellow wax from the base of the metal candleholder. He snapped it in half and placed one piece on the area he'd indicated.

“Here is where we must go.” He dropped the other piece of wax east of the Mediterranean, west of Damascus. Then he looked up at Isra, who was frowning at the map. “What way did you come?”

She only continued staring at the map, her eyes becoming a little wider, her face a little pale under her olive complexion. “Where is Constantinople?” she asked, her voice carrying a heavier hint of rasp than it had since she'd first awakened.

Roman pointed to the little spit of land between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Isra's lips parted and she was as still as one of the statues in the abbey's bailey for a moment. Then she turned wide, frightened eyes to Roman. “Where am I?” she asked in wonder.

“You don't know?”

Isra shook her head.

Now it was Roman's turn to frown. “You're at Melk Abbey. In Austria.”

“Austria,” Isra echoed in a whisper, dropping her eyes back to the map on the floor. He saw her throat move as she swallowed.

“Isra, how did you get here?” Roman asked.

She raised her face to look at him and her eyes welled. “I walked,” she said, her voice cracking.

His heart flinched in his chest. “Alone? From Damascus?”

Isra nodded and then swiped her fingertips under her eyes before the tears could spill over. “What month is it?”

“October.” He tried to keep his voice even. “When did you begin?”

Her voice was thin and reedy when she answered. “July.” She swallowed again. “That would explain why it is so cold.”

Roman felt his jaw grow tense, and he had to look away for a moment. Was it even possible that this woman had walked to Austria alone—a journey that had taken her four months—while being hunted the entire way? That she hadn't known what month it was, or where she'd ended up? It didn't seem conceivable.

He looked back to her. “You must tell me how you knew where I was. How you found me.” He heard the threat inherent in his tone, but he could no longer be gentle with her. What she was suggesting was so unlikely that Roman feared Constantine's wariness of the woman could be warranted.

She shook her head, and for a moment, Roman wondered if she would refuse to tell him. But then she met his eyes. “You will not believe me.”

He had no choice. “If you do not tell me, Isra, I will be forced to report to my friends that you cannot be trusted. I doubt I need remind you what their initial plans for you were.”

She winced, as if he had physically struck her. Her shoulders rounded, her head ducked. She hadn't shown this weakness to Constantine; was it an act for his benefit? Did she think him naïve?

Was
he naïve when it came to her?

“I snuck through the city gate at night, behind the men who led the patrols,” she said in a steady voice, although she wouldn't meet his eyes now. “I followed in their wake to the base of the hills, and when they returned to the city, I fled north into Mumed-Adin. I hid in the brush when the sun rose.”

All Roman could see of her face was the black fringe of lashes above the tip of her nose. “That night, I carried on toward Antioch.”

Roman frowned. “You came directly here from Damascus. You instinctively knew the route to take and where to find me.”

“No,” she whispered. “There were many nights I went in the wrong direction. At first I did not know.”

“You didn't know what?” Roman demanded. He felt his heart growing cold in his chest and he didn't care for the feeling at all. The feeling of being made a fool of. The feeling of knowing this woman was sealing her fate with every word she spoke.

“My lord, as I have told you, my mother is dead. But she came to me in my dreams while I hid in the daylight. She led me on the correct paths.”

Roman stared at the top of her head. He didn't know what to say. But he had no need to say anything, for Isra continued. “It was many weeks before I realized that when my sister came to me while I slept, I was in danger.”

“Your sister—she is dead, too, I suppose?” Roman was shocked to hear the condescension in his voice. It sounded unlike him even to his own ears.

Isra gave a tight nod.

“You're right,” Roman said. He took a moment to collect himself, while the coldness in his heart turned fully to ice. “I don't believe you.” And then he slid his sandal from the map and pulled the other edge from beneath the table legs. He rose and then awkwardly rolled up the parchment against his torso with one hand, the little pieces of wax flying across the floor.

“Her name was Huda,” Isra whispered. “She was ten years old.”

Roman kept rolling the map.

“Hamid and some of his men killed her. They . . . they raped her.” Her voice grew hoarse.

Roman walked to the door, prepared to take his chances with the tiger outside the cell. Surely the animal could not be more bloodthirsty than this woman.

“Wait!” she cried, and although Roman did stop, he didn't turn. He could hear her scramble from the pallet and stumble across the floor toward him.

“Please,” she said, and he felt a tugging on the back of his robe. “My lord, I beg you: Look at me.”

He dared a glance over his shoulder and was startled to see that Isra was on her knees behind him, a fold of his habit clenched in both her fists. She stared up at him with wide, pleading eyes, the wet tracks on her cheeks glistening over the indigo and green bruises.

“Hamid will kill your comrade, Baldwin,” she said in a whispered rush. “If he succeeds, you and your friends will never be free. There is no one else to stop him—Saladin is in Egypt.” She paused, swallowed, inched closer to him on her knees. “I must see that Hamid fails. For Huda. For my mother. I do not believe you are so coldhearted that you could not care.”

“You don't know anything about me,” Roman said.

“I know that you are loyal, and brave. Kind.” Her voice broke on the word, and despite himself, Roman felt a crack appear in his resolve. “I knew it the moment I saw you that night in Damascus, when you came to free your friends.
That
is why I have come to you. Why I have come all this long way to find you.”

“Although I am not of any noble class, I find it difficult to accept that your family, your village, would not rise up against such atrocities as a woman and her young daughter so brutally killed.”

Her mouth turned down even farther and she looked sad enough to dissolve away into the stones. “We had no family. No one in the city would ever come to our aid.”

“Impossible,” Roman said. “That night in Damascus, you were dressed in the clothes of a wealthy woman, with jewelry on your arms, silk about your head.” He dropped the rolled parchment in his hand before reaching down to jerk his robe from her grasp. “Someone would have helped you.”

Her support gone, she fell to her palms on the stones and let her head hang there while it seemed a sob tried to fight its way from her throat. She gave a long sniff.

“No one,” she wept. “There was no one I could turn to save you. You must believe me.”

Without knowing exactly what he was doing, Roman dropped to one knee before Isra, seizing her arm with his left hand and yanking her upright to her knees.

“Why?” he gritted between his teeth. “Tell me the truth!”

Her mouth was pulled wide in either fear or agony—Roman could not tell which—and he wondered if she thought he was going to strike her. The idea of it had never entered his mind, and even he found himself quite shocked at this action of taking physical hold of her.

“Because I am unclean!” she wailed and then covered her face with both hands as she sobbed.

Besides Isra's jagged weeping, it was very quiet in the cell while the meaning of what she'd said sank in on Roman. Stan had been right after all, at least about one thing. Hadn't Roman himself guessed as much when first she had come upon him in the Damascene alley?

“Your profession . . .” he began and then stopped. He couldn't bring himself to say it out loud. “Your mother, as well?”

Isra nodded into her hands.

“But the sister you spoke of—surely not she?”

“No,” she sniffed. She turned on one knee and faced away from him as she gained her feet, pulling out of his now weak hold. She walked to the pallet and withdrew what appeared to be a wadded kerchief from beneath the edge of the thin ticking. After blowing her nose and wiping her face, she took a deep breath. But when she spoke again, she did not face him, instead seeming to prefer to address the blank wall before her.

“So now you understand why no one cared to help us.”

It did explain many things to Roman: the abuse of her person he'd witnessed that night in Damascus, how she was able to receive such sensitive information from one of Saladin's generals, her manner of dress and freedom in the city at night, why no one would raise objections to the murder of her mother or the young girl who was her sister.

Roman didn't know what to say to her, didn't know what to feel as he stood and watched her thin back, the sharpness of her shoulder blades tenting the thin material of the borrowed gown she wore. The roll of her black hair was just visible beneath the hem of white linen over her head.

She had sold her body to any man who could pay for it. How could he trust that she would not sell him at her first opportunity?

“If you still cannot believe me,” she began in a husky voice, “tell me now, before you leave me. I will be no further trouble to you or your friends. You shall have no worries that I might lead your enemies to you.”

“Constantine will never let you leave here alone,” Roman said.

Isra nodded, and her eyes still seemed to be trained on the kerchief wadded in her hands. “He will have no fear of me after tonight.” She looked over her shoulder at him, and Roman realized that each time he had seen Isra Tak'Ahn, her face had borne the evidence of abuse. Although he knew her bruises would fade, the damage in her eyes was so deep that Roman wondered if anything could heal her.

Roman frowned and walked across the cell floor toward Isra. When he was two paces from her side, he held out his left hand, palm up.

“Let me have it.”

“No,” she whispered. Then she raised her head and looked into Roman's eyes. “It is the only guarantee of freedom I have. I have no family. No friends. I will not be forced into bondage ever again.”

“Isra,” he said, “let me have it.”

She shook her head.

“You said only moments ago that I was the only person you could turn to; the only person you could trust. Is that true?”

She nodded only slightly.

“Show me how much you trust me,” he said and lifted his palm toward her.

A gold-handled dagger crawled from the wadded folds of the kerchief like a gilded caterpillar from its cocoon, a smooth, polished ruby for an eye. Isra placed the weapon in his palm, the blade pointing back at her, and her fingertips trailed down the beveled metal edge, as if at any moment she would seize the dagger back again.

Roman closed his hand over the gold hilt and drew it behind his back, out of her sight. He turned and walked back to the cell door, stopping to pick up the discarded map with the same hand that held Isra's confiscated weapon.

“Wynn!” he called through the small barred portal. Then he looked back at Isra, who stood just as he had left her: her hands hanging limp at her sides, her shoulders sloped, the corners of her mouth drooping. “A few days,” he said to her. “I'll send someone to prepare you.”

The door pushed open and Brother Wynn poked his head through the space, an odiferous cloud preceding his white hair. “Ready, then?”

“Prepare me for what, my lord?” she asked, and the anxiety in her voice was so heavy that Roman felt a pinch of guilt for leaving her this way. “Will you come again?”

But he didn't trust himself to speak and so he only nodded to Wynn and then followed the albino as he backed from the doorway. Roman didn't look back into the cell as Brother Wynn pulled the door closed.