The Dagger and the Cross (6 page)

Aidan spoke for him with rich pleasure. “My lord of Rhiyana
accepts the apologies of the lord from Lusignan. Is he, perhaps, indisposed?”

“A slight fever,” said Amalric easily, keeping his eyes on
Gwydion, betraying no anger at the title which Aidan gave his brother. “No
cause for alarm.”

Or, his mind said clearly, for joy. He was a jarring
presence to such senses as Aidan’s: plain forgettable face, clever eyes, mind
darting from thought to thought with dizzying quickness. He relished this game
of kings, and the spice of fear that was in it.

Aidan preferred a good clean battle. He raised his cup and
drank rather more deeply than might have been wise; not that it could befuddle
him as it would a human man.

“We hope,” Gwydion said to Amalric, “that your brother
recovers swiftly from his indisposition. A kingdom is never well served when
its king is ill.”

Amalric crossed himself piously. “Your majesty is kind. My
brother would be pleased to speak with you when you come to Jerusalem; and the
lovely lady”—he bowed to Elen—”perhaps would consent to bear the queen company.”

“It would be my pleasure,” said Elen, coolly and flawlessly
courteous.

Aidan smiled to himself. The hoyden had grown into a great
lady. Maybe, after all, there was hope for Ysabel.

He was pleased enough, almost, not to mind that Amalric
accepted the place which had been made for him; even though it was beside Elen.
Joanna was on his other side, and she was well able to keep him in hand.

He seemed content to be the skeleton at the feast; he
essayed no further insolence, nor played any game that Aidan could discern,
unless this was all of it: to be here, and welcomed, and accorded courtesy.
Aidan put him out of mind. Let him bear the tale to his fool of a brother. They
did nothing here that was not perfectly proper. Even Guy might be capable of
comprehending that.

o0o

Elen was glad when the feast was over. Bred as she was to
courts, she had no fear of great gatherings and the dance of thrust and parry
which was conversation in their midst, but even royal blood could grow weary of
it. And she was more than weary. She was wrung dry.

Riquier had been no great marvel of a husband. She was given
to him at fourteen, to seal an alliance which her father reckoned
indispensable. She gave him three children, none of which lived past infancy.
Now he was dead, and she shocked herself. She grieved for him. She wanted him
back.

Sometimes she wondered if Gwydion truly understood, or if he
had brought her with him simply because she asked. That too had been a shock:
how keenly she wanted to be away from any place which reminded her of Riquier.
Rome was almost good enough. Outremer might even heal her. They said it could,
if a pilgrim’s heart was pure.

She grimaced as her maid undressed her in the room which the
two of them must share. It was an eastern room, not large but airy and cool,
with a door that opened on the garden. This part of the house, Lady Joanna had
said when she showed Elen to it, had been the harem when Acre was a Saracen
city. It was not a gilded and scented prison, as she might have imagined. It
was merely separate, and quiet.

Quite unlike her heart, or her unruly body. Whatever Riquier’s
shortcomings, he had been a skilled and frequent lover; and she had learned to
be his match. The fall that killed him was quick, and therefore merciful, and
of that she was glad. But she could not forgive him for abandoning her.

Someone rapped lightly at the door. Joanna, casting a shrewd
eye over the room and its occupants. Elen flushed, as if
that patently
human lady could know what she was thinking.

“You’re well?” Joanna asked her. Simple courtesy; there
could be no more to it than that. Elen murmured something. The lady nodded, but
she did not withdraw. Such a tall woman, and so strong, with a firm-jawed,
level-browed face. No beauty, but not ugly, either; handsome in an inescapably
Norman fashion. It was hard to believe that her mother was half a Saracen.

Elen spoke before she thought. “Won’t you sit down? Or do
you have duties?”

“You were the last of them,” Joanna said, blunt enough, but
with a smile in it. She sat down gratefully on a cushion that Elen had seen no
visible use for, and leaned against the wall. “Ah. That’s better. I’m run off
my feet.”

Elen smiled. “We’d never have guessed it, as cool as you
were, and everywhere at once. Were those all your children, who sang to us?”

“Every imp of them,” she said. “And no sour notes, thank Our
Lady. It would never have done to have Conrad throwing things in front of the
king.”

“Conrad is their tutor?”

“He’s been teaching them to sing. You’d have noticed him:
the Viking in the turban.”

Elen most certainly had. “He’s...rather noticeable. Why does
he dress like a Saracen?”

“He is one.”

Elen’s disbelief was palpable.

“He’s a mamluk,” Joanna said. “A soldier-slave. They come as
children from all over the world; they’re bought by the sultan’s men, and
trained as knights are—knights of Islam. Though mamluks from the Rus are rarer
than most; usually they’re Turks, or Tartars like the twins. They’re all Aidan’s,
that lot, though he set them free.”

“Aidan’s Saracens.” Elen liked the sound of that. “And one a
Viking. Take off his turban, put him in
a cotte, and you’d have a
perfect Norman.”

“So he does, now and then, mostly for mischief. He won one
of his wives that way. It was a terrible scandal. She was a good Christian, a
sergeant’s daughter; he wooed her and won her, and she never seemed to mind
that there were two others before her.”

“Two...” Elen eyed Joanna narrowly for signs of mockery, but
there were none. “How can a man have three wives?”

“If he’s a Muslim, he can have four. All that’s required of
him is that he be able to support them, and treat them all alike.”

“The women don’t mind?”

“Who asks them?” Joanna’s tone was surprisingly bitter. “It’s
better than lying and sneaking and keeping mistresses on the sly.”

“I couldn’t do it,” Elen said.

“Nor I,” Joanna admitted. “Nor, I think, if they had a
choice, most of them. Morgiana would kill before she’d share her prince.”

She spoke as if she knew it for a certainty. Elen was not
quite bold enough to ask how. Morgiana, Elen was learning rapidly, was strange
even for one of the Folk. Elen had yet to see anything of her but her hands and
her green cat-eyes.

She shivered a little. “I can imagine that she kills as
easily as she breathes.”

“No,” said Joanna with startling vehemence. “No, she doesn’t
kill easily. But quickly, yes, and sometimes without stopping to think. She’s
purely like a cat, is Morgiana.”

“You don’t like her, do you?”

“Liking has nothing to do with it.” Joanna stood,
straightening with care, bracing her hands in the small of her back. “I was her
prey once. No fault of hers that I survived. Forgiveness is easy enough; it’s forgetting
that I can’t do.”

Elen bit her lip. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Joanna was sharp, but not angry. She even
managed a smile. “She’s a hunting cat and I’m a dog of a Frank. We’ll never
love one another, but neither need we be enemies. We go our own ways; we cross
as seldom as we can. It works well, all in all.”

Well, but not entirely comfortably. Elen bit her tongue to
keep it from working any more mischief.

Joanna left her then, with an embrace that was somewhat more
than dutiful, and a smile that warmed her for a good while after. It even, a
little, eased her longing for Riquier.

Aidan had no use for sleep, with Gwydion to share the night
with him. Even Morgiana trailed off at last, leaving them to themselves in the
lamplit dimness of the chamber. Gwydion’s squire snored softly just outside the
door; but for that, there was no sound. For a long while neither moved to break
the silence, with mind or tongue.

Gwydion laid his head on his brother’s shoulder and sighed. “Never,”
he said. “Never so long again.”

Aidan settled an arm about him. “No,” he said. “Never. How
did we stand it?”

“Did we?”

“I thought I did.”

“I, too. Until I realized that there seemed to be too little
of me. I kept groping for my other half. I even missed your temper.”

Aidan grinned and ruffled his hair. “Does you good to have
to fly into your own rages now and then.”

His brother shivered. “You know why I don’t dare.”

Aidan’s grin faded. He held Gwydion close, shaking him a
little. “I’m here now. I won’t let you shatter.”

“No; you’ll do it for me.” Gwydion laughed: a quick hiss of
breath. “Ah, brother, God knows I’ve needed you. Maybe it’s true what they say,
and there’s only one of us, but in two bodies.”

“Does that make me half a man?”

“Surely that’s for your lady to say.”

Aidan ran his hand down his brother’s back. “Saints, you’re
as stiff as a stone. Here, lie down. Don’t you know by now to let it out before
it sets solid? You don’t need a rage. A good, loud howl would do.”

“What, on shipboard?” Gwydion lay as he was bidden and let
himself be coaxed out of his shirt. He gasped as Aidan attacked a knot. “I was
well enough until I went to Rome. Maura was with me then. You know how she
dislikes to leave the land which she has made her own: how she pined when I
brought her to Caer Gwent, until her beasts came, and she made her garden, and
put down roots in the new earth. In Rome it was worse. She hid it from me; she
gathered all her strength, and used it all, and worked miracles in the papal
curia. One day she fainted at a cardinal’s feet. She was alive and blooming,
but she was dying: like a flower cut from its root.”

Aidan’s hands stilled. “You didn’t tell me.”

“What was there to tell? I prevailed on her to return to
Rhiyana. She was most unwilling. She wept that she should be so weak; that she
had failed in a thing that any mortal child could do. But she was fading, and
in the end even she could not deny it. I sent her back to Caer Gwent, to rule
in my place, and grow strong again. So she did, and so she has.”

“And you’ve been alone.”

“And I’ve been alone.” Gwydion’s voice was inexpressibly
weary. “Now I understand why Maura wept.”

“Prices,” Aidan said, easing the tension out of him, stroke
by long slow stroke. “We have blessings beyond the reach of human men: beauty,
agelessness, great magic. But there is a price. She is bound to the land, and I
to you, and all of us to one another. And there are so few of us; so pitifully
few.”

“It keeps us from growing too proud.”

“Or too vain, or too spoiled.”

“Power can be a sore temptation,” Gwydion said. “Everything
can be so easy: to make, to heal, to speak not in empty rattling words but in
the truth behind them. Yet it’s never enough. The world is so great, and I—even
I—so small...”

Sleep was claiming him, though he struggled against it. The
weariness in him was bone-deep. It dragged at Aidan. He thrust it away, pouring
out his own bright, glad strength. “Rest,” he said. “Sleep.”

When Gwydion gave up the fight at last, Aidan stretched out
beside him. His warmth was beast-warmth, his presence a joy so profound that
for a moment Aidan could not breathe. He laid his arm across his brother’s
back, body to gently breathing body, and matched the rhythm of his magic to the
slow pulse that was Gwydion’s. Sleep came with it, sweet and deep.

o0o

Ysabel, looking for mischief in the hour before sunup, found
Aimery instead. He was full of himself as usual, ordering the bath-servants
about because, as he put it, “His majesty wants to bathe. Again. All over.”

“Prince Aidan bathes every day,” Ysabel said, unimpressed. “Don’t
you do that in Tripoli?”

“We live like Christians in Tripoli,” said Aimery haughtily.

“In filth?”

He snarled and tried to push past her. She was solider than
she looked; he could not move her.

He stopped, furious. “Will you get over? His majesty is
waiting.”

“His majesty is so happy to be with his brother, he’s not
noticing how long anything takes.”

“How do you know?”

Ysabel was not about to tell him. “I’ll get over if you
promise to take me riding after.”

“I can’t take you riding. I have to wait on his majesty.”

“What if his majesty wants to go?”

“Then I’ll go with him. And you,” said Aimery with enormous
satisfaction, “will stay home with the rest of the babies.”

Her eyes narrowed. She kept her voice quiet. She was proud
to hear how quiet it was. “I’m not a baby.”

“You’re a girl,” he said.

“Is that what they teach you in Tripoli?”

“In Tripoli,” he said, “women know their place.”

Either he was an idiot, or he had been away too long. She
thought that maybe it was both. She smiled at him with poisonous sweetness. “Prince
Aidan always lets me ride with him. He says I ride better than any boy.”

Aimery went stiff. He was even more horrified than she had
hoped.

She laughed and danced out of his way. He almost ran away
from her.

o0o

He fetched up against a wall, no matter which wall it was,
and drove his fist at it. The pain was sharp, and welcome.

She always knew exactly what to say. Exactly where to drive
the knife. Exactly where to twist it.

He was the oldest. The heir. The one who mattered most. And
it was always Ysabel they talked about, Ysabel they thought of, Ysabel they
fretted over. She was the one they noticed. She was their favorite.

He would give his heart’s blood for a moment of the prince’s
attention. And did he ever get it? For a vanishing instant, maybe. Then Ysabel
would come, and Aimery would be forgotten. He was only another of the tribe.
She was the one Aidan loved.

He cooled his burning cheek against the wall. His hand
throbbed. “I hate her,” he said.