Devil's Bargain (8 page)

He saw the quick flash of disappointment, but she mastered it almost as soon as it began. “I know,” she said before he could
speak. “Patience is one of the virtues a mage must cultivate. I shall be a patient scholar—and a grateful one.”

He stooped on impulse and kissed her hand that rested still in his, and held it for a moment, smiling into the starlit glimmer of her face. “Soon,” he said.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

S
ioned came very late to her bed. She had taken pains not to be seen; she had tried a thing that suggested itself to her, drawing the night about her like a mantle. She had learned a great deal from those hours in the lord Saphadin’s house, reading, waiting, cultivating patience; then sharing his company. It was a subtle teaching, but neither difficult nor particularly obscure. She cherished her memory of it.

And, she admitted to herself as the stars wheeled toward dawn, her memory of him. She was not a silly schoolgirl to squeal and giggle over any man who cast his eye on her, but this one . . .

She sighed. He was more than twice her age, he was sworn to drive her brother and his army from this country, and she had no doubt that somewhere, in Damascus or Cairo or the gods knew where, he had a flock of wives and concubines, and children innumerable. Her magic had drawn his attention, but she doubted rather strongly that he had noticed the rest of her. He could have the pick of the women of the east; old King Henry’s bastard daughter was hardly worth his notice.

She was not unduly cast down. A teacher was a rarer beast
than a lover, and one who could teach magic was as rare as the phoenix. She would thank the gods for what they had given, and ask nothing more.

Although, if they should be inclined to give more . . .

She rebuked her heart for wickedness, thrust down the thought and set her foot on it, and willed herself to sleep.

The messenger came on the morrow after all, and rather early, too. It was a very young Saracen page, as black and shiny as an olive, with a turban nearly as big as he was, and a sweet lisping voice. Master Judah was not visibly delighted to lose Sioned for another day, but when she glanced at him, he sighed vastly, shrugged, and turned his back on her. That was as close to his blessing as she would get.

He had no great need of her now; they were in between battles, and except for accidents and injuries and the worst wounded from Arsuf, there was little for the physicians to do. She knew a pang of guilt for the men who would have to do without her, but the master himself was looking after them. They were as well cared for as anyone could be.

She followed the page with carefully controlled excitement. He was human, she had assured herself; magic had not made him, though magic was woven about him. He regarded her with bright curiosity, but he had been well trained: he asked her none of the questions that a child of his age might have been expected to ask. He resisted her smile for a goodly while before he broke out in one as enormous as he was small. When she offered her hand, he took it; his clasp was warm, tugging lightly, leading her through the trees of the grove.

She had more than half expected to pass from world to world as she had into the lord Saphadin’s house, but they stayed in the orchards of Jaffa, making their way toward the Saracens’ camp. It had grown somewhat since the first day, gained a second circle of tents within the first. These faced inward, with a veiled look to them, as was fitting: there were women in them, wives and concubines of the lord and his escort.

Sioned could not have said what she felt. Disappointment? Not exactly. Excitement? Not as much as she might have hoped to feel, if she had been going to the lord’s tent and not to the one that stood in the center of these. Maybe he was inside—maybe he would seize her and bind her and make her his concubine.

Not that prince of Islam. If he had been a great deal younger and a great deal more foolish, yes, it might conceivably have been possible. But that would have required that she be a much more splendid prize than she was.

She had mastered her errant fancy by the time the page led her past the black eunuch guards—his kin, she supposed—and into a place that quite profoundly astonished her. She knew what the harem was like: she had seen the women’s quarters of enough princely houses, in Sicily and Cyprus and in this country. She had expected a world of shadows and whispers, cloying scents and coiling intrigue and stultifying boredom.

This was a clean and almost empty space, remarkably well lit: the back of it was open on a sort of court surrounded by tent walls. Most of the furnishings were rugs in heaps and rolls; there were chests, three of them, along one wall, and a table with a silver kaffé service, and behind curtains, what must have been a bed. Maybe the more usual accouterments of a lady’s tent were hidden behind those draperies; she caught no sound or scent, and sensed no presence there, human or otherwise. She was alone: the page had bowed to the rugs that covered the bare earth, and left her wondering whether to stand on guard or to sit at her ease and wait for what would come.

She elected, after a moment, to sit. The rug was comfortable as such things went. There was great pleasure in the quiet, the clear light, the unexpected solitude. She was meant to learn from it, she thought. It was like the house between worlds, a place of peace.

She was deep in the calm of the place, emptied of either anxiety or expectation, when she looked up into the face of a woman who was perfectly a part of the quiet. She was older than the lord Saphadin, though younger than Queen Eleanor: a woman past the years of bearing children and well into the age
of wisdom, with long dark eyes and a clean-carved face the color of old ivory. She must have been strikingly beautiful in youth; she was striking still, in a way that Sioned had not seen before. But the air about her, the light of magic in her . . .

“You come from Egypt,” Sioned said—rudely, she supposed, but she could not help herself.

The woman inclined her head. “You see clearly,” she said. “I am called Safiyah; I am first wife to the lord Al-Adil.”

Sioned’s stomach clenched. It was ridiculous; absurd. Yet she was suddenly and viciously jealous of this woman who was at least a decade older than her husband.

Even through her foolishness, she could think. She understood more than the lady said. Safiyah was not the name she was born to, nor did it bind her with its power. That much of Egyptian magic, Sioned knew: that it wielded the power of true names.

Her throat was tight. She forced words through it. “Are—are you to be my teacher?”

“If you will have me,” Safiyah said.

“I had thought—” Sioned broke off before she betrayed herself.

From the glint in Safiyah’s eye, Sioned suspected that she already had. “I was his teacher when he was as young as you,” she said. “He was a gifted pupil, but as he himself would admit, he never quite managed to surpass his teacher.”

Sioned’s cheeks burned. “I . . . am honored,” she managed to say.

“You should be,” Safiyah said. “I seldom leave Egypt, but he asked for this particular favor. I find that I am willing to grant it. He says that your Arabic is excellent. Do you know the old language at all?”

“The old—of Egypt? I know a word or two, maybe, as written in a grimoire, but—”

“You will learn,” said Safiyah. “You have duties, obligations to the Frankish king, yes? Those will continue. But in the mornings, you come here. Be awake, and be prepared to learn.”

Sioned nodded. Her eyes were wide; there were no words in
her at all. She had met whirlwinds enough in this world, and Queen Eleanor not the least of them, but this quiet power overwhelmed her. It was much stronger, much deeper than at first she had thought. There were wards within wards, shields within shields, and such a depth of knowledge and wisdom that if she had not already been speechless, she would have been reduced to silence.

She had been bitterly disappointed, a moment ago, that he would not be teaching her himself. Now she began to understand just how greatly he honored her. This was everything she had prayed for—here, in front of her, regarding her with a steady dark stare.

She scrambled herself together. When she spoke, it was with no diplomacy at all. “He married you for that. For what you are.”

“Magic is my dowry,” Safiyah said, “and my inheritance through ages of my ancestors. I brought it to a rarity, a phoenix among the falcons. Does he not shine brightly? Is he not beautiful?”

Once again, Sioned’s cheeks were flaming. “I didn’t mean—”

“Of course you did, child. Magic can sustain youth for a remarkable while, but the cost of that is higher than I was ever willing to pay. And yet when he first saw me, I was not ill to look on.”

“You were beautiful,” Sioned said. “You still are. But he sees differently. I think, to him, if a woman has no magic, it doesn’t matter what her face is; she has nothing to attract him.”

For the first time that great lady smiled. The warmth of it, strangely, cooled Sioned’s blushes. “Magic calls to magic, and spirit to spirit. We know one another, we of the Art, however foreign our origins may be.”

Sioned bent her head to that, and made what sense she could of her confusion. She had entered into a world more different than she could have imagined; its laws were strange, and its commonplaces were vanishingly rare in the mortal world in which she had lived for so long.

She could excuse herself; she could turn away from the
bargain. But she had wanted it for too long, and come too far, to give it up now. She drew herself up and breathed deep, steadying her mind and heart. “Teach me,” she said. “Make me wise, if you can.”

“Wisdom comes in its own time,” Safiyah said, “but knowledge I can give you, and somewhat of the wherewithal to be its master. There will be oaths, some sworn in blood; there will be sacrifices. No magic is without price—and your weakness of the body, that is the very least of it.”

“I will not sell my soul,” Sioned said quickly.

Safiyah raised a strongly arched brow. “Are we merchants? Do we trade in souls? You will give of yourself, to the soul indeed, but there will be no buying or selling. Not with us.”

“There are those who trade in such things,” Sioned said.

“There are,” said Safiyah. “But not here. We do not follow that path.”

Sioned had not known how strong was the tension in her body until it let go. Somehow she kept her feet, and faced the prince’s wife, too, as steadily as she could with her knees trying to turn to water. “I have never been drawn to that way, nor to those who follow it.”

“Good,” Safiyah said, “for I would have nothing to teach you if you had.”

In the event, there was ample to teach, and more than enough to learn—in days that filled to overflowing, between Master Judah’s tent and the lady Safiyah’s. Sioned never saw the lord Saphadin. He was engrossed in his embassy, and uninterested in the teaching of the king’s sister, now that he had found the means to honor his bargain. She supposed that she kept her half of it by simply being herself, and by answering such questions as her teacher might ask, of her country and her people and the magics that they practiced.

She had been Safiyah’s pupil for a week and more when the first stragglers came in from Ascalon. Saladin had not been nursing his wounds after all; he had been rendering the city into
rubble. The outcry reached her even in the sanctuary of Safiyah’s tent, a roar of rage in a voice like her brother’s, but magnified a thousandfold.

She paused in her study of a language so ancient that the words themselves embodied magic. For an instant they burned in her awareness, taking shape in the tale of a city in ruins; then they dissipated into the sunlit air. She sat blinking, feeling nothing yet but wonder and a distant sense of urgency.

“My brother needs me,” she said.

Safiyah said nothing. If she had spoken even a word, Sioned would have lingered, but she was silent. Sioned bowed in respect, tidied her inks and brushes and papyrus as quickly as she could, and returned with a physical shock to the world of men and their armies.

No one was fighting yet. Her brother’s captains had the army in hand, calming it as quickly as the rumor spread.

There was no one to calm Richard. He was just back from a dawn hunt, still with a string of waterfowl at his belt; they dangled bonelessly as he paced and snarled in the hall of the citadel, shedding an occasional feather. A man less brave would have retreated long since, but the lord Saphadin sat calmly in a shaft of sunlight through a louver in the roof, sipping from a silver cup. Mustafa sat at the prince’s feet, serving as interpreter, as he often had before. His face was carefully blank, as if he had made himself no more than a voice, without wit or will of his own.

Sioned should have gone direct to Master Judah’s tent, where the newcomers would be receiving care and tending. The heat of Richard’s temper had drawn her to him instead, and the banked fire of the other’s magic bound her irresistibly. She was attuned to it; focused on it.