The Dagger and the Cross (4 page)

“Subtle?” the plump monk said. “There are many things which
I would call the Prince Aidan, but that is not one of them.”

“Subtle,” said Seco, “in his very unsubtlety. All the world
knows what he is and where his sympathies lie, yet no one has ever dared to
touch him. While the leper was king, he was the leper’s sworn brother, and no
man was permitted to speak against him. When the leper died, when our lord Guy
was the rightful regent—husband as he was and is to the Princess Sybilla, and
stepfather to the child king—the leper’s favorite cast in his lot against us,
and favored the regency of the Count of Tripoli. When the child died, would he
acknowledge Sybilla queen, or Guy king by right of law and marriage? He would
not. He has made no secret of his contempt. He will not swear fealty to a king
who has, he professes for any to hear, no more substance than a poppet on a
pole.”

Seco’s son stared. “He actually said that?”

“Word for word,” said the man in mail, “to my brother’s
face.”

“He’s mad,” the boy said, awed.

His father quelled him with a look. “‘Mad’ hardly begins to
describe him. He lairs in his castle on the border of Syria, among his heathens
and Saracens, with infidels in his hall and an Assassin in his bed. The Sultan
of Syria is his boon companion; the Old Man of the Mountain has struck bargains
with him, and sealed them with the witch’s body.”

“He is also,” drawled the portly monk, “unconscionably rich.”

“The devil’s riches,” Seco said. “He has his hand in the
river of Saracen gold.”

“And when you would have dipped your own finger in it, he
laughed in your face.” The portly monk yawned. “Leave the sermons to us, Messer
Seco. You hate him because he has what you would give your soul to have; what
you strive for endlessly but never win, he gains simply by being what he is.”

“A king’s son,” said the boy. “Kin to the House of Ibrahim,
who are merchant kings.”

His father did not strike him, but he shrank, paling. “If
that were all he was,” Seco said through clenched teeth, “he would be easy
prey. Even if he were only a damned traitor, we would know how to deal with
him. The Master of the Assassins has never been one to let a prior commitment
interfere with present expedience.”

“I gather you tried it,” the portly monk observed.

Seco’s face was crimson; yet he smiled. “I did, Brother
Richard. Would you have dared?”

Brother Richard shuddered. “I leave daring to you men of the
world. What did the Old Man say?”

“Sinan,” said Seco, “was not minded to interfere. There were
reasons, he said. Such as that no wise infidel will cross wits willingly with
the jinn.”

“Now we come to it,” Brother Richard said. “You believe that
this prince and his tamed Assassin are—what? Minor devils?”

“I know what they are.” They all stared at Brother Thomas,
even the motionless and hitherto impervious knight. He swelled under their
regard, lifting his narrow chin. “They are,” he repeated. “Devils, witches,
unnatural creatures. I know them. I have seen what they can do.”

Seco leaned forward. “Have you, Brother? Have you, indeed?”

“I have studied them,” Brother Thomas said, “since I was
sent into Rhiyana as a young man, when Abbot Boniface was the pope’s legate to
the Rhiyanan king. I have returned there often since, and observed them as
closely as any man may. They are witches, sirs. Have no doubt of that. In their
own country they make no secret of it. Any child can see what their king is. I
came to Rhiyana as a youth of two-and-twenty, and so did the king seem when
first I saw him. Now I count twice that and more, and how does the king seem?
As his brother does, sirs. A pretty lad of two- or three-and-twenty.”

“We notice that,” the boy said. “They never change. You’d
think they’d have the sense to pretend.”

“Why should they?” said Brother Richard. “They must be, by
my reckoning, a good threescore and ten. Or a bad, if
you prefer; and
the Assassin is older than that. Who has ever touched them?”

“A few have tried,” Brother Thomas said. “None has
succeeded. Their people surround them; even their Church defends them. And they
have their magic.”

“You talk of it.” The knight sounded eminently bored. “I see
no use in it—and no terror, either. The dog and his bitch are devilish young
for the years they’re given: granted. Maybe he has help to be as good on the
field as he is; maybe she is as deadly with a dagger as rumor makes her. What
does that make them but comfortably dangerous? I want that thorn out of the kingdom’s
side, before it tears a hole wide enough to let the Saracen in. Unfortunately
the two of them are powerful enough to make removal difficult unless we catch
them in outright treason; and even then we’ll still need them, and the men they
can bring to the field.”

“If they bring them at all,” said Seco. “My lord. That is
what we do here. If we can separate them from their power, show them to be
witches and worse, remove the threat of treachery...”

“A perfectly ordinary impossibility,” said the knight. He
stretched out his legs, hands folded over his belt. He did not, for all of
that, look like a man at ease. “You want to draw his fangs: well and good. I
fail to see what witchcraft has to do with it.”

“Everything,” said Brother Thomas.

The knight’s brows went up.

“Everything,” the monk said again. “What you want, yes, that
I can see. The prince and his Assassin may endanger your kingdom; they
certainly endanger your king, whose right to the throne they are not eager to
accept. Now the brother comes, and he is a crowned king: an all too plausible
rival, should he choose to become one. I hear that King Guy is a fair knight
but no general, and a wretched statesman. Gwydion of Rhiyana is knight and
general and statesman, and enchanter besides.

“No,” Thomas said before the knight could interrupt, “you do
not see it. You see only what they wish to reveal. Their beauty and their
agelessness—that is the very least of what they are. Even that may be enough in
such a kingdom as this is, balanced on the sword’s edge. If the devil raised an
army against the Saracen, would you accept it?”

The knight shrugged. “That would depend on the price. If it
cost my brother his throne, then no, I wouldn’t. Guy may not be much better
than the idiot your witch-prince calls him, but he’s my idiot. I prefer to keep
him.”

“Then, my lord, you must take thought for witchery. I know—I
know for a certainty—that if one of them wishes to know what we do and say
here, then he will know. They can walk in your mind, my lord. They can read
your every thought.”

The boy gasped. His father was green-pallid and had begun to
sweat. Even Brother Richard seemed uncomfortable.

The knight shivered, but his expression was skeptical. “Why
conspire at all, then, if the enemy is omniscient?”

“They are not God,” Thomas said frigidly. “There are ways to
elude their scrutiny. Prayer is one. Knowledge is another—if it comes without
fear. Their powers are great, but hardly infinite; they are not easily
deceived, but they can be distracted. As they must be, if this plot of yours is
to succeed.”

“How do you know,” demanded the knight, “that they aren’t
spying on us at this very moment?”

“I do not.” Thomas was calm. “I trust in God that they are
well occupied with the king’s arrival in the city; too well to care what mere
mortals do.”

“Yes,” the knight mused. “They would be that arrogant.” He
fixed the monk with a hard stare. “If you’re telling the truth.”

“He is,” Brother Richard said.

“Even so,” said Seco. His voice shook; he struggled to
steady it. Bad enough that the one he wanted to break was a witch. It had never
occurred to him that that witchery could come to him from far away, and strip
his mind bare, and leave him shivering in the dark. Now he understood all his
failures, and his enemy’s scorn. The memory burned. “Even so, we have to try.
That is why the good Brother is here; apart from his other skills. To teach us
how to stand against the sorcerers.”

“If I agree,” said Thomas. “You may escape them if you fail.
I must live within their reach.”

“You’ve done it for years already,” the knight said.

“Never so close. Never with so much at stake.”

“True,” said Brother Richard. “You have to consider what
this will win you. Death if you fail. If you succeed...maybe only the Elvenking’s
discomfiture and his brother’s enmity. Prince Aidan is a bad enemy. His
Assassin is worse.”

Seco’s temper flared. “Are you with us or against us?”

“With you, of course,” the monk said placidly. “Someone
should be the voice of reason, no? Even with my lord Amalric to help.”

“I admit,” said Amalric, “that I fail to see what you can
gain from this. Messer Seco wants profit. I want a threat removed from the
kingdom. Your brother monk has his long campaign and, I judge, an old score to
settle. What have you?”

“The pleasure of the hunt,” Richard answered him. “And a
certain degree of greed. I have a way to make in the world and in the Church.
This may make it for me. I found Brother Thomas for you, did I not? Is he or is
he not more than you ever dared to hope for?”

“Only if he throws in his lot with us, and sticks to it.”

Brother Thomas sat still under their eyes, refusing to be
hurried. “What you ask me to do, I can do, if you will supply me with the
wherewithal. Whether I will do it...I have lived my life to bring these demons
to the justice of holy Church. Should I chance defeat by striking too soon?”

“It will be a worse defeat if you strike too late.” Amalric
measured him. “Whatever the King of Rhiyana may be, you’re no boy. Would you
wait so long for just the right moment, that it never comes at all?”

Brother Thomas stiffened. That blow had struck home. Amalric’s
mouth stretched with the beginnings of a smile. “They never grow old; they may
never die. Can you outwait them?”

“I can judge my moment,” Thomas snapped. “Very well. You can
do nothing without me, innocents that you are in the ways of witchkind. For
Christian charity, I will help you.”

“For Christian charity,” said Amalric, nodding sagely. “Yes.
Indeed. How else?”

Thomas’ look was not kind, but he was a man of God, and a
man of his word. He held his peace.

The cloth was on the table at last, the hall hung with silk
and scented with rosewater, the servants in fresh livery and the children in
their best clothes. The dogs were banished to the kennels, Ranulf’s falcon to
the mews. Ranulf himself was caught, scrubbed, and bullied into a cotte
befitting a baron of Acre. He looked well in it, if not precisely comfortable.
Age-softened wool and well-worn leather would always suit him better than silk.

Joanna, whose own rich gown was rather tighter in the middle
than she would have liked, gave it a last, exasperated tug, and turned to her
husband. “How terrible is it?” she asked.

Ranulf looked her over. “You look,” he said, “magnificent.”

“Angry, you mean. Like a sausage in a casing.”

“Sausages look angry?”

He was laughing at her. She aimed a cuff at his head,
stopped short of ruffling his newly combed hair. It was thinner than it had
been, and the gold was fading to dun and grey, but he was still a handsome man.
She bared her teeth at him. “And it’s all your fault, sir.”

“I’m doing penance for it,” he said, flexing his shoulders
in the cotte. “Don’t you think—”

“No! I don’t, and you won’t. Quick, out, or they’ll be here
before we’re ready for them.”

As it happened, they were not. The lord and lady of Mortmain
were in the courtyard when their guests rode in, as calm to look at as if a
king dined at their table every day. Aimery, stiffer with pride than with his
new cotte, was there to take the king’s bridle. Joanna took note that he did
not stare, though there was plenty to stare at.

It was true. They were exactly alike. It was dizzying to see
one on the tall grey gelding and the other on the tall grey mare; one in the
Saracen coat and one in blue embroidered with silver; one bareheaded, the other
with his hood on his shoulders. They had the same long-limbed grace, the same
light touch on the rein, the same effortless ease in the saddle.

Joanna’s knees wanted to melt. Twins were nothing uncanny.
Aidan’s Kipchaks were imps out of Hades, but they were human enough for all
that.

These looked it, well enough: tall, white-skinned,
black-haired young men with eagles’ faces. There was a glamour on them,
blurring their fierce alien beauty, dimming the light that shone out of them.
But she knew. She saw what they were, with doubled intensity.

One of them smiled at her. That was Aidan. It caught her
breath in her throat, and then it steadied her.

How had she imagined that they were indistinguishable? The
other was quiet, almost muted, with a fierce edge beneath; fiercer maybe than
Aidan’s own. He dismounted without the flourish that his brother put into it,
and greeted her in a voice, with an accent, so like the other’s that she
glanced aside, half expecting trickery.

The king’s eyes glinted. She smiled before she knew it, and
sank down in the best curtsy she was capable of. His hands as he raised her
were narrow and uncannily strong. Familiar, and utterly different.

Then he was past, greeting Ranulf, Margaret, the children in
order. There was a gap in the ranks; she looked harder, and it was filled.
Ysabel seemed flushed and a little breathless. Later, Joanna promised herself,
she would find out what the child had been up to.

“Don’t trouble,” Aidan said in her ear. She started, caught
herself. He was at his ease, damn him, and so happy that he shone. “She was
with us.”

“All this time? But—”

“But.” He leaned a fraction closer. Not quite touching. He
never, quite, touched. “No harm done, though one fine day I’ll take a strap to
her. She’s getting too clever for her own good.”