The Dagger and the Cross (57 page)

Now Aidan spoke to him, and he came out of his shadowed
corner and edged into the light. “Aimery,” Aidan said. “My lord of Mortmain.
Hattin is over and done with and your ransom paid. What will you do now?”

Aimery stood in front of Aidan. His back was straight. He
looked exactly like his father. “I’m going to fight,” he said. “And win our
lands back.”

Aidan nodded gravely. He was seeing Aimery as grownfolk, as
a man with lands and a lordship and the right to fight for them. “Have you
decided whom you’ll look to as your lord?”

Aimery’s hands opened and closed, in and out of fists. “I
promised Count Raymond that I’d go back to him—but—”

“But Count Raymond ran away.”

Aimery swallowed. “You told me, my lord, why he did it. All
about danger and prudence and someone needing to escape and muster what
strength we had left. He’d only have died if he charged back through the sultan’s
lines. But, my lord, he ran.”

“Sometimes a wise man has to run.” Aidan said it gently. “It
was bitter for him, too, Aimery. He had to see his city taken, his army
shattered, his kingdom—the kingdom he should have been king of—thrown down for
a fool’s ill judgment.”

Aimery shook his head, lips tight. “He ran, and he did
nothing to stop what happened after. He is a very clever man, my lord, and a
good ruler, and maybe he would make a good king. But how can I kneel in front
of him and call him my liege lord, when I saw how his spirit broke and he ran
away?”

“Then how much worse must I seem to you, who will run all
the way to Rhiyana, and never raise my hand again against the Saracen.”

“No, my lord!” Aimery was shaking, he was so vehement. “
No!
You aren’t running. You are oathbound. You fought until you couldn’t fight
any more, and then and only then you surrendered. Your oath is your ransom. How
could you have escaped it?”

“Raymond could no more have escaped what befell him, once he
accepted the war as King Guy would wage it.”

“I can’t follow him,” Aimery said, stubborn as he always
was, even when it got him into trouble. “I’ve thought and I’ve thought, my
lord, and I’ve tried as hard as I can, and I can’t forgive him for what he did.”

“Then you will swear your fealty to Guy?”

“No,” said Aimery with a curl of his lip. “He would be a
thousand times worse. I’m going to go to Marquis Conrad. People don’t like him,
I notice that, but they do what he tells them. I don’t think he’ll laugh at me.
He knows how to use men, even men who aren’t quite out of pinfeathers.”

Aimery was hardly in them yet. Ysabel kept her mouth shut
and watched her father’s face. He approved of what Aimery was saying. “It’s a
baron’s right, in default of a liege lord, to choose as he best may.”

“I don’t know about best,” said Aimery. “I just don’t want
it to be worst.”

“Conrad will do well enough,” Aidan said. “If it were mine
to choose, I would choose as you have.”

The light in Aimery’s face was as dazzling as it was brief.

“Of course,” Aidan went on, “you’ve discussed this with your
mother.”

Aimery went all dark. He had not looked at his mother, nor
had he spoken to her, either, except as he must, in days. Since he stopped
speaking to Ysabel.

It was like a boy, Ysabel thought. Hate the woman, loathe
the child, go on happily worshipping the man, and never mind that it took two
to make a baby.

Joanna had been aware of Aimery’s odd mood. She could hardly
help it. But she had all the other children to think of, and the house to run,
and a wedding on top of it. It was hard for her to keep track of every snit and
crotchet. She looked at him with a small bit of worry, but not overmuch. “It’s
what I would have advised,” she said, “if he had asked.”

He had not, and he was not about to. He started to go back
to his corner. His mother stopped him. “Is something wrong, Aimery?”

“No,” said Aimery, mumbling it.

She did not believe him, but she let him go. Ysabel knew
that look of hers. There was always a later, and Joanna always knew what to do
with it.

“Tomorrow,” Gwydion said, rather suddenly, “our fleet will
come.”

That stopped everyone. They all stared at him. The witchfolk
knew. The humans had to have guessed.

“You’ll leave, then,” Joanna said much too calmly. “As soon
as the ships are loaded and ready.”

“Two days,” said Gwydion, “or three. If the winds stay quiet
and no storm comes.”

None would, unless he wanted it. Messire Amalric was wrong
to make light of the powers he had. He did not use them casually, that was all.
And he believed that humans should look after themselves.

“You should come,” Aidan said to Joanna. He looked a little
wild, as if he had caught himself off guard. “What is there to keep you here?
War and fear, and hunger if the enemy lays siege to the city, and worse than
that if the siege drags on. It’s no life for a mother with children.”

Joanna faced him. It was as if the rest of them had dropped
away, and there were only the two of them. Ysabel had never seen so clear what
was between them. “What life would I have in a foreign country, dependent on
another’s charity?”

“My country would never be foreign to you.”

“Would it not?” Her eyes flicked to Morgiana, who sat
motionless, saying nothing, doing nothing, thinking nothing that went past her
mind’s walls.

Aidan could not help glancing at his hand, which had wound
itself in Morgiana’s some time since and was disinclined to draw away. But then
he looked back at Joanna, and they were alone again in a world they had made
for one another before Ysabel was born. “What of Ysabel?”

Joanna went pale. She had always looked younger than she
was, a strong-faced, clear-eyed, handsome woman who bent her will to no one.
Now, all at once, she looked old.

“You are her mother,” Aidan said. “It is your right to
command her obedience. But if she is here and I am in Rhiyana, what will become
of her?”

Ysabel felt the fear grow in her mother’s heart. This was
what Joanna had always dreaded. What a mother dreaded, no matter what her child
was. The moment when she had to decide. To keep it and maybe smother it, or to
let it go. Aimery had been taken from her too soon, and that was still a raw
wound. She had given him up later, to be sure, and done it as a proper baroness
should. She was getting ready to do the same for William; she would do it for
the others, one by one. But all of them would go to fostering in Outremer. None
of them would go across the sea.

And Ysabel was Ysabel. Joanna had never told her who she
really was. Someday, she was thinking, she would have to. Someday she would
have to surrender Ysabel to her father. She was of his kind and not of Joanna’s.
Joanna could not keep her.

Ysabel tried to make it hurt less. “Mother, don’t hate
yourself. I know. I’ve always known.”

Joanna rounded on her. The pain was worse. It tasted like
rage.

“I know who my father is,” said Ysabel. “I couldn’t not. It’s
written in my blood.”

For a moment Ysabel knew that Joanna would hit her. But
Joanna did not. She turned on Aidan instead. “You
knew!”

He had to stand. This was nothing he could take sitting at
his lady’s feet, hand in hand with her. He stood in front of Joanna, who stood
to face him. She was almost as tall as he was. “You lied to me,” she said. “Both
of you. You let me gnaw my soul with guilt. And fear—because someday I would
have to tell her, and she would hate me, because I lied.”

“I don’t hate you,” said Ysabel.

She might have been a mouse in the wall, for all the notice
Joanna took of her. “Why?” Joanna demanded of Aidan.

“At first,” he said, “because I didn’t know she knew. Then
because it never seemed to be time; and we were never where we could say it and
not be heard. You avoided me,” he said, “most strenuously, and most
successfully, for ten long years.”

She shook her head. It was not an answer to anything he had
said. Not exactly. “You should have told me.”

“I should.”

She hated it when a person would not quarrel. Maybe that was
why she loved Aidan: most of the time he would give her the fight she wanted.
Now he refused.

She looked about half blindly. Her eyes found Aimery’s face.
What little color was left in her own, drained away.

“He knows,” said Ysabel. “He found out.”

She rocked back. She had not even seen her mother’s hand
until it hit her. She barely saw it drop to Joanna’s side again. Joanna raised
it, shaking, to her mouth. She looked as if
she was about to faint.

Aidan seemed to think so. He reached for her. She beat his
hands away wildly, in something that was almost terror. “Don’t touch me. Don’t
touch
me!”

He let his hands fall. His face was stark.

She scrambled herself together, alone, in the middle of them
all. She looked from face to face. She did not flinch from any, even from
Morgiana’s. Even from Aimery’s. “So that is what it is,” she said. Her voice
was rough but calm.

Aimery was as much a roil as she was. Hating her, loving
her, adoring her, despising her. “How?” he asked her. “How could you do it?”

“I was young,” she said, “and I hurt, and everything that I
was and felt and did seemed too ugly to bear. And in the midst of it I found
something beautiful.”

He could not understand. He was too young, and he was a boy.
“You were weak.”

“I was weak,” she said. “People are. Why else is there rape
after battles?”

Aimery went bright scarlet. “That’s different. Men are
different.”

“Yes,” Aidan said. “Men aren’t taught to rein themselves in.”
He met Aimery’s furious stare with one almost as fierce, if nowhere near as
angry. “Don’t judge what you have no right to judge.”

“I have every right!” Aimery cried. “She is my mother!”

“She sinned against your father once. Your father sinned
against her a dozen times a year.”

It was not Aimery who flew in his face, who struck him with
such force that he swayed. He stared at Joanna, too shocked to be angry. “You
will not,” Joanna said, shaping every word with trembling care, “speak so of my
husband. What he did was never more than the body’s need. What I did was mortal
sin. I betrayed my vows to him, in spirit as in flesh. And I never repented it.”

“Not even now?”

“Now,” she said, “I want you to understand. You have vows of
your own. I will not give up my land and my country and my life because you
want to keep me near you, though you can never let yourself touch me. That
wanting is pure selfishness. It wrongs you, it wrongs me, it wrongs your lady.
And it wrongs the child you begot.”

The worst of it, the very worst, was that she was loving him
through all of this. Wanting him so badly that it was an ache in Ysabel’s own
body, and resisting him so fiercely that it shook her within and without.

“You may take her,” Joanna said. “She is yours. I cannot
raise her as she should be raised; I cannot rule her as she should, and must,
be ruled. But I will not go with you. This is my country. My children were born
to it. I will die in it.”

He shook, standing there, in the face of her mortality,
Humans died. Love could not hold them; grief could not save them.

Her face softened as she looked at him. “My lord, we knew
that it could never be more than a few moments’ pleasure, even when we did it.
What came of it...that, too, was only mine for a while.”

“I am not a thing,” Ysabel said angrily. “You can’t throw me
back and forth like a clipped penny.”

They both turned to her. Their eyes were frightening. She
tried to meet them steadily. “I may be an accident, but I’m still me. I won’t
be given away.”

“What will you do?” her mother asked. “I have to stay here.
He has to go away. One of us has to look after you.”

I
can look after myself,
Ysabel started to
say, but she stopped. It was not quite true. She was too young yet. She needed
training and teaching.

She could not get it as her brothers and sisters did, from
lords and ladies who owed her mother favors, or who wanted an alliance with her
father. She was not like the rest of them. Humans could not understand her, or
even stand her, often.

It was not a choice that she stood in front of. Of course
her father would take her. He was the only one who could. It was what would
happen once he took her. “I’ll never see you again,” she said to her mother.
Not whining too badly. She was proud of that.

Joanna tried to be light, to make her feel better. “The
world is not as wide as that. And children grow. You might be like Morgiana.
Then I’ll see more of you than I ever want to see.”

Ysabel shook her head till her braids whipped her face,
making the tears spring. “I’ll grow and I’ll learn and I’ll forget how long
time is, and when I come back it will be too late, and you’ll be gone.”

“Your father won’t let that happen,” Joanna said. She never
cried when other people would lie down and howl. She went quieter instead, and
stronger. “I’m sending you the way I sent Aimery to Count Raymond, to be Prince
Aidan’s fosterling and Lady Elen’s maid, and maybe when you’re older you will
be a maid-in-waiting to the queen. Someday you’ll come back to Outremer and we’ll
see one another again, as gentlefolk do.”

Oh, she was strong, to talk like that, who had always hated
passionately to let anyone touch a child of hers, even a nurse or a servant.
Ysabel would never have that kind of strength, rock-solid and rock-hard and
more than a little merciless. It looked at Ysabel and saw what was best for
her, and decided without wavering. It looked at Aimery and braced itself for a
long hard war.

Men were not reasonable about women’s sins. It was even
worse when the sinner was a man’s mother, whom he loved quite beyond measure
and understood not at all. Aimery did not even hear what Ysabel said, no more
than she heard it herself, something about having to do as she was told, and
coming back the moment she was able. She meant it, but half her mind had turned
to her brother, seeing danger there and not knowing what to do about it.