The Lions of Al-Rassan (50 page)

Which was what she had needed to hear. Exactly what she needed, and Jehane, still wondering, still incredulous, took his hand in hers, saying, “Let us walk.”

“Where would you like to go?” he asked, carefully, adjusting his stride to her pace.

“Where we can be alone,” she said steadily, her grip firm, coming home at last to where her heart had been waiting since a summer’s day in Fezana. “Where we can set aside owl and lion, apt as they might be, and be what we are.”

“Flawed as we might be?” he asked.

“How otherwise?” she replied, discovering with surprise that her heartbeat had slowed the moment she had taken his hand. Something occurred to her, unexpectedly. She hesitated, and then, being what she was, asked, “Were you with me earlier, when I stopped outside the barracks?”

He didn’t answer for a moment. At length he said, “Cleverest of women, you do your father and mother proud with every word you speak. Yes, I was there. I had already decided I could not approach you tonight before you made that choice on your own.”

She shook her head, and gripped his hand more tightly. A thread of fear; she might so easily have gone up those stairs. “It wasn’t the choice you may have thought it. It was a matter of hiding, or not.”

“I know,” he said. “Forgive me, my dear, but I know that.”

His own honesty, risking her ruffled pride. But she did forgive him this, because the hiding had ended now, on a night of masks, and it was all right that he understood this. He had approached. He had found her.

They came to the house he leased. It was nearer the palace than the quarters she shared with Velaz. He opened the door to the street with his own key: the steward and servants had been dismissed for the night to their pleasures. They went inside.

On the street behind them, a figure watched them enter. He had been following Jehane, and he knew who the lion was. He hesitated, then decided it was all right to leave her now. He considered staying out for a while longer but decided against that. He was tired, and wasn’t at all sure how he felt about the alleged delights of Carnival.

Ziri went back to the barracks, spoke briefly with the man on duty in the doorway, then went into the dormitory and to bed. He was asleep almost immediately, alone in the large room. All the others were still in the streets.

In Ammar ibn Khairan’s house, the servants had left two torches burning to light the entrance hall, and there were candles in the wall sconces. Before going up the stairs they removed their masks and set them aside and Jehane saw his eyes by the burning of those lights.

This time it was he who stepped towards her and this time, when they kissed, it was not the same—not at all the same—as it had been in her father’s room, by the open window the summer before.

And so she discovered that her heartbeat, which had steadied and slowed while they walked, wasn’t quite so steady any longer, and the trembling had returned.

They went up the stairs, and they kissed again, slowly, outside his bedroom door, where a spill of candlelight showed in a line along the floor. She felt his hands around her, strong and sure, drawing her close. Desire was within her, an ache of need, deep and wide and strong as a river rising in the dark.

His mouth moved from hers, and went to one ear. Softly he whispered,
“There is someone in my room. The candles would not have been left burning there.”

Her heart thudded once, and seemed actually to stop for a moment before starting to beat again.

They had been silent ascending the stairs, and now here. Anyone in the bedroom would have heard the front door open, though, and known Ammar was in the house, alone or accompanied. She asked the question with her eyes only. His mouth came back to her ear. “They want me to know they’re here. I have no idea. To be safe, go along to the next room. There’s a balcony, shared with mine. Listen there. Be careful.”

She nodded. “And you,” she murmured, no more than a breath. “I want you healthy, after.”

She felt his soundless laughter.

Afterwards, she would remember that: how utterly unafraid he had been. Diverted, intrigued, challenged, perhaps. But not at all frightened, or even disconcerted. She wondered what woman he had thought might be waiting. Or what man.

She went along the corridor. Opened the next door, silently passed within into a dark bedchamber. Just before she closed the door behind her, she heard Ammar call out, raising his voice, “Who is here? Why are you in my house?”

And then she heard the reply.

The door to the street would have been easy enough to unlock, and with the servants gone and candles helpfully burning it must have been no trick to find his bedroom.

Ibn Khairan, all his senses still oriented towards the feel and scent of the woman who had just slipped down the corridor, called out to the intruder, his mind struggling to sort through possibilities. Too many. Tonight and all nights there were too many people who might be waiting for him in his room.

Even so, even with twenty years of experience in such mysteries, he was not, in fact, prepared.

The door swung open, almost as soon as he called out. A man stood there, unmasked, in the spill of candlelight from the room.

“Finally,”
said King Almalik II of Cartada, smiling. “I had begun to fear a journey wasted.”

It took an extreme effort, all his celebrated poise, but ibn Khairan managed a return smile, and then a bow. “Good evening, ’Malik. My lord king. This is a surprise. A long journey, it must have been.”

“Almost two weeks, Ammar. The roads were not good at all.”

“Were you extremely uncomfortable?” Polite questions. Buying time for thoughts to begin to organize themselves. If Almalik of Cartada was taken in Ragosa, the balance of power in Al-Rassan would change, at a stroke.

“Tolerably.” The young man who had been his protégé for three years smiled again. “You never allowed me to grow soft, and I haven’t been king long enough for that to change.” He paused, and Ammar saw, in that hesitation, that the king wasn’t quite as composed as he might want to appear. “You understand that I could only do this tonight.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you could do it at all,” ibn Khairan said frankly. “This is a rather extreme risk, ’Malik.”

He found himself offering thanks to all possible deities that Jehane was out of sight, and praying she could keep quiet enough. Almalik could not possibly afford to be reported here, which meant that anyone who saw him was in mortal danger. Ibn Khairan deferred, for a moment, the question of where this left him.

He said, “I’d best join you inside.”

The king of Cartada stepped back and Ammar walked into his own room. He registered the two Muwardis waiting there. There was an air of unreality to all of this. He was still trying to absorb the astonishing fact that Almalik had come here. But then, suddenly, as he turned to face the king, he grasped what this had to be about and disorientation spun away, to be replaced by something almost as unsettling.

“No one but you,” said the king of Cartada quietly, “calls me ’Malik any more.”

“Forgive me. Old habits. I’ll stop, of course. Magnificence.”

“I didn’t say it offended me.”

“No, but even if it doesn’t . . . you
are
the king of Cartada.”

“I am, aren’t I?” Almalik murmured. He sank down into the northern-style armchair by the bed; a young man, not particularly graceful, but tall and well-made. “And, can you believe it, the first act of my reign, very nearly, was to exile the man I most needed.”

Which made it all quite explicit.

He had not changed in this, ibn Khairan noted. A capacity for directness was something Almalik had always had, even as a boy. Ammar had never resolved within himself whether it marked a strength, or a tactic of the weak: forcing stronger friends to deal with his declared vulnerabilities. His eyelid was moving, but that was something one hardly noticed after a while.

“You hadn’t even been crowned,” ibn Khairan said softly.

He really wasn’t prepared for this conversation. Not tonight. He had been readying himself, in an entirely different way, for something else. Had stood watching in the street, holding his breath like a boy, while Jehane bet Ishak had gazed upwards at a high, candlelit window, and he had only begun to breathe normally again when she gave the shrug he knew and moved on, a stillness seeming to wrap itself about her amid the tumult of the night.

He had never thought it might require courage to approach a woman.

“I am surprised to find you alone,” Almalik said, a little too lightly.

“You shouldn’t be,” ibn Khairan murmured, being careful now. “Tonight’s encounters lack a certain . . . refinement, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wouldn’t know, Ammar. It seemed lively enough. We spent some time looking for you, and then I realized it was hopeless. It was easier to buy the location of your house and wait.”

“Did you really come to Ragosa expecting to find me in the streets at Carnival?”

“I came here because I could see no other way to speak with you quickly enough. I had only hope, and need, when we set out. There is no company of men with me, by the way. These two, and half a dozen others for safety on the road. No one else. I have come to say certain things. And to ask you to come back to me.”

Ibn Khairan was silent. He had been waiting for this, and latterly, had been afraid of it. He had been the guardian and mentor of this man, the named heir to Cartada’s throne. Had put a great deal of effort into making of Almalik ibn Almalik a man worthy of power. He did not like admitting failure. He wasn’t even certain he
had
failed. This was going to be ferociously difficult.

He crossed to the sideboard, deliberately brushing past one of the Muwardis. The man did not move, or even spare a glance. They hated him; all of them did. His whole life was a sustained assault upon their grim piety. It was a sentiment he returned:
their
way of life—single-minded faith, single-minded hatred—affronted all his sensibilities, his perception of what life ought to be.

“Will you take a glass of wine?” he asked the king of Cartada, deliberately provoking the Muwardis. Unworthy, perhaps, but he couldn’t help this.

Almalik shrugged, nodded his head. Ibn Khairan poured for both of them and carried the glasses over. They saluted each other, top of glass touching bottom, then bottom to top.

“It took courage for you to do this,” Ammar said. It was right that he acknowledge this.

Almalik shook his head, looking up at him from the chair. In the candlelight it could be seen how young he still was. And standing more closely now, ibn Khairan could see the marks of strain.

“It took only an awareness that if you do not return I do not know what I will do. And I understand you very well, Ammar, in some things. What was I to do? Write you pleading letters? You would not have come. You know you would not.”

“Surely the king of Cartada is surrounded by men of wisdom and experience?”

“Now you are jesting. Do not.”

Quick anger flared, surprising him. Before it could be suppressed, ibn Khairan snapped, “It was you who exiled me. Be so good as to remember that, ’Malik.”

A raw wound: the pupil turning upon the teacher in the moment of shared ascendancy. An old story, in truth, but he had never thought it would happen to him. First the father, and then the son.

“I do remember it,” Almalik said quietly. “I made a mistake, Ammar.”

Weakness or strength, it had always been hard to tell. This trait might even be, at different times, a sign of both. The father had never, in twenty years together, admitted to an error.

“Not all mistakes can be undone.” He was stalling, waiting for something to make this clearer for him. Behind, beneath all these words lay a decision that had to be made.

Almalik stood up. “I know that, of course. I am here in the hope that this was not one such. What is it you want, Ammar? What must I say?”

Ibn Khairan looked at him a moment before answering. “What is it I want? To write in peace, I could answer, but that would be dissembling, wouldn’t it? To live my life with a measure of honor—and be seen by the world to be doing so. That would be true enough and that, incidentally, is why I had to kill your father.”

“I
know
that. I know it better than anyone.” The king hesitated. “Ammar, I believe the Jaddites will be coming south this summer. My brother is with Yazir ibn Q’arif in the desert, still. We have learned they are building ships. In Abeneven. And I don’t know what King Badir intends.”

“So you tried to kill the boys?”

Almalik blinked. It was an unfair thrust, but he was a clever man, very much his father’s son. He said, “Those two men weren’t killed in a tavern brawl, then? I wondered about that.” The king shrugged. “Am I the first ruler in Al-Rassan to try to strengthen himself by dealing with siblings? Were you not my teacher of history, Ammar?”

Ibn Khairan smiled. “Did I criticize?”

Almalik flushed suddenly. “But you stopped them. You saved the boys. Zabira’s sons.”

“Others did. I was a small part of it. I am exiled here, Almalik, remember? I have signed a contract in Ragosa, and have been honoring it.”