by Judith Tarr
Now that was ended. Aimery could reckon the very moment. When Aidan sat his horse under the gate of Tyre, and Ysabel dropped out of the sky into his arms. Aidan had barely said a word to Aimery since. It was always Ysabel, Ysabel, Ysabel.
No one had even thrashed her for almost getting herself killed. Jumping off the wall, for God’s sweet mercy. What if Aidan had not looked up when he did? What if she had misjudged her leap? She would have died.
Aimery did not want that. He detested her cordially, he hated her domination of their uncle, but she was his sister. He simply wished that she could be his sister somewhere else.
All his thinking had carried him through the Mortmains’ part of the caravanserai from bottom to top. He found himself at the foot of a stair which led to the roof. He climbed it.
And stopped in the bright air, and almost groaned aloud. Ysabel was there. Of course. She could not even keep herself out of his solitary rambling.
He started to turn back, but stopped. She had not seen him yet. She was doing something indecipherable. It looked like weaving, the way the weavers did it in the bazaar. But she had no loom. And no thread. Only dark and light.
He watched her shape a shaft of sunlight that came through the leaves of the lemon tree, rolling and spinning it between her palms until it was a shimmering, burning thread, and working it into her weft of air. She did it perfectly calmly, with a line of concentration between her brows, and the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth.
Aimery stood very, very still. He did not want to believe what he was seeing. But he had grown up with Aidan and his Assassin. He knew what magic was.
It all began to make excellent sense. Why Aidan favored her so strongly. How she could be such a terror. She would not have died when she jumped off the wall. She could fly. Probably Aidan had taught her.
She looked up. The light was strong and strange in her face. Her eyes were stranger still. Witch-eyes. “Hello, Aimery,” she said with perfect calm.
He refused to turn and bolt. “You,” he said. “You’re one of them.”
She nodded. “I’m surprised you never guessed.”
“Why? You’ve always thought me stupid.”
“I don’t.” That was more like Ysabel: sharp and indignant. “You’re a boy, that’s all. Boys are silly.”
“Girls are worse.” Aimery advanced on her. She made no move to protect her weaving. His finger reached of its own accord.
Solid. Like shadow, like sunlight. Cool, hot. Soft.
Carefully he reclaimed his finger. It did not shake. He was proud of that. “You’re a witch,” he said. “Like Morgiana. If the Church finds out, it will burn you.”
“It’s never burned the others.”
“It never tried hard enough.”
She showed him her teeth. Sharp cat-teeth, like Aidan’s.
He hated her suddenly. Hated her so much that he said what the devil bade him say. “You’re his, aren’t you? You’re his bastard.”
If he could have eaten the words, he would have. He did not want her to be that. He could not bear it if it was true.
“It is,” she said. Answering what he said in his mind. The way Aidan did. “He is my father.”
Aimery leaped on her. She fell back against the tree-bole. She did nothing to stop him, except fend his hands from her throat. He seized her shoulders instead and shook her till her head rocked on her neck. “It’s not true! It’s not true!”
“Then why did you say it?”
His head tossed. “You made me. You drove me wild.” He dragged her roughly to her feet. Her witch-weaving was all gone, torn and scattered into nothing. “Of course he isn’t your father. You just said it to make me mad.”
“No,” she said. “I am his bastard. Why else do you think he’d spend so much time with me? He’s trying to teach me how to be what he is.”
“You aren’t,” said Aimery. He was almost crying. “You can’t. How could he—how could Mother—”
“They loved one another,” said the little witch, calmly and horribly certain. “They still do.”
“No! She loves Father.”
“She does. But she loves my father, too.”
“No,” said Aimery. “No.” He could see them. His mother all naked and wanton, and the prince stooping over her. Ravishing her. Filling her with—
His cheek stung. Ysabel drew back her hand from the slap. Her eyes were fierce. “You are disgusting! It was only for a season, and it was only me. Do you think Morgiana would have let it last any longer? That’s why she tried to kill Mother. Because Mother was pregnant with me, and Morgiana was in love with my father and wanted him for herself. Morgiana took my father away to her cave in Persia, the way she’s always told it, and Mother went home to Father. Your father. Whom she left because of you. Because she wanted you with all her heart and soul, and he took you away, and she hated him for it. My father was one of the people who helped her understand why Father did what he did. She went back to him, and she was faithful to him. She learned to love him. She was never what you are thinking.”
Whore, Aimery was thinking. Slut. Wanton and wicked. Adulteress.
Ysabel hit him again. He tried to hit her back, but she was too quick. Witch-quick.
He was crying. Dribbling and sniffling like a baby, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Father was dead and Mother was a whore and his sister was a bastard, and his lord, his prince, his beloved kinsman, was a—a—
“Don’t think it,” Ysabel said softly. “Don’t you even think it.”
He swung wildly, knowing that he would not touch her, but wanting her out, off, away. She retreated out of reach.
“I hate you!” he screamed at her. “I hate you!”
o0o
Aimery ran as far as he could run. Which was not, after all, very far. He wanted to burst in on his mother, fling it all in her face, hear her call him a liar. She would beat sense back into his head. She would tell him to stop his fretting; Ysabel was baiting him again, driving him wild, because Ysabel was a hellion, and hellions could not help what they did.
But he did not approach Joanna. He knew what she would say. She would tell him that it was true. She had put horns on her husband; she had played the harlot with a jinni prince. A demon lover. Had they been surprised when he got her with child? Had they had the decency to be appalled?
He could not face Aidan, either. It was not hate, what moved in him. It was grief.
He carried it to the one place he could think of. Aimery had been unhappy at first to be put in the nursery, made to share a room and a bed with William and the baby, who was no longer the youngest now that Salima was born. But it was not crowded as rooms went in this house, and now it was empty. He flung himself on the bed and cried, and when he tired of crying, he began to throw things.
Cushions and bolsters were hardly satisfactory: they struck the wall with a muted thump and dropped bonelessly down. Clothes flew at peculiar angles, even when one wadded them up. He was not ready for knives yet.
Morgiana caught the lamp just before it shattered against the wall. She hardly even spilled the oil in it.
She walked away from the wall and set the lamp delicately on its table. She had not come through the door, which was on the other side of the room. Aimery crouched, breathing hard, glaring at her.
She tucked up her feet eastern-fashion and sat. “So,” she said. “The little witch told you.”
Aimery stopped goggling at the spectacle of the ifritah sitting with nothing between herself and the floor but a yard’s worth of air, and dropped back flat on the denuded bed. He dug his hands into his eyes before they could run over again. “Why did she have to tell me? Why couldn’t she have lied to me?”
“Would you have wanted her to?”
“Yes!”
She was silent.
He let his hands fall. He turned his head. She was watching him, wearing no expression that he could decipher. Except that there was no contempt in it. He looked for that.<
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“No,” he said roughly. “No, I wouldn’t have wanted her to lie. I don’t want the truth to be true.”
“One doesn’t, when the truth is as bitter as this.”
“It is true, isn’t it?”
“It is true.” She laced her fingers in her lap, studying them as if they formed a pattern that she could read. “It is also true that he has not touched her, or gone to her, since the night I thrust my dagger in her heart. We quarreled over that, did you know? That was why I left him in Jerusalem. He taxed me with—” She shook her head slightly. “It doesn’t matter. I taxed him with his old sin. We fought, and I sundered myself from him. We were both fools.”
“You should never have come back to him.”
“I should never have left him.” She met his eyes. Hers were as clear and hard as emeralds. “I have no love to spare for your mother. But I can, if I wish, see why he loves her. She is bright and strong and fearless. She has become a great lady. She gave him the child I cannot give him. If ever a mortal woman was a match for him, that one is.”
It was too much for Aimery. There were too many sides to it. That Morgiana could praise his mother for giving the prince a bastard. That she could understand it.
“And what about my father?” Aimery cried. “What voice did he ever have in any of this?”
“He never knew.” Morgiana met his incredulity with a cool stare. “Your mother saw no purpose in giving him pain. He thought the child his; he cherished her. She loved him as much as any daughter should love her father. It speaks well for your sister, messire, that she has love enough to spare for two fathers, nor ever stinted either of them.”
Aimery did not want to hear praise of his sister. “You all lied to him.”
“None of us told him aught that was not truth. We let him think as he pleased, and did nothing to disillusion him. There were indeed nine months between his reunion with your mother and the birth of your sister. She had indeed been apart from my prince for a month and more before she came to your father. There was never need to explain that witch-children dwell longer in the womb.”
Aimery was dizzy and sick. “Lies. Liars.”
“No,” Morgiana said.
The sickness rose to engulf him.
She held him all through it, and conjured a basin for it, and conjured it away when there was nothing left to empty himself of, except grief and rage and bitter disappointment. Her touch did not revolt him. He was a little surprised at that. She was not human enough to be repelled by. She was a pure thing, like fire, or like a spirit of the air.
“Which after all is what I am.” She smoothed his sweat-sodden hair with disconcerting gentleness. “I’m hardly a pure spirit, Aimery. What your prince is, what your sister will be, I am. We make mistakes like human folk. Worse than they, sometimes, because of what we are. One of them was that I tried to kill your mother, because I was jealous of her.”
“You should have,” he said bitterly. “Then none of this would have happened.”
“You know you don’t want that,” she said.
She was sitting on the bed now, still with her feet tucked up, looking hardly older than Aimery. He thought of all that he had said to her, and flushed hot with shame.
“Don’t,” she said. She reached out her hand. It was cool on his cheek.
He snatched it. It did not try to escape him. He looked her up and down, hard, the way he had seen men do in the army. “Maybe I should carry on the family tradition.”
She did not laugh at him. He was grateful for that. Nor did she ask if he was capable. Though of course she would know. Better maybe than he did.
“Not yet,” she said, so softly that at first he did not think he had heard it. “But soon.”
His flush mounted all the way to his hair and went down all the way to his belly. What was below his belly was soft and slack and helpless, and doing its best to crawl back into his body. He was not a man yet. He did not want to be one. He wanted it to be yesterday, and all this bitter truth untold, and his heart burdened with no more than his grief for his father and his hatred of the Saracen and his petty rivalry with his sister.
“I’ll never be able to look at her again,” he said. “Or my mother. Or—her—father.” He choked, getting it out.
“You will,” said Morgiana. “You are stronger than you know.” She flowed to her feet, drawing him with her. He staggered; she held him until he steadied, then set her hands on his shoulders. “Aimery de Mortmain, listen to me. This is no easy thing to learn and no easy time to learn it. And you are going to have to do something harder yet.”
“What?”
“Accept it.”
He shook his head so hard that he almost fell. But she held him; her fingers were inhumanly strong. They hurt. He welcomed the pain. It kept him from running screaming into the dark. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t accept it.”
“You will.”
“No.”
“Yes.” She shook him lightly, but hard enough to focus all of him on her. “Not at first. Not all at once. You will begin by keeping silence. You will treat your mother no differently than before; you will continue as you have been with your prince.”
“And my sister? My sister, too?”
“Even your sister.”
He laughed, rough and short. “Is there anything else you’ll ask of me? Maybe I should go to the Saracen sultan and kiss his foot? Maybe I should bow down to the caliph in Baghdad?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Morgiana. “You can study to keep your tongue between your teeth. It will serve you well when you come into your inheritance. And surely you can be courteous to your kin.”
“What will you do if I can’t?”
“I, nothing. You will do it all yourself.”
Maybe she made him see. Maybe she did not need to. The truth cried aloud in front of everyone. His mother repudiated, his kinsman rejected, his sister branded bastard. Even if he kept it among the four of them, it would poison all that they did and said to one another.
He was only twelve years old. People forgot it: he was so big, and his voice had always been husky, and maybe he knew how to act older than he was. Lords’ heirs learned that, being what they were.
But he was being asked to be even more than he seemed. To be not only a man but a saint.
“I can’t do it,” he said.
He heard the whine in it. So did Morgiana. She raised a brow. She was a cold, hard, cruel witch, and he did not care if she knew it.
She laughed.
“All right,” he said angrily. “All right, then. I’ll try.”
“You’ll do it,” she said.
She held out her hand. He stared at it. It stayed where it was. Demanding. Expecting him to seal it, so, like a wager.
Well, then. Let it be a wager. The family’s peace was stake enough against his own heart’s comfort.
He gripped her hand. He did not try to soften it. But she was stronger than he. Her smile was brilliant and wicked and a little—maybe more than a little—proud of him.
“And well you ought to be,” he growled at her.
She grinned and pulled him out of the room.
“Now?” he cried. “I have to begin it wow?”
“When better?”
He had a mouthful of answers for that, but she gave him time to utter none of them. He did get out a curse. “Witch!”
She only laughed.
32.
Ysabel peered warily round the door. Gwydion was gone, which meant that his servant and his squire were gone as well, and Simeon with them, though he would not have gone easily. There was only Akiva, curled in a knot on his mat, a bundle of blanket with his curly head at the top of it.
It was quite an ordinary sleep by now, or Gwydion would never have left him to it. She set down what had given her an excuse to come here, the bowl of bread and cheese covered with a cloth, and sat on her heels beside it.
Akiva was changing so fast that she could almost see it. Suddenly h
is nose almost fit his face, and his eyes were not quite too big for it, and his chin made human chins seem wide and clumsy. He was not getting pretty, she decided. No more than Gwydion or Aidan were. He was growing beautiful.
She would never let him know she thought it. He was almost awake. His nose twitched, catching the scent of cheese and new bread. She drew her brows together in the beginning of a frown.
He opened his eyes. Sleep made them soft and blurred, but his mind was clear enough. She watched him focus all in an eyeblink, like a hawk. He saw her. He reckoned where he was, and when he was, and what had put him there. He sat up a little dizzily. His stomach growled.
“The king was hungrier than you are,” Ysabel said as Akiva wolfed down his breakfast. “He ate so much that he even made Mother happy. That’s what power does, he says. You should have eaten after you did your healing, and then you should have slept. You’d not have been as sick then.”
“I didn’t think I’d done that much,” Akiva said between bites. He reached for the bottle she had brought. It was almost all water, but there was a little wine, and an herb or two that Gwydion had told Cook to put in it. Akiva grimaced at the taste, but he drank it.
“It’s odd,” he said. “I didn’t feel as if I was sleeping at all. More that I was dreaming, the way trees do, and growing, and mending where I needed to. I felt you there. You kept me from fading, did you know that? You gave me strength to feed on until the king came. It’s a gift, like healing, but different from it. Your father has it, too. He’s like fire. He warms more than himself.”
“Sometimes he burns,” Ysabel said. She filched a bit of bread and nibbled on it, for something to do. “You look all well. The king says you are. He says you’ll want to rest for a day or two until all your strength comes back, but there’s nothing wrong with you.”
Akiva stretched. His bones cracked; he made a face. “Did I grow again while I was asleep?”
“A whole inch,” said Ysabel.
He believed her, for a moment, until he saw the glint in her eye. He glared. “Just you wait till it happens to you.”