Behold the Dawn

  But it was not yet time. He would wait a while longer, until he could discover Annan’s plans. Why did Marcus Annan run from Acre, choosing instead to escort the widow of the dead earl to sanctuary?

  He pursed his lips, his heavy brows pinching over his eyes. If Annan had been swayed by the countess’s beauty, it was a step from the well-beaten path of solitude that had trailed him for the last sixteen years. And if he shielded her out of some sense of honor…

  Gethin’s exhale rasped. If that were the reason, it would be ironic indeed—that Annan would run from God-given duty in pursuit of some pale mockery of his own construction.

  Another gust of wind brushed the nape of his neck and slithered down his back. He drew a careful breath, trying to calm the angry energy that had burned in him for so long.

  All was silent now across the river, save the vague munching of the horses in the shrubbery. The lady and the lad had bedded down. Annan still stood, arms crossed over his chest, his silhouette black against the deep blue of the night sky. Perhaps he was contemplating the even darker blackness of his soul.

  Soon, very soon, Gethin would find the means to force Marcus Annan—that blaspheming façade of a man—to face his duty, to forsake his lies, to join his quest for justice…

  Soon.

  Chapter XI

  TWO DAYS AFTER finding Marek, Annan guided the gray courser away from the dwindling waters of the Orontes River. The port where the river debouched into the sea lay too far into Saracen territory to risk searching for a ship. Their best chance of gaining passage to Venice would still be found in Constantinople, which was yet a week’s ride to the northwest.

  They had been riding in the shadows of dusk for some twenty minutes, looking for a place to rest, when first he caught sight of the shadow on the horizon behind them.

  His chest seized, his arm jerking a few inches closer to the sword strapped against the pommel.

  Mairead, the tired lines in her face only inches from his, frowned and turned to look for herself. “What?”

  He let his breath out carefully. “Nothing.”

  It probably was nothing, an overreaction caused by a lingering sunspot in his vision. But he didn’t like it. Too many days had passed without anyone crossing their path. Sooner or later, someone was going to ride over the horizon. And then there would be trouble.

  “It was nothing,” he repeated.

  “What was it? You saw something?”

  “I saw a spot, lady.”

  He caught her frown out of the corner of his eye as he turned back, but it wasn’t mingled with fear—and for that he was grateful. Over the past few days her mistrust of him seemed to have abated. Whether due to Marek’s jovial influence or merely some inner strength of her own, he didn’t know.

  He twisted in his saddle to look at Marek riding some half-dozen paces behind the courser. “We’ll stop in this dell to the right here.”

  Marek stood in his stirrups to look, then scowled. “T’ain’t no boughs to make her ladyship a couch.”

  “She’ll sleep on the ground—”

  “I’ll sleep on the ground,” Mairead said.

  Annan twisted to look at her. Marek had made her a bed every night since he had met her. Annan had thought she would resent his refusal to accommodate that courtesy, unavoidable though it was.

  A smile lurked at the corners of her mouth. “Were it not unwise, I believe you’d provide me both boughs for a bed and a fire.”

  He squinted at her. “You believe that, do you?” Inwardly, he cursed the reflex that turned the question into a challenge.

  But again she surprised him. The smile ripened on her lips. “I’ve heard tell that you have rather more respect for the weaker vessel than you’d like to show.” Her expression was almost teasing, but he sensed the hesitation hidden in her gaze. She was testing him, taking a chance, making an effort to reach past the shields they had both erected.

  He swallowed and made himself speak softly, almost a whisper, to keep the growl from his voice. “Is that so?”

  “Aye.”

  “Well—” He glanced over to where Marek was leading his horse into the dell, talking his usual gibberish to the animal. “Marek never did learn mouths were made on hinges so they could be shut every now and then.”

  “Did no one ever tell you mouths were made on hinges so they might be opened every now and then?”

  “Marek’s mentioned it once or twice.”

  A few paces away from Marek’s palfrey, Annan drew the courser to a halt and dismounted. For the first time, Mairead kept her place on the pillion and waited for him to help her down. He lifted her carefully—not wanting to jar this sudden burst of good humor. If he could keep her fear at arm’s length for the rest of their journey, he would ask nothing more.

  He set her on the ground. “What else did Marek tell you?”

  “That you’re a troll.”

  “Ah.” He shot another glance to where Marek was whistling one of his troubadour songs as he unsaddled his mount. “Well, if the lad possesses no other virtue, at least he’s truthful.”

  Mairead sobered, and he wondered if the admission had been a mistake.

  “He also told me you came to Acre to help Lord William.”

  Annan’s back stiffened. “Is that what he thinks?”

  Her eyes looked huge in the gathering darkness, and he could see the tears misting on their surfaces. “Didn’t you?” Something in her voice—some note of pleading hope—tore at him.

  He couldn’t very well tell her that he didn’t know why he had come to Acre—that it had been a mere impulse. That he had found Lord William only by some strange twist of fate. That he could hardly have helped him even had he found him earlier. What could he tell her?

  “Had I been able, I would have saved him for you.”

  A tear broke free of her lashes and slid down her cheek. She forced a smile. “If that is true, then I have misjudged you.” Another tear dropped down the other cheek, sliding all the way past her chin.

  He knew he should turn and go, should leave. He could do nothing for his own grief… how could he heal hers? Better to leave her to cry her silent tears alone.

  But he stayed, his eyes on the tear track shining against her pale cheek. “He deserved to be mourned. He was a man deserving of a love that would remember him.”

  She wiped the tear aside and looked away. “It is not love that remembers him. It is just a woman.” She walked a few paces behind the horse and wrapped her arms round her body.

  Annan went to the courser and laid a hand on the animal’s neck. The horse, already half asleep, cocked a hip and grunted.

  “What did you name him?” He managed to keep his voice low, but the growl surfaced anyway.

  She turned halfway around, one hand reaching to smooth aside another tear. “What?”

  “The courser—what did you name him?”

  Her eyebrow arched despite the tremble in her lip. “You’re certain you want to know?”

  When he didn’t respond, she turned all the way around. “I named him Airn.”

  “Airn.” He tugged the girth loose and let it drop.

  “Aye. You approve?”

  “Better than what Marek would have come up with.”

  Marek, squatting next to his palfrey with a hoof in his lap, peered beneath the horse’s belly. “What’s that?”

  “I said the lady names horses better than do you.”

  Marek snorted. “And how would you ken?”

  Annan pulled the saddle from the courser’s back and set it on end. A cool wind whispered past, blowing the sun-warmed homespun of his loose tunic against his back. He tossed another glance at the horizon, but it was too dark now to see anything out of place.

  Mairead drifted to the horse’s head and pulled his forehead against her chest. “You think someone is following us, don’t you?”

  “Just being careful.” If indeed someone were back there, they would find out in time enough.

  For a
moment, everything was silent, even the horses. Annan rubbed the courser’s back with the heel of his hand and listened to the insistent whisperings of the wind. A shiver danced across his shoulder blades, and he leaned closer to the horse, reaching one arm over its back to rub the other side.

  “He married me to save me, you know.” Mairead’s voice, almost a whisper, broke the stillness. She had lowered her face to the courser’s forelock, the fingers of either hand resting beneath the bridle’s cheekpieces. “To save me from Hugh de Guerrant. He knew what would happen to us once he married me, but he did it anyway because he thought it was the right thing. He died for me.” She breathed deeply. “For what he did for me, I would have carried his sons and I would have stood beside him until he was too old to carry himself. I would have made him happy. You’re right—” she looked at Annan, “he did deserve to be remembered—and by so many more than just me.”

  He stared at her. “I remember him.”

  The earnestness of the little girl surfaced as she raised her face to see into his expression. “What do you remember?”

  What did he remember? He remembered the earl’s face—instead of his own father’s—smiling on his successes, on his growing prowess with sword and lance. He remembered William laughing every time Annan took a spill from an unruly horse. He remembered the older man’s pride when he had earned his spurs on the field of battle, fighting against the English King Henry II.

  The lines in his forehead tightened.

  He remembered the grief, the pain that had darkened his mentor’s brow when first he had learned of the burst of temper that had led to the blows exchanged between Annan and his older brother. It had been an accident when his brother’s wife had been struck in her attempt to intervene; it had been an accident that she and both the children she had carried within her had died. But Annan had borne the guilt of it nonetheless. The fight with his brother had been his first step down his dark path. The second had been choosing St. Dunstan’s as the monastery in which to pay his penance.

  He had no memory of his master’s reactions to the deeds of St. Dunstan’s; after that black day, he had not seen the face of his mentor Lord William of Keaton ‘til the night of his death in the prison camp.

  “I remember,” he said at last, “that he was a good man. If wisdom ever shone its light on me, it was through him.”

  Her cheek bent once more to the courser’s forehead. “He was a good man because he was a righteous man.”

  Annan shifted, clamping down on a defensive flash. Her words, after all, were not a comparison of William’s life and his own; condemnation had not risen to clog the air between them. Had it been so, he would have told her she had no idea what had shaped his own life, what had led him down a road so disparate from the earl’s.

  He held the words in check. William had been a righteous man, and he well remembered it. He had respected the earl’s righteousness, and he had tried to emulate it.

  But he had not had the faith to hold his own bellicosity in check—a bellicosity that had been born, in part, of his hatred for the unrighteous. And so it was, were he to tell her what had led him here today, he would also have to tell her that, in its own ironic way, it had been William’s righteousness that had sent him hurtling, unprepared, to the early holocaust that had so marked his life.

  Mairead laid her cheek flat against the courser’s forehead so that she could see Annan. “Would that all men could be even as he was.”

  Annan pushed away from the horse’s side. “Some men are called of God, and some are not.”

  She raised her head, both eyebrows lifting. “Aye. But it is also true that there are those who are called and do not come.”

  She held his gaze with a steadiness he had never seen from her. Behind them, Marek began to sing the song he had been whistling. His high, clear voice resonated in the night air. “I trained myself a falcon. He was as I wanted, gentled to my care.”

  Mairead turned away, and her soft tone joined his. “I bound his feathers proudly, gold the winding shone. Then he took the high road, and flew to parts unknown.”

  Annan watched her go. He would not say that she was not right. A long time ago—a lifetime ago—he had been one of the chosen. He had been willing to give everything, even his very life, to the cause of Christ. But that time was long dead.

  * * *

  Annan did not see the silhouette on the horizon until the eastern sky began to color with the blush of dawn.

  They had traveled throughout the latter part of the night, mostly in silence, the whir of the wind providing the only barrier necessary for them to keep their thoughts to themselves. Even Marek seemed to have nothing to say beyond an infrequent muttering to his horse.

  Mairead had descended into sleep slowly, her muscles softening and softening until at last she leaned against his back, her cheek between his shoulder blades. But as the courser plodded through the sand, its hipbones rocking in time with the bob of its head, Annan found that he had no need to fight the urge of sleep. His mind was too active, too aware of the woman who slept behind him.

  Through the coarse warmth of the jerkin Marek had dug from his saddlebags, Annan could feel her arms folded against her chest, drawing her cloak tightly around her. He could feel her gentle breathing, the tickle of her hair at the nape of his neck. He rode straight, shoulders back to keep her from slipping.

  Had she been awake, he doubted she would have allowed herself so near him. For that matter, she had never before fallen asleep behind him. He entwined the fingers of his rein hand in the courser’s thick mane and wondered if she had allowed herself to fall asleep because the exertions of the trek had finally overtaken her. Or had their conversation—the first conversation they had held without one of them leaving either in doubt or anger—finally convinced her she had nothing to fear from him?

  “Annan—” Marek’s voice, hardly louder than a whisper, seemed to echo in the pre-dawn silence.

  “What?”

  “Someone’s behind us. Can’t see him now— he dropped down out of sight behind that hill.”

  Annan twisted his neck as far as he could without jostling Mairead and cursed himself for not keeping a better watch during the night. He had allowed his own weariness to overweigh his instincts. He had seen someone last night, but he had foregone keeping a watch behind them in exchange for letting Mairead sleep undisturbed.

  “A Turk?” he said.

  “It looked to be a donkey.”

  He brought the courser to an abrupt halt and reined him around just as the stranger topped the hill. Adjusting his course slightly, the man kept the donkey’s bobbing head in line with Annan and Marek.

  In a rush, Annan’s instincts told him this was the donkey he had seen in silhouette the first night out of the prison camp, when he had questioned the coincidence that had led someone to ford the river exactly where he and Mairead had camped for the night.

  Now he knew it was no coincidence.

  As purple light streaked the sky behind him, the man on the donkey continued his leisurely journey. His cowl was thrown back across his shoulders, revealing the sunburnt sheen of a monk’s tonsure. And from the midst of dark robes fluttering in the morning breeze, the glint of a crucifix shone.

  Annan clenched his teeth, one hand seeking the hilt of his sword.

  Mairead roused and tilted her chin to see over his shoulder. “What’s wrong?” Her inhalation whistled past his ear as she caught sight of the approaching traveler. One hand darted from beneath her cloak to clench the jerkin at Annan’s side. “Who is it?”

  “The Baptist.” Why did he feel only dread, when he should be welcoming this man gladly, if only because of who he wasn’t?

  “Thanks to Heaven.” She straightened away from him, and the cold breeze immediately replaced the warmth of her body.

  “Indeed.” He hunched his shoulders, fingernails digging into the leather binding of his sword hilt.

  Marek gave a little snort. “Well, I can think of a few peo
ple I’d rather see. Trouble hovers round him like flies at a charnel house.”

  Annan threw some slack into his reins and reached to rub his sore hip. “I suppose he’s better than most of the other options.”

  “He saved our lives,” Mairead pointed out.

  Annan didn’t remind her that Gethin had meant to save the lives of Mairead and William—not Mairead and Marcus Annan. He had no doubts the Baptist was about to be as surprised to see him as he was to see the Baptist.

  But when Gethin at last drew near enough for the sun to cast its light upon his warped face, no expression of shock or confusion blurred the furor of his eyes.

  Annan didn’t move so much as an eyebrow. He owed Gethin nothing, not even an explanation.

  “Baptist,” he said.

  Gethin drew rein with only a pace of sand between his donkey’s head and that of Annan’s and Marek’s horses. “Marcus Annan.” His features lay flat, but contempt burned in the back of those fearsome eyes. His gaze flicked to Mairead, and he inclined his head. “Countess, where is your husband?”

  She hesitated, and Annan could sense more than see that she shifted her glance to him. “He is… in Acre.”

  Gethin grunted, then settled his gaze back on Annan. “And, pray tell, Brother Annan, what are you doing with his wife?”

  On Annan’s far side, out of Gethin’s sight, Mairead’s fingers slid tentatively against his ribs. A silent message burned in her touch, and he knew she was giving him permission to explain the provision Lord William had issued to allow her the protection of a husband’s name. Gethin could neither condemn nor censure if he knew she was Annan’s wife.

  But Annan’s eyes only hardened. Explaining himself to others had never been reason enough to bare secrets, especially to those he did not trust. And his old friend Gethin was no longer a man he trusted.

  “Do you add to your sins, Marcus Annan?” Gethin’s voice dropped lower.

  “Perhaps.”

  Mairead’s fingers tightened, and he straightened his shoulders. “And perhaps not. You impugn the lady with your accusations.”

  One heavy brow lifted. “On the contrary.” The donkey moved forward a step until Gethin was able to look directly into Mairead’s face. Her hand dropped from Annan’s side, and out of the corner of his eye Annan could see her shoulders draw back.