Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  “He is my son and my king,” said Eleanor. She paused. “Indulge me now. Tell me what he sends you to Tyre to do.”

  Sioned chose her words carefully. She was being examined like a pupil in a school. What the penalty would be for failure, she did not precisely know, but she had no intention of discovering it. “There are two contenders for the throne of Jerusalem—which though it may be fallen is still a rich prize, particularly if Richard wins it back. Guy, who lost both it and the royal wife who gave him the right to the title, has been insisting that he is still the crowned and consecrated king. But Conrad, who rules in Tyre, has married the late queen’s heir, the fair Isabella, and he contends that through that marriage he also took the right to call himself king.

  “Guy is a fool,” said Sioned, “and a waster of kingdoms, but he comes from Anjou and is sworn in fealty to its count, who happens in this generation to be Richard. Conrad owes Richard nothing. He took Tyre and held it after Guy lost the kingdom, and he won altogether too many knights of the kingdom to his service. And now the Duke of Burgundy has taken the knights of France to him. There may be a war brewing—one that has nothing to do with the war between Christian and infidel.”

  Eleanor nodded at the recital. “And your part is to seduce Conrad?”

  That was bluntly spoken. Sioned resisted the temptation to be as blunt. “My part is to discover what he intends, and if I can, to dissuade him.”

  “To seduce him.” Eleanor looked her up and down. “You do look the part. Can you play it as well?”

  “Henry says I can, if I don’t talk.”

  Eleanor’s laughter was melodious still, a bright ripple of sound. It startled Sioned into speechlessness. “Men,” said Eleanor, “are all alike. One glimmer of intelligence and they’re paralytic with terror.”

  “Henry seems to control the horror well enough,” Sioned said.

  The queen’s eyes sharpened. “You like my grandson?”

  “I rather doubt he’s for me,” Sioned said dryly.

  “Why not?”

  “What can I bring him? A bag of medicines and a king’s trust?”

  “Neither is entirely worthless.”

  “Neither of them is a royal dowry.”

  “Do you want that?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Do you?”

  “No,” Sioned said. “Not for itself. For what it might buy me . . . maybe. If the prize is worth the price.”

  “You have a clear eye and a hard head. And,” said Eleanor, “somewhat more than that. Is it true, what I hear? Have you been studying certain arts with certain of the infidels?”

  Sioned went perfectly still. For all her pretensions to wariness, Eleanor had caught her off guard.

  She must answer; silence would be more damning than a lie. But when she spoke, she chose to tell the truth. “You know I have, majesty.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I must,” Sioned answered.

  Eleanor nodded as if in approval. “What irony,” she said, “that of all my children, only Geoffrey had the power; and a simple fever carried him off. Yet you who are none of mine are everything that I would have wished for in a child of my body.”

  Sioned had her doubts of that, but she kept them to herself—even when the queen took her chin in those long fingers and tilted her face to the light.

  “Beautiful,” mused Eleanor, “and gifted in the powers. Yet I barely noticed you. You’ve been avoiding me, yes? Are you afraid of me?”

  Sioned could not nod; the queen held her too tightly. She lowered her eyelids in assent.

  “Good,” said the queen, letting her go. “Fear is wise. Will you be continuing your studies?”

  “If I can, majesty,” Sioned said.

  “Do it,” said Eleanor. “Learn all that you can. Every weapon that they give you, you can turn to our purposes.”

  “Do you think they would give me weapons? Would they be as foolish as that?”

  “Use your beauty,” Eleanor said. “Use your gifts. Persuade them that you can be trusted.”

  “Do you trust me?” Sioned asked her.

  “Richard trusts you,” Eleanor said, “and I have means of assuring that his trust is not misplaced.”

  Sioned bent her head to both the assurance and the threat. She offered no promises, took no oaths. Nor did Eleanor ask them of her—whether out of arrogance or wisdom, Sioned could not tell.

  “Jerusalem will be ours by the summer,” Eleanor said. “Conrad may be part of it, or he may not. The choice is his.”

  “And if he sets himself against Richard?”

  Eleanor shrugged minutely. “He’s not a fool by any means, but he is ambitious. Ambition will be his downfall.” She sighed as if in sudden weariness. “Go, child. Serve your brother well.”

  “Always,” said Sioned.

  The queen’s expression hardened ever so slightly. “I do hope so. Go now. I must rest.”

  Sioned did not doubt it. The power that had been pressing on her with almost invisible subtlety had grown immeasurably stronger just after Eleanor professed exhaustion.

  It did not penetrate her wards, though it cost her something in both strength and composure to sustain them against it. Only her outer thoughts impinged on it, harmless and rather vapid, and touched with fear of the great sorceress.

  The fear at least was real, though Sioned might have preferred to call it hearty respect. The queen was drawing power from the earth below, taking in darkness with the light. If she had devoted all of it to the matter of enlisting her late husband’s bastard in her magical army, Sioned would have had no hope of escape. But Sioned was a small concern among the many that engaged her.

  Sioned staggered a little as she made her way to her room. The floor seemed unsteady underfoot. For a moment the world wavered and flowed. She was still in Acre, but there was no queen here; Eleanor was far away in England, and the Crusade, with all that it had hoped and fought for, was crumbling rapidly into nothing. A world of what-ifs, she thought; a world as it might have been. A world she neither wanted nor sought, nor ever wished to live in.

  Then, between one step and the next, the earth was still. She walked through the web of the queen’s wards in a country that the queen meant to conquer. Once she had conquered it, would she sail home? Or would she stay and rule? Did she herself know for certain which it would be?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sioned walked abroad the morning after her interview with the queen—unwisely, any number of people would have told her, but she had a desperate need to be away from the court. She could feel the various currents of tension in the city, enmities as strong as any between Christian and Muslim: between parvenu and pullani, French and English, Pisan guard and Genoese garrison. They had been at each other’s throats since Richard left there. A single spark could set any of them off; only by a miracle and by Eleanor’s will did they keep such peace as there was.

  The market was bustling on this fine chill morning, merchants doing a brisk trade among the many nations—though seldom, be it noted, the French. The bulk of them had gone to Tyre without pay from their own king and without the loan of pay from the English king. Those few who remained roamed about in packs, trading remnants of Saracen loot for bread and cheese and bad wine.

  “So why aren’t you in Tyre with the rest of the French king’s dogs?” an English voice drawled from inside a tavern.

  Sioned had paused to admire a bolt of silk in a cloth merchant’s stall. The tavern was across the narrow street from it, crowded with soldiers who had been away from the battlefield too long. They were looking for fights with one another now, since the infidel declined to engage in warfare in the dead of winter.

  The Englishman was sitting near the door. The Frenchman was farther in, but Sioned had no difficulty in hearing his voice: it was pitched to carry. “Better a king’s dog than his catamite.”

  The snarl that rose at that was remarkably like a dog’s, and came from more than one throat. The Englis
hman had friends. They were not all English, either: Sioned glimpsed livery of the Italies—Pisa, she supposed, if the men who wore it had risen up on Richard’s behalf. The others, near the men from France, must be Genoese; one even carried the crossbow that was the famous weapon of his city. And what he was doing with that on a supposedly peaceable ramble through the taverns, Sioned would have dearly liked to know.

  The snarl swelled to a growl. Words mattered little by now; all either side wanted was a fight. She heard the rumble and crash of tables overturned and pottery flung at walls and floor. Someone loosed a shout of glee, which broke in a dreadful gurgle.

  She was completely mad to do what she did: not to turn and run like a sensible woman, but to kilt up her skirts and run toward the brawl. Trousers would have served her better, and her sword and bow better yet, but she had something that no one in the tavern had. She raised it as she ran, gathering it inside her, all the powers of the elements mingled in a net of magic.

  When dogs fought in the king’s camp, men flung water on them to cool their rage. Sioned flung magic. It struck like a gout of cold seawater, flinging combatants apart, swirling in a gust of sudden wind.

  When the wind died, the tavern was quiet. The brawlers had fled. Bystanders picked themselves up, nursing bruises and murmuring in confusion. “An angel,” one of them said. “An angel came and stopped the fight.”

  None of them spared a glance for Sioned in her plain gown and woolen mantle—save one. He was a pullani, maybe, or a Gascon, dark and slight; his coat of boiled leather was much worn and rather too large for him.

  He seemed as harmless as an idle soldier could be. And yet something about him raised her hackles: a look about the eyes, a subtle tension in the body. He saw her; he knew her. He had marked her in memory.

  A shiver ran down her spine. That was no Christian, and no soldier of the West, either. Even as she stirred, uncertain whether she would move toward him or run away, he melted into shadow and was gone. The last glimpse she had of him was strange: not dark but light, as if he were clothed in white.

  Sioned started like a cat. The watcher had vanished. Someone else stood directly behind her—someone slight and dark and by no means a Frank. Her dagger was at his throat and a bead of blood welling scarlet from it before she recognized his face. “Mustafa!”

  Richard’s most loyal infidel stood utterly still. He wore tunic and hose like a Frank, and a hat instead of a turban, but he was most definitely not the man she had seen in the tavern. That one had raised her hackles on sight. This one made her feel safe. There was no other word for it. When he was there, she need have no fear of shadows.

  Mustafa’s face was unwontedly somber, his ready smile nowhere in evidence. His eyes were wary, scanning the street and the tavern. He shifted a fraction; she realized that her back was to a wall, and he stood between her and whatever might come.

  “You saw him, too,” she said.

  He nodded. “You weren’t wise to use magic here,” he said. “The ones who watch, they notice. They’ll remember.”

  “I may be safe,” said Sioned. “The queen thinks she’s bound me to her.”

  “No one is safe,” Mustafa said, “where that one sends his hunting hounds.”

  “That one?”

  “We don’t name him here,” Mustafa said. He laid a hand on her arm: for him, a rare liberty, and a sign of great disturbance of mind. “Come with me.”

  She was not minded to linger in that place where the Assassin had been. In her mind she would use that word. He could not be the first who had seen her in all her time in this country, but he was the first of the Master’s servants that she had seen. And he knew that she had seen him. He had allowed it, most likely. To frighten her? To threaten? Even, perhaps, to warn?

  Mustafa led her through ways of the city that she had not seen before, down dark and twisted alleys that reminded her that one of the towers of Acre was called Beelzebub. Part of her wondered, rather wildly, what she was doing following this Saracen through such places, but she trusted him—however irrational or even dangerous that trust might be. In that respect, maybe, she was like her brother. When she gave trust, she gave it excessively.

  The ending was somewhat of an anticlimax: a postern of the citadel and a passage that, after a staircase or two and a door that yielded to his persuasion, she recognized as leading to the ladies’ solar. She rounded on him in perfectly unreasonable anger. “I thought you were leading me somewhere interesting!”

  “I was leading you somewhere safe.” He seemed to remember that he was still gripping her arm: he let go.

  She was not about to let him melt away as the Assassin had. She caught him and held on, stopping him where he stood. “You’re supposed to be with Richard. What are you doing here?”

  “Keeping you out of mischief,” he said.

  “Did my brother send you?”

  He shrugged in the complex manner of the east, speaking volumes with a gesture. “He didn’t prevent me. It seems I came just in time. I should have been quicker.”

  “But why—”

  “Don’t use magic again here,” he said, “no matter how strong the temptation.”

  “Why?”

  He tried very hard to slip away. She was too strong for him. “Tell me. Or I’ll drag you into the ladies’ bower and let them have their will of you.”

  He blanched. “I can’t tell you here—the walls can hear.”

  “Whisper it,” she said, relentless.

  He sighed vastly, but he bent toward her ear. His whisper was barely to be heard. “Because of her. Because the more everyone underestimates you, the safer you will be.”

  “You think so?” She kept her voice down, but not to a whisper.

  He set his lips together. “Please let me go, lady,” he said.

  “Why? Where will you go?”

  “Not far,” he said. “I promise.”

  She sensed the truth of that. He was greatly troubled for her. “You know something,” she said.

  He shook his head. He was not denying it, but neither would he speak. With a hiss of frustration, she let go his arm. He did not disappear as she had expected; he shifted instead, until he had established himself in her shadow.

  It seemed she had herself a guardsman. She resented it less than she might have expected. Whether his unease gave birth to hers, or whether she also had had a burst of prescience, she was surprisingly glad of his presence.

  He slept across her door that night. One of the ladies who shared the room squeaked with alarm when she saw a man on the floor, but the other two regarded him with lively interest. He was pleasing to the eye in his dark, slender way, and his eastern manners delighted them: he seemed to them a perfect image of a courtly nobleman.

  Sioned did nothing to disabuse them of the notion that her brother had sent one of his squires to protect her. It was true, in its way; certainly Mustafa belonged to Richard, and he was at least as adept in the arts of war as a Frank of his age.

  She heard him through the snoring of her bedmates, breathing softly and regularly. His sleep would be light, like a cat’s: alert for the slightest hint of danger. She wove wards through that wariness, shaped to guard him even as they heightened his senses.

  It was a quiet night, free of threats if not of fear. In the morning, a brow raised here and there at the sight of Sioned’s new shadow, but it was hardly polite to remark on him. Even Henry, who recognized Richard’s pet Saracen, simply nodded as if in satisfaction, and went about his business.

  They would leave that day for Tyre, sailing on one of Richard’s galleys. Sioned was horrified to discover how much baggage she was expected to bring with her. “A lady of fashion never travels light,” Joanna said, laughing at her expression.

  “But I don’t have maids or a retinue or—”

  “Now you do,” said Joanna. She was enjoying this much too much.

  She crooked a finger. A procession of ladies advanced into the solar, led by the redoubtable Blanche herse
lf. There were only half a dozen when Sioned stopped to count them, but in that first moment of shock, they seemed an army.

  “Joanna,” said Sioned. “I can’t—”

  “You must,” her sister said. “It’s only practical. Or do you think that you can look after all your gowns and jewels by yourself?”

  “One maid for that, surely,” said Sioned, “but—”

  “A single maid shames the rank and dignity of a princess. And,” said Joanna, “she’d be sorely taxed to manage that princess’ wealth.”

  “But I don’t have—”

  “No,” Joanna conceded, “but you have the resources of a king at your disposal. Our brother asked that we give you all the pretensions to which your royal lineage entitles you. You needn’t keep them afterwards—unless of course you want to.”

  “I would never want such a thing,” Sioned said with heartfelt sincerity.

  Joanna set her lips together and carefully refrained from comment. Instead she said, “Think of it as a battle. You’re fighting for all of us, and for the Crusade.”

  That was one way of thinking about it—Sioned could grant her as much. “But, Joanna, I can’t have this many women following me about!”

  “You can and you must,” Joanna said implacably. “Now, what is this thing you’re wearing? Blanche! Did I not instruct you to see that she was properly attired?”

  “I’m not in Tyre yet,” Sioned began, but none of them was listening. They had her comfortable traveling clothes off her before she could mount any useful resistance, and restored her to the excruciating elegance of court fashion. There was no walking sensibly in those tiny and exquisite shoes, even if she would be allowed to soil her silken train in the common streets. She would be taken to the ship in a litter and carried aboard like an eastern lady, wrapped and bound as securely as a bale in a caravan.

  It was war, as Joanna had reminded her, and this was a battlefield. She set herself to endure it, for her brother’s sake if not for her own.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Richard’s ship sailed into Tyre with all its banners flying. Sioned, trammeled in royal estate, still managed to be on the galley’s deck as they came to harbor in that ancient city. She had been aware of it from far out to sea. Even in a country so full of magic and so weighted with age, this place was old. Old as Nineveh, old as Tyre: poets had sung of such things even in Gwynedd where she was born.