by Judith Tarr
“I wish it would. I’m tired of being a baby.”
“Well,” he said. “Girls grow faster than boys.”
“I don’t want to grow,” she said, contrary. “I don’t want to change. I wish I could be grown up without having to go through all the awkwards in between.”
He looked at her. His eyes narrowed. “You could do that,” he said. “You could make it happen.”
She could. She saw it inside. One willed thus, and so. One made this change, and that.
She hugged herself, shivering. She could, but she did not want to. She thought that it might be a Sin. Children grew the way they did because God made them that way. If they grew themselves too fast, who knew what would happen?
Akiva was changing fast enough, and none of it was his doing. He was like a colt, all legs and awkwardness, but the grace was coming through. He walked to the bed and back, unsteady at first, then more sure of himself. He turned, feeling the way his body moved. A smile broke out on his face. “I feel so strong,” he said.
“That’s because you were so weak for so long.” Ysabel offered him his coat. He put it on over his long linen shirt.
He needed to rest then. It surprised him; he was as angry as Akiva ever got. Ysabel bullied more breakfast into him, and more of Gwydion’s potion. They helped more than a little, but he stayed where he was, sitting on his mat with his back against the wall.
After a while Ysabel said, “I did a little hunting while you were asleep.”
He was not about to be distracted that easily, but he raised his brows. “Did you find anything?”
“I think they’re here,” she said. “All of them. And the pope’s letter. The trader’s son spends a lot of time trying not to think about it.”
Akiva did not, as she had half expected, try to see what she spoke of. His mind was tender yet, and not inclined to stretch itself. “We ought to tell your father,” he said.
“What makes you think I didn’t?”
He looked at her.
Her cheeks went hot. “So. I didn’t want to do it without you.”
“You should have,” he said.
“When? They were all too busy with you.”
He had to admit the truth of that. “They’ll know now. That all the grownfolk are here. Their walls will be higher than ever.”
“But now we know where to look. I think we should go ourselves, and see what we can see.”
“Without telling anyone?” Akiva frowned. “That’s not wise. Remember what happened the last time we did it.”
Ysabel did not want to, but it was hard to stop, with Akiva showing her wherever her power looked.
“I think,” he said, “that we should go to your father now, and tell him. He doesn’t know. My lord king didn’t take it from my mind, or anything else but what he needed to heal me. He’s scrupulous, is my lord.”
“So is my father,” Ysabel said. “He won’t even read humans if he can help it. Morgiana says he’s foolish. But she doesn’t steal thoughts, either, except when she’s being shouted at.”
Akiva stood up again. “Maybe we should tell the king first. He’s less likely than either of them to get angry and kill someone, and then be sorry after.”
“No,” said Ysabel. “It’s my father’s grief, and my father’s right. He should know first. He’s wiser than people give him credit for. He won’t do anything hasty.”
Akiva was not at all sure of that, but he granted that she was more likely to know what her father would do. He let her lead him to the fire of power that was Aidan.
o0o
Guillermo Seco was not by nature a nervous man. It was his boast and his pride that, whatever befell him, he greeted it with a calm face and a steady mind.
His son, unfortunately, took after his mother. A silly, flighty woman, much given to excesses of religion. Seco had taken her for her dowry, and for her family that was one of the greatest in Genoa; once she gave him an heir, he was more than pleased to leave her to her moaning and praying.
Marco had her looks at least: her fine fair skin and her big brown eyes. It was Seco’s misfortune that the boy also had her propensity for foolishness. She would have seen him happily into an abbey in Genoa, and most of her dowry with him, had not Seco sailed headlong from Outremer to pluck both boy and dower free. Small thanks he had had for it, either. Marco sulked and pined and affected to loathe the slightest whisper of commerce. Seco had dared to cherish a hope or two in this conspiracy which they had entered, taking the boy with him against the others’ wishes, but now it was evident that the attraction had been not hope of riches and revenge, but calf-eyed infatuation with the monk who had forged the pope’s letter.
Now this Brother Thomas was in Tyre, attending the pope’s legate, and there was no reasoning with Marco. “Why can’t I see him?” the boy whined. “I don’t have to stay long. I can just talk to him for a little. Shouldn’t he know that the witch-king is here, and his brother and the Assassin, too?”
“I doubt very much,” Seco said tightly, “that he can be ignorant of it.”
“Then maybe he’ll know what to do.” Marco was shaking, God knew what for, whether eagerness or sulkiness or plain fear. “I tell you, Father, there are more witches here than we’ve been told of. That Jew’s whelp in the caravan—”
Seco had heard all he ever wanted to hear of the Jew’s whelp in the caravan. Incessantly. For months. Ever since the caravan left Jerusalem. He had long since given up trying to reason with Marco. He cuffed the boy to stop his babble, ignored the boy’s black glare, and said, “What your monk will do, I hardly care. I care more that the witches have come, and they will be in no forgiving mood. If they discover what part we had in their discomfiture...”
“They know,” said Marco. “The whelp knows. I tell you, Father. He said so. He haunts me. Night after night I dream of him. I pray, I hang myself with holy relics, and still he comes. Still he besets me. He knows, Father.”
Seco considered another blow, but something in his son’s face made him pause. “How can he know? Your monk said that we would be protected.”
“Yes, but were we? The witches were gone to the war. Did you keep on defending yourself as you were instructed? I tried, but it was, is, so hard. It makes my head ache.”
“Well, then,” snapped Seco. “If he knows, why hasn’t he done something about it?”
“Maybe he can’t,” Marco said. “He’s a young one, after all. Maybe he needed to wait until the others came to help him.” He fretted from one end to the other of the room, wringing his hands like a woman, plucking at his beardless chin. “They’ll hunt us, I know it. They’ll find us. They’ll eat our souls.”
Seco despised him. But months of his nonsense had not lessened it; and Seco himself was uneasy. Not because of Marco, he told himself. Marco was an idiot. Still, even an idiot need not be wholly blind. Seco had seen the witch-king and his brother in the city, and the Assassin riding beside them, fair and strange and terrible amid their human slaves. There was no mercy in those bloodless faces; no compassion in those eyes.
He was not unduly concerned for his soul. His skin, however, and his livelihood: those, he feared for.
Marco did not need to know that Seco had spoken with the monks, Thomas the sour-faced saint and portly Richard both. They had refused to tell him where the pope’s letter was. No more had they consented to do as he proposed—he who was, after all, the fount of this conspiracy. When the Constable comes, they had said, we will consider it. As if there could be anything to consider beyond what Guillermo Seco intended: what they had all agreed to do, long ago in Acre, once the pope’s letter was taken and forged and read. Messire Amalric was coming, they said, as perfectly immovable as ever Mother Church could be. He had set in train the gathering of the king’s ransom; now he would come to Tyre, then and only then would they do aught but sit and wait.
Messire Amalric had come. Yesterday, in the morning. He had sent no word to Guillermo Seco; no reply to the message which Seco
sent. Seco could argue that there had been no time. He knew that there had been no desire. He who had conceived this plot was closed off from it by those who had come after.
Marco dithered about the cell of a room that was all even a rich man could find in thronged and costly Tyre. Thomas had succeeded well with him: he was in abject terror of the witches and their spells. Now and again he crossed himself, muttering nonsense.
He stopped, quivering. “Father, let me go to Brother Thomas. Let me warn him at the very least. He’s in terrible danger. If they find him—if they catch him—”
Seco would be delighted to feed him to them. Sneering, sanctimonious fool. What he wanted was no secret. He would thwart the witches for the pure joy of it. And if they found and seized him, he would play the holy martyr for all that he was worth.
What Seco wanted was simple. The others did not intend to let him take it.
He was not their menial. Let them thwart him as they would. He would do it in spite of them.
He rose, breathed deep. His heart was thudding under his breastbone. He was not a young man, nor a brave one. But for his skin’s sake, and for his son, who though a fool and a witling was still his only heir, he could do what he must do.
33.
Seco left his son at home, telling him that he had an errand, which was true enough. The boy, commanded to remain where he was, sulked but did not argue. It was not the first time Seco had left him so. He prayed, the servants said, and read from his book of saints, and played the perfect little priest.
Let him do it now to his heart’s content. Seco intended to win him free from this war-mad country, and a fine weight of gold with him, to recover what they had lost in the debacle of Acre. Outside of Brother Thomas’ power, away from the reeking holiness of Outremer, perhaps at last Marco would learn that he was never born to be a priest; he was a merchant’s son of a long line of merchants, and his sons would be merchants after him.
Yes, Seco thought as he jostled through the streets. Sons for his son. They would go back to Genoa; they would survey the prospects; they would find Marco a wife. Someone pretty enough to fire his blood, practical enough to look after his house, and fecund enough to present him with a family. And rich. That, of course.
He shook his head at himself. Marco’s mooncalf moods were infecting him; he was building castles before he had the land to set them on.
But this was what he had intended from the first. Or part of it. The others thwarted him; or dreamed that they did. Cowards, all of them. They would sit with folded hands and do nothing while all hope of profit passed them by.
He was made of sterner stuff. Not that he lacked for fear. Dear Mother Mary, not at all. His hands were damp with it; his heart lurched and stumbled. Now and again his feet dragged to a halt, his body begged to turn, his mind screamed at him to give it up. But he pressed on. For Marco, he was doing it. For silly, saintly, ingrate Marco, he endangered his immortal soul and his precious skin.
The caravanserai loomed before him. Its doors multiplied to infinity.
He stopped. “Spells,” he said. His voice was a rasp, but it cleared his head. The walls shrank to human dimensions. The doors dwindled to a mere half-dozen along the colonnade. He had ascertained long since which was the proper one. The farthest, heading toward the harbor, no different from any of the others, except that its porter was a turbaned Saracen.
The creature showed no sign of speaking Frankish, but he understood it well enough. Ugly little beast, with his yellow face and his narrow slanting eyes. “Tell Prince Aidan,” Seco said, “that Guillermo Seco di Genoa begs the favor of an audience.”
The infidel looked Seco up and down with purest insolence. He took his time about it. Seco endured it. He had met this beast before, or another like him.
At length the Saracen deigned to respond. He opened his mouth and bawled what surely was a name. In time another appeared, who might have been his fetch: ugly little yellow-faced devil, this one wearing a broad, gap-toothed grin. The porter gabbled at him in what was not Arabic. The newcomer gabbled back. Seco discerned his name amid the nonsense.
The second imp swallowed a last, guttural word and sauntered inward. The first faced Seco. “You wait,” he said in dreadful langue d’oeil.
Seco waited. The porter leaned against the doorframe, arms folded across his chest. He did not invite the guest within, or even deign to notice him, now that duty was done.
Seco schooled himself to patience. It was cool in the shade of the colonnade, and he was out of the jostle of the street. He would have welcomed a cup of something cold, to soothe his thirst.
It was an hour, perhaps, before Seco was again acknowledged. People passed at intervals: another Saracen, this one with a Norman face, haughty as his own master; a pair of giggling women; a boy as tall as Seco, whom Seco recognized as the heir to Mortmain. None of them spared Seco more than a glance.
It was almost exactly an hour, Seco reckoned. Just past the stroke of terce, with even the shade beginning to take on the sun’s heat. The one who came was not the imp who had gone; it was a more proper servant, a Frank in a brown smock who said only, “His highness will see you now.”
o0o
His highness waited in what, in a castle, would have been the solar: a room more large than small, with tall windows and a good carpet or two, and chairs, and a table. There was no light but what came through the windows; after the dimness of stairs and passages, enough. Seco saw the figure in the tall chair like a throne, settled at its ease, lazy as a great cat, and as subtly dangerous.
There was fear, great waves of it, but Seco rose above it. He bowed to the rank if not to the man, and straightened, searching the white hawk-face. “Prince Aidan,” he said. It was not a question unless the prince chose to make it so.
He did not. He gestured slightly toward a chair. A servant offered wine.
Seco took both. If there was poison in the wine, then so be it. He doubted that there was. Prince Aidan was never one to poison a cup, when his tongue was enough.
It was excellent wine. He said so.
The prince smiled. It did not touch his eyes.
He was not going to make it easy. But then, he never did. Seco remembered. Memory roused hate, sudden and blinding. Seco quelled it with all the strength he had. This creature had made a mockery of him, and more than once. Now Seco had the means to master him.
The priest’s nonsense babbled through Seco’s mind. He hardly needed to think of it; it woke of itself and raised its wall. Foolish, perhaps, but perhaps not. This was not a man. He knew that, drinking wine from the fine silver cup, watching the prince out of the corner of his eye. Not a line on that face, not a thread of grey in that hair, and beauty to touch even a merchant’s hardened heart. The long fan-hands flexed on the arms of the chair, warning enough as he rose and began to prowl: proving beyond a doubt that he was Aidan and not the shadow-quiet king.
Seco willed himself to sit still, not to follow the prince with anxious eyes. Even when he passed behind, soundless on the carpeted floor, a bare breath of air and presence. He circled the room once, twice, thrice, sunwise.
A spell. Seco felt the panic rising. Soon, all too soon, he would have no power to quell it.
He spoke more quickly than he might have chosen, with none of the indirection which he had intended. “I have a bargain to offer you.”
Seco’s voice was steady, if harsh. It stilled the panther-strides; it brought the prince round to face him.
“A bargain,” Seco repeated, “which may work to both our advantage.”
Aidan stood still. His head was up, haughty, mettlesome as a stallion’s. He looked as if he would have liked to sneer, but would not so condescend. “People are always offering me bargains,” he said.
“Not such a bargain as this.” Seco drank from the cup, struggling not to gulp it down. “I hear that your lady is with you here. That she ransomed you from the Saracen sultan; that you have sworn oaths which you might perhaps have preferred to fo
rgo. Would you take her to wife still, if you could?”
“She is my wife in all but the name,” Aidan said.
“The name,” said Seco, “is all that you strove for. What price would you pay to gain it?”
The prince tensed subtly, like a panther braced to spring. Seco, weaponless, with only the monk’s wall of nonsense to protect him, sat straight and firmed his wavering spirit.
“I never bargain with thieves,” said Aidan.
Seco made himself smile. “Of course, your highness. But suppose that I offered you the wherewithal to gain what you seek. Would you refuse it for that you despise me?”
“What do you want?”
Seco sat back. He had him. Witch, prince, deadly beast this might be, but Seco had what the creature wanted; and now he knew it. “What do I want? Very little, your highness. Assurance of protection for myself and my son. Passage to the Italies, and the wherewithal to keep ourselves in comfort both on the voyage and thereafter. Your sworn word that we will be safe from reprisal, whether yours or any other’s.”
“And in return?”
“Knowledge that you need.”
“The pope’s letter?”
“The means to find it.”
Aidan was absolutely still. That, in one so restless, was startling; disturbing. “Why should I pay your price? My brother sails within the fortnight. It is a matter of little moment to disembark in the Italies, journey to Rome, obtain a new dispensation.”
“But, your highness, you swore to wed your lady in Outremer before the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Will you break that famous oath?”
“The Holy Father can dissolve it for me.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps he may refuse. What then? Will you surrender this chance, which is certain, for one which may turn against you?”
The prince laughed, light and mocking. “What, you’re no turncoat, either? Fool that I am, to think I knew one when I saw one.” He drew closer, standing over Seco. His presence was almost more than Seco could bear: a heat like fire, a flare of white terror. “You never loved me, Messer Seco. I saw through you long ago; I ordered you out of my sight. You had gall to come back. I admire gall. I chose to receive you, to see what could have brought you here, knowing what I am and what I swore to do when next you inflicted yourself upon me. Are you truly so eager to be stripped and shorn and whipped out of my gates?”
