Blaze of Silver

by K. M. Grant

  He pushed toward her but was held back. “Look.” Richard gestured with his head. “Look.” From out of the crowd, Ellie now emerged. Will shook violently and strained even more. No, not Ellie, too! Why hadn’t she stayed in Speyer? However, she was not looking at him. She looked at only Amal and she held out something toward him, something so small and tattered, something that was barely a book, more a collection of dog-eared pages, but something that Ellie raised as if it were the Bible. Queen Eleanor stood up. The crowd did not know how to react. Not so Amal. When he saw what it was that Ellie held, the confident raven lost even the little stuffing he had left. “Oh,” he cried before he could help himself, “Oh,” and his arms could not be stopped from holding themselves out in supplication. “My book, my precious book! Oh, you wicked Christian! You stole it! You stole it!” There was no German now, nor even French. Amal felt as if his tinder-dry innards had been set alight. For the first time since he had entered the Old Man’s service, he spoke without thinking. The image of Ellie and Marissa tracing the names of his children with their fingers, defiling them, was too much for him. He wavered like a thin flame and words sparked out of him, short, sharp, terrible words whose sting Ellie felt even though she had no idea what they meant. She trembled as they scattered about her like shards of glass, but she had to continue. People had to know. There could be no doubt. She had thought that this revenge on Amal would be sweet. Yet the shredding of an old man in the public gaze made her feel sullied.

  Nevertheless, she kept her nerve. This proof of Will’s innocence could not be wasted for it was the only one they had. Slowly, she held the book to her eyes and read aloud the Old Man’s inscription and name that she had painstakingly worked out with the skills Amal himself had taught her at Hartslove. Then she held up the book again to show the painted dagger, the unmistakable mark of the Assassins, and pointed. “This is the guilty man who caused the ransom to be stolen,” she said. “This is the man responsible.” Amal, his hands still outstretched, denied nothing.

  At once the emperor did the only thing he could do, which was to feign horror and stand bolt upright. He addressed Amal directly and had to watch as the old spy teetered as if on the lip of an abyss, before, as final proof of his traitorous allegiance, he fell to his bony knees and with thin, painful cries begged Allah to avenge him.

  Marissa and Ellie stood together now, holding on to each other. The sight of Amal, completely undone, was horrible. Then Will called out and opened his arms. For one, wild moment, Marissa thought they had opened for her and prepared to fly into them. But only for a moment. For though she knew she was included in Will’s embrace, she knew immediately, from his expression, that that special place, the place right at the core of his heart, was still reserved for Ellie and only Ellie. Of course Marissa had known it would be so but it was only now that she found the courage finally to acknowledge herself beaten. Yet she could never be beaten entirely. Neither Will nor Ellie could ever forget her. After all, it was not Ellie’s love that had saved Will. She, Marissa, had done that. Every moment they were together was thanks to her. She stood back to let Ellie through.

  But Ellie never reached Will’s arms. As soldiers bent down to hurry Amal away, he sprang out of their clutches and seized her, pulling her close to his ribs with arms like steel wire. In his right hand flashed Kamil’s triangular blade, bright and sharp, and he held it directly across her throat. “Get back, get back,” he warned. Suddenly, he was terribly tired, but he would not let go.

  “Do as he says,” cried Will, pushing Marissa behind him. This could not be. It was surely all finished. Wasn’t God satisfied yet with all that they had suffered? He lunged but Amal and Ellie were locked together like dancers in some macabre entertainment. It was impossible to separate them. Amal edged his way to the steps of the dais on which the emperor’s throne was placed, and as he and Ellie climbed up, the emperor scuttled down to Richard and his mother.

  Once at the top, Amal turned Ellie around to face him and they stood, for all the world, like a couple about to exchange vows, with Ellie’s back against a pole holding the imperial canopy. With the tip of the blade pointing toward her heart, Amal relaxed his grip on her arms and with his left hand carefully and very politely took back his book. He quaked from top to toe, so desperate was he to feel once again those familiar pages, to see his children’s names and read the declarations of affection for the father who still loved them. Although he had recited the memorized sentiments to himself every night since the book was lost, the whispered words could not be compared with seeing those childish letters and touching the paper on which, all those years ago, his children had leaned. The unevenness of the characters, the smudged ink, and the way his daughter had tried to draw a kiss sweetened the gall in his heart. His eyes looked at Ellie but he saw somebody quite different and he smiled.

  Ellie saw his smile and guessed what it meant. “You have children,” she said, her anger masking her fear, “yet you tortured Kamil, who might have been like a son to you, until he died in a ditch.”

  His eyelashes were like cobwebs over the mouths of two caves. However, with a jab of the blade, Amal reminded her that for all her youthful vitality, he still had the power to consign her to dust before him. “Better to die alone in a ditch than die with the Old Man as a companion,” he whispered, and his voice was the rustle of an antique page.

  “Kamil should not have died at all.” Ellie’s voice was deadly quiet.

  “Death,” Amal said, almost musing, “is not the worst thing.” He gripped the knife with renewed intensity although it seemed an effort. “Death is just the cracking open of a husk. We should not dread it. It will all be over in an instant.” He gathered himself together, and she turned so that she should, with her last glance, see Will. She wanted him to know that she was not afraid, even though she was. She also wanted him to know, for always, that she did love him, not with the awkward love she had had for Gavin, nor with the admiring love she had had for Kamil, but with a love so important she could not live without it, yet so unobtrusive that she scarcely felt it. And the best thing about this love was that she knew that Will understood it. He would mourn her, yes, but he would never doubt her and, of course, there was someone else to ease his loneliness. Ellie tried to feel glad that Marissa was there, but though Marissa had proven so stalwart at the end, it was still hard to think of her as Mistress of Hartslove. Ellie decided to stop trying.

  She faced Amal directly now for she did not want Will to see her face at the moment when the knife bit in and she could no longer control herself. Only Amal would see her final agony. She hoped it would haunt him. “I shall feel something of what Kamil felt,” she told herself. “My death will somehow make his less dreadful.” She held her hands tightly together so that they would not let her down by trying to push Amal away.

  He seemed to be waiting for her signal and she gave it with a queenly incline of her head. His lips disappeared. His knuckles whitened. Then suddenly his smile was a rictus and it was he who was gasping, not she. Ellie frowned. She felt no pain, but perhaps you didn’t when you were dying. Yet there was blood everywhere. It took her a minute to realize that though it ran down her dress, the blood was not hers.

  Amal rocked back. “See,” he murmured, “I am glad.” Indeed, he was jubilant as he showed her Kamil’s blade, buried not between Ellie’s ribs but between his own. The thin skin had split like old silk. “All my life I have obeyed another,” he breathed. “It is good to choose the moment of death for myself.” He staggered and Ellie found herself holding him up. “You did not let Kamil choose his moment of death,” she cried out. “You chose it for him.”

  She had to bend close to hear him for he had but a whisper of breath left in his lungs. “Ah, Miss Eleanor,” he said, “but I didn’t.”

  “What do you mean?” Ellie seized him harder. “What do you mean?”

  But though she tried to shake more words out of him, he could say nothing as froth bubbled from his lips, his tongue lolled
, and death rattled in his throat. Revolted, Ellie thrust him onto the emperor’s throne. His body was too small to fill the seat and he lay, sprawled, no longer a branch or even a twig, just the ghost of a splinter. The deep red of his blood looked too vibrantly colored to have once flowed through the veins of such a man. Under the throne, the pages of his book flapped as the binding broke.

  A great moan arose from the crowd as Ellie stumbled backward down the steps, her eyes on the knife as if it might suddenly leap at her again. The moaning grew in intensity when the people realized what had happened. A corpse on the emperor’s throne! It was an omen of the worst possible kind. Queen Eleanor put her hands over her eyes.

  Will was with Ellie in a trice. She clung to him. “Was what we did enough?” she asked him. “Was it enough?”

  It was Richard who answered, for he knew just what she meant. “Yes,” he said. “You have proved Will’s innocence. He is safe.” He walked swiftly to retrieve the parchment leaves before they drifted away in the draft, and holding them high, he turned to the crowd. He could not look at Will, for they both knew only too well that had Marissa and Ellie not intervened, it would have been Will’s blood now slowly oozing down the flagstones. The king felt a black smudge stain his soul.

  Guards now had to hold the crowd back though what the people wanted to do was unclear. The emperor held his ground proclaiming that he knew nothing at all about Amal except that he had seemed a good servant to the empire. Had he known the man’s real background and intentions he would have had him flayed alive. The emperor had no idea if anybody believed him and Richard let him sweat before going to stand beside him in a gesture of solidarity. This was hardly the moment to claim moral high ground since the actions of his captor had been no more contemptible than his own. And anyway, Richard calculated, to shame the emperor publicly would not be shrewd. It was shaming enough to have a dead Saracen dressed in imperial colors leaking blood onto the golden cushions. If Richard helped the emperor at his moment of need, the man would be grateful and gratitude could be useful. With Richard towering above him, the emperor had little choice but to concur.

  And so it was that Richard the Lionheart, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and King of England, finally threw off his role as a supplicant prisoner and reassumed all his God-given authority. Standing at the top of the steps, he commanded silence. “I asked you some moments ago if a treacherous man should be allowed to live,” he declared. “The man lying dead on the emperor’s throne was such a man. His actions shame himself and his master. Yet we cannot be surprised since his master was the Old Man of the Mountain. Let this miserable corpse remind us all of the importance of loyalty and honor.” He paused, then gestured toward Will. “But this man, on the other hand, is entirely innocent. He returns home with me with his integrity intact and any man who utters a word to disparage William de Granville, Earl of Ravensgarth, will not live long.” He stopped abruptly, threw Amal’s book into the dirt, and dared anybody to gainsay him.

  For a moment, the mood of the crowd threatened to turn nasty. Who did Richard think he was, to issue threats? Richard, Will, and Hal formed a barrier around Ellie and Marissa, their hackles raised like dogs. Then, somebody began to cheer, a small sound at first, but it proved contagious. A lynching or an unofficial crowning, what did it matter? Both were good spectacles and it was not as if there was no corpse over which to gloat, even if a man dying by his own hand was not as satisfactory as a man dying by theirs. The small sound grew larger until Richard, sweeping up his mother beside him, was borne out of the hall in a tide of goodwill.

  Will, Ellie, Marissa, and Hal were left behind as the hall emptied, Ellie full of Amal’s dying words. She wanted to ask Will what they might mean but was afraid to hear the answer. Instead, she began carefully to gather together the fragments of the old spy’s book.

  “Are you going to take those back to Hartslove?” It was Marissa who spoke first.

  Ellie shook her head. “We should burn them,” she said. It was good to know something with certainty. “Amal’s whole life is in these pages. It doesn’t seem right that he should be dead and they should survive. They have served their purpose.” She waited for objections and when none came, carried a candle over to the imperial throne. Amal’s body was virtually a skeleton already and although Ellie did not want to touch it, she steeled herself to make it neat before she burned the book and scattered the ashes over it. When she had finished, Will pulled down a curtain and threw it over the remains. Nobody said a prayer. They did not know what prayer to say.

  Now Ellie could wait no longer. “Will,” she began, but was interrupted by a familiar piping voice. Elric burst through and the air was suddenly light again, even though the boy was clearly distressed. Throwing himself down in front of Will, he cried, “Was it my fault? When that man insulted Mistress Ellie, should I have done nothing? Should I, sir? I just couldn’t bear it. But then I thought you’d died because of me until we found the green necklace and then we went to Marissa and she said I was wicked and not fit to be a knight but Hal says the fighting wasn’t because of me and then I didn’t think it was but then I did and—”

  “Hush, hush, Elric.” Will picked him up and held him close and the boy, so keen to be thought a man, for once didn’t object. Will noticed at once the scars on Elric’s arms from where he had tried to protect Hal during the massacre and there was now a furrow between the boy’s eyes that mirrored a similar furrow between Will’s. “The fighting was not your fault, Elric,” he said gently, feeling very old, “but you must learn to be less impetuous. It’s a hard lesson and even a sad one because it means you sometimes have to seem to accept things that are utterly wrong. But sometimes that’s the right thing to do. You should watch Hal. He thinks before he acts. It’s a good rule.”

  “But is it really?” Elric just couldn’t give up. “I know that’s Hal’s way but everybody says Marissa has just been impetuous and she saved you.”

  Will let him go and shook his head. “Honestly, Elric, have you an answer for everything?”

  Elric was momentarily very sober. “Not everything, sir.” Then he was back to his usual irrepressible self. “Do you know, when I was coming out of Hosanna’s stable, King Richard came past and swung me in the air. Swung in the air by the king! My mother will never believe it!” Elric seemed to have quite forgotten the coldness with which Richard had greeted him and Hal after they had ridden so hard to find the king. Better to forget. Now was not the time to remember.

  “Hosanna!” exclaimed Will and Hal together. “You should not have left him.” They hurried out of the hall with Ellie and Marissa right behind them.

  “Not at all,” retorted Elric, skipping alongside, “a nice nun is with him and Sacramenta’s there, too. She looks like a horse with four wooden legs! But the nun explained that the things they have wrapped around are to help with the swelling. She seems to know almost as much as you, Hal,” he finished naughtily. “I’ve learned a lot.”

  Hal gave him a mock swipe across the head. “Though not enough,” he observed.

  Ellie had another concern. “And Shihab?” she asked. It would be good to see her. “She is here, isn’t she?”

  “Oh,” said Elric airily, “don’t worry, she’s here and as bad-tempered as ever. She glares at everyone with that blue eye. I’m quite friendly with her groom. He’s been teaching me some German. I like him. He asked what on earth we had all been doing and whether all Englishmen ride their horses into the ground.” Elric went pink at the memory. “I put him right. I showed him Dargent. Hal has been letting me look after him almost by myself.”

  Will hurried on, rejoicing in Elric’s babble, and when he saw Hosanna, still weak and hollowed out but standing up, his star shining once again, and heard him whicker a greeting, he ran ahead and almost fell over Petronilla kneeling in the straw. Wordlessly he circled Hosanna’s head in his arms. The horse sighed as Will crooned his name and hid his eyes in the flowing red forelock.

  Ellie watched for a m
oment. It was a moment just for Will and his great horse. Her moment with Hosanna would come later. She moved on to the next stall, where Dargent was happily chewing strands of hay. Next to him was Sacramenta, who gazed out with wise eyes, and in the stall at the end was Shihab. The silver mare was thin as a wraith and the metallic sheen of her coat had dulled to nothing. Like Will, Amal had not spared his horse. She looked at Ellie and accepted her caress but with reserve, as if she was bestowing a favor. It was impossible not to smile at the mare’s unconquerable conceit. She was standing in buckets of ice to reduce the swelling in her legs but still she held herself like a princess.

  “You are very lucky, young man,” Petronilla observed to Will, stirring the poultice mixture she was creating. “This horse carried you long after most would have given up.”

  “Yes,” said Will. “Long after.” He let go of Hosanna’s head and began to run his fingers over his flanks, searching, checking, and caressing all at once, finding tender spots and scrapes just healing. Hosanna sighed again and, when Will had finished, licked his master’s palms in search of the salty taste he loved. Petronilla deftly applied bandages. “This should draw out any poison from the cuts and then he needs a river,” she said. “Cold water works wonders. I’m afraid he’ll not be carrying you into battle again.” She wiped her hands and looked at Hosanna appreciatively. “Perhaps you don’t want the bother of taking him home?” she asked. “I could use a horse like him. Actually, I’m surprised you ever had him as a warhorse. He’s really much too small.”