Black Lion's Bride

by Lara Adrian

  Two Arab men stood huddled together in hushed conversation outside the tavern; they ceased talking and looked up as Zahirah approached. She must have been a sight, her hair falling out of its braid, her face unveiled and streaked with tears, the wide cuffs of her shalwar soiled and muddied from the filth of the streets. Even bedraggled and in despair, she knew she did not look as though she belonged there. The two men exchanged a glance that seemed to acknowledge that fact, then one of them smiled and Zahirah instantly mourned the loss of her dagger at the palace.

  “Hey, pretty, pretty,” said the younger of the two men, the one whose leering grin was giving her gooseflesh.

  This close, they smelled of opium and danger, but they were all that stood between Zahirah and the help she might receive on the other side of the tavern door. She could hear the din of loud talking and laughter on the other side of that door, and she was determined to get past these two one way or another.

  “I'm looking for someone,” she said. She took a purposeful step forward and reached for the latch. She was stopped, as she fully expected. The smiling man blocked her reach with his body; his friend moved in from the side to knit her in. Zahirah backed away, just a pace, but enough for them to scent her apprehension.

  “Where you going, pretty? We've got all you need right here. Come talk with us. We'll make you happy.”

  “I'm supposed to meet someone,” she replied, deliberately hedging. “My father. He said to meet him at this tavern. He's probably already waiting for me inside.”

  “Down here?” challenged the first man. “At this hour?”

  The one on her left chuckled. “If you think he's here, then call him out. Maybe we'll let him play, too.”

  Zahirah stood there, factoring out her options, while the two thugs chortled and made jests about what they would do with her whole family. The smiling man began to laugh, his stupid, drug-induced guffaws ringing out in the deserted street. He reached out to grab her arm, all confidence and wolfish amusement. Zahirah seized her chance and struck out, just as she had been trained to do in her many drills at Masyaf.

  She grasped his arm as he took hers and yanked him forward, putting him off balance. Her knee came up between his legs, swift and unerring. He howled, but only for a moment. Zahirah gripped his head in the crook of her elbow, and, using her other arm as a lever, wrenched his neck. He dropped in a heap at her feet, dead as dust. When she looked up to deal with his companion, she saw nothing but empty air, the man's fast-retreating feet beating a frantic tattoo down the far end of the alley.

  Suddenly, a movement sounded behind her; a hand reached out of the dark. She whirled, ready to meet whatever trouble greeted her next with like malice.

  “Mistress, do not be afraid.” It was the vagabond she had stepped over to get to the tavern. He came into the lamplight and she saw that he was no mere drunkard. He was one of her clan, a fida'i agent posted in disguise to watch the streets. That he was here meant her father could not be far.

  “Take me to him,” she ordered her kinsman. “I must see my father at once.”

  She was brought along another jointed alley, ripe with the stench of offal. There was no light here, only the occasional slice of moonlight and the shadowy form of her fida'i guide to lead her through the slippery darkness beneath her sandals. She covered her nose in her sleeve, and used her other hand to steady her in the narrow walkway that seemed too vile for human habitation. Zahirah knew at once why her father chose this place to headquarter him while in Ascalon; no one but the most determined visitor would venture this far into the bowels of the lower city. Sinan would be as unmolested here as a beetle in a mountain of dung.

  Ahead of her some half a dozen paces, crouching low and unassuming at the end of the alley, was a hovel. Like a crone hunched over her kettle, the squat little building rose up from the street in a lump of sandstone and fallen away tile. Zahirah's kinsman paused at the rickety board that served as its door. “Hurry, mistress,” he whispered, rushing her forward as he held the portal open.

  She ducked beneath his arm and went into the pit of darkness beyond him. No lamps, no sound, just black silence. She froze where she stood, wondering if she were being led into another trap, but then the fida'i was at her side saying, “This way, mistress. You will see better in a moment.”

  Warily, not certain she had any better alternative, she followed the rustle of his robes deeper into the abyss. There was a soft creak of leather hinges from in front of her, then he turned and took her hand. “We are going down now, mistress. Stay close, and mind your step.”

  They descended some countless steps, down and down, until the air grew chilly and damp. From somewhere distant came the low howl of the wind. It sounded like a storm was blowing in. Slowly, Zahirah's eyes began to adjust to the lack of light. She saw shapes take form: the arc of crudely hollowed-out stone walls surrounding her, the flat slope of the stairwell below her feet, the slim outline of her guide's shoulders, shrouded in his ragged disguise. And up ahead, what seemed yet a day away, glowed the faintest sliver of light.

  A torch burned somewhere before them, the orange flame a wagging beacon. They followed that scant light, and as they drew nearer, above the crashing din outside, Zahirah began to hear voices. Low, Arabic rumbles carried to her ears. She heard her father among them, and weathered a shiver of dread for the news she brought him now.

  The stairwell ended abruptly, leveling off to smooth, flat ground. Zahirah's sandals sifted with each step she took, and she realized she was walking in sand. And as she followed her kinsman toward the end of the track, she understood now that the roar of the wind she heard was rather the roar of waves. They were very near the ocean. The deeper they walked into the cave, the heavier the smell of brine; it permeated the air and clung in her nostrils. She sneezed, and the murmur of conversation up ahead came to a quick end. The sudden silence was broken by the sound of weapons hissing out of their scabbards.

  “Who goes?” asked a menacing Arabic voice.

  “Jalil,” answered Zahirah's companion. “I bring the master's daughter.”

  He walked her around a wide bend in the rock, and there before them was Sinan, his trio of bodyguards, and several other men who stood with weapons ready. Fida'i, all of them, and a nervous-looking Muslim man who was the Assassin King's likely patron in the city.

  Sinan stared at Zahirah, but he spoke to Jalil. “Your orders were to stand guard and make certain no one found us here. Do you recall these orders?”

  Beside her, the fida'i shifted nervously on his feet. “Yes, master.”

  Zahirah felt a chill snake up her spine at the cold look her father turned on his man. At Sinan's back, two of the other assassin guards stepped forward to flank their leader. One of them drew a dagger.

  “B-but master,” Jalil stammered. He brought his hands up as if to hold off the advance of Sinan's guards. “She's your daughter. She was in danger. I thought--”

  “Yes,” hissed Sinan with lethal calm. “And that was your mistake.” He slid a glance to his men and the two fida'i moved on Jalil.

  “Father,” Zahirah cried. “Father, no!”

  Too late, and to no avail. With an efficiency she herself had trained for years to perfect, the assassins leapt on Jalil and slit his throat. His blood spilled into the sand where he fell, staining it black as pitch under the dim glow of the lantern.

  “Toss him over the ledge,” Sinan commanded. “Let the river take this rubbish out to the sea.”

  The guards hefted Jalil's slack body up and carried him off a short distance. In the dark it seemed they walked toward a sheer wall of stone, but then Zahirah realized there was a gap of space before it. The wall rose up from behind a cliff of jutting rock. Sinan's men paused at this ridge and swung Jalil out. He hit the water that rushed some distance below, the smack of his weight swallowed up in an instant by the roar of the ocean current.

  Zahirah blinked back her outrage and stared at the monster who was her father. She was horrified at w
hat she saw, but she was also afraid. He turned a glare on her and she inched away from him, a retreat that brought a knowing glint of amusement to his coal-black gaze. “Tell me you are here to bring me good news, Zahirah. Is the Frank dead?”

  She could not reply; her tongue seemed cleaved to the roof of her mouth. Sinan's answering chuckle was thin and malevolent. “I should have known you would not have the heart,” he accused in a brittle whisper. “You are weak. You are a woman. You disgust me.”

  There was a time that Zahirah would have bristled at his condescension, when she would have risen to her own defense, when she would have explained how she had tried to carry out her mission, and insisted that she was not weak or deserving of his disdain. But it bothered her more that she could share the same blood, that she could be in any way like him. It bothered her how she had for so long wanted this cruel man's approval, and would have done anything to earn it.

  It bothered her that she could fear him so much that she would rather betray the man she loved--risk losing him forever--than muster the courage to face Sinan's wrath. That was weakness. That was disgust.

  “Father,” she said, the word tasting bitter on her tongue. “I have never asked you for anything, but tonight I have come here to beg of you a favor. I have come to ask you for my freedom from the clan, and for your vow that you will not harm Sebastian.”

  Sinan's drawn face showed no reaction to her plea. His eyes stared flatly, his mouth a thin line within the graying wires of his beard. “You had both those things in your grasp, if you'd only done what you were sent to do. You failed, Zahirah. You knew what was at stake; you understood the price you would pay. And the price your Frankish lover would pay.”

  “I don't care what you do to me,” she said, dropping to her knees before him. “Father, I am begging you. Please, do not make good your threat against Sebastian.”

  “I don't make idle threats, Zahirah. You should know that.”

  “You will kill him, then?” she choked, sick with desperation. “Can I say nothing to persuade you? Is there nothing I can do to change your mind?”

  She could see no mercy in his unblinking stare, no trace of human emotion in the darkness looking down at her. His voice was as hollow as the abyss surrounding them. “You dishonor yourself in coming here to beg before me now. Moreover, you dishonor me.” He turned to walk away from her.

  “No, Father,” Zahirah said, forcing herself not to quake. “You are the one lacking honor.”

  A buzz of tension swelled around her as the other fida'i murmured amongst themselves, shocked, no doubt, to hear their vaunted leader challenged so recklessly. Sinan paused, then pivoted back to face her charge. He bore murder in his eyes, but Zahirah stared back with equal ferocity.

  “You rule through blood and terror,” she accused. “You think that because you are feared--because with a snap of your fingers you can order another man's death--that you are respected. Well, you're not. Fear and respect are not the same.” She shook her head, feeling some of her own fear dissipate under the blaze of her rising anger. “The obedience you demand is nothing close to devotion or honor. You're no leader. You're a monster.”

  The force of Sinan's ensuing blow knocked her down into the sand. She touched her bruised and ringing jaw, momentarily stunned. “You think you know what I am, girl? Let me tell you what you are.” He reached down and grabbed her chin, his brown bony fingers digging into her cheeks as he yanked her face back toward his. “You are nothing--my own creation. I made you out of dust and tears and the bleating cries of your own people as I trampled them under my heel.” Zahirah recoiled from the hateful words, her heart lurching as the horror of what he was telling her sank into her brain. “You beg now the way your mother begged me all those years ago. The way your father begged me to spare his wife and child. You're all weak, all worthless. I should have killed you along with the rest of them.”

  “No,” Zahirah moaned, squeezing her eyes closed as if to blot out the nightmare that began to repeat as memory triggered by the brutality of Sinan's confession.

  She saw it all now, the English pilgrim caravan lumbering across the desert toward Jerusalem, a journey she could not fully understand at just two years old. But she could understand the fear that descended on her family when a band of Saracen raiders spilled down from the crest of a hill to harry the group of Christian travelers. She understood the danger, the panic that set her mother screaming when her father was beaten and dragged away from the van. They had been crying, all of them, the adults pleading for mercy, the children shrieking.

  One of the raiders seized Zahirah from her mother's arms, taking her onto the saddle of his sleek black horse. Zahirah had thrust her arms out but they were not long enough to reach her mother. Their fingers brushed, then separated, and the horse beneath Zahirah began to move. She screamed for her mother, turning her head to see her, watching through her tears as a mob of black-clad Saracens converged on the caravan and demolished it with their swords and clubs and burning torches. Zahirah heard the screams behind her. She heard her father shout in agony, heard her mother call her name from over the din.

  “Gillianne!” she had cried. “No! Not my Gillianne!”

  “Oh, God,” Zahirah sobbed, every muscle in her body sagging, her legs and arms gone boneless. Sinan released her, thrusting her away from him with a snarling chuckle.

  She fell to her hands on the ground, weeping, not caring what happened to her next for she was already dead. Sinan was wrong; he had killed her all those years ago, when he killed her parents and the other pilgrims.

  Sebastian had given her a chance to live again, to be something more than the lump of clay Sinan had manipulated into his own wicked design, but she had thrown that chance away. And she did not dare hope for another. She had nothing now, and she had no one to blame but herself.

  Sinan was standing over her like a vulture eyeing carrion. She kept waiting for him to tear into her flesh, hoping he would, just to be done with the pain of all that was lost to her now, but that would have been an act of mercy, and he had none. Leastwise, not where she was concerned.

  “Take her,” he ordered his bodyguards. “I may still have a way to use her.”

  Zahirah did not fight the binding hands that clamped down around her arms like cuffs of iron. They hauled her up and dragged her after him like so much baggage, her feet slogging through the sand as they brought her to another section of the cave and bound her to await her fate.

  Chapter 29

  “Twelve deniers, graybeard. 'Tis my last offer.”

  Leaning back under the shade of a vendor's awning in the heart of the busy souk, Sebastian pivoted his head toward the exchange in progress. It was not going well. One of the English knights, a wellborn lad from Yorkshire, had been slacking in his watch duty to instead haggle with a merchant over a particular treasure. The fruitless negotiating had been underway for nearly half an hour, and it was beginning to irritate Sebastian to no end. “God's teeth, boy. Give him what he's asking, and have done with it, will you? The piece is worth twice that and you know it.”

  “What it's worth, and what I should be made to pay are separate issues,” said the lordling in his native Norman tongue, shooting Sebastian a haughty glare for his interference.

  That this green youth with his arrogant manner would be with him all day on guard duty grated Sebastian, though no more than the idea that the king had decided it fitting to place him under Garrett of Fallonmour's direction. As his newly appointed commanding officer, Fallonmour had made sure to put him in the most tedious tasks with the least tolerable company.

  He watched half-heartedly as the noble-bred pup dug into his purse and dispensed with a fair sum. The merchant took the coin and handed him what he had purchased: a fine wooden shatranj board with pieces carved of shining, bone-white ivory and glossy jet stone. Sebastian could hardly look at it--not without thinking of Zahirah, too.

  Come nightfall, it would be two full days since she had been gone. The kin
g's search parties had been dispatched and all came back empty-handed. She was likely many leagues away by now. For that, Sebastian was glad. But part of him missed her keenly, and he could not help himself from checking every veiled face that passed him for a pair of bewitching silver eyes. He did not think he would ever stop watching for her, hoping.

  As furious as he had been two nights ago, as betrayed as he had felt to learn that she had been deceiving him all along, he could not deny that she had meant something to him. He wanted to believe that there had been some truth in her, that her deception had not been so thorough as it seemed to him that night.

  He could not put out of his mind her assertion that Sinan--her father, repugnant as it was to accept--had forced her into undertaking the terrible task of killing the king. If he would do that to his own flesh and blood, if he would use her affection for Sebastian against her, what would he do to her if she returned to her clan a failure? Although Zahirah had told Sebastian that his own life was in jeopardy if she did not complete her mission, he did not fear for himself so much as he did her.

  He had sent her away, thinking to spare her the king's wrath, but he had since begun to worry that he might have sent her into a far greater danger. A danger that might await her with her own people. He swore under his breath, cursing himself for letting her go without him. Maybe it made him the devil's own fool, but he would never forgive himself if something were to happen to her.

  “Damnation,” he swore, wishing he'd still had his rank so he could assemble his own search party to ride out and find her, instead of hanging about the marketplace awaiting another man's orders.

  The young knight on watch with him trotted over with his prize, grinning now, and pulling Sebastian from his thoughts. “I've a brother back home who just turned four. He loves toys like this,” he said, as if he had no appreciation for the work of art he held in his hands. “Will you cover for me while I go put it away in the palace garrison?”