CHAPTER TWELVE

Joanna had won the battle and the war. There would be no wedding of Christian and infidel. The whole army knew every word that Richard and Joanna had said to one another, embellished and re-embellished until it had become a legend and a song.

Sioned heard that song everywhere she went, until she was ready to take a mule and her bag of medicines and ride to the world’s end. She was still angry, abidingly so—and never mind how foolish it might be. Her heart knew neither wisdom nor reason. It only knew that it was wounded. She had not gone to her lessons since the day Saphadin had failed to put a stop to Richard’s folly.

When she was not playing physician, she was pacing the streets and alleys of Jaffa. The darker, the narrower, the more dangerous they were, the better.

She was in the darkest and dankest alley she had yet found, near evening of a day some untold number of days after Joanna had refused to marry an infidel. A footpad lay gagging and clutching his privates, some distance behind. He had thought to find easy prey in a woman alone, and discovered all too quickly that not only did she know exactly where to hurt a man most; she was completely ruthless in the doing of it.

It was not like her at all to so indulge her temper. And yet she could not control herself. Was it not just? Was it not, after all, fitting?

That was a hazard, Safiyah had warned her. Mages were so strong in so many things, that God had given them a weakness to balance all the rest. It was dreadfully, deliriously easy to give way to the dark side of the soul.

And for such a reason, too—it was absurd, if she ever stopped to think about it. But she refused to do that. She wanted this darkness. It was better than facing reality; than admitting that she had let herself fall in love with a man. Love was not for the likes of her. She should have known that from the beginning, and built walls against it.

The alley in which she had been stalking, nurturing the swelling bloom of her anger, came to an abrupt and stony end. At first she thought it a blank wall; then she saw how it bent round a corner, and marked the faint outline of a door. It was a postern, tiny and hidden, but to her surprise it was unlocked.

This must have been a mosque when Jaffa was in the hands of Islam. It was older than the first Crusade, though not as old as Rome: she could feel such things, it was one of her smaller magical gifts. There were marks of fire on it, up near the dome, and broken tiles along the arches. Rats had nested in the rugs that heaped the floor, all hacked and fouled as they were.

Yet this was still a holy place. The air held a memory of incense; the light of day blessed the faded tiles of the walls. The lines of sacred script that flowed over the arches and the doorframes were hacked and broken, but she could read a fragment here and there, and one intact near the mihrab, the niche that faced toward Mecca: There is no god but God.

Spirits lived here. Sunlight made them shy, but she caught glimpses of them in shadows. At night they must come out in force. A deep thrum came up from below, a throb of sanctity. God, or gods, had been worshipped on this circle of earth since long before Muhammad proclaimed himself the Prophet of Allah.

Sioned knelt in front of the mihrab, not in worship, not exactly, but because it seemed appropriate to kneel in such a place. There was peace here, such as she had not felt in much too long.

She did not want peace. She wanted anger. She wanted the dark that came up from the earth. She wanted—

Eleanor.

As if the thought had been a conjuring, she saw in the mihrab, framed like a painted image, the queen in her chamber in the castle. Eleanor was dressed in black as she always was, but this was not her wonted fashion; it was a long robe without belt or girdle, and her hair was loose, unveiled, thick and gleaming, flowing down her back like a river of snow. Hers was a cold stark beauty, but beauty it certainly was, like a stone of adamant.

As she had done in the shrine of Cyprus, she spoke to a coiling shape of nothingness. It was stronger than it had been. Because she was closer to it? Or because all this war and blood had fed it, and given it space to grow?

It spoke in a voice so deep it rumbled in the bones. “Now?”

“Not yet,” Eleanor said. She did not waver, nor did she forsake her icy calm, but Sioned could feel the strength of the effort that kept her so steady.

“We have a bargain,” the dark one said. “I would keep my half of it.”

“You will do so,” said Eleanor, “in the fullness of time. Are you not well enough fed? Has not my son kept you sated with blood of Turks? Is it another battle you require? Surely we can arrange a small one. There are always skirmishes; men are men, and they will fight, however feeble the cause.”

“A holy war is feeble?”

“Come now,” the queen said. “Your faith is not the one that moves the sultan, nor is your worship any that he would approve of. You serve another power altogether.”

“I am a power in my own right,” said the dark one, “and he rankles at the core of me. Let me dispose of him now.”

“No,” she said. “It is not time. My son is managing him well enough for the moment, and these illusions of peaceful negotiation are serving us well. When his fall will destroy all that he made, when my son is so placed as to fill the void of his absence, then you may take him.”

The dark one hissed, but forbore to strike like the serpent it just then resembled.

“Patience,” she said to him. “You will have your prey.”

Maybe he trusted her; maybe not. She dismissed him with an incantation that raked claws through Sioned’s bones. He vanished. Eleanor sank down in a pool of black robe, as if all strength had abandoned her.

Yet when she lifted her head, her eyes were burning. Her hand, upraised, drew letters of fire in the air: wards, bound to Richard’s name and presence. She was wise and she was wary, and she knew her ally—who was also the worst of her enemies. He would not attack her son while he fancied that she was too weak to stop him.

The wards rose in a searing shimmer, closing off Sioned’s vision of her. Sioned made no effort to call it back.

Here was a way, if she would take it. Here was a path that she could choose. She could take the darkness to her; become both its ruler and its servant. It would possess her in the end, but then so would the light. Every living thing died; that was the price one paid for life.

It was a potent temptation. She knelt in the empty mosque, in the fading daylight, and all about her the spirits gathered: jinn and afarit, wrought of essential fire. They were no more purely of dark or light than any human creature. They too had that gift and curse: they could choose which power they would serve.

They swarmed above her, thick as a migration of swallows. They darted, swooped, wheeled. Some of them sang in eerie voices. When there were words that she could understand, those were words in Arabic, verses of the Koran and praises of the All-Merciful. Of course these would be good Muslim spirits, since this was a Muslim place, however faded and forgotten.

Laughter bubbled up in her, sudden and altogether unexpected. It had an edge to it, the cut of irony, but it was honest enough. In the giddy swirl of the spirits’ dance, she had found, not peace, not exactly—but a degree of sanity. She was still angry, but with some vestige of measure and restraint. For the first time in a long while, her mind was clear. She could think. She could make a choice.

Not the darkness now. Later, who knew? For the moment she remained in the light, though the shadows were a fraction deeper than they had been before.

She remained there into the night, resting her spirit in the dance of the afarit. When she left them, they sang a long, rippling note: bidding farewell for a while, but not for always. She sang it back to them as best she could. Those that were nearest to solid form and substance bowed before her, not entirely in mockery, and one or two followed her through the midnight blackness of Jaffa, seeing her safe to her room in Master Judah’s hospital.