The Dagger and the Cross (34 page)

But a gate—that, God willing, they could build. If she could
learn to trust him again. If he could learn to rule his temper.

He held out his hand. She looked at it. Her eyes were wary:
wild-beast eyes, hunting-cat eyes. Just as his hand began to fall, she caught
it. “I love you,” she said.

“And forgive?”

She did not answer that. But his hand was still in hers, and
she had not vanished otherwhere. Forgiven, unforgiven, still he had her back.
He could, for the moment, be content.

Jerusalem was empty with its fighting men gone from it.
There were pilgrims in plenty and townspeople as there always were, tradesmen
and artisans, women and children, the old and the halt, and the lepers on the
dunghills by the north gate. But there was almost no one to protect them. A few
knights in the Tower of David, a company or two of guardsmen, and that was all.
The rest had gone to war with the king.

The Patriarch was still there, and the pope’s legate, and
priests enough and to spare. The Holy City was still holy, even without swords
to defend it.

Ysabel would have been happier if Aidan had been there. She
hated it when he was away fighting. He might be hurt. He might even die. Then
what would she do?

Akiva never admitted to worrying about his king. He spent
most of his days studying, sometimes with his father to teach him, but mostly
by himself. He and his father were living in the Mortmains’ house: Joanna had
pointed out that otherwise they would be all alone by the Dome of the Rock,
with only Aidan’s servants to look after them. That would not have swayed
Simeon, but he looked at Joanna and decided that she needed protecting. Joanna,
who knew very well what he was thinking, was careful to keep her smile behind
her eyes. He took his son and moved into the room by the library and made
himself useful with the accounts, when he was not studying or praying or
talking to people in the city.

Ysabel was supposed to let them be. She had lessons of her
own, and duties, and more of both since her mother had decided that she needed
reining in. But neither lessons nor duties could keep Ysabel occupied for every
moment of every day.

She liked to watch Akiva study. He would let her into his
mind and take her with him where the words went. Strange places, sometimes. He
had a secret, and a gift. He could think of something that he had read, make a
picture of it, and it would grow out of air in front of him. It was like Ysabel’s
mirror, but it was not solid. Hands passed clear through it.

He made animals that way one day, out of a bestiary, and
Ysabel found that she could make them move. The lion was a fine golden beast,
but the unicorn had come out wrong: a great, lumbering, armored creature the
color of a thundercloud, with a small mean eye and a fondness for charging
blindly at anything that moved. Ysabel scowled at it where it grazed on the
meadow that was really a tabletop. “It’s ugly,” she said.

“It’s what it wants to be.” Akiva propped his elbows on the
table and set his chin in his hands. “You should see the cameleopard. It’s
preposterous. All those spots, and a neck as long as my king is tall, and the
head on top like a flower on a stalk.”

She eyed him dubiously. “You’re chaffing me.”

“I’m not.”

She was hardly convinced, but the picture was in his mind,
and it was hard to argue with that. She thought of an animal she would much
rather see; surely it was much more probable. “Do me a gryphon,” she said.

But he would not. “All I ever get is eagles,” he said.

She was disappointed. He flicked his power just so; beasts
and meadow melted, and there was only the table with its heaps of books and
parchments. He closed his eyes and sighed. “Do you know what I think? I think
the only magic there is, is ours.”

She could not say that she was shocked. She had had thoughts
like that herself. But he said it, not she, and she was nothing if not
contrary. “There’s the pope’s letter that was what it was, and then it wasn’t.
What do you call that?”

“Human trickery,” he said.

“Then why can’t we find the humans who did it?”

“They know how to hide.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Well? So how do they know?”

He shrugged.

It was a victory, but small. “We can find out,” she said. “We
can hunt. People don’t know what we are. If the ones they do know are gone,
maybe they’ll stop hiding and let us see them.”

“What makes you think we can see them, when Morgiana couldn’t?”

Ysabel hissed, just like Morgiana, and for much the same
reason. “They
knew
Morgiana would hunt them. We’re nothing and nobody.
All we have to do is make a snare and wait. Then
if
anyone thinks about
the pope’s letter, he’ll be caught.”

“Is that what Morgiana did?”

“No,” said Ysabel. “She was too angry. She wanted to prowl
and growl and flex her claws. But she’s done it before. I watched her; I know
how.”

Akiva was skeptical. His king had never done anything quite
so underhanded.

“Does he know how?” Ysabel wanted to know. Akiva had no
answer for that.

She was not about to waste time. She took a deep breath, and
emptied her mind as she had been taught. It was getting easier; or maybe need
made a better pupil of her than when she did it just to please her father. She
put even that thought aside and paused for a moment, clean and empty and
waiting, like a bit of fresh vellum before the scribe wrote on it. In that
emptiness she gathered her power. It came as her breath had a moment before,
and filled her in much the same fashion, but breath was cool, and this was
fire.

When she was as full as she needed to be, she made the
snare. She saw it in her mind as a loop of fire-colored cord hidden in a
thicket that was this part of the mind-world, marked and baited for the pope’s
letter.

Someone seemed to be standing behind her. Here she was eyes
all round; she saw but did not say anything to Akiva. She felt his interest and
his unwilling admiration. It stung him that she should be able to do something
that he could not, and she a full three years younger.

Girls learn better, she said, and grow up faster.

That was nothing more than the truth, but the truth was not
always what a person wanted to hear. Akiva nicked her with an edge of his
temper, just hard enough to sting. She would have liked to sting him back, but
she had already done that just by being herself. She laughed instead and set
her snare solid, where it would stay until it was sprung, and opened her eyes
on the world that humans called real.

Akiva looked ready to hit her. It was interesting to watch
him master himself. Obviously he had learned that from Gwydion; just as
obviously he had somewhat more to learn. He did not mind an equal, but he hated
to be bested.

He was disgustingly glad that Nurse came just then and
dragged Ysabel away to her hour of Latin.
But,
Ysabel said sweetly where
only he could hear,
I
like Latin. It’s better than being pricked at
by jealous little boys.

“Little” was what did it. She left him speechless and
simmering and threatening revenge.

o0o

He punished her by not speaking to her for three days,
though she came every day and watched him study. His mind was shut tight. He
was better at that than she was, which she knew already; she tried to find a
chink in the wall, but mostly she sat still and watched him. She could read
Greek or Hebrew over his shoulder or reflected in his eyes, or however she
pleased. Her father had that gift: to know any language once he saw it written
or heard it spoken. She was not as good at it as he was, but days of sitting
with Akiva had given her as much Greek and Hebrew as she was likely ever to
need.

Akiva did not know it. She was not about to tell him. He
might stop reading interesting things and choose the dullest tomes he could
find, just to spite her.

On the third day, when she was just about to have mercy on
him and go to her Latin, something stopped her. A tugging. A tickle on the edge
of her thinking. A cord closing about the leg of a small startled creature: a
thought of the pope’s letter.

She must have said something aloud. That was a bad habit,
Aidan said; it could be dangerous where humans were. But here was only Akiva,
and he stopped punishing her and shouldered in beside her, standing over the
trapped thought. It had a collar about its neck, and a cord as thin as a spider’s
thread leading from it.

Akiva was with her, his power like a hand clasping hers. Two
together were a hundred times stronger than two apart: Aidan’s arithmetic, and
he would know, being half of his brother. Ysabel was leader here, which was
part courtesy and part necessity, since the snare was hers. She took time to
firm her power, and set herself to follow the thread.

It was very thin. It wavered, sometimes almost to vanishing.
It was unsteady even for a human thought, as if it tried still to hide itself;
but it kept deciding that hiding was too hard, and the witches were gone, and
what harm could there be in letting down its guard?

Ysabel had no name for it yet. But it had a scent, even a
taste. A little too sour, a little too sweet, with a human reek on it, and the
cloying stink that was greed. It hated Aidan. It wanted what he had, or what it
thought he had. Riches, mostly. Power in the world. A beautiful woman. Beauty
of its own, and a body that would never age or sicken or die.

The fear of death was always there in human awarenesses,
even humans who were saints. In this one it was chokingly strong. It filled
Ysabel; it took her breath from her. She fled it blindly, sickened, gagging on
its stench.

Akiva was there, strong and clean. No fear in him. Only
strength, and the scent and taste that were her own kind.

“We have him,” Akiva said. “We marked him. We can find him
now.”

She forgot anger, fear, even disgust of the mind they had
touched. “Why,” she said, wondering. “We can. Morgiana couldn’t do it, but we
did.”

“Only because Morgiana was gone,” Akiva reminded her. “We
still don’t know who he is. Just where. What if he goes away?”

“We’ll find him now, of course.”

He knew she did not mean with her mind. He wavered transparently
between grown prudence and young eagerness to do something solid. She settled
it for herself by starting for the door. He was quick in her wake, still half
minded to stop her, but she was not having any of that. What she did was her
own business. He could follow or he could stay.

He followed. It took a little stealth to get out of the
house: Nurse was getting ready to come in pursuit of Ysabel, and Mother was
somewhat too close to the gate for comfort, going over something tedious with
the porter. But the garden was empty in the heat of noon, and the garden gate
was no match for a pair of witch-children.

Akiva had a hat: Jews never went anywhere without one. It
was part of their religion. Ysabel did not even have a scarf to cover her hair.
She would not have minded, but Akiva bought her a bit of veil in the market,
that matched her dress. He would have put it on her, but she was having none of
that.

She put on the veil herself, and kept her grip on the thread
they were following. They were going in the right direction, toward the scents
and savors of the Herb Market. It was a little slow: Jerusalem was crowded, and
there was a procession in honor of a saint. Ysabel would have given much to be
able to go straight, as Morgiana did, or even to fly, as Ysabel could do but
dared not in front of so many humans.

While they were caught, the thread moved. Away from them;
out of the Herb Market. Ysabel tried her tongue with a curse or two that she
had heard from Aidan. She shocked a monk who was treading on her toes. She
smiled cloyingly at him and eeled round him, back the way she had come.

Her quarry could move faster than she: he was on a clearer
street, and he was in a hurry. He had an appointment with someone. There was
another with him, a young person whose mind leaked like a sieve.

Ysabel almost whooped aloud. Here was just exactly what they
had all been looking for. It was not the one who had stepped into her snare. It
was better. Young. Disgruntled. No good at all at hiding what it was thinking.

His name was Marco. He was seventeen years old; he was from
Genoa in the Italies. He remembered it very clearly indeed, having been brought
to Outremer a bare year before; he pined to go back. He hated the heat and the
flies; he hated the dust; he hated the constant threat of war. But worse than
any of them, he hated what he did here. He was a merchant’s son. He was
supposed to be learning to be a merchant himself, and he loathed every part of
it. He wanted to be a priest. That was all that made this country bearable:
that it was so holy, and he was here, and every step was a prayer.

He was glad that they were going where they were going. His
mind gave Ysabel a picture of a house near the Patriarch’s, and a man in it,
waiting. A monk with a thin and wizened face, grown old early even for a human
man, but burning with a strong slow fire. Marco wanted that fire. He wanted the
holiness he saw in this Brother Thomas, the purity of intent.
He
did not
do what they all did for envy of a prince’s wealth. He wanted that prince
cleansed from the earth, and all his sorceries with him.

Marco was not so pure. He did not believe, quite, that those
sorceries were as terrible as Brother Thomas thought them. That was Marco’s
failing, and not Thomas’; he was trying to overcome it. He made a picture in
his mind, in blurry human fashion, of someone whom he called Prince Aidan. It
was not Ysabel’s father. It was too tall and too menacing and too much like a
picture Ysabel had seen that came from Egypt, of a man with a falcon’s head.
The picture blurred and shifted. It had a sword in its hand and fire coming
from its eyes, and a terrible, booming voice. It looked like a devil out of a
monk’s nightmare.