A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

“She the Saint Patrick.”

The O’Donnell’s flagship. That was a relief. It was also a summons they had all been awaiting for some days.

“I shall be losing you tomorrow,” Fabrisse told Adelia sadly “He’ll have made arrangements to send you all back to England.”

“No,” Adelia said. “We’re going with him to Palermo.”

Ever since she’d been surprised by the terrible indignation that had come over her in the cave at Caronne, she had regained certainty.

How dare he, how dare he, I won’t HAVE it. She’d been hired by Henry Plantagenet to do a job; so far Scarry had made her fail in her obligation, but she would see it through to its end if he killed her for it-or she killed him, which she was now perfectly prepared to do.

“Oh-ho,” said Fabrisse, looking at her. “We have stopped being frightened.”

“No, but I have stopped running.”

Oddly enough, it had been overhearing Rankin call her pursuer “the black-avised buzzard” that had raised her spirit. She’d forever cherish the phrase for taking the demonic out of her demon. It had turned hooves into human feet. Whether she could unmask and disable the buzzard, she didn’t know, but by God, she would try. After all, madmen had their own vulnerability

She and the others had gone over and over their time with Joanna for any clues to Scarry’s identity; who’d had the opportunity; who’d been where and when to do what he’d been able to do. As Ulf had said: “Who was it in that company kept buggering off?”

Practically everybody on what had turned out to be an erratic and rambling journey, that was the trouble.

Well, who had a mind that could influence other people’s into making Adelia seem a curse they were glad to offload onto a bonfire?

Who indeed?

They had scoured their impressions and memories until they could practically work out Scarry’s shoe size, but putting a face to him eluded them.

Eventually… “Ain’t got no further, have we?” Ulf had said, in defeat.

But Adelia, looking out over the Mediterranean, with Fabrisse beside her, was aware that they had. Scarry was like the light she could see flickering out at sea, a promise that he was somewhere in the darkness with the sword he had stolen. How she knew it, she wasn’t sure, but she knew for certain that he was going to Palermo, that she would meet him there-and defeat him.

She heard Deniz’s voice come down to them from the seawall. “Somebody rowing ashore.”

“Now?”

It was an overcast, moonless night, and at this point the land petered out into minuscule islands like scattered, tufty sponges that provided a better, almost unnavigable, defense against nighttime seaborne invasion than the castle walls.

“Signal ‘stand by and show light.’” Deniz came down from the walkway. “He brings goods.”

“Patricio, Don Patricio. My silk, hurrah.” Fabrisse hurried off to prepare food for her visitor.

Adelia waited while Deniz lit a lantern and flashed a signal to the invisible vessel out at sea, then accompanied him through the castle postern to the beach beyond.

Behind them, they could hear Johan calling for his eldest grandson to come and help prepare the mules that would carry the landed contraband into the keep, but on this side the only sound was the waves soughing softly against the shore. Adelia hadn’t stopped to put on her shoes, and the sand was cold against her feet. The ship had ceased signaling now, leaving Deniz’s lantern a solitary gleam in the blackness.

“It’s not just the countess’s silk, is it?” Adelia asked Deniz. She’d seen his face in the lamplight.

The Turk shook his head. “He signals ‘trouble.’”

Adelia ran back the way she’d come in order to rouse Mansur and Ulf and put on her shoes. Trouble. God dammit, was there ever anything else?

It was a chilly wait; the northern Mediterranean could be very cold in winter. The men warmed their hands at the lanterns they’d brought. Adelia stamped about in an effort to keep warm and tried to work out the date. It would be what… early January?

More than four months since she’d said good-bye to Allie. If the O’Donnell’s arrival this night meant another delay she’d… she’d kill somebody.

Fabrisse turned up with another lantern.

Ulf looked up; his young ears had heard something. Another second, and theyd all caught the creak of oars straining in rowlocks. Deniz waded out into the water, holding his light high.

Mansur and Ulf went to help him drag the rowing boat in. When they came back, they were supporting someone between them… a woman…

“Blanche?” Adelia shook her head to get her eyes in working order. “Mistress Blanche?”

The lady-in-waiting fell on her. “You’ve got to help her. Mother of God, she’s so ill. Help her. She’s dying.”

“Who?”

But now the O’Donnell was coming ashore, squelching through the water.

He was carrying something in his arms.

It wasn’t Fabrisse’s silk, it was Princess Joanna, and he was echoing Blanche. “Help her,” he said to Adelia. “I think she’s dying.”

THERE WAS A scramble to clear the bottom room of the keep and lay Joanna on the table at which soldiers had dined in the days when the room had been a guardhouse. Lanterns were hung.

Joanna was feverish and barely conscious. Her right knee kept rising toward her abdomen. It was a struggle to undress her because Mistress Blanche held on to Adelia like a drowning woman to a raft, begging her to save the child. “Use witchcraft,” she kept saying. “I know you can, everybody knows it. You saved those people from the flux, it was you, I saw you. Save her. I don’t care how, but save her.” Eventually, she had to be forcibly restrained by Ulf and taken outside.

Adelia began her examination, barely listening to the O’Donnell telling the others what had happened.

“She was taken ill almost as soon as we got her on board at Saint Gilles,” he was saying. “Doctor Arnulf diagnosed acute indigestion, he’s been treating her with seethed toad, powdered unicorn, cramp rings, various talismans, and I don’t know what else. The good Bishop of Winchester’s been reciting Psalm 91 over her ad infinitum. And her only becoming sicker and sicker.”

He broke off as Adelia abruptly left the room and headed across the bailey to where Blanche sat on a straw bale, her head in her hands, with Ulf awkwardly patting her shoulder.

The lady-in-waiting looked up at Adelia’s approach. “Can you help her? Can you make her well?”

“Has she been constipated?” Adelia asked.

Ulf growled with embarrassment, but it was a measure of Mistress Blanche’s desperation that, after a second’s hesitation, she nodded.

“Nausea? Vomiting?”

Blanche nodded again.

“Hmm.”

Adelia went back to the keep.

The O’Donnell was still talking: “… frantic she was. It’s my opinion, Blanche is the only one of those three women who cares more for Joanna than for herself Lord bless her. When I suggested to them we sail to Salses, where her ladyship here was in situ, the other two set up a caterwauling about what’d the king do to them if he learned they’d delivered his daughter to a witch and a Saracen, what’d Sicily do, what’d dear Doctor Arnulf do. I told them, I said, dear Doctor Arnulf’s doing damn all except kill her quicker…”

On the table, Adelia pressed gently on the lower right quadrant of the girl’s abdomen and then quickly removed her hand. There was a moan. The right knee flexed again.

“So we kidnapped her, Blanche and I. Left the other ladies asleep, had my lads lower the dinghy with Joanna in it, and here we are, and may God save us all from perdition.”

“So brave to dare it.” This was Fabrisse. “’Delia, isn’t he brave?”