It was very quiet. They listened to the river. Rodrigo said, "You know your parents are safe with us. This is ... the best possible place for them right now."
"I believe that."
"Jehane. It is ... probably the best place for you, as well."
She had known he would say that. She shook her head. "Safest, perhaps. Not best." She left the deeper words unsaid, but with Rodrigo they didn't have to be spoken.
Another silence. The moons had swung west, and the slow stars. The river murmured below.
"I've asked Husari to stay with me. He has agreed. I told the king a small lie tonight."
"I guessed. You don't really think Lain and Martin will be unable to get the company out, do you?"
'"Not really. And Husari, in his way, may be as good a governor—in Fezana, or elsewhere—as Ammar would have been."
"Will he do it?"
"I believe so. He will not serve the Muwardis. And he, at least, trusts me, if Ammar does not."
She heard the bitterness. "It isn't a question of trust. You know that."
"I suppose." He looked at her. "I wanted to be sure he could leave, if he insisted, so I made up that story about my company trapped in Ragosa."
"I know that, Rodrigo."
"I didn't want him to go."
"I know that, too."
"I don't want you to go, Jehane. There is no place in Al-Rassan for you, for either of you, when the Muwardis come."
"We'll have to try to make a place," she said.
Stillness. He was waiting, she realized, and so she did say it, after all. "I will not leave him, Rodrigo."
She heard him release his breath.
In the darkness by the river's steady, murmurous flow, Jehane said, looking down at the water, not at the man beside her, "I was under your window at Carnival. I stood there a long time, looking at your light." She swallowed. "I almost came up to you."
She sensed him turning towards her. She kept her gaze fixed upon the river.
"Why didn't you?" His voice had altered.
"Because of what you told me that afternoon."
"I was buying paper, I remember. What did I tell you, Jehane?"
She did look at him then. It was dark, but she knew those features by heart now. They had ridden from this hamlet the summer before on the one horse. So little time ago, really.
"You told me how much you loved your wife."
"I see," he said.
Jehane looked away. She needed to look away. They had come to a place too hard for held glances. She said softly, to the river, to the dark, "Is it wrong, or impossible, for a woman to love two men?"
After what seemed to her a very long time, Rodrigo Belmonte said, "No more so than for a man."
Jehane closed her eyes.
"Thank you," she said. And then, after another moment, holding as tightly as she could to the thing suspended there, "Goodbye."
With her words the moment passed, the world moved on again: time, the flowing river, the moons. And the delicate thing that had been in the air between them—whatever it might have been named—fell, as it seemed to Jehane, softly to rest in the grass by the water.
"Goodbye," he said. "Be always blessed, on all the paths of your life. My dear." And then he said her name.
They did not touch. They walked back beside each other to the place where Diego and Fernan and Miranda Belmonte lay asleep and, after standing a long moment gazing down upon his family, Rodrigo Belmonte went towards the king's tent where the strategies of war were being devised.
She watched him go. She saw him lift the tent flap, to be lit briefly by the lanterns from inside, then disappear within as the tent closed after him.
Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
Jehane saw Diego's eyes open in the greyness before sunrise.
He was weak, and in considerable pain, but he recognized his father and mother, and managed the beginnings of a smile. It was Fernan who knelt beside him, though, gripping both his hands. Bernart d'Inigo stood behind them all, grinning ferociously, then Ishak came out to see his patient, to take his pulse and feel the shape of the wound.
They had no need of her. Jehane used the moment to walk a little apart with her mother and tell her what she was about to do, and why. It did not greatly surprise her to discover that Eliane and Ishak had already learned most of this from Amman
It appeared he had been waiting outside their tent when they woke. She had a memory of him kneeling before Ishak the summer before. The two of them had known each other a long time, she'd realized that day, and Ammar ibn Khairan was not a man to ride away with their daughter without a word of his own spoken.
She wondered what had been said. What did surprise her was to encounter no protest. Her mother had never been hesitant with objections. Yet now Jehane was about to ride off through a land at war, with an Asharite, towards a future only the moons knew—and her mother was accepting that.
It was, Jehane thought, another measure of how much had changed.
Mother and daughter embraced. Neither wept, but Jehane did do so when her father held her in his arms just before she mounted the horse provided for her.
She looked at Alvar de Pellino standing silently nearby, his heart in his eyes, as ever. She looked at Husari. At Rodrigo.
She looked at Ammar ibn Khairan beside her on his mount and nodded her head and they rode away together. East towards Fezana and then past it, well north of the river, watching the plumes of smoke still coiling up from the city into the brightening sky.
She looked back only once, but Orvilla was already out of sight and she had stopped crying by then. She had set out on this same path a summer ago, riding with Alvar and Velaz. She had only one man with her now, but he was worth a hundred and fifty, by one measure.
He was worth infinitely more than that, by the measuring of her heart.
She moved her horse nearer to his, and held out a hand and he removed his glove and laced his fingers through hers. They rode through much of the morning like that as the clouds ahead of them slowly lifted and grey became blue towards the sun.
At one point, breaking the long silence, she said, comically, "A camel herder in the Majriti?" And was rewarded to hear his swift laughter fill the wide spaces around them.
Later, in a different voice, she asked him, "What did you say to my father? Did you ask his blessing?"
He shook his head. "Too much to ask. I told them I loved you, and then I asked their forgiveness."
She rode in silence, dealing with this. Finally, very quietly, she said, "How much time are we going to be allowed?"
And gravely he replied, "I truly don't know, love. I will do all I can to give us enough."
"It will never be enough, Ammar. Understand that. I will always need more time."
Their lovemaking each night, after they made camp, had an urgency Jehane had never known.
After ten days of riding they intercepted the army of Ragosa heading towards Cartada, and time, in Al-Rassan the Beloved, began to run, swift as horses, towards its end.
Eighteen
In a reaction to the protracted siege of his city, King Badir of Ragosa had ordered the northern-style wooden chairs removed from his private chambers in the palace. They had been replaced by additional pillows. The king had just lowered himself—with some care for his wine glass—into a nest of cushions by the fire.
Mazur ben Avren, his chancellor, did the same, not bothering to hide a wince of pain. Personally, he regarded the king's abjuring of northern furnishings as an entirely unnecessary gesture. Descending to the floor to recline seemed a more difficult exercise every time he did it.