Devil's Bargain Read Online Free PDF

half of the bargain.”
    Saphadin turned on his heel without a word. The shock of his rudeness startled even his own men; one or two of Richard’s knights lurched forward, ready to throttle him where he stood. But Richard held them with a glance. “Let him go,” he said. “He wants a battle as much as we do. Will you stop him from getting it ready?”
    They yielded to that. Saphadin, who was not known to speak the dialect of Anjou, ignored them all. He sprang into his mare’s saddle without touching the stirrup. Even as he settled on her back, she was off at a gallop.

C HAPTER F OUR
    S ioned had come to see the sultan’s embassy not for any power or prescience, but because she was curious. There were no sick or wounded to look after just then, and she was still too restless from marching to retreat to her tent. She wandered toward the camp’s edge, expecting nothing in particular. Saracens were all too familiar a sight by now, with their dark faces and their beards and their turbans. They had faded from the exotic to the almost commonplace.
    In that idle frame of mind, she saw the doubled guard of Templars and Turks and the lordly ones they protected, and was transfixed.
    Magic—true magic—was everywhere: in the earth, in sea and sky, even in the works of men’s hands. The world was full of it. And yet in mortal men it was not so common at all. Mages were as rare as jewels in the earth.
    She was bred to magic, raised and nurtured in it. Her knowledge was not what she would have liked it to be. She was a young mage, more promise still than fulfillment.
    This lord of the Saracens was a mage of beauty and power.There were handsomer men in the world, though this one was hardly ill to look at: a narrow face, fine-drawn but strong, and a body like a steel blade, slender and erect. He had a beautiful seat on a horse. He was not in first youth, but old age was years away yet. He carried himself without arrogance but as one who had been born to rule—like a prince, as indeed he must be.
    A long sigh escaped her. Princes were seldom mages; when they were, they could be deadly dangerous. She had only to think of Eleanor, left behind, thank the gods, in Acre.
    She could sense no taint of darkness on this one. There was a flavor to his magic that she recognized from elsewhere: a richness and depth to it that spoke of the ancient lore of Egypt. The sultan had been lord of Egypt before he was sultan of Syria, and this one of his brothers had ruled it for a goodly while after Saladin went on to Damascus.
    What she felt was lust, pure and simple—to know what he knew; to match her magic to the living fire of his. She had never known a yearning so strong or a desire so irresistible. It was all she could do to stand still, be quiet, watch and listen. This was no time or place to indulge the cravings of her magical self.
    As he rode out with that light arrogant carriage, as if daring one of the crossbowmen to put a bolt in his back, she thought for an instant that he paused; that he glanced toward her. Her heart stumbled to a halt, then began to beat very hard.
    The moment passed. He did not seem to recognize her after all, or to see what or who she was. He rode away, back to his brother and his side of the war.
     
    The forest beyond the river was called Arsuf, which was also the name of the fortress on the other side of it. It was a freak of nature, a forest in an all but treeless country, but few men from the western forests found any comfort in this one. There was no easy way around it: on the right hand it stretched toward the sea, and on the left it spread through a torn and tumbled country, too rough for an army this large to pass. The only practicalway was to go through it, and try to angle toward the open land beside the sea.
    Late the day after Saphadin came to Richard’s camp, the Franks marched with deep relief out of the wilderness of trees. They had had a grim time of it in the forest, marching in terror that the