Jaufre was in the stables, seated on a bale of hay, coaxing another year’s use out of a worn bridle. “I’ve just come from a royal audience,” she said. “Wu’s widow has finally seen fit to inform me of his death.”
“Twenty four hours after the fact,” Jaufre said in his
deep, pleasant voice. His hands stilled and his eyes lifted to hers. “It was better this way, Jo,” he said gently. “After the accident, it was only a matter of time. Li was not the man to live without his legs.”
She turned her face into an errant ray of sunshine and closed her eyes against the glare. “I know. It’s just…”
His hand, hard and warm and slightly sweaty, raised to her cheek. “I know.”
She pressed her face into his palm. He allowed it for a moment, and then pulled away to resume work on the bridle.
She pulled out a wisp of hay and chewed it, watching him work. He was as tall as she was, with smooth, tanned skin, the bluest of eyes and startlingly light hair, the first and only golden hair she had ever seen. It was thick and clipped short and in the sun gleamed like a polished helmet. He was muscular and agile from work at arms and with the horses and the soft boxing he practiced daily in the garden, taught him by her father, and which when she had expressed an interest he had begun teaching her, too. Since her father’s remarriage she had been spending more and more time with Jaufre, in the stables and out of them, and of course on the road with the caravan Li had consigned her entirely into Jaufre’s care. There was no one she trusted more than himself, he knew, unless it was Olan.
The ray of sun kissed the down of her cheek to gold, and threw her profile into proud relief, the straight nose, the high, shadowed cheekbones, the full lips that curled upwards at their corners, the delicately cleft chin. His eyes strayed to the rich bronze braid of hair, the strands that slipped out of its braid to coil over her shoulders and around the promising swell of her breasts. Her waist was tiny, her hips full, flowing into the long, smooth length of her legs lying negligently beside his in the hay. Her sprawl was less coltish and more graceful than it had been. Johanna was becoming a woman. He closed his eyes, took a deep and he hoped unobtrusive breath, and focussed once more on the bridle.
Her voice disturbed his thoughts. “Jaufre?”
“What?”
“How old are you?”
His hands paused in their work and he looked up with a quizzical expression. “I don’t know. When you and Li found me on the Silk Road I must have been about ten. I’d been wandering on my own for at least a year before that.”
“So by now you would have at least twenty years.”
“About.”
“And your father was a Frankish Crusader?”
He shrugged. “So my mother said. He left his crusade to ride as a caravan guard. Not a very good one, obviously, or our caravan wouldn’t have been slaughtered to the last man by Persian bandits.”
“And your mother was Greek?”
“Yes.”
“All the Greeks I’ve met are dark,” she said. “Was your father fair haired, as you are?”
“So my mother said,” he repeated. “He told her that where he came from, some island to the west, many people have fair hair.”
“It is very beautiful.”
He grinned, and two deep dimples creased his cheeks. “So the ladies tell me.” She threw a handful of straw at him and he ducked, laughing. “Why so many questions today?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You and I and Olan are beginning a journey that will take us across the world, and I just realized how little I know about you.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You know all you need to know.”
The red, full lips curved slightly. “Perhaps.”
He resumed work on the bridle. “So. When do we go?”
“Three days from now.”
“After the ceremonies for Li.”
“Yes.”
“Does Wu’s widow know?”
“No,” Johanna said.
He looked at her. “You can hate her, if you want to, Jo. She deserves it.”
She caught the note in his voice. “But?”
“But I would remind you that in four years she was unable to bear her husband a son. She looks at you, and she sees the child she should have had, and couldn’t. There is a reason for her rage.”
She stirred restlessly, unwilling to allow her stepmother any human failings. “There is something else.”
“What?”
“Edyk has offered for me, something my father’s widow undoubtably refers to as a miracle sent from the Son of Heaven himself, and is now busily planning my marriage.”
His hands stilled on the bridle, but he didn’t look up. “He loves you.”
“He thinks he does.”
“He loves you,” Jaufre repeated, his tone grimly certain in spite of every effort to keep it neutral.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It wouldn’t work. He wouldn’t be happy.” She paused. “I wouldn’t be happy.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” she said firmly, and the hard, painful knot in his gut that had been twisting steadily tighter relaxed a little, not much, but enough to let him breathe again. “Besides,” she added, with her sudden, rare smile, “we have places to go, you and I and Olan.”
“Money?”
“We have enough. More than enough. Father made sure of that. Olan will show you. And we can earn along the way. You’re a soldier and a caravaner. Olan’s a cook and a healer. And you said yourself I’m as good a horseman as any you’ve ever seen, and if worst comes to worst, we can always sing for our suppers.” She grinned. “And I know I’m a better diver, even if you won’t admit it.”
“Chipangu,” he said, a reminiscent smile pulling up one corner of his mouth.
“I brought back more of the rose pearls than you did,” she said, with an impish, sidelong glance.
“Only because the fish charmer failed to keep a shark from the diving ground and the rest of us had brains enough to get out of the water,” he replied promptly.
“Until you dived in to pull me out. I think you were more afraid of my bringing back more pearls than you had, than you were afraid that I might be eaten by the shark.”
He refused the bait. “And Edyk?”
Her smile vanished as quickly as it had come. “I’m going to see him now. To say goodbye.”
His heart beat heavily, once, high up in his throat, so that he could hear the thud of his blood in his ears. The knot in his gut was back, tied more tightly than it had ever been before, tighter than he would have thought he could survive. He found it hard to breathe, impossible to think. When his eyes cleared he found that the worn bridle in his hands had broken into two pieces almost as cleanly as if he had used a knife.
“Jaufre?” she said, sitting up, her eyes concerned. “Is something wrong?”
He stood up abruptly and tossed the pieces of bridle into the scrap barrel. When he turned to where she could see his face again it had resumed its usual genial mask. “Did you want me to saddle a horse for you?”