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I can see what she is, then surely he . . .”
    She shook her head. Her face, usually so mobile, was perfectly still. “He saw me. After all. And thought—” A breath of laughter escaped her. “He gave me far more credit than I deserve. Did he seem angry? Annoyed? Frightened?”
    “He seemed calm. As if he were instructing you in the law. Which I suppose he was. Do you think sorcerers actually fight wars somewhere in the world?”
    “I’m sure it’s possible,” she said. “Master Judah says that if there’s a law against it, you can be almost certain that people have done it. Probably a great deal of it, too, if it’s particularly tempting.”
    Mustafa snorted softly. “That almost makes me want to study law.”
    “I think I’d go direct to debauchery,” she said.
    The bread was done: the fragrance of it reminded Mustafa that his stomach was empty. She retrieved the flat loaves from the coals, shook off the crust of ash, and divided them among them all, even the wide-eyed and speechless boys. Their conversation was an earful, Mustafa supposed, if one were innocent and unlettered and bred in some dank castle far away.
    They were in love with her, or they would have turned tail and fled. She treated them as she did the dogs: with amused tolerance and a pat here and there.
    “He really did remember me,” she said, sitting with her breakfast half-eaten in her hand. Her face darkened. “He must think we have no art in the west, as well as no honor. To take me for a master of the art—does he reckon us all fools?”
    “I doubt he knows what reckoning to put on you,” Mustafa said. “He couldn’t even tell that you are a woman, and that should be obvious to a blind man.”
    “Magic tricks the eye,” she said, “and clouds the mind. He has a great deal of it. Maybe he has too much. Too much magic—can you imagine that? Even that is extravagant here.”
    “It seems he won’t be using it in tomorrow’s battle,” Mustafa said.
    She was just finishing her bit of bread. She ate the last of it, chewing deliberately, and dusted her hands over the embers of the fire. Then she said, “It is tomorrow, then.”
    “Thirty thousand of them, the sultan said. Waiting in the wood, to fall on us as we march toward Arsuf.”
    “Have you told my brother?”
    “He’s asleep,” said Mustafa.
    A smile curved the corners of her lips. She was a delectable thing, like a damask plum: dark and round and sweet. He did not think she knew that she was beautiful. She had none of the preoccupations that obsessed her sex; she took little notice of her appearance except to be clean and more or less tidy, and he had never known her to blush and giggle over a man.
    “I’ll beard the lion in his den,” she said. “You go, and get what rest you can. If there’s fighting, you’ll want to be near the king.”
    He pondered that for a moment. Then he nodded. He was not afraid of Richard, even new-waked and snarling, but he was a little tired. As for the fact that Richard most likely did not know she had been riding with the army . . . well, he thought, she was old Henry’s daughter. He would give her even odds against her brother the Lionheart.

C HAPTER F IVE
    “T hirty thousand?” Richard asked. “He’s sure of that?”
    “He heard the sultan say it,” Sioned said.
    Her brother had roused instantly at her touch, neither startled nor dismayed to find her bending over him in the dimness of his tent. His squires were deep asleep near the walls, and Blondel the singer snored softly at his feet.
    She did not tell him how she had got in past the guards, and he did not ask. Still less did either of them mention that the last he knew, she had been safe among the ladies in Acre. It would have been belaboring the obvious for her to point out that there was no sending her back now—she would have had to ride through the whole army of Islam.
    She would pay that piper later, she knew very well. For now, she was safe. She sat on