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calm to look at as if a
king dined at their table every day. Aimery, stiffer with pride than with his
new cotte, was there to take the king’s bridle. Joanna took note that he did
not stare, though there was plenty to stare at.
    It was true. They were exactly alike. It was dizzying to see
one on the tall grey gelding and the other on the tall grey mare; one in the
Saracen coat and one in blue embroidered with silver; one bareheaded, the other
with his hood on his shoulders. They had the same long-limbed grace, the same
light touch on the rein, the same effortless ease in the saddle.
    Joanna’s knees wanted to melt. Twins were nothing uncanny.
Aidan’s Kipchaks were imps out of Hades, but they were human enough for all
that.
    These looked it, well enough: tall, white-skinned,
black-haired young men with eagles’ faces. There was a glamour on them,
blurring their fierce alien beauty, dimming the light that shone out of them.
But she knew. She saw what they were, with doubled intensity.
    One of them smiled at her. That was Aidan. It caught her
breath in her throat, and then it steadied her.
    How had she imagined that they were indistinguishable? The
other was quiet, almost muted, with a fierce edge beneath; fiercer maybe than
Aidan’s own. He dismounted without the flourish that his brother put into it,
and greeted her in a voice, with an accent, so like the other’s that she
glanced aside, half expecting trickery.
    The king’s eyes glinted. She smiled before she knew it, and
sank down in the best curtsy she was capable of. His hands as he raised her
were narrow and uncannily strong. Familiar, and utterly different.
    Then he was past, greeting Ranulf, Margaret, the children in
order. There was a gap in the ranks; she looked harder, and it was filled.
Ysabel seemed flushed and a little breathless. Later, Joanna promised herself,
she would find out what the child had been up to.
    “Don’t trouble,” Aidan said in her ear. She started, caught
herself. He was at his ease, damn him, and so happy that he shone. “She was
with us.”
    “All this time? But—”
    “But.” He leaned a fraction closer. Not quite touching. He
never, quite, touched. “No harm done, though one fine day I’ll take a strap to
her. She’s getting too clever for her own good.”
    Ysabel, demure between her smaller, plumper sisters, was
engrossed in the king’s greeting. Joanna’s brows lowered. “I never even knew
that she was gone.”
    “You were busy.” Aidan sighed a little, shrugged. “She did
want to see my brother. I expect she’ll behave herself now that she’s done it.
For a while.”
    “For just as long as it takes her to find some new bit of
mischief.” Joanna drew herself up. Her back was aching. Again. “Enough of that.
Where’s Aimery? Ah. Here, sir, run to the hall and tell the steward to be
ready. We’ll be in directly.”
    She was running away, and he had to know it as well as she.
He did not try to stop her. He never did.
    This time, she supposed, he had cause. Of course the
Assassin would have waited to make her entrance until she could draw every eye.
Shameless though she could be when it pleased her fancy, running about dressed
like a boy, on high occasions she was always the perfect Muslim lady: wrapped,
swathed, and muffled in veils. Only her hands were visible, white and slender,
and her cat-green eyes. No one in the High Court had ever knowingly seen her
face, though once, and only once, they had come close to it: the first time she
went before them and claimed Aidan for her own. But then she had had her back
to them, and only King Baldwin had seen what there was to see, and he was years
dead. They told tales of her, exactly as she intended. That she was hideous, or
hideously scarred. That she was unbearably beautiful. That she had a demon’s
fangs, or a cloven hoof. They never matched the green-eyed Saracen eunuch who
was often in the prince’s company, with the mysterious lady of the Assassins.
    Her