Author's notes: Movieverse to a staggering degree, but if it sounds plausible for the movie characters, that's good enough for me.

Rated T – emphatically so – for warped ethics and for referring to sex both marital and extramarital. In fact I'm not entirely sure if this is still within the parameters set by this archive. Personally I think it is – worse things have been aired on Buffy – but I'll make its continued availability here dependent on reactions. The moment the first person objects, this story will be revised and the original version removed to a LJ.

She had done many things. But she had never betrayed her husband before. Sibylla after Ibelin.

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Crossroads

It would have to be tonight she knew, and so she had made sure they would dine together, in their own chambers. Once her lord joined the courtiers down at the King's table there was no telling what would happen. Politics, some quarrel, some crisis – she just couldn't be sure he would return. Talk was bound to be about Kerak; tempers were bound to flare. Thus, preparations had to be made. The meal would have to be excellent but not so elaborate as to arouse suspicion. She had settled it all with the servants she believed.

Then she had bathed. Told Rasha to rub her skin with almond oil and pay special attention to her hair. And then there had been the question of what to wear.

Kohl, lots of it. The murrey dress, white underdress, and perfume. Her hand hovering over the small bottles, she settled for rose. One drop went straight between her breasts.

It had to happen tonight. There was no more time. Tomorrow he might be off again on business of his own; she might not have another chance.

The Princess of Jerusalem could do many things. But to be pregnant with another man's child... that was not one of them.

She could not risk it. She did not know, but she could not risk it. She had done many things, but this did not touch her alone. This might touch the royal family. It might touch her brother and the kingdom. And it might touch a man who was not part of all of this. This could destroy them all, and him along with them.

Earrings – the heavy golden ones with garnets. She slipped some bangles over her wrists; the sound was pretty. Not too much jewelry, though, this was a quiet evening with her husband...

It was up to her now. She would have expected to be frightened at the knowledge, at all the things that might depend on this. But she was calm.

She reached for the girdle he had given her, with the silver disks that had been ancient coins, and nodded at her reflection in the mirror.

He came in a little later. She heard him calling for the servants from the hall, ordering a bath to be prepared, and fresh clothes. How odd, as she had thought before, that he had taken to the ways of the East so readily, and still despised those whose ways they were. Still, she did not complain. She had a husband who liked to bathe. Many of those newly arrived from Europe did not bathe, and it was not hard to tell.

She got to her feet, and went out into the hall and across it into the parlor, and there poured wine into a silver cup.

x x x

"That pup of Godfrey's – he'll think he's something now. Tiberias was making sure of that. Just what we need, another Muslim-lover pushing for advancement." Not and getting it, she thought, and no mention of the King; he had learned not to test her loyalties. She smiled, raising one shoulder and dropping it, a gesture lenient and graceful both.

"He's just a boy."

He frowned slightly. "He must be around your age."

"As I said", she said, very dryly. "Just a boy."

He grinned at that – she had known that would go down well. And reached out to catch her girdle as she passed, wrapping the end of it around his hand, pulling her closer. "You women. At a boy's age, you know more than any staid man –"

She let him draw her to his knee, smiling down into his upturned face – wryly, as if somewhat against her will; he would not have believed a too-radiant smile, he was not that kind of fool. Such a handsome face it was. In moments like this she remembered that things had not always been the way they were. Sometimes it made her sad – how long had it been? More years than she liked to count – and sometimes, rarely, sad enough to allow things to happen that she would regret on the morning. Not because her conjugal duties were too loathsome to recall, but it did mean that she would have to start afresh. She was a dutiful wife when she had to be, but not a loving one. He liked to forget it, sometimes. She did not.

Sometimes she was so tired of having to wear all those faces, she could no longer remember which was hers. She did remember that she had not thought about that at all when she had come to Balian. It had felt... right. She had sought that, she thought. Not having to choose what to say and how to say it. She had not felt that for a long time.

And how could she think like this, while sitting on her husband's knee and feeling his hands close round her waist?

She had done many things. But she had never betrayed her husband before.

Why did what she was doing now seem even more like a betrayal?

And must he say now: "Get yourself some wine too", grinning up at her and flicking one of her earrings as he liked to do to set it dancing? Didn't he suspect her, at all? She knew what he did – didn't he wonder what she had been up to while he had been off raiding caravans? She knew he went to other women – well, his bed at home was seldom warm – didn't he wonder at her willingness? Could it really be so easy – was he still taken with her, still?

"I told them to serve dinner about now", she murmured as his hands slid upwards from her waist.

A moment later she very nearly bit her lip. Don't delay, you fool. Something may still come up... But for a moment there she had been thinking: I cannot do this. And now she thought: Don't heed me, go ahead, it is your right...

"Ah, well." He set her on her feet. "I know what I'd like for dinner. But by all means, let's eat first."

They ate. He spoke of Kerak, careful not to be too disparaging or too angry in his words. It still came through in every breath he took. Again. Almost, almost we had them, so close we were, and then... again. And then he spoke of the army, of its magnificence, rank upon rank and banners waving...

She knew. She had seen. For every man we lose, they could lose five, her brother had said once, in court and angrily. But still, the sight had lifted her heart too.

And so she nodded and lowered her lashes, smiling into her goblet, knowing she looked lovely when she did. One sip, no more. He might drink, but she would not. She felt his eyes on her, gleaming in the braziers' light, and suppressed a shiver. It reminded her of the man she had been with. The reason, all the reasons she was doing this. Just a boy.

In fact he was not a boy. He was her brother's age – a little more, she rather thought. He'd had a wife and child back in France. A smithy. She had wondered what it must be like, working that smithy and then being told there was a barony waiting across the sea. She had asked Hospitaller if he had seemed resentful.

Not much, not long, Hospitaller had said, but then there was little left of his life there. "And I think", he had added, with that wry little smile, "I think he was waiting for a reason to leave."

It must have been bad, bad beyond mending, she thought, if a man like that had wanted a reason to leave. He had struck her as a man who would quietly take on almost anything, and just as quietly seek to make it better. That strip of rock and dust that was Ibelin, for one. She shivered again. There had been a quietness to the place, serene, as if they were at peace there with themselves, they and their young master...

Was that what had drawn her?

Something had, from the first moment.

There was a rawness about him that was not coarseness. He might say little, but the eyes were quietly watchful. He clearly did not know how to speak to a princess, but the way he ended up speaking to her pleased her.

She would have given much to be present at the audience that evening. To see how those two would respond to one another. Her brother would see Godfrey's son she knew. She, by that time, saw Balian. She had loved Godfrey, yes, but he had never been as close to her... and truth be told, she did not know her brother's heart any more.

It had been too long. She barely remembered his face. She did not know what people were to him these days – his onetime tutor, his tutor's son. His sister. They had grown so far apart, she was uneasy to be in the same room with him – a thing that came to pass once a month maybe, if that, and was not of her doing when it did occur.

She knew she had loved him once. She believed she loved him still, even if it was not love she felt during those strange encounters. But she could no longer remember when he had become a white apparition, and she... she had become the gay Princess of Jerusalem. Gay and fierce. Horse and hounds and falcon; cloak streaming in a wind of her own making, a laugh and gone. Respectable people at court and in the city frowned at her ways; she knew that. It amused her, and sometimes it stung and irritated her, but really she could not be bothered.

It would end soon enough. She just did not know when. Nobody did. Except, perhaps, her brother. And maybe, just maybe Tiberias.

She did not want to think of what would come. Nothing she could do would keep it away. She dreaded it, and then sometimes she almost wished that it would come to it, and show its face, and then the waiting, the endless waiting would be over. She would be Queen, no longer Princess. And then perhaps, things being expected of her, she would know what to do.

But she did not know and did not want to know, and nothing was expected of her except to wait. And so she rode and laughed and hunted. Defied her husband by consorting with infidels and those he called traitors to Christendom, and all that was proper as often as she could. Unpredictable, Tiberias called it. She had a feeling he meant more than that, a feeling he meant things she would not like to hear, but unpredictable was what he said, and that she could live with.

It was true, too. Sometimes she did not understand the workings of her own mind. Going to Ibelin on the strength of two brief encounters – what had she been thinking?

Yet she had found what she had sought. And whatever that might be, it was not mere carnal pleasure. Though that had been considerable.

That she had known. That they would be like flame and tinder together. Once he had understood why it was that she had come, and that yes, she was serious.

Not a boy. No.

"You're quiet", he said abruptly from across the low table, and she started, feeling her cheeks flame. A moment later he began to laugh.

"There are still some things you want of me I see", he said, still chuckling. And at that moment, with the resentment and the pity, the regret and bitterness and despair, the vast hollow yearning inside, she wanted to cry.

I cannot do this.

But she could, and she would. She had started it. It was up to her now, and he need never know. She smiled, putting the fading blush to good use, and raised her cup in a tiny salute. You'll do this properly and make it worth his while, at least...

Oh God, that she could have the years back.

Guy was chosen by my mother. I was fifteen.

Both true. What she hadn't said was that she had had no quarrel with her mother's choice then. He was older than she was. Handsome and strong, and wore his armor well. The room he entered seemed to shrink around him. He was a man who knew what he wanted. And what he wanted was she.

She liked his easy laughter, the way he courted her – they both knew the decision had been made, but he courted her like the princess she was, proudly and with an underlying earnestness. He knew what he had, and let her know that he knew. She liked the way he handed her up on her horse, and down from it. She liked his hands on her, the way they made her shiver. She had been looking forward to the wedding, to being handled less properly, and she had not been disappointed.

That had come later, slowly. When his talk of what needed to be done had first made her uncomfortable, and she did not know what to say and whose eyes to meet. When he spoke easily of the time they would be the King and Queen of Jerusalem, and she thought that her brother would have to die first, and that apparently she should be looking forward to it. When she pondered that if she was to take her husband at his word, her own falconer and the little old sweetmeat-seller who always pretended not to know who she was would have to be among those to be put to the sword too. When he laughed good-naturedly at her halting Arabic, at once proud of her and disdainful.

When things began to grate and chafe and his laugh was no longer pleasant to her, and she had fought not to think Fool, not even to herself.

The first time she watched from the gallery as he clashed openly with the King, in court, for all to hear and see, she had been furiously ashamed, and had not known who to be most ashamed for.

Her brother had not been so fragile then. She remembered the voices rising from the courtyard, her husband's bluster and the icy snarl that answered it, and the my sister and my wife, and the but while I live you will obey, and she had hidden her face although there was no one to see, and had thought Stop it – my God, why don't you stop it. She had been eighteen.

It had not stopped there. Although the clashes had grown rare and quiet. She knew what her husband thought. What her brother thought... it was a long time since she had even asked.

Still, it was he she had thought of first in this. This must not reach him or This must not touch him, whichever had been foremost in her mind. Strangers they might have become, her love for him a thing she remembered more than felt, but the King of Jerusalem must not be tainted.

Even if it was the thought of Balian that had told her what she must do.

It had been her doing. Hers alone. By himself, he would never have touched her. And so it was for her to see that he did not come to any harm for her sake. That neither of them did.

She reached out to take a candied almond, and brought it to her lips, and in the firelight met her husband's gaze over the sweet before putting it into her mouth, and biting down.

x x x

She did make it worth his while; she owed him that much. Like a whore, she thought at some stage, halfway out of her dress, his hands rough and competent at the lacings, making sure the customer is satisfied... But when she closed her eyes and thought, not of her husband, nor of Balian, nor of anything but those strong hands, the snap and rustle of silk and laces... she could still summon an answering shiver. There would be enough of it to carry her through.

Like a whore, she thought and almost laughed as he toppled her onto the bed, because she knew so well that this would work, and this, and this –

And she shrieked and dug her heels into her husband's back, nails raking, and thought: All's well. All's well...

-- finis