Mirrum gave up trying to wound Sybilla after that. To tell the truth she was ashamed, and her spirit recoiled within her at the action. Besides, Sybilla's eyes had been startled, even a little hurt – and they had much the same look as poor Prince Perseus when he thought a whipping was forthcoming for a garbled date in history or a misremembered piece of etiquette.

Mirrum did not want to hurt Sybilla.

I would never have dared to do it to Dame Juliana, Mirrum thought with a pang. I would have got a smart beating myself for my pains. I only dare to do it because Sybilla is kindly, and vulnerable, and because I am selfish and sullen and vain and I have not been to confession for nigh two weeks, and I am sure that this is mortal sin, and it can't be a... a... sin of necessity. To dwell so long on things. And Sybilla deserves to be happy, deserves to have the chance to love a little. Love is important. And I think Sybilla needs love, even if loving poor Lord Balian is like a moth loving a candle-flame. Does it matter if the flame loves the moth in return? He is good. Perhaps too good.

That, indeed, seemed to be part of the reason for the lengthy stay at Ibelin. It was not for lack of inclination – Sybilla could have happily dwelt there for ever. You could see it in her face. Sybilla laughing at small, mud-stained children dabbling their hands in the stream. Sybilla, sipping wine as Mirrum and Ammet fumbled in a teasing wind with an awning to protect Sybilla's pale skin from further freckles. Sybilla looking pensive, a little sad, as she watched Ammet loop whorls of henna-ed dots around her fingers and palms in an intricate spiral that seemed to mimic the Danse Macabre painted on the solar wall.

But Lord Balian was clearly... different to anyone Sybilla could have chosen in court. And it was because of his quiet, wary difference that Mirrum wondered. He was courtesy itself; ever the polite, accommodating host. Sometimes even an uncertain host, when Sybilla tested the boundaries of daring; slyly brushing his fingers as they dined, occasionally approaching her lips to his ear as she leant over to speak of some amusing gossip of the Court. But...

Lord Balian was different in that he was a good man. Not innocent exactly – wary if he was politically unsure of where to tread. But he loved the land with something Mirrum recognised from home. It was an earth-passion. It was his, and because it was his he would work for it, help it, coax it into something different from the dry, poor little patch of dust it had been, make it grow verdant, into the strange, unhealthy lushness of the East Mirrum had never grown used to. Sybilla plainly loved him for it. She could imagine herself happy here. Mirrum thought she could guess that Sybilla was pretending to herself she was mistress of Ibelin. And Balian.

And yet he avoided trespassing into the love of a Princess...

Sybilla stirred, restlessly, and turned to one side, scrabbling her fingers impatiently.

'My lady, you move.' Ammet said reproachfully. The paint will smear if you twitch so!'

'What?' Sybilla withdrew her gaze from the middle distance. 'Oh. Yes.'

Ammet prepared Sybilla's hands with deep concentration and a goose-feather quill, occasionally breaking off to dip the tip in a little clay saucer filled with the dye. Mirrum watched in fascination. She was not yet proficient enough in the art of a handmaiden to attempt it, yet – although she hoped to do well. Writing was surely excellent practice for making the little pin-pricks of ink marking Sybilla's long fingers...

Something prodded Mirrum, sharply. Whether by accident or design, Ammet had pricked the back of Mirrum's hand as she loaded her quill with henna. Her eyes flickered meaningfully towards the dish.

There was a roll of old rag there. Ammet used it to clean the quill when she burdened it with too much dye.

Mirrum's hand edged crabwise towards it –

'You leave my hair in disarray, Mirrum,' Sybilla said, without turning her head. 'If you feel idle you might dress it for me.'

'I beg pardon, my lady.' Mirrum turned, a picture of bewildered frowsy innocence. 'I shall braid it for you –'

'No – arrange the combs, that is all. Let it lie loose.' Sybilla raised a hand to pat the tendrils at her temple – delicate wisps of fine dark hair. 'I shall not require your services tonight, ladies. You are entirely at leisure.'

Ammet paused, feather in hand. 'You do not wish us to attire you for the evening?'

'I can be my own handmaiden,' Sybilla said, with some little frowning asperity directed towards Ammet. 'I have two hands, as do you. It's an idle fancy for solitude, no more.'

Mirrum paused, comb in hand – and then carefully slid it into Sybilla's hair, pretending she was a wooden doll again.

An idle fancy for solitude!

Ammet made fierce eyes at the rag, and then at Mirrum, deftly snatching the last comb from Mirrum's fingers. 'She is out of practice, my lady – allow me to arrange your hair.'

Mirrum withdrew, silent as a wraith – but a wraith that had picked up the little dish of henna, then goose-feather quill... and the rag.

Ammet had daubed in straggling Frankish letters a crude message on the linen.

OUR MIDNIGHT WALK IS TONIGHT. MOONRISE. BE THERE.

It was late – very late, when Ammet returned from Sybilla's chambers. Apparently Sybilla had changed her mind about attiring herself, and for once Ammet had been silently complicit in Sybilla's confidences. She said nothing when she returned to the little whitewashed cell that was their quarters.

'Is it far past moonrise?' she said, with a pinched, anxious face.

'Not much.' Mirrum was fully dressed and wary. 'Why all the mystery, Ammet? Why do I need to accompany you?'

'You don't have to come.' Ammet said, turning and planting herself squarely in front of her. 'But I'd like it if you did. As friends. No harm to you.'

'As friends.' Mirrum repeated.

'We must walk a little way from Ibelin.' Ammet was feverishly gathering together her bedroll, heaping what few possessions she had into the roll. Mirrum noticed a flash of silver that must have been the knife vanish into the parcelled fabric; so she had had one after all. 'Not far. Just outside the walls.'

'Why...'

Ammet looked up. 'I'm not coming back, Mirrum.' She said, with a dark smile. 'You're hopeless as a handmaiden, but I'm sure you'll learn, and you're cleverer with Sybilla than I am. She'll not miss me . This was the best possible way it could have turned out, really ... What's one maiden more or less in a retinue? In Jerusalem it would have meant...questions.'

'You're leaving?' Mirrum's stomach, to her surprise, pulled in tight, curdling in dismay. 'Forever, then...?'

'Why, I do believe you'll miss me!' Ammet said in surprise. There was the hint of a saddened smile turning up the corners of her mouth. 'I'll miss you too, Mirrum. In fact I ...No, I have nothing to stay for now.' She half-smiled. 'Come. Walk with me. I'll show you all.'

Ibelin was beautiful under the night sky. The dust of the earth became an indistinct grey veil beneath a sky that was like a spilt bolt of Sybilla's silks. It was a dreamy, gauzy blue– and gilded here and there by a seam of starry constellation. At any other time, it would have taken Mirrum's breath away. It held all the mysterious beauty of Eastern nature in one soft horizon.

But tonight was a night to follow with watchful step and quick breath in Ammet's wake – to start with jarring nerves at a dog barking, the clang of a fallen cooking pot, a light – sudden, faint, but then out again.

'Peace! It might be him... ah, no. It is too close.' Ammet sounded disappointed. 'He is no fool to venture near to discovery.'

She half-turned. 'You must be curious as to who I mean. Well – it's not just you and Sybilla that...' Ammet's breath snagged in her throat. 'A light! He's here!'

On the far horizon, almost at the point where earth met sky in the middle distance, there flickered a pin-prick of wavering light. Bit it dipped sharply – twice, three times – too regularly to be purely by accident.

It was a signal.

Ammet let out a strangled exclamation that was half-exasperation, half-joy, and stumbled towards it as though angels were lifting her heels. 'He's here! He came!'

It was a knight – a mailed, motionless figure that at first seemed to be carved out of black granite, grim and stern. But at Ammet's cry and hurried pace, the silhouette melted into anxious haste, very nearly rode Ammet down with the pace at which he urged on his mount, and then they met in a tumble of quick paced Arabic and a sudden , fervent embrace that spoke too plainly of the reason behind the mystery. Ammet was right. It wasn't just Sybilla and Mirrum who had secrets. Ammet had a secret too.

Not a Frankish secret. The face that looked up was that of a Saracen. A well-favoured Saracen, Mirrum had to admit – with a touch of the instant assessment peculiar to women everywhere. Ammet's knight had a quick, intelligent face, with a mouth that seemed always about to smile through his beard. Although he had started suspiciously at the sight of a pale Frankish girl peering at Ammet over his shoulder, one hand flying to the hilt of his sword.

'Who is –'

'I have told you of her, my lord,' Ammet said breathlessly, staring at him. Mirrum almost wondered if there was a second meaning there. 'She is my ally and my friend. We discovered each other here at Ibelin, didn't we, Mirrum? She only guessed before. She came with me in good faith before we had to part... and I owe her a little truth.' Ammet turned her head to incline slightly on a steel-clad shoulder. A very slight motion, but it only wanted the flash of soft tenderness from the eyes of the knight to complete the picture. 'You see, Mirrum... this is my intended. My future husband.'

'Your servant, mistress,' the 'intended' interjected swiftly. 'If Lord Imad can do aught to serve one who has been friend to his bride...'

'I...well... I...' Mirrum faltered, her command of Arabic utterly lost. 'You're... you're of the Saracen army!'

'Indeed,' Imad said solemnly, in near perfect Norman French. There was an absurd riotous twinkle in one fine brown eye that suggested he found the situation amusing – as much in his own knight-errant gallantry as anything else. It was a gleam of self-mockery. 'I am both Syrian lord and rash lover when the mood takes me, so it would seem.'

'I must explain!' Ammet said eagerly.

The story came like sieved grains of sand. Ammet had chosen her honourable position of spy over a marriage chosen by her family – honourable enough, but she had not liked the making of it, and she had been stubborn as a colt. And Imad had been indifferent to the whole process, idly ready for a marriage, not particularly enthused as to his new bride, but amicable enough.

'Until I refused him,' Ammet said happily. 'He grew quite indignant then – fancied I was an insufferable little chit, to choose danger and death over something so trifling as a husband –'

'My estimation of you has not changed.' Imad remarked calmly. 'You are still an insufferable little chit –'

'Peace! Let me finish!'

Ammet's family had not been happy with her postponement; for the marriage was delayed a twelvemonth until she should have better served her allegiance. But they allowed her the breathing space. Indeed, when referred to Lord Salahuddin, he had proved strikingly content with the arrangement...

Something to do, no doubt, with the fact that Lord Imad used his trifling 'practical philosophy' to take a look at the girl who had so flatly refused marriage with him. He went – oh yes. Under pretence of protecting the caravan. He went disguised as a servant in her retinue to Jerusalem , and a trusted underling in embroidered robes befitting a Syrian lord. His companion made little headway, trapped as he was in the stiff formality of lord to maiden. But in the process his witty, handsome manservant made a great impression on the haughty girl, and by the end of it –

Well, Ammet had been saddened to think the wry, genial man with the fine laugh and the mocking eyes was gone forever, never to be thought of again. Only he returned, again, and again, and pleaded his Lord's suit with eyes so eloquent that Ammet was for a time made very miserable. She believed herself in love with a servant, after all. It was only when he discovered her torment that he eventually undeceived her. Helped her. Became a silent, devoted ally, determined not to let his bride be discovered as a spy.

It was how he had been tempted into 'experimentation' on the return journey with a certain Frankish baron, although Mirrum never heard that tale. It remained a closed book to her. But Ammet's tale – the very presence in the weak torchlight, the mailed rider, the darkness all seemed faintly unreal to Mirrum – a crazed fragment of dream, or a piece of a story like something strolling players might invent. It smacked not a little of the sort of 'romaunt' jongleurs might well sing at banquet. Surely servants were not lords in disguise? How could she have not known?

But she was bewildered, tired beyond measure, and perhaps she was not so alert as she might have been outside the dreamy air of Ibelin. She did no more than nod, dumbly, and look on with pleased eyes. Even Ammet seemed faintly unreal to her now – a character sang straight out of the romances of Tristan and Iseult.

'I am glad you are happy,' she said, for want of anything else to say. 'Both of you. And – I ...'

She faltered, suddenly. A dreadful thought had loomed up out of the bewilderment that halted all congratulations.

'How is it you are here?' she said sharply. 'Ammet – you have not had time to send word! There is no...'

Both faces looked gravely back at her.

'Well,' Ammet said slowly. 'I was rather... hoping that you might come with me. I go to my kinsman's house in Damascus – I do not hope to be wed until war is... done with.'

'But there is a truce –'

'Not now.' Imad said calmly. ' Yesterday perhaps, was different, but no longer. My Lord Salahuddin has crossed the Jordan. It was convenient for me – I expected it. And thought it best to manage tonight.'

'We're at war?' Mirrum's heart lurched, horribly. War was a subject with which the chronicles had not spared detail. Vague scraps of old horrors floated in a whirl around her head, in no order.

'...And in the sacking of Troy they left none alive...'

'...captured the women...'

'Put to the sword the townspeople, sparing none, amongst all their cries for mercy...'

'threw the infant son of Hector from the ramparts...'

Mirrum had a sudden, sickening picture of little Prince Perseus's crumpled body flying through the air, Sybilla dragged shrieking away by her long dark hair. Her look of horror seemed to urge Ammet onwards.

'You could be my handmaiden!' she said coaxingly. 'See me wed – be friends! I'd see no harm came to you; you have helped me. You kept my secret. You'd be treated with kindness – I'd not meddle like Sybilla –'

'I care for Sybilla too!' Mirrum croaked.

'Bah! She's of Royal blood! Precious little happens to those who are worth something!' Ammet snorted. 'Reynaud of Chatillon's destroyed your old life for you – and mine. Come with me! You'd be safe – Mirrum, war is not kind to common women. Sybilla will go to Kerak, Mirrum – you're laid in the path of danger –

'So is Sybilla!'

'I care nothing for her! She discards waiting women like broken toys!' Ammet stopped, looked at Mirrum's tightly drawn face, and then changed tactics. 'She ruined any hopes you might have had of love, or marriage.' She said quietly. 'I know. I saw.'

Mirrum ducked her head to try and hide her expression with her cloud of hair, the lines growing tauter in her face. 'You didn't, Ammet.' She said, clutching a fistful of gown convulsively in one hand. 'You didn't see at all. And neither did Sybilla. But I don't hate her for it.'

'How-?'

'She didn't understand,' Mirrum said stoutly. 'Because she wasn't in love then. She didn't know how it was. And she's too lost. I couldn't leave her, Ammet. I owe her loyalty. She's uncertain and careless sometimes, because she feels alone but – imagine if she were totally forsaken? I couldn't-' Mirrum's tone grew firmer. 'I won't. She made me what I am. I bide by her.'

'Even to death?'

'If – if that is what will happen, yes. I think I do,' Mirrum said thoughtfully. A few weeks ago she would have resented the idea.

Ammet looked mutinous. 'But –'

'Let alone,' Imad interposed quietly, looking at Mirrum's face. 'She has made her choice, and I respect you for your fealty, lady. I hope you live to profit by it.'

Mirrum bowed her head. 'I hope I do too, sirrah.'

Ammet was looking away, her shoulders heaving. Ammet had always seemed such a fierce, unapproachable person, Mirrum scarcely knew what to say; but she was suddenly very painfully certain Ammet was crying stubbornly into the horse's saddle-cloth.

'Ammet?'

'What?' Ammet said ungraciously. 'It's the wind, blowing dust in my eyes.'

'Say we can part-' Mirrum swallowed. '-as friends?'

For one long, breathless moment it seemed as though Ammet would not answer her. Then, as Mirrum sagged a little in mournful anticipation...

'Friends, you little goose? Of course we're friends!' Ammet turned with a forced smile that wobbled into a woebegone look as she gingerly patted Mirrum's thin shoulder. 'I just... hoped you might have come...'

She dried her eyes. 'There, I'm myself again!' she said fiercely, as though daring the silent lord to contradict her. Imad did not; merely glanced at her with a kindly, vaguely pitying look as he hauled her up into the saddle. 'Think of me, Mirrum. I'll pray for you –'

The horse, annoyed at being stationery so long, broke into a canter that sprayed desert dust into Mirrum's face with flying hooves. By the time she had wiped it from her face Ammet was no more than a retreating dot on the horizon, the faint sickly gleam of almost-dawnlight showing Ammet's lord.

They didn't look back.

Mirrum was left with the light. The rushes were charred almost to Mirrum's hand. Well, no matter – there was light enough to make her way back to Ibelin.

Sybilla.

Mirrum broke into a half-run. Kerak, battles, sieges – the ever present pathetic spectre of Prince Perseus caught up in some horror of battle. The sad fate of Astyanax in the Iliad must have affected her more than she had thought. She must warn Sybilla! She must tell her –

Tell her what? A spiteful voice said in the recesses of Mirrum's brain. That you've helped an enemy of Jerusalem, that you're a true traitor now? You think she'll look kindly on that? What other excuse would she believe, that you have so much knowledge? How else will you explain Ammet's absence?

Mirrum fell over a jagged stone that had snagged her skirts and got up sobbing, knees scraped and bloodied. There was no warning she could give. Like Cassandra, she knew too much and could say too little. There was so little chance of going back to Jerusalem now. It would be too late...

'I can try,' Mirrum thought. She did not say it; it would have emerged as a desolate whimper, far too dispiriting. It had more power as a thought. I can but try...