Devil's Bargain by Judith Tarr

would answer; that was her duty. Was she not a teacher?
     
    Safiyah was not in the grove. The path that Sioned had walked every day led to a row of trees laden with ripening fruit. There was no sign that a tent had ever been pitched here.
    Sioned refused to give way to frustration. The lord Saphadin’s camp was protected, which it had not been before. She could pass; she knew the spell that let her walk through without breaking the wards. They sang below the threshold of hearing; they would send word to the one who had cast them that she was in the camp.
    There were no women here. Nor was there any message, any track that she could follow, to find her teacher.
    Sioned considered the number of things that she could do. The most sensible of them was to return to the citadel and join in the daymeal. The most dutiful would be to seek out Master Judah and place herself at his disposal. That in the end was herchoice, not because she was a saint or a loyal servant, but because it would engage her mind. Grinding herbs, mixing potions, seeing to the odd soldier or servant who came wandering in with a sore eye or a cut hand or a toothache, absorbed her completely.
    Darkness took her by surprise. Her sight had been dimming for some time; someone had lit lamps, but they were not near as bright as daylight. She squinted as she wrote out the label for the last pot of salve. When that was done, she set the pot on the shelf with the rest of its fellows, cleaned the pen and put away the ink and straightened, stretching out the kinks in her neck and back.
    Her stomach growled. She had completely forgotten dinner; there would be nothing but leavings now, but one or two of the cooks had been known to set a dish aside for her.
    She had been working in the portion of Master Judah’s tent that was closed off from the rest but open to the air, and she had been alone since she began. When she came through the back of it into the larger space, there was a lone physician making the rounds of the sick—dysentery, mostly, and recurrent fevers—and a cowled monk praying over one who was dying. She drew no notice to herself, but slipped out softly into the scented night.
    It was no longer summer, though a westerner would hardly have called it autumn. The days were still breathlessly hot, but the nights had begun to cool perceptibly. She shivered a little, less with cold than with the pleasure of air that did not sear the skin like heated bronze.
    Any camp of soldiers was a redolent thing, but the physicians tents’ were upwind of the privies, not far from the sea. The fragrance here partook of earth and greenery, ripening fruit, and sea salt, and only a little of overcrowded humanity. Master Judah taught cleanliness by example; soldiers who came here, drawn as much by the absence of stench as by the need for a physician’s services, often went back to their companies with a somewhat less jaundiced attitude toward the necessity ofbathing. Some even ventured the eastern luxury called soap, and found it remarkably pleasant.
    Sioned found the cooks still up and about. Master Jehan, who was an artist with a stewpot, had saved a bowl of his latest creation for her. With the last of the day’s bread and a lump of pungent cheese, it was thoroughly satisfying. “New spices?” she asked as she savored it.
    “New undercook,” Master Jehan said. “He’s half a Saracen. He claims they eat like this in Africa, where the king’s black-eyed boy comes from.”
    “Mustafa?” she asked. “I should ask him. This is lovely.”
    Master Jehan shrugged. “It’s not bad. It could use a little more savory and a little less sweet.”
    She forbore to argue. He was the master, after all. With a full belly and a reasonably contented mind, she turned toward her solitary bed.
     
    He was waiting for her. That was altogether unexpected—so much so that when she saw the lamp lit in the smaller tent that she had so lately left, and the turbaned figure sitting by it, she