The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay

hope.”
    â€œThat would be interesting,” Jehane said calmly, though her heart was beating very fast. He smiled. A moment later she watched him climb down the rough wall to the courtyard. He went through an archway towards the gates without looking back.
    She would have thought she’d won that last exchange, but the smile he’d offered, just before turning to climb down, made her less certain, in the end.
    â€œCare, Jehaa, care,” her father said, from behind her, echoing her own thoughts.
    Feeling frightened again, by many things, Jehane went back to his chair and knelt before it. She put her head in his lap. And after a moment she felt his hands begin to stroke her hair. That had not happened for a long time.
    They were like that when Velaz came for her, having already packed for the road—for both of them. He had arrived, of course, at his own decision on this matter.
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    Some time later, when Jehane was gone, and Velaz, and Husari ibn Musa, the silk merchant who had become, however improbably, a declared conspirator against the Lion of Cartada, strange sounds could be heard emanating from the study of Ishak ben Yonannon, the physician.
    His wife Eliane stood in the corridor outside his closed door and listened as her husband, silent as death for four long years, practised articulating the letters of the alphabet, then struggled with simple words, like a child, learning what he could say and what he could not. It was fully dark outside by then; their daughter, their only child, was somewhere beyond the walls of civilization and safety, where women almost never went, in the wilderness of the wide world. Eliane held a tall, burning candle, and by its light someone watching could have seen a taut anguish to her still-beautiful face as she listened.
    She stood like that a long time before she knocked and entered the room. The shutters were still folded back and the window was open, as Jehane had left them. At the end of a day of death, with the sounds of grief still raw beyond the gates of the Quarter, the stars were serene as ever in the darkening sky, the moons would rise soon, the white one first tonight, and then the blue, and the night breeze would still ease and cool the scorched summer earth where men and women breathed and walked. And spoke.
    â€œEyyia?” said her husband, and Eliane bet Danel heard the mangling of her name as music.
    â€œYou sound like a marsh frog,” she said, moving to stand before his chair.
    By the flickering light she saw him smile.
    â€œWhere have you been?” she asked. “My dear. I’ve needed you so much.”
    â€œEyyia,” he tried again, and stood up. His eyes were black hollows. They would always be hollows.
    He opened his arms and she moved into the space they made in the world, and laying her head against his chest she permitted herself the almost unimaginable luxury of grief.
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    At approximately the same time, their daughter was just outside the city walls negotiating with a number of whores for the purchase of three mules.
    Jehane had known, in fact, of several hidden exits in the city walls. Some of them were too tenuous for a man of Husari’s girth, but there was a place in the Quarter itself, at the northwestern end, where a tree hid a key to a low passage through the stone of the city wall. It was, in the event, a near thing, but Husari was able to squeeze through with help from Velaz.
    As they came out and stood up on the grassy space before the river a woman’s voice—a familiar voice, in fact—said cheerfully in the darkness, “Be welcome, pilgrims. May I lead you to a Garden of Delights such as Ashar only offers to the Dead?”
    â€œHe doesn’t offer it at all to the Kindath,” Jehane replied. “Tonight you could almost tempt me, Jacinto.”
    â€œ Jehane? Doctor?” The woman, scented and gaudily bejewelled, stepped closer. “Forgive me! I didn’t recognize you.