He drank the bitter draught, his eyes never leaving hers. And with that act, he knew he bound himself to her without a word spoken between them. He finished it and would have swallowed even more had she commanded him. She eased his head back silently and took the cup away, still never taking her eyes from his. There was no judgment there. The gray of them went on forever, a wide mirror that held his entire life spread out before him like a landscape he could walk into.

Fever dreams. It was only the fever, and he prayed it would take him away, some place she could not look at him again.

Lemons and pomegranates and death, he wanted to laugh as his eyelids drifted closed. Prayers and angels and fear of an absent God. Better to hurry up and die now, before this sudden attack of religion made a monk of him. Almost he could laugh at the thought, of what all England would say if Ranulf of Morency should ever even attend the Mass. Come to pilfer the chalice, is what they’d say. The corners of his mouth lifted in a smile at that, until his eyes opened and found hers again – her eyes and everything in them. She watched him, unmoving. He could not ever remember being watched so closely, ever in his life.

If she was an angel, it was not deliverance she offered, but the hard and unbending truth of what he was. It was not a new truth to him, nor anything he had hidden from himself. But he did not care to look long at the truth of his life.

He let his eyelids fall and closed off the sight of it all reflected in her eyes. He gave himself to the fever and shut out this thing he had bound himself to, trying not to wonder what angel she was – salvation or vengeance or reckoning, or all of them.

There was no way to tell how long he slept in fevered dreams. Images came to him and wove past and present together. One minute he was bumping along a dirt track, carried by unseen hands as he stared at the trees and sky above. In his more lucid moments, he recognized that he’d arrived at this unknown destination, in a bed of some sort. But then the dreams would take him, and the journey became his race to take sail for the Holy Land. Sometimes this dark and smoky place where hellfire licked at him became also that darkened bed chamber. He was an old man curled in sleep, and he was the sword that hovered over the man in the bed, and he waited – then and now – to die.