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“Rhys.” I stopped and fixed him with my best scowl, swordfight-proven. “Let’s not empower fear. The man didn’t even use my name. He may not have even known who I really am.”
“Then how is it that, so soon after the airport, he found you here?”
I looked around us, at a rope of guitars hanging outside one souk and a rainbow of glittering material draped before another, at the press and flow of people all around us. “Well…we wouldn’t have noticed anyone following us around here, that’s for sure.”
“But how is it the man could have followed us in this crowd, and in Cairo traffic? And Maggi, why would he?”
Yeah, that one had me stumped, as well.
“Rings for rings,” called the veiled woman working at the jewelry counter nearby, which made me look down at my left hand.
My breath caught in my throat, stopping as surely as it had when Sinbad shoved his elbow into me. “Unless…”
I could barely form the words. But the sudden rush of possibility was too horrible to keep to myself. “Unless I’m wearing some kind of tracking device.”
“But who could possibly—” Rhys apparently saw how I was staring at the wedding ring.
The one Lex had given me.
Lex, one of the lead members of the Comitatus.
That’s the problem with old wounds. They reopen.
“The guy attacked me with a sword,” I whispered.
Rhys grabbed my hand, PDA or not. “Now wait a moment, Maggi. You were in a shop chockablock with swords. Just because this stranger used one does not mean he’s a member of that secret order.”
Yes, Rhys knew. I hadn’t taken any vows of silence.
“They used ceremonial daggers, didn’t they?”
“There is a difference between the two. Even if there were not, even if the man were—” he lowered his voice “—Comitatus, that could mean Phillip Stuart sent him, not necessarily Lex.”
“But Lex is the only one who could have told Phil, and how else did that man follow us from the airport?” I freed my hand from his and waded through the crowd to the jewelry counter, where I could see the female clerk’s smile in her eyes, over her veil. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “Yes. Rings for rings.”
“I don’t want to buy—well, not a ring,” I decided, since if I wanted help, I couldn’t expect her to give it for free. I glanced impatiently at the cluster of cheap pewter pendants and quickly chose the horned disk that symbolizes Isis. “But I was hoping you could check this ring and tell me if there’s anything strange about it. Anything like a…a tracking device?”
The clerk stared at me blankly, as if disappointed. Apparently her English wasn’t good enough to include tracking device.
Great. “Is this a normal ring?” I tried, tugging the wedding band from my finger and sliding it across the counter toward her.
Then I froze, because of what she’d just slid hopefully across the counter toward me.
A brass chalice-well pendant—two intersecting circles, also called a vesica piscis. Similar to the pendant I already wore, had worn in one version or another since I was fourteen, except for the Arabic flourishes.
Symbol of the Grailkeepers.
Chapter 4
When the hopeful clerk repeated, “Rings for rings,” I finally understood her. I’d simply known the childhood rhyme as Circle to Circle.
But circles, rings…they were all eternal loops. It lost little in translation. And it was a recognition code.
“Never an end,” I greeted softly, purposefully giving the next piece of the Grailkeeper’s chant.
She clearly recognized it. She beamed. I even caught a pale hint of white teeth behind her veil as she reached across the counter and grasped my hand. Her grip was firm. Then her eyes closed and she drew in a long, deep breath, as if savoring…
What? Was she sensing the essence of goddessness that seemed to empower women whom I touched, of late?
It wasn’t like I expected her to rip off her veil and head scarf and demand equal pay for equal work. But when she opened her eyes, all she said was, “It is you!”
Uh-huh… “What is me?”
“You have come to reclaim the sultana’s magic,” she continued. “As in the tales.”
For a moment I had the sick feeling that there was an actual sultana out there somewhere. One more responsibility I hadn’t meant to take on. Then I realized that my word for the position would be queen.
“You mean like the fairy tale, about the queen and her nine daughters?” I asked.
“Seven,” corrected the clerk—but as surely as I’d heard different versions of the story, I’d heard different numbers. Sometimes the queen had as many as thirteen daughters, sometimes as few as three. “Seven beautiful daughters.”
Rhys, behind me, asked, “Does she mean the story where the queen gives her daughters magical cups?”
The clerk’s eyes widened. She backed away two steps, making what I assumed was a protective gesture.
“It’s all right,” I assured her. “His mother is a Grailkeeper.”
She stared at me blankly.
“A…Chalice Keeper,” I tried.
She nodded slowly and said, “A Cup Holder.”
“Um…yeah. A Cup Holder.” Now that one suffered in translation. “He knows the story.”
Pour your powers into these cups, the queen instructs. Hide them so that your energy can live on even though you be forgotten.
The veiled clerk continued to eye Rhys as if he meant to attack her. Or me. With his big, manly hands and all that…testosterone.
“Perhaps I should go look at…yes, there,” said Rhys, choosing the first thing he noticed. “One can’t have enough T-shirts, can one?”
Only after he’d backed away did the “Cup Holder’s” shoulders sink in relief. Poor, gentle Rhys.
“Let me try again,” I said. “Hello. My name is Magdalene Sanger.”
“I is Munira,” said the clerk, clearly pleased. “It is…honor…to meet champion.”
“To meet what?”
“Champion of the Holy One.” She opened her arms toward me, like a tah-dah move. “It is you, is not?”
“I’m looking for goddess cups, but I wouldn’t call myself a champion.” Certainly not the champion.
Even factoring in the number of women who’d forgotten or dismissed the legends, I suspect the number of hereditary Grailkeepers had to count in the hundreds, if not the thousands. The whole world had once worshipped goddesses, after all. We’d just kept such a low profile for so long, we’d lost track of each other.
There still had to be a handful who understood what the stories meant. Not just me.
“Blessings upon you, Champion,” said Munira.
I gave up arguing with her, in favor of better information. “Well…thank you. Would you happen to know where a goddess cup is hidden?”
Like the Isis Grail?
She stared, brow furrowed.
“Did your mother teach you a rhyme or song about where the Holy One’s cup might be waiting?” That’s how most of our knowledge had been kept. Power mongers rarely think to dissect fairy tales or nursery rhymes.
“Ah!” She nodded—and recited something singsong in Arabic.
I smiled a stupid half grin of ignorance, and Munira took pity on me, but her attempt at translating was clearly an effort.
“She…she sleeps, yes?” She mimed closing her eyes, head tipping sideways in illustration. “With no light. She is.”
“She is what?”
Munira shook her head. “She is. And much…always…will she be such.”
Then she nodded at her completely unhelpful attempt, proud of herself. To be fair, her English so far outshone my Arabic that I couldn’t do anything but thank her.
That, and make a mental note to come back with someone—a woman—who was fluent in both languages.
“May she smile upon you,” said Munira—then looked down at the wedding ring I’d set on the counter. “What is you wish for this ring, Champion? You say…trapping?”
No reason to confuse matters with the concept of a tracking device. “Is there anything unusual about this ring? Something that does not belong, embedded in it?”
I felt sick, just having to ask. Lex and I were working on trusting each other, damn it. If it turned out he’d bugged me again, the man would need more than a sword to defend himself.
Munira raised a jeweler’s loupe to her eye, a strange contrast to the veiling, and professionally examined the ring. If there was anything artificial there, she would surely see it.
“It is written,” she said. “Graven?”
“Engraved?”
Nodding, she found a pencil to trace the unfamiliar letters, right to left. They came out sloppy, like a child’s—but again, any attempt I made to write the beautiful flourishes of Arabic would have looked worse. All I needed was legibility.
That’s what I got. Virescit vulnere virtus.
Latin. Something about vulnerability and strength. I’d seen the words before—over Lex’s father’s fireplace.
It was the Stuart clan motto.
“Does this…understand…to you?” she asked, and I nodded tightly. “Is all I see. Is fine ring. Very old. Very expensive.”
So, just for giggles… “How expensive?”
She named a price—in American dollars, not Egyptian pounds—which staggered me. For just gold? No diamonds or anything?
“You have generous husband, no?” she asked.
No. What I had was a contradiction to Lex’s oh-so-casual, standard-for-women-overseas story. Was it also company policy for businesswomen to wear expensive, been-in-the-family-for-generations, complete-with-motto rings?
“We sell much fine jewelry,” offered Munira. “Very low price.” And like that the strange Grailkeeper interlude turned back to the assumed normalcy of souvenir shopping at the Khan el-Khalili.
I’d seen the Pyramids of Giza as we flew in, and caught glimpses while we were in the city, they were so close to urban Cairo. But they were the opposite direction from Alexandria.
The drive had its points of interest, for sure, like the occasional sight of fellahin, or peasant farmers, riding overpacked bicycles, donkeys or even camels down the road. Rhys pointed out the road we would take if I wanted to check out the oldest Christian monastery in existence. But contrasted against pyramids almost anything would seem anticlimactic.
Even speculating about who had attacked me with a scimitar—and what Munira had meant about me being “Champion.”
“Perhaps you’re special,” offered Rhys.
“I’m not special.”
He glanced toward me as if he wanted to contradict that but hesitated from propriety’s sake.
“I mean, I’m no more special than the next person. Certainly no more than the next Grailkeeper.”
“Perhaps you are. That is to say…perhaps you have been somehow chosen. You did find the Melusine Grail. And you did drink from it.”
“My cousin Lil drank from it, too,” I reminded him. “And my friend Sophie, and Aunt Brigitte.”
“That happened some days later, did it not?”
It did, but… “One thing I’ve liked about being a Grailkeeper, ever since I realized the concept was bigger than my grandmother’s old stories, is that there’s no hierarchy. No inner circles. No one woman—one person, I mean—is more important than another.”
“Unlike the Comitatus?” Damn, but Rhys could be insightful when he wanted.
“As far as I can see, the only difference between a secret warrior society and a pyramid scheme—the financial kind—is that nobody tries to sell you anything.”
“Instead, they try to kill you.” Rhys shared my grin, then asked, “Do you still believe that Lex was denied leadership simply because he had leukemia as a child?”
“It makes a weird sort of sense, especially if the order was established during pagan times. An ancient belief equates the health, even the virility, of the land with that of its king. Who knows? That could explain how my country has managed to prosper under presidents who were real hound dogs.”
“But surely if Lex has fully recovered…”
“Oh, he recovered all right.” But thinking about Lex and virility at the same time wasn’t going to uncomplicate anything. Besides, I was still annoyed that he’d tricked me into wearing a family heirloom—so annoyed that I’d taken it off. “I used to wonder why he was so driven to stay in shape. Now I guess I know. But no way would Phil relinquish control that easily. My best guess is that Lex will try for a peaceful coup.”
