Manfred break with Sophia. Of course, Manfred
would never be willing to admit that his wife could force him to do such
a thing.

She wanted to get off by herself and think this out, and cry, let tears
release some of the pain she felt. This curtained bed confined her like
a dungeon cell. She found her white shift amid the rumpled bedclothes.
Getting up on her knees, she raised the shift over her head and
struggled into it.

"Where are you going?" Manfred asked.

She crawled around the bed to look for her gown and her belt. "I have
arrangements to make. Packing to do."

"I have not dismissed you," he said a bit sullenly.

"Yes, you have," she said, deliberately making her voice so low that it
would be hard for him to hear.

"You have not heard everything." He took her arm. She wanted to pull
away, but she let him hold her.

"I need your help," he went on. "You see, if David fails, in a year or
two I may be dead."

He let go of her. She picked up the blue gown she had so eagerly thrown
off an hour ago. Her fingers crushed the silk. She wanted to be alone,
but she needed to learn more. She paused, kneeling beside him.

"God forbid, Sire! Why should you be dead?"

"This time the pope is offering my crown to the French."

Sitting down, laying the gown in her lap, she sighed and turned all her
attention to him.

"Why can you not make peace with the pope? Why is he so determined to
dethrone you?"

"Like all storied feuds, it goes back so far that no one can remember
what started it," said Manfred, smiling with his lips but not his eyes.
"At present the pope refuses to recognize me because my father promised
to give up the crown of Sicily."

He paused a moment, and fixed her with a strangely intent stare. "And
because my father did not marry my mother. Even though he loved her
only, and never loved any of his three empresses."

_He is trying to tell me something_, Sophia thought.

But before she could reply, he went on with his tale of the
Hohenstaufens and the popes. "As the popes see it, to have a
Hohenstaufen ruling southern Italy and Sicily is like having a knife at
their throats. This pope, Urban, is a Frenchman, and he is trying to get
the French to help him drive us out."

The French. It was the French who, over fifty years ago, had stormed
Constantinople, looted it, and ruled over it until driven out by Michael
Paleologos.

And now the French threatened Manfred.

From his island of Sicily, how