by Somaiya Daud
The falconer smiled at her and Maram felt that rush of lightning again. Her fists clenched in anger.
“Come here at dawn and I’ll show you.”
4
I thought with the wedding over and my part finished I might be given a reprieve. I returned to my chambers in the early hours of the morning free of the weight of Maram’s jewelry and heavy wedding regalia. I bathed and broke my fast, then settled down to work on my tapestry. I had only just picked up my loom when Tala arrived.
“Her Highness has summoned you to her chambers,” she said, holding out a cloak and veil.
I frowned, startled. “What for?” She had done this once before, in the days just after my return to Gibra. Then it had been boredom, but what a new bride could be bored of was beyond me.
“She would not tell me, Amani,” Tala said, and shook the cloak at me. “But she was insistent both that I retrieve you and that I do so with all possible secrecy and haste.”
My eyebrows rose. “Secrecy?”
“Amani,” Tala snapped, and my eyebrows rose higher. She was never short with me. “Please. I did not like how insistent she was, and you know how she is.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, standing. “You’re right. I just—what could she possibly want?”
“I cannot imagine,” Tala replied as she draped the mantle over my shoulders. “You know her better than I do.”
* * *
Maram stood as she had that long-ago day, one hand braced on the stone balustrade of her balcony, the other twisted in the folds of her skirt, robed in finery and gold. She was limned by the golden afternoon light, her body framed by the out-of-season greenery of her garden’s treetops rising into the air behind her. Her body was as still as a statue, her expression stoic and regal as if she’d stepped out of a painting of antiquity. She wore a mask, when she rarely needed to with me. Her rage or her happiness—what I saw was of little consequence, for I could relay it to no one, nor could I use it against her.
I sank to my knees, mind racing. It had seemed to me the last time I’d seen her that she wanted nothing to do with me. But here she was now, without her stewardess, and quick on her heels was an air of secrecy.
“Your Highness,” I greeted her as I came to my feet. “Is anything amiss?”
“Why should anything be the matter?” she said.
I would have agreed except for the hollow ring of her voice.
“Have I displeased you in some way, Your Highness?”
“I do not think of you enough for you to displease me, Amani,” she said, voice cool. “I have summoned you to give you another assignment.”
My eyebrows rose. “Assignment?”
“You are to take my place tonight,” she said, turning away from me.
“Tonight?”
“Are you a parrot?” she snapped. “Yes. The wedding procession into the marriage bed.”
I could not stop the surprised laugh that came out of me. “You can’t be serious.”
“I didn’t think your duty was a laughing matter.”
I stared at her, bewildered. The wedding procession to the marriage bed was the consummation night. It was not a festival or a dinner or any other engagement for which I was prepared to take her place. It was a private family affair—the bride waited for her husband as he was escorted to their new and shared bedchamber. There was no risk of harm—certainly not enough to invoke her shield. And she had come here alone, without Nadine.
Something clicked into place. Nadine did not know.
Regardless, I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.
“No.”
“You are refusing a royal command—”
“I am a shield, not a doll,” I said.
“Amani—” I ignored the way her face had drained of color, the way my name came out of her mouth: small and frightened. I’d rarely felt rage as I did then, but my grief had given way to it, at long last. Had I become so small in Maram’s mind that she might barter my body for her own peace of mind on her wedding night? She didn’t know that I loved him—and even if she had, the marriage was done. The marriage bed belonged to Maram, and I would not enter it.
“Idris is your husband,” I said, forcing my voice to be even. “It is your duty to consummate the marriage.”
“You don’t understand—!”
“Explain it to me then.” I was dangerously close to yelling. “You are asking me to be you on a night you are expected to bed him. Have I fallen so low in your mind that you would prostitute me?”
My rage had at last eclipsed my sense.
Her eyes glimmered in the light of her room and searched my face as if she might find softness or weakness. She would find neither.
She stepped back. Her shoulders sagged as if strings that held her up had been cut, and she sank down onto a bench on the balcony.
My rage did not disappear entirely, but I felt fatigue take its place. I sighed as I sat down beside her.
“Why don’t you want to go to your wedding night?”
She huffed a nervous laugh. “I just … I can’t explain it. All my life I’ve known I would have to lie with a man.” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “I can’t do it.”
My eyebrows rose. “Idris is widely regarded as one of the best-looking young men on the planet,” I said. “More importantly for you, he is kind and cares about you. He would never harm you.”
“You don’t understand,” she whispered and shook her head. I watched her hands, twined around one another, white knuckled in their grip. “I can’t. Just … until I talk myself into it.”
Talk herself into it?
“Even if I wanted to,” I told her, “Idris would know the difference between us immediately. You delay the inevitable. You’ve known you would marry him most of your life, Maram.”
“Then don’t sleep with him,” she said. “I don’t even care if you tell him you aren’t me. Just. Take my place in the bed.”
“Wait.” I raised a hand. “Your Highness—”
“You had no problem helping me—” she burst out.
“Before my family was beaten in your name?” I asked.
Her mouth hung agape in shock for a moment, and then to my horror I saw a glimmer of tears. None of them fell, but I remembered a different girl who had come to me, desperate to do right by her mother’s legacy. Who had been terrified of all the things that were expected of her, of the two worlds she had to straddle to avoid death.
She swallowed. “I didn’t do that.”
“Someone did.”
“And so I should pay the price?”
“Someone should,” I snapped, then took a deep breath.
“I liked things before,” she said softly. Here again was the girl I’d come to know in the last days before her coronation, peeking out at me again. Not gentle-hearted, but frightened and in need of an ally.
“Before I made things difficult with my split loyalties?”
“Yes.”
“But they aren’t split at all,” I told her. If the girl I’d known for an instant would come back. If she would trust me again. “I risked my life for you, Maram. That is where my loyalty lies.”
“If that’s true, why won’t you do this for me?” She looked so frightened, and I knew it wasn’t of the marriage bed. I knew her, though she wanted to pretend I didn’t. Something else was at play here. If this had been about her marital duties, she would have sent Nadine in her place—what an easy thing it would have been to do, and for Maram in particular. I will not bed down with savages.
I took another breath and closed my eyes. It was an unfair thing she asked of me, but she didn’t know the half of it. But I knew her well enough to know that she would not show this side of herself to me unless her need were truly dire. What that need could be, I could not begin to imagine. But Maram showed the softest, most vulnerable parts of herself to no one.
“I will not sleep with him. Not even for you,” I said to her. “And if he asks me why you are missing, I shall send him t
o you.”
Relief washed away her fear and doubt and brought forth the girl I’d known briefly, bright-eyed, beautiful, and happy. Her head dropped and she braced her hands against the bench as if to get herself under control. When she came to her feet she didn’t look at me. Instead she walked to the glittering outfit hanging off the wardrobe. She raised a ringed hand to it and trailed a touch down its center.
“What would your wedding have been like, Amani?” she said. Her voice was blank, even—there was none of the emotion I’d heard only moments ago. Not even the cool, slightly amused charm that normally preceded her anger. It was as if she’d wiped it all away in an attempt to return us to what we were—master and slave. As if she abhorred that she’d had to ask me anything at all and wanted to erase the moment.
“I won’t have a wedding, Your Highness,” I said, struggling to control the sharp spike of anger.
“Oh?” she said without turning around.
“Unless you are in the habit of allowing your body double the luxury of a personal and private life,” I said, my voice at last even and flat. “No, I will not.”
I rose just as she turned away from the gown. I imagined we were mirror images of each other, faces carefully blank, bodies held in tension.
“No,” she said at last. “I suppose you won’t.”
She gestured to the vanity.
“I’ll have the gown sent to you. And this, too.” She lifted a necklace from her jewelry box and laid it against my neck. “It was my mother’s.”
It was beautiful and more complicated than any of the jewelry I had worn to date. Eight strands of pearls gathered on each side of the necklace with a gold nugget studded with emeralds and met at the center behind a circular brooch that just barely fit in the palm of my hand, it was so large. The brooch itself was several discs of gold layered over one another, etched with Kushaila designs ringing a large emerald.
“It matches you,” she said softly, fastening it behind my neck. Her mask slipped. “Us.”
I examined her carefully, though she avoided my gaze now. There were dark circles under her eyes, and a strange, haunted look about them. If I knew less about Maram, I would have guessed she was in the grip of some illness.
“Are you alright?” I asked.
The mask dropped back into place and the necklace went back into the jewelry box.
“Tala will collect you when it’s time,” she said coolly. Her eyes met mine in the mirror briefly, then skittered away. “Go.”
I rose to my feet, then paused in the doorway. The urge to comfort her for some invisible thing lay over me like a weight. It was absurd—I was the one being forced into an impossible position. But I could not help but wonder how much we mirrored each other—what impossible position was Maram being put in, that she would ask this of me? And how much of a fool was I that I had agreed to it?
But whatever Maram thought of me, I was her friend, and loyal to her besides. And I knew something she would never admit: I was the stronger of the two of us. I could bear up under this single night. I was not brittle, like she was. And I knew, soon enough, she would come to understand that. To understand why she had come to me first and not Idris with this fear.
5
The royal bedchamber was beautiful. Lushly carpeted, dark wood paneling, tapestries depicting moments from the Book and from history. The bed was wide and large, stacked with pillows, and hung with light curtains that lifted on the ocean breeze. I sat in the center of it, my eyes fixed on the window open to the ocean, and waited. Brass lanterns hung from the ceiling, and two more sat on the floor on either side of the bed.
I’d entered the bedchamber from the side door that led to the dressing room, flanked by three serving girls, including Tala. A hand held mine as I climbed the few steps from the floor and up to the mattress, and was settled in its center. The trail of my gown and mantle were arranged around me just so, and I was bid to fold my legs beneath me, instead of pulling my knees up to my chest as I wanted.
“It will be easier,” Tala said to me gently, “for the Salihi tradition.”
My eyes widened in alarm. “Salihi tradition?”
“Be calm,” she said. “A rosewater ceremony.”
I stared at her bewildered, but she didn’t expand and so I waited with my hands in my lap. The lamplight glinted off the rings on my fingers and the bracelets on my wrists.
Earlier, Tala had ringed my eyes with kohl and arranged my hair so that my curls hung over my shoulders and down my back, threaded with gold chain. I wore heavy earrings with green stones, rings, a necklace, and several bracelets of Kushaila design. I tried not to think about why I wore them—to be taken off—so late in the evening. I wore a simple, flowing red gown, belted at the waist, and an even lighter black mantle, stitched with gold.
It’s just a play, I told myself as voices singing Kushaila song rose up outside the door. You’re just an actor. It’s not real.
Two of the serving girls walked to the double doors of the suite and pulled them open. Sound flooded in—they were singing unaccompanied by instruments, though many clapped their hands in time to the song. The sea of people—no more than a dozen, though they sounded louder—parted and there was Idris in their center.
He wore a white djellaba, and his hair was loose and curled beneath his ears. He looked as haunted as I felt and did not manage the smile of a groom elated to at last meet his bride. I watched him carefully, my heart thundering in my chest, as he clambered onto the bed and sat across from me, his legs folded beneath him as mine were.
His family circled us, and one of his cousins came forward with a silver bowl filled with rosewater.
“That had better not be for the bed,” I said, and his cousin grinned. I recognized him—one of the few who had been allowed to grow up in Al Hoceima: Fouad.
“Don’t worry, cousin,” he said cheerfully. “It’s to purify mouths and hearts.”
I stared at him, uncomprehending.
“To drink,” Idris said gently. It was over quickly—Idris dipped a cup into the bowl and held it for me to drink, and I in turn dipped a second cup into the bowl and held it for him to drink. His hand wrapped around my wrist and his grip tightened when his eyes fixed on my face.
He knows.
I drew the cup away and Fouad pulled it from my fingers. I heard a roar in my ears as the Salihis recited a short prayer over us, and then filed out of the room. The serving girls, including Tala, filed out after them, the doors clicked shut, and we were alone.
For long moments we sat in the center of the bed, neither one looking at the other. His hand reached forward and he linked his fingers through mine.
“She sent you in her place,” he said softly.
“Yes,” I replied and at last moved.
“Is she … she’s alright, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Then why—”
“She’s afraid,” I said. Afraid, and carrying a secret, I thought. But I couldn’t say so to Idris. I wouldn’t betray her trust.
“Of me?” he asked, bewildered.
“Of marriage.”
“Oh. Do you—”
“I’m fine,” I said, sliding off the edge. A moment later I stumbled but managed to right myself easily.
“Amani.”
I didn’t respond. There was a vanity at the far end of the room, and it was there I went. The process of removing my jewelry was a slow one. None of the bracelets were large enough to pull off—each required that a link be undone. I worked methodically and single-mindedly, as if no one else were in the room. So focused was I on my work that I didn’t hear Idris climb off the bed and walk up behind me. His hand covered mine where it worked on the last bracelet.
“Let me help,” he said. I couldn’t meet his eyes but held up my wrist for him to finish. The bracelet came off, and I turned away and lifted my hair. There were four latches to the pearl and emerald necklace Maram had sat around my neck. I watched Idris in the mirror as he began undoing th
em.
He was so far from me now—further than I’d ever imagined him being while being in the same room. The first latch came undone, and the necklace sagged. I dropped my hair over my shoulder and began to work the rings off my shoulder. The second and third latch came undone. Maram, it seemed, had never done up the fourth one, so the necklace slid down my chest and hit the vanity dresser with a loud crash.
I ignored it—Idris’s thumb pressed against the exposed skin of my neck, the knobs of my spine as they disappeared beneath the collar of my gown. He pressed his face into my hair.
“Amani,” he said hoarsely. I was afraid to move, as if I might dislodge him, or worse, might turn to him and press myself into his arms. “I’m haunted by you—by us.”
I forced myself to turn around and raised my hand to his cheek. “I was told to reveal my identity to you—to protect myself. Tell her you don’t wish to see me anymore,” I said.
His forehead lay against mine. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? You are the only one I want to see.”
It was that, for some reason, that broke whatever held back my tears. I disliked tears—they seemed to me at this juncture a waste of time. What was done was done—our story was over. And yet there was no clean end, no avoiding Idris or my heart. I pressed my face against his shoulder and clung to him as he put his arms around me.
“It isn’t fair,” I rasped through my tears.
“No,” he said into my hair. “It isn’t.”
My fingers tightened in the folds of his shirt, and at last I forced myself to pull away.
“Idris,” I said, “I’m serious. You must tell her—I can’t keep doing this. Please.”
“This is all we have, Amani,” he said and brushed a thumb over my cheek.
“It’s not enough,” I cried, pulling away. “Can you keep doing this? Stuck in limbo like this? You have a wife.”
“Amani—”
“You have a wife,” I repeated, voice softer. “Think about how painful that is for me. To be made party to your marriage. To be forced into its intimate spaces.”
“She won’t listen to me,” he said at last. “She never has.”