Traitor to the Throne

by Alwyn Hamilton

  People die. I tried to remember that. It was what happened on missions. She wasn’t the first, and unless we managed to kill the Sultan tomorrow and put Ahmed on the throne, she wasn’t going to be the last. This is the cost of starting a war, said a nasty voice in my head that sounded too much like Malik.

  Only she was a Demdji. We’d never lost a Demdji in the fighting before. Or a child.

  This was the Sultan’s fault. Not ours. He’d let the Gallan across our borders and let them kill Demdji in the first place. And he was the one hunting our kind down to use as weapons now. It was his fault she was dead. But we were still alive – me, Imin, Delila – and we weren’t going to become another Noorsham. We were going to topple him before he could find another Demdji. I’d make sure of that.

  ‘I’m fine.’ Delila squirmed as her brother checked her over for injury. ‘Really, Ahmed, I’m fine.’

  Shazad gave me a significant look that she hid behind the guise of scratching her nose. After half a year I could read Shazad like an open book. This one meant we were about to be in trouble.

  So we hadn’t exactly had permission to take Delila with us. But we’d known we’d need help if we were going to get past Saramotai’s impenetrable walls. We’d also known that if we asked Ahmed if we could take Delila on a mission he’d say no. So we just hadn’t asked him. It wasn’t technically disobedience if we’d never been forbidden from doing it. Even though we both knew that excuse would fly just about as well as either of us could.

  Personally I’d been hoping Ahmed might not notice that Delila was gone at all. He was busy running a whole rebellion, and we were gone only a handful of days. But then, unlike me, most people seemed to be able to keep track of their siblings.

  ‘She did good, Ahmed,’ I offered. ‘A lot of folk would be dead if it weren’t for her.’ A lot more folk. But I didn’t say that aloud. I knew Shazad heard it in my silence all the same. Delila just beamed at her feet as Ahmed finally tore his eyes off his sister to survey the state we were in and the rabble behind us. Some were riding, others were on foot if they were strong enough. Mahdi was among those who had declared he needed a horse after his ordeal. Imin had shifted to a girl’s shape, riding double with Navid, whose arms were wrapped around her protectively.

  ‘I see you managed to bring back Imin and Mahdi, and then some.’ There was a wry hint under his indulgent smile.

  Some of the ex-prisoners had stayed in Saramotai, but plenty of others had decided to leave with us. Women who had nothing to stay for. Whose husbands and sons had been among the bodies hanging from the walls. The woman who’d called me Zahia was one of them. The Holy Father in Saramotai had seen to her as best he could. Enough to tell me that she wouldn’t die on the journey to camp. Mahdi argued about bringing her, but Shazad didn’t question me when I said it seemed wrong to leave her helpless in the city that had tried to kill her. I could tell Shazad knew there was something I wasn’t telling her. The woman had been weaving in and out of consciousness since we’d left the city, riding mostly tied with a sheema to another woman in front of her so she didn’t slip off.

  It wasn’t exactly uncommon for strays to come back from missions. I ought to know – half a year ago, I was one. Jin had been meant to come back with news of the Sultan’s so-called weapon. Instead he came back with me. And in the six months that’d passed since then, I’d long stopped being the rebel camp’s newest arrival.

  We’d been joined by rebel sympathisers like Navid, ignited to action after the battle at Fahali. Orphans picked up in Malal, clinging to the hem of Jin’s shirt the whole way back to camp. A defecting soldier who’d been guided our way by Shazad’s father, General Hamad. Sometimes Shazad would slip and refer to them as troops. Ahmed called them refugees. After a few weeks everyone was just a rebel.

  ‘We need to debrief.’ The words came with a significant look directed specifically at me and Shazad. Ahmed wasn’t about to dig into us in front of everyone. But that didn’t mean we were off the hook.

  Shazad was already talking as we pushed through the gateway that led to camp, telling Ahmed what hasdhappened in Saramotai. She danced around arranging to get me captured and skipped to how she and Delila, invisible under Delila’s illusion, had slipped in behind me the moment I’d pretended to trip in the doorway, waiting for nightfall to let the others in behind us. The less she could remind Ahmed we’d put his sister in danger, the better. The way she told it, you’d barely know there’d been a fight. We’d left Samira in charge of the city, Shazad told him.

  ‘We need to send her reinforcements,’ she said as we felt our way through the inside of the cliff towards camp. ‘We left everyone we could to help.’ ‘Everyone we could’ meant the half a dozen other men who had come with us to Saramotai. Navid would’ve made seven whole people but he wouldn’t be separated from Imin again. It wasn’t exactly an army that could hold a stronghold but it was what we had. ‘It’s not enough to hold the peace. We should send fifty well-trained soldiers, before somebody else develops any ambition and steps into Malik’s shoes. And we need to reinforce the city against the Sultan. Ahmed’ – Shazad lowered her voice, casting her eyes behind us to where the newly recruited rabble was feeling their way nervously through the dark tunnel – ‘your father’s troops were in our half of the desert.’

  Ahmed didn’t answer her right away, but as we neared the end of the tunnel I could see he understood the significance even better than I did. A whole lot of the power we held relied on appearances. Truth be told, we wouldn’t be able to match the Sultan’s army on a battlefield if they tried to take the desert back from us by force. Keeping our half of the desert relied on the Sultan believing our numbers were greater than they were. And that deception relied on his men never straying into our half of the desert to find out the truth.

  As we stepped through the other side of the cliff face, I blinked against the sudden brightness. The summer light made the rebel camp look like one of Delila’s illusions – too beautiful and alive in this desert full of dust and death. A world apart.

  The camp was twice the size it had been when I’d first seen it. I couldn’t keep myself from glancing over my shoulder at the women of Saramotai following us. I’d gotten into the habit of watching the new refugees’ faces when they first set eyes on the camp. I wasn’t disappointed this time. One by one, they stepped out of the tunnel and got their first look at my home. For just a moment, grief and fear and exhaustion parted, giving way to wonder as they took in the oasis rolled out below them. Watching them, it felt for a second like I was seeing it with fresh eyes, too.

  Except in the past six months I’d gotten used to coming home. I knew everything about the camp. I knew the faces that waited here and the scars they wore. Both the ones that brought them to our war, and the ones they’d gotten fighting for us. I knew which tents were slightly lopsided, and what the birds sounded like in late afternoon from the bathing pools, and that the smell of fresh-baked bread meant Lubna was on cooking duty for the day.

  I half expected to see Jin sauntering toward me, like he had the last time I’d gotten back from a mission I’d been sent on without him. A smile on his face, his collar loose so I could see the edge of his tattoo, sleeves rolled up to his elbows so when he pulled me to him, making my own shirt ride up, the bare cool skin of his arms pressed against the desert-flushed heat of mine.

  But it looked like he still hadn’t come home.

  Shazad was arguing with Ahmed over the details of who to send to Saramotai and how many, leaving me to take charge of our new refugees. I gave Imin and Navid instructions to get them settled. Take the sick and wounded to the Holy Father. Get everyone else working. Navid didn’t need instruction; he’d been on the other side of it himself. But he still smiled genially as I gave it. When I was done, Imin started to help him guide the women to the other side of camp.

  I caught Ahmed’s gaze over Shazad’s shoulder as she kept talking, with Mahdi interjecting every so often. Ahmed’s eyes flicked pointedly
to Delila. I understood. He didn’t want her any more involved than she already was in this. ‘Delila,’ I said, catching her attention, ‘would you go with Navid and Imin and make sure they can keep their hands off each other long enough to settle everyone?’

  Delila might be naive, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew what I was doing. I thought she might make one last stab at standing up for me and Shazad. But she ducked her head, pushing her purple hair behind her ears with false brightness, before following Imin and Navid and their gaggle of women from Saramotai.

  Ahmed waited until she was out of earshot before he started. ‘What were you two thinking?’ He hadn’t taken his eyes from his sister’s back. ‘Delila’s a child and she is not trained to fight.’

  ‘Not to mention that your plan almost wound up getting you shot in the head,’ Mahdi butted in.

  ‘Your total lack of a plan got you locked up in a jail cell, so I wouldn’t point fingers if I were you. You know what they say: those who point fingers wind up with them broken so badly they point straight back at them.’ Shazad had even less patience for Mahdi than I did. She’d known him longer. From the days before the Sultim trials in Izman.

  ‘I’m pretty sure that’s not a saying,’ I said.

  ‘You almost died,’ Mahdi said again, like we might be too stupid to understand.

  ‘You say that like it’s the first time I’ve ever had a gun pointed at me,’ I retorted as Shazad rolled her eyes. ‘It’s not even the first time this month.’

  ‘My sister is not as accustomed to near death as you two.’ Ahmed started walking, an unspoken signal that we should fall into step.

  ‘We wouldn’t have let anything happen to her, Ahmed,’ Shazad said as she and I dropped into pace easily on either side of him, leaving Mahdi trying to elbow his way in.

  ‘Besides, Delila’s as Demdji as I am.’ We passed out of the glaring sun at the edge of camp and into the shade of the oasis trees. We were headed towards Ahmed’s pavilion. I was trying to remember just when I’d gotten quite so comfortable talking back to royalty. ‘She wants to help, same as everyone else here.’

  ‘That’s not why you took her, though, is it?’ Ahmed didn’t look at me as we walked. ‘You took her to prove a point.’

  He was talking about Jin.

  It’d been two months back that I’d gotten shot and nearly died while Jin and I were on a mission in Iliaz. I’d been lucky to survive. When I woke up, back at camp, stitched and bandaged, Jin was gone. Ahmed had sent him to the border while I was unconscious. To infiltrate the Xichian army, which had been gnawing at Miraji from the eastern border, trying to get a foothold in our desert ever since the Sultan’s alliance with the Gallan had shattered.

  I wasn’t so petty as to drag his sister into danger just because he’d sent his brother into it when I might’ve been dying.

  But then, I wasn’t sure I could say that out loud, either.

  ‘We can need her and prove a point at the same time.’ Shazad stepped in, taking the bullet for me. We’d nearly reached Ahmed’s pavilion as he halted, turning to face us. I staggered to a stop and for a moment, all I could see was the Rebel Prince facing me, outlined by the gold sun on his pavilion, standing half a pace above us like he could bring justice down on our heads at any second. Like he was our ruler instead of our friend.

  It was then that I noticed the entrance to the pavilion was closed. That was why I could see the sun stitched into the tent flaps radiating from Ahmed like he was stepping straight out of the sun. I’d only ever see those closed when Ahmed was holding a war council. Something was wrong. Shazad realised it the same second I did.

  ‘Hala’s back,’ Ahmed said. Something had to be wrong to get him to drop the subject of his sister so quickly. ‘She got back from Izman just before you. Maz spied you on the horizon from the air, so we thought we’d wait, to … talk.’ His eyes danced to Mahdi, and then away so quickly I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been watching him so closely.

  ‘What happened?’ Shazad asked. ‘Why didn’t you tell Imin that Hala was back?’ Imin and Hala were siblings. They shared a Djinni father. If Hala hadn’t already been in Izman when Imin was captured, then there was no question we would have taken her instead of Delila. She would’ve torn through the mind of every inhabitant of Saramotai to get Imin out.

  ‘Is Sayyida with her?’ Mahdi butted in.

  Sayyida. The reason Hala had been sent to Izman in the first place.

  I’d never met Sayyida, but I’d heard plenty about her. She was the same age as me. She’d been married at fifteen to one of Shazad’s father’s soldiers. Shazad was the one who’d noticed she had more broken bones than her soldier husband. She was the one who had contrived to move Sayyida out of her husband’s home to the Hidden House, a Rebellion safe house in Izman. From there she had gotten tangled up with the Rebellion. And with Mahdi, from the sound of things.

  In the early days, right after the Sultim trials, Sayyida had managed to manoeuvre herself into a position in the Sultan’s palace as a spy for the Rebellion. A month back, she’d missed sending her regular report. Ahmed waited a week. It was possible something else had gone wrong. And the last thing anyone wanted was to blow her cover if it was just a delay. A week of Mahdi nagging Ahmed every day to send someone for her before Hala finally went to find out what was happening.

  ‘Is Sayyida all right?’ Mahdi pressed. He sounded hopeful, though I could see the apprehension in his eyes as he looked over his prince’s shoulder at the shut pavilion.

  Ahmed’s silence was answer enough.

  *

  Inside the pavilion Hala was kneeling on the ground, slumped over a pretty Mirajin girl, her golden hands resting on the girl’s head. Hala didn’t look up as we came in, and her eyes stayed screwed shut. She looked tired. Tired enough that she wasn’t using an illusion to hide her missing fingers like she usually did. Her Demdji skin moved like molten gold, as every shuddering breath she took shifted the lamplight across it. A thin sheen of sweat clung to her. Not from heat, I realised, but from effort. She was using her Demdji powers, just not on her own vanity. She was using them on the girl on the ground. Sayyida, I guessed.

  Sayyida’s eyes were wide and unseeing, fixed on something far away that none of the rest of us could make out. Hala was inside her mind.

  Mahdi dropped to his knees on her other side, across from Hala. ‘Sayyida!’ He gathered her up in his arms. ‘Sayyida, can you hear me?’

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t do that.’ Hala’s familiar clipped voice sounded strained. She still didn’t open her eyes. ‘It’s a little insulting to try to shake me out of her head like I’m a bad dream, seeing as I’ve been holding an illusion for the better part of a week to try to help.’ A week? That would explain why Hala looked like she was cracking. It was hard for any of us but the shape-shifters to use our powers for more than a few hours at a time. Let alone a week.

  ‘She was easy enough to find, waiting for me in a cell.’ Hala slumped on the ground. She was shaking visibly. Barely hanging on. ‘Getting in her head was the only way I could carry her all the way here quietly.’ She looked desperately at Ahmed. ‘Did you bring something to knock her out?’

  Ahmed nodded, pulling a small bottle of something clear from his pocket.

  ‘What happened to her?’ Mahdi shifted so he was cradling Sayyida. I’d always figured Mahdi for a coward, but I realised now I’d never actually seen him look scared before. Not even on the wrong side of a prison door. And this fear wasn’t for himself. It was possible he did belong in this rebellion after all.

  Hala glanced to Ahmed for permission. He hesitated for a second before nodding. The only sign Hala gave that she was letting go of her power was the small sigh that slid out between her lips before she sat back on her heels. But the change in Sayyida was like watching night fall at high noon. Her blank peace turned to screaming, her head arching back as she writhed out of Mahdi’s grip. She was thrashing blindly, like a trapped animal, clawing a
t Mahdi’s clothes, at the ground, at anything.

  Shazad took the bottle from Ahmed’s hand and the sheema from her neck and poured the contents of the bottle into the cloth. Just the smell of it made my head spin a little. She latched one arm around Sayyida’s body, trapping the screaming girl’s arms against her sides, and pressed the soaked cloth against Sayyida’s nose and mouth. Shazad pushed slightly on the girl’s middle, forcing her to take a gasping, panicked breath, inhaling the full force of the fumes.

  Mahdi hadn’t moved. He just stared with hollow eyes as Sayyida’s struggling got weaker until unconsciousness claimed her, making her go limp in Shazad’s grip.

  ‘Mahdi.’ Ahmed broke the silence finally. ‘Take Sayyida to the Holy Father’s tent. She can rest there.’

  Mahdi nodded, grateful for the escape. He wasn’t a strong man; a scholar, not a fighter. His arms shook with the effort as he gathered her up. But none of us was about to insult him by offering him help.

  ‘Rest isn’t going to help her,’ I said as the tent flap closed behind him. ‘She’s dying.’ The truth came easily. Us Demdji couldn’t tell a lie. Whatever they had done to her, it was killing her.

  ‘I know,’ Ahmed said. ‘But trust me, it does very little good to tell someone that the one they love is dying.’ He looked straight at me when he said that. I wondered what had passed between him and Jin when I was at death’s door.

  ‘What did they do to her?’ Shazad’s voice was tight. ‘Did she tell them anything about us?’ Of everyone in this camp, Shazad had more at stake than any of us. She belonged to a family at the heart of Izman, and if it ever got out that Shazad was on the Rebel Prince’s side, there were a lot of people close to her the Sultan could easily reach for.

  ‘Oh, forgive me, I didn’t ask after the particulars of her torture while I was rescuing her all by myself, while also trying not to hand my Demdji self straight over to the Sultan,’ Hala sniped. ‘Maybe you’d like me to go back and trade myself in for some useless information?’ Hala was normally short-tempered, just not with Shazad. Folk didn’t exactly do well when they got smart with Shazad. Hala must be worse off than I’d realised.