Everything left in my stomach came up.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tightened my arms around the metal bucket. I ignored the cloying smell of vomit climbing up from the bottom. My head was still spinning, my stomach still churning. I didn’t move straight away, even after I was sure there was nothing left to choke up but my own liver.
I seemed to still be alive. Which was unexpected. I’d feel good about it when I stopped retching my insides up. And which meant I’d been drugged, not poisoned. The army ought to have killed me. They ought to have killed all of us.
Maybe they’d kept me alive because I was a Demdji, and I was valuable. Or because I was a girl and I looked helpless. But they didn’t have any reason to take the rest of the camp alive. They’d have no reason not to take one look at Jin, who always looked like he could be trouble, asleep, and put a bullet through him to keep him out of the way.
There was one way I could know for sure. I couldn’t speak anything that wasn’t the truth. If I couldn’t say it out loud, then he was gone.
I swallowed the bile in my throat.
‘Jin is alive.’
The truth slipped out like a prayer into the dark, so huge and so certain I felt like I finally understood how Princess Hawa had been able to call the dawn. The words felt as important as the rising sun, easing the panic in my chest.
Jin was alive. Probably a captive in this place like I was.
I started listing names quickly. Shazad, Ahmed, Delila, Hala, Imin – they were alive, one after the other. Not once did my tongue stumble. They were all fine. Well, trying to say they were fine out loud might be pushing my luck, seeing as we’d all just lost our home. But alive. And so was I. And I wasn’t about to let that change.
I was going to live long enough to get back to them.
The room was moving, I realised then. Was I on a train? The floor shifted below me and my stomach heaved again. No, this was different. There was no steady, juddering feeling. This was more like being rocked in a cradle by a drunken giant.
As my head cleared I took stock of things. I gingerly set the bucket down again and eased myself up. I could sit up. That wasn’t nothing to start with. And thanks to the light coming through a small window above me, I could see.
I was on a bed in a cramped room with damp wooden walls and a damp floor. The light had the feel of late afternoon. Burned sky after a long day in the desert. It’d been night when I was taken, so that meant I’d been asleep nearly a whole day. At least a whole day.
I shifted, trying to stand up, but my right hand pulled me up short. I was tied to the frame of the bed.
No. Not tied. Chained.
Iron was biting into my skin. I could feel it the moment I reached for my power. I shoved up the sleeve on my arm to get a look at it. The iron was clamped like an angry hand on a child’s wrist. Only not completely. A sliver of light leaked between my skin and the iron.
I could work with that.
Without thinking, I reached for my sheema. My fingers scraped across bare neck instead. It felt like being punched in the stomach.
It was gone. I remembered now. Jin had tied it like a sling. I’d been struggling as the drug filled my nose and mouth, and the sheema slipped off me. Gone in the sand.
It was stupid. It was just a thing. Just a stupid strip of red cloth against the desert sun. Except it was a stupid thing Jin had given me. Snatched off a clothesline in Sazi, the day we’d escaped Dustwalk. I’d never stopped wearing it since then. Even when I was angry at him. It was mine. And now it was gone.
But there were other ways out of this.
I worried at the stitching on my shirt until the side of it gave way. Tearing off a strip of cloth, I started to stuff it between my skin and the iron manacle. It wasn’t exactly easy work – the manacle was tight and the cloth was awkward and thick. But I kept going all the same, working the piece of cloth in one bit at a time.
There. I felt it the moment the iron stopped touching my skin. My power rushed back in.
I was tired and thirsty, and my mouth tasted of vomit and some unknown drug that was still lingering in my lungs, but I could do this. I reached for the desert outside with everything I had. I felt it surge in answer, only to have it slip away. I pulled again, but nothing came. It felt like reaching for something just a little too far away.
I fought down the panic. There were still other ways. Like there’d been in Saramotai. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I could feel it now as I calmed myself. Even against the strange lurching of the room and my dizzy head. The sand that clung to my skin.
I raised my free hand in one quick violent motion, tearing the sand from every part of me that I could find, scraping skin off with it. I slashed the sand down towards my arm in one sharp motion.
The chain on the manacle splintered like wood under an axe. And I was free.
I bolted for the door, fighting the haze that was clinging to my mind like a lingering desert exhaustion. The floor tilted below me, pitching me out into a long dark hallway. At one end light leaked through from whatever was above. The floor heaved again below me.
Something connected in my mind, pieces from stories. Some I’d heard around campfires, and some Jin had told me.
This wasn’t a train.
I was on a ship.
Wooden steps rose to meet me in the spot of sunshine, and I bashed my shin into a step as I scrambled upwards, the ground tilting yet again. And then I was up in the sunlight and fresh air.
I was momentarily blinded by the sudden glare after the dark. But I’d never been the sort to stop running just because I couldn’t see where I was going. As my vision cleared I bolted forward, focusing on the place where the ship seemed to end.
Shouts followed me, but I didn’t stop. I pushed my legs forward into one last violent whip of speed. I crashed full force into the rail at the edge of the ship. My escape.
Only there was no escape.
I’d once asked Jin if the sand sea was like the real sea. He’d given me that knowing smile he used to use when he knew something I didn’t. Before I stripped all his secrets away and that smile became mine.
But now I knew.
There was water as far as the eye could see. More water than I’d seen in my whole life, more water than I’d known even existed in the world. I’d seen rivers and I’d seen pools, and I’d even seen some desert cities that had the luxury of fountains. I’d never seen anything like this.
It was as vast as the desert. And it kept me as trapped as I ever had been in Dustwalk by the miles and miles of burning sand.
Hands grabbed me from behind, yanking me away from the railing like someone thought I might throw myself off and into the mouth of the sea.
The haze of the world was starting to fade, and I was becoming aware of other things around me now. The strange smell that I could only guess was the drowned, endless stretch of sea around me. Shouts and cries, someone asking how the hell I’d gotten out.
It was a rabble of men who surrounded me. Mirajin, and no mistaking it – their skin was desert dark, and darker still for some of them. Bright sheemas covered their faces, and their hands were hard from work and raw with welts. I held on to my handful of sand, even though I knew I couldn’t take down half their number before someone would shoot me. Not when there were already three pistols aimed at me.
And then there, standing among the crowd of men in a white khalat so brilliant it hurt my eyes, was the reason Jin was still alive. It wasn’t the Sultan’s army who’d taken me after all.
It was my aunt Safiyah.
‘You drugged me.’ My voice sounded scratchy. My aunt whose hands danced with practised ease through the medicines in the Holy Father’s supply chest. She’d made the food. She could have slipped anything into it to knock out the rebels so she could escape. How easy would it have been for her to grab me as I stormed to Jin’s tent, and knock me out with something stolen when I’d left her alone with his supplies unlocked. Twice she’d tried to push bot
tles that would put me to sleep. For the pain.
Shazad always said I was bad at watching my back. That was why she did it for me. Shazad would’ve also said this was one of those times to keep my mouth shut. But Shazad wasn’t here. Because this woman had kidnapped me. ‘You know, last time I drugged someone who trusted me,’ I said, ‘I had the decency to leave him where he was.’
‘God, I wish you didn’t sound so much like her, too.’ She spoke low enough so I was sure I was the only one who heard. Safiyah circled around me, to where the sailor was still holding my arms. I felt her touch the strip of torn shirt still stuffed between my skin and the manacle. ‘Clever.’ She almost sounded proud of me. ‘So you can use your Demdji tricks.’
I tried to pull away but the sailor held me fast. ‘You know what I am.’ It wasn’t a question, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want answers.
‘I’ve been trading medicines in Izman since before you were even born.’ She pulled the cloth free from my wrist almost gently. ‘Do you really think you’re the first Demdji I’ve ever come across? Your kind are a rare breed. And worth a small fortune each. People in my trade learn to recognise the signs. I guessed because of your eyes, but I knew when that sandstorm saved us out in the desert. And your mother was always so secretive about you in her letters.’
She was in Saramotai for no good reason. No good reason except that the Emir of Saramotai had just started bragging to the world he had a child with eyes like dying embers who wielded the sun in her hands. Ranaa had been worth something. But my aunt had missed her chance to take the little Demdji girl. So she’d taken me instead.
‘It’s not true, you know.’ I remembered what Mahdi had told me, his knife held to Delila’s throat. ‘What they say about carving us up like meat to cure your ills.’
‘The thing is,’ she said, not quite looking at me as she twisted the piece of cloth back around her own hand, ‘what really matters is that they’re saying it at all.’ She was right. Stories and belief meant more than truth. I knew that as the Blue-Eyed Bandit. But I wouldn’t be the Blue-Eyed Bandit any more after she took my eyes.
Then to the man holding me, she said, ‘Put her with the other girls for safekeeping.’
*
We went deeper into the ship than I’d come from. Far deeper. Back down into the deepest dark of its heaving wooden stomach and then down further still. I didn’t know where we were going, but I knew we were getting close. I could hear the crying long before I could see them.
The room where the other girls were being kept made the tiny cell I’d woken up in look like the lap of luxury. They were chained to the wooden walls by both arms, and a shallow swamp of water sloshed around where they were sitting, lapping in the dark at their shivering bodies.
There were about a dozen of them. I caught glimpses of their faces in the swinging lamplight as I was led through. A pale girl with ivory blonde curls, in the rags of a foreign blue dress that looked like it had once been shaped like a bell; a dark-skinned girl whose eyes were closed, her head tipped back – the only sign she was still alive was her lips moving in prayer; a Xichian girl with a curtain of jet hair and pure murder in her eyes as she tracked the man holding me; a single other Mirajin girl in a plain khalat shivering against the cold. They looked as different from each other as day and night and sky and sand, but they were all beautiful. And that was what frightened me the most.
I’d heard the stories from Delila of how Jin’s mother had been brought to the harem. A Xichian merchant’s daughter who lived her life on the deck of a ship – a deck that turned slick with the blood of her family on the day they were boarded by pirates. Lien, sixteen and beautiful, was the only survivor, taken in chains and silk rags to the new Sultan of Miraji, who’d just killed his father and brothers to take the throne for himself. Who was building a harem to assure his succession.
She was sold for a hundred louzi into those walls, where she would bear a son to a man she loathed. Where only the death of a friend she loved like a sister would give her the chance to escape back to the sea, clutching a newborn, with two young princes clinging to her hem.
Sometimes I doubted if Jin even knew those stories of his mother. They weren’t the sorts of things women told their sons. They were the sorts of things women told other women. Beware, they told their daughters. People will hurt you because you’re beautiful.
I wasn’t beautiful. I wasn’t here because of that. I was here because I was powerful.
This time the iron manacles bit hard into my skin. Safiyah and the man turned to go, taking the light with them. I couldn’t just let them leave me here in chains. It was too much like surrendering.
‘You know what they say – that betraying your own blood means you’ll be forever cursed in the eyes of God,’ I called after Safiyah. The water was already lapping at my clothes. I was still wearing Shazad’s khalat, I realised. The water was soaking through it to my skin. ‘The Holy Father preached that a whole lot in Dustwalk, too.’
I didn’t expect Safiyah to stop. But she did. She stood in the doorway a long moment, her back to me, as the man vanished ahead of her.
‘That he did.’ She turned back to face me. And for the first time, she scared me. It was the calm in her face. It told me she hadn’t hesitated in doing this to me. Not even for a minute. ‘Your mother and I always used to go to prayers. Every single day. Not just holy days, not just prayer days. Every day. We’d take up prayer mats next to each other and squeeze our eyes shut and pray like we were told to. We prayed for our lives. To get out of Dustwalk.’ I hadn’t noticed it before, this coldness in Safiyah. But it was clear as daybreak now as she crouched across from me. ‘I loved my sister like the sun loves the sky. I would have done anything for her. And then she died, and left you. And you look so like her. It’s like seeing a Skinwalker wearing my sister’s face. Do you have any notion of what that’s like? Looking at the thing that killed someone you loved, a thing that isn’t even wholly human but seems to think she is?’
I watched the lamplight swing threateningly across her face, casting her into startling light and then darkness as it went. ‘Dustwalk killed my mother.’
‘Because she was protecting you. She was protecting you from the man who called himself your father. Would you like to know what her last letter to me said?’
I wanted to say no. But that would be a lie.
‘She told me you weren’t really her husband’s. That he knew. He’d always known. That she feared for you now that you were older. That it was time to run. That she would die to protect you if she had to, but if she did, she would take him with her.’
I was back in the desert, that day. The day the gunshots had come. They said my mother had gone crazy. She hadn’t. She had killed her husband knowing full well that she might die. And she’d done it for me.
‘She was going to come and join me, you know. Before you. I hated you from the moment she told me that she would have to delay leaving because she couldn’t cross the desert while she was with child. Or when you were too small. And yet still, I built my life thinking one day I would be able to share it with my little sister. I did terrible things to make a life for both of us. Dustwalk killed my sister. But she died because she was your mother. And now I’m going to take the life I should have always had. And you are going to buy it for me.’
‘If you hate me so much, why not take my eyes out here and now?’ I spat out at her. Let her show if she really hated me as much as she thought she did. ‘Just get it over with.’
‘Believe me, if I could have saved myself from carrying you across the desert I would have.’ My aunt tossed a smile back at me lazily. ‘But you’re worth your weight in gold, you know.’
I’d heard that before. In Saramotai, about Ranaa. And again from Hala, after rescuing Sayyida from Izman.
She wasn’t just going to take my eyes to sell on to some rich Izmani whose heart was going to give out on him. She was taking me to the Sultan.
Chapter 13
I was blind. Everything I saw was inside my mind, and outside that was just a darkness that went on forever and ever, sometimes punctured by noises.
In my better moments I knew it was the drugs. I was trapped in nightmares of fire and sand. Of sand on fire. A desert full of people burning. People I knew but whose names didn’t exist in this dream. And a pair of blue eyes like mine watching it all. Because I still had eyes. I just couldn’t figure out how to open them.
At some point I became aware that something had changed. I was being moved. And I could hear voices. Like I was listening from the bottom of a well.
‘You know the Sultim likes Mirajin girls.’
The Sultim. I knew that name. Far away, I knew what it meant.
‘This one isn’t for the harem.’ Another voice. A woman’s. One I knew. It made me want to reach for my power. I stretched out my mind for it. The darkness started to creep in again. I lost my grip on the sand and the voices. The last thing I heard before it swallowed me again was ‘—dangerous.’
A spark of consciousness woke at the very back of my mind.
Dangerous.
They’d better believe I was.
*
I came to all at once, a dozen bits of awareness competing for my attention. The cold of the table under me, the sharp pain riddling my body. The crystal-white glare of sunlight on my eyelids, a cacophony of birds, and something else, something that tasted unnatural. More drugs, I realised.
But I finally managed to open my eyes. The room was bright and airy and flooded with light reflecting brightly off a marble ceiling above me. The stone was the colour of every sky I’d ever seen all at once. It was the pink and red of the wounded dawn, the dark violet of a calm dusk, and as brilliantly unsettling as the clear blue glare of high noon.
I’d never been anywhere this rich before. Not even the emir’s house in Saramotai.
The palace. I was in the Sultan’s palace.
We’d spent long hours trying to figure out ways to get more spies into the Sultan’s palace. Months easing people from our side in through the kitchens. And I’d just been carried unconscious over the threshold like it was nothing.
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