Traitor to the Throne

by Alwyn Hamilton

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Shira snapped. ‘I wouldn’t risk giving the Sultan a cripple for a son.’

  ‘And you really wonder why I think you’re awful?’ I clenched my fists, fighting the old urge to defend Tamid. He wouldn’t fight for me. I wondered if she was why he loathed me now. Had she infected him with her hatred of me on the journey? Or had I made him hate me all on my own?

  ‘Is what I did to survive any worse than what you did?’ She moved her foot in slow circles through the water, sending out ripples. ‘Naguib abandoned me here after I was no good to him any more. I would have died if I hadn’t proved myself more interesting than the other girls in the harem.’ A new chorus of shrieking emerged from the gaggle of girls, as another jewel sailed into the water. ‘But even being the Sultim’s favourite will only keep you alive here so long. So I’ve done the only thing I could that really ensured my survival.’ She ran her hands along her swollen stomach, her jaw working. ‘And you can tell whoever you want. No one will believe you.’

  Good God, she was not making this easy. It’d been a long time since we’d last bickered in Dustwalk. I’d faced a whole lot of folk worse than her. But she was making me feel like we were right back under her mother’s roof and there was nothing I wanted more than to best her just once.

  ‘Yes, they will, Shira.’ If she wasn’t going to flinch, neither was I. Because if I knew one thing for sure, it was that if anyone found out Shira was carrying some other man’s child and pretending it was the Sultim’s, she’d lose her head. I held her life in my hands just the same as she did mine. ‘And I reckon you know that.’

  Shira stared me down. Being Sultima suited her; even I had to admit it. There was weight in those eyes that’d make most folk want to drop their gaze first. But I’d grown up shooting; I could outlast her.

  ‘Fine, it’s a deal.’ Sure enough, Shira blinked first. ‘I won’t tell on you if you won’t tell on me.’

  ‘You’re going to have to do me one better than that, cousin.’

  ‘You want something else?’ She scoffed, still running her hands across her stomach over and over. She had a whole lot of power here. But she didn’t have any over me. Finally she pursed her lips, as if the words she was about to spit out tasted bitter. ‘Of course you do. Fine.’ Then Shira tossed her head back and laughed like I’d just said the funniest thing in the world. For a second I thought she’d lost her mind. Her voice echoed around the tiled walls, carrying over the commotion in the water and making Kadir look up. And he saw me. Damn it. Shira gave me a satisfied smirk. ‘Better talk fast, cousin. I’m guessing you’re the new toy Kadir keeps talking about. The one he’s not allowed to have. So you have until he gets here to play with you to spit out what you want.’

  I really wanted to push her into the water. ‘Rumour has it you’ve got a way to pass contraband in and out of the harem.’

  ‘Who says that?’

  ‘People,’ I evaded. ‘Do you or don’t you?’ I kept one eye on Kadir as he got to his feet, sauntering lazily around the iridescent blue tiles of the pool towards us. It was like being tracked by a hungry Skinwalker. I wanted to get out before he got to me.

  ‘I might,’ she said, hedging. Wasting time. ‘What is it you’re so desperate to get in that you’d threaten my life for it? A bottle of liquor? New clothes? That certainly seems worth the price of my head.’ It wasn’t a half-bad attempt to make me feel sorry about blackmailing her. Anyone else and I might’ve actually been sorry.

  ‘I don’t want anything brought in.’ I kept an eye on Kadir, getting closer now. ‘I need to get a message out. Can you do that?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Shira ran her tongue over her teeth, deliberately slowly. She was trying to keep me here. ‘I’d need some time.’

  ‘I don’t have a whole lot of that. Can you help me or do I tell your husband that you climbed into another man’s bed and get you hanged?’ He was halfway across to us now.

  ‘I can help.’ Shira set her jaw angrily, resting her hand on her middle. ‘If you—’

  ‘Come to join the game?’ Kadir called, interrupting whatever Shira had been about to say next. He was close enough to be heard. His eyes travelled up and down my body. ‘You’re a little overdressed.’

  I pushed myself to my feet. Shazad had taught me enough to know that you didn’t stand against an enemy from lower ground. ‘I’m dressed just fine for leaving, Your Exalted Highness.’

  Kadir made a noise at the back of his throat, like a hum of agreement. Except it sounded an awful lot like a laugh. ‘You are free to leave, of course.’ He was rolling a perfect white pearl between his thumb and forefinger. He circled around in front of me, standing between me and the way out. Then he tossed the pearl carelessly aside, letting it land in the water. The girls, who’d been watching the exchange, didn’t scramble for it. ‘As soon as you bring me back that pearl.’

  ‘I can’t swim,’ I said. Anywhere else I’d be able to stand up for myself. I’d be able to fight him. But I was helpless. I tried to hold myself like I wasn’t.

  ‘Then you can’t leave.’ He smirked. ‘That pearl is very precious to me.’

  I couldn’t fight him. Just the thought of raising my fist and putting it in his too-pleased-with-himself-looking face made the tug of the Sultan’s orders twinge in my stomach. And I wasn’t sure what he’d try to do if I walked out. What he could do. Or whether the Sultan had warned him against hurting me.

  If the Sultan cared whether his Demdji prize got hurt. I didn’t even know why I was still alive. He had his Djinni.

  The silence was broken by a splash as one of the other girls dove under the water and sprang back up a moment later, the pearl between her fingers. ‘I got bored waiting,’ she said, pouting prettily, her pale hair sticking to her forehead as she brandished the pearl. But there was a tightness to her smile. And I understood what she’d done. For me. The risk.

  The tension broke as Kadir lounged over to her. Shira was on her feet, grabbing me by the elbow, pushing me out of the baths. ‘Tonight.’ She shoved me back towards the safety of the gardens. ‘Meet me by the Weeping Wall after dark.’

  Chapter 19

  The Weeping Wall was the easternmost wall of the harem, a small, closed-off part of the garden dominated by the biggest tree I’d ever seen in my life. It would’ve taken three of me to get my arms all the way around it, and the branches stretched so far they touched the top of the walls on either side.

  According to the women of the harem, it was the place where Sultima Sabriya had waited for Sultim Aziz a thousand years ago. He had gone to war on the distant eastern border and left his love in the harem. The Weeping Wall was the closest she had been able to get to him while he was away in battle. She stood there every day, waiting for him, her tears watering the tree so that it grew higher and higher every day. Until one day it was finally high enough for her to climb to see over the walls of the harem to where her husband’s army was. That day, the other women found her on the ground, screaming and wailing and clawing at the wall. She couldn’t be consoled and she cried until her voice left her; and the tree grew greater still.

  Three days later the news came that Aziz had been killed in battle. That was what Sabriya had seen from the top of the tree, across the walls, across deserts and cities and seas.

  The wall looked just like every other in the harem in the dim light of my oil lamp. Ivy blooming with flowers all the colour of the setting sun climbed from the earth up the stone wall, trying to hide the fact that we were in a prison. I pushed the ivy aside, setting my hands against the solid stone. My fingers met an uneven surface. When I held the lamp up I realised it looked like a gouge – several of them. The kind fingernails might leave.

  ‘And her wailing carried on for seven nights and seven days.’ I jumped at Shira’s voice behind me. She was draped in a dark blue khalat that made her melt in with the shadows. ‘Until the Sultan could listen to her grief no more, and he strung her up where only the stars could hear her wail.�
�

  I dropped my hand. ‘Who knew such love could exist in the harem.’

  Shira didn’t miss the sarcasm in my voice. ‘Anyone less self-centred than you.’ I was about to retort that she didn’t love Kadir, no more than she’d loved Naguib. But then I realised that her hands had drifted to her pregnant stomach as she spoke. Folk did terrifying things for the ones they loved. That, I’d learned from stories. I even had a bullet wound scar across my hip from Iliaz to prove it.

  ‘So what now?’ I raised an eyebrow at her expectantly, a trick I’d learned from Jin.

  ‘Oh, now we wait, cousin.’ Shira leaned against the huge tree, tilting her head back.

  I was going to have to play along with Shira’s game. I flopped against the tree next to her. ‘How long?’

  Shira tipped her head back further. ‘It could be a while. I can’t tell. It’s hard to see the sky properly from the city.’

  I leaned my head back against the trunk, my hair snagging in the rough bark. She wasn’t wrong. Through the crisscrossing branches of the huge tree I could see the dark sky, but with the lights from the palace and the city, I couldn’t make out the stars.

  ‘So.’ Shira broke the silence after a moment. ‘Are you really with the Rebel Prince?’ She was fiddling with something, and I realised it was a rope that ran the length of the tree, like a pulley. She was tugging it absently, up and down. At the top, above the line of the harem walls, a piece of cloth stirred in the wind.

  ‘I really am.’ She was signalling someone. It could be a trap for all I knew. I couldn’t do much about it if it was except face it when it came.

  ‘Who would’ve thought it?’ Shira smiled. ‘Two girls from Dustwalk, with royalty. What was it the Holy Father used to say?’ Her accent was slipping. I wondered if she noticed. ‘Men who worship at the feet of power either rise with it—’

  ‘—or get trampled,’ I said, filling in the saying. ‘Good thing we aren’t men, then.’ I didn’t know why I was buying into her game. But I was real low on people I could talk to in this place. Leyla was sweet enough, but she was still the Sultan’s daughter. And Tamid wasn’t worth thinking about. He might be alive, but my friend had still died in the sand in Dustwalk. Shira’s dark eyes met my pale ones. A moment of recognition passed between us. We’d both hitched our wagons to powerful folk, just on different sides. If that was the choice, to rise or be flattened, chances were one of us was going to wind up rising and the other one dead.

  ‘Shira—’ I started. I wasn’t sure how I was going to finish.

  I never did. Because a man stepped out of the Weeping Wall.

  I’d seen a whole lot of Demdji do impossible things, but I’d be lying if I said I’d been expecting that.

  The man was flesh and blood, and though at first glance he was dressed in desert clothes, he was distinctly un-Mirajin. He had hair the colour of sand, held back by a sheema that looked like it had been tied by someone with no hands, and pale skin that glowed in the lamplight. And his eyes were nearly as blue as mine. For a second I thought he was a Demdji.

  ‘Blessed Sultima,’ he said, his voice low and tinged with an accent. Not a Demdji, then, just a foreigner.

  He pulled himself to his full height, giving me a better view of him. Dark polished boots different from anything I’d ever seen in the desert rose to his knees, his loose desert trouser legs stuffed inside, and he wore a white shirt open at the collar. I got the strangest impression he was pausing for effect. After a beat, he stepped forward dramatically.

  That was when his arm got stuck in one of the vines that hung from the wall.

  It sort of ruined the effect.

  He recovered as well as he could, untangling his arm. Then he plucked one of the flowers from the vine and offered it to Shira with an extravagant bow. ‘Your beauty grows with every passing day.’

  His badly tied sheema flopped open, falling off his face so I could see him clearly. He wasn’t a whole lot older than we were, and a light constellation of freckles over his pale nose made him look even younger. He was northern but not Gallan; his words sounded wrong, and I’d seen enough of the Gallan to know he wasn’t one of them. He straightened and flung the sheema over his shoulder like the sweep of a cloak. Shira took the flower and pressed it to her nose.

  So this was how Shira smuggled things into the harem. And, judging by the look he was giving her, this was how she’d managed to get herself pregnant, too.

  Finally the foreign man seemed to notice me.

  ‘This is—’ Shira started, but he didn’t let her finish.

  ‘Allow me to introduce myself.’ He snatched up my right hand without asking. I resisted the urge to yank it out of his grip. Shazad would call that undiplomatic. ‘Especially to such a beautiful young woman.’ He raised my hand to his lips, in some strange foreign gesture, and kissed it. ‘I,’ he declared, straightening dramatically, ‘am the Blue-Eyed Bandit.’

  I choked on a snort that got stuck in my throat and turned into an uncontrollable cough. Shira patted me awkwardly on the back as I doubled over, bracing my free hand against my knees.

  ‘Yes, I know, my reputation precedes me.’ My reputation precedes you. But I still couldn’t talk through my coughing. ‘Don’t let it intimidate you. I didn’t really defeat a thousand soldiers in Fahali.’ He leaned forward conspiratorially, still clutching my hand, now twining his fingers through mine. ‘It was merely hundreds.’

  ‘Is that right?’ I’d finally managed to catch my breath. I remembered Fahali like a blur. Gunpowder and blood and sand, and myself in the middle of it. ‘So tell me, how did you flood the prayer house at Malal?’

  ‘Well.’ There was a glint in his eyes. He talked from the top of his mouth, unlike the Gallan, who talked from the back. ‘I could tell you, but I’d rather not give you any dangerous ideas.’

  I probably ought to stop enjoying this. But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had something to laugh about in this damn rebellion. Definitely not since we’d fled the Dev’s Valley. ‘And how about the fight at Iliaz? Is it true what they say? That the Blue-Eyed Bandit was outgunned and outnumbered and surrounded by enemies on all sides?’

  He didn’t miss a beat, his chest swelling as he drew me towards him. ‘Oh, well, you know, what others call outnumbered, I call a challenge.’

  ‘I heard the Blue-Eyed Bandit got shot in the hip.’ I’d let him pull me close enough that we were almost chest to chest now. ‘Can I see the scar?’

  ‘My lady is very forward.’ He grinned widely at me. ‘Where I come from, you have to know a girl more than a few minutes before she’ll try to get your clothes off.’ He tilted his head forward, winking at me.

  ‘Well, how about I take my clothes off, then.’ Before I could think better of it, I stepped back and tugged up the side of my shirt. The huge ugly scar was hard to miss, even in the dark. ‘Because I heard the scar looked something like this.’ I was pretty sure nothing he’d ever brought into the harem for Shira was as priceless as the look on his face just then. It was almost worth the risk of giving him my identity. It might not have been a smart thing to do, now I thought about it, but it sure was satisfying. He dropped my hand as I let my shirt fall back, pulling away from him. ‘And, see, I was in Fahali, and I don’t remember you being there.’

  He scratched the back of his head sheepishly as I went on. ‘I remember fighting the Gallan soldiers in the sand and I remember men burning alive on both sides, but I don’t remember you.’ The act was gone now – he was watching me with real interest. ‘But I gather you’re the reason everyone thinks I can be in two different places at once. And why I keep hearing rumours about the Blue-Eyed Bandit seducing so many women.’ That part made sense now. He was as handsome as anything, even when he looked ridiculous at the same time. And he knew it, too.

  ‘What can I say, I walk into their homes to take their jewels and they give me their hearts.’ He winked at Shira, who smiled enigmatically into the flower he’d given her. No, Shira was too clever
to give anything away to a man she couldn’t truly have. She’d taken from him. She’d used him for her child and she was still using him.

  ‘So this is your way to the outside world?’ I asked my cousin.

  Shira was twirling the flower he’d given her between her fingers, looking pleased with herself. ‘Sam was sneaking in and … wooing one of the Sultan’s more gullible daughters, Miassa. I noticed she kept disappearing and coming back with her hair and clothes all mussed. It didn’t take long to catch her – very silly of her to start running around with other men when she was already engaged to be married to the Emir of Bashib. I promised not to turn them both in to her father if Sam helped me.’

  ‘It all worked out for the best.’ The foreigner, Sam, shrugged again, as if to say it wasn’t her brains he was interested in anyway. ‘The Emir of Bashib leaves his wife alone a great deal; it’s not hard for the Blue-Eyed Bandit to visit her still now and again.’

  There he went, using my name again. My temper flared. ‘Believe me when I tell you, I know the Blue-Eyed Bandit, and you’re not me. So who are you really?’

  ‘Well.’ He leaned his shoulder back against the wall. ‘You can’t blame a fellow for cashing in on a very good story. Nobody told me the real Blue-Eyed Bandit was so much more …’ He looked me up and down, eyes seeming to linger on the places I’d fleshed out recently. Half a year of decent meals with the Rebellion meant I wouldn’t be able to pass for a boy any more. I raised an eyebrow at him in a challenge. He coughed. ‘So much more. And I am a bandit. Well, more of a thief, I suppose. When all these stories started spreading, it was only sensible that I take advantage of my God-given looks.’ He winked one of those mocking blue eyes at me. ‘You wouldn’t believe how much easier it is to strike a good deal when you’re practically a living legend. They say you’re very good. Though you’re obviously not that good if you wound up locked in here.’

  I wished I could punch him.