Traitor to the Throne

by Alwyn Hamilton

  The mention of Jin made my heart clench. Something about the way she said his name was off. But I had more pride in myself than to ask about him when we were at war.

  ‘That’s why the palace is swarming with foreigners,’ I said instead, thinking of the crowd of uniforms and strange men we’d passed on our way here. ‘You think the foreigner rulers will come?’

  ‘Rumor has it one of the Princes of Xicha has already set sail. And the Gallan Emperor and Albish Queen have both sent their ambassadors ahead of them.’ I thought of the plain-clothed man whose eyes had chilled me. ‘They’ll come. If they don’t, there’s too great a chance the Sultan will make an alliance with one of their enemies. Meanwhile, soldiers from all sorts of places are flooding into the city from every border to pave the way.’ Shazad tapped her fingers to her thumb one after the other in quick sequence. It was a nervous gesture. It meant there was more. Problems she wasn’t telling me. Complications with the Rebellion that I wasn’t privy to.

  ‘What does that mean for us?’ I recognized this feeling of being helpless when there was so much to be done. I used to feel like this in Dustwalk.

  ‘Nothing good.’ She caught the nervous tic and stopped, balling her hand into a fist. ‘Especially now. But the Sultan can only ally with one country. As soon as an alliance is struck, war will spark again. The rumors say he’s planning to announce his new ally at Auranzeb. But until then …’ she trailed off. I knew what she meant. Until then we had trouble. And it could only get worse with the Sultan having an immortal being at his command.

  My mind turned over. There might be another way to figure out how to free a Djinni. I’d just have to get out of the harem long enough to find out. But something kept me from mentioning that to Shazad. We were running out of time. Izz’s distraction could work only so long, and we couldn’t be caught conspiring.

  But I couldn’t let her leave without asking: ‘Shazad, is everyone all right?’ I didn’t ask what I wanted to ask. It was stupid and selfish. But his name hammered against my teeth. Is Jin all right?

  ‘Not everyone.’ For not being a Demdji, Shazad had always been the honest sort. ‘Mahdi died in the escape from the camp and we couldn’t save Sayyida. A few others. But the death toll is as low as can be expected. Ahmed is alive, Delila, Hala, Imin, the twins. They’re all here in the city.’

  ‘And Jin?’ I couldn’t stop myself any more. She hadn’t mentioned him, which couldn’t mean anything good. Neither could the hesitation that followed my question.

  ‘No one is exactly sure where Jin is right now,’ Shazad said finally. ‘He …’ She shoved her loose hair up off the nape of her neck. ‘After you disappeared in the dead of night, he rode a horse half to death to get to the meeting point. When you weren’t there, he broke Ahmed’s nose and turned back around in the desert. To find you. Thank you for proving me right in my scepticism about the lack of detail in that plan, at least.’ I knew she was trying to lighten the mood, but worry had taken root in my chest. It hadn’t ever crossed my mind that Jin wasn’t with the rest of the rebels.

  ‘He’s still alive.’ I tested the words out loud. And then I realised what she’d said. ‘He broke Ahmed’s nose?’

  Shazad scratched her ear, looking as sheepish as I’d ever seen her. ‘Ahmed might’ve implied that if Jin stopped treating you as casually as some girl he’d just met in a dockside bar, maybe you’d stop running away.’ A surge of indignation that Ahmed thought I’d leave the Rebellion over a lovers’ spat struck in my chest. ‘Jin hit Ahmed so fast even I couldn’t get between them. It was impressive, actually.’

  Izz screamed again. Further away. The chaos was settling down.

  ‘I have to go,’ Shazad said. We were out of time. ‘I’m going to figure out a way to get you out of here. Until then, stay out of trouble.’ It came out halfway between an order from my general and a plea from my friend.

  ‘You know better than to ask a Demdji to make a promise.’ This might be the last I ever saw of her. That was true every time we parted. But this time more than ever. Now I was on enemy ground. ‘And you know better than to believe I’m going to stay out of trouble.’

  Chapter 23

  I had a plan. Well, plan might be a strong word. Shazad was the plan maker between the two of us. This was more like the beginnings of an idea that I was hoping wouldn’t get me killed. Which was more my style.

  I could figure out the rest of it later. For now, I didn’t need to get free of the palace. I just had to get out of the harem. And there was only one man who could make it happen.

  ‘Why do you want to leave?’ Leyla was making another toy for the harem’s children, though I wasn’t sure why. Most of their mothers wouldn’t let them play with the toys she’d already made. Was this just her way of keeping herself sane in this place where she fit so badly? This one looked like a tiny person. He lay forgotten in her hands, clay limbs splayed, as she looked at me with her huge, earnest eyes. ‘The harem is nicer than a lot of other places you could wind up.’

  I liked Leyla. A part of me wanted to blurt out the honest truth, make her a real ally here in this place. But she was still the Sultan’s daughter. And big innocent eyes weren’t a good enough reason to gamble with the lives of everyone I loved. Jin’s face flashed across my mind. The way I’d last seen him, half-shadowed in the tent, on the run, uncertainty hanging between us as the kiss ended. His face was quickly chased away by others’. Shazad. Ahmed. Delila. The twins. Even Hala.

  ‘It’d be nice to be able to get out of the path of your brother,’ I said finally. ‘I mean Kadir,’ I corrected, remembering what she’d told me about her only real brother being the one who shared her mother. Prince Rahim, the soldier among scholars in the Sultan’s circles. I’d mentioned seeing him in court the day before to Leyla, but she’d shifted the subject quickly. ‘Not to mention Ayet and Uzma, who have it in for me.’ Watching Shazad frighten Uzma might’ve been satisfying, but the humiliation still burned hot and fierce. ‘If I could convince your father to give me the run of the palace, we could stay out of each other’s ways.’

  Leyla’s eyes dashed back to the ground, and she chewed at her lip anxiously. I knew her well enough by now to recognise when she was thinking something over. I also knew better than to interrupt someone smarter than me when they were thinking. Something else I’d learned from Shazad.

  ‘Bassam turns thirteen the day after tomorrow.’ Leyla spilled the words out in a rush. Whatever I’d been expecting her to come out with, that wasn’t it. ‘Bassam is one of my father’s sons by his wife Thana. My father has a tradition – for every one of his sons on their thirteenth birthday, he teaches them to shoot a bow. As my grandfather did for his sons. And his father before him. They are not to eat again until they eat something they have killed themselves. He has done it with every one of his sons.’

  Not every single one. How had Ahmed and Jin spent their thirteenth birthdays? They hadn’t been hunting with their father. Had they been on a ship, or some foreign shore? Had they even known what day it was to be able to mark it?

  I had an image of a scene that never was. The two of them standing side by side with their father’s hands on their shoulders, bowstrings drawn back, competing to impress him.

  ‘He’ll come to the harem for Bassam.’ Leyla returned her eyes to her work, the small clay man. She was sculpting a face for him. ‘If you wanted to ask him for something.’

  *

  The largest of the harem gardens was twice the size of the rebel camp – a huge swathe of green crowned with a blue lake that rolled down from the walls of the palace, across the cliff that overlooked the sea, before slamming hard into another wall. Another border, the edge of the palace. The water was dotted with fat birds, flapping their glaringly pale feathers lazily, sending water droplets sprawling in a bright arc through the sun.

  From my position sitting by the iron gate that led back into the heart of the harem, it looked like a picture printed in a storybook. The Sultan was standing on
the shore with a boy I guessed was Bassam. This son was thin and wiry and trying hard to look older than he really was. He held a longbow drawn back across his body, arms shaking just a little bit from the effort, clearly trying to hide it from his father.

  I’d watched him miss a dozen shots already, the arrows splashing uselessly into the water. After each shot came an exercise in patience as Bassam tossed a handful of bread into the lake and then withdrew to wait for the birds to come back and settle. Until they felt safe enough again for him to try to kill them. Now his father reached out, resting one reassuring hand on his shoulder. The way the boy swelled happily under his touch, I half wondered if he’d been missing on purpose, to steal a bit more time with his father.

  I imagined a younger Jin standing there in Bassam’s place. I’d never seen a person need anyone else less than Jin did. It was hard to picture how he would react to his father’s hand on his shoulder, if he would have held himself straighter, too, eager for his father’s pride.

  Bassam loosed the bowstring with one easy gesture. I knew with the practised eye of a girl from Dustwalk that this shot was different from the others.

  The arrow flew true, passing straight through the neck of the nearest duck. The bird let out a pained squawk that sent the rest of the flock darting up in the air in a panic. A servant scrambled forward, pulling the bird out of the water by its long neck.

  The Sultan laughed, throwing his head back as he clapped his son on the shoulder proudly. There was no mistaking the look of pure joy that passed over the young prince’s face. For just a moment, in the late afternoon sun, they might’ve been any father and son sharing a moment of happiness.

  And then the Sultan’s eyes fell on me, hovering on the edge of the garden. He patted his son on the shoulder again, squeezing it tightly with pride before sending the boy on his way, carrying the dead bird slung over his shoulder.

  When his son had vanished, he gestured me over.

  ‘Hardly anybody uses bows any more, you know,’ I said when I was close enough to be heard. ‘Guns are cleaner.’

  ‘But not so quiet when you are trying to hunt,’ the Sultan said. ‘They scare your prey off. Besides, this is a tradition. My father did it for me, and his father did it for him.’ And the Sultan had killed his father and now a handful of his sons were counting on following that tradition, too. ‘What do you want, little Demdji?’

  I ran my tongue along my teeth nervously. Chances were, he’d see right through me. But Shazad had said it herself the day Sayyida was brought back: we needed eyes in the palace. The whole palace. I could be those eyes. ‘I want to be able to leave the harem.’

  I couldn’t leave the palace, but information could. Shazad had put Sam on the Rebellion’s payroll. The past three nights, since the day Izz had dropped paper from the sky, I’d had a standing meeting with Sam at dusk by the Weeping Wall. Shazad would figure out what to do about him later, but for now, his only task was to slip into the harem every night to meet with me and make sure I hadn’t sold out the whole Rebellion on a royal order. It was an awfully boring task. Or as Sam put it, it was the easiest money he’d ever made, being paid to come look at a pretty girl every night. If I succeeded here, I could make his job a little more interesting.

  The Sultan played with the string of his bow. ‘And you want to leave because …?’

  ‘Because I can’t stand it there much longer.’ It was a truth. A half-truth. And it wasn’t going to be enough. ‘And I can’t stand your son.’

  The Sultan leaned on the bow. ‘Which one?’ he asked wryly. There it was again: that faint prickle down my skin, like we were both in on a secret, like we were both playing some game. No, that was ridiculous. If he knew I was allied with Ahmed, all he had to do was command me to tell him where he was. He could use me to lead him to Shazad and from there the rest of the Rebellion.

  ‘Kadir.’ I shook off the feeling. ‘He looks at me like I’m a flower in that garden for him to pluck.’

  The Sultan twanged the string of the bow again, like he was playing a musical instrument. ‘You know that you are my prisoner, little Demdji. If I wanted to, I could order you to lie in one spot, completely still, until I needed you for something. I could make you grow roots and stay there waiting for an order. Or’ – the Sultan paused, twanging the bowstring pointedly – ‘to be plucked.’ My skin crawled. ‘But … I admire you coming to find me here. Tell me, little Demdji: can you shoot?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, because, as much as I didn’t care for him to know just how good I was with a gun, I couldn’t lie. Shazad always said our greatest strength was being underestimated. But the Sultan always saw through me when I tried to dodge around a truth with a half-truth. ‘I can shoot.’

  He extended the bow towards me. I didn’t take it immediately. ‘You want something,’ he said. ‘People who want things have to earn them.’

  ‘I know how to earn things. I didn’t grow up in a palace.’

  ‘Good,’ the Sultan said, that hint of Jin’s smile lingering. ‘Then you should understand this. Take the bow.’

  I did as I was told because I didn’t have a choice, though I didn’t know if he’d meant to give me an order.

  ‘If you can bring down a duck, I will give you free range of the palace – at least, as much as anyone else has. If you don’t … well, then I hope your bed is comfortable, because you will lie there a very long time.’

  I ran my fingers down the taut string of the bow. It was an old weapon. Something from the storybooks. Before guns. I remembered some legend about the archer who took out a Roc’s eye with an arrow.

  I stood in a shooting stance and tried to pull the string back.

  ‘Not like that.’ The Sultan’s hands were on my shoulders. I tensed automatically. But there was nothing lingering in the way he touched me. He gripped my shoulders like he had the young prince’s. Like I’d seen fathers in Dustwalk do when they were teaching their sons to shoot a gun. No one had ever done that for me. I’d taught myself to shoot while my father was drunk. And not really my father anyway. Though he cared about whether I lived or died just as much as my real father did, as it turned out. ‘Widen your stance,’ he ordered, lightly kicking my ankles apart with his instep. ‘And draw the bow across your body.’

  I was keenly aware of him watching me as I drew the bowstring back. I took aim at the nearest duck the same way I would with a gun. I lined up my sight carefully. If I had a gun, my bullet would go straight through the bird.

  I’d gotten good at killing birds in the past few months. When you were camping in the mountains, it was helpful to be able to hunt.

  I loosed the bowstring. It scraped painfully along my arm. The arrow flew and missed the bird by a foot, plunging into the water. The flock of birds panicked at the noise, spiralling upwards into the sky in a flapping mess of feathers and squawking.

  I swore, dropping the bow, clutching my scraped arm.

  ‘Let me see.’ The Sultan took hold of my wrist, another order I couldn’t disobey. My forearm was already welting.

  ‘You should have an arm guard,’ he commanded. ‘Here.’ He pulled his sheema off from around his neck. It was the colour of the fresh saffron in dishes in the harem. He wrapped it neatly around my arm.

  The sight of it brought on a pang of longing as I remembered my old red sheema. Jin.

  The Sultan finished tying off the sheema with a final yank, fastening the knot around my wrist. ‘When the birds return, try again. And this time, draw the bowstring higher – closer to your cheek.’ I had to obey, though I half thought he had forgotten who he was speaking to. That he meant them as instructions more than orders.

  We waited in silence until the birds returned and settled again. I wanted to call them stupid for coming back to something that might get them killed so readily. But then, I was standing next to the Sultan of my own will.

  I missed again with my second shot. And my third. I could feel my neck prickling with shame, keenly aware of the Sultan watching me
miss over and over. I needed to win. I needed to be able to leave the harem. I needed to save my family from my father.

  ‘Your Exalted Highness.’ A servant’s voice made us both turn. He was bent low. ‘You are awaited for negotiations by the Gallan ambassador.’ My ears perked up. It was starting. The negotiations for this country. To turn us back over to them. Why I needed to be able to report back.

  ‘Wait,’ I called out as the Sultan turned to go. ‘I can do this.’

  The Sultan considered for a moment. And then he nodded. ‘Then find me when you have.’

  *

  The sun crept across the sky as I tried. I could feel the sweat running down my neck and I was half-tempted to unwrap the sheema from my arm and tie it around my head. But the throbbing welt there told me not to. There was nothing to be done about the blistering in my fingers, though. Or the creeping ache in my arm as my muscles protested being pulled back the same way one more painful time. Shaking to release the bowstring.

  Some servants came and placed a jug of water and a bowl of dates next to me when the sun got high. I ignored them both. I could do this.

  I pulled back. Another arrow dove into the water. The birds scattered.

  I cursed under my breath.

  Damn this.

  I had done harder things.

  Before the birds could fully escape I reached down and plucked out another arrow. I nocked it quickly and aimed for the still-flapping squawking mess of birds. I found the duck I wanted to hit. And I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t waste time trying to line up my shot. I aimed with certainty, the way I always had with a gun.

  And I loosed the arrow.

  The duck separated itself from the flock, plummeted, and hit the grass even as my heart took off.