‘And how’d that work out for you?’ I asked.
Rahim caught my eye out of the corner of his. ‘That’s what you ask me? Not why?’
‘I’ve met Kadir, I can guess why.’
‘I wanted to take something from my father the same way he did from me. Women vanish out of the harem every day. Most children just have to accept when their mothers vanish without a word. I wasn’t prepared to be one of them.’ I remembered how calm Leyla had seemed when she told me that her mother had been taken away from her. She shared a mother with Rahim. I had to imagine he hadn’t been quite as placid as his sister. ‘It took three soldiers to pull me off Kadir. His nose is still crooked, you’ll notice.’
He scratched the bridge of his own perfectly straight nose, hiding a laugh. It was the Sultan’s nose, I realised. That was what made him look like Ahmed.
‘So how come you’re not dead?’ I asked.
‘It looks bad for the Sultan to kill his own sons. Especially after he already had so much of his family’s blood on his hands. So my father decided to send me away to war to die quietly, or at least somewhere he wouldn’t hear. My father underestimated me.’
‘You became the commander instead.’
‘The youngest ever. And the best.’ He wasn’t bragging, I realised. He sounded like Shazad. Easily certain that he was right. ‘Now, will you get my sister out?’
I shouldn’t be doing this. It ought to be Ahmed or Shazad or even Jin here negotiating with Rahim. This wasn’t a job for the Blue-Eyed Bandit. But right now I was the only one here. ‘That depends what you’ve got.’
‘How about an army?’ That wasn’t a bad opening offer. ‘The Emir of Iliaz is due to arrive for Auranzeb. He has as little love for the Sultan as I do and the fighting force of Iliaz nearly matches the rest of Miraji’s combined. A word from me and that army can be your Rebel Prince’s.’ We’d arrived.
The Sultan looked up as we entered. ‘Ah, Rahim, I see you managed to get Amani all the way here without her running off.’ It was a gentle barb. ‘Congratulations. No mean feat, it would seem.’
It would take one word. Just one to his father now, telling him that I was the Blue-Eyed Bandit. And just like that, everything would be over. He could betray me before we’d even made an alliance.
But he didn’t. Rahim stepped aside, letting me in the room ahead of him, like a gentleman. As I passed he said in a low voice, ‘I can get your rebellion an army. Tell me I’m lying.’
I didn’t say anything as I took my place behind the Sultan. I could only speak the truth.
Chapter 28
‘You know, where I come from, there’s an ancient expression, passed down from parents to children.’ Sam spread his hands like he was seeing it written out in big letters floating in front of him. ‘“Don’t ally with people who have tried to kill you.”’
‘You just made that up.’ Shazad leaned back against the wall that she and Sam had just walked through. She was the only person I knew who wouldn’t be even a tiny bit ruffled by being pulled through a wall by a man we only barely trusted.
‘I did.’ Sam winked at her. ‘But you can’t deny it’s a good policy.’
‘Shazad nearly slit your throat when you first met,’ I pointed out. ‘And you’re here.’ I was keeping one eye on the gate into the garden, in case anyone wandered our way. It was morning and the sunlight glaring down on our meeting, with the rest of the harem awake, made me nervous. But dawn had beaten Sam back to the rebel camp with Rahim’s offer. And Shazad wasn’t willing to wait another day.
‘Well, that’s just because Shazad’s charm trumps all wisdom.’ Sam winked at Shazad, who ignored him. ‘Besides, I’m just the messenger. That’s how I’m going to avoid getting shot.’
‘What?’ He was doing that thing where he talked nonsense again.
‘It’s an Albish expression, it means – never mind.’ He shook his head, fighting a laugh. It was one of those rare smiles on him that looked real, not calculated or designed to charm me. The ones that actually made me like him.
But Shazad’s eyes had a faraway look. Like she was working through a problem quickly in her mind. I already knew where she would get to. She’d been telling Ahmed for ages we needed a real fighting force. And now I was offering her one. She was taking it seriously enough to come here herself. She hadn’t even made a comment about my missing hair, even though I knew she’d noticed.
‘We can trust him?’
‘He’s hiding something,’ I said. ‘He won’t tell me why he’s frightened for Leyla, for one. But he hasn’t lied to me. He hates his father, and he has no designs on the throne.’ No matter what Shira suspected, that truth fell easily off my tongue.
‘What do you think?’ Shazad turned to Sam. He looked taken aback for a moment by the full force of her attention.
‘I think it’s not my place to make decisions about whom you should trust,’ Sam said, recovering. ‘I mean, you obviously have excellent taste.’ He gestured to himself.
‘She meant about being able to get Leyla out of the palace.’
‘Oh, well.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I can walk her out of here. As easily as I walked you in.’ Sam’s smile looked pasted on again. ‘Only, in my experience, someone usually notices when princesses go missing from palaces.’
‘You’ve got a lot of experience kidnapping princesses, do you?’ Shazad said.
‘I’ll have you know that princesses find me irresistible.’ He leaned in conspiratorially. ‘I’m still working on bandits and generals.’
‘He’s right,’ I interrupted before they could descend into arguing again. ‘Wives seem to disappear from the harem all too often, but the daughters seem to be a little bit more closely watched. She can’t just vanish; she’d be missed.’
‘And then you’ll be questioned. Rahim will get found out along with the rest of us and we’ll lose any shot of getting both you and that Djinni out of the Sultan’s hands.’ Shazad was steps ahead as usual. I’d told them about my encounter with my father. Or at least as much of it as mattered. That the only way we were going to get him free was if we broke the circle. We’d need some kind of explosive. And even I knew you couldn’t exactly blow something up in this palace without people noticing.
‘So we’ve got to strike a single blow,’ Shazad was working it through out loud. ‘We get everyone out at once or no one at all.’ She was right. If we got my father out, we lost any chance of helping Leyla and Rahim escape. If we walked the two of them out of the palace, my father was left in the Sultan’s hands. So we’d have to get all three of them out at the same time. One shot was all we were going to get. One shot for three targets.
‘Auranzeb,’ I said, drawing Shazad’s and Sam’s eyes my way. ‘We can use Auranzeb as our cover. This isn’t the sort of thing that you and I and a handful of good luck can pull off on our own. We’ll need backup, and from what I’ve heard, there’s enough strangers coming in at Auranzeb that we ought to be able to get a few more in.’
Shazad considered it for a long moment. Neither Sam nor I spoke as she ran through past celebrations at the palace in her mind. ‘Auranzeb could work. We could get Imin in easily. Hala, too, if she gets back from Saramotai in time. Maybe two or three more, without pushing our luck too much.’ She could see the celebration laid out in front of her like a battlefield, and I could tell she was looking for openings and escape routes. A smile started to dawn slowly across her face. It died suddenly as she looked up. ‘What about you?’
She was right. It wasn’t three people who needed to be freed from the palace. It was four. I couldn’t stay here. No matter what blow we struck at Auranzeb, everything could be undone if I didn’t leave with them.
We could break the circle. But so long as the Sultan had me in his control he could just summon my father back. They could abduct Leyla and Rahim to safety and win a whole army. But the Sultan could make me give away every name in the Rebellion before they could strike.
‘Let’s cross that brid
ge when we come to it.’ I tried to sound easy about it. ‘For now, I’ll tell Rahim that we’ll take his deal. We’ve got a while before Auranzeb yet.’
Sam started talking again, laying out the plan. But Shazad wasn’t fooled. We were both thinking the same thing.
I couldn’t be left behind at Auranzeb. At least not alive.
Chapter 29
War was building. Everybody could feel it. Even those of us who hadn’t been alive for the last war, when the Sultan took his throne.
And nobody seemed to know exactly what side they were on yet.
Inside the palace, I saw it in the rising tension in the council room. I saw it in the way the Xichian general’s hand slammed down, knocking over a pitcher of wine that drenched the papers sprawled across the table. I saw it in the number of guns and swords that surrounded the Albish queen when she arrived at the palace, taking the place of her elderly ambassador in negotiations.
Having Rahim as my guard made getting around a whole lot easier. After a few days I understood why the Sultan had allowed Rahim to talk his way into the role of my protector. He and Kadir despised each other. And the Sultan had made clear he didn’t approve of Kadir’s eyes on me by putting another one of his sons as my shield.
Rahim fed me more information that made it back to Sam as fast as anything. I was able to warn him when the Sultan’s city guard thought they were closing in on the new location of the rebel camp in the city. They never found anything. And two days later they had brand-new intelligence that would lead them in circles at the opposite end of Izman.
The news that the Sultan was negotiating with foreigners slipped out somehow, too. Nobody had forgotten how much they hated Gallan rule. New tracts circulated in the streets reminding the Mirajin people what they had already suffered at the hands of our occupiers and our Sultan. But when the soldiers tried to trace where they might have come from, they wound up chasing their own tails.
The Rebellion was rising up like bursts of gunpowder all over Izman. Most exploded in neighbourhoods that had suffered under Gallan rule. A NEW DAWN was burned onto walls in the night. Bombs made in kitchens were flung at soldiers in the streets. Folk had started painting Ahmed’s sun on hulls of ships. The Rebellion was spreading, further than it ever had before. The Sultan’s army came after the culprits. But the names of those they planned to arrest were in the Rebellion’s hands before the army’s. By the time men in uniform got to their doors, their homes were empty.
I brought Sam a report of thirty Izmani citizens languishing in prison, due to be hanged as examples of what happened when you supported the Rebellion. Last time, it’d been a whole tavern arrested when a bit too much alcohol had them standing on the table chanting Ahmed’s name. The Rebellion had managed to get half of them free of the noose before the trap opened below their feet. The rest had choked to death slowly. The Sultan’s hangman had made the rope too short, deliberately. So they’d suffer.
So Ahmed would watch them suffer.
We’d get there first this time. Or we hoped we would.
We had the people. We had the city. But there was no taking the palace. Not without the army Rahim had promised us. And there were a whole lot of fires to keep burning until then. Fires we’d started, for the most part. Sam told me it felt like we were trying to plug holes in a wicker basket. I couldn’t remember when Sam had started saying we instead of you.
‘There’s a plan to rebuild the factory in the Last County,’ I told Sam when we were a few short weeks away from Auranzeb. ‘The one outside Dustwalk. Once they’ve reclaimed our half of the desert.’ As a gesture of goodwill to the Gallan, of future willingness to continue to provide them with weapons in their war against any other country that didn’t share their beliefs. ‘They’re sending a small party down there, soldiers and engineers, to assess the feasibility of it.’
‘What am I missing?’ Sam might be a posturer most days, but he wasn’t stupid, either, even though he behaved like he was half the time.
‘Dustwalk is where I’m from,’ I said, leaning back against the tree. I was tired. Cool air ran its fingers through my hair, lulling me. ‘I was born there. It might not be that nice a place, but it still deserves better than this.’
Sam nodded. ‘So we make sure their party never makes it back.’
He listened to me rattle off the rest of what I’d gathered since I last saw him. But when I was done, he didn’t leave straightaway. ‘You know,’ he said, still leaning on the wall across from me, ‘I heard a lot of stories about the Blue-Eyed Bandit. Granted, some of them were about me. I particularly like the one about how the Blue-Eyed Bandit stole the necklace right off a woman’s neck, got caught, and still managed to seduce her.’
‘Is there a point to this, or are you just trying to remind me that the longer I’m in here, the more sullied my reputation becomes?’
‘My point,’ Sam said, ‘is that none of those stories said the Blue-Eyed Bandit was a coward.’ That got my attention.
‘Oh, so is your point actually that you’d like to get punched in the face?’
‘If I’d known the famous Bandit, who fought at Fahali and struck fear into the Sultan’s soldiers, was this lily-livered, I probably wouldn’t have taken her reputation. It’s bad for business to be known as a cowardly bandit. And you should take my stealing your reputation as high praise. I could easily have chosen to be the Blond Bandit or the Dashingly Handsome Bandit or—’
‘I swear to God, Sam.’
‘No, really, go ahead and tell me I couldn’t rightfully call myself the Dashingly Handsome Bandit – eh, truth-teller? Tell me I’m not handsome, I challenge you. See? You can’t.’
‘You really seem to think I’m not going to break your nose.’
‘See’ – Sam wavered back on track – ‘cowardice is the only reason I can possibly think of that makes any sense of why you still haven’t gone to speak to the person who might be able to get that little piece of bronze under your skin out so that you can leave the palace with us.’
I sobered. ‘Shazad told you about Tamid.’ I felt a little bit betrayed by that. ‘It’s not that easy.’
‘It’s certainly harder if you don’t try. And for all my many feats of bravery, I’m deeply afraid of your general, so I sincerely don’t want to bring back the news that you haven’t even tried yet. Because guess which of us will get blamed? It’s not the one she actually likes.’
‘Shazad likes you fine,’ I said offhandedly. ‘Why do you even care?’
‘She depends on you. You don’t see it, but she does.’ For just a moment he actually seemed serious. ‘And I don’t think you’re selfish enough to die on her just to avoid an uncomfortable conversation. Besides, if you die, I can’t be in two places at once any more.’
I ignored that last part. Sam annoyed me even more than usual when he was right.
*
I dragged my feet as we left the negotiations the next day, forcing Rahim to drop back with me.
The Sultan caught his eye, a question mark there. A spark of suspicion neither of us could afford. Rahim saw it, too. He leaned in towards his father, whispering low in his ear. ‘The Gallan ambassador has the look in his eye of a man about to do something very foolish.’ He wasn’t wrong about that. I’d torn down three of the Gallan ambassador’s lies in the meeting, as he got angrier and angrier. ‘If he were one of my soldiers, I would have him run drills until he cooled off. As he isn’t, I think it’s best to let him go ahead.’
The Sultan considered me before nodding, letting me and Rahim drag back behind the rest.
‘There’s a—’ Prisoner wouldn’t get past my tongue. ‘A boy. From the Last County. He only has one leg.’
‘I know him.’
‘Can you get me to him?’ I pressed.
‘Do you want to tell me what you need with him badly enough to risk going places my father doesn’t want you?’
‘Do you want to tell me why your sister so desperately needs to be saved from the harem?’
Rahim scratched the edge of his mouth, hiding a smile. ‘This way.’
*
I started to recognize this part of the palace as we came to the foot of a long winding staircase. My first day in the palace, I’d clambered down this, body aching with fresh wounds, fighting legs that couldn’t help but obey the Sultan’s order to follow him.
I heard voices as we got closer to the top. I recognized Tamid’s instantly. It was a voice that went with laughing ourselves stupid after we’d been sent out of the schoolroom for misbehaving. With nights falling asleep while he read me the Holy Books after my mother died. The other was soft and female. A part of me wanted to turn back. To avoid sticking my fingers in this wound. But Sam had been talking sense for once. I had no right to be a coward in this rebellion.
I pushed the door open.
Two startled heads looked up at me. Tamid was sitting on the edge of the same table I’d woken up on. The sight of him was so heartbreakingly familiar that for a moment I wanted to rush to him and pour everything out. His left trouser leg was rolled up to his knee. Or where there ought to have been a knee.
Instead there was a bronze disc hiding the place where his leg ended. It was secured to the scarred skin with a leather strap. There was nothing attached to it. The rest of Tamid’s leg – the hollow, polished bronze – was in Leyla’s hands, as she sat across from him. She gaped at me and Rahim with wide eyes, mouth moving open and shut in silent panic.
Well. I hadn’t been expecting that. I didn’t think Rahim had, either.
‘Don’t tell Father!’ she blurted out finally. It was exactly the wrong thing to say. Though the fact that she was suddenly flushed from neck to chin wasn’t doing her any favours, either. ‘I was just here to make sure it wasn’t …’ She trailed off.
‘Squeaking,’ Tamid filled in even as Leyla made a noise that sounded an awful lot like a squeak herself. ‘The joints were squeaking. Leyla came to tune my leg up. Seeing as she built it and all.’
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