I’d been allowed to sit. Ordered, more like. But his sons stood at attention behind me. The Sultan ordered me to tell him what had happened. He wanted the truth, he said. And that was what I gave him. I left out Leyla, but I couldn’t avoid Tamid. The Sultan would question why I’d been alone in the palace when I wasn’t supposed to be. I tiptoed around that part of the story as carefully as I could, my heart in my mouth. One wrong word and it could all be over. I asked Rahim to take me to the Holy Father. He left to give us privacy. I tried not to let relief leak into my words as I slipped on to the next part of the story without any questions from the Sultan.
When I finished speaking, no one said anything for a good few moments. I had a strange feeling like I was back in school, in trouble along with Tamid for something stupid I’d done, facing the anger of a teacher. The three of us lined up in front of the Sultan like we were quarrelling children, not soldiers and spies fighting for a country. The Sultan was silent as the last of the sunlight outside faded. Through the huge window I could see the lights of Izman start to flicker to life.
My mind kept running back to the same thought: the gun. The Sultan had seen me holding a gun to his heir’s head. Holding it like I knew what I was doing. Holding it like the Blue-Eyed Bandit would hold a gun. He had to know I was more than just a desert girl now.
But I didn’t try to explain it. The guilty always talked first. Rahim and I were both smart enough not to interrupt the Sultan’s silence.
‘Father—’ Which made us both smarter than Kadir.
‘I didn’t give you permission to speak.’ The Sultan sounded calm. Unnervingly calm. Deceptively calm. ‘You are a thief, Kadir.’ Kadir bristled, but the Sultan was already talking again. ‘Don’t disagree with me. You tried to take something of mine.’ He gestured to me. I hated being referred to as belonging to the Sultan. But I couldn’t help the surge of satisfaction over being worth more to him than Kadir right now. ‘And trade it for the support of the Gallan.’
‘She’s not human, Father!’ Kadir’s voice rose. He sounded close to stomping his foot in rage like a child.
‘Everyone knew that, brother,’ Rahim interjected. His calm just made Kadir angrier. ‘If you only just figured that out, I have some concerns about the intelligence of our future ruler.’
The Sultan held up his hand. ‘If you think now is the time for bickering, with a foreign diplomat dead in my palace, then I have questions about your intelligence, Rahim.’ He nodded at Kadir to continue.
‘The negotiations were lasting forever. And the Gallan were never going to make a new alliance with us so long as you were so blatantly flaunting a half-human thing in violation of their beliefs. They came to me’ – his chest swelled with pride – ‘and demanded her death before they would negotiate any further.’
The Sultan didn’t raise his voice, but even I shrank under the look he gave Kadir. And it wasn’t even directed at me. ‘They demanded her death because she is making lying to me about their resources and their intentions more difficult, and revealing that the Gallan empire is stretched thinner than they would like us to think.’ He spoke slowly, carefully, like he was explaining something to a child. ‘And they came to you because you have clearly been itching to get your hands on her in some way for weeks now.’
Kadir sneered, flopping into the other chair petulantly as his father spoke.
The silence that followed was worse than the glare. ‘I didn’t give you permission to sit.’
Kadir started a laugh, like he thought his father might be joking.
‘Stand up,’ the Sultan ordered calmly. ‘Take an example from your brother for once. Perhaps I should have sent you to Iliaz instead of him.’
I remembered what Rahim had told me – that the Sultan had sent him to Iliaz to die. I understood the threat implied in his words. But it was lost on Kadir.
‘All that military training didn’t help him beat me in the Sultim trials.’ Kadir stood, shoving the chair so it clattered angrily against his father’s desk, shifting some of the papers from the edge onto the floor. ‘So, what, are you going to put him on the throne instead of me now?’
‘The Sultim trials are sacred.’ The Sultan kept all his attention on his son, ignoring the disrupted papers on the ground. ‘Overturning them would turn the people more against us than they already are. You’d have to die before we held another Sultim trial, Kadir.’
‘So unless you’re going to do everyone a favour …’ Rahim muttered.
I snorted under my breath, drawing the Sultan’s gaze. I stifled it too late. The Sultan had already noticed the connection between me and Rahim. But his gaze shifted away again without comment.
‘The Gallan king is due to arrive tomorrow, in advance of Auranzeb.’ The Sultan’s fingers returned to drumming out the same pattern. ‘You will come with me to meet him, Kadir. And you will tell him the same story I will. That the ambassador went into the city without a guard and was killed by rebels on the street. Do you understand?’
Kadir’s jaw worked angrily for a moment. But if he thought his father was going to give in first, he was badly mistaken. ‘Yes.’
‘Good. You are dismissed.’
Kadir slammed the door behind him on his way out, like an angry child.
‘That lie may not be wise, Father,’ Rahim said. ‘If it looks to the Gallan like you can’t control your own people—’
‘Then we may look weak. I had considered that and I don’t in fact need a lesson in political strategy from my son.’ The Sultan cut him off impatiently. ‘If we are lucky, it may give the Gallan soldiers who come with him some incentive to help keep the peace in Izman leading up to Auranzeb. The only alternative is to turn you over to Gallan justice. Perhaps you’d prefer that.’
Rahim’s jaw screwed itself shut.
‘Rahim saved my life.’ I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. The Sultan’s attention swung to me and immediately I regretted talking. But I was already going now. ‘He ought to be rewarded, not threatened.’ The Sultan didn’t speak and I didn’t back down. I couldn’t afford to now. ‘I figured I was here to tell the truth.’
Finally he seemed to check his temper. ‘She’s right. Your soldiers did well today, Rahim.’ Somehow it still didn’t sound like praise. ‘At your orders, no less.’ More like veiled suspicion.
‘Yes, they did.’ Rahim was as smart as his father. He didn’t offer excuses for his men obeying his orders over Kadir’s. He kept his answers short. Like a good soldier would. Or a traitor. Waiting to be dismissed.
‘The rebels raided an incoming shipment of weapons at the south gate yesterday.’ The Sultan spoke again. ‘How do you think they knew where those were, Rahim?’
I was sure the Sultan could hear my heart speed up. I knew exactly which shipment he meant. They knew because Rahim had told me and I’d told Sam. Did he suspect us? Was it an accusation? Or was he asking his son’s military advice as a peace offering? I prayed wildly that he wouldn’t turn the question on me, that it wouldn’t be in this moment that we lost everything.
‘There is a war going on.’ Rahim kept his eyes straight ahead, over his father’s head, like a soldier at attention. ‘Your soldiers are unhappy. Unhappy soldiers drink and they talk.’ He chose his words so carefully that they were true. That I could have repeated them without hesitation. Though not carefully enough not to insult his father’s rule.
‘We killed two rebels in the raid,’ the Sultan said. My stomach clenched. A list of possible rebels I knew cascaded through my head. Imagining them all dead. Suddenly I desperately wanted to run to the Weeping Wall and Sam and find out who. Find out if I’d never be seeing Shazad again. Or Hala. Or one of the twins. But the Sultan wasn’t watching me. His gaze was on Rahim. Waiting for a reaction? ‘Next time I want one alive for questioning. Your soldiers from Iliaz seem well trained. Have Lord Bilal designate half of them to join the city guards on patrol.’ My shoulders eased in relief.
‘As you wish, Father.’ Rahim didn’t wait to be
dismissed. He just offered his father a quick bow before turning on his heel.
And then it was just me and him. A long moment passed in silence. I half thought the Sultan had forgotten me. I was about to point out that I hadn’t been dismissed when the Sultan spoke again.
‘You’re from the end of the desert.’ It wasn’t what I’d been expecting.
‘The very end,’ I agreed. There was nothing after Dustwalk but uninhabitable mountains.
‘They say your people’s blood runs thicker with the old stories than elsewhere.’ That much was true. That was how Tamid had known how to control Noorsham. How to trap a Djinni. All the things that the north had forgotten. ‘Do you know the stories of the Abdals?’
I did.
In the days before humans the Djinn made servants out of dirt. Simple creatures made from clay and animated only when they were given orders by a Djinni. Good for nothing except to follow orders from their immortal masters.
‘The Abdals were as much their creation as we are, and yet the holy texts refer to humans as the first children of the Djinn. I understand why now.’ He riffled his hands through his hair as he leaned back in his chair. It was an exasperated gesture that looked so much like Ahmed it made me homesick. ‘The Abdals didn’t have it in them to be nearly so difficult as children.’
‘Abdals would be a fair bit harder to leave a country to, though.’ It slipped out before I could bite my tongue. I was too comfortable with him. He might look like him, but he wasn’t Ahmed. But the Sultan surprised me by laughing.
‘True enough. Though it would be easier to govern over a country full of Abdals. I wouldn’t have to constantly try to convince them I am doing what is best for them.’ One of the maps pinned up on the wall showed the whole world. Miraji was in the middle. Amonpour crowding our borders on one side. Gallandie looming over the north, swallowing countries as it went towards Jarpoor and the Ionian Peninsula and Xicha, the country that had sheltered Ahmed, Jin, and Delila for years. Albis a fortress holding against Gallandie’s expansion in the sea and Gamanix on land. It was a big world. ‘The people of Miraji are rising up in protest of the Gallan, of the Albish, of the Xichian, of all our foreign friends and enemies.’
I swallowed and felt the pain in my throat from where I’d almost just been choked to death by one such foreigner. ‘So don’t renew an alliance with them.’
I knew I’d overstepped. I knew as soon as the words left my mouth. But the Sultan didn’t rage at me the way he had at his sons. He didn’t sneer at me. He didn’t try to explain to me like he had when we sat across from each other over dinner in the next room.
‘You’re dismissed, Amani.’ And somehow that was worse than anything else he could’ve said.
Chapter 31
‘I think they’re fading.’ Leyla inspected the marks along my throat. They’d bloomed into a glorious necklace of purple fingerprints by the next day. ‘They ought to be gone by Auranzeb.’ That seemed to be everyone in the harem’s biggest worry on my behalf. That my near death would clash with my khalat. Across the garden I could see two women whispering behind their hands, casting me looks. Good God, I hated this place. Leyla’s gentle hands dropped away. ‘I really think you ought to go see Tamid, though; he might be able to give you something for that.’
‘I’ll survive.’
Her big eyes were wide with something unspoken.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Rahim told me, about Auranzeb. About getting out. And just … I wouldn’t want to leave Tamid behind.’
I started. Had Tamid told her about me? That I’d done exactly that? Was that a jab meant to hit me in that old wound? But there didn’t seem to be any kind of malice behind her words.
Leyla bowed her head, brushing her hair nervously behind her ear, avoiding my gaze. She was in love with Tamid. Or at least she thought she was. She was still shy of sixteen. And she’d spent her whole life trapped in a palace. Tamid had to be one of the first men our age she’d ever encountered who wasn’t a brother to her. No wonder she’d think she was in love with him.
And he was clever and he was kind. No wonder she’d really fall in love with him.
And she was right. I couldn’t leave him behind a second time.
*
When Sam walked through the wall that night he had a split lip and he was walking like he might’ve bruised his ribs. It was the one sign he brought with him that things were getting close to boiling point on the outside. He only ever gave me good news from the Rebellion. That Saramotai was safe. That an ambush had been successful. That the delegation meant to inspect the remains of the factory in Dustwalk had never made it that far.
‘You want me to break out four people from this palace now, and I only have two hands.’ Sam scratched at the scab on his lip. I slapped his hand away. He was going to make it scar.
‘Three people.’
‘Four,’ Sam said. ‘I’m counting you. How long have you known me now? Do you really still underestimate the prowess of the Blue-Eyed Bandit?’ He flung his sheema over his shoulder. It snagged on one of the branches of the Weeping Wall tree.
‘Is it just me, or have you gotten more ridiculous?’ It was so like Sam to try to dodge anything even a little bit serious. Like the real possibility I might not be able to escape at Auranzeb with them.
‘Ridiculously smitten with you.’ He’d managed to extract the sheema with some dignity. I realised he was trying to make me laugh. And it was working.
‘You’re not smitten with me, you’re—’ In love with someone else. It almost slipped out, but I stopped myself in time. Sam spent a lot of time bragging about conquests. I was more than sure half of them were invented. But I’d never heard him talk about anyone in particular that he actually cared about. I searched his face now, looking for a hint of something truthful under there. But I was the one with traitor eyes, not him.
‘You sound awfully sure of yourself, my beautiful friend.’ He was all swagger as he planted his hands on either side of me against the tree. ‘Want to bet on that?’
He was going to kiss me, I realised. Or he wanted me to think he was. To prove some stupid point.
‘Your lip is bleeding.’ I reached out to where the split was, but Sam caught my hand playfully as he leaned in a little closer. I didn’t feel anything. Not the way I did when Jin looked at me the way Sam was. Or was pretending to. No rush of heat invading my whole body. The world around him was still as sharp as it had been before he touched me. He wasn’t Jin. But he was here when Jin wasn’t.
The laugh was unmistakable. Our heads snapped around, pulling us apart before his mouth could find mine.
Ayet was in the gateway to the Weeping Wall garden, head thrown back to the sky in a laugh, like she was thanking the heavens for the gift that’d been sent to her. Seventeen years of desert instincts reared in my chest. Only I wasn’t in the desert now. And this was a different kind of danger.
‘You know, in all this time looking for a way to keep you out of my husband’s bed,’ Ayet said, ‘I never thought it would be as incredibly obvious as this. You’re just one of the hundreds of women in the harem stupid enough to take a lover.’
‘Ayet—’ I took a step forward and she took one back. I stopped, keenly aware that she could bolt like a startled animal any second and run to sell me out. ‘Don’t do this. It’s not—’
‘Oh, it’s very much too late to negotiate, Amani.’ And then she whipped around, racing back into the harem.
‘Well,’ Sam said. ‘This seems like it might be a problem.’
*
It was a matter of hours until the Sultan and Kadir were back from greeting the Gallan king. From lying to him and saying it was the Rebellion who had killed his ambassador. A handful of hours to stop Ayet before she got the chance to spill the news to her husband. Stop her or get everyone out.
Sam was making a run for it back to the rebel camp for help. I still didn’t know where it was and I was grateful for that. If the Sultan ordered me to
tell him, my ignorance would buy them some time at least. But they still had to be prepared to run.
In the meantime, I was going to try to stop Ayet.
If there was one person who was a bigger threat to Ayet than I was, it was Shira. And she was still standing. I needed to know how. Shira bartered in information. She had something that kept Ayet off her back. And I needed it.
I burst back towards the core of the harem, breathing hard. Something was different. I felt it immediately. I spotted Leyla, dark hair gathered up off her neck, staring across the garden, worrying her thumbnail. ‘Leyla.’ I dashed across to her. ‘Listen to me. Ayet just found out – it’s complicated. If she speaks to your father or to Kadir, we’re not going to be able to get you out of the palace at Auranzeb like we planned. So you need to be prepared to leave tonight if I tell you to. And I need to find Shira,’ I summarised quickly. ‘Do you know where she is?’
Leyla looked startled as I spilled the information out at her. But she grasped on to the last question. ‘The Sultima? Her baby’s coming. Someone has sent word to Kadir.’
That was it, I realised. That was the restless wildness filling the harem. Damn. Bad timing. ‘Leyla, where is she?’
Shira’s screams got louder as I burst down the hallway. There were a handful more harem women, sprawled in prayer outside the door. A servant woman rushed out, carrying a blood-soaked cloth. Shira’s screams followed her out. Then the door slammed shut again, muffling them.
And then, suddenly, silence dropped like a stone in Shira’s rooms.
I held my breath. Trying to count out heartbeats as the silence stretched. Waiting. Waiting for it to be broken by something. A shout. An accusation. A midwife stepping out to let us know that Shira hadn’t survived.
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