Traitor to the Throne

by Alwyn Hamilton

  Because he wasn’t his father.

  There had been moments in the palace when that had frightened me. That he might not be strong enough, knowledgeable enough, that he might be too idealistic. But that was what Miraji needed. Miraji needed a ruler like Ahmed. I was just afraid that a ruler like Ahmed could never seize the country from a ruler like the Sultan.

  ‘It should be easy, shouldn’t it? One person for an entire country. My sister or an army.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I thought of the ease with which the Sultan had ordered an execution. ‘I don’t think ruling is ever supposed to be easy. But, what if there was another way?’

  ‘To win the Rebellion without an army?’ He cast me a wan smile. ‘With more riots and lost lives? More cities falling out of my hands like Saramotai? With a death count rising as my father creates machines to make slaughter easy?’

  ‘No. What if there was another way to gain control over the army from Iliaz?’

  Ahmed looked up at me, a flicker of hope on his face.

  ‘Rahim,’ I said. ‘He was commander of Iliaz’s army before Bilal was ever the emir. They know him. They respect him.’ I thought of how easily his soldiers had fallen into line when Rahim had ordered them against Kadir the day the Gallan ambassador almost strangled me. ‘I think they would follow him. With or without Bilal’s consent.’

  ‘Are you suggesting we send Imin—’

  ‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Imin might be able to take his shape, but wouldn’t be able to take Rahim’s place.’

  ‘Imin’s done it before,’ Ahmed said. ‘Impersonated someone for us.’

  ‘Not for so long. You don’t think that if Imin walked into camp with your face and started giving us orders, everyone would notice it wasn’t you quicker than anything? We need the real Rahim. No more tricks, just a good old-fashioned rescue.’

  Ahmed leaned back in his chair. ‘Is that the only reason you want to save him?’

  ‘I don’t like leaving people behind.’ Especially not people whom I owed my life to.

  ‘Amani, with the whole city looking over their shoulders and Abdals patrolling the streets every night … this sounds like a suicide mission.’ Ahmed rubbed his eyes. ‘And we’re going to need the others here if we’re planning one of those.’

  Chapter 44

  It was dawn before we had a plan that wouldn’t end with us all dying by Abdal fire.

  We started looking for the most likely place to intercept the transport taking Rahim out of the city. We needed to get to it before it left Izman. Fighting in the confined space of the city streets was to our advantage; if it got out into open ground, we didn’t stand a chance. Sam stepped through the wall as we all stood craned over a map of Izman. There was an ugly bruise on his cheek that hadn’t been there last time I saw him.

  ‘Where’d you get that?’ Shazad asked, distracted for a moment.

  ‘A friend,’ Sam said cagily before joining us around the table. He shot me a meaningful glance I couldn’t quite read. And then it was gone. ‘What are we doing?’ he asked. ‘Picking out summer homes?’

  ‘Picking a good place for an ambush,’ I said. The Sultan was sending Rahim’s transport across the city with human guards and Abdals alike. We weren’t worried about the mortal soldiers. Hala could take care of them. And if she couldn’t, bullets could.

  The Abdals were a different story.

  We needed Leyla.

  She was messy with sleep when she was brought before us in chains. But her eyes were wide and awake and frightened. Even though she wasn’t so much younger than us, she looked like a child standing across from Shazad.

  ‘Leyla.’ My friend leaned on the desk. ‘Think very hard about the answer you are going to give me before you speak. Is there a way to stop the Abdals? Any way you can think of?’

  Leyla’s eyes darted around the room nervously, between me and Imin, and the men who were her flesh and blood without being her true brothers. ‘I’m not sure—’ she whispered. ‘I don’t want anyone else to get hurt if I’m wrong.’ Her voice was thick with unshed tears. I resisted the urge to comfort her. There’d be someone to feel sorry for her if we rescued Rahim. Until then she was going to have to grow up.

  ‘This is your brother’s life at stake, Leyla,’ I said. ‘He would’ve done anything to save you. The least you can do is try to save him.’

  She chewed nervously on her lower lip. I couldn’t tell if she was looking for an answer or if she already knew it and was deciding whether to tell us. ‘You could try destroying the word.’

  ‘The word?’ Ahmed asked.

  ‘The one that gives them life. It channels the Djinn’s fire into their spark. I put it inside their feet.’ Leyla shifted nervously. ‘It was the hardest place for anyone to do them damage,’ she said. ‘They look like people so folk will naturally aim for their heads or their hearts. Who would think to aim for a foot?’

  ‘That’s smart,’ Shazad admitted. ‘And very inconvenient for us.’

  ‘Do you think they could be fooled by an illusion?’ I asked. ‘Not like Hala climbing into their heads; like a veil.’ Like one of Delila’s illusions. But I didn’t mention her by name. It would be an argument to take Delila with us if the answer was yes and that was not an argument we’d be having in front of Leyla.

  ‘They might,’ she admitted. ‘Do you have someone here who can cast illusions like that?’

  ‘Thank you, Leyla.’ Ahmed’s voice carried dismissal. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  Ahmed looked at me as Leyla was led back away, steeling himself.

  I was ready for a fight. ‘You can’t protect her forever, Ahmed; we need Delila—’

  ‘I know.’ He held up a hand to stop me. ‘I know I can’t protect her forever. So I will count on you two to do it.’ Ahmed rubbed his hand tiredly across his face. ‘Get some rest before you go save my brother.’

  *

  Sam hung back with me as the others made their way to their beds even as the sun made its way into the sky. Jin cast a look back for me, but I waved him on.

  ‘I found your aunt,’ Sam said when we were out of earshot of the others. ‘She is in a very fine set of rooms above a gold merchant’s, living beyond the means of a simple medicine trader, by all accounts. It made her easy to find.’ She was living off the gold she’d traded me for. It was a sort of poetic justice that it had allowed Sam to find her.

  ‘Fine.’ I shook my head. It was heavy with sleep and too many plans, too many things that could go wrong in rescuing Rahim. ‘We can go in a few days and—’

  ‘If you do that, you’ll be finding an empty house,’ Sam said, interrupting me. ‘She’s packing up her life and leaving the city tomorrow. A lot of people are. Too much unrest in the city. And now the curfew. Cities are never a good place to be in times of war.’

  Of course. It’d sounded too much like good luck to be true.

  ‘So we’d have to go tonight to have a stab at getting her to cut the iron out of me.’

  I would need more than Sam’s help for that.

  *

  ‘And you’re coming to me.’ The circles of exhaustion under Hala’s eyes made the skin there look a deeper shade of gold. ‘Me, instead of your darling Shazad or your beloved Jin?’

  They don’t know how to crawl inside someone’s head like you do. It was on the tip of my tongue. But she wasn’t wrong. Shazad or Jin and a few well-placed threats could probably get me the same thing. That wasn’t the real reason I was here. We were both Demdji, and we owed each other the truth.

  ‘They’re human,’ I said. They would fight beside me. We would die for each other. But no matter what, they would never understand this the same way Hala did. To have a part of myself trapped away. That someone had hurt me because of what I was. That I wanted to hurt her back. ‘The story around camp is that your mother sold you in marriage to the man who took your fingers.’

  Hala’s face changed at once. ‘Do you know what our mothers get,’ she replied as I watched
the motion of her golden fingers through her inky hair, ‘along with us, from our fathers?’

  ‘A wish,’ I said, remembering my conversation with Shira in the prison.

  ‘Do you know what your mother wished for?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted. I supposed I ought to ask my father, if we ever succeeded at getting me back into the palace.

  ‘Mine wished for gold,’ Hala said. It was such a stupid simple wish. The one that every peasant and tinker and beggar made in stories. I didn’t press her. I just waited. She had this look like she wanted to tell me, her golden lips parted slightly. If I didn’t push, she would.

  ‘My mother had grown up poor and she wished to be rich,’ she said finally. ‘And maybe she meant it well. Maybe she found out she was going to have a child and wished for wealth to be able to raise me in comfort instead of in the gutter where she’d grown up. That’s the lie I used to tell myself when I was little. But I could never say it out loud.’ Her smile was bitter. ‘And then the money ran out, and what she had left was me, her golden daughter.’

  She leaned back, and the light in the opening of the tent made her skin flash. She was one of the only people bothering with a tent. It occurred to me she might be hiding. The golden daughter of a woman who loved gold too much. We’d both been traded in for gold in our own way.

  ‘I’ll help you.’

  *

  I found Jin shaving inside the house, in a small room set off from the study. For the long nights when the general didn’t get to his bed, I guessed. A beaten brass basin was half-filled with water underneath a cracked mirror. It was just a little bit too low for him, so that he had to stoop over. His shirt was flung over the door handle. From behind him I could see the way the muscles on his bare shoulders bunched, moving the compass tattooed on the other side of his heart. There was a new tattoo on the opposite shoulder. A series of small black dots across his skin. Like a burst of sand. As he straightened he spotted me in the reflection, leaning in the doorway watching him.

  ‘That one’s new.’ The room was small enough that I only had to take one step to be close enough to touch it.

  ‘I got it done while I was with the Xichian army.’ His skin was hot under my hand as my fingers danced across the dots, one at a time. ‘I was thinking about this girl I knew.’ He turned around quickly, catching my hand. He smelled of mint mostly, but there was an undercurrent of desert dust and gunpowder when he kissed me that made me desperately homesick. That made it harder to speak what I had to say next.

  ‘Jin, I’m going to tell you something,’ I said, pulling away, ‘and I don’t want you to ask me any questions about it. I just want you to trust me. Tonight, there’s something I’ve got to do before we rescue Rahim. And I need Sam and Hala for it, and I don’t want to tell you what it is in case it doesn’t work.’

  ‘I hate everything about this already.’ Jin wiped a stray streak of water off his jaw with the back of his hand.

  ‘I had a feeling you might. But I’ve got to tell someone, and Shazad is more likely to try to stop me. And she needs to get to the ambush point. You both do. We can’t chance this falling apart on my account.’

  ‘One way to be sure of that is for you to just come with us.’ Jin toyed with the ends of my shortened hair, considering me carefully, trying to read me. But for this I was determined not to let anything show.

  ‘Get to the intersection.’ I stood my ground. ‘Wait for us there. If everything goes right we can still get there in time to intercept Rahim.’

  ‘Is that a promise?’ I knew when Jin was saying yes without really saying it. I had him on my side.

  ‘Djinn’s daughters shouldn’t make promises.’ I pushed myself up, reaching for a shadow near his ear where the razor had missed, close enough to him to feel his heartbeat. ‘It usually doesn’t end well.’

  Jin turned his head instead, catching me off guard with a kiss, fast and sure. He broke it off quickly, but he didn’t pull away. He just smiled against my mouth. ‘Then this had better not be the end, Bandit.’

  Chapter 45

  The rooms my aunt kept above the gold merchant’s were cluttered with chests, half-packed, some of them stuffed to overflowing. When Sam walked us through the wall I smacked my shin into one of them, and barely kept in the string of curses that sprang to my tongue.

  We picked our way through the mess carefully; silks and muslins spilling out of a trunk brushed against my leg like clinging cloth fingers. A rope of pearls was wound carelessly on top of another chest. So this was what selling someone out to the Sultan bought you.

  And in the middle of it all, sprawled across a bed, slept my aunt.

  ‘Ready?’ Hala whispered. I nodded because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to answer truthfully. Hala didn’t deign to wave her hands over my aunt’s body like the street performers did. There was no sign that she was doing anything at all except a slight crease of concentration on her forehead.

  My aunt came awake with a violent gasp as Hala seized control of her mind.

  For a second, she looked around, wild-eyed. Then she saw me and her gaze focused in recognition.

  ‘Zahia,’ she gasped out. I watched her fight it for a moment, the line between reality and dream. Between the knowledge that her sister was dead and what she was seeing standing in front of her. It took only a few blinks before the illusion won.

  ‘Safiyah.’ I sat on the edge of her bed. ‘I need your help.’ I rested my hand next to hers on the cover. I couldn’t quite bring myself to clasp it in pleading.

  But Safiyah did it for me. She laced her fingers with mine and pulled my hand to her lips. ‘Of course.’ There were tears in her eyes now. ‘For you, I would flood the desert.’ She paused expectantly, looking at me. And I realised it was one half of a saying. Something that’d passed between Safiyah and my mother. Some secret bond between sisters.

  Only it wasn’t secret. I knew it. My mother had said it to me before. But there was no way I could say it to Safiyah.

  I thought of Shazad. My sister in arms. We had recognised something in each other the first time we met and we were tied. By more than blood.

  I would probably want to destroy anyone who stole her life, too. The way I had my mother’s.

  ‘For my sister …’ I willed the words off my tongue. ‘I would set the sea on fire.’

  The rest was like walking my aunt through a dream world. She led me into her kitchen. It was a small room crowded with hanging spices as well as jars and jars of things that belonged in an apothecary. She cleared the kitchen table, talking the whole while, snippets of conversations meant for my mother which I barely understood. It was eighteen years of all the pent-up things she’d wanted to talk to her sister about while there’d been a desert between them. All the secret private jokes between sisters in a life before this one. The language of two women I’d never really known.

  ‘You need to strip,’ she told me. As one, Hala and I turned to look at Sam meaningfully.

  He held up his hands like we had him at gunpoint. ‘I’ll, um … keep watch,’ he said, backing through the wall.

  I stripped and lay down on my aunt’s table. She plucked a tiny knife out of the pile and started cleaning it. I’d been stabbed and shot and beaten and plenty of other things in my life. But I still didn’t love the look of this knife. With a roll of her eyes Hala slipped her hand into mine as my aunt stepped forward, swiping a piece of fabric, wet with something that made my skin tingle, across the spot where the first shard of metal was embedded.

  The tiny knife pressed into my arm. I felt the needle of pain shoot through me. I tensed instinctively, squeezing my eyes shut. But the feeling of my skin breaking never came. And then the hard table below me was gone. I moved my fingers and found soft sand beneath my skin.

  I opened my eyes. I was staring up at stars. Desert stars, the way they blazed in the open nothingness against the dark, the last burning light of the desert.

  This was an illusion. I knew that because I knew Hala. And I
knew I was lying on a kitchen table with a knife cutting metal out of my arm and being stitched back up by my aunt.

  But knowing the stars above me weren’t real didn’t matter – same as realising you were in dream didn’t help you wake up. I didn’t fight it, this unexpected kindness of Hala stealing away the pain from my mind. Instead I stretched my fingers out across the sand, revelling in the feeling of it against my skin, even if it was all in my head.

  The illusion Hala had woven in my mind shattered. The desert and the stars were gone and the kitchen was back. Pain across my body woke up. I hissed and quickly Hala grabbed my mind again and the pain faded as she pulled it out of my head.

  I must’ve been under the illusion for a good long while beacuse there were twelve tiny pieces of iron lying in a glass dish next to the table. There was a tiny symbol printed into each of them. The Sultan’s seal. I got angry all over again. That was so like him. He could’ve just shoved iron under my skin from a scrap pile, but these pieces had been specially made.

  ‘The last one …’ I felt my aunt’s fingers exploring my skin; I felt the slight pressure on my stomach, just above my hip, a hand’s breadth away from my navel. Her dreamlike expression looked worried now. ‘It was so near your stomach, Zahia,’ she said to me. ‘There were scars here already, like an old healed wound.’ She frowned, like she was struggling to remember what had hurt her sister. But I knew what it was. That was where Rahim had shot me. Where the wound had healed over a long, torturous month. ‘The scar tissue makes it almost impossible to remove it all without making it worse,’ Safiyah was saying now. ‘I’m worried I’ve made it worse.’

  I pushed myself up, ignoring the returning pain of the smattering of twelve tiny wounds across my skin. This might be the city. But it was still desert land. There was desert dust everywhere. I pulled on it. A stabbing pain tore through my side as I did, right where my old scar was, blinding for a moment. But sure enough, I felt the ground shift, a thousand tiny grains of sand rushing towards my fingers.