“Your Royal Highness, Sultana Jawahir, we are starving. Your trade bans have made it impossible for us to do our jobs. If we can’t do our jobs, how do you expect us to buy the things we need?”
“Trade bans?” My mother asked.
My stomach lurched. She was not prepared for this. How could she be? She’d forgotten everything she’d put in place only last week.
“And the taxes are ridiculous,” someone else shouted. The crowd nodded and jeered.
My mother suddenly looked scared. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
“Let me pass!” I shouted to Malik.
Jamal caught my arm. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t leave her up there. You can see what’s happening. They are going to storm the stage!”
He licked his lips. “You can’t go up. The people remember Jawahir. Half of them don’t remember you. You’ll only add to the confusion.”
“But...”
“What do you think is going to happen when you go up? They’ll wonder who you are. When you tell them you are the Sultana’s daughter, most won’t believe you. Do you trust me?”
He relaxed his grip on my arm and looked right into my eyes.
“Do you trust me, Gaia?” he repeated.
I nodded my head. Seconds later, he’d pushed past Malik and joined my mother on the stage.
“My name is Jamal. I’m an advisor to the Sultana. I know you are all hungry and scared. We are going through unprecedented times. The Sultana has been working tirelessly to get us through these past few weeks despite not feeling well herself.”
A white lie. My mother had barely done anything these past weeks, and the things she had done had caused this mess in the first place.
“The tax raise and the trade restrictions were a mistake,” Jamal continued. “I had proposed it for consideration for the future, but somehow the memo got leaked. It was never meant for public eyes. The tax raises, if they should happen, will only come when things are better in Badalah, and they will be nowhere near the amount on the memo. As for trade, the ban is lifted from immediate effect.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. He’d gone up there and lied to the people. And they were cheering him. He’d even said that taxes would be raised at some point. The man was a genius.
“He’s great at this, isn’t he?” Freya said, grabbing my arm.
I flicked my eyes to my mother to see how she was taking this. The blank stare I’d come to recognize was still on her face. Jamal took her hand in his, and she seemed to snap out of it.
“But we’re still hungry,” someone shouted. “We’ve not been able to sell our wares for two weeks.”
“I couldn’t collect a shipment from Draconis last week!” another said.
“My children are starving!” yet another said. “Our crops are failing.”
In a loud, determined voice, my mother stepped forward and spoke.
"I've heard enough. At my direction, the people of the palace will be setting up food banks for each of you to take what you need and bring it back to your homes to tide you over. In the meantime, you are all welcome into the palace where I’ll make sure food is laid out for all of you.”
I almost laughed. This is what we did all the time before the curse hit Kisbu. She’d just forgotten.
I felt hope that maybe she was starting to get better, starting to remember.
Back in the palace, we all set to work, organizing the kitchens, and getting everything ready for the people. My heart was full as I did what I loved best, helping the staff to prepare for one of the Palace Parties, as they were known.
Maybe, just maybe if my mother was beginning to remember, maybe my father would too, and this weird...whatever it was would go as quickly as it had come.
Jamal buttered slices of bread, tossing them to me with a grin, which I then filled with meat and passed to Freya to add salad.
It wasn’t the same without my father, nor without Genie, but it was a step in the right direction.
Genie! He used to love this. “I need to tell Genie,” I said, breaking off.
“Really?” Jamal said. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want to be bothered with something as menial as this.”
“Actually, he always helped before. I think he should know what is happening.”
Jamal nodded curtly then kissed my cheek. “If you must.” He turned to Freya. “It looks like it’s just you and me on sandwich duty.”
My heart felt light as I skipped down the corridor to Genie’s room.
"Genie! There you are. I've got some good news." I enthused, opening the outer door. When I saw him, I stopped. Something was wrong. He was sitting, gazing out of the window in much the same way my father had done at the beginning of his illness.
My throat constricted. As my mother was getting better, was Genie getting worse?
He turned to me with a weird expression. His eyes were red and held a pained expression
"What's the matter?" I whispered.
Genie lifted his arms, and over his wrists were two bronze cuffs.
"Genie..." I whispered, rushing to his side. The veins in his strong hands looked as if they were about to pop. I reached for one of his hands and carefully touched the cuff.
"It's happening again," he said.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean the magic. The wish. It is all fading away.”
The reality of what he was saying hit me like a punch to the gut. He was a free man because of my father. My father had saved him from a life of slavery by using a wish to do so. A wish that belonged to my father, one of three.
“What does that mean?” I asked my voice barely more than a choked sob.
“I don’t know for sure, but these cuffs are the mark of a genie. If they are back, it must mean the lamp is back.”
“It can’t be! My father threw it out into the desert. It hasn’t been seen for over eighteen years.”
I remembered what Freya’s mother had told me when I’d first met her. She said it was unlikely that The Vizier was still in it. Maybe when he escaped, it paved the way for Genie to turn back to what he once was. It kind of made sense. My father’s other two wishes were also disappearing. He’d wished to be the sultan, and he’d wished for my mother to fall in love with him. Genie couldn’t produce love, so he’d produced a magical night with flowers and music and moonlight. My mother had fallen in love with my father all on her own. Now, my father was living on the streets, and my mother had forgotten he existed. His last wish of three was to free Genie.
He looked at me through watery eyes.
“Neither had these,” he replied sadly, holding his wrists up.
"No! I will not allow that. Do you hear me? I won't allow you to go back to being someone's slave. There must be something I can do. What about the wishes? If you are a genie again, you owe wishes, right? You gave my father three? Well, I wish..."
Genie stopped me with a finger to my lips. "Don’t do it.”
He held his hand out to mine. The coldness of the metal on his wrists grazed my fingertips.
“Owning wishes is not for people like you. Only the greedy covet the riches I can bring them. Even those who don’t start greedy turn that way when they find out what they can do. If you make the first wish, I will be bound to you for three wishes. I will become your slave.”
Tears sprang to my eyes. “Finding out you are a genie again is one thing. Finding out that’s what you think of me is another entirely.” I looked directly at him. “Is that really what you think of me? That I’ll use the wishes for my own gain. Don’t you know me at all?”
“I’m sorry, Gaia. I barely know myself anymore. There are gaps in my memory. And there are things I remember that I don’t even know if they really happened.”
I’d never seen him look so helpless. In fact, I’d never seen him look helpless at all before now. I leaned forward and touched my lips to his. He didn’t flinch or pull away. He closed his eyes as I pulled
back.
“Do you remember that?” I whispered. “Do you remember me now?”
“Gaia,” he said his voice soft and warm.
“I will use my first wish to free you as my father did,” I said, holding his wrists and running my thumb over the metal. That’s all I want. I don’t care about anything else.”
His lips tightened, and I could see he was trying to hold his emotions back.
“What about your father? The curse spreading through our kingdom. You’ve talked about nothing but the strange magic for weeks. What about that?”
He remembered my father again. Just like with my mother, the magic came and went. “Can you cure it?”
“Even with these on my wrists, I don’t understand the magic. I feel it, but my wishes are not powerful enough to stop it.”
“You were the most powerful in all the kingdom.”
Genie dropped his head. “In the kingdom, yes. In most of the kingdoms, but there were others that were more powerful than me. The gods...”
“Gods? I don’t believe in gods.”
“Hmm.”
I waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. All I could think about was the taste of his lips on mine, but I had to concentrate on more pressing matters. The kingdom was depending on me, even if they didn’t know it.
I thought of all the things I could ask for. For my father to be home, for him to remember me, for the people to have enough food. There were so many things that battled for prominence in my mind.
In the end, the solution was clear. The million things I could ask for I already had a couple of weeks ago. I wanted everything to go back to normal.
“Can you send me back in time? Maybe if I go back a few weeks, I can stop this. Then you won’t become a genie again.”
Genie gave me a sad smile. “You had an inkling that something was going to happen, but you didn’t know what. Knowing what you know now, what do you propose you’ll do to stop it?”
“I’ll...” I didn’t know. This wasn’t a single thing I could touch or see, it was a myriad of problems created by a magical force. A magical force I didn’t know how to stop now any more than I did then. I didn’t even know where it had come from. I didn’t believe it was a thing of the gods. I doubted Genie believed that either. This had something to do with me. My magic started when this started in Badalah.
“Take me back to my birth.”
“You want to go back to when your parents were young? You know that time travel will take you out of this timeline to put you in another. You’ll cease to exist here. What would I tell your mother?”
“Can you send me back long enough to see where I came from and then bring me back?”
“I can. It will take you two of your three wishes. One for each way. If you just want to see what happened, I can show you without you leaving the palace. That will take one wish. You’ll stay exactly where you are.”
“Do it!” I said, standing up. “Show me everything you can around my birth. And when you are done, I’ll wish for your freedom.”
“I don’t even know this will work without the lamp.”
“Neither of us will know without trying.”
“You have to say the words,” he said with a sigh. He’d known me better than myself. He’d known I would make a wish, but it wasn’t a frivolous wish. I was doing this for him as well as for me. I was doing this for all of us.
He looked at me as though he was hoping I wouldn’t. But I had no choice. If I wanted my father back, my mother well, and Genie to be free, I needed to find out how this all started.
I took his hands in mine. “Genie. I wish for you to show me my own birth.”
The hairs on my arm stood on end, sending a chill down my spine as his magical energy spun around us.
It peeled away and formed a spinning orb of light.
Genie let go of me and nodded to the light.
“In there, is what you seek. It will appear to you that you are somewhere else, but in reality, you’ll not leave my office.”
The light was cold, making me shiver as I stepped through it.
A dense fog rolled in, and with it, a scream pierced the air. Not mine, not Genie.
A hazy image appeared before me.
A younger woman on a bed, screaming. But I couldn't do anything. There was some invisible shield between us. It wasn’t real, it was a memory.
Then an older woman came into view. She was at the end of the bed.
She held a baby in her arms. A newborn still tethered to its mother.
The old woman cleaned it up and cut the cord. The golden rings around its irises were unmistakable. I was looking at myself.
It was the most bizarre feeling. I felt a strange sensation in my stomach as the older lady passed the baby to the mother...my mother. As she passed it, I noticed something else about the child. I’d been so caught up in its eyes, that I’d not paid attention to the rest of it. It wasn’t me, after all. It was a baby boy.
Disappointment filled me. Genie was wrong. This wasn’t about me. This was someone else. The look of love on the mother as she gazed down at her new son was unmistakable.
She was an extraordinarily beautiful woman, with long dark hair that clung to her face with sweat, but I imagined it hung beautifully straight on normal days. Her features contorted, and she screamed again. The older woman took the babe and disappeared from view, returning a few seconds later without the child. For a second, I was confused. What was happening? But as the older woman took her place at the foot of the bed, I understood. Twins.
I watched in awe as the young woman bore down and pushed another child into the world. It came out quickly, almost falling into the older woman’s hands.
“A girl!” she announced. She proceeded to clean her up in the same way she had with the boy. The mother was flushed with exhaustion, but the same look of love I’d seen moments earlier came back to her face as the baby was swaddled and handed to her.
I’d asked to see my birth, and here it was. I had a brother. A twin brother. Of all the things I’d wondered about where I’d come from, I’d never expected to see another child. If I had a twin, where was he? Why didn’t the women want to keep us together?
"What will you do with the babes?" The old woman asked, gazing down at the small child.
I looked at the baby myself, willing myself closer. She had the golden rings around her eyes. Other than that, she could have been anyone.
We both watched on as she carefully caressed the little girl's cheeks, cuddling her into her bosom.
The younger woman finally looked up to the older one and spoke. "My father will kill them if he finds out. I’ve hidden the pregnancy. I can’t hide the babies."
It suddenly made sense. She was young. There was no man in the room, so probably no father was in the picture, and she’d kept it from her own father. I wanted to reach out and hug her, but before my eyes, the scene shifted.
The women were seated at a table in what looked to be a kitchen. I could hear the babies crying, but I couldn't see them. The fog around the edges of the picture was thick, and I knew if I tried to walk into it, I’d only find myself out of the picture altogether and back in Genie’s office.
The young woman was in tears, but the older woman was speaking. "You must have noticed the magic that came into the world when the babies were born.”
“I don’t want to give them away. I love them.”
“I know you do, but this is bigger than you. Look at this.” she pushed a newspaper toward the younger woman. I leaned forward and read the headline. A hundred years of sleep comes to an end. Draconis celebrates.
Below it was a picture of a young woman looking at a man adoringly. I recognized them as the king and queen of Draconis.
The young woman barely looked at the paper before pushing it away.
“You can’t ignore it,” the old one said. “All the bad in the world. It’s gone. You made something beautiful. The babies are special, but you know they aren’t
safe. If your father finds out about them and kills them to make up for your sins, all this good will be over. Did you see the marriage announcement of the young prince in Atlantice? It’s not the only one. The kingdoms are protected from evil. For the first time in a long time, people are happy.”
“I’m not happy,” the younger one said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand “Why must their happiness take precedence over mine?”
The older woman reached across the table and patted the younger woman’s hand. “You know why. We are talking about everyone in all the kingdoms. That’s millions of people. Besides, will you be happy if your father kills them? No, you won’t. I’m afraid your happiness is not possible, but your children’s might be. You want them to be happy, don’t you?”
Tears flowed down her face, but she nodded.
"The magic won't last forever,” the young woman said assertively. “When they turn eighteen, this burst will fade. It is about then that they will come into their own powers. I just need to hide them until they are adults."
With a heavy sigh, the old woman spoke up again. "I will help you. I have an idea..."
The fog rolled out, and the haze was gone. Suddenly, I was back in Genie’s office.
My head hurt with everything I’d just witnessed, but I was soon brought back to the present when Genie fell to the floor in front of me.
"Genie, are you all right?" I asked, running toward him. I crouched down and wrapped my arm around his back.
He smiled weakly, "I forgot how exhausting magic can be. I’m not the man...the genie I once was. I’m an old man now.”
“You aren’t old,” I said, ignoring the fact that he was generations old. He didn’t look it. What he did look was tired.
“Come on, let’s get you up onto the couch.”
I already had my arm around him, and with the other, I grabbed his arm and helped him to his feet.
“Not the couch,” he huffed. His face was sheet white with the exertion of standing. “My bed.”
Not once in my whole life had I gone through the doors from his office to his private quarters. He was usually so private. Asking me to help him to bed was a huge deal.
Gaia: Daughter of Aladdin Page 12