by Lucy Tempest
Cora kept demanding to come with me, but I insisted she was too conspicuous with her height and looks. She also had no experience as a thief and I couldn’t afford to train her in these conditions. In reality, I could have used her distraction while I stole, but the dread of causing her apprehension and imprisonment, too, outweighed any benefits of pairing up in my heists.
But those were nothing like back in Ericura. There, I’d flitted from town to town, leaving once I’d become noticed, or made a substantial robbery. Now I couldn’t leave in search of fresh targets. By now I’d mapped out the whole city for what and when to steal, and my choices had narrowed down to a few haunts. On each thieving errand, the dread grew that any day I would build up enough suspicion, and with it the possibility of being caught.
That day was today.
In my attempt to make a baker’s dozen an actual dozen, relieving a tray of its thirteenth loaf, a harsh shout lodged in my back.
“THIEF!”
Almost keeling over with fright, I froze. It was essential in my line of business never to act guilty when discovered or confronted. I surreptitiously looked over my shoulder and found that I was past bluffing this out.
A vendor from across the bakery, one I’d noticed eyeing me before even in my disguise, was pointing right at me. He probably believed it would buy him his new queen’s favor to help rid the city of its rising crime. Right in the middle of the street, I had no chance of disappearing among the miserable number of shoppers.
Guards were already falling out of their patrol formation and heading to the vendor. When they all looked in my direction, I played innocent to the last possible possible, tightening the scarf that covered everything but my eyes, sticking the loaf in my satchel. The moment the first guard took a step towards me, I exploded into a sprint to a narrower part of the marketplace.
The guards chased after me, shouting orders to stop and surrender.
When I didn’t, I heard grunts then a spear flew past my ear. Its whoosh filled me with dreadful images of what would have happened had it cut a little closer. Another whizzed over my head just as I neared buildings that retained their original structure of pigeon houses, but were now as dark and slimy as tar. My heartbeat churned between my chest and ears as I snatched up a fallen spear and ducked into the alleyway.
They followed, their bellowed threats getting more vicious as I continued to evade them.
Getting caught was not an option. Not only would I leave Cora alone, probably driving her to take extreme measures to survive—measures I suspected everyone in Sunstone would regret—but unlike Ericura, where getting caught meant being thrown in prison or sold to a temple, here an arrest for theft meant getting my hand chopped off. It had always been the law in Cahraman, but had gone unimplemented since Xerxes died. It was said it would be reinstated in full force in Nariman’s Cahraman. The Cahraman I’d helped her create.
Swallowing my heart back down and dispersing the guilty thoughts, I reached one of the blocky buildings with thorny edges. Sticking the spear into the ground, I vaulted up. Holding onto the edge of a window with one hand, I stashed the spear in my belt at my back. Then with both hands bracing me, with wrists almost breaking off and muscles burning under my weight, I kicked and heaved myself up. The window was shuttered, so I used the thorns beside it as steps up. They were sharp enough to tear through my leather boots. If those gave out, my feet would be next. I was at least thankful I had pants below my tunic. This wouldn’t have been possible in a dress, let alone any of those I’d been forced to wear during the Bride Search in Sunstone Palace.
It didn’t occur to the guards to look up at first. The relief didn’t last, because one at the rear suddenly looked up, shouted for the others, and they turned back, converged below me, tossing their weapons at me. As bad as their aim was, they were bound to hit me by accident.
Then it got worse. They began to climb after me.
Once I reached the roof, lungs burning and shaking all over, I ran to the other end, looked below. Sweat slid into my lashes, stinging my eyes and fogging my sight as I realized two things.
I’d climbed far higher than I’d thought in my desperation. It was a good five stories to the bottom. And climbing down those jagged protrusions would probably prove fatal. Whenever I’d climbed that high up into houses, I’d had a hooked rope to support me back down. Now I had nothing to keep me from falling to my death.
I was trapped!
“I’ve got you now!” a guard yelled from behind me, struggling to pull himself up the roof’s edge in his cumbersome armor.
Heart stuttering, I looked at the adjacent building. It was too far. Even if I ran from the far side of the roof before I jumped, I’d certainly fall and shatter on the ground.
But I couldn’t afford to die now. I had so much I needed to do, to fix before I did.
Suddenly, a thought burst through the panic.
I didn’t waste another heartbeat thinking the idea through, snatched the spear from my back and ran towards the guard. I stomped on his fingers as he struggled to drag himself up, then I sprinted across the roof. Right at the ledge, I slammed the spearhead into the ground and vaulted myself across the chasm.
I sailed into nothingness and time stopped. A strange, cold peace overwhelmed me, nothing like the quiet, weightless serenity of drowning in the flooded shrine of Anaïta. Something totally new. A direct stare at my mortality.
Whatever this feeling was, it ended abruptly as I plummeted to the opposing ledge with a slam that tore a stifled shriek out my lungs. Hot pain flared in my left thigh, followed by the numb burn of scraped skin. Nothing broken, though. Good enough for now.
Swallowing the delayed fright of my gamble, I checked the roof. I was still in the same predicament of needing to climb down. But at least the guards weren’t breathing down my neck.
Sliding over the edge, scraping more skin through my flimsy clothes, I dangled off until I peeked into the first window. It was open, the room beyond empty. Another dwelling that had been abandoned during Nariman’s initial mayhem.
Clinging to the edge, blanking my mind to the pain cutting through my palms, I swung my legs over the windowsill. I crashed inside in a heap, my breath shearing through my lungs and my heart ramming against my ribs as if for a way out.
I didn’t have time to calm either, checked the place for anything worth taking before running out the door and down the floors of spiraling stairs to the street.
The guard on the roof had clearly told his comrades below of my escape. I heard them shouting to split up, to check every alleyway I could be in.
For Ellat’s sake, all this for a loaf of bread? Or was it the principle of theft itself? Nariman had compelled them to respond to all unlawful acts with the same ferocity?
Before they turned the corner to the alley I was in, I bolted into the first thing I could find, a massive water urn people used to fill as a public service to passersbys in this desert. It was now full of some rancid liquid.
I’d barely managed to climb inside, to squat down holding my satchel above me head and fall still when I heard the guards stomping by. I bated my breath and prayed they wouldn’t hear the liquid sloshing around me. I squeezed my eyes shut, expecting to find angry faces staring down at me any second now.
But the thunder of their boots and the fury of their frustration passed by and trailed off.
When the last echoes of their passage died I burst up, tossed my satchel away, tried to climb out. I ended up knocking the urn down and the thick pottery shattered, spitting me out with its slimy burden. Struggling to my feet, I retrieved my thankfully dry bounty, and continued my escape, my every laceration and blossoming bruise shrieking with a furious pain.
When I was far enough away from the guards, I stopped behind a pillar by a pomegranate cart to catch my breath, feeling the rising sun drying my clothes like a hot iron. And I found myself looking straight at the palace.
In the past weeks of chaos, any moment of silence I got always led my mind back
to Cyrus. Now tears stung my weary eyes, not from the burning sun or the ashes-soaked air, but from the searing ache that slashed through my lungs and throat at the thought of him.
He was trapped up there with Nariman. With her doing who knew what to him. It would have been bearable if we were trapped together, but he was stuck in the palace he’d always considered a gilded cage and I was back on the streets.
It was as if a cartwheel of capricious fate had rolled us back to our original spots, making sure to run us over while at it.
I’d thought of all possible ways of getting back into the palace, spent nights making all sorts of wishes of my ring. But with it useless, and without Ayman, I had no way back there.
They were all trapped for good and I would never see Cyrus again.
The thought I always struggled to evade, what would drain me of the will to live if I let it in, forced itself into my breached defenses as my near-death experience crashed down on me.
He could be dead.
He could have been long gone with my last words to him an insistent rejection.
Now I’d almost died, over a loaf of bread, and any chance of seeing him again would have been so pointlessly lost.
“Oh, Cyrus, how I wish I could see you again,” I whispered brokenly as I stifled sobs, the desperation I’d been holding in bursting out and deluging me. “If only so I can tell you how sorry I am, for everything I’ve done to you and Cahraman—that I would die to undo it all!”
But reality said I’d never get that chance. To see him, or to atone.
Utterly guilty and helpless, I forced my wet eyes away from the sinister structure that had once been the most beautiful place I’d seen, and forced my thoughts back to practical matters.
I snuck two pomegranates into my satchel and headed back to the half-destroyed hovel at the outskirts of Sunstone that Cora and I now called home.
Until I could figure out a way to find out what had happened to Cyrus, to help him and all the others if they were still alive, all I could do was survive.
Chapter Two
The stone form of Ayman, draped in damp clothes, welcomed me “home.”
His permanent expression of frozen fury sometimes felt more like a look of great offense, that he, who’d once been the stuff of nightmares—with everyone thinking him cursed, or even a ghoul or a demon, rather than the albino he was—was now our drying rack.
He was still the liveliest thing around. This place was the most miserable place I’d ever squatted in. It used to be a spacious domicile in this multi-storey building, but its left side had been destroyed by the distortion of the city’s architecture, and the rest of it was still crumbling with this disturbing decay that continued to eat at every part of Sunstone. It was still the safest place for us to stay as far away as it got from the patrols.
I still chose the top floor to be able to see anyone coming from a good distance. And to have an unobstructed view of the palace.
Cora stood in the kitchen where we’d replaced a missing wall with patchwork cloth, stirring a large pot over the fire, long blonde hair bound with a rag and face drenched in sweat.
With me unable to provide enough food as she needed, and staying mostly indoors, Cora had lost a significant amount of weight, melting her strong curves and sucking her skin’s golden glow. But while everyone looked sick, sallow and subdued under Nariman’s reign, Cora had been boiled down to a sinewy, angry, and perpetually hungry creature.
It always made me wish she’d taken Nariman up on her offer to join her, and possibly be allowed back to the home she’d longed to return to from the first day she’d set foot in Cahraman. But being her fearless self, Cora had instead chosen to offend Nariman. For all she’d known, she could have suffered the same fate as Ayman. What she’d ended up with was arguably not much better, this miserable existence with me.
While I hated that she shared my suffering, I was still unspeakably grateful that she’d chosen to stick with me. I didn’t think I could have survived on my own this time.
But living with her always dragged my mind back to the time I’d had with the Fairborns. And to the safe, smiling Bonnie I’d seen through the portal I’d compelled Nariman to open before she’d shaken off the ring’s compulsion. Now I no longer knew if this had been Bonnie, or an apparition Nariman had conjured to mess with me.
But even if she wasn’t living in the secure conditions I’d seen, she was bound to be better off in whatever part of Arbore she was than we were here. Especially if Nariman had truly freed her and Mr. Fairborn as she’d claimed. Even if they could never return to Ericura, I hoped they’d make the best of their situation. I hoped they were now in an idyllic town where Mr. Fairborn was a smith, and Bonnie was far away from any beasts and working in a bookshop or library.
I hoped they had the happiness and freedom they’d once given me.
I knocked on a cupboard to get Cora’s attention, and she turned, brows raised in expectant hope. “What did you get?”
I emptied my bag on the kitchen table, rolling out the pomegranates, an onion, a few potatoes and the loaf of bread, which had been a bit battered in my great escape.
“That’s all?” Cora groaned, disappointment heavy in her green eyes. “You got more last time.”
As a farmer from The Granary, Folkshore’s most fertile valley, having to ration the little I stole, and to share it with me, had been a severe shock to Cora’s system. Her body was used to grueling activity and masses of food to compensate for the spent energy. She’d only ever known appetite, had never imagined what real hunger was like.
I, on the other hand, from my years of being alone on the streets of Ericura, was used to being perpetually hungry and holding onto scraps for another day.
I gingerly touched the tender bruising on my chest, knowing it would only feel worse tomorrow. “Last time I didn’t almost get impaled by a bunch of compelled guards.”
Cora frowned, wiping her forehead on her sleeve. “You got caught?”
“Almost,” I said tiredly. “Someone thought I looked suspicious and yelled, ‘Thief!’”
“You do look suspicious,” she pointed out. “In fact, you always did.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, thank you for reminding me.”
I dropped on a chair at the table, started peeling the onion for her soup. “Hear any news?”
She got those from the only neighbors we had on the ground level, and some extra food, in return for mending things around their house.
She went back to stirring the pot with a sigh. “Ayda says one of the palace handmaidens allowed to visit her family in Sunstone told her Almaskham is still promising dire consequences if Nariman doesn’t release their Crown Prince and Dowager Princess. But I say it’s still all talk. If they had witches strong enough to cross the magical barrier around Cahraman they would have by now. All they can do is send Nariman long distance and empty threats.”
I sometimes forgot to count Miraz and his grandmother, Aurelia, among Nariman’s hostages. They’d been visiting Cahraman at the time of her takeover and had gotten trapped with the rest of us. Another report had claimed that Almaskham had magically projected a previous ultimatum to Nariman a week after her takeover, and that she’d projected back one of her own. She’d told the High Prince she’d return his mother and son if he made her his queen, and became her consort. She wanted to rule her homeland, too.
Reportedly, Prince Mazin hadn’t been diplomatic in his response. So Miraz and Aurelia remained her hostages. I’d been hoping the prince had been preparing a rescue, but as Cora thought, it was more likely he’d given up on one by now. Almaskham had a lot of witches, but I doubted even their combined powers could rival the genie’s.
I sighed as my ring glinted in sword of sunlight slashing through the makeshift wall.
Cyrus had chosen it nondescript so it wouldn’t draw suspicion until he could make his proposal official. That, and he’d suspected it was the wish-granting ring I’d asked for. And he’d been right. It
had granted me wishes. Specific ones. Like it had a mind of its own.
But since my confrontation with Nariman, its power had stuttered, before fizzling out altogether. As if it had been burnt out by the shockwave of the genie’s overwhelming power.
And to think I’d gone to that confrontation believing it housed one. The ring had led me to believe that when I’d wished to know what it contained. It had opened a page from the Anthology of the Dunes, depicting a man letting a genie out of a bottle.
But after seeing the might of the one Nariman had released from the lamp, I knew whatever had powered my ring was nothing like that. Unless there were levels of genies, and the one she had was the most powerful of all. While I had a limited, fickle and now useless entity.
But I’d decided to confront Nariman believing in its power. I’d thought I could compel her to return the Fairborns to me, send us back to Ericura, then banish herself to Almaskham. It had worked, but only during her initial surprise. Once that had passed, its compulsion had proved nothing compared to her magic and will.
Now the ring was only a painful reminder of Cyrus’s love and the promise of our future together—the first I never deserved, and the second would never come to be.
Cora drew me out of my melancholy musings, grumbling about her lack of spices as she sprinkled her brew with a generous amount of salt.
Pre-Nariman, spices had been Cahraman’s most lucrative export. Since the trade routes had turned inward, their prices had dropped dramatically. And we still couldn’t afford any. I hadn’t figured out yet how to swipe any without making a mess, but had managed to steal a crystal of Deep Red Sea salt, what Cora had ground to powder with a rock. It wasn’t much compared to the precious spices the Folkshore coveted, but it made her bone broths bearable.
She suddenly stopped sipping from the ladle and cocked her head at me. “You never told me why Nariman kidnapped you exactly.”
“I did tell you. To get her the lamp.”
“Yes, but why you?”
“I must have been the first girl thief she found,” I evaded as I slammed down the knife, splitting the onion in half, immediately tearing up.