by Lucy Tempest
She thumbed the diamond that sparkled like a tiny twinkling star in Barzakh’s eerie light. “He assured me this wouldn’t happen, but I didn’t have much hope of him marrying me, anyway. His father was a very harsh man and Almaskhami royals are unbending in their traditions and expectations, and they have total control of their children’s life, for life. But Jumana couldn’t imagine marrying Azal either and soon noble houses were launching a bidding war for her. Everyone wanted the only Morvarid princess for themselves.” She suddenly looked up at Cyrus with sorrow in her eyes. “I am so sorry you never got to know her. I should have done a better job as her friend and healing witch. Then she died and I escaped to be with Azal, only to leave him to save Adelaide.” She transferred her filling gaze to me. “I ended up leaving you, too.”
I latched tighter onto her, as if mentioning leaving would take her away from me again. “You had no choice. And you didn’t think you’d leave me that long.”
“There were so many things I could have done differently,” she said, choking up. “With you and with everyone else, because in the end, it didn’t matter. Nariman still found you.”
“The past is done. Only what we all do going forth matters,” Cyrus said, voice heavy with emotion. “But do tell us more about them—Nariman, my mother, Azal. Any information could help us once we return to Cahraman.”
His conviction that we would was both reassuring and distressing. I could only hoped his confidence would somehow sway the fates in our favor.
My mother detached from me to wipe her eyes. “Nariman and I met Jumana through Azal, when my family visited his family estate and I brought her as a guest. Jumana took an instant liking to us and requested we both become her companions, and protect her with wards and spells. Her ailing father, Prince Jalal agreed under the condition that we bring a third girl from our temple, as both ladies-in-waiting and witches come in threes.
“It was a dream come true to Nariman and I. We came to love Jumana as we lived with her, accompanying her to events, helping her learn the practices of her status, and protecting her from the evil eye of the envious and the enemies of her family. Her father died not long after he contracted us, so it was her uncle who handled her suitors’ bids once she came of age at sixteen.
“Her mother, Princess Maissa rejected them all. As the only girl in House Morvarid, and the niece of our high prince, Jumana’s value was immense, and her mother wouldn’t settle for any lesser prince like Azal. Then she heard of a diplomatic meeting on Iacoöt, the Isle of Rubies, attended by young princes from across the Folkshore and decided this was where she’d find her daughter a suitable husband.”
Engrossed in her story, Cyrus absentmindedly stroked his growing beard. “So my grandmother planned for my parents to meet?”
My mother nodded. “I daresay Darius was her main target. But there were other prospects if he failed to make an offer. Your grandmother had us convince Jumana to join her cousins on Iacoöt as a fun trip, when our real job was to put her in front of as many princes as possible. Beside Cahraman, those from Merjan, Gemisht, Avesta and other kingdoms from across the Silent Ocean were attending.”
The thought that Jumana hadn’t known of her mother’s intentions when she’d made that trip made me uncomfortable. “You had to dangle her before them like bait and see who bites?”
“Yes, and many did. Jumana was beautiful and joyful and anyone who saw her loved her.”
“How was their first meeting?” Cyrus asked, looking almost anxious.
“Cordial and lively. Darius and Jumana hit it off at once, chatting and laughing, but it was brief before he had to attend another meeting or she was whisked away by her cousins to sightsee the island. Hessa and I went with her but Nariman felt ill and stayed behind. I later realized she had for a chance to spend time with Darius. From her account much later it seems that during all the meetings she’d contrived with him that week, he expressed interest in her.” My mother sighed, playing with her diamond ring. “Once we returned, Jumana’s mother received many offers, but the only one she showed Jumana was the one from Darius, and well, the rest is history.”
Nariman’s disappointment in the glimpse we’d seen made more sense now. She’d nurtured the hope that Darius would choose her over a Jumana, like I’d wanted Cyrus to pick me over two princesses, a noblewoman and Cora in the Final Five.
“Why did my grandmother hide the other offers?” Cyrus asked. “Why make it seem like my father was the only choice?”
“Because he was the only Crown Prince, and while all little girls want to be princesses, their mothers want them to be queens. In Jumana’s case, she wouldn’t have been any queen, but one of a larger, older, more powerful kingdom, with the advantage of being nearby so she’d be close to her motherland, and in a similar culture so she wouldn’t feel estranged and would make the best of her situation. When you think about it, it should have been a perfect situation.”
Cyrus nodded, and I could see another piece of the puzzle that made his parents’ lives, and consequently his own, weighing down harder on him.
“It would have been if Princess Maissa didn’t fail to account for one vital factor,” I said sadly. “That Jumana never wanted to be queen.”
“No.” She shook her head. “She realized that too late, and died not a year after Jumana with a broken heart. None of us, including her, were equipped to prepare Jumana for the requirements and restrictions her new status entailed, the sacrifices demanded of her freedom and choices. We were too young and sheltered, and we failed to envision what life in a foreign land, without our families, would be like. For all of us, moving to Cahraman was a harsh shock. Magic and the people who practiced or relied on it were persecuted and reviled. Sunstone, and especially the palace under King Xerxes’s rule were a terrible place to live.”
Cyrus exhaled. “I know magic and the people who practice it can be dangerous, but then so can everything and everyone else. The worst crimes and conflicts in our history were perpetrated by normal people. So why did he hate magic and its wielders so much?”
“Oh, dear boy, your father never told you?” At his headshake, she exhaled. “Your grandmother, Queen Morgana, died by black magic while pregnant with their fourth child, predicted to have been a boy. At the same time, your father came down with a strange illness he wasn’t expected to survive. Xerxes marched on Zhadugar and threatened its inhabitants with genocide if they didn’t find who was cursing his family. Lady Marzeya told him she only tolerated his impertinence because he was the blood of Zafira.
“She still traced the curse to Avestan sorcerers employed by the royal family. They plotted to wipe out neighboring royal lines to revive the Avestan Empire under their rule. Xerxes was about to launch an all-out war on Avesta, when Mazeya vanquished the sorcerers and your father recovered. King Xerxes still outlawed magic in his court and made even suspicion of black magic punishable by death. Without the gentle hand of his beloved queen, whom he’d lost to magic, and with age and anguish and vices, he escalated his persecution until he suspected any unpredictable or even unfavorable thing of a witch’s tampering. So when Jumana didn’t show signs of pregnancy six months after her wedding, Xerxes snapped.”
She fell silent at last. We continued walking. I could no longer see anything around me, the tragedies that had torn the royal house and shaped a kingdom filling my mind’s eye.
Cyrus finally broke the silence, talking as if to himself. “How is it that no one has ever told me any of this?”
“Parents withhold things from their children for many reasons.”
“Yes, to makes them easier to control and manipulate,” he gritted.
“Or for their own safety or because they don’t want to burden them.”
I huffed. “And we all know how well that turns out.”
Her shoulders slumped, expression pinching with guilt and regret. “I would have told you everything eventually, when you were old enough to understand. I just never got the chance to.”
&nbs
p; “Just tell me why you abandoned Nariman like that.” I suspected losing my mother’s support was what had set Nariman on the path that had led to this destruction. “When you opened that portal, why didn’t you take her with you?”
She looked suddenly confused. “After Jumana got pregnant, instead of getting better, things got infinitely worse. I kept trying to open portals so we could all escape, but could barely transport inside the same room. Then I received a letter from Azal after his divorce from Loujaïne was finally granted and I thought the drive to be with him would give me the strength to open a portal to his mansion in Zahra. It didn’t. Then Jumana was gone and I opened that portal. I stepped through it without a second thought.”
“Why didn’t you go back for her?” Cyrus asked quietly.
She ran her hands through her hair agitatedly, hitching the bandages away from the still angry cut beneath. “At first I was ill after everything that happened and what it took to open the portal, so I couldn’t open another one. When I was I well enough to try again, I-I couldn’t bring myself to. The idea of going back there paralyzed me. So I started convincing myself that Nariman was the strongest of us, and she’d find a way to escape if she wanted to, but that she didn’t because she loved Darius, that in her place I would never escape a place, no matter how terrible, if it had the man I loved.”
“You loved Azal that much?” I whispered.
She nodded and her tears splashed my hand. “I did, and he loved me the same way.”
I felt my life being rewritten all over again now I knew I was the product of love, not the cold, exploitative relationship I’d thought existed between my parents. And I could understand how she might have loved him, since she’d only heard of his role in the crime against Ayman long after the fact, and from a bitter, vengeful source, too.
She then told us of her confrontation with Nariman in Almaskham, the scene we’d seen, almost word for word. “When she confronted me, all my excuses not to go back for her, to give her the chance to escape if she needed to, were inexcusable to even me. I felt I deserved her anger and retribution, and that taking you from me would be my punishment. I’d also seen witches going totally mad as they grew their powers, doing unspeakable things to those they considered a target of vengeance, or a source of power. I—we—were both.
“It was the most terrible decision, the hardest thing I ever did when I opened my second portal and fled to Ericura, leaving Azal and everything behind in a bid to save you from her.” She gave me a watery, wobbly grimace of contrition and imploring. “It wasn’t a good life I gave you, but I believed it was better than being at her mercy. And there wasn’t a day that went by on Ericura where I didn’t long for your father, didn’t die with regret that you couldn’t grow up with him, with our families, in our land.”
I wiped at my tears, my insides shaking at finally hearing the whole truth from her, answering my lifelong uncertainties. “Would we have fared any better if I had? I doubt his family would have wanted anything to do with the child of a mistress.”
“Mistress?” She gaped at me before she almost shouted. “I was—I am his wife!” She tore the ring off her finger, showed me its inner side. “This is my wedding ring, inscribed with his name, as mine is within his ring.”
The inscription said Azal Berlanti.
Cyrus gripped my shoulder, turned me to him. “Ada, do you understand what this means? This means you are—”
“A princess.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
By now, I should have grown immune to shock.
I wasn’t. That small tweak to my backstory changed everything.
If my mother hadn’t felt Nariman would be a lifelong threat to me and hadn’t run, my poor, fatherless childhood, my dangerous, lonely adolescence, my struggle to survive to adulthood, and a life of longing for a home and family, would have never happened.
As a legitimate daughter, I would have been born Princess ‘Adalat of House Berlanti. I could have been the only girl of my generation at Prince Faisal’s court, and be one of the fifty sent to Cyrus’s Bride Search for real.
I could have still met him, but as someone else entirely.
But discovering who I really was didn’t change a thing. It didn’t make me a powerful witch like my mother or a born-and-bred royal like my father. I remained myself, with my whole life more collateral damage from the disaster that was Darius’s and Jumana’s marriage. Nothing was going to change the fact that I’d lived this life.
All the truth did was fill me with bitter longing for what could have been.
My mother tentatively touched my arm. “I know you must now feel even worse about my keeping the truth from you. But when I thought we’d live our lives in Ericura I thought knowing it would only make you long for what you couldn’t have, make you as unhappy as I was.”
I couldn’t say anything. My mouth wobbled to hold back frustrated tears.
Cyrus’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “Ada, say something.”
I shook my head, walked ahead, stopped, turned to them. “I may know why you left Nariman behind without warning.” Both stared at me, baffled by my sudden change of subject. “Remember when Jumana made inadvertent wishes neither of you could even remember?” When she continued to stare at me, I summarized the memories we’d seen, went on, “One of the wishes was ‘I wish to keep you beside me for the rest of my life.’ I bet that’s why your portal didn’t work until she died. And since she was talking to only you at the time, the genie compelled only you. But it seems the unnatural compulsion to stay, when it broke, was only matched by as an inexplicable impulse to flee. I think that impulse also kept you away.”
She burst out crying. Hard, harsh sobs that seemed to be breaking things inside her.
“All these years…I hated myself for leaving her,” she sobbed before she looked up at me in pained wonder. “But even when you’re angry with me, when you should be thinking of what I cost you…you still only think of making me feel better, like you always did…”
“I-I can’t be angry at you, mother…you don’t know how many nights I cried myself to sleep wishing I’d hugged you that night you disappeared. I would have given anything for that one more hug…”
She dragged me into her arms, the one to rest her head on my chest now I was taller. Cyrus hugged me, and her with me, stroked and soothed us.
I suddenly pulled back, another thought striking me. “I thought Nariman killed you!”
“I thought she’d kill me, too.” She exhaled raggedly. “Before I learned how to ward against her vision, she saw me after I portaled to Ericura, and that was how she knew where I ran. But it was difficult to keep my wards up in the North. I hated to leave Belaina, but it was why I had to move as far South as I could before I gave birth to you. Since then, I used almost all my magic to make you invisible to her.
“Then one day I felt very ill, and knew my wards would be down until my fever broke. I expected my potion would work within a day, but it would be enough for her to see me. I hated to move you again, so I decided to travel as far away as I could, as she could only find you through me. I was miles away when I got sick and they let me off the carriage near a wood. I fell and gashed my arm, and was stemming the bleeding with my cloak when she came.
“She’d finally learned to portal, and far more than I thought possible besides. But she said all her powers mean nothing without the lamp, the key to her future as a queen. She believed it was buried somewhere in the palace, but knew she wouldn’t find it. You were the one destined to bring it to her. And though it was still years in the future, she said she was considering taking you then, to train you. She thought maybe that was how you’d fulfill the prophecy by the time you were the age she saw in her crystal ball.
“I told her she’d have to find it another way, and she said the prophecy was immutable. She would never be queen without you. I said then she’d never be queen, since I would never let her use you, that as long as I lived, she’d never find you. She raised h
er staff and I thought she’d remove me as an obstacle in her way to you. I panicked, opened a portal and jumped through it. On the other side, I fell over a cliff into a river, hit my head, and lost consciousness. When I came to what felt like an hour ago, I learned Prince Guidion’s men found me, took me to their physician. He said since I was already sick, the fever from exposure was much worse, and kept me from regaining my wits for a long time. I insisted on leaving at once to go back to you, and I guess you saw the rest. To me, it’s only been a day since I last saw you.”
The very concept boggled my mind. But for now, one thing mattered most.
I grabbed her urgently by the shoulders. “Can you open another portal to Faerie?”
She shook her head. “It happened by complete accident, so I have no idea how to replicate it.”
I sagged as yet another hope of finding Bonnie was dashed.
Another shroud of silence descended over us.
It was Cyrus who shattered the stillness. “Do you know why my mother killed herself?”
Mother made an impulsive move, as if to hug him, before she caught herself. “You must feel like she deserted you, or that she was weak, or any of the callous and untrue things you might have heard all your life. But I think what she suffered was more than anyone could bear.”
“Did my grandfather—or my father…”
“No, no. Xerxes was paranoid and vicious, and he did imprison her with us, but I really don’t believe it was why. As for Darius, he tried what he could to heal her, but he was young and helpless against his father’s tyranny, and especially her affliction. There was anything he could have done to help her even had he known.”