by Lucy Tempest
He wrapped me in his arms, exhaled. “Definitely not by storming the palace with only a flying carpet and a counterfeit jann for help.” At Esfandiar’s complaint, he inclined his head in apology. “I beg your pardon Carpet—for lumping you with him. You’ve saved our lives many times over. He’s the reason, in so many ways, we’re all in this mess.” He turned back to me. “Anyway, there would be no storming of any sort involved.”
“But look how our stealth plan turned out last time.”
“Two different causes do not count as a plan. You were there for the lamp and I was there for the staff and didn’t even get the basics of the situation. That’s why we failed.”
The screams of women rose from below, and I rounded on Esfandiar, screaming, too, “Do something!”
“Me—or me?” He sounded almost amused, that I wanted to shove him off the ledge.
I grabbed and shook him. “Both.”
“You’re going to need to be a lot more specific than that. Precise language is key. Remember how I ended up in your ring.” His lecturing tone riled me up further.
I raised my ring to my lips and looked him in the eye. “I wish you to compel all Nariman’s soldiers to stand down.”
He nodded. Clapped his hands. And nothing happened. The attacks raged beneath us.
“I’m sorry, Mistress. I can only influence someone who feels emotion, preferably fear or agitation. Boredom works, too. Those men feel nothing. They must already be under a powerful influence.”
I now got confirmation how the ring had influenced Cherine and Cyrus then the palace guards. Why it had been working only in desperate situations after Nariman’s takeover. She’d compulsion-proofed her soldiers.
I cried out, “Cyrus—what do we do?”
“Nothing,” he said, a terrible quietness in his voice as he surveyed his kingdom devolving into chaos, hands on the parapets like they were grasping the arms of his imperiled throne. “We can do nothing here, or anywhere else, if we don’t find a way to cure this madness at the source.”
Another battlefield awaited us at our hideout.
As we approached, the billowing smoke of extinguished fires parted and we saw a dozen phalanxes of armed-to-the-teeth guards facing a mob of angry young women brandishing kitchenware.
They were led by the only girl big and strong enough to intimidate an armed man—or ten: Cora.
She was fearlessly attacking the first row of a four-by-four phalanx, her frying pan raining down forceful blows that dented their shields, gnarled their legs under her unrelenting barrage, destabilizing the whole group. Strangely, no man dared to raise his weapon to her.
Or not so strangely. This was the girl who’d killed a ghoul with her bare hands then had taken its head for a souvenir. She must be scaring those mere men witless with her feral growls as she piled on the swings, like she was cutting down a tree.
The other women followed her lead, knives slashing and pans swinging as they dodged swords and lances.
When the shadow of simurgh’s wings grew over the scene, the phalanxes in the rear dispersed at the sight of the giant bird about to land on top of them.
Cora was now bludgeoning the ones who stood their ground, knocking them down, then kicking and stomping on them, each hit punctuated with roaring fury. In that moment I could believe she was—as her mother claimed—sired by a minor god. She was the image I always had in mind when I imagined wrathful goddesses.
The moment we dismounted the simurgh, I ran to her, yelling her name.
Noticing me, she swung the guard she’d picked by and a hand and a foot and tossed him into his comrades, bringing half of them down. She then stepped over the squirming bodies and fallen shields, bounding the remaining distance to meet me halfway.
“Cora, I’m so sorry it took so long for us to get—oomph…”
Air was squeezed out of me in her rib-cracking hug.
“Where. Have. You. Been?” she growled, squeezing me harder with each word.
“Long…story…” I croaked, pushing at her shoulders to loosen her grip. “Very long. We can discuss it over dinner. You didn’t eat all the food did you?”
Cora pulled back, still holding me hostage in her arms. “Of course I did, five times over. You’ve been gone for like two weeks.”
I huffed a breathless chuckle. “Yes, I know, two hours without food seem like two days to you. So the two days I was gone feels like two weeks.”
She shook her head, releasing me. “Ada, you’ve been gone for two weeks—real time, not my-stomach time. I thought the worst has happened to you.”
My jaw dropped. Two weeks had passed here? This explained all those changes.
But it could have been much worse. My mother’s two weeks in Faerie had equaled six years of my time.
I rubbed my arms, massaging away the pain of her grip. “Well, that depends on your definition of ‘the worst.’ We got banished, and getting back from the literal land of no return was one convoluted and almost fatal journey.”
“Banished?” Cora yelled, almost blowing my hair back with the agitation and aggression pouring off her. “I thought you were in the palace dungeons this whole time!”
“As I said, really long story.”
“Then you better start telling it.” She pointed above my head. “Starting with that giant griffin you rode in on. That was quite the entrance. Where did you find that thing?” She then jerked her thumb at my approaching mother. “Also, who’s the witch?”
My mother looked Cora in wide-eyed bafflement. “How did you know I’m a witch?”
“You’re joking, right?” Cora waved a hand in her direction. “Magical energy is radiating off you, sort of like the nymphs in my trees and fields.”
“No one’s ever mentioned that to me.” My mother held out a hand to Cora. “I’m her mother, Dorreya Johar, and you must be the mighty Cora.”
Taking her hand, Cora’s tension softened with a pleased, “Mighty, huh?” then she threw me a baffled frown over her shoulder, mouthing, “Mother?”
“Oh, yes, Adelaide has given me a hair-whitening account of the ghouls.” My mother turned over Cora’s hand, tracing her palm lines. “Now, what are you?”
Cora withdrew her hand to pick up the guards’ abandoned weapons as Cyrus joined us. “Just a good old farmgirl.” She pointed a steel spear between Cyrus and I. “Start talking.”
Sighing, I began to condense the whole ordeal. Cora herded me towards our run-down place, gesturing for Cyrus and the rest to follow us.
If I’d thought Cora’s welcome a bit extreme, then Cherine’s was beyond that.
The second we entered the house, Cherine hopped off the floor, her hair matted, her face lined in tear-tracks, and tackled me.
“You’re alive! I thought you were dead! I thought you were all dead and we were doomed to be stuck in this dusty hovel forever!” Cherine rambled with a nervous energy enough to power a lightning bolt, and looking every bit the lightning-struck mess. “But you’re out now. Did you find my family? Where are they, Ada?”
I didn’t know where to begin my explanation in a censored way to calm her down, especially since her family hadn’t even crossed my mind when we’d been in the palace.
When my mother joined us, Cherine’s attention flit to her. The resemblance must have been clearer to her than Cora, because she yelled, “But you said she was dead!”
Thankfully, Cyrus pulled Cherine off me and led her away to the petrified Ayman, speaking to her in soothing tones.
“So, about the bird?” Cora reminded me. “And who’s the wacky elf?”
On cue, the simurgh landed on the balcony, poked its head through the wide-open doors. When it spotted Ayman, it let out a horrified squawk.
“That’s the friend you meant?” She stomped a clawed forefoot as Cyrus rushed to her. I feared she’d destroy what was left of the platform. “He was one of many pale fledglings left to die among the dunes. I usually take them to my nesting sisters, but I kept him with me for two yea
rs before the gods demanded I let him go. So I took him to a sister who brought him up until we were told to return him to the world of man and the house that abandoned him. I knew we should have never have returned him to you. What have you done to him?”
I was surprised she hadn’t found out about Ayman’s curse, since she seemed to know everything else. But maybe the gods she served wouldn’t let her see this, so she wouldn’t be tempted to abandon her post to go to the man she’d once raised as her own.
As Cyrus tried to placate the enraged bird, a loud sob made me spin around.
My mother was standing before Ayman, eyes rounded in horror, hand clamped over her mouth, shoulders shaking. “Azal?”
I rushed to her, hugged her as tears filled my eyes again. “This is Ayman.”
“Loujaïne’s son.” A shudder rattled her in my arms. “W-what happened to him?”
“Nariman. Her staff. I don’t know what she did exactly but—” I turned back to the simurgh. “Can you save him?”
The simurgh shook her head, and if possible, looking desolate.
Cyrus and I then looked to my mother, who also shook her head, eyes wet. “Even if my magic were that strong, I must know the spell to reverse it. And I only heard of this in stories.”
Esfandiar stuck his head through the balcony door. “Anything I can help with, Mistress?”
Cora’s eyebrows rose. “Mistress? What have you been doing those two—days?”
“Why did you assume he was addressing me?”
“Because he was?”
Why was I even asking? Cora was the most astute person I would probably ever meet.
Esfandiar squeezed himself past the simurgh, puffing as she pecked his head again, and reappearing by my side with a big, people-pleasing smile—the placating customer-service smile I’d always used but had never been on the receiving end of.
“Can you turn him back to flesh and blood?”
Esfandiar’s smile shrank into a grimace. “That is very powerful magic.”
“And you can only do convenient magic,” I finished as I pushed past him, reaching into my shirt. I pulled out my gold feather and raised it to the simurgh. “What about this? Can you help him if I command you to do it?”
“It’s not about whether I am willing to or not,” she said. “I would be willing to break any rules for him. But the ‘miracles’ I grant have to be within my knowledge. I don’t know what happened to him.”
“Do you?” Esfandiar asked me. “Know the circumstances of his current state?”
“What does it matter?” I grouched, tucking the feather back, hoping it could come in handy later. “If it’s beyond your ‘convenience.’”
He waved. “Remember, what I can’t help with magic I can with experience.”
My heart skipped a beat. “Did you ever see anything like this?”
“More than once, and depending on how he ended up that way, I might be able to help.”
Cora stepped to tower over Esfandiar, eyes wide. “You mean there’s a cure for the victims of gorgons?”
“Gorgons?”
“Demons around my area,” Cora said. “Some turn people to stone just by looking at them. One attacked an ancestor of mine, Petra, but she looked away, so only half of her turned to stone. After her flesh half rotted, it looked like her skeleton was chiseled out of the stone. Her remains, both bone and stone, now stand in our fields to ward off crows.”
“That’s…morbid.”
She shrugged.
“Was it a gorgon then?” Esfandiar asked, not disturbed in the slightest by Cora’s story.
“No, it was a witch,” I answered.
He clapped, lightening up. “Ah! A curse!”
“Is that a good thing?” Cora asked.
“No, but if there’s anything I learned in all my years it’s that every curse can be broken.”
That caught all of my attention. “Even the curse on this whole kingdom?”
“Is it a curse though?” Cora wondered. “Did she mean it to be this way? Why would anyone would want to rule a kingdom that looks like this?”
Why indeed? Unless it was beyond her control?
But we had to fix one thing at a time, and Ayman topped the list. Not just for him, and because he was so much to Cyrus, Cherine and me, but because we needed him in this war. Nariman had taken him out to deprive us of a formidable warrior and spymaster. And because she hoped losing him would leave Cyrus with no one to turn to but her.
I owed them both to do anything to reunite them.
“Do you have experience in breaking such curses then?” My mother asked Esfandiar, now avoiding Ayman. His resemblance to Azal must be too much for her to bear.
He bowed to her, now treating her with reverence as his Mistress’s mother. “Yes. A person turned to stone is not the same as a gorgon’s victim. They’re not transformed but put in a dormant state—”
“Yes, yes, I get it,” I cut him off. “So what do we do?”
“The only time I’ve seen this kind of curse reversed was when they had the victim’s brother among their traveling party. They also used his favorite Avestan purple scarf.”
“How did a brother and a scarf help?” Cora asked.
“He wore the scarf all the time and his brother shared his blood,” he said. “Both held different kinds of familiarity, a bridge from the cursed state, a guide back to consciousness.”
“So we need something Ayman had with him all the time and a relative to stand by him?” I said.
“No, not just any relative, a close one,” Esfandiar said. “And the relative doesn’t just stand there. They need to bleed. I meant share blood in both meanings.”
“I am both!” Cyrus blurted out.
I blinked up at him. “What?”
“I am both family and familiar. He spent most of his time with me and he’s the son of my aunt!” he said, excitement radiating off him.
“He’s Loujaïne’s son?” Cherine small voice came from behind me. “She had him out of wedlock? Is that why he hid in the shadows?”
I turned to her. “He hid because people reacted to him the same way you did.” When she winced, I forced my voice to gentle. “And, no, he’s a legitimate prince. He really is a silver prince.”
Her lips quivered as she stared down at her delicate, now-abused hands. “I’ve been thinking about that since you left. I now realize he’s both the ghoul of my nightmares and the silver-haired prince of my dreams. Cora said he liked me, wanted to know me, have my favor, possibly even my hand.” She looked up, big hazel eyes shining with unshed tears. “Did he turn to stone because I rejected him? I’ve heard of people’s hearts turning to stone but not all of them.”
I patted her back soothingly. “It’s not your fault. Didn’t Cora tell you what happened?”
“She said it was my fault he left the palace and turned to stone.”
“But that’s not—ugh, really, Cora?” I huffed, wondering if Cora had used Cherine’s growing sense of guilt to yank her chain during my absence. I wouldn’t put it past her to use it as a way to keep flighty Cherine in line.
Not that she was that anymore. Little Cherine was growing up.
Cyrus drew out his scimitar, tossing me a challenging grin. “Will you try to stop me?”
“No.” I grinned back. “But if the protective charm stops you from bleeding enough, I’ll take over.”
Nodding, he started slicing across his forearm, and Esfandiar tutted. “The palm, Your Highness. The dominant hand you place on his heart must be pulsing with fresh blook.”
Without a second’s hesitation, Cyrus sliced across his right palm and bright red blood immediately flowed out.
“Time to wake up, old friend,” he said, voice ragged as he pressing his bleeding hand onto Ayman’s chest.
We watched with bated breath as blood dripped down the stone.
But nothing happened.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Cyrus’ expectant smile dulled. “How long does
it take for him to turn back?”
“Maybe there’s some interference because you’re both requirements?” I took the scimitar, biting my lip as I sliced my palm. Then I rubbed my bleeding hand over Ayman.
I stood alongside Cyrus, each with a bleeding hand on Ayman’s chest. And nothing changed.
Cyrus turned his scowl to Esfandiar who only waved. “Oh, it’s not working because you’re his cousin. Forgot to say that you don’t count as a close relative.”
“Why don’t I?” I asked.
“What are you?”
“Half-sister.”
“WHAT?”
Cherine’s squawk rivaled the simurgh’s.
Esfandiar hummed. “Did you come from the same mother?”
“No.”
He sighed. “Then you might as well be cousins, too.”
Cyrus dropped his hand and shouted, “Then who counts as close?”
“Full siblings, children, parents—”
Cyrus exploded past all of us, sprinting to the bedrooms, kicking open one of the two doors.
A minute of loud squabbling later, he came out, dragging Princess Loujaïne by the arm with his still-bleeding hand. She fought against him weakly, whimpering.
He stopped in perfect view of Ayman and rounded on her. “You claim to care for me…”
“I do!”
“Then how do you not trust me? And then, whatever injustices you’ve been dealt one day, today you are the source of half of our problems, and now you must fix one of them.”
“How d-dare you!” Loujaïne rasped. “I-I have never done anything wrong in my life. I have done everything that was asked and expected of me and it is not my fault—”
“ENOUGH!” The word carried such ferocity, even Cora looked unsettled.
Loujaïne stopped struggling, leaning away from him as if she was about to faint.
“Every one of us shares a measure of the blame and it’s time you accepted yours. If you thought of the good of the kingdom rather than your own need to have control, even if over how my life was run, you wouldn’t have envied Nariman. If it wasn’t for your petulant jealousy Nariman would have remained in her post. If you were content with your status and position, she wouldn’t have been framed and banished, wouldn’t have gone to such extremes to exact her revenge, not just on my father and you, but our whole land!”