by Liz Braswell
“Oh, sure, people to tell you where to go and how to dress,” the girl said, rolling her eyes.
“It’s better than here, where you’re always scraping for food and ducking the guards,” he pointed out.
“You just said you and Abu come and go as you please. If you were born into a royal family, you’d have to do whatever they told you to. Whatever you’re expected to do. And you can’t go anywhere.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t go anywhere socially when you’re a Street Rat. Our upward mobility is strictly limited. Even if I wanted honest work, no one would hire me. For any job. Not even for a servant at an estate. And there’s no place else to go. Once you’re born in the Quarter of the Street Rats, you’re…”
“Trapped,” Jasmine finished.
Aladdin looked up at her, surprised. It was like she actually understood—like she felt the same way.
He went over and sat down next to her. She didn’t move to give him more room. Their legs touched.
He took a couple of apples out of his sash, handing one to her and the other to Abu. Abu rewarded him with happy, raucous chittering and then did exactly as Aladdin had hoped: he scampered up into the roof of the tower to enjoy the whole thing by himself.
The girl pulled a tiny silver dagger out of her clothes and neatly cut her apple into two halves, handing one to him. He grinned at her and toasted her with his half.
“So where are you from, anyway?” he finally dared to ask.
“What does it matter?” she growled. “I ran away and I am not going back.”
“Really? How come? What could be so awful that you never want to see your mother or your father again? Or sister, or whatever?”
The girl seemed to soften a little at that.
“I would love a sister. Or a brother. And my mother died when I was very young.”
Aladdin felt something in his heart break a little. What a terrible thing to have in common with a beautiful girl.
“And my father…is forcing me to get married.” Her eyes grew hard again. “How would you like it if someone told you that you have no choice about who you’re going to spend the rest of your life with?”
She balled her fists in anger. Aladdin found himself stepping back.
“He could be thirty years older than me. But rich,” she snapped at Aladdin, as if it was his idea. He pulled back in genuine fear. “He could be dumb. But rich! He could be arrogant. He could treat me like just another possession. I mean, that’s how my father is treating me, handing me over like that. He could be cruel. He could be…” She stopped herself from saying whatever was next, looking at Aladdin with a little embarrassment, like it was something too horrible to mention aloud. “He could stuff me full of babies, one every year. Not that there’s anything wrong with babies. Like, one or two. Eventually.
“All I know is that I haven’t even reached twenty years yet and my father has decided that my life, what little I have to choose of it, is over.”
Aladdin gulped. For some reason the Widow Gulbahar appeared in his head: she wasn’t bad at all, but if he was told he had to marry her? And spend the rest of his life with her? He also thought about Morgiana. She had a tiny dagger hidden on her, too, but it wasn’t silver, and it wasn’t for fruit. If anyone even tried to suggest her marrying anyone against her will—well, it would go badly for everyone involved. She would never let that happen.
“That’s awful,” he said with feeling. “I…I’m sorry I…”
Just then Abu leapt down from the ceiling. Aladdin watched with concern as the little monkey made a beeline for the girl’s half of the apple. Aladdin grabbed the little monkey out of the air and put him on his shoulder, whispering a reprimand.
“What’s wrong? What was he doing?” the girl asked. She began to relax again at Abu’s antics.
“Nothing,” Aladdin said, stroking the little monkey’s back.
The girl leaned over and tickled Abu’s chin.
“Abu was just…ah…just outraged at what a terrible thing your dad is doing to you.”
“Oh really?” the girl asked with a knowing smile. She pursed her lips in a moue of disbelief. Aladdin felt his chest go weak and his brain go stupid.
“Oh, yeah. He was just saying how outraged he was that men still control the lives of young women even in this modern, enlightened age,” Aladdin said. He was petting Abu, but looking at the girl. He wasn’t sure what he was saying, really. He would say anything, keep talking forever, if it kept her looking at him like that.
“Interesting. And does Abu have anything else to say?” she asked, leaning closer.
Cinnamon. Her breath smelled of cinnamon. He could even smell her skin at that distance. Though he wasn’t one normally prone to poetry, he could only think of a fresh desert breeze that carried a whisper of cypress and sandalwood.
“He wishes there was something he could do to help.…” That at least was honest. He wasn’t exactly sure how kissing would help her. He just knew it was going to happen or he was going to die.
“Tell him I just might take him up on that,” the girl said, closing her eyes and tilting her head.
Aladdin put his arm around her back and prepared for the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Which was, of course, when the guards showed up.
Rasoul wasn’t with them; his second-in-command led the attack. And how a man even larger than Rasoul, with five large guards, had managed to sneak up the stairway without Aladdin’s hearing was a mystery he would have to solve another day.
A better question, he realized instantly, was how they had known where he was.
“Finally, I’ve found you!” Rasoul’s second shouted.
“And again, really?” Aladdin said, leaping up. “All this for one loaf of bread?”
“How did you find me?” the girl shouted at the same time.
The two turned to look at each other.
“They’re after you?” he asked.
“What about bread?” she asked.
Rasoul’s second-in-command wasn’t the sort of person who would let confusion interrupt his orders.
“You cannot escape. Come now, lest it be worse for you!”
Aladdin leapt up onto the edge of the narrow stone balustrade that separated his sleeping nook from the city below. He held his hand out to the girl.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
The girl looked confused for a moment.
“Ye-es?” she said uncertainly.
That was enough for Aladdin.
“Then jump!”
He grabbed her too-slow-moving hand and yanked her up next to him. Then he leapt into the air, pulling her along.
She did scream; who could blame her? They were plummeting from rosy twilight into deep midnight as they shot several stories down through a crack in the ceiling of a building below them.
Their speed was broken by two very carefully tied tarps that Aladdin had installed in case of just such an emergency. Their landing, while jarring and painful, was made softer on the piles of sand that had been gathered there by centuries of neglect and wind.
Aladdin leapt up immediately, the girl’s hand still in his. She was right by his side, also too smart to take a moment to recover. But the door was suddenly filled by an unfortunately familiar silhouette.
He appeared too quickly for them to change direction.
Aladdin and the girl slammed into Rasoul’s chest.
“We just keep running into each other, don’t we, Street Rat?” he said with a tired irony. He grabbed Aladdin by his vest, shoving him off to the second squad of guards behind him.
Aladdin cursed. He should have realized something was up when the captain of the guard wasn’t in the tower with the rest. Rasoul had already reconned his hideout and planted himself by the escape route. Irritatingly intelligent.
“It’s the dungeon for you this time, boy. No escape.”
The girl, somewhat incredibly, began to attack the giant captain. Aladdin and the guards
watched with similar surprise as she hit Rasoul uselessly in the chest again and again with her small fists.
“Let him go!” she shouted.
“Well, look at that,” Rasoul said, tossing her aside as easily as he had the monkey. “A Street Mouse.”
Aladdin felt his blood boil as the girl tumbled to the floor.
The guards began to laugh; even Rasoul chuckled as he turned to go.
“Unhand him.”
The girl stood up and swept off her robe. “By order of the royal princess!”
Rasoul stopped chuckling and the guards gasped.
Aladdin felt his stomach flip.
That girl, the girl he had spent the afternoon with, the girl who had leapt off the sides of buildings and pole-vaulted off others, who had charmed Abu and shared an apple with him, was not some rich girl off for a jaunt or running away from home. She was a princess. The royal princess.
Jasmine.
Her eyes were black and hard. Her back was straight; her arms hung gracefully at her sides as if she had too much power even to need to put them on her hips or cross them in anger. Her diadem sparkled.
“The princess…?” Aladdin said faintly.
It was said that Jasmine was beautiful; it was said she was quick-witted. Both of these were without question true.
It was also said that she was a witch with a tiger for a familiar. It was said she tore her suitors to shreds—verbally and, vis-à-vis the tiger, occasionally literally.
“Princess Jasmine,” Rasoul said immediately, lowering his eyes and bowing. “What are you doing outside the palace? And with this…Street Rat?”
“That is none of your concern,” Jasmine said. She put her hands on her hips and marched right up into the captain’s space as if he was no more to her than an irritating camel. “Do as I command. Release him.”
“I would, Princess,” Rasoul said. He seemed genuinely regretful. He flicked a look back at Aladdin. Maybe he thought it was all a bit much for a loaf of bread, as well? “Except my orders come from Jafar. You’ll have to take it up with him.”
Aladdin’s heart froze.
Why would the grand vizier care about Aladdin?
“Jafar?” Princess Jasmine was apparently thinking the same thing. But she managed to control her surprise, turning the question into a sneer of disgust.
The last thing Aladdin saw before the guards hauled him off was her concerned eyes hardening.
“Believe me,” she growled, “I will be paying him a visit.”
IF THERE WAS a moon or sun in the sky, it didn’t matter at all.
Underneath the tallest tower in the palace was the deepest pit in Agrabah, the bottom of which was lit by a single torch. No sunlight, moonlight, or starlight had ever touched its depths. The bottommost chamber had been excavated in the dead of a black night by workers who were then murdered and buried under the very stone steps they helped lay—to preserve the secrets of the palace dungeons.
There was only one door that led in: it was windowless and triple-barred. Beyond it were a dozen skeletons still shackled to the wall, left there even after they had decomposed like a forgotten detail in a fairy tale. Scurrying around these were rats that had never seen the light of the sun and probably had something to do with the creation of the skeletons.
Aladdin had only been there for a few hours and hadn’t quite let the obvious finality of the place get to him yet. He was still shocked by the events that had led up to his being there.
“The princess,” he muttered to himself for the fortieth time. “I can’t believe she was the princess. I must have sounded so stupid to her.”
But…maybe…just maybe…she liked him? A little?
And for a moment, in the chilly, foul-smelling dungeon where he was chained, Aladdin let himself dream of the life he would have if he was a prince. Then they could be together. He would have the girl of his dreams and they would all live happily ever after.
Of course, the fact that she was a princess was the reason he was in a dungeon.
It was obvious: his imprisonment had nothing to do with the bread he had stolen. Somehow Jafar had seen them, had known a Street Rat was coming close to desecrating the royal daughter…leading her into a life of poverty, crime, and villainy…and had stopped it.
“Aww, she was worth it, though,” Aladdin sighed, thinking about her eyes, remembering the soft warmth of her hand. For a moment he had touched greatness.
The tiny echoes of chittering interrupted his thoughts.
“Abu?” he asked incredulously, looking up.
Very faintly he could see a tiny shadow of a monkey as it hopped from beam to beam, from stone to stone while he made his way down to the bottom, where Aladdin was.
“Down here!” Aladdin called excitedly.
Abu dropped onto his shoulder. The boy petted him as best he could by rubbing his head into Abu’s furry belly. “Hey, boy, am I glad to see you! Turn around!”
After enjoying a few more moments of their cuddly reunion, Abu did as directed. Using his teeth, Aladdin carefully extracted a needle he had pinned into Abu’s little vest for an occasion such as this. The little monkey wasn’t just a distraction while Aladdin swiped things; the two had many, many other routines they had worked out over the years for getting out of—and into—trouble.
Aladdin turned his head and strained his neck as far as he could, working the needle into the keyhole of his right-hand manacle with his teeth and lips. It was a simple, crude lock; obviously if you were thrown to the bottom of the deepest dungeon in the palace, extreme measures weren’t needed to keep you there.
Which was rapidly bringing Aladdin to the next part of his problem. Once his right hand was free, he easily undid his left…but where was he going to go from there?
Abu chittered angrily. Monkeys obviously did not like being underground or in dungeons. It sounded like he was saying he had done his part; now it was his human friend’s turn to figure out the rest. Fast.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re going. Let’s get away from the palace as fast as we can. I’ll never see her again…” he said wistfully, more concerned with that than their immediate escape. He thought about how she had looked standing on the rooftop, pole in her hand, the wind blowing tendrils of her hair out of her eyes. “She can only marry a prince. I’m a fool.”
“You’re only a fool if you give up, boy.”
Aladdin spun around.
There was nothing but shadows and rats. But the voice was creaky and weak—human, not ghostly. One of the other prisoners must still have had a little life left in him.
“Who are you?” Aladdin called out to the shadows. “Show yourself!”
There was the rattle of chains and the light scuffling sound of something bony and hard against the floor. An ancient man hobbled out of the dark. He seemed barely to have the strength to stand, much less move. There were no manacles binding him. There was a light left in his eyes—a crazy one.
Aladdin found himself a little afraid of the strange specter.
“I’m merely a lowly prisoner like yourself,” the old man continued, revealing that he still had most of his teeth—but they pointed in every direction, thin and yellow with age, like toothpicks. He used an ugly old piece of firewood as a cane and forced himself sideways with the shuffling motion of a crab. “But together, maybe we can be more.”
He rubbed his fingers together suggestively, as if he was counting gold coins. Aladdin found himself relaxing. A man with the craze of greed in his eyes was something Aladdin was used to.
“I’m listening,” he said.
“There is a cave. A cave of wonders, boy, filled with treasures beyond your wildest dreams!” He stuck a gnarled hand into his threadbare robe. When he pulled out his closed fist, shoved it into Aladdin’s face, and opened it, the boy almost fell back in surprise.
Rubies.
Three of them. Huge. Dusty and old, with the facets of one chipped and in need of the hand of a skilled jeweler. But rubies nonetheless. Those t
hree would have bought most of the Quarter of the Street Rats—and the people who lived there, as well.
“Treasure enough to impress even your ‘princess,’ I would wager,” the old man said with a crafty smile, taking them back and hiding them again.
Aladdin felt a blush wash over his face quickly before disappearing.
The rubies…
He started to smile. That was more wealth than he had ever seen up close. Enough to buy horses, fancy clothes, servants…
…and then his smile faded. Until that moment Aladdin never would have imagined that limitless treasure wouldn’t be enough for him.
“It doesn’t matter how much gold or jewels I get,” he said morosely. “She has to marry a prince. I have to come from a noble family, a line of princes. Or be granted the title and lands, which I can’t really see the sultan doing anytime in the near future.”
The old man struggled for a moment, frowning and wheezing as some undefined pain bothered him. Then he took a deep breath and stuck his face into Aladdin’s.
“You’ve heard of the Golden Rule, haven’t you? Whoever has the gold makes the rules!” The man laughed—perhaps insanely; perhaps he genuinely thought himself funny. Aladdin noticed as the old man’s lips were spread wide with mirth that his only healthy-looking tooth was gold.
“All right,” Aladdin said cautiously. It was true: money bought almost anything. All the guards could be bribed to look the other way with enough gold or gifts. All the guards except for Rasoul, of course. He was like a big, stupid rock of morality. Maybe sultans and kings could be bribed, too…or haggled with. Maybe with enough gold, the title of prince could be bought.
“But why would you share all of this wonderful treasure with me?”
Catches—like perfect girls turning out to be unattainable princesses—Aladdin was used to. Free treasure, he was not used to—and highly suspicious of.
“I need a young pair of legs and a strong back,” the old man said, tapping Aladdin’s legs as solicitously as a camel buyer. Aladdin squelched a shiver of fear. Was the man a sorcerer who meant to literally take Aladdin’s back and legs?