by Liz Braswell
“Hey, what’s that?” he asked, suddenly noticing several chalk marks on the wall. He initially thought they were random, but then he realized that they were four elongated triangles…like claw marks from a giant beast.
“The Mark of Rajah,” Jasmine said, not looking up. She continued to ponder her map, one finger to her mouth. “Some of the Street Rats thought that if Jafar has a symbol, we should have one, too. It’s supposed to mean resistance. Also because Rajah resisted Jafar himself—and was wounded. It’s to honor him.”
“Oh. Clever,” Aladdin said.
“Yes, yes, but listen,” she said impatiently. Little tendrils of hair waved, unkempt around her head, like a wreath, and Aladdin had a hard time concentrating on her words. “In the genie’s note he said that Jafar is looking for one book in particular that deals with magic of the dead and the undead. If it’s not in this shipment, it may be in one coming from Kajha, by the sea. They are expected to return tonight, but we don’t know if they will stop off at Midrahf for supplies first. So the Street Rats are going to disrupt caravan arrivals at both the southern gate and the western gate as a distraction.”
“What’s the book?”
“Al Azif, by Abdul Alhazred.”
Although they were in underground passages where no winds blew, Aladdin found himself shuddering in sudden cold. Jasmine didn’t look particularly pleased to say the title aloud. There was just something about it.…
“Maybe it’s one of those books we just lifted—they definitely looked serious.”
“Yes, let’s go take a look at them,” Jasmine said, getting up and stretching. “It will be a welcome break from playing robber queen. I don’t mean that, ah, meanly. This whole thing would be utterly impossible without Duban and Morgiana and the Street Rats.”
Aladdin was silent, thinking about his discussion outside with his old friend. About layers of complexity, and good and evil, and choices. If Morgiana hadn’t gone down a path he didn’t approve of, she wouldn’t be able to help him now. Where did that fit in the great moral scheme of things?
“You guys took a long time to get back,” Jasmine said, poking him in the stomach. It was as if she could read his thoughts. “You and Morgiana.”
“We were catching up. Jealous?”
“Only because she’s known you for so long,” Jasmine said with a smile, giving his hand a squeeze.
“We saw something,” Aladdin said reluctantly, not wanting to break her mood. “Jafar is now having people line up for bread and swear allegiance or loyalty or whatever to get it. He’s not just handing it out anymore. Things are taking an…unsettling turn.”
“What, and the whole ‘wanting to create an army of the undead’ thing isn’t unsettling?”
“No, that’s horrific. But it’s so horrific it’s like it’s unreal. But this…these were normal, desperate people suddenly afraid the free food they had just gotten used to was being taken away. I can’t speak to genies and ghouls and ancient books of magic. But I don’t like what Jafar is turning the people of Agrabah into.”
“He killed my father in front of me, in front of the people of Agrabah,” Jasmine reminded him with gritted teeth. “There is nothing he is incapable of.”
They came to the main room of the headquarters, the one with the tables and braziers. A guard stood next to the chest of pilfered items—the girl in blue from the heist. Now she wore trousers and a long dagger slung on either hip.
“Thank you, Pareesa,” Jasmine said with a warm smile. “We’ll take it from here. You deserve a break after everything you’ve done today already.”
“Of course, Jasmine,” the girl said with a bow before she left.
Aladdin opened the chest and carefully took out the musty leather-bound books. They were still a relatively novel concept for him; he was more used to scrolls or notes written on shards of dried clay.
“There’s an imam from the Old Quarter named Khosrow, very learned, who said he would help us with any translations as soon as he could slip away,” Jasmine said. They sat down at the low table, now clear of food except for a pitcher of mint tea and a plate of flatbread. They put the stack of books between them and each chose one.
Aladdin opened his, A Treatise on the Limits of Magic, then quickly traded out the giant text-only volume for Spellbreaker, a Compendium, which had pictures and recipes for charms.
After a few minutes, Jasmine put hers down in disappointment.
“I don’t think any of these are Al Azif. I can’t be sure about these two, because of the languages. That looks like cuneiform, which is just mad…and that’s hieratic Egyptian, which I definitely cannot read. But they seem to be about much lighter subjects, if the illustrations mean anything. We need that imam.”
“But on the other hand, do you want to protect your sheep against hoof fungus?” Aladdin asked brightly. He turned the book so she could see the ancient, brightly illuminated picture and recipe he had been looking at. “Because if you do, have I got the charm for you!”
Jasmine smiled. “I wonder if it works.”
Aladdin put his book aside. “So what is this Al Azif all about anyway?”
“I guess it’s a record of some ancient madman’s travels to forbidden and dark worlds. He wrote down the knowledge he gained there about channeling powers from beyond the universe itself. Somehow the very act of recording it became the conduit of that power.”
Aladdin blinked at her.
“Just possessing it lets you kill with your mind and raise armies of the undead,” Jasmine re-explained, rolling her eyes.
“Ahhh. I get it now. Bad stuff. So what do we do when we get it?” Aladdin asked, putting his book down. “Burn it or something?”
“Burn it?” Jasmine said in shock. “A tome of that importance? No, we can’t do that. We have to keep it for ourselves.”
“Um…what?” Aladdin said slowly.
“Just think. In it lies the power to break the laws of magic. What else can it do?”
“Nothing. Nothing good,” Aladdin said firmly.
“It could give me the power I need to defeat Jafar and take back the throne.”
“We’re working on that. Here,” Aladdin said gently, reaching out to touch her knee. “With people who believe in you and your cause. With children and thieves and beggars and tigers and genies. We can do it without any extra magic.”
Jasmine looked doubtful. “More strength, more weapons couldn’t hurt.”
“Oh, yes, they could—when the weapons are evil. And just because the book’s in our hands doesn’t mean it couldn’t wind up in someone else’s hands. We need to burn it. That keeps it from ever being used for ill purposes.”
“That’s a dumb reason to destroy it—because it might do damage someday. When we could use its magic to fix everything!” Jasmine yelled.
“You know who believed magic could fix everything?” Aladdin yelled back. “My mother. All of those stories about marids and djinn and houris and whatever granting wishes and fixing all of your problems with a snap of your fingers. Every single one ended happily ever after. Just like she believed my dad was going off to find some ‘magical’ thing or job or whatever that would save our family. Magic doesn’t do that. Nothing does it. And you’re as crazy as my mother if you think otherwise.”
“I could bring back my father with it.”
Jasmine said it quietly, in a small voice. She wasn’t looking at Aladdin or the books anymore; she was staring off into space with eyes that were suddenly wet.
Aladdin immediately felt his anger melt away like a sand castle in the desert wind. She looked so tiny sitting there—not a robber queen or a sultana at all. He scooted over next to her and wrapped her in his arms.
“Hey,” he said quietly, kissing her on the cheek. “I know you miss him. I miss my mom, too, despite all those things I just said. But…you can’t bring your father back. He wouldn’t be the same. He wouldn’t want it.”
“You don’t know that,” Jasmine said, sniffling.
>
“Are you willing to find that out the hard way? He’s gone, Jasmine. Let him go.”
Jasmine held Aladdin tightly for a moment, squeezing him harder than he’d thought possible for a girl her size. Then she sat back and tried to compose herself, wiping her nose.
“This is all because of my father, in some ways. Isn’t it?” she finally said. “If he hadn’t…brought Agrabah to the place where it is now, with a huge population of incredibly poor people, and an even huger disparity between them and the wealthy nobles like us, there wouldn’t have been an opening for someone like Jafar. No one would have supported him if the sultan had…done right by his people.”
Aladdin really, really wanted to tell her it wasn’t true. But he couldn’t.
She saw the pitying look on his face and smiled wanly.
“I’ve…learned a lot of hard truths about him and my whole world lately. I think maybe, in the back of my mind, I always knew. In the history books I read, great rulers didn’t spend all of their time playing with children’s toys. And they didn’t let their advisers handle everything. They kept an eye on their people and had a hand in the day-to-day running. The great ones, that is. Even military leaders like Xerxes. They didn’t just let ordinary people go hungry for no reason…ordinary people like you.…”
Aladdin guessed what was coming next. He focused on his piece of flatbread, carefully breaking it in half.
“What…happened with your family? With your mother?” she asked hesitantly. “What made you turn to a life of thievery?”
Aladdin sighed and put the bread back down on his plate. His usual glibness drained away under her scrutiny. Actually, a lot of his joking and irrepressible monkeying had disappeared in the past two weeks. He wasn’t sure if he missed it or not.
“My father, Cassim, left us when I was very young. I barely remember him.”
Aladdin hadn’t mentioned his father’s name aloud in years. He half hoped he wouldn’t be able to remember it, but it rose perfectly formed from the depths of his mind, immediate and whole, just waiting to be brought to the surface again with all of its accompanying pain.
“Imagine someone just like me,” he continued. “Imagine an independent, roguishly handsome young man, quick with a laugh and a joke. Slow to find honest work. Imagine a…me with no thought for any other person, no thought beyond the moment’s fun. But with two people to be responsible for.
“When it got too much, he just…left. And my mom…she was a great mom,” he said forcefully, looking into Jasmine’s eyes. “She could make soup out of dust and a drop of water. She could make clothing—decent clothing—from scraps she begged for from people only slightly less poor than us. She kept our nasty little house spotlessly clean and as cheery as she could.”
“She sounds like an amazing person,” Jasmine said gently.
“Yeah. But…” Aladdin sighed again, his defensiveness gone. “Like I said, she was completely deluded. Insane and irresponsible in her own way. Another woman would have had people hunt her wayward husband down and bring him back. Another woman would have had him declared dead and found herself another husband. A better man. But she truly believed, until the day she died, that Cassim would come back. That one day he would return and whisk us away to a fabulous new life. With a nicer house and servants. And he would stay at home and be the father and husband our family needed.”
He looked up at Jasmine. She had a look of such compassion and sadness Aladdin had the urge to reach over and comfort her.
“She died young, of course,” Aladdin finished. There was no other way to put it. No “nice” way. “She was overworked and came down with a wasting disease. It was…one of the other things that drove me apart from Morgiana and Duban and everyone. ‘Street Rats take care of each other,’ my mother always said. But no one took care of us. Maruf tried to help out a little…but by that point his leg no longer worked and he was scraping for food himself. And my friends were too busy putting together their little network of thieves and beggars to spend much time helping me or comforting my mother.
“Well, I guess that’s not fair,” he said, breaking his pieces of bread into smaller pieces. “Everyone’s got something, like they say. Everyone had someone starving, sick, or dying. Morgiana’s parents would spend any money they got on wine. Duban’s dad was lame and his older sister was married to a man who beat her.”
“Good God,” Jasmine murmured. “I had no idea.…”
“Yeah. It’s all bad. It’s the Quarter of the Street Rats, remember? Anyway, from the day my mother died, I decided I would never rely on anyone else for food or shelter—or to fulfill my dreams for me. And that someday I would be rich and live in the palace. And all my troubles would be over.”
“You dreamed of living in the palace?” Jasmine asked with a curious smile.
“Our house had a view of it, out the back,” Aladdin said with a weak grin. “I used to gaze at it and dream. It looked like paradise. Golden and white in the sunlight, stark and imposing in a dust storm, lit up by a thousand lamps in the middle of the night. And then, when I moved out…after my mom died…I chose my hideout because it had a similar view.”
“And all those years,” Jasmine mused, “I languished in my beautiful gardens, and looked out the windows at night at Agrabah laid out below me, and wished I could be there. I wonder if our thoughts ever crossed, like stray breezes.”
“Or a pair of swallows.” Aladdin made his fingers dance around each other in the air.
“But wealth isn’t a magic lamp that suddenly erases all your problems,” Jasmine said slowly, breaking off a piece of bread for herself. “Imagine being a large bird in a tiny—but golden—cage. If it weren’t for the death of my father, I’d be happier now than I’ve ever been. I’m free here. Having the freedom to choose is better than having everything you want.”
“You’d better convince the people of Agrabah that,” Aladdin said wryly. “Otherwise they’ll never back you. So far they seem to prefer full bellies and no choice.”
“When I am sultana, they shall have both,” Jasmine vowed. “I will figure out how to feed the people and keep them free. They shall go to school—all of the children, no matter what religion, no matter what class. Boys and girls. They shall be given every opportunity to do whatever they wish when they grow up and not be forced to thieve and beg. This I swear.”
Her eyes were distant, looking at some future sight, a world of her own building. Aladdin had no doubt that she would achieve that vision or die trying. She made him believe that it was actually possible…that a kind of paradise on earth could be possible.
And he was willing to do whatever it took to help her with that dream.
“I believe you,” he whispered. “I believe in you.”
He never would have dared kiss the royal princess Jasmine.
But it turned out he didn’t need to.
The royal princess Jasmine leaned over and kissed him.
Her skin was warm and smelled of sand and mint. Aladdin melted into the kiss like his whole body had been waiting for it and he didn’t even know it himself. She put her hands around his neck and drew him in closer. One of her hands worked up into his hair, the other onto his shoulder, with a need he hadn’t realized she felt.
“So I guess we’re done fighting?” Aladdin whispered.
The royal princess Jasmine tweaked him on the nose.
“MORNING, FOLKS,” Duban yawned, stepping into the room with slapping feet and big heavy steps. He had a large brass ibrik of steaming hot coffee and several tiny delicate-looking cups. Despite this, he fell like a donkey onto a floor pillow. Not a drop spilled. Blearily, he set out the cups and poured.
“Wait, it’s night, isn’t it?” Jasmine asked, looking up from the book she was reading. “It’s so dark in here—you lose track of time.”
“Dusk is morning to those who work in the shadows,” Duban said, expertly pouring despite his narrowed eyes. “Sorry, oh great Robber Queen and Sultana-to-Be, I didn’t as
k how you liked yours. I made it with lots of sugar, the way Dad taught me.”
“I would drink the dregs at the bottom of an army canteen right now,” Jasmine said, delicately picking up her cup, “and I’m sure yours is much better.”
“Jasmine!”
Two chaotic bundles of rags came rushing into the room and threw themselves onto the princess’s lap. She laughed and put an arm around each.
“Shirin, Ahmed,” Maruf chastised, coming in slowly behind them with the particular tap-slide gait his bad leg gave him. “Do not treat the royal princess like your personal auntie.”
Aladdin cocked his head and looked at Ahmed, who had Abu sitting on his shoulder just as naturally as you please. Sort of like a miniature…Aladdin.
“It’s all right, Maruf,” Jasmine said, giving them a squeeze. “I never got to play with children at the palace. Even distant relatives were told to, uh, ‘keep their distance.’”
Shirin looked up at Jasmine with huge, adoring eyes. Then she found Jasmine’s little silver dagger and played with it wistfully, singing a song that sounded suspiciously like the anthem they played in Jafar’s crazy parade.
“They seem pretty happy,” Duban said, indicating the children with his cup.
“Happier than they’ve been in a long time,” Maruf said bleakly.
“Your sister hated thievery. She swore that neither she nor her children would ever have anything to do with it,” Aladdin remarked. “And here they are, in the very belly of the beast.”
“Well, if she were still around, maybe she’d have a say in the matter,” Duban growled.
“I meant no disrespect,” Aladdin said, holding up his hand. Very few things could get the normally rock-solid Duban riled. The fate of his sister was one of those things, however. “I just meant…they seem to be thriving here.”
“Well,” Maruf said brightly, “what could be better than having a royal princess, a tiger, a monkey, other children to play with…oh, yes, and food. Almost forgot that. Having food in their bellies seems to be important to these little ones.”