“A woman? Who?”
“I don’t know. It was just a dream.”
Ali looked unconvinced. “Last time I had ‘just a dream,’ it was the marid putting visions in my head two days before the lake rose up to tear down the Citadel.”
Fair point. She wiped her face with her sleeve. “What are you doing up? You should be resting.”
He shook his head. “I’m tired of resting. And of having nightmares as well.”
Nahri gave him a sympathetic look—she’d heard Ali screaming Muntadhir’s name in his sleep just the other night. “It’ll get easier.”
Another time, she knew he would have nodded with genuine earnestness—or, more likely, Ali would have been the one telling Nahri it was going to get better.
Now he did neither. Instead, he pressed his lips in a obviously forced expression of agreement and said, “Of course.” The lie seemed to age him, the optimistic prince she’d known gone. He rose to his feet. “If you’re not going back to sleep, I made some tea.”
“I didn’t know you knew how to make tea.”
“I didn’t say it was good tea.”
Nahri couldn’t help but smile. “I’ll take a glass of not-very-good tea over returning to nightmares.” She reached for her shawl, draping it around her shoulders to fight the chill, and followed him.
She blinked in surprise when she entered the apothecary. The tins and glass vials on the shelves had been neatly reorganized and dusted and the floor freshly swept. The braids of garlic, herbs, and roots Yaqub stuffed into the ceiling to dry had all been moved to some apparatus Ali appeared to have constructed from the broken baskets the old pharmacist had been saying he’d mend since before Nahri left for Daevabad.
“Well,” she started. “You’ve certainly been doing more than brewing tea.”
Ali rubbed the back of his neck, looking sheepish. “Yaqub’s been so kind. I wanted to be useful.”
“Yaqub’s never going to let you leave. I didn’t even realize there was this much room in here.” She perched on the work-bench. “You must have been up all night.”
Ali poured a glass of tea from a copper pot set over the fire and handed it to her. “It’s been easier to keep busy. If I’m doing things—fixing things, working, cleaning—it keeps my mind from everything else, though that’s probably a cowardly thing to admit.”
“Not wanting to be destroyed by despair doesn’t make you a coward, Ali. It makes you a survivor.”
“I guess.”
But again, Nahri could see her words had failed to pierce the haunted expression in his gray eyes.
It made her physically ache to look at him. “Let’s go to Khan el-Khalili tomorrow,” she offered. “It’s the biggest bazaar in the city, and if trawling through human goods won’t keep your mind occupied, I don’t know what will.” She took a sip of her tea and then coughed. “Oh. Oh, that’s awful. I didn’t think you could ruin tea. You do know you’re supposed to take the leaves out, right? Not let them steep until it tastes like metal.”
The insult seemed to work better than kindness, bringing a glint of amusement to Ali’s face. “Maybe you like weak tea.”
“How dare you.” But before Nahri could expand on her offense, she heard shuffling outside the apothecary door—followed by voices.
“I am telling you she returned.” It was a woman. “The pharmacist says she’s a servant, a peasant from the south, but Umm Sara says she has the same black eyes as the girl who used to work for him.”
Nahri instantly reached for Yaqub’s paring knife.
Ali gave her a bewildered look. “What are you doing?”
“Protecting myself.” She tensed, gripping the knife. It was astonishing how quickly it all came back. The constant worry a mark would return with soldiers, accusing her of theft. The fear that one wrong move would lead to a mob calling her a witch.
There was a knock at the door, rough and insistent. “Please!” the woman called. “We need help!”
Nahri hissed a warning under her breath when Ali moved for the door. “Don’t.”
“They said they needed help.”
“People say a lot of things!”
Ali reached out and gently lowered her hand. “No one’s going to hurt you,” he assured her. “I don’t know humans well, but I’m fairly certain if I make all the liquids in here explode, they’re not going to stick around.”
Nahri glowered. “I’m not putting down the knife.” But she didn’t stop him when Ali opened the door.
An older woman in a worn black dress pushed her way inside.
“Where is she? The girl who works with the pharmacist?” Their new arrival had a markedly southern accent and, from a glimpse at her unveiled, sun-beaten face, looked like she’d lived a hard life.
“That’s me,” Nahri said coarsely, the knife still in her hand. “What do you want?”
The woman lifted her palms beseechingly. “Please, I need your help. My son, he fell from a roof last week …” She gestured behind her and two men entered, carrying an unconscious boy in a sling. “We paid a doctor to come out who said he just needed to rest, but tonight he started vomiting and now he won’t wake …” She stumbled on, sounding desperate. “There are rumors about you. People say you’re the girl from the Nile. The one who used to heal people.”
The woman’s words struck a little too close: the one who used to heal people. “I’m not a doctor,” Nahri replied, hating the admission. “Where’s the physician you originally saw?”
“He won’t come again. He says we cannot afford him.”
Nahri finally put down the knife. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“You could look at him,” the woman persisted. “Please just look at him.”
The pleading in her eyes nagged at Nahri. “I … oh, all right. Ali, clear the table. You”—she nodded at the men carrying the boy—“bring him over here.”
They laid the boy out upon his sheet. He couldn’t have been older than ten, a wiry youth with close-cropped black curls and a wide, innocent face. He was unconscious, yet his arms looked oddly extended at his sides, his hands flared outward.
Nahri took his pulse. It was thready and far too slow. “He won’t wake up?”
“No, sayyida,” the older man answered. “He’s been sleepy all week, complaining his head still hurt and speaking little.”
“And he fell from a roof?” Nahri asked, carefully unwrapping the bandage around his bruised skull. “Is that what caused this injury?”
“Yes,” the man replied urgently.
Nahri continued her examination. She lifted one eyelid.
Dread rushed over her. His pupil was widely dilated, the black nearly overtaking the brown.
And immediately Nahri was back in Daevabad, trailing Subha as she went through the tools she’d brought to the hospital. But how did you know? she’d pestered, harassing Subha into the details of the patient Nahri had spotted in her garden.
Subha had scoffed. A blow to the head a few days back and a dilated pupil? There’s blood building in the skull, no doubt about it. And it’s deadly if not released—it’s only a matter of time.
Nahri kept her voice controlled. “He needs a surgeon. Immediately.”
One of the men shook his head. “We’re Sa’idi migrants. No surgeon is going to help us. Not unless we pay upfront with money we don’t have.”
The woman looked at her again, her gaze brimming with a hope that tore Nahri to shreds. “Could you not … lay your hands on him and wish him well? My neighbors say that’s what you used to do.”
There it was again. What she used to do. What, deep in her heart, Nahri feared she might never do again.
She stared at the boy. “I’m going to need boiling water and lots of clean rags. And I want one of you to go to the pharmacist’s home. Tell him to bring any tools he has from his grandfather.”
The woman frowned. “You need all that to lay hands upon him?”
“No, I need all that because I’m going to open
his skull.”
TYING BACK HER HAIR, NAHRI STUDIED THE INSTRUMENTS that Yaqub had brought, thanking the Creator when she recognized the small circular trephine among his great-grandfather’s old tools.
“This is it,” she said, plucking the drill free. “How fortunate you’re descended from a surgeon.”
Yaqub shook his head fiercely. “You’ve lost your mind. That thing is a hundred years old. You’re going to kill that boy and get us all arrested for murder.”
“No, I’m going to save his life.” She beckoned to Ali and then handed him the drill. “Al Qahtani, you owe me. Go boil this and get me the scalpel already in the water.”
“Nahri, are you—”
She was already turning Ali around, pushing him in the direction of the cauldron. “Less talking, more helping.”
Yaqub stepped in front of her. “Nahri, in all the time I’ve known you, you’ve never done anything like this. What you’re talking about is surgery that people train for years to master.”
Nahri hesitated. She actually agreed with him—she’d practiced on some coconuts and melons with Subha, but that was it. Contrary to the pandemonium that characterized the rest of her life, she was typically cautious with healing, and her years in the infirmary had only made her more careful. It was a responsibility and a privilege to be entrusted with a patient’s life, not a thing she took lightly.
But Nahri also knew the disregard with which people like this family were treated. Peasants and migrants, girls with no name and parents with no coin to convince a reluctant doctor.
“They don’t have time to go around Cairo begging for a surgeon to take pity on them, Yaqub. This boy could be dead by dawn. I know enough to try and help.”
“And if you fail?” He moved closer, lowering his voice. “Nahri, you know how things are here. Something happens to that boy in my shop and his neighbors will come for my family. They’ll run us out of this neighborhood.”
That stopped her. Nahri did know how things were—it was the same fear that had haunted her back in Daevabad. When emotions got high, the lines that divided their communities grew deadly.
She met his gaze. “Yaqub, if you refuse, I’ll understand, and I won’t do this. But that child will die.”
Emotion swept his lined face. The boy’s parents had taken up a vigil on either side of their child, his mother clutching one of his hands to her tearstained cheek.
Yaqub stared at them, indecision warring in his expression. “You chose a very inconvenient time to develop a conscience.”
“Is that a yes?”
He grimaced. “Don’t kill him.”
“I’ll try my best.” Still seeing reluctance in his eyes, Nahri added, “Would you mind making some tea for his parents and keeping them back? They don’t want to see this.”
She scrubbed up with soap. Ali had returned and laid her tools out on a clean cloth.
“Go wash your hands,” Nahri ordered.
Ali gave her an alarmed glance. “Why?”
“Because you’re helping me. The drill takes some strong-arming. Go.” As he walked away, muttering under his breath, she called, “And use plenty of soap.”
Straining to recall everything Subha had taught her, Nahri measured a spot about a hand’s breadth behind the boy’s brow and then carefully shaved his hair, scrubbing the skin with more soap before making a precise cut in the scalp. Dabbing away the blood that instantly blossomed from the cut, she pinned back the small flap of skin, revealing the bone underneath.
Back at her side, Ali rocked slightly. “Oh. That’s what that looks like.”
“Hand me another cloth,” Nahri replied, swapping out the blood-soaked one. “Now the drill.”
His hands were shaking when he gave it to her, and as the weight of the drill fell into hers, so did the staggering prospect of what she was about to do. Was Nahri mad? Who was she to take this boy’s life in her hands and drill a hole into his head? She was a thief, a con artist.
No, you’re the Banu Nahida.
When Nahri placed the drill against his skull, her hands had stopped trembling.
Later, she could not say when the eerie hush of calm descended, a feeling like what she’d been told proper prayer was supposed to invoke. There was the steady grinding of the drill and the wet, chalky smell of bone dust and blood. When her hands and wrists began to throb, she carefully coached Ali through a few rounds, sweat beading on her skin. She stopped him as soon as she saw the last bit of bone begin to give way. Nahri took over, her heart nearly stopping as she carefully withdrew the drill, removing a bloody coin of bone.
She stared at her work, too awed to speak. She’d just put a hole in a skull. Excitement buzzed beneath her skin, layering in with fear and anxiety.
Breathe, she reminded herself, Subha’s words coming back to her. There’s a membrane just below the skull. Beneath is where the blood builds. That is what you must puncture.
Nahri picked up her scalpel. The silence of the room was smothering, her heart beating so fast it felt ready to burst. She took a deep breath, offering a prayer to the Creator, Anahid, and anyone else willing to help tip the scales in her favor.
Then she pierced the membrane. Blood sprayed directly into her face. It was thick and dark, purple, with an oily cast.
That caught the other woman’s attention. “What have you done?” the boy’s mother cried, lunging up from where she’d been sitting with Yaqub.
Ali stepped between them, catching her before she could grab Nahri. Nahri had frozen, staring at the bloody incision. As the dark fluid dribbled out, she could see the pinkish-yellow brain beyond begin to pulsate with the boy’s heartbeat.
He stirred.
It wasn’t much, just a sigh and a slight twitch of one hand. But then there was movement beneath his closed eyes. The boy mumbled in his sleep, and Nahri let out a choked breath, fighting not to collapse.
She glanced back. Every eye in the room was on her, staring with a mix of horror and awe.
Nahri grinned. “Would someone hand me my sutures?”
IT TOOK THE REST OF THE NIGHT TO STITCH HIM UP. Nahri waited until the boy opened his eyes, and then another relative came by with a board to move him. His home was only down the block and Nahri gave his parents thorough instructions on how to care for him, assuring them she’d come by around noon for a checkup.
His father was an apologetic, grateful mess when he left. “May God shower you with blessings,” he gushed. “We’ll find a way to pay you, I promise.”
Nahri shook her head, watching as the mother cradled her son. “You don’t need to pay me,” she said, holding open the door. “I was happy to help.”
She watched them depart as dawn softened the sky. It was quiet save for the song of birds, a breeze bringing the scent of the Nile. Nahri took a deep breath, feeling a sense of peace and purpose she hadn’t felt since the morning of the Navasatem parade.
She still had it. Her magic might be gone, but Nahri had just saved a life, doing a procedure she suspected trained physicians would be lucky to pull off. She leaned against the apothecary door, trembling as the buzz of anxiety and excitement drained from her body, and then she wiped her eyes, embarrassed to find them wet.
I am who I always wanted to be. Forget Daevabad’s politics or the lack of whatever certificates the human world would never grant a woman like her. Nahri was a healer, and no one could take that away from her.
She went back inside. Ali and Yaqub were sitting across from each other, both looking stunned amidst the bloody tools and rags.
No, not just stunned—Ali looked as close to vomiting as she’d ever seen him. Nahri had to bite back a smile. “You’re the last person I’d think squeamish.”
“I’m not squeamish,” he said defensively. He raised a shaking finger at the drill. “I do not ever want to touch that thing again, but I’m not squeamish.”
Trying not to laugh, she laid a hand on his shoulder. “Why don’t you get some sleep while I clean up? I’m far too j
umpy.”
Relief lit his face. “God bless you.” Ali was gone the next moment, lighting out of there like he was being chased by a karkadann.
“Let me help you,” Yaqub offered. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep after watching brain surgery being performed in my apothecary.”
They got to work, Nahri piling the bloody rags in a sack to be washed, and Yaqub wiping down his instruments.
Nahri rolled up the cloth she’d used to cover the table. “I’m sorry for not asking your permission first. I shouldn’t have put you in that position.”
Yaqub clucked his tongue. “First she takes a risk for a stranger, now she apologizes. Where is the rude girl who tried to swindle me so many years ago?”
Gone, for a long time now. “I can steal those instruments if you’d like to feel nostalgic.”
He shook his head, clearly not buying it. “You’ve changed for the better, whether or not you want to admit it.” He hesitated before meeting her gaze. “You did it somehow, didn’t you? You went and trained as a doctor.”
“You could say that.”
His eyes didn’t leave hers. “Where were you, Nahri? Really?”
A dozen excuses ran through her head, but God forgive her, she was so tired of lying.
Nahri took a deep breath. “Would you believe me if I said I came from a long line of djinn healers and was being held captive in a hidden magical kingdom on the other side of the world?”
Yaqub snorted. “Not even you could sell that story.”
Nahri forced a nervous laugh, the blood leaving her face. “Of course not,” she said, fighting disappointment. “Who would believe such a crazy tale?”
Yaqub set a kettle over the fire again. “It was an astonishing feat wherever you learned it,” he said, spooning tea leaves into two glass cups. “You’ll have stories spreading about you.”
“Especially since I didn’t make them pay.”
The Empire of Gold Page 11