by Somaiya Daud
I screamed again, but the droids dragged me away even as I struggled, kicking and screaming, crying out my brother’s name.
“Husnain!” My throat felt raw from screaming, but he didn’t get up, and no one stopped to help him.
I was dragged up a ramp to a Vathek cruiser, and my last sight of home was the kasbah, lit by the spark of fire a droid had set just as the doors shut.
the ziyaana, andala
4
I’d dreamed forever of leaving Cadiz, of visiting other star systems in our galaxy. But I’d never thought I would be taken against my will. I was dragged through the building, pulled onto a ship, silent and numb, then finally deposited in a holding cell.
My whole body hurt, and my vision was blurry with unshed tears. Below me was a glass floor, clouded and turning gray. But I could see where I was—and where I was going.
Cadiz was gone and left behind and Andala, our mother planet, grew minute by minute in my view. I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to contain the panic inside me. I prayed fervently that my family had survived the burning of the kasbah. I didn’t understand—couldn’t understand why they had taken me, or to what end.
I could not escape the image of Husnain lying motionless in the stampede, nor the sound his body made when it hit stone. Was he alright? Were my parents? Had Aziz gotten them out? And what of Khadija? The phaser’s blast was aimed at her arm, not her chest; meant to threaten, not kill. But she had lost a lot of blood … My mind went round and round, from one thought to the next, trying to make sense of it, hoping for the best.
The Vath had gotten me, for whatever reason. My family and the village were safe.
They were safe.
At least, that was what I repeated to myself. I didn’t know if I believed it.
Hours passed as I stared at the steadily approaching planet. At last, the ship slowed, and streams of cloud and mist engulfed my view. The floor melted back to its imposing steel gray color as the door hissed open. I stiffened, waiting for the Imperial droid to step through. Instead, an Andalaan girl waited in the doorway. She was dressed as I was, in a long qaftan, its sleeves tightened at the wrist, with a short sleeveless jacket. She drew a veil down from her red hair and freckled, brown face.
“Amani?”
I said nothing.
“I am Tala,” she said. “You should follow me.”
She led me from the ship into a courtyard that seemed to stretch on forever, filled with soft, pruned grass waving gently in the breeze. I gaped at the sights around me as Tala led me down an avenue of polished marble toward the garden’s center. Arches striped in red and white lined the walkway, and their alabaster columns gleamed. Birdsong filled the air, and jewel-toned peacocks strutted across the pathway. The air was fragrant with the scent of incense and flowers, and warmer than I’d ever felt it on Cadiz.
I would have been a fool not to recognize the pavilions and mosaics that marked where we were: the Ziyaana, Andala’s imperial palace. For centuries it had been home to our own royalty, Andalaan kings and queens. It was the last place to fall in the occupation. Now the palace played host to the Vathek king and his new court.
“Can you tell me what I’m doing here?” I asked, willing my voice not to shake.
“Come,” she said instead of answering my question. “The king’s stewardess, Nadine, is waiting in the east wing—she’s to be your mistress. Have a care with her—she is one of the High Vath.”
I swallowed. If one of the High Vath was involved in the assault on the kasbah, then my end would be grim. They made up the upper echelons of our conquerors, rarely seen away from our capital, and almost never alone. Their class was marked by pale silver hair, and it made them easy to pick out among their kind.
“And after?”
She said nothing.
She led me down a set of stairs, and through a collection of airy chambers. A breeze wafted through, lifting gauzy curtains, revealing dark wood trellises, cushioned alcoves, and carved pillars. But it was silent—gone was the sound of birdsong and flowing water.
Eventually, we came upon another courtyard. There was little grass, and what shrubbery was around was potted and foreign. A fountain murmured in the center, and just to its left was a table, high off the ground. The Andalaan comfort and luxury had finally given way to sanitized Vathek splendor. No life, no warmth—only stone and water.
A woman with gleaming silver hair, the trademark of the High Vath, sat behind the table, a stack of tablets on one end, and a holoreader in front of her. Her features were sharp—sharp cheekbones, sharp nose, and a thin mouth that seemed ill suited to smiling.
“Your Ladyship,” Tala said in Vathekaar. “I’ve brought the girl.”
Her Ladyship, Nadine, said nothing, and continued to work.
Tala stood perfectly still, as though this were routine to her. Minutes and then tens of minutes, and then what felt like hours ticked by. I struggled to stay standing, my nerves fraying as time wore on, my thoughts cycling through the stories I’d heard in ever rising panic.
Near the end of the war, our moon had been a protectorate held by one of the High Vath. The mountains ringing our valley sheltered some of the last rebels, and the High Vath had hunted them down systematically, making examples of them. I wasn’t born, but the scars of his tenure had remained. Adil’s maimed foot. The empty village two miles south of us. The village to the west with its sole Kushaila inhabitant and her daughter, silver haired and blue eyed.
“Do you speak Vathekaar?”
I nearly jumped at the sound of Nadine’s voice. My mouth opened and closed as I tried to bring myself back to the present. “Yes.”
“Where did you learn?”
“School,” I said at last.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“Do you speak any other languages?”
“Kushaila,” I whispered.
It had been our moon’s common tongue before the Vathek occupation. Here in the capital it had been the royal language. Now, if one were caught speaking it, they risked the ire of whatever Vath was in their path. If a droid or a member of the Garda caught you, your chances of being beaten and thrown into jail were high. Galactic law meant they couldn’t outlaw an indigenous language outright, and all of Andala’s various populations took pride in their mother tongues. But the Vath seemed determined to beat our language out of all of us, and the Kushaila in particular, no matter the cost.
Nadine snorted in derision.
“Do you have any skills?”
I heard Husnain’s voice, telling me to practice poetry. Saw my father bent over the plants in his greenhouse as he taught me how to cross breeds. My mother’s face, red and sweating in the kitchen as she taught me to make bread.
I couldn’t close my eyes—I couldn’t show weakness. So I took each memory, folded it over and over again, and put it away.
I shook my head. None that would matter to her.
Nadine folded her hands on the table and leaned back as though she didn’t believe me. I could not say if she took pleasure in her questioning, in seeing me so openly afraid, but it certainly seemed that way. When I didn’t offer an answer, she said nothing, and the silence stretched between us.
“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” she said, and stood. “We will find out one way or another. Cover her face, Tala. The seamstress is coming.”
Tala rushed to secure a veil across my features, and soon a seamstress hurried into the courtyard and began measuring me. I was to live then. The idea brought me no relief. Why should I need new clothes? Who was to see me in them? Why must my face be covered?
What did they want with me?
“See what Agron’s schedule is like in the coming days,” Nadine instructed Tala. “The ball season is approaching—he may be booked for weeks.”
“Yes, Your Ladyship.” Tala’s face remained impassive, and she refused to meet my eyes.
“You may go. I will send for you when I’m ready for you to col
lect her.”
Tala did not look at me as she walked out, the seamstress following soon after.
I stood alone in the courtyard as Nadine worked through a series of tablets and passed them on to the droid behind her. It had been early morning when I was summoned, but time crawled forward as I waited to be dismissed.
I was not dismissed.
The minutes stretched into hours, and the shadows in the courtyard stretched with them. I knew patience, was used to the backbreaking work of picking fruits in the orchard, which we often did from sunup to sundown. But before long my back and feet began to ache. I hadn’t slept or eaten since the majority night celebration had come to an abrupt end, and I felt dizzy, disoriented by the veil that shielded my face and narrowed my field of vision.
And then all at once it seemed that even the whirring of the droid stopped. Nadine set her stylus down, then straightened up. I straightened along with her just as footsteps, quick and precise, echoed in the courtyard.
Nadine rose from her seat and swept past me.
“You will remain here,” she said, clipped and sharp, and then disappeared behind the shrubbery at the other end of the courtyard.
“As ever,” I heard, “it is a pleasure, Your Highness.”
My heart thundered in my chest. I could hear them murmuring with each other—Nadine and one of the royal household. There weren’t very many members. The Vathek king, King Mathis, had only had one child with his Andalaan bride: Princess Maram, who was rumored to be as cruel and Vathek as her father, despite being half Kushaila. King Mathis’s queen had died of illness during the Purge—the systematic extermination of the Salihis, the most powerful Andalaan family, who had resisted the Vathek takeover.
“Kneel,” Nadine said from behind me.
I sank to my knees clumsily.
“Well, your work is quite cut out for you, isn’t it?” a second voice said. It was cultured and sharp, as though the speaker were used to cutting people down with it.
I could feel her eyes burning holes into the back of my skull, and then the sound of swaying skirts and jewelry chiming as she made her way in a large circle around me. The bottom of her skirt was a dark red, embroidered and shot through with black. Hanging from the gold belt around her waist were several long, thin chains that swayed and hit against one another as she came into view.
My eyes met hers, and I made a sound that was both a sob and a laugh. Looking at the girl in front of me was like looking into a mirror: it was my mouth on her face, the same dark eyes as mine, though they were lined in kohl. The same chin and cheeks—though hers were fuller, rounded with wealth.
No one on Cadiz had seen an image of the princess, not for a long time—her father had kept her hidden away on Luna-Vaxor, the Vathek homeworld, out of danger and out of view. But now I knew that standing in front of me was Maram vak Mathis, Her Royal Highness, High Princess of the Vath.
And she looked exactly like me.
5
The princess stepped closer to me, the move easy and graceful, pulled off my veil, then slipped a hand beneath my chin. She looked like the queen she would one day be, standing over me, one hand twisted lazily into the folds of her opulent gown. Sunlight glinted off her gold belt and the rings she wore. We were the same, I thought, and yet not. She wore more wealth than I’d thought to see in my entire life. And where I still retained the scent of a village girl, the princess smelled of sweet oils and incense. Her chambers were likely scented with bukhoor, her hair washed in sweet-smelling soaps, her qaftans folded away with satin-wrapped rose resin.
It was foolish of me to look her in the eye—she was a princess, after all. But each of us seemed to be riveted by the other, and the longer we stared the more painful her grip around my face became. I struggled not to twist out of her grasp.
The princess, I’d heard, had been raised on the Vathek homeworld after her mother’s death, among her father’s relatives. She was every inch the Vathek scion, or so the stories went, cruel to family and friend alike. She’d willingly impoverished cousins who’d displeased her. And when she returned to Andala, one of her Andalaan ladies-in-waiting emerged two weeks later with her face disfigured as punishment for speaking out of turn. Her hatred of her mother’s people and her legacy was legendary. She neither spoke nor read Kushaila, and she regularly derided its use whenever someone used it in her hearing.
Young as she was, and though half of her belonged to us, we expected her to continue her father’s reign in just his way when she came to power.
“Why do you suppose you are here and not at home?” the princess asked softly.
“I am here because I was brought here, taken from my home,” I said, letting some of my anger seep into my voice.
Her grip tightened painfully against my cheeks, and I sucked in a sharp breath.
“Don’t play,” she said. “I am not in the mood.”
“I don’t know why I am here,” I told her, though it wasn’t entirely true. I did know, or thought I did. My mind raced with thoughts of situations where they could use me—a disposable farmer’s daughter—in place of the princess. I thought once more of the droids storming our kasbah, scanning the faces of every girl in the village who was coming of age. It was no stroke of luck that they’d taken me. They’d been searching for me—for a mirror image of Maram—all along, probably all over Cadiz and every other moon in our system.
“I don’t know, Your Highness,” she corrected, and shook my chin angrily. “Say it.”
“I don’t know, Your Highness,” I repeated, trying to match her tone.
“What a darling mimic you are,” she said. “One could almost forgive you for looking so much like me.”
“I didn’t choose to look like you,” I said softly.
Her expression changed from banked anger to something uglier, crueler. The air stretched and thinned between us, until she released my chin. She moved quickly, like a viper, and backhanded me with her ringed hand. Pain was quick and hot; it radiated over my cheekbone and down my jaw, spreading like wildfire, amplified by the bitter taste of copper inside my mouth. I turned my head back slowly and gripped my skirts as tight as I could.
When our eyes met a ghost of a smile came and then left her face. She looked almost satisfied, and that more than her anger terrified me.
“Nor did I,” she said at last, her voice even. “And yet here we are—a baseborn girl and a future queen. Now, answer my question.”
“I don’t know, Your Highness,” I repeated.
She curled her lip.
“Her Highness,” Nadine said, “has been blessed with a spare.”
“I am not a spare,” I gritted out.
Her satisfaction grew and transformed into triumph. My stomach sank as I realized I’d stepped into the trap she’d laid for me.
“The Vathek have a story about a man named Alexius who angered their god,” Maram began, her mouth curving into a lazy smile. “He was strung up on a mountaintop and fed to birds of prey. Every day they pecked him until he died,” she continued, and began to circle me. “And every night god healed his body so that these same birds could feast again with the rising of the sun.”
I tried to keep my breathing even and my eyes fixed on a spot on the floor. Whatever she had planned, I would not cower. She couldn’t make me.
Maram whistled, a high-pitched, thin sound and lifted her right arm. For the first time I noticed the long leather glove she wore. The sound of wings beat against the air, drawing closer and closer.
To her credit, Maram did not flinch or waver when the roc alighted on her arm. The bird was half her height at least, and when it spread its wings for balance, they spanned as long as she was tall. Its talons and beak were bone white, a stark contrast to the near midnight black of its plumage. It regarded me with one eye, as dark as its feathers, unblinking and fixed on me as if I were prey.
I swallowed.
“Nadine used to tell me stories,” Maram said. She stroked a spot against its chest, and i
t warbled, an eerie sound from so frightening a creature. “The roc used to be large enough to carry grown men off to feed their nestlings.”
When I met her eyes her smile widened. Fear beat in me, louder than my heart, and drowned everything out. I did not jump when she lifted her arm up and the roc launched itself back into the air, but it didn’t matter. Keeping my composure would not stop what I knew was coming next.
“You will learn a great many things in the Ziyaana,” she said. Her smile was sweet now, nearly congenial. There was a dimple in her left cheek. “Here is your first lesson: do not presume to speak back to me.”
She whistled two short, sharp bursts. The roc cast its shadow from high above as it circled the ceiling, gave out an angry cry, and dove with its wings tucked against its sides.
I could not stop the scream of terror that tore itself out of my throat.
I had seen feral hawks and the like on Cadiz, watched them take down prey and feast with a detached fascination. I had never allied myself with the prey, had never imagined I’d be on the receiving end of claws and beak and terror. You could not be anything like prey and survive our village or our moon.
The roc was silent as its claws slammed and then dug into my shoulders. They clenched, digging into flesh and bone, before it lifted me off my feet and dragged me back several feet. It was not large enough to lift me more than few inches off the ground, but when the earth disappeared from beneath my feet I screamed louder than before.
What little composure I’d had broke when it dropped me on my knees. My majority night gown was soaked through with blood already, and I felt the thick, slow crawl of blood coming out of the wounds. I hunched over on the ground, sobbing.
You learned a different sort of fear when you grew up in a village like mine. Fear of hunger. Fear of Imperial droids. Fear of the low hum that came with Imperial probes. But that fear taught you endurance—you could let its unwavering presence wear you down, or you could learn to stand up despite it.