by Somaiya Daud
But there was nothing like this. I’d never experienced the bone-shaking terror that a roc might wing around for a second chance at my flesh. Nor the fear associated with the soft click of slippers on a courtyard floor.
I forced myself to meet her gaze when Maram came to stand over me. This time I could not understand her expression. It was disorienting to look up at her, at myself, and not understand what the different tells I understood on my own face so well meant on hers.
“What a dark, pathetic creature you are,” she said at last.
Despite my wounds, I smiled. “Do you look in a mirror, Your Highness?”
She struck me again and before I could fall over caught me by the shoulder and squeezed. I cried out in pain and she squeezed tighter, looming over me, her face grim.
“You will not laugh in the days to come,” she promised. I said nothing, but I hoped she saw my determination.
She released me and shoved me away with a sound of disgust. She made a gruesome picture now, with her blood-covered fingers and gown.
“The king,” Nadine began, unconcerned with the pair of us, “values his daughter’s life. And too often, of late, she has come under threat. She can rarely leave the Ziyaana for fear of rebel attacks.” I held my tongue, though it seemed little wonder to me that she’d inspired such ire. “The advent of her eighteenth birthday and the confirmation of her inheritance will necessitate more public appearances. Our king has commanded that you will risk your life where she cannot. You will train, and you will become Her Royal Highness. You will speak like her, walk like her. You will even breathe as she does.”
“If I do not?” I asked, trying to keep hold of my disgust.
“You will,” Nadine said.
“Your very life depends on it,” Maram added with a chilling smile.
* * *
I concentrated on walking, on placing one foot in front of the other, as a droid led me from the courtyard back to the side of the palace where I’d first arrived. We crossed no one, not even other droids. No one to see me, I realized. No one to see my resemblance to Her Highness.
Just when I felt I would collapse, the droid ushered me into a set of chambers where Tala waited, a small table in front of her and a cushioned bed just behind. She shot to her feet, her face ashy and colorless. Her eyes were wide, and her hands shook.
“Dihya,” she breathed, and caught me around the waist as I swayed.
I cried out, pain radiating through my body. When she pulled her hand away, it was covered in blood.
She whispered a rapid prayer in Kushaila, and then helped me down to the bed.
“Thank you, Unit 62,” she said to the droid.
“Yes, citizen.” It whirred, and then strode away.
She worked slowly and meticulously, as I stared out at nothing. I had been bleeding for so long that the fabric stuck tight to my wounds. She sponged my shoulder carefully, until finally the dress could be pulled away so she could clean the wounds and wrap them with a glowing white cloth. The cloth was warm and stung, briefly, before sinking into the wounds as though it had never been there at all.
I knew it was not a kindness she did me. She was fixing me so that I could perform my duties, to return to Maram and be punished again. I flinched when her cool fingers touched my chin, and turned my face toward her. Our eyes met.
“It will take some time for the wounds to close,” she said after washing my face. “You may bathe. The bandages will hold. But it would do you good to sleep on your stomach.”
Her hands were covered in my blood. I watched her dip them into a bowl of murky water, watched the bowl grow darker. How many others had she ministered to in this way, I wondered. How many had it taken for her to learn to effect the cool, blank stare? The distance? Would I end up the same way?
“These are your quarters. You have full use of this suite and the courtyard beyond. But you are not to venture past the west gate, understand?”
Our eyes met for the second time. Some emotion slipped across her face and was gone.
“It is a hard lesson,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “But it is best learned early. There is no escape from what they want. Only survival.”
6
Morning came to me in starts and whispers. I could hear a soft breeze weave its way through curtains, a door shaking, thin chains trembling. I did not hear the crows or roosters call at dawn, or the pawing of our old goat in her paddock. Nor could I hear my parents moving around downstairs, or my father give the soft call to prayer, a tradition he insisted we maintain despite the danger.
I couldn’t bear to open my eyes or move. My whole body ached, and I was slow to rise out of the nightmare I’d experienced. But if I didn’t rise soon, my mother would come and scold me and remind me that I had agreed to milk the cantankerous goat when we’d bought her. Worse, it was my duty to catch her when she escaped, which seemed likely given her silence so early in the morning.
“Momma,” I groaned. My bed felt like air, and my whole body felt flushed from the warmth trapped beneath the covers.
“Momma,” I said again and forced myself upright, then froze.
It had been no nightmare.
The droid, my wounds, the princess—all real. I was in the capital city, Walili, within the royal palace, the Ziyaana.
My mind went blank with terror. I’d barely survived my first night. How would I fare the next night and the next and the next, never mind what would happen when I took my place as Maram’s body double? I hunched over in my bed, fighting tears.
Someone had already been in my rooms and laid out tea and bread. Hanging on a hook by the entrance to the chambers was a cream-ivory qaftan. I imagined for the wealthy ladies of the Ziyaana it must have seemed plain—what little beadwork there was was constrained around the neck and the edges of the jacket’s sleeves. But it was ornate and detailed, the beads flecked in gold and silver, and the cloth was light and rippled beneath my fingers like water. It was worth more than my family’s farm, I was sure.
I washed and dressed, carefully avoiding my wounds, just in time for Tala to appear, silent as a ghost.
She was dressed in a qaftan similar to mine, though hers was black, the sleeves and lapels of her jacket embroidered in white. She wore a stiff velvet belt in the old style, over gown and jacket both.
“Come,” she said, and gestured to a vanity and a set of cushions. “We have little time, and I must make you presentable.”
I sat warily, and watched as she worked on my hair. She must have been a lady’s maid to a daughter of one of the makhzen who worked in the lower echelons of the new government. Her fingers worked deftly as she oiled and parted my thick, tightly wound curls. I expected her to simply comb out the knots, but instead she wound gold and silver thread into the braids, before tying off the bulk of it into a long braid.
“Earrings,” she commanded, “and a necklace. Here.” She opened a small cabinet and a smaller jewelry box and picked out a pair of gold earrings with dark green stones, and a matching necklace. She set three rings in my hand without comment and waited while I slipped them onto my fingers.
“I think jewelry is the least of my worries,” I said.
She had no reply to that.
* * *
Tala did not accompany me to Nadine’s courtyard. Yesterday’s droid—Unit 62—escorted me instead. I was not invited to stand after I knelt in greeting to her, and so I remained on my knees, eyes fixed on the cool stone floor. Nadine said nothing; she worked as she had yesterday, methodically and without distraction. It echoed yesterday’s proceedings too well for me not to worry, but I kept my hands steady and my back straight.
The sharp taptaptap of heeled slippers on tile heralded the princess’s arrival.
Maram swept in, a cloud of pink and black fabric rippling behind her. If anyone thought the pink might soften her features, make her seem sweeter or gentler, the black torque of beadwork undid it all. Her hair spilled over her shoulders, unadorned by gold or jewels
, and there was a single, enormous bracelet set with a large black stone on her left wrist. She looked furious and wrathful. Her eyes were lined heavily with kohl, and when she turned her gaze to me I lowered mine and held back a shudder.
Her face was carefully blank, her footsteps precise, but her knuckles were white where she gripped her gown. She took a seat beside Nadine and gestured for me to stand.
“Your Highness,” I murmured. She did not reply.
When I hazarded a look, she was staring at me, as though she found me as alien as I found her.
“You’ve cleaned her,” she said at last and gestured me closer. When I knelt at her feet she gripped my chin, her manicured nails digging into my cheek. “The resemblance—”
I suppose with my hair combed back and draped in new and expensive fabric she could more clearly see the similarities between us.
Not similarities, I thought. We were nearly twins.
“What a barbaric practice,” she said, and I flinched. “I thought we had outlawed such things.”
“Among the nobility, we have,” Nadine said. “But we have little care for what savages get up to.” With shock, I realized she meant my daan.
Heat rose in my cheeks even as I struggled to keep my mouth shut. Her mother had borne such marks on her face proudly, as did her grandmother, the Dowager Sultana, who had survived the occupation but was now shut away from the world. They’d been outlawed among the makhzen, but they were a valued tribal custom, and not just among the Kushaila.
I wanted to ask her how she had come to hate half her lineage so. How had she become so fully and completely like her father?
“We will take care of her face, of course,” Nadine added.
Nausea swam up through me, quick and fast. I knew what they intended.
“You can’t,” I said, and hated the waver in my voice.
Maram didn’t respond, though her gaze didn’t waver from the ink on my cheeks. She looked almost serene now, despite planning to take the one thing that was truly mine. My daan were everything—my family, my faith, my inheritance.
This was it, then: I was to be taken, reshaped in the image of my master, stripped of one of the only things that separated me from Maram. I knew so little of the Imperial princess—but I knew she was half Kushaila, and that her fiancé was Kushaila. Had she no love of them, or sympathy?
“I’m begging you,” I whispered as her grip tightened around my face.
“Oh,” she said, and in that single breath I heard the hard edge of her voice, her loathing. “You should never beg.”
I wanted to scream, I wanted the whole palace to know what it was that she was doing to me. But then there was a pinch at the base of my throat. I looked down to see a tiny, spider-like machine scurrying down my skirt.
The last thing I saw was Maram, her face still carefully blank, one white-knuckled hand fisted in the folds of her gown, watching as I toppled over.
* * *
I slept, or thought I slept, and was plagued with nightmares. A great laser coming closer to my face. Insect-shaped droids creeping over me, cutting into bone. The raw hum of a small saw. Heat as they shaved down my cheekbones and rounded my jaw.
I floated into consciousness slowly. The closer I came to the surface, the darker the world seemed to feel. I was standing on the edge of terror, crying out in my mind, and perhaps in real life. No one came to comfort me. I remained suspended in a nightmare, until, finally, I woke up.
I stared at the ceiling, waiting for the interlocking stars in the wood paneling to come into focus. My body felt heavy as lead. The bed was piled high with covers, and the curtains that separated the room from the rest of the suite were drawn shut.
I struggled to sit up.
There was a moment of complete serenity in that disorientation. I could not remember how I’d gotten back to my room, what had passed in the time since my last lesson.
And then, I lifted my hands to my face, and felt bandages.
The sound that tore itself out of my throat was broken. I felt—I could not feel betrayed, and yet I did. I curled up in my bed, with my bandaged face pressed against my knees, and sobbed. Great heaving sobs that shook my whole body and rang out against the stone floors of my suite. I knew without checking that the new scar on my back was gone, the skin smoothed to match Maram’s. I had lost a battle I’d never been equipped to fight. I’d been stripped of all things that were meant to be mine, that Dihya had blessed me with, and now— How could I keep myself, preserve myself, if I had none of myself left?
If all I had was Maram?
I thought of my mother’s voice, of her brushing my hair, tucking my curls behind my ear. I thought of her hard at work, her thin face grim, as though she were prepared to wage her own little war in the kitchen. I had inherited far more of my father’s whimsy, and less of my mother’s strength. Now I wanted nothing more than for her to appear and hold me, to somehow pass some of her iron will on to me through her touch.
I wanted to see my family again. My mother and father, my brothers, the old women in my village whom I had called khaltou since I was small. I wanted to never dream of droids or the Ziyaana again. I wanted open skies and mountain air. I wanted to know my family was safe, that Khadija was unharmed, that Husnain lived. More than anything, I wanted to write my own story, free from Vathek intervention.
But there was no end to these days in sight. I would rise every day, a prisoner of the Ziyaana, at the mercy of Nadine and other High Vath like her. And no matter what I did, how well I succeeded, the chances of my seeing my family again were low. Would I ever be allowed to go back to Cadiz? Would I see my parents or my brothers again? Would I even know if they were alive or not?
I wanted answers, but no one here would be able to give them to me. My family, my fate, my home—they were all out of my grasp for now. Perhaps forever.
I was drying my eyes when I saw it. Hanging from a wooden room partition was my majority gown. It had been laundered and repaired. Gone was the blood and dirt of that awful night, the tears from running and being kidnapped. I raised a hand to touch it and felt again that swell of grief, lodged beneath my breastbone.
And on a chair beneath it sat the sheaf of papers Husnain had gifted to me on my majority night. Breath went out of me as I stared at it, uncomprehending. I’d forgotten about it, forgotten that brief moment of happiness. It had survived my trip to the Ziyaana, my first encounter with Maram, and Tala’s repair.
How?
My hands trembled as I undid the twine still holding them together and pulled the pages out. A stiff piece of paper fell out, sturdier than the parchment, with Husnain’s writing on it.
May these words be suspended in your thoughts all your life.
Once more, my vision blurred with tears. I thought I’d lost everything, every connection to my family and my past and the people and things I loved. Husnain’s handwriting was like a beacon after a long and dark night.
“Bright-feathered and cloaked it came to her, and inclined its head,” I recited in Kushaila. “And fixed to her crown a star, gold as the sun. And it said, kneel for the Grace of the Most High.”
I felt the words shoot through me like lightning. I loved the stories of Massinia more than any other. She’d been the daughter of a Tazalghit queen and as a child was kidnapped by slavers. Massinia had suffered under the weight of her bondage before finding a way to escape. They’d branded her and beat and claimed her. But she’d freed herself and Dihya had eventually delivered her, newly marked with His touch, to her mother and her family.
Later, the tesleet that first delivered her, Azoul, returned to her with the Word of Dihya which she transcribed first into her skin, and later into the Book. Her message united the Tazalghit tribes for the first time in their history.
In the courtyard, dim, false moonlight filtered in through the dome above, and the air was filled with a stream of orbs, glowing like a sea of dying stars. Every now and then one glowed brighter than all the others and emitted a so
ft, childlike hum. They filled this part of the palace, the only source of light at night. Coupled with the discovery of my brother’s gift, they felt like a sign, like hope.
I prayed, fervently, for another sign, anything, to reveal my purpose in being here. I couldn’t give up hope and I wouldn’t. But I wanted to believe—had to believe—that there was a reason I was here, that there was meaning to this sudden change in fate.
The crown of Dihya had been stripped from me, my face changed, my body broken. But I was not a slave and I was not a spare. I was my mother’s daughter, and I would survive and endure. I would find my way back home.
7
Nadine did not sit behind her desk today. Nor did she wait for me to unveil myself, but took it upon herself to tug at the face covering. I fixed my gaze to a spot over her shoulder while she turned my face this way and that.
“Well,” she said at last. “You certainly look like her.”
I said nothing.
“How biddable you now seem. Come,” she said. “You may sit with me.”
There were two chairs at the table, and a breakfast spread. I hesitated.
“My lady?” I said.
“You must learn to sit with your betters if you are to emulate Her Royal Highness,” she said.
“Yes, my lady.”
Her gaze was critical as I took my seat. “Do you understand the stakes of what you’ve been commanded to do? There is no room for error.”
I watched her pour tea. “I do, my lady.”
“We shall see,” she said, then gestured at the food between us. “Eat.”
I reached for a piece of bread, but before I touched it, Nadine rapped the back of my hands with a knife. I snatched my hand back in pain.
“I see we must begin from the first.” She sneered. “You are not in a village. We do not eat with our hands.”
“It’s bread,” I said helplessly.
“You will ask for things to be passed to you,” she said. “If not, you will use a fork. Am I understood?”
“Yes, my lady.”
“Again.”
So the morning went. By the time the sun was up, my hands had dozens of purple bruises, and I’d eaten nowhere near my fill. Nadine did not care. She had the table cleared and walked to the center of the courtyard.