by Somaiya Daud
the ziyaana, andala
12
Maram was waiting for me in my chambers as soon as we returned to the Ziyaana. She stood in front of a window, haloed by the bright orb light.
The door creaked open and then shut before she turned around to look at me. It was still disorienting to see myself in another person. I had become so much like her, had learned to carry her expressions over mine like a second skin, that sometimes I forgot there was an original.
She sighed and sat on the pillowed bench behind her.
“Well,” she said. “You seem to have had a good time.”
“I danced,” I replied, voice flat. “It was enjoyable.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “So. Tell me how it went.”
I didn’t know what to tell her. No one, not even her father or fiancé, had been able to divine the difference between the two of us. Her father had been warned, and still failed to notice a double in his daughter’s place. Her peers had given me a wide berth, had spoken to Idris first before looking at me.
I wondered, for a moment, how such a life might feel. Isolated from everyone except the person you were meant to marry, and he a prisoner of the state in every way but name. Feared by your peers. Ignored by your father. Orphaned by your mother.
For a brief moment, I felt something like pity.
It died quickly.
“It was as you said,” I spoke finally. “Dazzling. Far more fun than I thought it would be.”
“Different from your small country parties, I gather?” she said, leaning back.
“We don’t dance with one another on Cadiz,” I said. “At least not in such close quarters.”
The dances on Cadiz had none of the manufactured polish of the waltz I’d shared with Idris. They weren’t about closeness or about looking close—they were about joy. They were about experiencing joy with your family and community. The waltz felt as if it were about secrets—Idris’s voice in my ear, his breath on my neck, his hair brushing my cheek.
A manufactured closeness, but an effective one.
“How … quaint.”
The gown she wore made it seem as though she poured herself onto the divan, as if she were a flood, when she sat down.
“The king?”
“Could not tell the difference,” I said quickly. “It was a complete success.”
I hated that she flinched. “Come here,” she said, and patted a spot on the divan.
I watched her as I would watch a viper, but did as I was commanded. In the moonlight she looked soft and young and vulnerable. She was young, I remembered. Seventeen, nearly the same age as me. I wondered how often Idris saw her like this. Did this make it easier to be kind to her? Was this the girl he remembered when he told her stories?
“You do look very much like me,” she said, and tilted her head. “One could almost forget you were a farmer’s daughter.”
“Am I meant to be flattered?” I asked.
She laughed, loud and bright. “You’re developing a sharp tongue,” she said. “Tell me, at least. Did he speak to you?”
For a moment, I blinked, confused. “Ah—His Eminence. No, not more than a few words. He asked about your plan for your inheritance, but—he seemed quite busy.”
“Yes,” she said, her smile slipping. “Though not too busy to remind me I still haven’t secured my own inheritance from my half sister.”
My eyes widened. “You have a half sister?”
Maram nodded, her gaze far-off. “Galene, from my father’s first marriage. His only Vathek marriage, as everyone is kind enough to point out whenever given half a chance. We were brought to Andala at the same time, though she’s been relegated to its northern climes. Technically she doesn’t qualify for the line of inheritance—a stipulation of the peace treaty is that only my mother’s children can. But it doesn’t keep her from trying to supplant me.”
“But—” I started.
“But Mathis, Conqueror of Stars, has never been held back by the laws of others.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Do you know the story of how my father came to power?”
I shook my head; I’d never heard it before.
“He was a second son,” she began. “His father expected him to be a second general as befitting his order of birth. My father refused—he killed his father and took control of both the planet and its military. Mathis stops at nothing to secure his power and rule. He will disinherit me if he believes it suits his aims better.”
I stared at her, unable to comprehend such ruthlessness.
“I imagine a farmer is not so merciless or single-minded, hm?” Maram asked, apparently done with her story.
“My father…” I’d seen my father often, but that happened when you lived in a small house and worked a small farm in a small village. Still, I knew what Maram meant. Some fathers, like Mathis, did not have time for their children. Baba had always been present, had encouraged the dreamer in me despite my mother’s insistence that he not. I never doubted that he loved me, and I never felt as though I’d disappointed him.
“He loved poetry,” I said without meaning to and turned to look out the window. “He wrote poetry for my mother before they were married. It was a necessary skill in courting—and he taught me.” I smiled.
My parents were not a showy couple. Some of my friends’ parents brought one another flowers or re-declared their love every festival. My parents on the outside were very close friends, though the heat and passion that characterized most love poetry was absent. When I was young, I’d wondered sometimes if theirs had been a marriage of convenience or of love. But then when I was eleven or twelve I’d returned from the orchards earlier than either of my parents expected me. I’d found them sitting quietly in the living room, my father’s head in my mother’s lap as he slept. When he opened his eyes to look up at her he smiled and she’d leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss to his forehead. My father was gentle by nature—my mother was not. But in that moment I’d seen what she might have been like when she was young, and what she was like when she was with my father.
Maram raised an eyebrow. “What need does a farmer have for poetry?”
“Every Kushaila is a poet,” I said. “Poetry is our way. It’s how we court, how we tease, how we—”
She raised a hand. “Enough,” she said, voice threaded with laughter. “Don’t break into vapors. My, my—you look pleased at such a heritage.”
“Aren’t you pleased with yours?”
I’d said the wrong thing. Her smile turned hard and brittle, and her warmth evaporated. She stood up as if to remind me that I was the lesser of the two of us.
“Well,” she said, and her smile made me shrink back. “Congratulations on your success. You needn’t look so suspicious.”
She made her way to the door. For a moment she stood in the entryway, framed by the faint light coming from the courtyard. What a lonely figure she struck, I thought. Without family or friends.
And then she lifted the hood of her cloak over her head and was gone.
13
A few weeks after my return from Atalasia, I watched Tala’s fingers in my hair as she wove in semiprecious stones polished down into beads. The first time she’d shown me what she meant to put into my hair, I’d gaped in astonishment. But time had done its work and now the fineries afforded to a body double no longer shocked me.
“Tala,” I said softly.
She looked up from my hair and caught my eye in the mirror with a smile. “Hm?”
“I never thanked you.”
“For what?”
“For … saving my majority night dress,” I said. I couldn’t thank her for the poetry. That seemed a dangerous thing to speak out loud, and I knew in all likeliness she wouldn’t acknowledge it. But it had carried me through all my weeks here ever since I’d found it. And I wanted her to know how grateful I was to have it. “I know you didn’t have to.”
She looked back down at my braids, the smile gone. “Say nothing of it,” she said at la
st.
I watched her for a moment, then nodded. “Of course.”
We sat in companionable silence for a few minutes. I imagined this was the way Tala preferred it. She had shown kindness to me, to be sure, but she had never tried to be my friend. I imagined she knew firsthand the costs of friendship in the Ziyaana.
“I meant to ask,” she started. “How was the ball? How was the amir?”
I raised my eyebrows in surprise. She’d never asked me about how I spent my days, and I wasn’t sure whether this was meant to be an opening.
“Oh, come now,” she said with a sweet smile. “Maram is the envy of every Andalaan girl in the world. Idris ibn Salih is handsome and tragic. How did he seem to you?”
To my horror, I flushed. Handsome had seemed an understatement to me. But he was too charming by half, with his elegant dancing and his light touches and his quick rejoinders, and I knew he had to be clever to have survived in Maram’s presence for so long. Still, even knowing that, I’d been hard pressed to resist his charm.
I smiled without meaning to. “He was a prince,” I said at last. “What else is there to say?”
She made a soft chiding sound. “How vague.” And then, “Oh,” she said, as a droid arrived, summoning me away.
* * *
I’d never visited Maram’s royal apartments. In truth, I’d rarely left the deserted east wing. It seemed dangerous to venture out, but the droid had offered a veil before we left, and I wore it now, terrified it would slip.
Maram’s apartments were, I suspected, unchanged from their Kushaila stylings since before the occupation. The walls were layered in red and orange and green tiles, the ceilings and moldings along the wall were carved with geometric shapes in the zelij style and the old Kushaila script. There were no carpets, just cool stone floors beneath my feet, and dark wood furniture, upholstered in rich fabrics, stuffed full with feathers. Everything was situated low, in the Kushaila style, and there was a tea table to my left with floor cushions, and a Kushaila tea set.
I had imagined that she, with all her hate for her own blood, would have stripped the room of any Kushaila design. The script, at least, which I knew had to be from the Book, I thought she would have sanded down. And yet …
Maram herself was sprawled out on a divan, and facing the open balcony doors. I could see the wooden trellis, and hear birdsong and a babbling fountain, the rustle of leaves as a false wind passed through the courtyard below. It carried with it the smell of fruit—fig, I thought, and oranges. It smelled like home.
“It’s so beautiful here,” I said without thinking, forgetting for a moment that this was not a casual interaction between friends. But Maram seemed pleased.
“I’ve always wanted to hold our sessions here, but Nadine refused,” she said, more to herself than to me.
I slid the cloak from my shoulders, and the veil I wore with it, and hung it over the back of a chair, before sitting next to her.
“Aren’t you the princess?” I said without thinking. “Why don’t you decide?”
Her mouth quirked briefly into a smile. “If—when—I am queen, I will do as I please,” she said with a shrug. “Nadine is Father’s steward.” Her mouth twisted at the word. “She can do as she likes whenever she likes.”
Again, I could not control my mouth. “That seems—”
“She is High Vathek. Pure,” she interrupted, staring into the distance. “My father … he values that. They all do.”
There was nothing I could say to that. We sat in awkward silence as she seemed to mull over what she’d said, and I was uncomfortably reminded why we looked like one another. Maram was not only Vathek. I could imagine, suddenly, the neglect she’d suffered at the hands of her father, and how it might have been a result of the circumstances of her birth. Few of those outside the Ziyaana believed the old queen had married Mathis willingly. It had been a necessary thing; the only way to stave off the bloodshed, to save the last families remaining, to ensure peace.
Peace among the makhzen, at least.
A bird cried out from the courtyard, and Maram startled, coming out of her reverie.
“That isn’t why I called you here,” she said, standing.
I straightened.
“We have an assignment for you.”
“Some plan to send me to my death, then?” I asked, before I could think better of it.
The words hung between us, said in her voice, in her dry humor, perfectly sharp and royal. If only they hadn’t come out of my mouth.
She laughed, a burst of crystalline sound. I eyed her uneasily, but her shoulders relaxed and she dropped back into the seat beside me.
“I like you better when your tongue is sharp, village girl,” she said, a smile still tugging at the corners of her mouth.
I had the sense to not say “today,” and kept my eyes on her hands, instead of meeting her gaze.
“The assignment, Your Highness?” I said.
Her laughter had not transformed the tension in the room, at least not for me. I knew by now how mercurial her moods were, how quickly a smile or the appearance of friendship could turn. She would remember something, or I would move in a particular way, or she would simply change her mind about the way she wanted to be.
So I waited, and I watched.
“Oh, yes,” she said, and pulled her braid over her shoulder. “My grandmother, the Dowager Sultana—in exchange for remaining off-world, I must visit her. It’s meant to demonstrate”—she waved her hand dismissively—“something. Continued good will between savages and conquerors. You are being sent in my place this year.”
There was no way to hide my confusion. I was meant to be a stand-in when there was trouble. What harm could there possibly be in going to her grandmother’s estate? Too late, I noticed the clench in her jaw. For once it was not me she was looking at, but a tapestry hung on the far wall in the room. I watched her, hands clenched in my lap, as she made her way around the divan and onto the balcony.
She didn’t brace her hands on the railing as I would have. Instead, again, she stood perfectly still, one hand twisted easily in the folds of her gown, the other idle. She looked picturesque—a vision of Andalaan royalty, burning in red.
“There are rebels on the moon where she resides,” she said at last, her voice dangerously flat. “Some suspect they have flourished because of her idleness.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Maram was universally reviled by Andalaans—there was no way around that. But her grandmother, no matter how much a patriot, could not condone a rebel plot to assassinate her only grandchild.
Maram flicked her gaze to me, and then back to the garden below, uncaring. “You needn’t look so shocked. It’s your way, isn’t it—tribal infighting?” she sighed. “Go. I tire of you. Nadine will tell you the rest.”
I forced myself to speak as I stood, the words tight with fury. “It’s in our blood, I suppose,” I said, and left.
14
The day of my departure dawned early. I sat at the vanity while Tala moved between the wardrobe to the many open chests spread around the room.
“What are the Gates?” Tala said. She was quizzing me as she worked.
“The Gates of Ouzdad are the unassailable walls of the Dowager’s estate, brought from an ancient temple on Andala to the moon Gibra at the time of its terraformation. It predates the space age.”
“Name the Dowager’s living relatives,” Tala said, with a brisk nod.
“She had two younger sisters and a younger brother before the invasion,” I said. “The brother rebelled in the twelfth year of her reign, sparking the civil war. He was banished to Cadiz and was among the dead in the first wave.”
“And her sisters?”
“Died in the third wave of the invasion,” I said.
“The populations on Gibra,” she prompted.
“Largely Kushaila,” I replied. “Though a coterie of the Tazalghit settled there some two hundred years ago.”
Tala made a soft noise o
f approval, her quizzing over.
I stared at myself, hair twisted like Maram’s, a circlet wrapped around my forehead, the dark green of the qaftan gleaming in the soft light of a lantern.
I set the stick of kohl down and stood, finished with my preparations. Small earrings, two rings, instead of Maram’s customary four or five, and a single bracelet. I’d forgone even a necklace in light of the Dowager Sultana’s tastes.
A droid waited for me in the courtyard, one of Maram’s cloaks draped over an arm. It was not alone.
Maram stood beside the droid, uncharacteristically quiet and patient. She was dressed as I normally dressed—an austere dark blue qaftan, with little embroidery, no jewelry, and a cloak with its hood raised over her hair. A veil hung limp from one of her hands, waiting to go back over her face.
She cracked a smile when she saw me. “Oh, don’t look so stoic,” she said, coming forward. She reached over and pulled the loose braid from over my left shoulder to my right. “You’ll have a great deal of fun on Gibra and then you’ll come back, and that’ll be that.”
She seemed in a great mood, her smile wide enough that her left cheek dimpled. There was no edge to her today, no anger or sarcasm in reserve. I didn’t trust it for a second.
“Where will you go?” I said, rather than poke at her mood.
She beamed at me. “Somewhere far. I don’t mean to be a caged bird while you go traipsing through my grandmother’s catacombs.”
“Oh,” I said. I hadn’t thought about that, really. I was certainly caged in when she was cavorting through the Ziyaana or traveling the system. Still, I was not a princess. There was no reason allowances should have been made for me.
“Somewhere cooler, then?” I asked.
She hummed, lifting a shoulder, and plucked at my gown. “Perhaps. It’s not for you to know.”
The droid beside her lifted my cloak, a signal to prepare to leave. I draped it over my shoulders, slid my arms through the small openings in its fabric, and raised the hood.
“Village girl,” she said, as I turned away.
I paused, the hairs on the back of my neck raised in warning.