Mirage

by Somaiya Daud

  “No—I didn’t mean at all,” he said.

  “What did you mean?” I said, and let some of Maram’s frostiness seep into my voice.

  His eyes fell to the book. “Kushaila. You can read Kushaila?”

  “My mother taught me,” I said and closed the book.

  I didn’t ask if he could read Kushaila. It was becoming abundantly clear that while the lower classes had suffered beneath the occupation, the royal families had suffered a different kind of cruelty. He might have learned when he was young and then been made to forget. I watched him reset the pieces and tried to think of what to say. I knew what I would want. A piece of myself, of my family, back. A taste, no matter how bitter, was better than knowing that a piece of you was missing and having no way to fill it.

  He gave me another half smile. “You’re staring.”

  Idris had offered me respite. Telling him my name, speaking of my life in Cadiz—in some small measure, he’d helped me find a way back to myself. Didn’t I owe him the same?

  “I could read it,” I said.

  It was his turn to go still, a hand poised on a red horse piece. He knew I meant the ink on his arm. “It’s in the formal script,” he said eventually.

  “What do you think the Book is written in?”

  I thought he would reject the offer, he was quiet for so long. His nod was sharp and fast, as though he were afraid that he would change his mind before the movement was complete. He didn’t look at me when he gripped the bottom of his shirt and pulled it up over his head. Idris wouldn’t meet my eyes, and his jaw was tight almost as if he were bracing himself against a blow.

  I’d guessed right; it was a khitaam. I brushed my fingers over his arm, and he flinched, then stiffened.

  “I don’t even know what it is,” he said. His voice was hoarse, and his right hand was clenched tightly in his lap. I was seeing him without a mask, without his usual polish and distance. I wanted to avert my eyes, as if I’d caught him in a worse state of undress than when he’d emerged from the water.

  I took his arm instead and redirected my gaze to the tattoo. It was beautiful and elaborate, clear despite the abundance of lettering crammed into such a small space.

  “It’s a khitaam,” I said. “A royal seal.”

  He sucked in a sharp breath. “Those are usually on your back.”

  “They are,” I said. “This was done just after the surrender, wasn’t it?”

  He was quiet, staring at the chess board.

  “Idris?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Just after.”

  “They probably put it on your arm to hide it from the Vath. They would be looking for daan and khitaams on your back. But barbaric writing on your arm would go unremarked on.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said.

  “You still have it,” I pointed out. “And you’re engaged to the Imperial Heir.”

  He had no reply to that.

  The seal was split into three parts—the top half was broken in two while the bottom remained whole. I traced the left corner.

  “This is ancestry. Descent from an ancient house, always royal.” I smiled. “Half the families claim to be direct descendants of Kansa el Uwla.”

  “Mine as well?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and pressed a finger to the narrow point of that section. “This is her name, here. All the writing flows from her.”

  He nodded, as if it made sense.

  “Here,” I said, touching the right section, “is your immediate descent. Mother, father, grandmother.”

  “Their names? They’re there?”

  “Yes,” I said again. His eyes closed. “This bottom half—your name is in the center, here. There’s a Dihyan blessing. These are the hopes of your family—kindness and justice. I think this is for health.”

  “Enough,” he said, and tugged his arm out of my grasp. He wasn’t rough or abrupt, though I would not have blamed him. The color had drained from his face, and the tendons in his throat stood out from the tension in his jaw. He scrubbed his hands over his face and raked them through his hair.

  “Idris,” I said, and hated that my voice came out so soft. He was not a wild animal I could spook.

  He looked so tired with his elbows balanced on his knees, slouched forward as if suddenly bowed beneath the weight of what he’d learned. I shouldn’t have offered, I thought.

  “You should know,” I said. “Whoever inked that khitaam for you loves you beyond imagining.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a crime to ink daan or khitaam on royal skin. Someone risked their life so you would always know where you came from.”

  I reached for him without thinking, placing my hand over his and leaning in close. He let out a slow breath. For a moment, I was transfixed by the image of our hands, mine covered in henna over his larger one. I’d indulged, despite Maram disdaining the practice. When I looked up he was watching me, his face close to mine, openly curious. I had the feeling he was seeing me as I’d seen him—as me, not the person I had to be as Maram, not the girl in between. His hand turned beneath mine, and our fingers intertwined.

  The winged pulse at the bottom of my throat beat its wings faster, hard enough that I could feel it echoing through the rest of me.

  “You have given me a gift,” he said when I lifted my eyes to look at him. “I didn’t know I carried them with me. A hazard of having forgotten your mother tongue.”

  Don’t stare, I thought. He hadn’t shaved, and he looked more Kushaila for it. Like a boy I could see walking down a road in my village.

  He brushed a touch over my cheek and trailed his thumb down to the corner of my mouth. It felt as if he had as little control over his hands as I did.

  His hand settled on my neck, and his thumb grazed just over the pulse in my throat. It beat faster, fast and hard enough, I knew, for him to feel it.

  “I…” he started.

  “Cousin?”

  It wasn’t a spell broken, but I saw him remember just as I did where we were. Who we were. We pulled apart easily, without comment or fluster, though I could feel the flutter of my pulse at the base of my throat, like a bird trying to escape.

  Furat stood on the steps to the pavilion, smiling as though she’d discovered a secret. When our eyes met, her smile widened.

  “Are you teaching her to play shatranj?”

  “Teaching her to get better,” he said, and managed a halfhearted smile.

  “Were you betting clothes?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

  The heat of embarrassment returned twice as strong.

  “Yes,” Idris said, managing a real grin, and leaned back on his hands. “I lost the first round.”

  “I think,” I said, rising to my feet, pulling Maram’s brusque manner over me like a second skin, “that is all I care to play today.”

  Idris didn’t look at me, though his lashes trembled just a moment when I gathered up my book. I—we—were playing a dangerous game. Idris was as Tala had said: beautiful and tragic. But he wasn’t mine, and there was no world or reality where he ever could be.

  I saw logic, and yet I could not shake the feeling that he was as aware of me as I was of him as I walked all the way out of the grotto and back into the open air.

  18

  I slept and I dreamed.

  My majority night wound down to a close. Touched with the ether of dreams, the festivities went on uninterrupted. The trees were strung with small orbs of light, and the trill of a loutar filled the air, punctuated by the sound of someone beating a bendir. The loud rush of wings against air came and went, though no birds appeared. From my shoulders fell a cloak, black embroidered with feathers in gold thread. Like Massinia’s cloak, my mother’s voice said. I laughed, though at what I had no idea. In the center of the courtyard, my friends danced, beckoning me to join them.

  “Look,” Husnain whispered, sitting beside me. “To your right.”

  Idris.

  He stood beside my eld
est brother, dressed like one of us, smiling easily. Aziz was taller than him, I knew this for a fact, but they seemed of a height with one another tonight. My eldest brother clapped a hand on his shoulder, then pointed at me.

  Idris’s smile changed when our eyes met. Sweeter, bolder, touched with a different kind of happiness.

  And then the dream faded away. I was coaxed into wakefulness by the soft notes of another loutar. The sound that played in my dream had not stopped. I rose from bed as though there were a string tied to my breastbone that drew me gently closer and closer to the sound.

  In the back corner of the courtyard was a short wooden gate that led to a small garden. There I found Idris, seated at a table, on a collection of cushions. The garden was less than half the size of our courtyard, and boxed in by wooden trellises on all sides. A tree grew just beside him, and he cradled his loutar in its shade.

  He lay his hands over its strings, quieting them, when the wooden gate shut behind me. “Did I wake you?”

  I shook my head. He looked so much like the version I’d dreamed. His hair fell down just below his chin, and the bristle of his beard had grown just a little more. He wore a djellaba, though the sleeves had been shortened and there was no hood.

  “I … I’ll let you play,” I said at last, and turned to leave.

  “You’re welcome to stay,” he said.

  I paused. I should leave, I thought. The longer I spent with Idris, the easier it was to forget who we were. He a prince and I a slave in all but name. There was no happy ending to this story, no way for the two of us to make one.

  And yet …

  “Have you eaten?” I asked, instead.

  I brought back a tray with tea and bread, and a spread of butter. He fiddled with the strings on his loutar as I poured tea and set a glass close to his elbow. He’d arranged a cushion against the tree, and gestured that I could take my seat there. Comfortably seated, with a glass of tea warming my hands, I closed my eyes and listened as he began to play again.

  It was easy to welcome the answering shivers in my heart as the music built and changed, rising and falling softly. I wondered who had taught him to play. He couldn’t speak or read Kushaila, so who would have taken the time to teach him how to play a Kushaila instrument so well? Procuring it would not have been difficult for a prince, but learning it was another matter. The Vath had not outlawed all our cultural and religious practices, but their stance on it was clear. And among the makhzen, especially, such a hobby would have been quickly snuffed out.

  The tune changed again and I opened my eyes. “I know this song,” I said, smiling.

  He smiled back. “Will you sing it?”

  I laughed. “I have a villager’s voice.”

  “Beautiful, then, I’m sure.”

  I resisted the urge to call him a flatterer, though his eyes told me he noticed the wry twisting of my mouth, and began to sing. It was an old song that had come to the Kushaila by way of the south. A girl wandered a garden and found a man swaying and singing, and though she asked for mercy, nothing could free her from love, nor was she sure she wanted to be free. The sound of the loutar faded away before the song was done, and I let the sentence hang, unfinished.

  “You—” he began, then stopped.

  “I?”

  It unsettled me when he looked at me as he was doing now. Not critical, but sharp. He missed nothing when he looked at me like that, and he always came away having learned something I had not offered. I thought of how he’d guessed who I was, how he’d seen through weeks of hard-earned training. Could another have done the same? I’d been angry with myself for my failure, but the truth was he hadn’t only seen that I wasn’t Maram—he’d picked up on the clues of who I was.

  We sat close enough that he could reach over and sweep my hair over my shoulder and pull at the chain hanging around my neck. I caught his wrist to stop him, but he’d already found the pendant hanging on the end. The pendant was half the length of my thumb, and just a little wider. On one side it was etched to look like an ornate hand, and on the other someone had carved a verse from the Book.

  Believe, for We know things you do not. And We see what you do not.

  Maram would never have worn such a thing.

  “Something from your old life?” he murmured.

  The sharpness softened when I met his gaze. “I have nothing from my old life.”

  I’d found it two nights ago, stashed among Maram’s jewelry. Likely it had been a gift from the Dowager that she’d never worn, or a piece of jewelry commissioned before her mother’s death. Such charms were common among Dihyaans, and the Kushaila in particular. They were worn to ward off evil and invite good, to turn away envious gazes, to safeguard the fortunes in your life.

  He lowered his gaze to examine the charm again.

  “Do you dislike it?” I asked.

  “I don’t trust in such things to protect me.”

  “Then in what?”

  “Myself,” he said, letting it slip from his fingers.

  “None of us can survive alone, Idris,” I said.

  He watched me for a moment. “You were alone.”

  “Not entirely.” My fingers wrapped around the charm. “I had hope.”

  “Amani,” he started. I went still. It still felt novel to hear him—anyone—say my name. “I have a request.”

  “Yes?”

  “I want you to reveal yourself to the Dowager when you meet her today,” he said. “And to Furat. I’ll keep your secret. We all will. But they deserve to know. This is their home.”

  I’d already risked my life trusting him with who I was. To tell others was— It didn’t bear thinking on. “You know you ask too much—so why ask at all?”

  “The Dowager is as a grandmother to me,” he said. “I love her very much. And she’s suffered a great deal. She is Kushaila, but none of her descendants speak her mother tongue. None of them know the old songs or stories. It’s too dangerous. She has given up her home and her throne to aliens.”

  We’d all given our homes over to aliens. That was the state of the world. But most of us had family to comfort us in difficult times, grandparents or grandchildren, friends who’d suffered through the war. We had our language to give us respite and our stories to keep us warm.

  The Dowager had none of that. And she hadn’t been queen on a small farm—she’d ruled the world and was now trapped on this moon. I felt my heart soften—a dangerous thing.

  “And Furat?”

  “Surely you know how Maram feels about her,” he said. “When Maram visits Ouzdad … She hates being here, and she takes it out on Furat. My cousin feels like every moment is a landmine waiting to go off. I want to give her respite from all that.”

  He laid his hand over mine and lowered his eyes just a little.

  “Don’t do that,” I said with a laugh. “We aren’t in the Ziyaana.”

  He grinned and squeezed my hand. “Is that a yes?”

  “Has that ever worked with anyone?”

  “Amani.”

  I resisted the urge to bite my lower lip.

  “It’s such a risk,” I said softly.

  “I’ll make sure nothing happens to you.”

  “How gallant,” I said dryly, and his grin widened.

  “Is that a yes?” he said again.

  “Yes,” I said at last. “I’ll do it.”

  “Thank you. You have no idea how much this means to me,” he said, his grin near blinding in its brilliance, and kissed my cheek.

  I froze, my hand still in his, and stared at him for a moment, uncomprehending. It took him a moment to realize what he’d done. He raised a hand to my cheek, his thumb brushing over the spot he’d kissed.

  I didn’t move, nor could I tear my gaze away from his. We seemed balanced on a knife’s edge, in territory I’d warned myself away from. He watched me as closely as I’d watched him, his hand still on my cheek, his eyes locked with mine.

  “There you are,” Tala said, out of breath. “I
have been looking for you everywhere! You’re expected at the Dowager’s for lunch. Dihya, you’re not even dressed.”

  Idris helped me to my feet as Tala waited, but didn’t release my hand when I made to walk away. He looked at me as he had yesterday, as if he meant to find answers in my silence. His fingers were feather light on my cheeks as they drifted down and over my throat. There was a hot, tight feeling in my belly, my fingers itched, and I couldn’t look away from him. The sharpness had gone completely from his gaze, but I liked what had replaced it even less. It was the look of someone gone too far.

  It called to its sibling in me, waiting for it to reply.

  “Your Highness,” Tala snapped. Even that couldn’t shock us apart.

  “You will tell the Dowager today?” he asked, voice low enough that Tala couldn’t hear.

  I nodded, still unable to speak. I took a step back but he held fast to my hand.

  Idris smiled, and gestured to Tala. “She is becoming impatient.”

  I did not look back as I walked away.

  * * *

  Tala oiled and combed my hair. I saw her glance at me in concern more than once, but said nothing.

  “Shall I braid it in the Gibrani style?” she asked me, setting the comb down.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Smaller braids, wound with fabric,” she explained.

  I nodded.

  For a long time the rooms were quiet except for the sound of the comb going through my hair and faint music, strings and drums wafting through the air from a distant corridor. I felt a knot in my chest ease as the moments ticked by. In the Ziyaana it felt as though I spent half my time splitting the world between Maram’s and mine. The lines were never clear, or at least never seemed so to me. I knew part of this was because I could not remove myself from the part I played. Every time I emerged from my room as Maram, I felt more pieces of myself woven into the fabric of Her Highness. But this moment felt as if it belonged to me. Idris knew me now, by name, and soon, the Dowager and Furat would too. The request frightened me; it was a risk, no matter how much I trusted Idris. But a part of me was excited, too, at the thought that more people would know who I really was; that I could be Amani again, that this seed of relief and contentment that Idris had planted could flourish.