Mirage

by Somaiya Daud

  “Does his lordship need reassurance?” I asked in the same tone.

  She laughed. “I could stand to be warmer, or so I’ve been told.”

  “Why?” I said, surprised. “It’s a matter of state. Not love.”

  “You surprise me, village girl. I would have thought a provincial sort would have been all for love.”

  I shook my head. “My parents were a love match,” I said. I had countless memories stored away of the small things they did for one another that spoke more loudly than the declarations many spouses made during our festivals. His hand on the small of her back, the soft look in her eyes sometimes as she watched him move around the house. I’d always felt lucky to grow up in a house with such love, even knowing that it was likely not in my future. “But I knew I wouldn’t have that luxury. That I’d likely have to pick someone who wouldn’t impoverish me further over someone who loved me.”

  “That’s quite mercenary,” she said. She sounded delighted.

  I shrugged. “An empty belly makes one mercenary, I suppose.”

  The board went ignored between us while she stared at me as though I were an interesting puzzle. “We are not in love,” she said at last, matter-of-factly. “The marriage is a stipulation in the peace treaty that granted my father stewardship of this planet.” A pause. “What a strange puzzle you are,” she said and returned to the board.

  I laughed. “Are your companions so uninteresting, Your Highness?”

  She grimaced and leaned away from the table. “You have no idea.” I must have looked skeptical, because she continued. “All they can talk about is my upcoming eighteenth birthday.”

  “I imagine they are excited,” I said and watched her reset the board. “Certainly such chatter is more interesting than me.”

  A corner of her mouth lifted, an echo of Idris’s own self-satisfied smile. “It would be if they didn’t spend half their time giving me sideways glances they thought were discreet.”

  “Oh?”

  She finished setting the board, and tilted her head at me. “Stupidity is a poor look on you—or me, I suppose. On us. My inheritance of this planet and its ancillaries has not been confirmed. It needs to be by the time I turn eighteen or it will pass to my elder half sister, Galene.”

  “Oh.” I tried to wrap my mind around what she’d told me. That she might not actually inherit Andala. That someone worse could rule over us. I wanted to ask why she would be passed over, but held my tongue. My curiosity would be a strange thing to her, and I didn’t need her prying into the new secrets I had to keep.

  Maram’s shatranj set was done up in sapphire blue and white. She set the blue pieces on my half of the board, and the white on hers. Where Idris’s set had elephants, hers had birds. I lifted one into my hand to examine it more closely.

  “Why birds?”

  She shrugged. “The set came with the apartments,” she said. “Whoever lived here before must have liked birds.”

  I rubbed a thumb over the beak, and then the crown and froze. There was a spring of feathers swooping back over its head, smoothed out and nearly disappeared with time.

  “What?” she said, then plucked the piece from my fingers. She frowned again. “What is this?”

  “I think it was a tesleet bird,” I said, then drew a finger up over the center of my forehead. “It’s nearly gone, but…”

  “Why should that matter?”

  “It doesn’t, I suppose.”

  It was the royal bird—or had been before the Vath. How strange that Maram had kept these pieces—kept all the old trappings of the Ziyadi order.

  Maram set the piece back on the board. “White always has first move.”

  We were quiet after. It seemed she truly had been bored, and didn’t want to play against an AI or a courtier that would have to let her win. We were evenly matched, which was to say neither of us was particularly good. Like me, Maram never thought more than a few moves ahead and eventually we found ourselves locked into an unsolvable board.

  She huffed a laugh. “Reset?”

  I shrugged.

  “How was Ouzdad?” she asked. “How was my grandmother?”

  I should have been prepared for such a question, but I wasn’t. I’d assumed she wanted to avoid all mention of it, of ever having to go. Another lesson, then. Always be prepared to report to Maram.

  “Old,” I managed, tamping down the image of Idris, just before our first game.

  She hummed. “Yes, well.”

  Her hum turned to a noise of surprise when I captured one of her birds.

  “And Furat? She returned there just before you set out.”

  I remembered the last time Maram and I discussed Furat. “Briefly,” was all I said.

  “And?” Maram asked, impatient.

  I pulled away from the board. “Perhaps if you were more specific with your questions, Your Highness.”

  She looked away from me, and for a moment I had an image of her as a small child, short arms folded across her chest. I imagined she had been used to getting anything she wanted. At least for a short time. Had Najat doted on Maram, despite who her father was? Would she have been able to resist a child made in her image, unaware of all the horrors that surrounded her conception?

  Perhaps not. Perhaps Najat had been a woman who could forgive her daughter the sins of her father.

  “How did Furat seem?” Maram asked finally.

  I thought of my walk with Furat, and our shared conspiracy. We were allies now, tied in our rebellion against the crown. Against Maram. “She wanted to play shatranj with me. With you. I declined. I imagine you would have done the same.”

  She nodded after a moment and returned her eyes to the board between us. I couldn’t resist watching her, though I should have been watching her advance across the shatranj board. In this moment she seemed normal, though that felt like a weak word. She was only my age and worried about how her cousin and grandmother had received her, resentful of those her grandmother favored.

  No one had given her a chance to be raised among them, and by the time she’d returned from the Vathek homeworld her mind had been poisoned against that part of her family. And I imagined that her cousins had not reached out to her when she returned. They all viewed her with fear and suspicion now, but her complete hatred might not have stood against kindness.

  Or perhaps I was a fool who expected too much.

  Maram caught me staring and narrowed her eyes. “What?”

  I knew better, and yet … “I don’t think your grandmother is … is seeding a rebellion.”

  “I told you stupidity was a bad look,” she said. “What would a village girl know about what the Dowager planned?”

  “I speak Kushaila, remember? You do not. They didn’t say much around me.” I shrugged. “Her head of security is too cautious for that. But it did sound like they were trying to protect you.”

  It wasn’t a complete lie. The Dowager missed her granddaughter; she missed what they could have been. She grieved their relationship. She would not have turned on her, not in such a violent way. And the longer I’d been there, the more I’d served as a holdover, a way to assuage all her grief at losing her only grandchild.

  Maram balanced a chariot piece in one hand, weighing it. “You’re sure.”

  “As sure as I can be.”

  She smiled suddenly and set the piece back on the board.

  I didn’t want to plumb Maram’s hidden depths. There was nothing that could change what she’d done to me when I first arrived, or the way she treated those around her. Despite that, I couldn’t forget how the Vath had shaped her. How early she’d lost her mother. How terrible such an upbringing would be. They’d shaped her into the cruel, hateful creature she was now. I imagined she didn’t believe she had a choice in how she behaved. Survival among the Vath would have ensured that.

  She made a sound of triumph and my gaze returned to the board.

  She’d won.

  “I never beat Idris,” she said, grinni
ng. “We will have to play again.”

  I thought to bite my smile back too late. Our eyes met and I watched as she tried to remember herself, remember who we were. Not friends, not twins. Master and servant.

  “A droid will escort you back,” she said, gesturing to the walkway from which I’d come.

  I rose to my feet, bowed, and collected my cloak. I knew she would not invite me back. I’d seen her come back to herself, the strange flicker of anger in her eyes. But I couldn’t help wondering what life in the Ziyaana might have been like if she were always like this; what the future might be like if she softened just a little.

  25

  I sat on the cushion Maram offered me, hands folded in my lap, my eyes fixed on the ground.

  It had been a week since Maram and I played shatranj. Maram and Nadine had not been in the same room with me for a long while, and I could not work the itch from my back. Whenever they’d been together, I’d paid for an offhand comment or a tantrum Nadine could not or would not control.

  So I waited, hoping they’d forgotten Maram had invited me to her apartments. Praying that neither thought I had any opinion on their argument.

  “She is not a doll,” Nadine said. “You may not dress her up and send her where you please. She is a shield.”

  “Galene’s parties are dangerously dull, then,” Maram said.

  I’d been summoned earlier without warning to prepare to take Maram’s place at her half sister’s ball. She’d tossed a holopad in my lap and commanded me to learn the names and faces of those who would be present, then settled herself on her divan.

  Even Nadine’s arrival had not stirred her from it. How odd that she and I sat close, though I was at her feet, while Nadine stood. It did not escape my notice that Maram had not offered her a seat. In fact, any place where she might sit was conspicuously absent.

  “And what will you do if the fool girl exposes herself?”

  “She fooled my grandmother, Nadine,” Maram said. I didn’t have to raise my head to know the look she gave Nadine implied a measure of stupidity. “She is clearly quite adept at her job.”

  “Your Highness—”

  “Are you forbidding me?”

  “Have a care, Your Highness. It would be to your detriment to lose her.”

  I held my breath as Nadine spun away, the silver lining of her skirt flashing in the afternoon sunlight. Only when the door clicked shut did I release it and the tension in my shoulders.

  “Now,” Maram said, swinging her feet to the floor. I looked up; she was smiling. “Shall we?”

  * * *

  Maram had a closet large enough to be its own room. Aside from the clothes hanging along the walls, there was a sitting area, a vanity, and a small alcove with a stand and a mirror. I hovered in the doorway while she dived in, flipping through qaftans and gowns.

  “So,” I started. “A party?”

  She sighed and rolled her eyes, as if the very mention of it pained her. “Galene is throwing a party to celebrate her profitable year in the north. It’s a desperate, last-minute bid to be considered for inheritor of the realm. Vathek visitors only, barring spouses and fiancés.”

  “You dislike her so much?”

  “Do you like all of your siblings?” she asked archly.

  I managed to stifle the desire to laugh. “Yes.”

  A strange look came over her face, as if she were reliving a memory. “Galene was—is—the height of imperial breeding. Everything in her life was assured until I was born, and she’s never forgiven me for that, nor for being a half-breed. She turned the Vathek court on Luna-Vaxor against me before I ever set foot there.”

  “Blood is so important to the Vath?”

  She cut me a withering look. “You say that as if blood is unimportant to Kushaila. But to Galene, yes. She hates foreigners, and my mother’s people most of all.” There was still a shadow in her gaze, as if the things Galene had done were worse than what Maram wanted to say.

  Her own sister, I thought, and fought the creep of pity. It was no wonder she trusted no one. I kept my thoughts to myself—Maram would never condescend to accept my sympathy.

  Instead I said, “And you can’t decline?”

  “To decline would be to appear weak.”

  I frowned. “Weak?”

  “Is the word beyond your comprehension?”

  I struggled not to scoff. “It is not. But if you don’t want to go to the party, then don’t go.”

  “Galene would have been a natural contender if the galactic treaty hadn’t locked my father into having to declare me as heir,” Maram said.

  “Alright,” I said, skeptical.

  “You don’t know anything about the history of your own world, do you?”

  I said nothing, lest I snap.

  “When my father conquered Andala, he violated galactic law. The only way to keep the planet—the whole system—was to legitimize his rule. Marry the queen or one of her children, and ensure that her line inherited the planet.” She waved a hand. “At any rate, Galene is still convinced that she has a chance to inherit the protectorate of Andala over me.”

  I took a seat beside her. “But—”

  “But it’s my inheritance?” She looked away. “It is not the Vathek way to let those conquered rule themselves, and with my Andalaan fiancé—people say … things. They say my father will have to sign over the center of Vathek rule to someone else.”

  “Ah,” I said, ignoring the uneasy turn in my stomach. This was how Vathek rule worked—we, the conquered, were prizes in a game to be won or lost among people who didn’t care about us. “This is a bid to unseat you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I cannot avoid her. If I don’t go, my father will know I didn’t have the stomach for it, and it will prove them all right—that I’m unfit to be the heir.”

  I was too much a fool not to laugh. It seemed in keeping with the absurdities of my life that it now included a rivalry between sisters played out on a cosmic scale.

  “What?” she asked, furious.

  “I just,” I said, coughing. “I didn’t expect such a problem from you.”

  “Such a problem?” she said coolly.

  “You’re rivals,” I said. “It happens.”

  “You’ve had this problem?”

  “No. But I never had anything anyone coveted.”

  She sniffed and leaned back. “Then how do you know? That this is such a normal problem?”

  I shrugged. “I had friends, hard as it may be for you to believe. And in a village as small as ours, rivalries happen.” Khadija had often found herself the target of one girl or another’s ire. She was beautiful and loved to smile—heads turned for her, sometimes when they should have been looking at someone else.

  “So what would you do?”

  “Really?”

  “I’m asking, aren’t I? Don’t make me repeat myself.”

  I hesitated, searching her face to see if she would take it back.

  I worried at my bottom lip, searching the room. “The best way to unsettle her is to behave as though you’ve already won. You’re the one living in the Ziyaana. You’re the one born here and meant to inherit. She is the foreigner. Do you have jewelry that would remind her of the Andalaan royal seal?”

  “Like a crown?”

  It was difficult to restrain my skepticism. “Something more subtle.”

  “The royal tesleet is not very subtle, village girl.”

  “Birds have feathers,” I reminded her. “And you had a necklace—a talon gripping a jewel.”

  “And she’ll associate those things with the inheritance?”

  “She wants to inherit the whole planet,” I said. “She’s spent her life resenting your birth. She’s likely spent hours imagining her wardrobe and the seal and all the things related to the office in the event of her success.”

  “Hm,” was all Maram said, but she rose from her seat. “You are not as stupid as you seem, village girl.”

  I tamped down a smile,
and returned my eyes to the holopad still clutched in one hand. The list of guests was quite long, but I recognized them all. All Vathek, all silver-haired and pale. Maram would stand out in such a crowd.

  I frowned. “His lordship isn’t on the guest list.”

  She made an unprincess-like sound. “He is skulking and so was removed,” she said without turning around.

  “What?”

  “We had an argument. So he refused to accompany me.”

  My eyes widened just a little. I hadn’t imagined that the two of them ever argued. Fighting with Maram seemed to me a dangerous thing, and my curiosity was close to getting the best of me and asking what they could have argued about.

  There was a sharp twist of disappointment in me too. I hadn’t seen Idris since our return from Ouzdad, and I’d hoped— But then, things rarely went so easily in the Ziyaana. “Is that why you planned to send me in your place?”

  “Are you asking me if I was avoiding my fiancé?” she said, and stilled in her rummaging.

  I lowered my eyes. “No, Your Highness.”

  “Good,” she said, then tossed a gown toward me. “Try this on.”

  galene’s estate, andala

  26

  Galene’s estate was far to the north, across the sea. Farther north than Atalasia. It was situated against a mountain range and made of white stone that shined even against the snow. High turrets and coned roofs marked it apart from the architecture many of the visitors would have been used to from the south. Even on board the ship I could hear the mountain wind screaming as it bore ice and snow down the mountainside.

  I was placed in tower apartments on the north side facing the steep slope leading away from the castle. A fire roared in the bedroom, already stoked by a northern serving girl. For a moment I wondered who had lived here before the property had been confiscated and given to Galene. I didn’t even know the name of the people that lived so far north. Who had the will to build such a castle in such a place? Who had the will to stay?

  A knock on the door roused me from my seat. It opened before I reached the door, revealing my visitor.

  “Idris!” I couldn’t stop myself from smiling.