by Somaiya Daud
She sounded peevish and young, but I didn’t trust her with anything else.
“Let’s try the bread first.”
Having Maram in the kitchen made me increasingly sympathetic to my mother. Maram shied away from the skillet’s heat, waited too long to flip it, and more than one of the flatbreads ended up on the floor.
“Here,” I said at last, and handed her a clean cloth. “If you fear the fire so much, use this.”
She stared at it for a long moment. “How will that protect my fingers?”
“It won’t,” I said. “But it may fool you. Besides, my mother used to say you never learn unless you’re burned at least once.”
“She sounds charming.”
“No more so than any other village mother,” I said with a smile.
She turned her attention back to the bread after that. Still, I noticed a number of strange things. She was silent, and when she wasn’t biting at the edges of her thumb, she was pulling her bottom lip into her mouth. Maram had always shown an extraordinary ability to showcase either complete apathy or rage; nervousness was not an emotion I’d ever seen from her.
“Is … is everything alright?”
Her eyes widened. “What? Of course it is.”
“Your thumb is still in your mouth.”
She snatched it out and hid her hand in the folds of her skirt. For a moment she said nothing, just glared angrily at me. “You know I’m to accompany Idris to the Eastern Reach?”
“This is the first I’m hearing of it,” I lied. “Is there a reason you go with Idris?”
She looked away from me and fiddled with the ring on her finger. “My—my mother had a stipulation in her will. They—their families were close. Or so I’d guess. She wanted me to visit.”
“Ah,” was all I could think to say.
“They all hate me. A very. Great. Deal.”
It may have been stupid of me to be shocked. And yet. “Why?”
Maram seemed to agree with my estimation, and leveled a look at me that would have made me cringe a few months ago. “There’s the little issue of my father.” She rolled her eyes. “You must learn to stop being so shocked all the time. Everyone hates me. I’m used to it.”
“But—they’re your mother’s people, too,” I said without thinking.
“I don’t think anyone sees it like that.”
I had a hard time believing it for some reason. I knew exactly what Maram was like. I had experienced her cruelty firsthand. But as I’d seen with the Dowager, many of Maram’s Andalaan family mourned her loss. It was a cruel person that judged a child by their parent’s legacy. And while Maram had proven herself a worthy inheritor of Mathis’s regime, a person who knew the circumstances—how she’d been treated by everyone on Luna-Vaxor, by her own half sister—would not hate her for it. Would they?
“You are lucky,” she said.
“Me?”
“You know exactly where you belong. You have your family, and your traditions, and no one is … is screaming at you to be something else. All my Vathek family can see is my lesser blood. And all my Andalaan family can see are their conquerors. I am treated like a bad omen of a horrible future no matter where I go.”
It was a strange thing to feel such a strong swell of pity for her. But we’d come far, she and I. I touched her arm without asking and waited for her to look up at me.
“You can choose who you want to be,” I said. “You can choose what you are.”
She scoffed. “Everyone has already decided what I am not— I am not Vathek and I am not Andalaan.”
I squeezed her arm. “You are the trueborn daughter of the last queen of Andala. They can’t choose what you are.”
I was surprised when she raised a ringed hand to cover mine, though she wouldn’t meet my gaze. “I know it’s unfair of me to say, but … I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re you. I don’t think anyone else in the world would be kind to me after what I’ve done.”
I had nothing to say to that. I couldn’t tell her why I was so kind, what I saw. She would resent me for my pity and my worry.
“Why don’t I go for you?” I suggested.
I’d become quite good at controlling my expression and tone and it served me well with Maram. I needed to be the one in the Eastern Reach to deliver my information to Arinaas’s agent. And I wanted the time with Idris. But more than that, to my surprise, I wanted to help her. Despite all she’d done to me, all I could see now was a scared girl who didn’t want to face the disapproval of her relatives, or worse: their rejection.
“Really?” She sounded small and young—younger even than me.
“Really,” I said, and bumped my shoulder against hers.
“What’s that smell?” she asked a moment later.
I sighed. “You’ve burned the bread.”
* * *
The meal wasn’t ruined. The soup finished cooking, so we took the remaining unspoiled pieces of bread into the courtyard, along with tea and bowls for the soup. We sat in companionable silence. For the first time there was no undercurrent of tension, no fear. It was a strange feeling, but one I liked.
She toyed with a pendant I’d never seen her wear before, swinging the gold piece lazily up and down the chain between her fingers.
“I wanted to ask you something,” she said. She’d caught the pendant in her hand and closed her fingers around it.
“Of course.”
I watched as she lifted the chain from around her neck and held it out to me, the gold charm swinging lazily to and fro.
“Can you—do you know what this is?”
My eyebrows raised as I got my first clear look at it. “Probably no better than you…” My voice trailed off when I flipped it over.
“What? What is it?”
“Nothing,” I said with a laugh. “It’s a royal seal. If you’d been born before the occupation, you would have had the same design inked on your back.”
Maram rolled her eyes. “Thank you for that clever deduction. I gathered that much from the roc on the front.”
“It’s not a roc. It’s a tesleet bird.”
“A what?”
“Tesleet,” I repeated. “The bird of the Banu Ziyad is the tesleet. And on the back is your name and this line: I was marked before my husband. I shall be marked after.”
“What in the world does that mean?”
“It’s a quote attributed to Massinia—she had a scar with gold twisted into it on her back. Many took the scar as a sign from Dihya, that she’d been chosen by Him to be a prophetess before her husband’s death. Historians like to argue that his death was the making of her—it wasn’t.”
She leaned forward. “And why is that strange?”
“The seals are like daan. They are meant to denote family, ancestry, faith—all the things prized by the Kushaila. Whoever made this seal meant for you to prize this above all else.”
“Wonderful,” she drawled, taking the seal back. “My mother wanted me to remember she hated my father.”
I tried not to laugh. “That is not what the quotation means.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Massinia loved her husband very much. Many sources say she was of a higher class than him, and she was Tazalghit. She married him in secret anyway. That is unheard of, even today.”
“So…?”
“It means she—you are not defined by the men in your life, no matter how powerful. You lived before them and you shall live after them. You can’t let them determine your path.”
She stared down at the seal, thoughtful. “She disappeared in the end, didn’t she?” she said.
I nodded. “She was seen once after, but the popular opinion is her mother’s people took her back and after that it would have been impossible to track her.”
She smirked. “What’s the unpopular opinion?”
“That the tesleet bird she carried with her revealed itself as a spirit and offered her entry to its kingdom in the sky.”
The smirk
turned into a genuine, wistful smile. The seal was worn, rubbed thin and smooth in some places. It was clear she kept it close to her whenever she could. Her mother had likely had it made and then given it to her herself. Parents designed their children’s daan, and I imagined among the nobility their children’s khitaam.
“I like the second one better,” she said.
“Your grandmother may know more about the seal,” I said instead of answering. “What I know is from history books. Your grandmother is royalty; she would have designed your mother’s seal.”
She said nothing, but stared hard at the pendant. I wanted to ask her what she was thinking, but I imagined asking me to explain the seal had been hard enough for her. Her mother had left her something precious and invaluable; I didn’t want to distract her from that. And maybe it would serve as a bridge, however tenuous, to her grandmother.
Eventually, she looked up, her gaze unfocused and a little lost, and shook her head. I said nothing, but gestured to her bowl. At last, she rehung the pendant around her neck and returned to her food.
* * *
After Maram left, I cleaned our dishes, packed away the food, then retired to my room.
I hated this place, I hated Nadine, I hated what had been done to me. I’d been transformed, reforged into a girl my family wouldn’t recognize. But I’d found—I’d found so much and I didn’t know if I would exchange one for the other. The girl I was for everything else. If—when—the rebellion succeeded, there would be no going back to my old life. What would I do? Where would I go? Where would Maram go?
And did the rebellion have to sacrifice Maram in the name of freedom? She could be a powerful ally—a figurehead no one would reject.
I pulled my own charm out of my gown and slid the communication tab behind my ear. It warmed quickly, and a moment later I heard a beep.
“Yes?”
“It’s me,” I said. “I have news.”
“Has there been a change?” Arinaas said. “Or have you missed me?”
I laughed. “There’s been a change,” I said. “Maram is joining the convoy to the Eastern Reach.”
“She’s not a target at present.”
“Nor should she be,” I said sharply. “But I am to go in her place.”
I could almost hear the gears turning in her head. “And you can bring the plans you smuggled out of the council meeting?”
“Yes.”
She drew in a sharp breath. “Amani. Carrying something like that out of the Ziyaana … you’ll be taking a great risk.”
“It’s all a great risk, isn’t it?”
“We’ll arrange a handoff,” Arinaas said finally. “Keep safe in the following days, hm?”
“You too, Arinaas.”
al hoceima, andala
31
Several days later I boarded a cruiser with Idris and a small retinue and traveled east to Al Hoceima. Though Idris’s real intent was to check in on the state of his family and his home, he had timed the visit to his great-aunt’s birthday. Three years had passed since his last visit and I could see the nervousness in him as the cruiser landed in the city with a soft hiss.
While most of the Salihi clan was extinguished, some of Idris’s aunts and uncles had survived. A clan that had numbered in the thousands now numbered a little over a hundred, most of them either very old or very young. He knew the young better than he knew the old—the Vath had allowed him to keep in contact with his cousins, but not anyone who might have retained their loyalist leanings.
His aunt had lived to one hundred and five years and was now celebrating her hundred and sixth. It amazed me that anyone managed to live so long. Most of the elderly in my village didn’t make it past sixty. Poverty and war did not encourage long life.
The guest of honor, Naimah, sat at the front of the gathering hall, flanked by sisters and nieces. She was a small woman, more like a bird, with sharp eyes and a sharper nose. Her shoulders were stooped and her mouth curled. The daan on her face were a faded green, having never been retouched. The room was filled with women—I imagined all the women left to the Banu Salih, old and young alike. Only the very old among them, like Naimah, bore daan. They, like their great matriarch, flitted around the room in brightly colored garb, whispering and giggling with one another. The men, as they normally did when faced with so many women, had gathered in the back and monopolized the tea.
For my part, I stood by a window, my back turned to most of them.
From the window I could see the run-down city of Al Hoceima. In antiquity and before the occupation, it had been one of the greatest cities on the planet. The Lions of Al Hoceima had ruled from the northern coast all the way to the south of the continent. And when they’d married into the Ziyadis, they formed the largest army the world had ever seen. They’d marched across the planet, conquering everything in sight until nothing was left. Now, there was more dust than people. No one could afford to fix the roads or the houses. The filtration system that purified the poisoned water had nearly broken the city with its cost.
In the distance I could see the red of fire painted across the horizon, smeared by smoke. All day there had been a steady trickle of refugees who’d escaped the coast with all they could carry, hoping to find safety further in the reach. Away from rebels and fire.
So far the Vath’s bombing campaign had been confined to the two cities: Sidi Walid and Tairout. But the rebels hadn’t taken it lying down and even without my information had fired back. The rebel flag still hung in the center of Ghazlan from its bright white tower, or so what little news I’d gotten said. And I understood the Vath a little better now—rather than feel relief, anxiety gnawed at my mind. They would respond like cornered beasts and lash out at the rest of the region if the rebels’ luck held. The information I had was all that stood between the rebels and certain death. Arinaas knew it as well as I did, and had arranged a handoff for the middle of the night.
Just below in the courtyard was Idris. He’d escaped the festivities as soon as possible, to entertain a gaggle of cousins around him vying for his attention. I’d never seen him as he was now. Some of his fear had washed away the moment we touched down in his city, and now, surrounded by loved ones, he nearly glowed. And they glowed in return. I’d watched him stop to talk to uncles and cousins and aunts, and each of them had shone a little brighter, smiled a little easier, in his wake.
He helped a younger boy onto a horse. Though I couldn’t hear what he said, it was clear he was teaching him how to keep his seat. He loved them, no matter how long he’d been apart from them.
I wondered uneasily what he would say if he knew of my rebel ties. From his upset at the cause of the bombing campaign, I knew he had no love for what the rebels’ campaign might do, or what retaliation it might provoke. But they—we—were necessary if any of the people on Andala were going to survive the century.
“She looks just like Najat,” a voice murmured to my left.
I stiffened, but didn’t turn around. Maram didn’t speak Kushaila—she might have, once, but time with the Vath had taken it from her as it had taken it from most of those fostered away from their Kushaila families.
“It doesn’t matter,” a second voice said. “She can look like her mother all she wants. She’s still an outsider.”
Given everything Maram had said, I’d expected those words to be spoken with venom. Instead, all I heard was pity. They would have mourned her, I knew. Filial ties were important to us, and to have her taken away from family so young and then never returned would have pained them. And now, much like the Dowager, they didn’t know how to reach her or what to do with her. Maram didn’t help matters. I was beginning to suspect she didn’t hate Andalaans so much as she hated remembering what her father had done to them.
I was pulled from my thoughts when something—someone—tugged on my skirts. The girl couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. She looked up at me with wide eyes, as if torn between fear and fascination.
“Yes?” I said
in Vathekaar.
“Khaltou Naimah has summoned you,” she replied. When I looked to the platform where the aunt sat, I saw her watching me.
“Well,” I said. “Let’s go then.”
I didn’t know if I was meant to kneel or kiss her cheeks or bow. Naimah and I regarded each other, I a bit warily, and she hawk-like. In the end, she said nothing, but gestured to a cushion beside the little girl. I sat. I had no intention of drawing the attention of the rest of the room or the group of aunts around her.
A pregnant aunt, who’d managed to walk her way to the platform, sighed. “What are we meant to do with her?” she said in Kushaila.
Naimah clucked. “Do with her?” she said. “If you all had not been such bumbling fools when she returned five years ago, she might know us. Like us. Now look at her. Vathek to her core.”
The aunt sighed again. “You can cry over the past, khaltou. But there is nothing to be done now.”
A third aunt nodded wearily. “Idris will marry her and that is that. We may as well resign ourselves.”
“To what?” Naimah asked.
If I could have, I would have warned the sisters not to answer. I recognized the tone—Maram had it, my mother had it. The question was not meant to be answered.
But the third aunt looked startled, as if she’d never heard such a tone in her life. “The rule of the Vath,” she said, as though it were obvious.
Naimah snorted. “This is why you’ve only ever born sons, Nusaiba. You are a weak-minded fool.” She flapped her hands. “Go. All of you. Out of my sight.”
I expected to be left alone after that, but instead Naimah returned her gaze to me. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t been watching. She waited for the aunts and nieces to clear, murmuring among themselves. And then she gestured me up beside her. I flinched when she took hold of my chin. Her fingers were thin, and I had the impression of being held by claws.
“You must eat more,” she said in heavily accented Vathekaar. “If you are to be any good at bearing daughters.”
“Why daughters?”
“Only your daughters will have the stomach for the future,” she said. “It is why your mother had you.”