Prince of Cahraman: A Retelling of Aladdin (Fairytales of Folkshore Book 2)

by Lucy Tempest

  I was about to point out that we had saved each other but Cherine interrupted me, giggling excitedly. “Ooh, it must burn, being a princess and being showed up by a poor, backwater girl who has no experience or finesse—no offense, darling.”

  “None taken. But seriously, she saved me as much as I saved her. She killed a ghoul with her hoopskirt! If not for her, this—” I pointed to my bandaged neck. “—would have been the end for me.”

  Both girls stared at me, Cora considering my statement, Cherine stubbornly dismissing it with a “Pfft!”

  At the head of the table, Cyrus gave me a warm, approving smile, before continuing to talk to Aurelia and Miraz.

  Looking pointedly at Ayman who stood beside him, I nudged Cherine. “What would you do if you found the silver prince of your dreams?”

  Her eyes grew dreamy at once. “I would ask him so many questions. Where he came from, what he’s doing here, who he is, if it’s true that people with silvery hair have magical powers and if he is, in fact, a prince.”

  “What if he’s not?”

  “Then he must be some kind of ambassador if he’s here,” she reasoned. “Members of the royal family can be ambassadors. Miraz might end up being that someday.”

  “Aside from asking all these questions, what would you do if you met him?”

  “I’d make him stay with me.” Her answer was unhesitating, instantaneous.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know, I just want him to stay. I mean, we had to meet at some point, why else would I dream of him if it wasn’t a sign from the gods?”

  I decided to test the waters. “What if I found him for you?”

  Cherine slowly turned her head towards me, spoonful of cream still in her mouth.

  Cora peeked over her head. “How would you find her imaginary suitor?”

  “I think I saw him last week.”

  “Could you? Could you really?” Cherine jumped in her seat, spoon falling out of her mouth.

  “I think I could.”

  She squealed and hugged me, catching the attention of everyone at the table.

  When Cyrus turned to give me another smile, I felt even worse than ever that I’d be going behind his back.

  After we were dismissed, I whispered to Cora to distract Cherine then limped towards Cyrus who’d stopped by the door last, Ayman right behind him.

  “I believe we’ll meet again shortly?” Cyrus set his hand on my arm. The cool metal of his rings pressed lightly against my hot skin, filling my head with steam that I felt coming out my ears, deflating my anxious tension. I barely felt the ground beneath my feet.

  I thudded back to earth when I remembered what I was about to do.

  “Oh, about that. Turns out I don’t know where that simurgh statue is,” I said as innocently as possible, feeling terrible to be lying to him. “Think Ayman can lead me there?”

  Cyrus looked to Ayman, who nodded and moved to follow me out.

  Cyrus pressed a quick kiss to my hand before retreating. “Meet you there?”

  I resisted the urge to do the same, gulped, “Yes.”

  I waited until he was out of earshot then turned to Ayman. “You heard my little conversation with Cherine, didn’t you?”

  His deep voice was muffled by his helmet. “Bits and pieces.”

  “You like her, don’t you?”

  Ayman avoided my gaze bashfully. “I don’t know her.”

  “I think you do. You’ve been creeping around her since we arrived.”

  “Sorry about that. I was just checking who was in each room that first night. I didn’t know she was a light sleeper.”

  “And every night after that?”

  He took his time answering me. “I—wanted to see if I could talk to her. Explain that I wasn’t…”

  “A nightmare?”

  “Evil.” He said with a sad finality.

  “She knows that now.”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “You heard her, she wants to meet you.”

  “She wants to meet the version she put together in her head.”

  “That’s because she knows nothing about you. You want her to know who you really are, don’t you?”

  He again hesitated, exhaled, his breath echoing in the confines of his armor. “I do.”

  “But?”

  “But she won’t. No one wants to get to know me after they see me.”

  I stopped by the stairway railing, arms out to my sides. “I’m no one, then?”

  I couldn’t see anything but his peculiar purple eyes, but I didn’t need to. They projected how he felt clearly enough.

  It was a very familiar kind of disbelief, a disheartened quality I’d carried for years until I’d found the Fairborns, a belief that no one would ever care.

  It became especially heartrending when he carefully asked, “Why do you want to know me?”

  “We’re friends, right?”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “You like talking to me, don’t you?”

  “I don’t talk to anyone but Cyrus, so, yes. Others don’t answer me if I do.”

  “Even the ones who know you here?”

  He considered his answer. “Only some of the staff, those on a lower-tier. The ones who run things avoid me.”

  “Why?” I asked again.

  “I scare them,” he said sadly.

  “All because you’re as pale as alabaster?”

  “Because they think I’m evil.”

  “I still don’t get that.”

  He pointed to the spiraling stairs. I climbed down slowly, my foot killing me.

  “People believe that my appearance is the cause of a curse, or that I myself am a demon,” he explained. “They only think Cyrus somehow has me in check.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. On the southernmost part of the continent, whenever someone like me is born, their families either kill or hide them, or else others will hunt and dismember them.”

  I missed a step, stumbling with a squeak and clinging onto the railing for dear life. “What? Why?”

  “They sell their limbs and organs to those who practice witchcraft. A man from the mountains of Opona took a trade ship down there once, to buy ivory, and they believed he was like me because he was so fair and had light yellow hair. They cut off one of his fingers before his crew saved him.” The detachment in his voice seared me with his quiet misery. “In other lands across the Silent Ocean, they shun the colorless, believing that contact with them will bring bad luck or death. And on another island in the Silent Ocean, they sacrifice them to appease angry mountains.”

  “Angry mountain gods, you mean?”

  His hands acted out something flaring up into the sky. “No. Angry mountains. The ones that crack open their summits and spew fire.”

  “Volcanoes?” I already felt sick to my stomach, but the word ‘sacrifice’ made me want to dry-heave.

  “Is that what they call them?” He seemed intrigued before shaking it off and continuing down after me. “I don’t know if those even exist in the north.”

  Not on Ericura, at least. I only knew of them from Bonnie’s books. But while she was safe from being thrown into hot molten rock, any day now the people of Rosemead could switch their sacrifices from animals to girls.

  “What about here?”

  With bright daylight pouring from a stairwell window, his eyes looked more red than purple. Unlike Marzeya’s dreadful red, his eyes had an ethereal quality to them. “In Cahraman? They won’t sell my arms on the black market or sacrifice me to the evil god Angramain. But they still fear and hate me.”

  “What about your parents? What did they think?”

  “I don’t know, but I can make a very good guess.”

  We reached the top of the last flight of stairs. I faced him, trying to show him I saw him for what he was: a great friend not just to Cyrus, but to me as well.

  When he didn’t look back at me, I exhaled. “Where are they?”

&nb
sp; “I don’t know that either. I know my mother lived here in the palace, and my father—” he stopped, looking down the stairs behind me.

  Standing at the bottom, watching us with her arms tightly at her sides and fists clenched, was Loujaïne. When she noticed we were watching her back, she pretended not to see us and floated away.

  I sighed. “She hates me.”

  “It’s not you,” he said with certainty. “She thinks I bring bad luck to the palace. Wanted to have me thrown out the day Cyrus returned with me.”

  “Returned with you? I thought you were born here.”

  He shook his head and I heard his hair scraping the inside of the helmet. “My mother was from Sunstone, my father was from Almaskham. I was born there. My father believed that I was a blight on his house, sent my mother back to her family and left me.”

  “Left you where?”

  Ayman walked down past me and headed straight for a painting hanging on the wall of a white sand desert at the bottom of a purple mountain’s craggy terrain were humanoid creatures were painted with faint, flickering strokes to give off the impression that they were made of flames.

  “Here.”

  “Where is this?”

  “Where you and the princess were, Mount Alborz in Gül, right across the Gulf from Almaskham. It’s the, lowest hottest part of the desert, where it’s said only the genies can withstand the temperature in summer.”

  Horror shook me to the core. “They left you to die of exposure.” He nodded and moved past the painting. I chased after him. “Why? Why would he do that?”

  “Weren’t you listening? Everywhere in the world, people like me are abhorred and feared.”

  “But those were your parents. It makes no sense for them to do that.”

  “What would you know?”

  He was getting angry. I wasn’t helping. “Sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry?”

  “For upsetting you.”

  Helmet or not, I could tell he was looking at me like I was crazy. “Why?”

  “I just am.”

  He reached up and pulled the faceplate, baring the bottom half of his face. He had a strong jaw, a flat chin, just like mine, and a wide mouth that was curved in the smallest of smiles. “Don’t be. I can’t get angry at you for being nice to me for whatever reason.”

  Guilt stabbed me like an arrow.

  But I wasn’t being nice to him to get him to help me.

  I was genuinely interested and concerned, curious to know him as himself and as the man Cyrus trusted the most. I would segue into trading a meeting with Cherine for guidance through the tunnels to the king’s chambers, but I wasn’t using him. I was just making a good trade, and I was, in fact, his friend.

  So why was I drowning in guilt?

  Ignoring the sickening squirm in my guts, I patted his arm, returning the comfort. “Can I ask how you met?”

  “It was less of a meeting and more of an ambush,” he said fondly. “It was when he was sent to his relatives in Almaskham as a child. I hid in that palace like I did in this one. He went down to the kitchens after curfew one night and saw me stealing a meat pie.” A chuckle echoed out of his armor. “Then he followed me and asked if I was the White Shadow of Avesta and if I could show him my pet simurgh.”

  “People can have pet simurghs?”

  He shook his head. “They’d have to find one first. I’ve never met anyone else who saw one.”

  “Else? You’ve seen a simurgh?” I gasped, my dormant fascination with this land resurging.

  “I…well, yes. I knew one. It’s actually the reason I’m here,” he responded awkwardly, like he wasn’t sure if he should have told me. “Not here in Cahraman, but the reason I didn’t die as an infant.”

  “It saved you?”

  He nodded, rattling his helmet. “It kept me with it until I could fend for myself, then it dropped me off in Almaskham, and the rest is as you know it.”

  I had heard of people being raised by wolves, but this was a more fantastical and sorrowful tale, where instead of gaining the ability to shapeshift into a wolfman, he was abandoned yet again, lost, alone and unwanted—until Cyrus had latched onto him.

  It hadn’t occured to me that their lives and their friendship could mirror mine and Bonnie’s so much. I just hoped that nothing and no one ever separated them like Nariman had done to us.

  “So, no, you can’t have a simurgh,” he continued. “But you can have a saber-toothed cat.”

  I couldn’t hold back my amazed shout. “Where?”

  “Some nobles in Almaskham kept it as an exotic pet.”

  “Amazing! Any other magical creatures? Are there dragons?”

  He pondered that question for a second. “In the northeast, I believe.”

  “What about phoenixes?”

  “What? Don’t you have magical wildlife in Arbore? I could have sworn you had a few weird things in your woods, saber-toothed deer and horned horses.”

  “Unicorns,” I corrected, thinking of the Hornswoods. “I’ve yet to spot one myself though.” Putting aside my fascination with the Folkshore for now, I nudged him. “What happened after he found you?”

  “He immediately decided we were friends. And when he found out that I couldn’t read, he dragged me to the court of his uncle and demanded I join him during his and his cousins’ lessons and be trained by the guards.” He tapped his helmet. “The princely family were not happy, especially the reigning prince’s nephew, Azal. He hated me more than Loujaïne does, and if it weren’t for Cyrus he would have had me killed.” Despite the awfulness of his recounts, he softened up towards the end. “I didn’t know it at the time, but Cyrus had a whole plan figured out for our future.”

  It was the most human I had heard him sound.

  Unbearably saddened, my eyes watered. “How so?”

  “According to him, the moment he found me he knew he was taking me home with him, and the only way that could happen was if I was the son of a nobleman or titled. Like the ladies-in-waiting of a princess are actually titled ‘lady.’”

  Like Nariman was to the Princess of Cahraman.

  But—if one had to be titled to accompany a princess, that meant my mother hadn’t only been a witch, but a true lady.

  It was becoming uncomfortably evident that I hadn’t known my own mother at all. And in turn didn’t know myself.

  “How did he manage that?”

  We had crossed into an empty, darker hall and he removed his helmet, shaking out his long white hair so it fell to the middle of his back. He raised the helmet, presenting it as part of his answer. “His argument was that I had good potential to be his personal guard, that my ability to go about unseen and even scare people out of their wits was very valuable. He also threatened to not attend his father’s coronation if I wasn’t allowed to return with him.”

  Even though I was on the verge of tears, I couldn’t help grinning at that. At Ayman’s poignant story and unique friendship with Cyrus. And at the mounting pain in my foot.

  The bottom floor of the palace seemed to stretch on for miles, an endless expanse of multicolored marble forming swathes of images and patterns, each section with a different theme.

  After a few twists and turns, we saw the simurgh statue in the distance. The fact that the hall wasn’t empty became instantly clear.

  Fairuza was by the other side of the statue, leaning a hand on the bird’s wing as if to steady herself. Her hair wasn’t perfectly coiffed and styled for once and her dress was a simple make, no embroidery, no layers. Practically a nightgown.

  On second thought, that was a nightgown.

  She looked like she’d sleepwalked here.

  “Cyrus didn’t ask her to meet him too, did he?” I asked, both concerned and jealous.

  Ayman frowned at the sight of her. “No. Last I heard she was refusing to leave her room.”

  Intrigued and unsettled, I limped into the hall slowly. Ayman didn’t follow.

  As I approached Fairuza, I took
in the cylindrical walls sculpted into bas-reliefs depicting sections of a sequential story, like the secret passageway behind the vault. Sunlight poured over her from the four curved rectangular windows behind the statue that looked out onto a section of the gardens.

  I came behind her, touched her lightly. “Are you alright?”

  She jumped around, hands raised, as if to ward off a blow. I stepped back quickly, nearly tripping over the edge of the simurgh’s platform.

  “Easy,” I gasped, pain flaring in my foot. “It’s just me.”

  Awareness seeped back into her eyes, replacing the primal fear as she let her hands down. Tears were silently pouring from her almost swollen-shut eyes. She looked—desolate.

  Before I could say anything, she sagged into a heap at my feet and wept, “You.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I stared down at the girl who’d been my rival, the one I’d hated from the start for her perfection and privileges, and almost didn’t recognize her in her grief.

  What happened to her?

  I stood almost on one foot, the pain in the other a searing reminder of what we’d both suffered, and was lost for words.

  I’d wanted to talk to Fairuza about our shared ordeal, known she’d be the only one who’d fully understand. I’d thought I’d been shaken and changed forever by the experience. But looking at her now, it felt as if she’d been destroyed.

  Chest tight, I held out my hand, not knowing how else I could comfort her.

  Something thin and sharp stung my arm. It took a second to register the pain, and one too long to react, to face the source. I found myself confronted by what should have been a silly sight, but instead found it unsettling.

  Fairuza’s handmaidens, looked nothing like their usual pretty, lightweight selves. Meira had a long, sharp hairpin held in her hand like a dagger, and Agnë had a long silver chain held like a whip. Next moment Agnë lashed out at me again, this time almost slashing my face.

  Flinging myself backwards, dropping my cane and flattening myself against the giant bird, I shouted, “What is the matter with you?”

  “Get away from the princess!” Agnë hissed, face distorting as she lashed out again.