Fatima led Luz back to the harem without speaking. Either something terrible had happened or nothing had happened at all; she couldn’t decide. What Hassan did had never seemed strange to her. She couldn’t remember a time when he had not inhabited that room, scribbling away with his eternally darkened fingers. People in the palace understood him in their own particular ways: the sheikhs understood that his abilities were too valuable to be blasphemous, the servants that he was uncanny and a little high-strung. He was needed, and that made him familiar.
Yet Luz’s silence worried her. She was uncanny herself: Fatima felt as if she had known Luz for years, long enough to make such silences feel like intimacy, yet they had been together for less than a day. She had an odd impulse to kiss the woman walking next to her, to thank her for handling the shock so gracefully. Perhaps, after all, Luz was telling the truth: perhaps she was here to help. Perhaps Lady Aisha ought to have been kinder to her.
Fatima leaned over and brushed Luz’s cheek with her lips. Luz put her golden head against Fatima’s shoulder. The maidservant, Catalina, ample and sweating, appeared in the doorway of Luz’s room as they approached, observing their intertwined forms with an air of disapproval. The scent of boiling mutton perfumed the breeze and the sound of giddy laughter came from the courtyard; someone close by was playing a feast-day song on the lute. Fatima allowed herself to relax.
“You’ve been asked for, senora,” said Catalina to her mistress. “By the lady Nessma.”
“I’ll be there in a moment,” said Luz. She looked tired, as if the morning’s exertions were too much for her. “I think I want my coif—it’s so hot that I can barely stand to have my hair against my neck like this.”
“I’ll get it for you,” said Fatima, “if you tell me where to look.”
She was rewarded with a beaming smile.
“Thank you, sweeting,” said Luz. “It’s in my trunk—it should be near the top.” Twisting up her hair in one hand, she followed Catalina across the courtyard toward the sound of voices. Fatima ducked into the shuttered cool of her room. Catalina had unpacked Luz’s dresses—all black and plain, some with ornamental lace along the sleeves—and hung them in the wardrobe, tucking the leather trunk neatly into one corner of the room. Fatima knelt and opened it. There was a clever tray fitted into the top for smaller items: pins for hair and brooches for cloaks, a gold wedding band in need of polish. Her coif was folded up on one side. Fatima lifted it out and held it up to her face: it smelled of Luz’s hair. She folded it again and tucked it into her sleeve.
As Fatima closed the trunk, her eye fell on a square of paper with a red wax seal that had been concealed beneath the coif. It was emblazoned with a crest she didn’t recognize: a cross flanked by a leafy branch and a sword. Underneath it was written a phrase in Latin letters:
TRIBVINAL DEL SANTO OFICIO
Fatima sounded out the words beneath her breath. She could speak Sabir and Castilian well enough, but reading them was tedious. Lady Aisha was constantly imploring her to improve her comprehension, but since the Andalusian translation schools had long since rendered all the great Hellenic works into Arabic, Fatima had never seen the need. Now, in the grip of a powerful curiosity, she regretted it.
The serving woman was calling everyone to lunch. Fatima rose and left the room, wincing as the tiles underfoot went from cool to hot. She tiptoed across the courtyard in order not to scald herself. Lady Aisha and the other women were sitting in the common room beyond, leaning on cushions and rugs, a great brass platter of cooked meat and rice between them. Fatima felt her mouth water. She slipped in and sat down beside her mistress.
“How was she?” asked Lady Aisha in a low voice, handing Fatima a bowl of food.
“Fine,” said Fatima. “She was fine. Only—”
“What?”
“She knows about Hassan.”
Lady Aisha popped a piece of mutton into her mouth and chewed with noisy relish.
“That’s unfortunate,” she said. “But possibly inevitable. Did she speak to anyone else? A clerk, one of the secretaries?”
“No.”
“Good.” Lady Aisha wiped her mouth with a handkerchief. “We may be all right, then.”
Fatima scooped up a mouthful of rice with her fingers. It was redolent of sheep fat and sea salt. She licked each finger clean. She wanted to tell Lady Aisha that Luz had behaved well, that she had been nothing but eager and kind, but thought better of it.
“What’s a tribunal del santo oficio?” she asked instead. Lady Aisha froze with a piece of bread halfway to her mouth.
“Where did you hear that?” she demanded.
“I read it,” answered Fatima, startled. “It was on a letter in Luz’s trunk.”
Lady Aisha said nothing for several moments. She set down her bowl and began to clean her fingers.
“Tribunal of the Holy Office,” she said lightly, dipping her hands in a dish of rose water nearby.
“What’s that?”
Lady Aisha picked up her bowl and set it down again, as if she couldn’t decide whether or not she was hungry.
“I never used to underestimate people,” she said. “I must be older than I think I am. She’s very clever, this Queen Isabella of Spain—or if she isn’t, there are very clever people advising her. I assumed the general was their hawk—that they sent their military man to bully our military men. But they know us better than we know ourselves, it seems. They know my son does not love his viziers or his generals. The people he loves are here, in the harem. They sent their dove to the men. The hawk, they have sent to us.”
Fatima was not often afraid. She had never known a time without war; when it was not outside on the battlefield, it was inside on the birthing bed, or in the winters when the very young and the very old and the very ill died in their sleep without a sound. Yet now she had a sick feeling, as though she were looking off the edge of a tower. She swallowed to keep from gagging.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “What does that letter mean? What does it mean about Luz?”
Lady Aisha resumed her lunch, scooping up a quivering mass of mutton fat with a fragment of bread.
“It means that Luz was sent by the Inquisition,” she said.
Chapter 5
The moon rose early that night. It lay fat and red in the clear sky, a solitary blemish unattended by stars. Fatima found Luz in the courtyard staring up at it. The garden was softened by lamplight, its straggling roses and withered palms rendered less offensive than they seemed in daylight hours, when the neglect was palpable. Fatima felt a strange, dislocated ache. Even the things with which she had grown impatient—this courtyard, this garden, the many restless hours she had spent there—seemed precious now that she knew she would lose them. The back of Luz’s golden head, made pale by the dim evening, mocked her. No kindness was ever freely given: each followed from its own secret ambition. Fatima knew this, yet somehow Luz, who was so unlike Nessma and the others, had caught her off guard. There was a chill in the garden, a finality, as if the diminutive figure in black had drawn all the warmth from it, and all the memory of warmth. Fatima felt her lip tremble. No one was coming to save them. No one was coming to save them.
Luz’s hair was plaited for the evening. She played with the frayed end of her braid, looking so like a little girl that Fatima hesitated, biting back the furious speech she had prepared in her mind.
“What do you call the game you play with Hassan?” Luz asked, as if continuing a conversation she had begun in her head. She held out her hand for Fatima. “The one with the naming of birds.”
“It’s not a real game,” said Fatima after a baffled silence. “It started as a joke. There’s a long poem by Al Attar about a party of birds who go on a journey to find their lost king. Lady Aisha bought the first few pages. We could never find the rest. So we’ve been making it up as we go.”
“A shame,” said Luz, half to herself. “It’s always helpful to know how things end.” She looked over her shoulder with a puzzled frown. “Why are you standing so far away?”
To her horror, Fatima felt tears prick her eyes.
“You’re an inquisitor,” she said.