“Fear can make anything real,” said Vikram. “The black-cloaks are afraid you’re a sorcerer. If they condemn you as a sorcerer and burn you for it, then you are, for all practical purposes, a sorcerer, whether you began as one or not. Fear doesn’t need to make sense in order to have consequences.” He rolled over and eyed Hassan’s stricken face. “The difference between us is that I am Vikram whether you fear me or not.”
Fatima felt light-headed and wondered if she might faint again. She walked toward the mouth of the tunnel, taking deep, greedy breaths of the chill air. The light on the horizon had brightened in earnest. In the bluish dawn, she began to recognize where they were: the tunnel ended in a modest rock ledge downhill from the palace, whose outline abutted the sky above their heads. Below them, the shallow Genil River slid eastward, its banks lined with scrub and river rock. To the west, the medina was waking up: she could see rushlights winking in the windows of white plaster houses and shops. Milk cows were lowing quietly in their sheds, the sound carried up the hill by a wild little breeze. Before her, at the foot of the hill, was the Vega de Granada, flat and silent, stretching south toward the rim of the valley.
“I will go,” came Hassan’s voice gravely. Fatima turned to gape at him.
“You will not!” she declared. But Hassan held up his hand.
“It’s all right, Fa,” he said. “There was never much chance of me surviving this anyway. One of us might as well live.” His eyes were watery and reddened. Fatima wanted to go to him, to put her arms around his neck, but with Lady Aisha and the dog-man watching, she did not dare.
“Then it’s settled,” said Lady Aisha. “Hassan will go to the Castilians. In exchange, Fatima will not be punished for treason. Everything will fall back into its rightful place. We will have peace.”
Fatima studied her mistress. She looked calmly back through her bloodshot brown eyes, her face still except for a tiny tremor in her mouth, which told Fatima all she needed to know.
“No,” said Fatima.
“No?”
“No.”
Lady Aisha began to pace across the mouth of the tunnel.
“You are so eager to leave me,” she said in a caustic voice. “I can’t do without you, Fatima. I’m old. I am losing my home and my country. My son weeps like a woman for what he could not defend as a man. And now this little rebellion.” She gripped an outcropping of rock at the mouth of the cave and lowered herself to the ground. Fatima, unthinking, ran to help her, putting her shoulder beneath her mistress’s fragile arm. They sat on the cold earth, breathing the same air.
“You want me to love you,” said Fatima. Her mistress’s scent filled her senses, an admixture of myrrh and wool and the faint, unsettling smell of age. “But I’m a thing you own, and property can’t love. I want to love you. Let us go and I will. If this is peace, then I hate peace. Peace is unfair.”
Lady Aisha chuckled. Her gaze became unfocused and almost sad, as if she was in the grip of some profound memory.
“You’re very young, my dear,” she said. “Let me tell you something important. The real struggle on this earth is not between those who want peace and those who want war. It’s between those who want peace and those who want justice. If justice is what you want, then you may often be right, but you will rarely be happy.” She squinted at the brightening sunlight. “If anyone asks me what you’ve done, I’m going to tell the truth—I won’t risk what little I have left, not even for you. But if you leave now and walk very briskly, there is a chance you may outrun the Inquisition. A small chance.”
For a moment, Fatima didn’t understand.
“I’m setting you free,” said Lady Aisha gently. “You’re no longer a thing I own, since that’s how you put it. Go, make your escape.”
Fatima let her head sink against Lady Aisha’s shoulder. She kissed the exposed sweep of collarbone, thinly clad in skin the color of the elms on the hill above.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
There was a sound above their heads, the sharp clatter of talons on rock. Vikram dropped to the ground beside them.
“There are dogs out on the hill,” he said. “And silent men. You have minutes before they pick up your scent. It’s time to leave, one way or another.”
Lady Aisha got to her feet. Hassan, who had been sitting in a daze with his knees pulled up, did likewise, clutching his leather case to his chest with the fervor of a lover.
“What do we do?” he asked.
Lady Aisha sighed and surveyed the hillside.
“You’ll never outrun dogs in this terrain,” she said. “You’ll have to cross the Vega. There’s no help for it.”
“The Vega?” Fatima looked out over the smoky plain and felt a stab of fear. “It’s so open—it’s just an empty field that goes on and on. There’s nowhere to hide, no trees, no hills, not for miles.”
“Then I suppose I must lose you as well,” said Lady Aisha to Vikram. She stroked his head. “After all these long years.”
“If you want these little palace-bred children to live, yes,” said Vikram. He caught her hand and pressed a kiss into it. “For your sake, I will help them cross the Vega.”
Lady Aisha withdrew her hand and twisted a ring off her finger, wiggling it over the bony protrusion of her knuckle. Fatima recognized it: it was set with a dark ruby encircled by tiny pearls, a gift from her husband while he still lived. Lady Aisha dropped it into Fatima’s palm.
“When you reach the edge of the valley, follow the harbor road south,” she said. “Stay off the road itself, if you can, but follow it, for there are few paths through those mountains and autumn is nearly upon us. When you reach the sea, this should buy you both passage on a ship, with a little left over if the captain is fair. Where you go then is your own business.”
Fatima slipped the ring onto her own finger. It was heavy and still warm. She wanted to say thank you, but before she could open her mouth, she heard the faint baying of a hound, intent and anguished, echoing over the hillside.
“They’re coming,” said Vikram, leaping down the rocks. “Follow me.”
Lady Aisha turned away.
“Go,” she said, pulling up her veil. “Let’s not spoil things with promises none of us can keep.”
Fatima felt Hassan tug her hand. Stumbling, she followed him, feeling as though something needful had been left unsaid; longing, with a force that startled her, for the silk-shrouded figure that diminished in her wake. The palace above them had begun to cast its shadow over the medina, its red towers square and sharp, an extension of the hill on which they sat. They had stood for centuries and might stand for centuries more, but as she looked back, Fatima knew, though she could not say how, that she would never lay eyes on them again.
Chapter 7
Humming and picking at his ears, Vikram led them down the face of a sandstone cliff. The slope, all descending angles of umber and red, was so nearly vertical that Fatima’s guts heaved each time she forced herself to take a step. Too soon, she began to wonder whether she had made a grave mistake.
“Your left foot goes there,” called Vikram, pointing. “Then your right, here. You’ve got four limbs: as long as you only move one at a time, the other three will save you.”
“This is insane,” shrieked Hassan, who clung to a slanting boulder like a redheaded bat, his leather satchel swinging in the air below one shoulder. “We’re all going to die.”
“Not if you follow directions,” sang Vikram, flinging himself into the air and landing silently on a largish rock below. “The hounds won’t come this way. You need free will to do something this mad. We’re nearly to the bottom. The hard part begins then.”
Fatima wedged her left foot in the crack to which Vikram had pointed, uncurling one hand to shift her weight. She saw with dispassion that the skin of her thumb and forefinger had split open, leaving angry vertical tears. She was also profoundly hungry. None of it was pain, exactly—she was too alert for that, too focused to feel anything acute. Yet it was a hindrance. A small part of her quaked silently, convinced that she was ill-equipped for any purpose beyond that for which she had been raised.