“I won’t,” promised Vikram. He turned away and loped back toward the shore. Hesitating a moment longer, Fatima peeled her tunic over her head. The air that had been warm when she was dry felt very cold now that she was wet. She wriggled out of her trousers as quickly as the sodden fabric would allow, then tossed the bundle of wet clothes toward Vikram’s back, as a sort of test, and was only half pleased when he caught it with one hand.
Fatima waded into the shallows on the far side of the river and stepped out onto an embankment of rubble on the far side, squatting to rummage in Hassan’s pack. Hassan himself was splashing contentedly in midstream, cursing and woofing under his breath at the cold and the rocks underfoot. Fatima stole a glance at his bare form. His back was as pale as a northerner’s and his ribs were visible; freckles dappled his shoulders. In this light, shivering and naked in the river, he seemed unremarkable, his genius invisible, yet he was alive, and her hope lived with him.
“You’re judging me,” declared Hassan, standing up and spitting water. “I can feel your eyes boring into the back of my skull.”
“I’m not,” protested Fatima, turning away with a grin.
“Yes you are. We can’t all be as lovely and formidable as certain people. Some of us have flaws. Some of us even like flaws. If you were a man, I’d be afraid to flirt with you, no matter how much I might want to. You’d fix me with that knowing little smirk when I was in some terribly vulnerable state, and that would be the end of me.”
“Am I really that bad?” asked Fatima, unsettled.
“Yes,” said Hassan, clambering out of the river with his clothing piled on his head. “But it’s all right. I love you nonetheless.”
Fatima flushed and turned her attention back to the wad of clothing she had stuffed into Hassan’s pack. It was all wrinkled now and smelled of canvas on the verge of mildewing. She pulled out the plainest robe she could find: it was a light felted wool dyed blue with indigo and embroidered with red yarn along the hem and cuffs. It was cut for a man, but she and Hassan were roughly the same height, and when she pulled it on, it fell where it should. Vikram took the two bundles of wet clothes in his arms and stood on a rock.
“Your daggers,” he said, flinging them into the dirt at their feet. “Don’t forget those. You will almost certainly need them.”
Fatima dug out a dry sash and wrapped it around her waist, securing the dagger at her hip.
“That’s better,” said Vikram, eyeing her critically. “You don’t quite look like a peasant, but you look much less like a royal concubine who has run away. Time to go, children! There are miles between you and a safe place to sleep.” He climbed up the riverbank and into the scrub, passing through it as soundlessly as a shadow. Fatima hurried to follow him. Her feet squeaked in the wet boots, but on the whole she felt well enough: the water had refreshed her, Hassan’s robe was less confining than her own had been, and though the afternoon threatened rain, the prospect of walking in a straight line, without corners or walls or doors in the way, was new enough to feel full of promise.
Vikram led them south, following the pebbly foothills of the Sierra Nevada. To their right, the Vega stretched westward, as flat as the palm of a hand, curving up at the horizon to meet the more forgiving hills that defined its farthest reaches. The farmland was empty now. Fatima could see the white remains of houses and stone walls that had once marked the perimeters of fields, like chalk lines dividing up the landscape. Years of siege had made them into roosts for crows, the roof tiles looted or smashed, the walls quarried for other uses. The little streams and tributaries that watered the Vega were at their summer ebb and in some places had run completely dry: they reached out into the silent plain like fingers of gray mud, withdrawing moisture rather than replenishing it.
Fatima watched Vikram as they walked. He seemed to know where he was going, for he rarely raised his head: instead he grumbled without cease, though in a voice almost too quiet to make out, and in languages Fatima could not decipher.
“You know Lady Aisha,” she hazarded at one point, desiring to make conversation. Vikram looked over his shoulder, one elegant brow arched with scorn.
“Such powers of perception it has. Of course I know Lady Aisha. How many hours have we spent together in the courtyard while she played the lute and you moped about in corners, pretending to mend the linen?”
“I mean you know her particularly,” said Fatima, exasperated. “You aren’t just a dog, and she wasn’t just playing the lute. You must have met her somehow.”
“Ah.” Vikram smiled. “Well. That is a good story. Once upon a time, when Lady Aisha was simply Aisha, not yet the wife of one sultan and mother to the next, I stole a pair of jeweled slippers from her.”
“Why?”
“I wanted her to run away with me.”
“Run away with Lady Aisha?” Fatima laughed. “Why would you want that, and why would you steal her slippers if you did?”
“She was bewitching as a girl,” said Vikram defensively. “She still is. Not pretty in the profound sense that Fatima is pretty, but compelling and sly and maddeningly aloof, like Scheherazade or Cleopatra. Everyone was dying of love for her. She would have none of it, of course. She wanted the most powerful man in Granada, and by God, she got him. It was he who gave her the slippers as an engagement gift. I thought that if I stole them and she was found to be without them, there would be a scandal, and the engagement would be called off.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to do to someone you love,” muttered Hassan, shifting his bags from one shoulder to the other.
“I’m not nice, as it happens. And anyway, this was not precisely love. Jinn don’t love very often, or very much. We are prone to mild obsessions, however, which is what this was.”
“What happened? I can’t imagine Lady Aisha in a torrid love triangle with a jinn. She’s always seemed so remote and forbidding to me. This is entirely new information.”
“There was no torrid love triangle, so you’re excused from imagining it. No, Aisha didn’t care for me in the least, and told me so frequently. A day came when her betrothed—presently to become your master’s father, Fatima—visited her in her father’s villa, expecting to see her wearing his costly gift. She appeared before him barefoot, which was a shockingly intimate thing to do with a man to whom she wasn’t yet married. She told him she’d given the slippers to a beggar who had no shoes in exchange for his blessing upon their marriage. Her fiancé left even more pleased with her than when he’d arrived, and the wedding was pushed forward by a month. Thus ended my pursuit.”
“What did you do with the slippers?” asked Fatima.
“I gave them to my sister in the Empty Quarter. I’ve spent much of the last four decades paying off my debt. Which is why we are all here together. What a happy coincidence.” With that, Vikram put his head down and trotted onward on all fours, resuming his private monologue. Fatima and Hassan struggled after him and lapsed into silence.
They walked until midday without seeing any sign of life. The foothills to their left turned white and shimmered in the heat, exhaling some internal luminescence. When the sun was highest, a lone falcon began to circle above their heads. It cried piteously and without cease, as if pleading for some response.
“That thing is eerie,” Hassan said, stopping and huffing to catch his breath. Walking over the uneven ground had made his cheeks as florid as his hair. “Why is it making such a racket? Could it be a Castilian spy?”
Vikram looked up at the bird and knit his brows.
“You joke, but you may be more right than you realize,” he murmured, climbing a rise to get a better view. “Falcons are curious birds. They’ll follow anything that interests them. As long as it trails us, anyone hunting you will know there is movement here in the foothills.”
“Can’t we make it go away?” asked Fatima, peering up at it. The bird crossed in front of the hazy sun; she closed her eyes and saw its double.