“You can’t live on this hill. Down in the harbor there are ships. Each will run a different course, but you can only board one.”
Fatima twisted Lady Aisha’s ring on her finger. Now that she had the leisure to admit it to herself, she found she had thought no farther than this hill at the edge of the map that hung on the wall in the sultan’s bedroom, beyond which was only blank paper and Hassan’s crudely drawn sea serpent: perhaps she never believed they would survive long enough to decide what came next. They had fled to spite their masters but now they must live for something else. The how seemed as important as the where, but the where came first, and try as she might, Fatima could not imagine a place that felt safe.
“Should we cross the Strait, like everyone else?” she hazarded.
“You ask that as if there is a right and a wrong answer,” said Vikram. He was looking at her in a way she found unsettling.
“I want to say something,” announced Hassan, looking out toward the water. “Something mad.”
Fatima recognized the vacant light that had entered Hassan’s eyes and quaked inwardly.
“The thing I do with maps. I’ve always wondered whether it isn’t some kind of intuition, better than what everyone else has, but the same sort of thing: whittling unconsciously through possibilities until I arrive at the sole possibility, the truth. Like being very, very good at guessing, so good that sometimes the angels indulge me and make my guess right even when it isn’t—so that a cave appears in the rocks, or a tower in the palace, or a trapdoor in the floor of my room. That’s what it feels like—like being spoiled by heaven as if I’m some willful but beloved child. Though I don’t know why it should be so—I haven’t been good, not really.” He sniffed and rubbed his nose absently with the back of one hand. Fatima felt a swell of tenderness and pulled his hands away from his face, kissing one and then the other.
“You’re wonderful,” she pressed. “You don’t lie or steal or gossip and when you’ve had a terrible day, you don’t even take it out on your friends.” She paused, her words hanging reproachfully in the back of her mouth. Everything seemed clearer to her on the hilltop: the horizon and the curve of the earth, and also her own faults, which seemed to multiply the farther she got from the life that had fostered them. “You’ve saved the lives of people who are afraid of you,” she said in a softer voice. “More than once.”
Hassan was shaking his head.
“It’s not enough. Luz and her inquisitors are probably right: I should be put on the rack and made to atone or some such thing, for my impudence if nothing else.”
“No one can choose who God loves, or change who God loves,” said Vikram. “Not even the Inquisition.”
Hassan looked back toward the water.
“I want to say something,” he repeated. Fatima knew what it was, and her heart sank.
“I can get us to Qaf,” he said. “I can get us to the isle of the Bird King. That’s where we should go. That’s where we’ll be safe.”
Fatima closed her eyes and attempted to muster her self-restraint.
“It’s a game, Hassan,” she said as gently as she could. “We were bored children shut up in a crumbling palace, so we made it up. Bit by bit. We made up a story.”
“But that’s just it,” said Hassan, leaning toward her. “What if our stories are like my maps? What is a story but the map of an idea? There is a secret in the poem of Al Attar—we made it into a joke because joking felt better than despairing. But perhaps that is the secret. The Bird King is real, and we are his subjects.”
“Hassan—”
“What other choice do we have?” Hassan’s voice rose unsteadily. Fatima pressed her hands to the sides of his face, smoothing away the mania that lodged in the creases around his eyes. She understood now: he was not quite mad, but he had chosen madness over despair. Yet if she followed him there, into madness, it meant she had despaired already.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he begged. “Please.”
“All right, all right.” She pulled away. The sea below her was unchanged, or rather, it was changing as it always had, exhaling against the brief shoreline, a white curl of froth the only bright color left in the waning day. She should have seen it. The way he had laughed at meeting Vikram, at the scout they had left dead beneath the willow tree on the Vega: the brittleness of it, his fine nervousness, like that of a racing horse. Of course he was going mad. He needed solid walls and certainty to counter the constant upheaval of his gift. If the world couldn’t keep him safe, he would seek safety in the stories of their childhood. Her cheeks were wet: she dried them with her sleeve and tried to smile.
“I’m not mad,” he said, reading her thoughts. “I’m as sane as I’ve ever been, though perhaps that’s not saying much. I’ve just decided we weren’t ever living in the world we thought we were. Everyone always looked at me and saw the odd one, the freak, the pervert. But maybe I wasn’t any of those things. If we can drop through a door and land in the dark, in those tunnels beneath the palace, and see demons, and the palace dog was really a jinn after all, who’s to say I wasn’t the only person in that pile of stone who saw things clearly? Why did we tell each other those stories if not to escape? We were making a map, Fa. We can follow it out of this.”
He made her want to believe, though she was no more convinced than she had been when he first suggested it. The thought of leaving entirely, leaving not just the siege, the war, the threat of capture, but the world itself, caught her powerfully, and she answered him before thinking.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll do as you like. We’ll go to Qaf.”
Hassan grinned. Fatima saw his fingers, bluish under the moon, twitch on the leather flap of his satchel.
“I’ve never tried to draw a sea chart,” he said. “I’ve only been on a boat a handful of times, and never out of sight of land.”
“You want to try,” said Vikram, roused from silence. “Your fingers say so.”
“But if I can’t—” Hassan flexed his hands and began to crack each knuckle, one after another. “We’ll die of thirst or drown or be killed by brigands or worse.”
“You’ll never be free of danger. But that’s a choice you’ve already made. If you wanted certainty, you would never have left Granada.” The jinn studied Hassan intently, as if to assess his fitness: if he thought Hassan mad, his face did not betray it. Yet he seemed to be waiting for something, and Fatima, now that she had made her decision, did not want to linger and hear a jinn talk her out of it.
“We’re going,” said Fatima. “Hassan, draw your map.”
There was a small pause.
“I’ll need some light,” he said.
Fatima knelt next to him and put her arms around his neck.
“I love you madly,” she whispered. “Even when we do get lost and drown or die of thirst or any of those other horrible things, I’ll still love you madly.”
Hassan kissed her shoulder.
“We won’t get lost,” he said.