“I thank you for your prayers,” was all she could think to say. Luz smiled and rose to her feet.
“You’ll be safe here,” she said. “Eat and rest. I’ll come and see you in the morning, after you’ve had some time alone.” She hesitated at the tent flap and smiled again, and then was gone, succeeded by an eddy of cold air.
Fatima lay down on the furs that covered the floor of the tent and hugged her knees to her chest. Luz had left her lamp behind: it cast an uneven circle of light on the little table and the ground, and across Fatima’s feet, leaving everything beyond it obscured. She heard a small noise, like a cry, from somewhere outside, and held her breath to listen, thinking it might be Hassan, but it did not come again, and she was left to imagine who or what had made it.
Through the tent flap, she watched a filament of stars progress across the sky and let herself fall into a stupor. She thought of Luz, whose hair was the color of the lamplight, and felt the imprint of her kisses upon her fingertips, and wondered whether she was wrong after all, and this was what goodness looked like. She spoke like goodness. It would be easy, thought Fatima, if Luz was right: if Luz was right, one need never bother about the wreckage left in the wake of these holy wars, about the lives lost and enslaved, for the wreckage was cleansed by the horrors visited upon it. She fell half asleep thinking about how easy it was. Yet against her lids, she saw the little speck, the worm, burrowing its way across Luz’s field of vision, and knew, in a way she knew very little else, that whatever had spoken to her was not God.
Something warm and soft pressed against her and brought her back to consciousness. It rumbled happily, smelling of the pine woods: it was the tortoiseshell cat, the tiny queen that had been and gone in the afternoon, and it was blinking at her companionably in the dark. Fatima rolled onto her back and held out her hand: the cat rubbed its cheek against her fingers. But the little creature was after the remains of the meal Luz had brought her, and soon abandoned Fatima to lick mutton fat from the edge of the bowl. Fatima sat up to stretch her stiff legs. The cat twitched its tail and made small satisfied sounds as it ate, indifferent when she caressed it. It felt good to touch something so artlessly affectionate, something that neither promised nor demanded anything. Whether Fatima lived long enough to set foot outside the encampment or not, there would still be black-and-gold cats, and sparrows, and the matted grass she could feel beneath the furs that covered the ground, and though her time among them might be brief, the knowledge that these simple things would persist comforted her.
“Look at you, so small and neat. You’re very pretty,” she told the cat.
“So are you,” said the cat, raising its head and licking its whiskers, “though my brother says you’ve heard it so often that the compliment annoys you.”
Fatima fell backward onto her hands.
“You’re not friendless,” the cat continued. “The forces you see are working against you, but some you do not see are working on your behalf.”
“The forces I see,” repeated Fatima dully. The cat fluffed out its tail and shook its paws like a woman fussing with her skirts, and suddenly Fatima did see a woman, or the reflection of a woman, clothed in furs and in her own thick black-and-gold hair, which sparkled with fragments of ribbon and small jewels. She was angular, all sloping jaw and skewed brow, and her eyes were large and yellow in a face the color of temple smoke. On her feet were a pair of jeweled slippers sewn with thread-of-gold, like those a palace woman might wear.
“What are you?” Fatima whispered.
“You already know,” said the woman.
Unthinking, Fatima reached out to touch the woman’s hair, expecting to encounter only air and silence, but instead found her fingers tangled in warm, heavy tresses that gave off the scent of living wood. The woman closed her eyes and smiled with undisguised pleasure, offering the side of her neck for Fatima to stroke. In a stupor, Fatima let her fingers trail over the feverish skin, as soft as something newly born, and felt as though she had fallen backward, so that the woman and the world itself loomed over her.
“Are you frightened of me?” the woman asked. When Fatima didn’t answer, she shifted, half shrugging, and Fatima’s fingers slipped down a length of jeweled chaos to rest against the flat of her belly. Fatima was seized by something that was emphatically not fear, but frightened her nonetheless.
“I haven’t decided yet,” she said, her mouth dry.
The woman laughed and pulled away. Fatima felt her face go hot. She retreated again into Gwennec’s cloak and palmed the grip of her knife.
“What do you want?” she demanded. Her voice sounded harsh and silly in her own ears, like that of a child pretending to be big. The woman must have thought so too, for she shook her head, making a dozen tiny bells dance and giggle in her hair.
“Why have you come?” asked Fatima in a humbler tone. “A week ago, I’d never met a jinn in my life, and now I can’t seem to avoid you.”
“You’ve met plenty of jinn,” the woman replied, stretching her velvet limbs. “You’ve passed us in the twilight and in the empty places. If you didn’t see us, it’s because you lived between safe, well-lighted walls. Now that you’re out in the dark, your fear makes you see more clearly.” She smiled. The lamplight glinted on a double row of pointed teeth as bright and closely packed as shards of glass. Fatima fought the urge to run.
“But as for your questions,” the woman continued, “my brother sent me. He says he told you to expect me, but that you might not remember.”
Fatima searched her mind and could indeed remember nothing.
“Your brother,” she repeated.
“You were dreaming,” said the woman in a patient voice. Fatima sat up straighter.
“Vikram,” she said. “I dreamed of Vikram on the ship.”
“You didn’t dream of him. You dreamed, and he visited your dreaming.”
“Then he really is alive? Why didn’t he come himself?”
“We don’t heal as neatly as you do. He can’t come to you in any form you could understand. If you saw him now, it would drive you mad. We’re not meant to have these little conversations, your people and mine, sitting in the same room, in the same moment, and every time we do, it requires an effort of the will.” The woman rose and drew Fatima to her feet also. “My name is Azalel,” she whispered, her voice merry, leaning toward Fatima as if relaying a secret. “I’ve been all about the camp, looking and listening. Your ship is still in the harbor. Walk with me now and you might reach it. These men are used to looking at girls without seeing them. It would take very little to convince them you aren’t important. It would take very little more to convince them you aren’t even here.”
Fatima looked out at the quiet camp, the ghostlike peaks of canvas where men were sleeping.
“I’d never make it,” she said. “There are too many of them. And I wouldn’t try, not without Hassan.”
Azalel tilted her head, and Fatima once again saw the cat, its ears translucent with the light behind them.
“Why not? Isn’t saving yourself better than saving no one at all? Your death won’t prove a point—and even if it did, you won’t be around to enjoy the satisfaction.”
Fatima could smell newly fallen dew on the trampled grass, the bloom of sweet water over the tang of the sea.
“I’m tired of being told no,” she muttered. “Especially tired of being told no by make-believe beasts who are supposed to say yes to things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. I won’t leave without Hassan. I’m not trading one prison for another.”
Azalel flopped on the furs and stuck out her lower lip.
“This isn’t a proper adventure,” she said. “My brother never told me you’d make speeches about prisons. I wouldn’t have come if he had.”