Trees cut through Fatima’s view of the sky. The sound of the surf was replaced by the hiss and rustle of leaves and the steady drip of dew, and high, curious animal sounds that Fatima could not identify. The trees, too, were not any sort she had seen before, not elm or cypress or oak or pine, but graceful, thin-limbed things with rough silvery bark. Fatima let one arm drop to caress the ground. Mosses slid beneath her fingers. She could hear running water, and soon enough she touched it: a stream, bitingly cold, lined with smooth stones. She lifted her hand again and sucked on her fingers, tasting water that was sweet and rich with some tart mineral.
“It tastes like silver,” Fatima murmured, half drunk.
“It tastes like rocks,” said Vikram. “Like the quartz vein that runs along the streambed, which you’d see if you looked down. This island is halfway between your country and mine. Where you find quartz, you’ll find the jinn.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why. Why do the banu adam love gold? We were all made to covet one thing or another. Rest, if you can. You’re hurt and there’s still a bit of a walk ahead.”
Fatima closed her eyes obediently, and for several minutes, Vikram’s hunched, loping gait lulled her into a light sleep. But the air changed, growing steadily colder, and when she felt her breath begin to freeze on Vikram’s fur, Fatima opened her eyes again.
The ground before her was covered in snow. The forest had given way to a sloping hillside fringed with winter grass. The air was soundless, hanging over the blue earth in one chilled breath, and leading away over the crest of the hill was a line of forked footprints made by a creature much larger than anything Fatima had ever laid eyes upon. She clung to Vikram in a panic.
“What made those?” she demanded, struggling to climb onto his back. Vikram shifted to accommodate her.
“If your people ever had a name for it, it’s long been forgotten,” he said. “But listen to me, little friend—stop clambering around and listen. You have only one natural enemy here, and that is fear. Nothing in this place can hurt you, no matter how large its footprints. But if you give in to your terror of the unseen, those very same things will devour you and leave not one bit of gristle behind.”
Fatima pressed her face into Vikram’s pelt and began to relax the muscles of her back, one after another. It was the effort itself that calmed her.
“You might eat me too,” she muttered.
“I might, but I only eat when I’m hungry. You banu adam eat whenever the mood strikes you, whether you’re hungry or not. Judge for yourself which impulse is more reliable.”
“And the thing that made those tracks? When does it eat?”
“Whenever it senses opportunity. Ah, here we are. Look, Fatima. You’re the first of your kind to lay eyes on this place in many hundreds of years.”
Fatima lifted her head. Vikram had taken them to the summit of the snow-covered hill. They stood looking down its far slope, where the snow faded by gentle gradients into yellow sand. A series of mounded dunes led down into a shallow valley, at the bottom of which was a cluster of trees whose thick fronds threw shade over low, flowering bushes; all were suffused with ambient light, as if the sun shone on the little oasis from beneath. In the middle, ringed by the sharp-shadowed trees, was a small lake.
It was perfectly round, the lake was, and a shade of blue that was not reflected in the many-colored twilight of the sky above. Fatima was sure she had seen it before. But she had not: the lake was part of Gwennec’s story, and she had committed its image to memory.
“Is this Antillia?” she asked, startled. “Are we not in Qaf after all?”
“Perhaps it’s time to consider the possibility that it doesn’t matter,” said Vikram. “The place remains, regardless of what you want to call it. Go! Go down and see the king.”
Fatima slid from his back. Her feet landed in a borderland between sand and snow, where the ground was frozen on top but warm underneath. She hurried down the face of the dune, her steps kicking up sheaves of fine sand until she was forced to slow down
and shield her face. The haze before her settled. The lake came into view, nestled in its bed of palm trees. It was not so much a lake, she realized, as a pool or a spring: some ancient race had enclosed it with a low wall of limestone that might once have been white but was now water stained and spackled with lichen. Fatima rushed toward it and pressed herself against the warm stone, searching the curvature of the wall, the thicket of flower-strewn thornbushes, the face of the rosy limestone hill that emerged abruptly from the desert just beyond the oasis.
Nothing stirred except a little current of air through the dry fronds of the trees. Fatima heard Vikram pad toward her and come to a stop, sniffing the air.
“There’s no one here,” she protested.
“Certainly there is,” he said. “We’re here.”
“But where is the king?”
“Where do you suppose? Look into the water.”
Fatima looked down. The surface of the spring was preternaturally calm. Peering into it, she saw only herself. None of the copper and silver mirrors in the Alhambra had reflected images so precisely. She found herself surprised by the sight of her decisive jaw, the skeptical curve of her brow. They belonged to someone older and more intent than she had been when she last saw herself; someone who had gone without food and could take a life if the need arose. But her features were interrupted by something that had not been there before: a thin seam cut diagonally across her face from forehead to chin, traversing her nose at its widest point, less a wound than a fracture, like cracked glass. She touched her face, startled.
“I fixed what I could,” said Vikram, sounding almost apologetic. “You’re lucky you didn’t lose an eye. But the line will always be there, I’m afraid. Will you mind? You look as though you might mind.”
“I don’t mind,” said Fatima, running one finger along the seam. “I was only thinking that people have been telling me how beautiful I am for as long as I can remember, and I’ve always hated them for it. But they were right. I am beautiful.”
Vikram threw his head back and laughed. The sound echoed off the chalky hill on the far side of the spring and bounced back again, doubling itself.
“Come along,” he said. “Let’s go back—it’s too hot in this part of the island.”
Fatima sat on the edge of the little wall and watched Vikram amble away.
“I want to see the Bird King,” she called after him, feeling something had gone wrong.
“You’ve been looking at the Bird King for the last five minutes,” said Vikram.
Fatima looked into the water again. Her own face stared back at her. All the moments that had come before, the things she had remembered and forgotten, arranged themselves into a straight line. She could look back along it to the yellow room in the palace where she had been born and see how they had each proceeded, one after the other, to the wild place in which she found herself, though she could not have imagined at the beginning where the end would be.
“I am the king of the birds,” she whispered to herself.
“Yes, you are,” came Vikram’s voice. “Get up, Fatima. Rise, oh King of the Birds.”
Chapter 20
Fatima took off her boots and left them by the lip of the spring, and walked back up the canted dunes in her bare feet.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
Vikram was hunched over beside her, a dark blur above the sand containing eyes and teeth and little else she could identify. Yet there was nothing about him that frightened her anymore: she knew, in some real sense, what he was, and more than that, she knew what they were to each other.
“There was nothing to tell,” he said. “To find the Bird King, you needed to rid yourself of all the parts of you that were not the Bird King. I had nothing to do with it, and neither, for that matter, did anyone else. If you had made your choices differently, you might be in Morocco now, comforting a deposed sultan; or in Castile, crowning an empress; or in the Empty Quarter, sitting at my sister’s feet. You could have clung to hope. Instead, you chose something more radical.”