Fatima examined the pale inquisitor. In the brilliant light, she looked almost translucent, as though the sun passed through her without interruption.
“Thank you,” she forced herself to say. Luz shook her head.
“I should thank you,” she said. “I’m only safeguarding your life. You’re safeguarding my afterlife.”
Fatima smiled in spite of herself. The tide had crested and begun to go out, pulling at the boat that leaned against her foot. She reached out and helped Luz to her feet. The map was folded inside a pouch that hung at her sash; she took it out and pressed it into Luz’s hands. Luz unfolded it, tracing the rhumb lines, the outline of the coast she would never see again.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Like everything he does.” She drew a shuddering breath. “Will you help me into the boat?”
Fatima pulled the prow onto the beach to steady it. She put her shoulder beneath Luz’s and half lifted her over the edge of the boat, surprised by how little the older woman seemed to weigh, by how cold she felt. When Luz had settled onto a plank seat at the stern, Fatima pulled out one of Mary’s cloaks and wrapped her in it, fastening it beneath her chin. Luz smiled.
“Good-bye, King of the Birds,” she said. “I don’t suppose we’ll meet again.”
“Perhaps in your afterlife,” said Fatima. “If there’s room.”
Luz laughed at this. She folded the map and tucked it under the cloak, into the bodice of her gown. “I’m ready,” she said.
Fatima put her shoulder against the stern of the boat and pushed. The water slid past her ankles, lifting the prow over an eddy of foam, and in an instant the boat weighed nearly nothing, and belonged to another realm. Fatima pushed until the water reached her waist and then fell back, shivering in her sodden robe, and stumbled onto the beach. The tide pulled the boat into itself and hid it from view. Taking up her heavy skirts, Fatima jogged across the sand toward the chalk steps; the leviathan was sleeping in the newborn shadows, its ribs rising and falling with the waves.
Fatima mounted the stairs. She could see the boat again, farther out, its sole passenger visible only as a dark blot in the stern. A pale arm was raised. Fatima raised hers in return, waving until the current carried the image from view. Then she let her arm fall and continued up the stairs toward the clifftop, balancing over the plank Deng had laid between the missing steps. She could hear Hassan and Mary arguing good-naturedly over dinner; Asher calling to one of his brothers. The wind dropped upon her from above, warm with the scent of a cooking fire, carrying with it the laughter of children.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Warren Frazier for his unwavering faith in this book, Amy Hundley and Dhyana Taylor for their editorial insight, and Professor S.J. Pearce for her profound historical acumen.