I pushed myself to my feet. Shazad had taught me enough to know that you didn’t stand against an enemy from lower ground. ‘I’m dressed just fine for leaving, Your Exalted Highness.’
Kadir made a noise at the back of his throat, like a hum of agreement. Except it sounded an awful lot like a laugh. ‘You are free to leave, of course.’ He was rolling a perfect white pearl between his thumb and forefinger. He circled around in front of me, standing between me and the way out. Then he tossed the pearl carelessly aside, letting it land in the water. The girls, who’d been watching the exchange, didn’t scramble for it. ‘As soon as you bring me back that pearl.’
‘I can’t swim,’ I said. Anywhere else I’d be able to stand up for myself. I’d be able to fight him. But I was helpless. I tried to hold myself like I wasn’t.
‘Then you can’t leave.’ He smirked. ‘That pearl is very precious to me.’
I couldn’t fight him. Just the thought of raising my fist and putting it in his too-pleased-with-himself-looking face made the tug of the Sultan’s orders twinge in my stomach. And I wasn’t sure what he’d try to do if I walked out. What he could do. Or whether the Sultan had warned him against hurting me.
If the Sultan cared whether his Demdji prize got hurt. I didn’t even know why I was still alive. He had his Djinni.
The silence was broken by a splash as one of the other girls dove under the water and sprang back up a moment later, the pearl between her fingers. ‘I got bored waiting,’ she said, pouting prettily, her pale hair sticking to her forehead as she brandished the pearl. But there was a tightness to her smile. And I understood what she’d done. For me. The risk.
The tension broke as Kadir lounged over to her. Shira was on her feet, grabbing me by the elbow, pushing me out of the baths. ‘Tonight.’ She shoved me back towards the safety of the gardens. ‘Meet me by the Weeping Wall after dark.’
Chapter 19
The Weeping Wall was the easternmost wall of the harem, a small, closed-off part of the garden dominated by the biggest tree I’d ever seen in my life. It would’ve taken three of me to get my arms all the way around it, and the branches stretched so far they touched the top of the walls on either side.
According to the women of the harem, it was the place where Sultima Sabriya had waited for Sultim Aziz a thousand years ago. He had gone to war on the distant eastern border and left his love in the harem. The Weeping Wall was the closest she had been able to get to him while he was away in battle. She stood there every day, waiting for him, her tears watering the tree so that it grew higher and higher every day. Until one day it was finally high enough for her to climb to see over the walls of the harem to where her husband’s army was. That day, the other women found her on the ground, screaming and wailing and clawing at the wall. She couldn’t be consoled and she cried until her voice left her; and the tree grew greater still.
Three days later the news came that Aziz had been killed in battle. That was what Sabriya had seen from the top of the tree, across the walls, across deserts and cities and seas.
The wall looked just like every other in the harem in the dim light of my oil lamp. Ivy blooming with flowers all the colour of the setting sun climbed from the earth up the stone wall, trying to hide the fact that we were in a prison. I pushed the ivy aside, setting my hands against the solid stone. My fingers met an uneven surface. When I held the lamp up I realised it looked like a gouge – several of them. The kind fingernails might leave.
‘And her wailing carried on for seven nights and seven days.’ I jumped at Shira’s voice behind me. She was draped in a dark blue khalat that made her melt in with the shadows. ‘Until the Sultan could listen to her grief no more, and he strung her up where only the stars could hear her wail.’
I dropped my hand. ‘Who knew such love could exist in the harem.’
Shira didn’t miss the sarcasm in my voice. ‘Anyone less self-centred than you.’ I was about to retort that she didn’t love Kadir, no more than she’d loved Naguib. But then I realised that her hands had drifted to her pregnant stomach as she spoke. Folk did terrifying things for the ones they loved. That, I’d learned from stories. I even had a bullet wound scar across my hip from Iliaz to prove it.
‘So what now?’ I raised an eyebrow at her expectantly, a trick I’d learned from Jin.
‘Oh, now we wait, cousin.’ Shira leaned against the huge tree, tilting her head back.
I was going to have to play along with Shira’s game. I flopped against the tree next to her. ‘How long?’
Shira tipped her head back further. ‘It could be a while. I can’t tell. It’s hard to see the sky properly from the city.’
I leaned my head back against the trunk, my hair snagging in the rough bark. She wasn’t wrong. Through the crisscrossing branches of the huge tree I could see the dark sky, but with the lights from the palace and the city, I couldn’t make out the stars.
‘So.’ Shira broke the silence after a moment. ‘Are you really with the Rebel Prince?’ She was fiddling with something, and I realised it was a rope that ran the length of the tree, like a pulley. She was tugging it absently, up and down. At the top, above the line of the harem walls, a piece of cloth stirred in the wind.
‘I really am.’ She was signalling someone. It could be a trap for all I knew. I couldn’t do much about it if it was except face it when it came.
‘Who would’ve thought it?’ Shira smiled. ‘Two girls from Dustwalk, with royalty. What was it the Holy Father used to say?’ Her accent was slipping. I wondered if she noticed. ‘Men who worship at the feet of power either rise with it—’
‘—or get trampled,’ I said, filling in the saying. ‘Good thing we aren’t men, then.’ I didn’t know why I was buying into her game. But I was real low on people I could talk to in this place. Leyla was sweet enough, but she was still the Sultan’s daughter. And Tamid wasn’t worth thinking about. He might be alive, but my friend had still died in the sand in Dustwalk. Shira’s dark eyes met my pale ones. A moment of recognition passed between us. We’d both hitched our wagons to powerful folk, just on different sides. If that was the choice, to rise or be flattened, chances were one of us was going to wind up rising and the other one dead.
‘Shira—’ I started. I wasn’t sure how I was going to finish.
I never did. Because a man stepped out of the Weeping Wall.
I’d seen a whole lot of Demdji do impossible things, but I’d be lying if I said I’d been expecting that.
The man was flesh and blood, and though at first glance he was dressed in desert clothes, he was distinctly un-Mirajin. He had hair the colour of sand, held back by a sheema that looked like it had been tied by someone with no hands, and pale skin that glowed in the lamplight. And his eyes were nearly as blue as mine. For a second I thought he was a Demdji.
‘Blessed Sultima,’ he said, his voice low and tinged with an accent. Not a Demdji, then, just a foreigner.
He pulled himself to his full height, giving me a better view of him. Dark polished boots different from anything I’d ever seen in the desert rose to his knees, his loose desert trouser legs stuffed inside, and he wore a white shirt open at the collar. I got the strangest impression he was pausing for effect. After a beat, he stepped forward dramatically.
That was when his arm got stuck in one of the vines that hung from the wall.
It sort of ruined the effect.