*
Even in summer it wasn’t warm in the palace prison. I felt the chill sink into my bones as Imin and I descended the worn stone steps. The guard at the door hadn’t even tried to stop us after one glance at Imin in uniform. We would be left alone down here.
Shira was shivering in a corner, wearing the same clothes she’d given birth in, her back turned to the door. I took a step toward her, but Imin stopped me, one hand on my shoulder. He pointed toward the cell neighbouring Shira’s.
It took only a few steps closer to the cell to realise that what I’d thought was a pile of discarded clothing was moving. Just barely. Only the faint rise and fall of breathing. It was a woman, collapsed on her side, dark hair spilling across her face. But I knew the khalat she was wearing, the colour of roses with stitching the same shade as overripe cherries. It was the same one she’d worn that day in the menagerie.
‘Ayet?’
‘It’s no good.’ Shira still had her back to us. ‘She doesn’t talk any more. She might as well be dead except she’s still breathing.’ Like Sayyida and Uzma. Driven mad. This was what Imin meant by saying that I didn’t need to worry about Ayet betraying me. Slowly Shira turned over, working her way to sitting with the help of the wall. ‘You wanted to know where girls disappear to.’ She waved one hand in a gesture so grand she might’ve been showing off a golden-domed palace. ‘This is where we go. I told you I had nothing to do with it.’ She dropped her arm; it fell limp to her side. ‘Good news is, only one of us has to die today.’
‘Shira—’
‘Don’t try to comfort me.’ Her tone was the same one she’d used when we shared a floor in Dustwalk, dripping with disdain. But she didn’t fool me that easy any more. She was a desperate girl. ‘And you,’ she shot at Imin, who was hovering behind me on the stairs, ‘you don’t have to watch us like that, you know. I’m already condemned to die. What else am I possibly going to get up to between now and sundown?’
Well, being condemned to death sure hadn’t made her any more polite. I thought about telling her that Imin was on our side. But that wasn’t what really mattered to Shira. I gave Imin the tiniest nod and he retreated back up the steps, out of earshot.
‘So.’ I slid down the wall next to the cell so we were sitting side by side. Seventeen years, I couldn’t think of a single time we’d sat together. Not in Dustwalk. Not in the harem. It’d been us facing off against each other every single time. Now we were sitting side by side with a row of steadfast iron bars between us. ‘You asked for me.’
‘Funny, isn’t it? The last person I ever want to see is the last person I get to see alive.’
‘You don’t have to explain, Shira.’ Half a year and I’d started realising every conversation I had with someone in the Rebellion might be our last. Sometimes it was. But it was harder to push that out of my head when I knew for sure that Shira was a dead woman. ‘Nobody wants to die alone.’
‘Oh, good God, don’t be so pathetic; it’s depressing.’ Shira rolled her eyes so far back I thought she might lose them inside her head. ‘There’s only one thing I want from you. Your rebel friends were here. They said—’ She swallowed hard, like she was trying to hide from me that she’d hoped, even just for a second, that this might not be the end. ‘They said they couldn’t get me out.’ A stab of guilt went through my heart. They could. But they were saving me over her. I was choosing my new family over my old. ‘But they said they would help Fadi.’ She opened her eyes, her fingers curling around the bars. ‘I didn’t become Sultima by trusting anyone and everyone. I want to hear it from you. You might not be much, but you’re still the only blood I’ve got here. Tell me my son is safe.’
‘Hala’s gotten him out of the palace.’ As the words spilled off my tongue I knew they were true. ‘We can protect him.’
A tension I hadn’t even realised was there fled her body as I spoke, a fear she’d been holding deep in her bones since the first time I’d seen her in the baths. Had she looked at me that day, my Demdji eyes, and understood that she was going to be done for on the day she gave birth? Before I knew the harem, I might’ve asked why she’d taken the risk of lying with anyone other than her husband. If she was really stupid and arrogant enough to think that she wouldn’t suffer the same fate as Ahmed and Delila’s mother. Of every other harem woman who had ever strayed into another man’s arms. But I’d seen enough since entering the harem to know there were other ways to die here. Ayet was proof of that.
‘Why didn’t you try to sell me out to the Sultan in exchange for your own life?’ It slipped out. I never believed anyone ever did anything that wasn’t for themselves before the Rebellion. And there were parts of me I couldn’t shake from before the Rebellion. The parts that kept me alive. ‘You know who I am. You knew your life was all but forfeit. If survival in the harem is one big game, why not play your last piece?’
I knew the look she gave me from days together in the Dustwalk schoolhouse. The one she saved if you said something particularly stupid in class. The one that made sure that you knew not just that you were stupid but that she was a whole lot smarter than you. ‘The Sultan doesn’t make trades. Everyone knows that. He hasn’t traded anything since he traded Miraji’s freedom for a throne. That’s a mistake you only make once. He takes instead. And he would’ve taken the knowledge of your treachery from me and then we would’ve both been dead. And I want one of us alive. I’d rather it be me, of course, but you’ll have to do.’ A slight smile appeared on her face at her own joke at death’s doors. But it was gone quickly. ‘When I’m gone I want you still around with your idiotic idealist rebellion to gut the Sultan and Kadir.’ The more she talked, the more her accent leaked out through the cracks. Our accent from the Last County. ‘I hate them and I hate what they did. And I almost succeeded in taking their throne, too.’
‘Wait.’ I cut her off before she could chase her own thoughts too far away from me. ‘What do you mean you almost took their throne?’
‘Fereshteh promised.’ She said it with the certainty of a child repeating something she truly believed. Who didn’t understand that promises were just words. But Fereshteh was a Djinni. If it was dangerous for Demdji to make promises, how bad was one from a real live Djinni? A thousand stories of Djinni promises granted in horrifying torturous ways tumbled towards the front of my mind.
‘I figured out that the harem was an unwinnable game, early on. The only real way to win is by becoming the mother not just to a prince but a Sultim. Only Kadir can’t sire any princes. And Fereshteh was just there, in the harem gardens one day. Like he’d stepped out of a story and into my life to save me. And he said that he could give me a son. And just like that I had a way to win the unwinnable game. To survive past Kadir losing interest in me in his bed and become the Sultima.’ Her eyes were far away. ‘And when I touched him he turned from fire to flesh. And he asked what I would wish for our child.’
‘What do you mean, what you wished?’ My mouth had gone dry.
Shira’s bloodshot eyes snapped open, like she’d been startled from the edge of drifting to sleep. ‘He said he could grant me a single wish for his child. Every Djinni can.’
‘Shira.’ I chose my words carefully. ‘You’ve heard the stories as well as I have. A wish from a Djinni—’