Jin and I were on his back and off the ground with one powerful wingbeat, carrying us high over the rooftops of Izman. Shots punctured the night behind us. They had a clear aim without the cover of the sandstorm. But Izz dodged expertly, moving too quickly to be a target. As we rose I could see Izman spreading out below us like a map, houses dotted with tiny pinpricks of light at the windows among dark streets. And just beyond the rambling walls and roofs was the sea, looking pink with the dawn. We were almost out of range. Even through the blinding pain I could tell. Almost. Just a little higher, just a little further, and we’d be out and gone and Izz could drop me and Jin somewhere safe and go back for the others.
I didn’t hear the gunshot that hit us. But I felt it. In the sudden jerking motion of Izz’s body as iron punctured his skin. In the scream that erupted from him. In a blur of pain, I realised they’d hit his wing. Jin’s arms tightened around me.
For a moment I was back in the harem, looking out over the water with the Sultan at my side, bow drawn as I took aim for the birds. The moment my arrow went through my kill. Watching it plummet to the ground and we were falling, too.
Izz was fighting not to plunge us back into the camp. To carry us further away. To get us out. The Sultan couldn’t capture another Demdji. I could feel the iron biting into him, and the pain hobbling his injured wing.
A last few frantic wingbeats carried us forward, the wind grabbing at us. And then we burst free of the city, of the roofs and streets and the walls that would shatter us when we crashed. We were out over the sea, a sheer drop of a cliff face from the city into the water.
We were falling. Izz’s body flipped, spilling us out as he screamed in agony, frantically beating his wings. Jin’s grip left my waist.
I had just a moment to catch sight of the water below as I slipped from his back, plunging towards it.
I didn’t even feel it when the water swallowed me whole.
Chapter 48
I’d never understood drowning.
I was a desert girl. The sea was made of sand where I was from. And that obeyed me. This. This was an attack.
Water invaded every part of me. Rushing to swallow my body hungrily. Rushing into my nose and my mouth. I was suffocating and the world was narrowed to black. Turned out I was good at drowning for a desert girl.
And then I was surging out of the depths of the water; air hit my face. Something slammed into my lungs. Light burst across my vision. It bloomed then faded to black. And then again. Pain and light wracking through me. Battling for my body.
And then stars. Stars above me. And a mouth was on mine.
I wasn’t dying. This was one of Hala’s illusions. Except it wasn’t. Jin hovered above me. I saw the lines of his face, etched in the predawn light as the pain slammed into my lungs again. Burning. Burning.
I was a Djinni’s daughter. Burning was what I did.
And then the stars vanished and I was staring at the ground and the sight of bile and water spilling out across sand. Expelled from my lungs as I vomited half the sea out. Even after it was all gone I was on my hands and knees retching violently.
I felt a gentle hand on my back. ‘Remind me to teach you how to swim sometime.’ The joke sounded strained. But I laughed anyway. It turned into more coughing as I knelt doubled over, shaking, trying to put myself back together.
The shadow of Izman, set high on the cliff above, loomed over us. It was an awfully long fall. I saw the pain written across Jin’s face, his hair sticking to his brow. I pushed a piece away. My heart was slowing. The chaos of the fight. Of surviving. Some of the pain in my side had subsided.
It was quiet and calm here on the shore as the sun rose. Just for a moment. But the stars were glaring down accusation at me. And I had to let the rest of the world back in eventually.
‘Izz?’ I asked. I didn’t see a giant blue Roc anywhere. He’d been hit by a bullet. He wouldn’t be able to shift again with that in him.
‘I’m not sure.’ Jin shook his head. ‘We got lucky; we fell and hit the water. Izz didn’t fall with us. By the time I’d surfaced with you, I’d lost sight of him.’ The water lapped innocently at our bodies, but out there it was a churning mass that’d swallow you whole.
‘And the others?’
Jin shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Sam got some out. I saw others fall. I lost track of Ahmed and my sister in the fighting and then you dropped.’ He sat back. He was shaking. ‘So this is what you didn’t want me to know about.’
I reached for the sand in my mind, but I could feel the stabbing sensation where my old wound was and I stopped. I might have the iron out of my skin, but it wasn’t so easy to shift back. I sank my fingers into the waterlogged sand under myself and forced my heartbeat to slow. ‘Ahmed is alive.’ It fell off my tongue easily. The truth. ‘Shazad is alive.’ The names tumbled off my tongue one after the other. Delila, Imin, Hala, Izz, Maz, Sam, Rahim. Our people were still alive.
‘Anyone who made it out will head for the Hidden House.’ Jin pushed his soaked hair back off his face as he stood up, reaching down for me. ‘We need to get back there; it’ll be safe—’
‘Maybe not for long.’ I took Jin’s hand, letting him help me to my feet. I was still unsteady from how I’d stopped breathing for a bit. ‘It just takes one person to talk.’
It was painfully slow going to get back up the cliffs to the city. As the sun worked across the sky, we waded where the water was shallow enough. Jin swam some of it with me hanging on to his shoulders until finally we found a place where the ground up to the city sloped enough to climb. The sun was high over us by then and still we did not move quickly. Jin caught me when I stumbled, but a few times we still had to stop to rest. For me to catch my breath as the pain in my side throbbed. We finally found flat ground just outside the city walls. We were far from alone. A crush of people were fighting their way in through the gates.
Someone shoved by me, jostling me back into Jin, who steadied me.
‘Hey.’ Jin caught a man by the shoulder. The man turned, clearly spoiling for a fight. He backed down when he caught sight of Jin, who had the look of knowing how to kill a man and being half-desperate, too. ‘What’s going on?’
‘The Rebel Prince,’ the man said. My heart jumped at the mention of Ahmed. ‘The Rebel Prince has been captured. He’s going to be executed on the palace steps.’
‘When?’ I shoved forward; I couldn’t keep it in any more. The man’s eyes swept me disdainfully, from my dishevelled hair to my clothes dried stiff with seawater against my body. He might not want to mouth off to Jin, but I wasn’t half so intimidating as my foreign prince.
‘Answer her,’ Jin pressed.
‘Sundown,’ the man said, shaking Jin’s hand off, already pushing towards the crowd. ‘He’s lifting the curfew for one night for it. And if you don’t let me go I’m going to miss it.’
Jin and I traded a glance before our gazes went to the horizon, across the sea.
The sky was already darkening.
Chapter 49
The Rebel Prince
When men and women on long desert roads sat around campfires, where only the stars could see them, they told the tale of the Rebel Prince as best they knew it. And they told the truth as best they could. But not all of it. Never all of it.
When they told of his days in the harem, they never told of his brother the Foreign Prince, born under the same stars. They told of the night his half-Djinni sister was born, but they never knew of the young woman who risked her own life to take three children away to safety as the Rebel Prince’s mother died. And when they told of the Sultim trials, they left out the general’s beautiful daughter who trained him and fought beside him until he was ready to face the challenge.
In years to come in the desert, when the caravans warded against the fear of the night with stories of great men, they would tell of the day that the people of Izman gathered at dusk in the thousands to get their first glimpse of the Rebel Prince since the Sultim trials, as he stood on an executioner’s stage. Waiting for the axe to fall.
The stories would never tell that the Rebel Prince was not the only captive of the Sultan on that day. They would never know that he could have escaped capture had he not made so many of his people escape before him. They would never tell that he had laid down his weapons and surrendered himself to his father in order to save those others who were left behind.