Imad’s words wafted through her mind like poisonous smoke. It’s no wonder he lives! Do you know what he is, girl?
“I don’t know.” She could barely say the words over the knot in her throat.
A tangled web of memories unfurled in her mind: Qadir, confessing he could not return home. Imad, speaking of a relic so valuable any who saw it were ordered dead—a jinn king’s relic. She remembered the hunger in his eyes as the ruins collapsed. The way his voice had trembled as he approached her and Qadir. You. It was you we were looking for.
Her mother had told her stories about the seven jinn kings, who had power enough to sink their world. Ifrit, Qadir called them. But that was a word for terrible, fearsome jinn. For the creature that had revived Aisha with twisted dark magic. For the legendary jinn in the lamp.
Not Qadir.
She pulled her hand away. Qadir’s eyes dimmed. “Loulie…” He looked as if he were about to reach for her again when he turned, eyes narrowed.
Aisha bint Louas leaned against the cave entrance, arms folded over her chest, one ankle crossed over the other as she surveyed them with a catlike smile Loulie knew was not her own. The look made her heart thud nervously. She had barely trusted the thief when she was just herself. Now that she was hosting a deadly jinn, she trusted her even less.
But Qadir seemed unconcerned. “I see you made your deal.”
Aisha clicked her tongue. “You is not my name. Can you say ‘Aisha’?”
“My gods.” These words were spoken by Prince Mazen, who stepped into the cave, holding a bloody hare by its feet. He stared between them, bug-eyed. “How are you alive?”
Qadir frowned. “Who’s asking? Prince Mazen, or is this another disguise?”
The prince at least had the decency to blush. Loulie wanted to punch his embarrassed face. For so long, her anger at him had been muted by her grief. But now it was back, sparking inside her like an unruly flame. The first time he had lied about his identity, she had sympathized with his plight. Evidently, that meant nothing to him.
Aisha scoffed. “How delightful that we’ve all been keeping secrets.” She grabbed the hare from Mazen, strode over to the fire, and began to skin it with some shard she’d apparently acquired in the desert. “Perhaps we should have a heart-to-heart?”
No one spoke into the silence that followed. Loulie knew she should try to take charge. She was the Midnight Merchant, after all. She was—useless. The realization hit again, so hard it made her shudder. It was true. What was she without her relics? Without Qadir?
It was Qadir who at last broke the silence. Not with a word, but with a sigh that made the fire in front of them waver. “Fine.” He gestured, and the campfire rose, twisting and stretching until it morphed into a marvelous landscape of shining minarets and domed buildings. “Let us speak of lies and truths, and of the story hidden between them.”
And so he told them the tale of the seven jinn kings, but his version was different from the human tale. In Qadir’s story, the jinn kings were not a nameless group of villains; they were a collective of jinn so powerful they were given their own name. Ifrit: beings of fire whose magic so defied the natural order, it was feared even amongst jinn.
He swept his fingers through the fiery mirage of the city, and it re-formed beneath his fingers, separating into seven figures. “The ifrit were different from normal jinn in that they could learn multiple magics, not just the one they were born with. They were named, however, for the affinity they specialized in.”
He reached for the nearest fiery silhouette and altered its shape, morphing it into a large, flaming bird with many tails. “The Shapeshifter,” Qadir said.
He touched the second figure, which hopped and spun through the air. “The Dancer.”
The third figure perched itself on a flying rug and held up a skull. “The Resurrectionist.”
Loulie glanced at Aisha, who caught her gaze and looked away, brow furrowed.
“So you are the Queen of Dunes,” the prince mumbled.
“Stop calling me that,” Aisha said sharply. “The jinn may speak through me, but only when I grant her permission. I am still myself.”
Qadir pointedly cleared his throat as he reached for the fourth figure, which swam through the air with angled limbs. “The Tide Bringer,” he said.
The fifth figure clasped its hands in prayer. “The Mystic.”
The sixth figure pressed its hands to the ground. Flaming trees shot up in a circle around its hunched form. “The Wanderer.”
Then Qadir drew his fingers through the last form. He crafted a turban made of smoke for its head and a cloak of blue fire for its back. The figure strode around their campfire like a sentinel, its blue cape billowing soundlessly on a nonexistent wind. “The Inferno,” he said softly.
The prince made a sound of awe. Loulie said nothing. She felt Qadir’s gaze on her. She knew what the look on his face would convey even without seeing it: I’m sorry I never told you.
A storm of emotions rose inside of her, a thicket so thorny she could barely discern one virulent feeling from another. Every time she tried to focus, her concentration fractured and she remembered the pain in her legs. She had never felt so broken before. So bone-deep tired.
When she said nothing, Qadir returned his gaze to the fire. He shaped it once more—this time into eight forms. He set one on a throne and had the others kneel before it.
“The ifrit served a king who ruled from his throne in Dhahab. They were both his warriors and his advisors and were sworn to protect their country. For hundreds of years, there was peace.” He stared for a long time at the flickering image of the bowed jinn. Then he sighed, and the fire lost its shape. Loulie was startled to see beads of ash on his face. His chest rattled every time he breathed. It is no simple thing, re-forming a body so badly damaged.
“In the legends…” The prince paused, color coming into his cheeks, as if he were aware of how strange it was to refer to history as myth. “In the legends, the seven kings brought the wrath of the gods down on them. They buried the jinn world beneath the Sandsea.”
Aisha laughed, a soft chuckle that seemed misplaced coming from her slanted lips. “Gods? There were no gods—only you humans.”
Even Loulie looked up at this, but Aisha—or the Resurrectionist, whoever the hell she was in the moment—only stared forlornly into the fire. “One day, humans came to our lands. We thought them harmless creatures. An incompetent, magicless people. Our king was curious, so he welcomed them into our city.”
“It was ill advised,” Qadir murmured. He spoke lightly, as if he’d lost the strength to project his voice. “When they found out our blood could heal and that our relics could be wielded as weapons, they came after us with iron swords and spears.”
“They were relentless,” Aisha said. “We could not destroy all of them, so…”
Qadir turned away. “We ran from them. We disobeyed our king and buried our country deep beneath the sand so that no human could ever reach us.”
The weight of those words settled slowly. To sink a landscape of ruins was one thing. To make an entire country disappear was another. Loulie crossed her arms and swallowed. She imagined falling forever, imagined her home and her loved ones suffocating beneath the sand.
“They made us suffer for our betrayal,” Qadir murmured.
Loulie glanced at the faded scars running up his arms. My shame was carved into me with a knife so that I would not forget it. I deserved it.
“Those of us who didn’t want to suffer fled to the human world,” Aisha said. She held up the hairless rabbit and, after a significant pause, threw it into the fire. The prince made a sound of protest that quickly collapsed into a gasp, for the fire did not burn the hare; it cooked it. “Of course, all of us suffered in the end.”
A sullen but short-lived quiet permeated the cave before the prince cleared his throat and said, “In our legends, they call you the Queen of Dunes. They say—”