As we reached the end of the trail, a wagon rumbled past us, stacked with towers of crates bound together with water-stem rope. The smell of fresh aish baladi drifted from the main road as the kids threw loaves of the dense flatbread into baskets or onto the wooden lattices propped on their shoulders.
The warm scent of wheat tugged at my memory. How many mornings in Usr Jasad did I spend with crumbs on my clothes, burning my tongue on aish baladi hot from the palace ovens? The bread was more common in Jasad’s rural communities, but my mother had asked the bakers to prepare us two loaves each morning. So many of Jasad’s customs had been adopted by the other kingdoms. Jasad’s food, art, traditions—pretty spoils of war for the circling scavengers.
I turned away from the bakery. Jasad was gone. Mourning a kingdom I barely knew was a disservice to the life I had built.
“It’s my turn to pick up the fūl for breakfast,” Sefa said. “If I go home without it, Raya will mop the keep with my neck.”
“We don’t have the pot,” Marek said.
“Hamada is nice. He’ll let me borrow his extra pot.”
“Nice,” Marek repeated with derision. “Only oil, salt, and black pepper this time, all right? Nobody likes lemon on their fūl except you and Fairel.”
Sefa rolled her eyes. “I’ll ask for it plain so you can season it your way. Your wrong way, I might add.”
We stopped at the fūl cart. Hamada dismissed Marek and me with a glance, homing in on Sefa. While he poured the steaming beans out of a massive metal jug and into a lidded pot, I surveyed our surroundings. The shift change had happened twenty minutes ago. Even if they allowed the soldier a few minutes for tardiness, they would not have waited twenty minutes before calling in reinforcements. Dread swelled in my chest. Why did I come back? I should have left the soldier and kept running. I knew how to hide in the wilds of Essam. I had had a basket of food and a head start. I could have eventually found my way into the lower villages of Lukub or Orban and started over. What kind of simpleton was I to stumble back to the cage and hope they didn’t close the lock?
They would barricade any entry or exit within Mahair. Every home would be combed for Jasadis. Trade would halt. They might even cancel the waleema, one of the greatest sources of income for the village.
“Soldiers disappear frequently,” Marek murmured. I flinched, surprised to find him openly watching me. “They will not waste resources on a middling Omalian village until they are certain he was killed.”
“They have plenty of resources.”
“Not with the Alcalah only a few months away. They divert a massive retinue of soldiers into the woods to protect the Nizahl Heir while he searches for a Champion.”
I stared at Marek. I had the scars on my back to testify to the thoroughness of Hanim’s education. She had ensured I studied the dialects of each kingdom, the common language shared between them, their habits and history. Yet I had less than a cup’s worth of knowledge about the Nizahl Heir. Hanim hadn’t talked about him beyond telling me he’d kill me without losing his breath unless I made my magic work. Given her fervent hatred for my grandparents and Supreme Rawain, I imagined it stung to see the ways the Supreme succeeded where she had failed. He raised a warrior, and she… she raised the person who’d be spotted from a watchtower fleeing the battlefield with the other soldiers’ food.
Some of my regret subsided. If I’d gone running into the woods and encountered Arin of Nizahl, the question of my fate would have been instantly decided. Jasadis did not leave an encounter with the Nizahl Heir alive.
How did Marek know how many soldiers Nizahl diverted while its Heir chose his Champion for the Alcalah? My earlier suspicions returned with a vengeance. “You certainly seem familiar with Nizahlan customs.”
His raised eyebrow was pointed. “As do you.”
“You’re sure they will not raise the alarms unless they find a body?” I badly wanted to believe him.
“Sure enough.”
“Will one of you take a handle?” Sefa wheezed. Hamada had filled the pot to the brim with fūl. Sefa staggered, and some of the beans dribbled over the side. Marek and I snatched the handles, and we returned to the keep unscathed.
Raya shouted at us for ten minutes about the filthy state of our clothes. As soon as she finished, the three of us split up. Me to bathe, Sefa to help with breakfast, and Marek to change for a day of hard labor.
As I dragged the towel over my body, I wished I could rub the tension from my limbs through sheer force. I was strung tight in a way I hadn’t been since my first few months in Mahair. I wrapped my wet curls in linen pants, tying the ends at the nape of my neck. Not even dropping onto my bed helped me relax. Outside my door, a flurry of footsteps and conversation signaled the start of the new day.
The younger girls in the keep did not like me much. I lacked the gentle, nurturing touch that came so naturally to Sefa. Though I tried to be softer with them, I possessed the maternal instincts of a bloodthirsty cockroach. Yet for some unfathomable reason, I found their presence grounding whenever fear tightened its noose around me. Raya would rather die than let these children feel the pressure of the responsibilities she carried on their behalf. She made sure they were free to worry about urgent problems like who could claim the prettiest dress in the monthly donation carts or who could carry the biggest goat the farthest. These orphaned girls were as close to happy as their circumstances permitted.
“You shouldn’t hide the realities of the life they face outside this keep,” I’d said once, a few days after I turned sixteen. I’d been sharpening the kitchen knives by the fire while Raya counted her weekly earnings for the sixth time. “The more responsibilities you place on their shoulders, the better they will become at bearing them.”
She’d looked at me so long that I’d started to tense, tightening my grip on one of the knives. Dark circles hollowed the space under Raya’s eyes. “Children are not meant to bear the woes of this life, Sylvia. It breaks them. They will spend their adult lives doing everything in their power to never feel the weight of the world again.”
Exhaustion tugged at me. I hadn’t slept in two days, but each time I closed my eyes, I saw Nizahl soldiers riding into Mahair with swords and torches.
Any illusion of safety here had been shattered.
You are the Jasad Heir. Safety was not written for you, Hanim said.
I shoved my face into the hard pillow. I mentally recited the herbs I would pack for Rory and planned the best spot to set up our table for the waleema.
When nothing else worked, I resorted to a practice as old as the scars on my back. I pressed my cold palm against my heart and counted the beats.
One, two. I’m alive. Three, four. I’m safe. Five, six. I won’t let them catch me.