After assuring myself of the road’s emptiness, I picked up the basket and resumed walking. A wagon’s wheels had gouged enormous tracks. I walked inside its tread, hiding my footprints within the unsettled dirt. A silly precaution, given Mahair’s rigid sleep schedule. Very few homes or businesses bothered to invest in outdoor lanterns, and if they did, they used the kind shaped like a shell and filled with just enough oil to illuminate their immediate surroundings. The sole lantern on this entire road hung from a balcony six buildings down.
What I remembered of my childhood in Jasad wouldn’t fill a poor man’s pocket, but I knew we were a night people. Just as no two villages in Omal were alike, every wilayah in Jasad kept slightly different customs. In the evenings, daughters of wealthy families relinquished their finery for their street clothes and chased each other for miles. Men gathered for tea and table games, their laughter and good-natured shouts audible throughout the street. And in every wilayah, magic swept the air. It animated the sky, rumbled in the ground. I was born to a place where magic meant joy. Celebration and safety.
Lost in thought, I crossed the street. A prickly pear fell from beneath the blanket I’d tossed over the basket. “Dania’s bloody axe,” I swore, scooping up the vengeful fruit with the bottom of my tunic. The sesame-seed candies had added to the volume of this week’s emergency supplies. Why did I even put them in the basket? As though I’d be in the mood for sweets if the need to flee Mahair arose. I pictured myself indulging in a little treat while I hid in a ravine full of the ashes of the dead.
A disintegrating wall of mud-and-straw brick barricaded Mahair from the woods. I gingerly felt along a cornerstone. Plumes of dust exploded from the pressure. Awaleen be damned, but I hated this village sometimes.
The wall was a relic of days past, when monsters crawled between the borders of the kingdoms, feeding on the traces of magic scattered between the trees. Terrible creatures with horns longer than my arm and tails like a polished sword. More thoughtful monsters, with lovely faces and a beckoning hand, drawing you sweetly to your bloody end. Magic had permeated Essam for most of its existence, and where magic settled, monsters spawned.
A wall would hardly have deterred the monsters if they wanted to enter the village, but I suppose its presence gave Mahair some measure of peace. I rubbed the dust covering the words etched into the limestone:
May we lead the lives our ancestors were denied.
My grandmother had told me the monsters were already dying out when Nizahl descended on the woods in powerful, crushing waves thirty-three years ago. The siege was long and deadly. Monsters had fled into villages on the outskirts of the woods, slaughtering entire populations.
I pressed close to the wall and kept moving. The purging of monsters was not the first piece of Nizahl’s campaign against magic, but it was certainly the most effective. To the other kingdoms, they were burying their dead not as a consequence of the former Supreme’s poorly planned siege but because of magic. Magic made monsters, and monsters killed without discrimination.
It was the first real stroke of doom over Jasad’s image.
I peeled myself from the wall to squeeze past the stacks of straw blocking the path. Children tended to get sneaky maneuvering into Essam, so random blockades had been erected around the village to pen them in.
A donkey lazily twitched a fly from its ear, flaring giant nostrils at my appearance. Finally! I exhaled at the sight of a crack in the rows of brick. I preferred to use the wall behind the vagrant road, but the encounter with the Nizahl soldier had unnerved me. At this hour, the patrol was harder to shake than fleas on a dog. The hole barely fit my basket, but it would squeeze me into the woods without needing to risk the main trail.
The donkey brayed, irritated with my prolonged presence. My heart somersaulted into my throat, and I hurriedly shoved my basket through the crack. Someone might stick their head outside to check for intruders and see me skulking on their grounds.
This was the excuse I gave myself for nearly rending my arm from my body to get through the hole. It had nothing to do with the old Jasadi superstition that donkeys brayed at the sight of evil spirits. Absolutely nothing.
I grabbed the basket and continued into the woods. I sidestepped the twigs and mud puddles, barely avoiding walking headlong into a tree. I despised making the monthly trip to the ravine, burdened with the food I judged least likely to perish in the dank underbrush. Especially during winter, when the wind carried out its personal vendetta against my thin cloak.
I reached the row of trees marked with the Nizahl raven. It was against the rules to cross the line without explicit permission. Nobody sane would risk trespassing and giving the bored and bloodthirsty soldiers an excuse to cut them down.
The raven stared at me. Discomfort trickled in my belly. I was suddenly acutely aware of the silence of the woods. The impenetrable darkness.
If I hadn’t spent five years of my life living in these woods, I might have turned around and run straight back to Mahair.
“You think you are the most frightening creature in these woods, but you’re not,” I said to the raven. “I am.”
Tightening my grip on the basket, I crossed the line of Nizahl-marked trees and continued walking. This trip—and my trespass—was necessary. I lived against the will of those who would see me dead for the magic in my veins. Never mind that my veins were the only place my magic existed. The cuffs meant I could not so much as squash a mosquito with my powers, let alone use it to defend myself.
I glanced at my wrists. The cuffs glimmered an overly smug silver.
When I took a step around a patch of wet moss, my foot failed to land. A shriek rose and died at my lips as the ground gave way.
“Ugh.” I lifted my dripping sandal out of the mud. The ravine was still another three miles ahead. Sighing, I moved the basket to my other arm. I would have to hurry if I wanted to get back before Raya did her morning bed checks.
As I walked deeper in the woods, my muscles began to relax. The lines in my brow and the tight curl of my lips eased. These woods… they knew me as I knew them. The branches overhead seemed to wave in greeting. A gang of white lizards scuttled over my foot and up the side of a tree. The slight smell of rot lingered in the mist, underscoring the warmer notes of wood and dew.
I hummed a jaunty Lukubi tune I’d overheard in the duqan and reviewed my tasks for the next day. Preparations for the waleema had spun Mahair into a frenzy. Celebrating the Alcalah was no small affair. I shuddered, thinking of the influx of strangers that flooded the village during the last waleema three years ago. Restraint alone had prevented me from running into the woods until it ended.
A splash caught my ankle as a sesame-seed candy tumbled out of the basket and into a puddle. Kapastra’s twisted horns, these candies were a curse. I bent down, wrinkling my nose against the scent of excrement and rain. Maybe I could leave the flies to enjoy this one.
I straightened, reaching for the basket—and found myself face-to-face with the Nizahl soldier from Zeinab’s street.
My heart slowed. Each beat thundered in my ears.