Izz was writhing in the air, high above us, thrashing amid flames. A lit arrow had caught his left wing. It was burning a violent mix of blue and red flames as his feathers ignited.
He screamed and plummeted his way towards the water to extinguish himself, trailing smoke behind him in a black train.
Cries went up around me. From somewhere a few streets away, Maz shot into the air after his twin, shifting shapes frantically, from kestrel to Roc to sparrow, looking for the place where Izz had landed. For a way to help his brother.
Suddenly it was as if I were watching it all from far away. As if only half of me was standing on the battlefield and another half of me was standing in a green palace garden on a warm day, a lake full of birds in front of me, pulling back an arrow to strike one down.
Except that I wasn’t the one holding the bow now.
I tracked the arc that the arrow must have come from. I was a good shot. I would find it. And sure enough, there he was.
I saw the Sultan before he saw me. He was standing atop the wall, armoured and dressed in uniform. I drew my gun and took aim. I knew it was impossible that he heard the click of my pistol, but his head turned my way. His gaze was hot, his stance cool. His head tilted ever so slightly as he drew his bow back, aiming for me now. His throat was just a little exposed.
I could make that shot. I dropped my pistol, gathering the sand to me instead.
I pulled my power backwards, like a bullet in a gun. Like I had just one bullet left and everything riding on it back in the pistol pit in Dustwalk.
I saw his hand tense to release the arrow even as the sand flew from my hand, heading for exposed skin, tearing towards my target with all the force of the desert behind it.
I was a good shot.
I didn’t tend to miss.
Chapter 47
The Rule of the Good Prince Ahmed
Once, in the desert country of Miraji, there was a prince who took his father’s throne.
Many people told many stories of that day.
They said that the Rebel Prince Ahmed fought a glorious battle against a cowardly opponent, his father, who hid behind his walls and let his soldiers fall in waves. They said that such was the Sultan’s cruelty the people turned on him as well. And that when the Sultan fell, his armies laid down their weapons at the prince’s feet and surrendered to their new ruler’s mercy gratefully.
They said that when the Rebel Prince Ahmed entered Izman, flowers rained from the windows, thrown by jubilant people grateful to be freed. His Demdji sister, Delila, who had begun this fight with her birth, blew kisses to the men as they passed, happy to at last be returning home to the palace she had been forced to flee. And the Blue-Eyed Bandit caught the flowers, weaving them into a crown for her prince as they advanced towards the palace.
But those were stories. They would never tell the truth of what I remembered of that day.
I remembered carnage on the streets, not carnations. The confusion after the Sultan fell, as men continued to fight. Good men, not wicked. Men who were just following orders given to them by a dead ruler. Men whose families would pour from their houses later to weep over their bodies. I knew how the Sultan fell, because I killed him, and I would have nightmares about that for months afterwards. And sometimes his face would change to Hala’s. Sometimes to Shira’s. Or Sam’s.
But the storytellers would never know that. No one would know that except for Jin, who would wake in the night when I did, ready to fight until he realised that the threat was in my mind and he couldn’t defend me from it.
Even if people had known the truth, they wouldn’t have been interested in telling it. Flowers pouring from windows like falling stars made a better tale.
The stories would never tell that after the Sultan fell, as we crossed the city, we were reminded of the cost of war with every single body. That as I pushed my way through the streets, I found Samir, a bullet through his chest. A kid from Dustwalk, like me, who’d joined us in Sazi. It didn’t matter how well we had trained him. War took lives and changed the ones that were left behind.
The stories would remember that Izz survived his fall at the Sultan’s hands but not that his mangled, burned wing would turn to a mangled arm that would never fully heal, no matter what shape he took. He had a limp when he was on all fours, and his wing flapped hopelessly when he tried the shape of a bird. Maz stopped shifting into creatures that could fly altogether, because he didn’t want to go somewhere his brother couldn’t follow.
I remembered how thick the air was with the smoke from funeral pyres that night. We burned as many bodies as we could. And we burned four empty pyres, too.
The first one was for Sam. There was nothing left of him to burn, though we tore up the tiles of the palace looking all the same. But it was only ashes and collapsed Abdal bodies down there. If I hadn’t known better I might’ve thought he’d just slipped away through a wall after all, run off to some other adventure. Captain Westcroft told me that in Albis they believed that when you died and were buried, your body blossomed into a tree or a field of flowers. A new life. So we covered Sam’s funeral pyre in flowers, cut from the vines in the harem. The same kind Sam had plucked the first night I met him.
We set a ring on Hala’s empty pyre, gold for our lost golden girl.
For our Demdji of a thousand faces, we used one of Shazad’s khalats that Imin had liked to borrow.
A crown for Shira, our dead Sultima.
Bodies long lost because they died in the war, not this battle. Other ones. But we finally had the time to mourn them now that it was over.
*
We burned the Sultan, too, and his sons stood next to the pyre as they ought to do. Even if they were the reason he was dead. But that was the way. We were mortal. Sons were always meant to replace their fathers.
The pyres burned until the moon wasn’t visible through the smoke.
I remembered finally collapsing into a bed that was familiar because I had slept in it when I was a prisoner of the harem. I didn’t know where else to go in the huge empty palace we had conquered. I woke to the noise of the pillow moving under a new weight as Jin came and lay down. I shifted just enough to let his arms curl around me and pull me to him.
‘No men allowed in the harem,’ I remembered mumbling half-asleep into his shoulder as he tried to get comfortable. When he laughed, I felt it through my whole body, and the joy at still being alive swelled so quickly through me all at once that I thought I might shatter.
‘I think they make an exception for princes,’ he said into my ear before kissing me.
I remembered noticing that we were both still wearing our weapons and wondering how long it would take for the fight to really leave us, even now that we had won.