I offer my hand, but he scrambles away, his eyes wild and wary.
For a moment, he and I regard one another silently beneath the pulsing stars. His ragged breathing is laced with fatigue, but he is as tense as a cornered cat, ready to flee, waiting to see what I will do. My head is still spinning from the suddenness of what’s happened: the first human I’ve seen in five hundred years, the mad race to escape the collapsing ruins, the vastness of the desert after so many centuries confined to my lamp. I sway a little, taking a moment to sort out earth from sky.
“I cannot hurt you,” I say. My hands clench at my sides, and I force my fingers to open disarmingly. “The same magic that binds us together prevents me from harming you. Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Have you never seen a jinni before?”
The boy clears his throat, his eyes fixed on mine. “No, but I’ve heard stories of them.”
Turning my back to him, I look up at the stars. “Of course you have. Tales of ghuls, I’m sure, who devour souls and wear the skins of their prey. Of ifreet, all fire and flame and no brains at all. Or perhaps you mean the maarids, small and sweet, until they drown you in their pools.”
He nods slowly and climbs to his feet, brushing sand from his palms. “And the Shaitan, most powerful of all.”
A chill runs down my spine. “Ah, of course.”
“So are they true? All these stories?”
Turning to face him, I pause before replying. “As the poets say, stories are truth told through lies.”
“So are you going to devour my soul?” he asks, as if it is a challenge. “Or drown me? What sort of jinni are you?”
With a curl of smoke, I shift into a white tiger and crouch before him, my tail flicking back and forth. He watches in amazement, recoiling a bit at the sight of my golden eyes and extended claws.
“What are you?” he whispers.
Should I tell him what—who—I really am? That even now, legions of angry jinn—ghuls, maarids, a dozen other horrors—could be racing toward us? If he has any wits about him, he’ll abandon my lamp and put as many leagues between us as he can . . . which would leave me completely helpless. At least while he holds the lamp, I have a fighting chance.
“How did you find me?” I ask. So many centuries, and this hapless young man is the only one to have found my prison. After that final battle, after you fell, Habiba, my kin threw me into the garden I had created for you. Sit in the dark and rot, traitor, they said. And for so many years, I was certain that would be my fate. But then, surpassing all hope, the boy appeared.
“I’m from Parthenia.” At my blank expression, he adds, “Two weeks by horseback, to the west. On the coast. As for how I found you . . . I was led here. By this.”
He pulls from his finger the ring he’d been twisting earlier. He holds it out on his palm, and after a slight hesitation, I pick it up. A tingle in my fingers tells me the ring was forged in magic. There is something familiar about it, but I am certain I have never seen it before. The band is plain gold but for the symbols carved into the inside, symbols that have been blurred by time and fire.
“And you say it led you to me?” I straighten and stare hard at him.
He takes the ring from my palm. “When I . . . um, found it, it began whispering to me. I know it sounds insane, but I couldn’t get it to stop. Even when I took it off and tried to throw it away, I kept hearing it. So I thought, why not see what it wanted?”
“What did it say?”
“It wasn’t so much words . . .” He closes his hand around the ring, looking haunted. “I just knew it wanted me to follow it, that it would lead me to something important. I didn’t know what. Only that I had to find out, like it’d put a spell on me or something. When I found your lamp, it went silent for the first time in weeks, so I guess . . . it was leading me to you.”
I wonder if he is truly as na?ve as he seems. Perhaps he is a simple pauper who stumbled across an ancient and powerful talisman without understanding its true worth. The ring is enchanted, meant to lead the bearer to me. But who created it? It is very old, likely made around the time I was abandoned by my kin in the jeweled garden five hundred years ago. Why hasn’t it been used until now, and why by such an unlikely individual?
“So you followed a magic ring all the way to Neruby, just out of curiosity?”
“Well,” he says gruffly, glancing aside, “it’s not as simple as that. Let’s just say I’m not the only one interested in the ring. I knew it would lead to something valuable, and finding valuables happens to be my . . .” His voice fades and his eyes grow wide. “Wait a minute. What did you say?”
I frown. “I said it’s strange that mere curiosity—”
“No, not that. You said this city was called Neruby.”
“Of course,” I reply.
He sucks in a breath, taking a half step backward, and he scans me head to toe as if just seeing me for the first time. When he next speaks, his voice is tight, excited, breathless.