Her wariness taking shape in the gloom, she tucked the dagger into her waistband, then stretched to her feet. Every muscle in her body ached from days of hard travel and nights of poor sleep.
Three nights of worry. Three nights spent fleeing a city set to flame. An endless fount of questions without answers. Those three long nights of worry for her father, whose battered body had yet to recover from whatever damage it had incurred on the hilltops outside Rey.
Shahrzad took a deep breath.
The air here was strange. Drier. Crisp. Soft bars of light slanted through the tent seams. A thin layer of fine silt clung to everything. It made her tiny world appear as though it were fashioned of diamond-dusted darkness.
On one side of the tent was a small table with a porcelain pitcher and a copper basin. Shahrzad’s meager belongings were perched beside it, wrapped in the threadbare carpet given to her by Musa Zaragoza several months ago. She knelt before the table and filled the basin with water for washing.
The water was tepid, but clean. Her reflection looked strangely calm as it stared back at her.
Calm yet distorted.
The face of a girl who had lost everything and nothing in the stretch of a single night.
She slipped both hands into the water. Her skin looked pale and creamy below its surface. Not its usual warm bronze color. She fixed her gaze on the place where the water met the air, on the strange bend that made it seem as though her hands were in a different world beneath the water—
A world that moved more slowly and told stories.
The water lies.
She splashed some water onto her face and dragged her damp fingers through her hair. Then she lifted the lid from the small wooden container nearby and used a pinch of the ground mint, white pepper, and crushed rock salt stored within to cleanse her mouth of sleep.
“You’re awake. After you arrived so late last night, I didn’t think you would rise so early.”
Shahrzad turned to see Irsa standing beneath the open tent flap. A triangle of desert light silhouetted her sister’s slender frame.
Irsa smiled, her gamine features coming into focus. “You never used to wake for breakfast before.” She ducked into the tent, securing the tent flap closed behind her.
“Who can sleep with that damnable goat shrieking outside?” Shahrzad flicked water at Irsa to divert her inevitable onslaught of questions.
“You mean Farbod?”
“You’ve named the little beast?” Shahrzad grinned as she began plaiting the tangled waves of her hair into a braid.
“He’s quite sweet.” Irsa frowned. “You should give him a chance.”
“Please tell Farbod that—should he persist in his early morning recitals—my favorite meal is stewed goat, served in a sauce of pomegranates and crushed walnuts.”
“Ha!” Irsa took a long stretch of twine from the pocket of her wrinkled sirwal trowsers. “I suppose we shouldn’t forget we’re now in the presence of royalty.” She bound the length of twine around the end of Shahrzad’s braid. “I’ll warn Farbod not to further offend Khorasan’s illustrious calipha.”
Shahrzad glanced over her shoulder into Irsa’s pale eyes.
“You’ve gotten so tall,” she said quietly. “When did you get so tall?”
Irsa wrapped both arms around her sister’s waist. “I’ve missed you.” Her fingertips grazed the hilt of the dagger, and she pulled back in alarm. “Why are you carrying—”
“Is Baba awake yet?” Shahrzad smiled overbrightly. “Can you take me to see him?”
The night of the storm, Shahrzad had ridden with Tariq and Rahim to a hilltop outside Rey, in search of her father.
She’d been unprepared for what they’d found.
Jahandar al-Khayzuran had been curled in a puddle around an old, leather-bound book.
His bare feet and hands were burned. Red and raw and abraded. His hair was falling out in clumps. The rain had gathered them in the mud, smashing the strands against wet stone, like so many discarded things.
Her sister’s dappled horse was long-since dead. Its throat had been slashed. The blood had drained in rivulets from a vicious wound at its neck. Veins of mud and drifting ash had melded with the crimson to form a sinister tracery across the hillside.
Shahrzad would never forget the image of her father’s huddled body against the red-and-grey slope.
When she’d tried to pry Jahandar’s fingers away from the book, he’d cried out in a language she’d never heard him speak before. His eyes had rolled back into his head, and his lashes had fluttered closed, never to open again, not once in the four days since.
And until they did, Shahrzad refused to leave him.
She had to know her father was safe. She had to know what he had done.
No matter what—or whom—she’d left behind in Rey.
“Baba?” Shahrzad said softly, as she knelt beside him in his small tent.
He shuddered in his sleep, his fingers wrapping tighter around the ancient tome clutched in his arms. Even in his delirium, Jahandar had refused to relinquish the book. Not a soul had been permitted to touch it.