فصل 19

nineteen

Dark fell in the oasis earlier than I thought it would. I hadn’t noticed when we’d been crossing the desert, but now it struck me that Shihabian really must be close. At twilight, the colorful world turned to a softer version of itself. Campfires burned among the trees. Each was surrounded by a little pocket of people, sharing food, laughing. I thought of Dustwalk at dinnertime. Everybody shut up inside their houses, jealously guarding every scrap they had. Here the food was laid out on a big carpet in the middle of the camp, with a stack of mismatched plates.

Shazad and I sat down by one of the small fires. Shazad helped herself to two plates, piling flatbread and fruit on one and handing it to me.

“Where do all these people come from?” I asked Shazad in between bites. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I started eating.

Shazad looked around at the hundred or so rebels, as if the question surprised her. “A little bit of everywhere. There were only a dozen of us when we fled Izman after the Sultim trials. But in the last year, the cause has gotten bigger. More people have joined. A few were turned out of their houses or arrested for supporting Ahmed a little too loudly. Some we broke out of prison. Farrouk and Fazia are orphans from Izman.” She gestured to the pair I’d seen tinkering with the bomb that morning, now building some kind of structure out of bread. “We hired them to make an explosive device on a mission a few months back and the Sultan’s army identified them, so they’re refugees now. Fairly useful to have around, although I worry one day they’ll blow this whole place sky-high.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“I’m a girl who could’ve done just about anything if I’d been born a boy.” Shazad took a bite of her food. “But I was born a girl, so I’m doing this. My mother thinks it’s an elaborate stall tactic to avoid getting married.” I’d seen Shazad kill a Skinwalker. Watched her that afternoon run a dozen of the rebels through sword drills with the kind of command that could march a whole army across the desert. If she couldn’t carve out a place for herself in Izman, what hope was I going to have?

“She’s too modest.” Bahi dropped down next to Shazad by the fire, folding his legs over the pillow. He was balancing a plate on his knees. “Shazad was born to greatness. Her father is General Hamad.”

I gave them both a blank look.

“He’s been the Sultan’s chief general for two decades,” Bahi bragged for her. “He had a strong daughter and a weak son. Being a man of unconventional strategies, he trained his daughter to follow in his footsteps.”

“My brother’s not weak, he’s sick,” Shazad said.

“Most people,” Bahi said with a bold smile that was all teeth and no humor, “would have killed their son trying to turn him strong. Like my father tried to do with me.”

Shazad saved me from having to answer. “Bahi’s father is a captain in the army. He reports to my father, which is why Bahi and I have known each other since we were six years old.”

“And we’ve been friends that long because I’m so charming,” Bahi said.

“You’re marginally less of an ass than the rest of your brothers,” Shazad conceded. “Captain Reza”—there was scorn in Shazad’s tone and Bahi snapped a fake salute—“has six sons, so he thought he could spare a few. Much as he enjoyed gloating to his superior officer that he has six strong sons, where my father had only one.”

“And you,” I said.

“Captain Reza never counted me.”

“His mistake,” Bahi put in.

“Does your father know . . .” I wasn’t sure how to put it. “That you’re turning against him?” I probably shouldn’t have put it like that.

“I’m not against my father.” Shazad smiled fondly. “I’m against the Sultan. My father turned against him a while ago, too. He’s the one who told us about the rumors of the weapon being made down in the Last County. So highly secretive, the Sultan didn’t even tell him—but he has other ways of obtaining information.”

That made me sit up. Rumor in Dustwalk was that Ahmed’s rebellion was just a band of idealistic fools in the desert. But the rebels had had enough of a hold on Dassama that it’d been worth destroying. And the general was high-ranking in court. If he was loyal to Ahmed . . .

“You’re saying you’ve got allies in the Sultan’s court?”

Shazad was easily the most beautiful girl I’d ever met, and when she smiled with all her teeth she looked like the most dangerous one, too. “A few. The stories would have you believe that Ahmed appeared in Izman on the day of the Sultim trials like magic. Same way they’d have you believe that he disappeared from the palace the night of Delila’s birth in a poof of Demdji smoke. But campfire stories are never the whole story.” I remembered what Ahmed had told me, as we kept watch over Jin in the sick tent. That his mother and Jin’s had plotted their escape. But Jin’s mother wasn’t even in the popular story. Neither was Jin, for that matter. “Ahmed came back to Izman half a year before the Sultim trials, on a trading ship. He fell in with an intellectual crowd. A lot of very clever, very idealistic boys, including my brother, who sat around and talked about philosophies and how to make Miraji better. Many of them are children of people in the Sultan’s court.”

She took a bite of her food. “One night, I found my brother and Ahmed and three of their idiot friends in stocks in the middle of Izman because they’d been preaching that women ought to have the right to refuse a marriage.” That struck down to the bone. “Fortunately, being General Hamad’s daughter gets you a long way when dealing with soldiers. I dressed them down for arresting their general’s only son, and they were rushing to unlock the rest of them. They had no idea they’d accidentally arrested the prodigal Prince Ahmed, or I doubt even being the general’s daughter would’ve done much. Ahmed was renting rooms in the Izman slums under a false name then.” I figured there was a reason things like that didn’t make it into the stories. No one wanted to imagine their hero prince sleeping in a flea-infested bed. “I dragged my brother home, and Ahmed followed us. When we got there I dressed him down about almost getting my brother killed. And the next thing I knew, we were shouting about Ataullah’s philosophy on the role of the ruler in the state, and then I was agreeing to train him for the Sultim trials.”

“I was locked away in the Holy Order at the time,” Bahi said with his mouth full. “Or I would have talked some sense into her.”

“Would you like to tell her what you actually did when you got kicked out, or shall I?” Shazad took a bite of flatbread.

Bahi was suddenly very intent on his food. “I don’t recall.”

Shazad didn’t miss a beat. “He got very drunk and turned up to serenade me outside my father’s house.”

I snorted a laugh. “What song?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“I don’t remember,” Bahi muttered again.

“‘Rumi and the Princess,’ I think?” Shazad caught my eye, the spark of a laugh there.

“No.” Bahi looked up defensively. “It was ‘The Djinni and the Dev’ and it was beautiful.” He puffed out his chest as Shazad’s spark exploded into a real laugh. It was contagious, and soon I was laughing, too. Bahi started to call for a drink, saying he’d sing it for us once he had some liquor in him.

Truth be told I already felt drunk.

The night and the colors and the laughter and the sense of power and certainty in what they were doing made my head spin. This revolution was a legend in the making. The kind of tale that sprawled out long before me and far beyond my reach. The sort of epic that was told over and over to explain how the world was never the same after this handful of people lived and fought and won or died trying. And after it happened, the story seemed somehow inevitable. Like the world was waiting to be changed, needing to be saved, and the players in the tale were all plucked out of their lives and moved into places exactly where they needed to be, like pieces on a board, just to make this story come true. But it was wilder and more terrifying and intoxicating, and more uncertain, than I’d ever thought. And I could be part of it. If I wanted to. It was getting way too late to rip myself out of this story now, or to rip it out of me.

“Where the hell have you been, holy boy?” The new voice startled me out of my daydream. I stared at the speaker. I’d thought Delila and Imin were sights to see, but the girl who dropped uninvited next to our fire was made of gold. Everything from the tips of her fingernails to her eyelids looked like she’d been cast out of metal instead of born, except her hair was as black as mine and her eyes were dark. Another Demdji. “Can you deal with this?” She stretched out her arm toward him; it was caked in blood and burn marks.

Bahi hissed through his teeth as he took it. “What happened?”

“There was a small explosion,” the golden girl said drily.

“The burns aren’t that bad,” Bahi said. “It’s hard to burn the daughter of a First Being made of pure fire.”

“When did you get back, Hala?” Shazad asked. Hala didn’t answer; she just gestured sarcastically to her bloody traveling clothes in a way that seemed to suggest Shazad was stupid for not realizing she was fresh into camp.

“We were too late,” she said. “She’d already been arrested. I thought she’d have longer. Shape-shifters are usually better at hiding. Imin lasted for two weeks, remember? But apparently this one is stupid. Rumor is they’re holding her for trial in Fahali. I’ve just come for backup. I say we leave tonight, slip in, and scramble their minds before they can hang her.”

“You mean the girl with the red hair.” I interrupted, before I could think not to. For the first time Hala seemed to notice me. “That’s who you were looking for in Fahali. A Demdji.” The word still tasted strange. “She had red hair and a face that changed.”

“You! You saw her!” Hala’s golden face glowed eagerly in the firelight as she leaned forward, and I knew we were talking about the same person.

The next words that fell out of my mouth stopped her short. “The Gallan shot her in the head.”

The cheery mood that’d been around the campfire a moment before was extinguished. “So how come you’re still alive?” Hala’s golden face hardened.

Something in her voice said she expected me to grovel. To stumble over myself to explain how I dared to have survived when the person she’d been out to save hadn’t. “Because they didn’t shoot me in the head,” I answered.

Her sneer reminded me of an ivory and gold comb Tamid’s mother used to have. She waved a hand, like she was urging me to go on. I noticed she had only eight fingers. Two were missing on her left hand that I could’ve sworn were there before. She noticed me noticing, and a second later her hand was whole again.

“It’s rude to stare.” A black bug crawled out of the sand, over my boot, and up my body. “And it’s rude to leave someone for dead to save your own skin.” I swatted at it, but it just exploded into ten black bugs, and then each of them into ten more until I was crawling with them, my hands slapping at my skin until it was red and painful.

“Hala, whatever you’re doing, stop it,” Shazad ordered. I’d been wrong. Her voice wasn’t sharp; it was clean, like a good cut. The bugs vanished.

Shazad had said something about a Demdji who could crawl into folks’ minds. I guessed I’d just met her. I already hated her.

“Where I come from, people take care of their own.” Hala picked at her nails as if she hadn’t just twisted my mind around.

“She was,” Jin said behind me.