by Somaiya Daud
“You look well,” I said at last, meeting his eyes.
“As do you,” he replied.
A thousand words lodged in my throat. What did I say to him? That I loved him? That I thought of him always? That of all the possible futures I would have chosen—
“You’re safe,” he said, and it was as if some spell had broken. His arms came around me and drew me against his chest. I laid my head against his shoulder, and my hands clung to the back of his jacket. “Dihya—I’d thought—Nadine is a terror, she would not have balked at killing you for so small a slight.”
I choked out a laugh. “I think she considered, before realizing that my family was a better target.”
He drew back, his eyes wide. “Are they safe?”
“I don’t know,” I said and hated the waver in my voice. “I’ve had no news since the coronation. This is the first time I’ve been allowed out. Nadine says … she says that so long as I perform as I’m expected no harm will come to them.”
“Do you trust her?”
Another laugh that sounded too much like a sob. “I don’t have a choice.”
“Amani—”
I shook my head and leaned away from him. He was resplendent in his wedding finery, a vision of Kushaila grace and dignity. Dihya, he was married. I pressed a hand over his heart.
“I did not expect this day to come so quickly,” I said, voice thick with tears. “Even though—”
He laid his hand over mine and squeezed. “Nor did I,” he said. “I thought we might have more time. One more meeting before—”
“Before you were married,” I whispered. “I wish we’d run away when you asked.”
The sound he let out was half laughter, half grief. “You don’t mean that.”
His mouth was curled into a half smile, but grief lay heavy over his eyes. He was right, of course—I didn’t mean it. I couldn’t mean it, not with everything at stake. And yet, Kushaila legend was filled with lovers who cared nothing for the consequences and everything for each other.
“I—”
“Our families would pay too high a price,” he said, giving voice to my thoughts. “And we would neither of us be able to live with that. We both have family being held hostage by the state. Neither of us would take that risk.”
“No,” I replied softly. “And yet, I dreamed of it.”
His expression sobered. “You don’t dream of it anymore?”
I blinked back my tears. “How can I? You are someone else’s husband now.”
His thumb stroked my cheek and I closed my eyes as a shiver rolled through me.
“You are always in my mind, Amani. And in my heart.”
“As you are in mine.”
He pressed one last kiss against my forehead, squeezed my hands, and then we parted. He walked to his dressing parlor, and I to mine. Our paths would not cross in this—in love—ever again.
01. Maram
STARDATE 4393, FORTY-ONE DAYS TO THE IMPERIAL WEDDING
Maram’s grip tightened in the folds of her gown as ocean winds buffeted the cruiser for the hundredth time in the four-hour flight. It was only wind, she reminded herself. Not an assassin, not a gravity beam meant to reel her ship in. Powerful late-summer winds were the norm in this part of Andala, and so close to the surface of the water there was bound to be turbulence.
She had not left the Ziyaana in the weeks following the attempt on her life. She’d made appearances among the makhzen and Vathek courtiers, smiled as if nothing were wrong, and expected a knife in the dark every moment. Eventually, she’d had enough and, without warning or permission, packed her bags.
The cruiser shuddered again, but for once this shudder was welcome. Outside she saw the ground rushing up to meet them. She came to her feet, smoothed her hands down the folds of her qaftan, and took a deep breath.
This place, this estate, was safe. It was well guarded, and no one made it past its boundaries without passing through a bioscan. The wall to her left hissed and detached, then lowered into a ramp.
Waiting for her beneath a linen canopy were twelve servants all dressed in green and white, the Ziyadi crest embroidered on their right sleeves. Heading them up was an elderly Kushaila woman.
As a group they knelt. Maram made a quick motion with her hand and the woman—Fatiha—stood.
“Welcome, Your Highness, to Dar at-Tuyyur.”
* * *
“The last stone was set almost a month ago,” Fatiha said as they strolled down the path. The cruiser had landed in one of the flower meadows east of the main estate. “All the flowers you requested have been imported, and half the fields have been planted.”
“The orchards?”
“Coming along,” Fatiha replied.
“It looks so different,” Maram breathed.
Twenty years ago, the estate and the surrounding lands had been rubble. Bombed out of existence by air raids during the Vathek conquest of Andala, almost nothing had survived. But Maram had pictures—holos of her mother’s visitation to the falconing retreat, recordings of hunts from the years before the Vath ever darkened Andalaan skies. And in the six months since Maram had decided to rehabilitate it and rebuild, it was transformed into something close to what it might have been in antiquity.
The first time she’d set foot here there’d been green, but it’d been the wild untamed greenery that sprung up after wildfire. Now, in the distance, she could see the aviary tower, gleaming in the early-morning sunlight, and the flags with her mother’s crest, whipping in the wind.
“Yes,” Fatiha said with a smile. “We have come a long way toward your vision. And we are all quite proud of the result, Your Highness.”
“What remains to be done?”
“The aviary is empty,” she said, her voice clipped and efficient. “We’ll need to hire a falconer, which I’m working on, and implement a breeding program.”
Maram wandered from the beaten path and into the fields. She’d seen pictures of what this part of the estate looked like prior to the work she’d ordered. It was chaotic—beautiful but unordered. The grass was knee-high, but a few feet away from where she stood the dirt was overturned, and stacked neatly on small benches were flower bulbs. The world was in chaos and on the brink of civil war. Maram couldn’t fix that—she couldn’t fix the world. But she could do this, she could instill a little peace and beauty in these twenty square miles.
When she turned around, Fatiha was watching her, her dark eyes soft, as if she didn’t see Maram when she looked at her. No one looked at her as Fatiha did, not on purpose.
“What is it?”
She’d expected her to avert her eyes or look embarrassed, but the old woman met her eyes. She forgot, ofttimes, that Fatiha had been nursemaid to queens. She’d raised her mother Najat and served her grandmother Itou. There was very little that cowed her.
“You look very much like your mother, Your Highness,” she said when Maram returned to the path. “You remind me of her.”
Her gut twisted, half pleasure, half unease. “Children often resemble their parents.”
“Few could emulate a will such as your mother’s,” Fatiha replied, and then began to walk again. “Shall I show you the main palace?”
* * *
Maram watched as the great iron doors to the palace groaned open on their own power. The walls of the palace were high and sturdy, the stone a pale gold. She followed Fatiha inside and they in turn were followed by the twelve servants who’d greeted Maram at her landing. The walls were hung with thick tapestries; the floor a brilliant white stone.
“The palace is almost an exact replica of its pre-conquest predecessor,” Fatiha said. “Your assistance in providing holos and film from your mother’s cultural archive were a great asset, Your Highness.”
Maram fought the feeling of pride that unwound in her belly. This project—she loved and hated it with equal measure. It was her respite, as it had been her mother’s, and yet it was wholly alien to everything Vathek in her life. She sh
ould not have come, she should not have built it, and yet she followed Fatiha through the palace as if a string were tied to her breastbone and drew her through its bright and high-ceilinged halls.
“The courtyard,” Fatiha continued, leading Maram out into sunlight, “is the crown jewel of the palace.”
Her eyes widened as she took in the verdant center of the palace. It seemed to go on forever—nearly the full length of the palace. They were on a rise—several steps would take them down to the floor level—and from the rise she could see the tops of orange trees, the gleam of water winding its way through. A sharp cry echoed through the air.
“You’ve introduced peacocks?” she said, trying to hide the delight in her voice.
“Your mother loved them,” Fatiha said. “I imagined you might like them too.”
“Should I be on the lookout for other wildlife?” she drawled.
“A small family of gazelles,” Fatiha said.
Maram stared at her, eyes wide. “You can’t be serious.”
“Of course I am,” Fatiha said, her voice perfunctory. “Now come along.”
Maram followed quietly as if she were a young child and not the Vathek heir. Her eyes remained wide as they swept over vegetation and wildlife—aside from the peacocks and gazelles she saw pheasants, and the air was filled with birdsong. Every few minutes she’d see a brilliant flash of jewel-toned feathers as a small bird darted from one branch to the next.
“And here is my favorite part of the estate,” Fatiha said, her voice laced with warmth. “The Ziyadi triptych—the artist did it in the classical style.”
Maram’s breath punched out of her on a quiet gasp as she looked up. The image was threefold: her grandmother, her mother, and Maram herself. Her grandmother was resplendent in a Kushaila hunting outfit, astride a horse, with a great golden eagle on her fist. The Golden Punishment—the eagle was legend for having taken down a deer on its own and lifting it into the air for several minutes. On the right was a good likeness of Maram herself, turned away from the viewer, bow in one hand, arrow in the other. Hovering over her head was a small falcon, a freedom falcon, its wings outstretched as if it were ready to pierce the vault of heaven at any moment. Like her grandmother, she wore a green Kushaila hunting jacket, but she’d explicitly asked the artist to have her turn away so that the absence of daan on her face would not be so clear to the viewer.
Maram almost walked away before looking at her mother’s image. But there was an inexorable pull to her, as in life so too in death. This was the greatest departure of the painting—elsewhere in the palace generations of Ziyadi women hunted on horseback and with falcons and spears, but here Najat bint al-Ziyad stood in ivory and black, with a tesleet on her fist, its crown of feathers a brilliant white. Though Mathis had scoured Najat’s Kushaila daan from her face as a stipulation of the peace and marriage treaties, here they were depicted on her brow and cheeks, and clutched in her left fist were gold-tipped arrows.
This version of her mother was one Maram seldom saw—when she was a child, Najat had only ever looked so when they’d emerged out of the shadow of her father. In holos she caught glimpses of her—the vibrant woman who’d inherited a kingdom recovering from civil war, who’d been equal to the task of its many problems. People in the Ziyaana remembered Najat’s last days, bedridden, hollowed out by sickness and disease.
Maram remembered the woman in front of her, back straight, gaze fierce. Forged in fire and made of steel.
“Your Highness.” Fatiha’s voice held a faint note of doubt, as if she worried she’d made a mistake in showing the triptych to Maram. The princess schooled her features and tried to return herself to the present. Fatiha stood beside her, gesturing to a pathway leading further into the palace.
“We have set out a light repast for you, if you wish to rest before touring the rest of the grounds.”
She bodily turned herself away from the painting. Her stomach turned with unease—this was a bad idea. There was no escaping the past in a place meant to replicate it. There was no holding on to her Vathek roots in a place where she pretended they didn’t exist.
“Yes,” she said, her voice even. “Let’s.”
* * *
The palace, aviary, and surrounding lands all made up a large estate for Ziyadi heirs called Dar al-Zahra’, the house of flowers. Maram had wanted, more than anything, when she began this project, to have a place without worry. A place she could go outside without needing guards or droids. She didn’t trust the locals any more than she trusted the people who lived in the imperial palace—the estate borders had an airtight security grid that prevented anyone from passing through. Those who wanted to leave had to go through a complicated exit process, and security codes were changed every four hours. It was expensive and far-reaching and complicated, but it meant that Maram could mount a horse and ride out onto the grounds on her own, without escort or worry.
But now, as she rode out into the late-afternoon air, wrapped in a heavy velvet mantle, she shivered. There were times when all she could hear was the first shot, when all she could see was sunlight glinting off the metal of the blaster. This place was safe, she’d made it so, and she would not let some nameless, faceless boy take it from her.
Maram was good at not thinking, at ignoring the great things that her conscience required her to see. And so it was with practiced ease that she turned away from the facts: she had not stood on that stage, she was not the one who’d faced a child turned killer. Amani, her body double, had. It was easy to settle into the selfish fear and anger that cared only about herself—the child had been trying to kill Maram, not Amani, after all. And so it was easy to shed the difficult feelings of being afraid for another person, of fearing for them, of caring about them. She did not think about the risk Amani took for her, or the complicated situation they now found themselves in. She did not think about how desperately she missed Amani’s friendship or the gulf that now stood between them because of her betrayal.
She thought of the horse beneath her, and the sky above, and the cry of a ghazal falcon. Nothing else.
* * *
Maram’s heart beat a staccato rhythm behind her ribs. The woman stood in the open field between four hills. She was well into the estate, but she didn’t creep the way Maram expected someone who had trespassed on royal property to creep. She stood tall, her broad shoulders straight. She was beautiful, her skin a dark copper, her black hair bound into hundreds of braids and held in place with a silver clip. Her cheekbones were sharp, her mouth wide, her face stoic. On each arm was a silver vambrace nearly the length of her forearm; she held her left arm aloft, and as Maram watched, a small young falcon alit on her wrist.
Maram’s grip tightened on her horse’s reins as she realized the impossible: it was a wild falcon, without bells or leash or hood. It had come to the woman of its own volition and settled on her wrist without bait or prompt. It remained there, its wings outstretched for balance, and when she lifted a hand and stroked its breast, it cooed, as if it were a tame nestling.
Wild falcons had no tolerance for people, less tolerance for being treated like pets. Maram’s grip tightened on the reins further, sure the falcon would attack the woman at any moment, and the horse neighed and shook its head in protest. The falcon startled—it gave out an angry, sharp cry, and launched itself into the air in a flurry of wings and talons. The woman watched it climb in the sky, her expression bemused, seemingly unharmed. In truth, the woman’s encounter with the falcon should have left her with several large wounds, and perhaps even a missing eye or finger.
For long moments Maram stared at her as if what she was—who she was—might resolve itself in her mind. She’d never seen her before on the estate. Certainly, she’d never seen someone at such ease and in such harmony with a wild hawk. Part of her wondered if she’d wandered into a dream.
At last the woman turned her gaze from the sky to Maram, and the princess flinched at the directness of her stare. Her eyes were so dark they were ne
arly black, and Maram felt them cut through her like a scythe through wheat. When the woman bowed she didn’t lower her eyes, and the bemused, half-cocked smile did not leave her features.
“Your Highness,” she said, then straightened.
Something like lightning rushed up Maram’s spine and she didn’t know if it was fear. She was on her estate alone, with nothing but a horse for protection, with a stranger who should not have been able to make it onto the grounds.
“Who are you?” she said at last. “And what are you doing on my estate?”
“I am Aghraas, a master falconer.”
* * *
Fatiha had hired her.
“It’s been twenty years since humans have disturbed this ecosystem,” Aghraas said. Maram had at last descended from her horse only to find that Aghraas was a head taller than her. “Your stewardess—”
Maram startled, frightened that her secret might have escaped her already. “My stewardess?”
“Fatiha,” Aghraas said patiently.
Of course. Nadine was no longer her only stewardess.
“Your stewardess,” Aghraas continued, “wanted the whole of the estate mapped, including potential hunting and nesting grounds. She was quite insistent that I attempt to calendar breeding cycles, which is a bit harder.”
“Why was I not informed that you were hired?”
“I only started yesterday,” she said and then smiled. “You must not scold Fatiha too harshly. I was eager to start as soon as possible, and I took advantage of her divided attention.”
Maram turned her face away sharply. “Well?”
“Well?” Aghraas repeated.
“The falcons—how are they?”
