Court of Lions

by Somaiya Daud

  A shaft of moonlight hit the pool behind them and seemed to illuminate the entire courtyard.

  I’ve stepped into a dream, she thought, and stepped past Aghraas.

  “Your Highness?”

  There was a feather floating on the surface of the pool. It was night-black and seemed to absorb the silver light around it. She’d heard no bird fly by to drop the feather, no coo to signal one might be nearby. Nor had they stored any falcons in the aviary yet. Maram knew what it was even as she chided herself in believing such a thing.

  An extinct bird was extinct. It did not come in times of difficulty or need, did not revive itself as a species for one girl. And yet.

  She stepped into the water without thinking and it rippled out around her ankles. The tiles at the bottom of the pool were cool and clean—there was no algae or dirt. She almost didn’t pick up the feather. It was light, and when her finger brushed over its curve, color sparked as if following the trail of heat she left behind.

  She hadn’t asked for a sign or an answer. She didn’t even know she had a question. The breath in her lungs thinned and chilled—was the cosmos reminding her of her duty?

  “Maram!”

  Her head jerked up. Aghraas stood over her, her face solemn, her feet as wet as hers, her hands cradling Maram’s elbows.

  Aghraas was beautiful. That was an easy thing to admit, a thing she’d admitted to herself long ago. And now, haloed by the moonlight, her eyes wide, she seemed more so than before. Maram felt a well of grief rise in her chest, a great spike of pain.

  “I’m married,” she said hollowly.

  And Aghraas did something no one had ever done before. She laid her forehead against hers and sighed. “I know.”

  14

  I could not spend the day traveling abandoned corridors and observing Maram. I returned to the abandoned suite and the tower where I’d found her before Nadine’s arrival, and took with me a stack of books to pass the time. This was not the sojourn out into the city that I’d wanted, but it was the respite from court and the strange play my life had become that I needed. The sounds of the city rose as the day progressed, the clamor of carts and carriages, the cries of goats and sheep and donkeys, and the screaming of both merchants and seagulls.

  I felt the stress of the last few weeks roll off my shoulders.

  When I was small all I’d wanted was to get away from the quiet of our small village. I’d wanted to see the world beyond Cadiz, the cities on Andala, the megatropolises in the Wizaar system, the parliamentary buildings on Maron. And though I hadn’t seen half of that, I felt as if I’d seen enough. I would have traded anything to go back to my parents’ farm. I would have given anything for my day to start with milking goats and to end in front of a fire with my brothers.

  Would I ever return to Cadiz? Would I be able to stomach my old life, given everything I’d endured?

  Only Dihya knew, and he gave me no answers. My thoughts were too wound up in it all, and that, I thought, was why I heard no one climb the tower steps.

  She stood in the exact center of the room, though how she’d gotten there I couldn’t imagine. She was dark-skinned and dressed all in black. Her hair was bound into hundreds of thin braids, and nearly half of those braids wore small gold rings. A collection of them springing from her widow’s peak were white. She wore a mantle against the chill, a heavy black velvet; and when the wind caught at its edges and it rippled, it seemed to be made not of velvet but of feathers. Instead of a qaftan she wore a simple blouse and trousers, with leather boots made for walking through the desert. Around her wrists were heavy silver braces, scuffed as if she’d actually been in fights. Most astonishing of all were the marks on her face—on her cheeks and on her forehead, she bore daan similar to Houwa’s—sharp, pictographic representations of feathers. One on each cheek, and two crossed like swords on her forehead.

  “You look surprised to see me,” she said as I rose to my feet. Heat emanated from her as if a furnace burned at her center, but what was perhaps more surprising was the warmth with which she looked at me.

  “Have I got the date and time wrong?” she asked.

  Dihya, she was tall. As tall as Idris, no doubt.

  And she thought I was Maram.

  I remained where I was—Maram and I were identical, but I didn’t know how well this woman knew her.

  “I think,” I started in Maram’s tone, “that I forgot we were meeting today.”

  The girl frowned a little. “We’ve met every day since we’ve come here. Why should today have been any different?”

  “I thought I would have to take my place in the court today. The stewardess has arrived.”

  I sat back down and she came closer. An ocean wind blew in, and her braids swayed in the breeze, her cloak moved like a living thing about her hips and legs. Where in the world had she acquired such a beautiful thing?

  “Has Amani taken your place, then?” she asked, a wry twist in her voice. “Again?”

  I did not grin—Maram would not grin. But I could not keep the small smile off my face. “You sound critical.”

  She sat across from me, on the other side of the shatranj board, and shed her cloak. I was hard put not to gawk—every movement of hers was fluid, easy. Idris had the makings of a warrior in him, but this woman was a warrior. There was confidence I’d only ever seen in veterans in her body and its limits and capabilities. She sighed.

  “I’m not critical, Maram.”

  That gave me pause, nearly enough to disrupt my stream of thought. Few people called Maram by her given name. In fact, in all the time I’d known her, the only person I’d ever seen refer to her by her name was Idris. Not even Nadine spoke to her without her title.

  The woman continued, as if she hadn’t crossed a line of decorum, as if she regularly was so comfortable with the Imperial Heir of several star systems.

  “Dihya knows I shirk my duties often enough to see you, but…”

  “But?” I said, raising an eyebrow.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and glanced at me. “Eventually, the world will force you to make a choice.”

  “Yes,” I said softly. “But not yet, it seems.”

  She smiled. She was entrancing, I thought. There was a flicker in her dark eyes, like flame. And I found myself reaching forward to tilt her face so that I might look at them more closely.

  A mistake, of course.

  Maram touched no one, if she could help it. The woman’s smile, and all the warmth she’d exuded, sloughed off her like water.

  “You are not Maram,” she said, catching my hand.

  I pulled it out of her grasp and smiled.

  “You are the answer to a mystery.”

  She did not smile back. “There is no mystery.”

  “So Her Royal Highness has not been neglecting her duties to keep a standing shatranj appointment with a very tall and handsome woman?”

  There was a shift in her expression, and I remembered the scuffs on her vambrace and stepped back. I could not believe it. It made sense that Maram would wish to avoid her marriage bed if she had a romance of her own—but I would not have imagined it possible. She loathed vulnerability and feared how one might use it against her. To lower her guard enough …

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  She eyed me for long seconds before she spoke. “My name is Aghraas—I am the master of falcons.”

  “It is bad of you to lie,” I replied. “I have the staff roster memorized and there is no master of falcons.”

  “At another of Her Highness’s estates,” she clarified.

  I didn’t believe her. “Then what do you do here?”

  “I followed Maram.”

  The way she said it, plainly, obviously, as if she had nothing to hide, made me believe her. When I said nothing she folded her arms over her chest.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. But you can’t linger here. Maram won’t be back today, and there are others who may come through. They can’t know y
ou visit her.”

  She stood over me for a moment, examining me in the way that all people who lived in or near the Ziyaana eventually learned to do. Prying, peeling, as if her silence alone could pry out my secrets.

  “I understand why they chose you,” she said at last.

  My eyes widened, bewildered. “What?”

  But she didn’t clarify, only gave me a roguish half grin. She bowed and there seemed no mockery in it, and then she left.

  * * *

  The sun had long set when Maram returned to the abandoned suite. I hadn’t expected her—the setup Idris and I shared would work for her as well as it worked for me. And yet return she did, just after I’d turned the lanterns low and prepared for bed.

  “I can’t sleep out there,” she said as I turned up a lantern.

  “We can switch back,” I said, and she shook her head.

  “Stay with me awhile,” she said. “I’ll have to tell you about today.”

  I called for tea and the two of us found a seat around a small table within the bedchamber. I watched her as she talked and outlined the most important events for me to remember.

  “You and Idris have done quick work—I did not expect … so much,” she said, cradling her glass.

  I smiled, thinking of Idris. “He had the lesser challenge. Idris is easy to love, and favored among the makhzen.”

  “The implication, I take it, being that I am difficult to love,” she said dryly. But I could see the small cracks that signaled she was serious.

  “No,” I said contemplatively. “They don’t know you. They don’t know—or they didn’t know—where you stood.”

  “Where I stood?”

  “Some might imagine that you stood to gain from the destabilization of the makhzen and from the death and kidnapping of their families and allies,” I said.

  “I would gain from those things—status among the Vath, stability in my claim as heir. Respect from my father.” She barked out a short laugh. “But I am not as strong as a High Vath. I cannot stomach it.”

  “That isn’t weakness,” I pointed out, frowning. “That is a conscience. Something few in power remember to hold on to.”

  Maram shook her head, as if she were still undecided. I couldn’t undo a lifetime of conditioning at her father’s hand. But I would not shy away from the truth, either.

  “At any rate,” she said, looking at me. “Well done. And they were good choices besides—I’timad is fascinating.”

  I grinned. “She makes one almost believe that training horses might be a personality trait.”

  I watched her, Aghraas foremost in my mind. Had a change come over Maram and I simply hadn’t noticed? Or was she so practiced an actress that there was no way for me to know?

  Did she love the woman I’d met?

  It was not hard to imagine that she loved someone or that someone might love her. I knew her well enough to know that. And I could not imagine that she’d turned her back on the duties she’d carried on her entire life and avoided what had been set forth as her destiny since her return to Andala for a new friendship she’d cultivated. No matter how novel that friendship might have been.

  “What?” she snapped at last. “You’ve been staring.”

  I curled both my hands around my tea glass. There was no diplomatic way to say it, and I knew she would have the answer from me one way or another. Worse, if I withheld what I knew and Aghraas told her we’d met, it would go poorly for me.

  “I had a visitor today,” I said carefully. “She came looking for you.”

  Maram’s hand tightened on her tea glass and she lowered her gaze.

  “Who is she to you?” I asked gently.

  Her eyes met mine with a flash. “I haven’t broken my wedding vows, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “But she prevents you from keeping them?”

  I imagined few people had the patience to wait for Maram to open up, and if anything it made Aghraas more intriguing. How deeply must Aghraas have felt for Maram that she’d followed her to M’Gaadir. And how deeply Maram must have felt in turn to have arrived in my suite of rooms panicked at the prospect of carrying out her marital duties.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she whispered. “I’m trapped.”

  “We could have planned,” I said.

  “There is no solution,” she snapped, and rose to her feet. “By Vathek law I must marry befitting my rank—we are not Kushaila. We do not absorb freely of those below us. We do not marry commoners without noble blood.”

  My eyes widened. “Is that how you see us?” I asked.

  “Furat’s mother was a merchant’s daughter, wholly unconnected to the makhzen,” she said. “And her father was of an ancient and noble house.”

  “Some might argue that to be a member of a Kushaila tribe is to be of an ancient and noble house,” I countered.

  “How egalitarian,” she said through gritted teeth. “And what a promising world you must occupy to think there is any plan that will rescue me from this.”

  She stopped in her pacing as understanding washed over her features.

  “Khulood made a strange comment about lovers during lunch,” she said hoarsely. “She asked me if Idris had upset me that I had withdrawn some of my warmth. You are in love with him.”

  I didn’t look away from her. That would have been cowardly when she had not flinched at my questioning her relationship with Aghraas.

  “Yes,” I said, voice thick.

  Her eyes widened. “You didn’t fall in love with him here … he knew. How long has he known you’re my double?”

  At that I lowered my gaze. “From the first.”

  “You were so resistant to taking my place in the marriage bed,” she said softly. “I didn’t think anything of it. Why did you agree in the end?”

  “You were frightened. I was not,” I said simply.

  She sat down across from me, her gaze distant and focused on the teapot between us. When she at last looked at me, her expression was almost fragile.

  “No one else would have done what you did,” she said at last. My eyes widened. “No one else would— I know I don’t always make it easy for you. I know that I’m not—not loveable—”

  “Maram—”

  She wasn’t crying, but it seemed she was close to it, so I came around the table and laid my hand over hers.

  “You don’t make it easy,” I said, and she laughed, a startled and hoarse sound. “But I am and will always be your friend.”

  “You said once we were sisters,” she said.

  “Is that what you want?” I asked her.

  She nodded and leaned her head against my shoulder. “I will endeavor to be a sister to you, too. Better than I have been until now,” she said quietly, then sighed. “What a pair we make, hm? How unlucky we’ve been.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Do?” She huffed a laugh. “If I dissolved my marriage with Idris, I would lose what little support I have among his people. The peace treaty that legalized my father’s occupation of this planet would be in jeopardy, as well as my inheritance. We’re stuck, whether we want to admit it or not.”

  I expected the look of panic I’d seen the day of her bedding night. Instead, she simply looked sad. Her gaze was unfocused, and I wondered if she thought of Aghraas.

  “Sometimes,” she said quietly, “the state demands horrors of us.”

  “It shouldn’t.”

  At that, she smiled. “You are remarkably optimistic for someone in your position.”

  “Because you give me hope,” I said with a small smile, trying to disappear the sad air. “You are stronger than I gave you credit for.”

  “Oh?” she said, an eyebrow raised.

  “Aghraas is beautiful. I don’t know that I would have been able to resist.”

  She smirked. “I take it you did not resist my husband,” she drawled.

  My smile turned into a grin. “You seemed to have little use for him.”

  Maram t
hrew her head back and laughed.

  15

  I had not visited the beach since my outing with Idris, when he had shown me the mural of Houwa and read my palm. But I stood there now wrapped in black velvet, a mantle about my shoulders whipping in the ocean wind. Our excursions out of the estate went from almost never happening to happening regularly. With Nadine in residence and in a foul mood at her expulsion from Maram’s inner circle, Maram and I concocted a strategy where she could both retain the freedom she’d found in her relationship with Aghraas and not undermine her new position.

  This was made easy by the Ifrani sisters, the Mas’udi twins, and the Banu Nasir siblings. The collection of former Andalaan royalty and current makhzen, tied loosely together by history and some blood, numbered almost twenty. Maram complained that they were difficult to keep track of, but I could tell that they offered a respite she hadn’t expected. Every court came with pitfalls and the need to navigate it carefully, but since the event at the races, the core among them showed a distinct warmth toward Maram, and so the rest fell in line.

  My mind treaded the same paths it had treaded since the night before, turning over my conversation with Maram. I had never considered the differences in rank between Idris and me—that he was a prince and I was not anything close to that. Or rather I had, but I had never thought of it as a difference that mattered. Kushaila stories were littered with people who found their way to each other despite that sort of gap, and, as Maram pointed out, our nobility was littered with such unions. But there was a large difference between being a wealthy merchant’s daughter, from a family that had many galactic trade agreements in hand, and being the daughter of a pair of villagers who worked in a state orchard many months out of the year. Idris had only ever treated me as an equal, but—

  I’timad’s cheerful cry interrupted my thoughts and I turned away from the sea.

  Stable hands had set up a horse paddock on the sand, which struck me as a risky endeavor, but none would be swayed away from it. Many in our entourage meant to race horses on the beach, among them the two Mas’udi scions ‘Imad and I’timad. Servants had set up linen awnings a ways from the paddocks and the racing strip, against a cliff that sheltered us from the worst of the wind.