Court of Lions

by Somaiya Daud

  The probe appeared, emitted a white light, and scanned the space where I’d only just stood. It hovered in place for a minute, then turned around and floated away.

  I should have felt relief, watching it drift out of sight and out of range, but a new fear took its place. Why was Idris here, and prepared with a diversion beacon? Had he followed me? What had he seen?

  The whirring, beeping sound of the probe faded away completely, and Idris led me back into the main passageway. Neither of us spoke as we made our way back to the hidden entrance in the royal suite. And we remained silent as I led us back to the double’s suite I occupied. We made our way to the sitting room. He dropped the beacon on the table, and I closed the doors, then waved a hand. Lanterns ignited around the room, giving his face a garish cast.

  “Did you follow me?” I asked softly.

  “Yes,” he said, and then, “How long?” When I said nothing, he rose to his feet. “You will not answer?”

  I lifted my chin. “I do not have to answer.”

  He swore, angrier than I’d ever heard him, and raked his hands through his hair.

  “Do you not understand the cost of what it is you do? Do you not understand what they will do to you if they find out what you are?”

  “I know the price of treason,” I replied.

  “And yet you say it so calmly. I don’t think you do.”

  “Do you suggest that I am stupid?”

  “Amani.” He said my name on an exhalation of breath, as if all life were being torn from him. “Do not play.”

  “Long enough,” I said at last, conceding defeat.

  “You must stop.”

  “Stop?”

  “Stop before you lose your life.”

  “No. I will not.” I remembered and dreamed of the tesleet that had come to me just after the assassination attempt. It carried me through the mornings when I thought I couldn’t face another day being someone else. It promised that one day I would be myself again, that when I went out people would know my name.

  “No?”

  I pulled away from the door and met him in the center of the room. “Would you condemn me to this life?”

  “Condemn you?”

  “I am a slave, Idris,” I said. “I wear jewels and velvet, and I am fed and pampered, but I am a slave. I have no future in this world. Is this what you want for me for the rest of my life?”

  “No—”

  “And your people? The subjects who entrust their health and prosperity to you? What of them? Will you condemn them to this shadow?”

  “It is not a shadow,” he cried out. “Shadows are benign. It is a cancer, and it has won. It is here to stay.”

  “Cancers eventually kill the host. I refuse that reality,” I said, shaking my head. “We have a chance—”

  “We have never had a chance,” he interrupted me. “Not when they first came. Not when my family and the Wattasis stood during the last siege.”

  “So what would you have us do? You have noted it yourself—there is no relief, no help under the Vath. We cannot even keep ourselves fed!”

  “You don’t understand the cost—”

  A cold rage took hold of me, spinning up from the base of my spine and out through the rest of me. It stilled my shaking hands, my trembling voice. It obliterated the fear I felt at his discovery.

  “I don’t understand the cost?” I hissed. “My mother is the last of her siblings. Of her family—all of them killed during the war or taken by starvation and disease after. Before I came here—before I was brought here—the Vath burned my village’s only source of income and food. Every year we worry if they will come and burn our houses or take our boys or our women. I was taken”—I was shouting now, and shoving at him so that he stumbled back—“from the only home I’ve ever known, my dignity stripped away, beaten and tortured and forced to watch my family pay the price for any dissent.

  “Do not tell me I do not know the cost, Idris ibn Salih. I have paid the cost three times over.” My hands were still on his chest, bent like claws. For a moment I stared at them, then drew them away and covered my face.

  “Maybe…” I started, then paused and drew in a tremulous breath. “If we cannot agree on this … maybe we were a dream.”

  He sucked in a sharp breath. “This is not about ideology, Amani. This is about your life.” His hands came to rest on either side of my face. “I cannot lose you.”

  “And do you have me now, Idris? Am I yours? Do I live?”

  When he laid his forehead against mine, I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear to look at him knowing what would happen in the next minute. All my hopes for the future, the vague uncertain imaginings of what we might be to each other turned to dust.

  “Why is this not enough?” he whispered.

  For long moments the only sound in the room was our breathing. But I could not give him what he asked. My pride and dignity were all I had left.

  “I am half of what I ought to be,” I said softly, and drew myself away. “And I would rather be dead than a slave.”

  19

  I sobbed myself to sleep. In some ways I’d known this day was coming. Whether open war was upon us or not, the ways I pushed Maram both big and small would have revealed my allegiance to him. Would have revealed the core difference between us: I was not content to sit and watch while the planet slipped into collapse and ruin. We’d both grown up snatching joy and happiness wherever we could, and perhaps he could continue living like that. I could not. Our dream of a future together was always destined for death.

  I was roused from slumber violently, with a hand that felt like a claw around my arm, and pulled unceremoniously from the bed. There was no time to understand who pulled me from bed or why. The moment I stood a hand struck me across the face, sharp and hard. Hard enough that I fell again, inches from the fireplace.

  Nadine.

  My mind was still half-asleep, but it took very little—seeing her silver slippers and the black hem of her gown—to bring it to full wakefulness. Perhaps it was naïve of me to imagine that she would take the severing of her power lying down. Maram, Idris, and I had rooted her power out of the royal household as thoroughly as we were able. And perhaps it was more than naïve to assume that she would not take out her rage on me, the only vulnerable one of the three, when my explicit purpose was to receive the violence and punishment of the masses in Maram’s place.

  Nadine seemed to have the same thought. She gripped my arm once again and dragged me to my feet.

  “Did you think,” she hissed, “that I would suffer your meddling? Or did you somehow imagine that I would not put the pieces together?”

  She shook me as she spoke and when she finished, threw me once again so that I fell back and tumbled over a divan.

  “I … I don’t know what you’re talking about, Your Ladyship.”

  “You don’t know?” Her voice was dangerously close to a shout, a loss of composure I had not thought her capable of until this moment. “I was closest in Maram’s counsel before her marriage. And now I find that you are deep in counsel with her in the afternoons, that she allows you out among the makhzen, that she trusts you. She’s pushed me out, fired my servants, watches my movements. Whatever poison you’ve spewed—”

  Nadine rarely lowered herself to brute violence—droids, birds, Maram—they all struck me in her stead. But as I rose to my feet, her anger spurred her further and she struck me across the face a second time. And when I didn’t fall, she wrapped a hand around my throat.

  I should have felt more terrified than I did, but I knew she couldn’t kill me, though she was possessed of a murderous rage. And I had suffered worse—I would not allow Nadine to frighten me.

  I met her eyes, my throat still in her grasp. “It isn’t my fault she now runs her own house,” I rasped.

  “I have done things that would turn your blood to ice, village girl,” she said. “The Ziyaana, Maram—the world—was under my thumb until you. And I will not shy from doing what is n
ecessary to secure what is mine by rights.”

  “And what is yours?”

  Nadine froze and at last released me. “Your Highness,” she said, and sank to her knees before Maram.

  There was a tightness to the princess’s face I had only ever seen once—the day we’d met. She had not undressed after the day’s events and looked every inch the Imperial Heir, her chin raised, her eyes ringed in kohl.

  “How dare you,” Maram said.

  “Your Highness—”

  “Be silent!” Her footsteps rang out in the quiet tower as she came closer to Nadine. I did not forget myself, and sank to my knees, waiting.

  “Is that what you have imagined this entire time?” she asked softly, coming to stand before Nadine. “That through me—what was it you said? The world would be under your thumb? That in my fear or youth I would give over my inheritance to be ruled by an upstart, a woman of low birth?”

  “No—!”

  “I thought Amani unfair in her estimation of you,” she continued. “I defended you.”

  “My only thought is to serve the crown.”

  “I am the crown,” Maram said. “Look at me when I speak to you.”

  Nadine’s face was pale but for two red spots of anger on her cheek. Few people liked to be upbraided, and for Nadine I imagined being upbraided by an eighteen-year-old girl she had raised would sit poorly with her.

  “I will never trust you again,” Maram said. “Get out of my sight.”

  Nadine rose slowly to her feet and walked to the staircase. She paused and looked at Maram.

  “Beware, Your Highness. I am not the snake the villager has led you to believe.”

  “No,” Maram replied. “You are a foot soldier who believes herself to be a general. Get out.”

  I didn’t move until the sound of the doors to the suite boomed shut.

  “Are you alright?” I asked Maram as I came to my feet.

  She flashed me a false smile. “I should be asking you.”

  “I’ve suffered worse,” I assured her. “Though I think she split my lip, and I will have bruises around my throat.”

  Maram sank onto a divan and put her head in her hands.

  “We should call you a physician,” she said without raising her head. “Or a medi-droid.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I told her. “Just a few bruises. Tala can tend to me. Maram?”

  “She raised me. Bandaged my scrapes when I was young. When I was told I had to leave Luna-Vaxor and return to the Ziyaana, she offered to come with me. I had thought her a comfort—” She rubbed her face. “But now…”

  She rose to her feet and paced, one hand twisted in her gown. I said nothing. Could say nothing. I hated Nadine, and my blood sang at her dismissal. I wanted Maram free. I saw the makings of a great queen in her, the traces of her mother’s legacy in her blood. She had a shrewdness in her that would aid her, and a kindness that had rarely been given an opportunity to flourish. So I waited.

  “Can I trust you, Amani?” she whispered.

  I looked up, surprised.

  “Or will your rebels supplant me the first chance they get?”

  “You are Queen Najat’s trueborn daughter,” I said. “The rightful heir to this planet. I serve at your will. I will defend you as best as I am able—as I have done in the past.”

  She sat back down beside me and after a moment, threw her arms around me and drew me close.

  “I rely on you,” she whispered. “Please do not disappoint me.”

  “I won’t.”

  20

  In light of the bruises I’d suffered at Nadine’s hand, I was relegated back to the double’s suite. Truth be told, it was a welcome reprieve. I had no desire to spend time with Idris or pick up my role once again as pretend-wife. Nor did I want to wallow in my sadness. But there was little to do in my quarters that didn’t remind me of him. I couldn’t read poetry without remembering him, or poke at my tapestry of Massinia without being reminded of the mural he’d caught me at all those months ago.

  The doors burst open in the midst of my melancholy.

  “Amani!” Maram drew short in the room and raised an eyebrow. “What happened?”

  My eyes widened. “Nothing. What are you doing here?” I had no desire to share, and I didn’t think Maram would commiserate with me or comfort me.

  “The king is calling.”

  A chill shivered up my spine. “He’s coming here?”

  “No—he’s calling.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “And…?”

  “I know you can’t always be me,” she said. “But can you be there? Hide up in the rafters if you must.”

  “Why?”

  “I feel stronger when you’re around,” she said, avoiding my eyes.

  “Let me dress,” I said quietly. “And compose myself. I imagine there is a place for me to hide while you speak?”

  She nodded. “It’s the diwan chamber.”

  She waited outside my bedchamber as I rushed through the room, performing ablutions and selecting clothes and jewelry for the day. There was no world, I knew, where I would have been able to spend the day in bed, mourning Idris. Even if I were still a girl living on Cadiz, my mother would have roused me to milk our goat, and then I would have been expected to return to the fields or the village kitchen.

  The world never stopped for a single broken heart.

  I finished pinning up my hair, then found a mantle with a hood and a veil for my face. Maram stood in the center of the courtyard, face upturned to the dim rays of the rising sun. Sometimes I marveled at how similar we seemed and yet so different, too. Maram was raised among royalty, and despite everything, was told the world would always bow at her feet. That reality was so different from mine, and it poured out of her no matter what she did. Even standing now, with no one to witness, she seemed a queen only in need of her crown.

  She caught me staring and raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re just—you’ll be a fantastic queen someday. You know that, don’t you?”

  She widened her eyes, bewildered. “Because I can stand still in sunlight?”

  I laughed. “Yes. That’s what I meant. I assume you have a way for me to reach the gallery that will keep me hidden?”

  Maram had thought well ahead, and brought with her not only a holomap detailing the hidden corridors of the estate, but a beacon much like the one Idris had brought along with him last night. It would allow me to pass unchecked through the passages.

  “I don’t want the security log to show us both there,” she explained. “If people found out—”

  “They’d accuse you of needing a crutch.” I nodded. “Clever. I’ll be close behind. I promise.”

  * * *

  I had never been in the diwan chamber when it was empty. I stood on the second-floor gallery level, a little to the left of the throne, and waited. Maram stood before it, her face blank, her hands at her sides. She looked entirely at peace, though I knew she wasn’t.

  A moment later a sharp beep shot through the room and the air above the throne wavered. Mathis’s form came together like an image stilling in rippling water. He sat, back straight, one hand on the arm of whatever seat he was in wherever in the galaxy he was currently situated.

  Maram sank to her knees prettily and inclined her head. “Your Eminence.” Her voice was strong and clear.

  “Maram.” Mathis’s voice was equally strong and clear, but there was an icy edge to it. I thought of Maram’s tone often as one limned in frost, but Mathis seemed to be able to take that to the extreme simply by existing. I felt it sink into my bones, and I marveled at Maram for not reacting at all.

  She rose to her feet gracefully and looked him in the eye. “What would you have of me, Your Eminence?”

  He rose to his feet and came down the steps so that he was close enough to touch her. He dwarfed her—Mathis was a warrior and he looked the part. Broad-shouldered, tall, large enough that in the days of an
tiquity he might have wielded a broadsword or a double-headed axe.

  “You look well,” he said.

  “Thank you. I am well.”

  “We have heard reports,” he said.

  Maram’s face barely moved. “Reports. You are having me watched.”

  “You’re surprised,” he replied. “Don’t be.”

  “What do the reports say?” I marveled at her tone—even as far as I was from him, Mathis’s voice set a chill in my bones. But Maram sounded as if they were having a polite conversation over tea.

  “That you have gathered support among your mother’s people.” His tone didn’t waver toward anger or violence, and yet the air changed. My muscles clenched as if my body prepared to be struck. “That you have allied with the makhzen.”

  Here lay the difference between Maram and me. She did not shift her footing, nor did her expression break. She betrayed no fear or anxiety. She only folded her hands in front of her and raised an eyebrow.

  “It seemed prudent to mitigate what has been a constant threat in my life, especially after the attempt at my coronation,” she said. “I did as I have been taught—I found strength. I neutralized those who would be my enemies.”

  “I didn’t know there was such strength among savages.” His voice betrayed no emotion. No amusement or rage. There was only the cold.

  “I am here because you sent me here,” she said. “To live among savages. I have done what is necessary while I abide among them.”

  I shivered. I knew it wasn’t true, that I saw the real Maram and that her father saw a facade, a necessary mask to ensure her survival. And yet her tone chilled me. In what world did a girl learn to lie so easily about her peers?

  I almost laughed—the same world I lived in. The world that had taken me from my family, stripped me of my daan, taught me to be Maram. That world demanded a cruel, unforgiving mask. And both Maram and I had learned to wear it well.

  “Let’s put your … mitigation … to the test,” he said. “You will tour the southern provinces with your allies. But you will do it with the Vath in tow, lest you forget you are my daughter and not your mother’s. If you survive, then you will have earned the right to determine who are your allies and who are not. If you do not—”