by Somaiya Daud
“Did your brother kill him?” he asked, his eyes dark.
I felt a strange, bubble-like joy take shape in my chest. Everything lately had felt heavy and difficult, and this felt lighter and easier than anything in the last few months.
“He didn’t,” I said, and reached over the shatranj board. My fingers tangled in the soft cloth of his shirt and I drew him forward, uncaring that the board was between. “Husnain will love you.”
“I’m not worried about him loving me,” he said, looking off to the side.
“Aziz, too—he will challenge you to shatranj, probably.” I wound my arms around his neck.
He still seemed a little sullen.
“Is it so difficult to imagine that others loved me before you?”
He shook his head.
“I have loved none but you,” I told him. “I love no one but you. I will love no one but you.”
“I just … sometimes I realize you could have your pick of the world, Amani,” he murmured, and pressed a kiss to my shoulder.
“I chose you,” I replied. “And I have never regretted that choice.”
He looked up at me, before reaching for my braid. His fingers were nimble as he pulled pins and clips from it before it unwound and spilled down my back.
“You regretted it a little,” he murmured. “Enough to give this away.”
He held out his palm between us—nestled in its center was the emerald and pearl necklace I’timad had won from me during the poetry competition. I stared at it for a moment, uncomprehending.
“She gave it to you?” I asked blankly.
“I had to beg,” he replied. “And even then, she was not inclined to give it to me.”
“Then what did you do to win it back from her?” I asked, suspicious.
He looked away from me. There was, to my shock, a hint of pink in his cheeks.
“Idris?”
He muttered something so quietly I had to ask him to repeat it.
“I had to perform,” he said louder, through gritted teeth.
I felt joy bubble up in my chest. “Perform?” I repeated.
“Poetry.”
“And you are so skilled, clearly,” I said, grinning. “Else-wise you would not have won the necklace back.”
“Amani,” he groaned.
“You will have to declaim. Fair is fair,” I said, leaning my forehead against his.
“I am not half so talented as you,” he said, looking up at me beseechingly.
“And yet I require a performance all the same.”
“My Kushaila is not— I pieced it together from a performance on a holo.”
I combed my fingers through his hair. “Idris … I don’t tease. It is the performer that matters to me. Not the performance.” When he remained silent, my eyebrows raised. “You’ve recited before—what’s the difference now?”
“I did not know what I said then,” he said softly. “I did research this time.”
Something soft twisted in my heart. Idris had researched poetry for me before, but this he must have done during our separation. I thought too of the difficulty of barely speaking what was meant to be his mother tongue and piecing poetry together. Kushaila was not an easy language; it was one that existed in layers and transformations. There was never a single meaning to anything.
I pressed a kiss against his forehead. I would not force it, as he had not forced me. But I had heard him declaim once, and he had a voice suited to it, a regal manner that conveyed beauty in the telling of the poem. And I imagined that his understanding of the poetry this time would only deepen its beauty.
“Morning came,” he started softly in Kushaila, “—the separation—substitute for the love we shared, for the fragrance of our coming together, falling away…”
My mouth fell ajar. His Kushaila held just a thread of Vathekaar, but the words rumbled out of him, beautiful, smooth, and clear.
Our enemies envied us as we drank lovers wine.
They prayed for it to spoil and the world complied.
What was bound together was unbound
And what we held between us withered away.
Our souls were as one, never to be parted,
And now there is no world where they can join once more.
Would that I knew that nothing would satisfy our enemies.
Has their satisfaction brought us fortune?
For long moments I remained motionless, my hands braced on his shoulders, my eyes fixed on his face. He looked down, at my lap, his hair obscuring his eyes. The first and only other time he’d declaimed had been in Al Hoceima; a later part of this same poem that he hadn’t understood but remembered because his father often recited it to his mother. It had been a beautiful recitation, but a blind one.
This—
If he asked me anything, I thought hazily, in the next few moments I would agree to it without thought.
“Amani,” he said, voice strangled. “Say something.”
I didn’t know what to say. That he had chosen this poem, that he had performed it so beautifully, so movingly—
“Was it … before Azaghar? That you retrieved the necklace?” I asked, clearing my throat.
He still hadn’t looked up. “At M’Gaadir,” he said. “Just before we left.”
“Idris—”
What I felt I didn’t know how to say. Instead I lowered my face to his and kissed him. I heard the necklace strike the carpeted floor as his hands swept along my ribs and over my back. The grief in his recitation had lodged like a shard of glass in my heart, and I never wanted to think on it again. I never wanted to imagine that we would have to grieve one another in such a way, that we would be so irrevocably separated, that we would allow people to drive us apart.
In truth, nothing needed to be said. Eventually we lay entwined before the fire, my head on his heart, his fingers marking a trail over my spine. I remembered what I’d thought in M’Gaadir—that I wanted a lifetime of this. Poetry and politics and passion.
“Amani,” Idris said, his hand stilling on my back. “Do not think I am so easily distracted.”
I said nothing, though I imagined he could sense the stillness that fell over me.
“What bothers you?” he asked softly.
The problems I’d confronted earlier in the evening reared their heads. Idris had sworn to support me, to support all rebel efforts. But saying so and doing so were two different things, and I’d not yet put it to the test. And something such as this—I didn’t know how to explain it to him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“I have been given an assignment,” I said at last.
He stilled for a moment, then sat up. “Your first?”
I forced myself to meet his gaze. “No,” I said softly.
“Then why the reticence?” He frowned.
“It requires Maram’s cooperation. It requires her to make a great sacrifice,” I said, sitting up beside him. “I don’t know— I don’t think it’s a sacrifice she’s ready to make.”
His frown was severe. “Amani, I don’t think she will. Collaborating with the makhzen is one thing. Making a sacrifice for the rebels—knowing that you’re a rebel…”
“She knew,” I said softly, “before you did. That I was a rebel. She’s known all along.”
His eyes widened. “And yet you live,” he said.
“I meant what I said to her at M’Gaadir. She will be a great queen and leader. But waiting—we can’t afford it. We don’t have time.”
“And you would take the risk?”
“The future of the whole world, Idris, against my fear,” I said. “What should win?”
He smiled ruefully. “You should bring such audaciousness to your shatranj playing,” he said, and I hit him on the arm. A moment later, he sobered. “I understand. And for what it’s worth—I think it’s a risk worth taking. I think it’s time we stopped underestimating our future queen and asked for the courage we expect of her.”
07. Maram
Maram had sent
the letter.
After days of agonizing, on the eve of their departure from M’Gaadir she’d sent it and had heard nothing. And now they were heading to Qarmutta—they would leave Ghufran in the morning—and her grandmother was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. To many she was Mathis’s daughter and not Najat’s. Perhaps her grandmother thought herself a woman without a granddaughter.
She’d hoped that her grandmother’s presence would decide her. That it would lay something awful and devastating inside her to rest. There was a storm inside her. Fear of change. Anger at her marriage. Grief because she had to pretend. She felt as if she would fall apart at any moment.
She donned the gown the serving girls laid out for her—a blue silk qaftan, with a high collar and a feather fan design over her chest. Rimming the hem were crossed scimitars. She’d seen Idris’s robes; she knew they were meant to complement him. This is what she would wear at the feast ending her visit in Ghufran. To celebrate her marriage. To a man.
A horrible pain wracked its way through her and she shuddered and turned away from the mirror. She was her mother’s daughter, her heir, the rightful inheritor of this planet. She had to do what was necessary.
But she would have given the world to do what made her happy instead.
A knock on the door. “Your Highness?”
“A moment.” Her voice was steady, for which she was thankful. The only time she’d felt anything like this was after her mother’s death. Gritty eyes and a throat filled with rocks. She hadn’t cried; she hadn’t dared. But the impulse was there, waiting for her to be weak and give in.
The doors to her dressing room opened as she approached them and all the serving girls bent their knees in greeting. The room was dim; all the lanterns had been turned low, and the room was accented in dark woods and dark reds so that it seemed wreathed in dark shadow.
But the woman sitting in a chair by the window was familiar to her, even if they had not met for more than a year now. She had come. After all this, her grandmother had come.
“Leave,” she said to the girls, before her voice cracked.
Maram had dealt with enough emotion in the last week to last her a lifetime. She had no interest in dredging up old wounds or vulnerabilities. She especially had no desire to revert to her child self, though she felt the impulse rise sharply in her chest.
“Yabnati,” her grandmother said, and held out a hand.
She almost didn’t move.
The thing Maram hated the most about her grandmother was that she imagined her mother would have aged to look the same. Every time she saw her, she imagined her mother, a doting grandmother herself, looking over Maram’s children.
But come forward she did, and pressed a kiss against the back of her grandmother’s hand, and knelt at her feet. She thought she might retain her composure. She certainly had the strength for it. But her grandmother laid a hand on her cheek, and swept a thumb in an arc beneath her eye, and she felt the tears come.
The dowager sultana said nothing as Maram laid her head in her lap and wept. Her hand was warm on her back, though still.
“I can’t do it,” she said at last, looking up. “I can’t keep doing it.”
Her grandmother looked grim as she looked down at her. “Your mother felt much the same. She survived.”
“My mother was loved,” she rasped. “I am not.”
The dowager’s eyebrows rose. “Do you think I do not love you?”
Maram hated how her voice wavered when she spoke. “Few people will love the daughter of a monster—even if she is made in their image.”
“You are not a monster,” the dowager said. “You are my granddaughter. And you will survive this.”
Perhaps she was a monster. Every time she looked at Amani she remembered some slight she’d dealt her, some horrible violence. Her life was littered with the evidence of what ran in her blood—the things she was capable of. The things she’d done.
“Did my mother ever give him up?”
The dowager stilled. “What?”
“I was given letters by the scholars in M’Gaadir,” she said, and swallowed around the lump in her throat. “Her letters.”
Her grandmother leaned back in her seat, her old eyes shrewd. “I will tell you the story of your mother, if you answer me honestly.”
Maram nodded.
“Why did you write to me?”
“I—” She blinked rapidly, trying to stem the tears. “I know what I have to do. I know what is expected of me by—by the Andalaans. I know it’s the right thing to do. But I can’t do it alone. Grandmother—”
“Hush now,” her grandmother murmured, and laid a hand on her cheek. “Ruling is difficult beyond imagining. Understand this and you will never be surprised.”
“I can’t do what my father wants,” she whispered.
The dowager smiled only a little. “I know. That is why I have come.”
“My mother—”
“During the height of the civil war, Najat believed we would lose. My brother and his daughter Moulouda seemed unstoppable. He’d found a tesleet—or it found him—and they rode to war with its blessing. They’d captured Cadiz, and were moving across the islands, and controlled the Strait of Qurtan and the east continent.” She closed her eyes. “She was a foolish girl in love—so she married the boy she loved, thinking we would lose the war and she would never sit on the throne. Thinking that the decision would not have political ramifications.”
Maram blinked back her tears, and stared up at her grandmother in disbelief.
“But—”
“Her marriage to Mathis was necessary, but illegal. Neither Andalaan nor Vathek law recognizes bigamy. You must understand—if Mathis could not secure his hold on the planet legally, he would wipe out the makhzen, all our governments—everything. He was willing to make a concession with the understanding that his heir would inherit, and that he would be regent of the planet until her majority. Najat ensured the language of the treaty secured your position, not his.”
Maram frowned. “I don’t understand.”
The dowager leaned forward. “The treaty states that Najat was the primary ruler—even if that was not the reality—and that in the event of her untimely death her husband would be regent to her first born. Mathis is not her husband, which renders the occupation illegal. But it’s a plan that works only if Najat is alive to enforce it and to plead to the galactic senate for aid.”
“He killed her,” Maram breathed, stumbling to her feet.
“He poisoned her so that no one could accuse him of killing the rightful ruler of the planet. She died slowly. And her husband was executed on charges of treason. Yabnati—”
“He killed my mother,” she said again.
She couldn’t breathe. Every day of her life had been wracked with guilt—guilt that she wasn’t enough for her father. That what she had become would frighten and disgust her mother. She struggled every day between the two—running from one disparate shadow to another. But a dead woman couldn’t provide comfort, and her living father had no desire to.
Her head snapped up to look at the dowager. “Is—is Mathis my father?”
Her grandmother smiled sadly. “I don’t know. But I do know that his custodianship of this planet is illegal because he never married your mother. And now, with the rebels as strong as they are and you of age—if the world found out … If the galaxy found out—”
Maram shook her head and closed her eyes. She didn’t care about politics, not now. She cared about the legacy she had nursed inside of her, of the promises she’d made because she believed that legacy was real and valid. Of the choices she’d made, believing she could nurture her heart and the state both.
“Maram?”
Her head snapped up.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” She stared at her grandmother. “Mathis is not the ruler of this planet. You are.”
* * *
She called a serving girl to escort her grand
mother to her chambers, then sank to her knees by the fire.
Her father had killed her mother. She had spent all her life trying to make him proud. Trying to make him love her. Be harder, crueler, more steadfast in the ways of the bloodline. Leave half yourself behind and perhaps they would bestow purity on you.
What, exactly, ran in her blood?
What sort of legacy was she inheriting?
She couldn’t stop weeping. She didn’t know why she cried. Perhaps for what her mother had endured. For what she had given up in the name of her people. For the death of Najat’s optimism and romantic spirit. Everyone remembered her mother as one of the conquered—but Najat had never appeared so to her.
Yabnati’l aziza …
Her mother had loved her, though people seemed to doubt it. Would Najat have cared who Maram’s father was?
The doors to her balcony rattled, then opened. For a moment she stared at the figure haloed by the lanterns outside, uncomprehending. The metalwork in her hair caught the brassy light of the lantern and seemed to gleam.
“Am I a stranger to you now?”
The cry that left Maram’s mouth felt jagged and broken. She lurched to her feet and threw herself at Aghraas, and the solidity of her form shocked her as it always did. Aghraas was a warrior, though she had never said as much. Maram had spent time cataloguing the scars on her arms and on her back. There was one just beneath her ear that had always frightened and perplexed her in what it implied. She felt the rumble of laughter in her chest as she pulled her into her arms.
“You’re here?” she whispered.
“Of course I am,” Aghraas said, some of the laughter still threaded through her voice. “I have come to take you away.”
Maram felt a thrill and a cold fear at the same time and pulled back. “Away? I cannot go away. I am the princess.”
It was so strange—the image of regality in her head was quite married to the Vathek idea, but whenever Aghraas sat anywhere it put her in mind of a warrior queen from antiquity. Her legs were never crossed, and there was a slouch to her shoulders that made Maram think she was used to being ready to reach for a weapon. She sat thus now, dropping languidly into an open chair without permission, her head tilted just so that their eyes still met.
