by Somaiya Daud
I didn’t look entirely Kushaila, though I desperately wanted to. There were enough Vathek qualities about the dress—the epaulets, the way the skirt gathered at my hips—that I straddled the line between the two worlds Maram occupied quite well. But if I’d had my daan—I missed all the markings, but the crown of Dihya most of all. It was my link to Massinia, to her poetry, to her life. And the markings on my cheek would have marked me as my parents’ daughter, would have preserved all their well-wishes for me.
I had not thought about them in so long, but suddenly, wrapped in wedding finery, I wanted them desperately. It would have been undeniable: who and what I was, my heritage inked into my skin. My fingers tightened in the folds of my gown as I made myself a promise. When all of this was over, when Maram was queen and I was free, I would get them back. I would return to Cadiz and have the tattoo artist remake them on my skin.
I could claim that much of myself back.
* * *
I was not prepared for the wall of sound—muffled as it was by the thick cloth walls of the tent—when I emerged from the tent. It wasn’t only the parade getting itself back into order. Idris and Maram’s marriage had made planetary and galactic news, and journalists, their assist-probes, and cameras all whizzed around, trying to capture the moments leading up to the final wedding feast.
I froze when I saw Idris. I was so used to seeing him wearing clothes that were either entirely Vathek or straddled the line. I don’t think in the time I’d known him that I’d ever seen him in entirely Kushaila dress. He wore a black jabadour, with a velvet black jacket embroidered in gold. Along the sleeves and hem were maned lions, their mouths open in a roar. Between the lions were pairs of crossed scimitars. His hair fell down, curling around his ears and at his neck. At his waist was a janbiya dagger, and a scimitar, its sheath bejeweled. The leather gleamed in the noonday sun.
He grinned. “What do you think?”
I let out a strangled laugh. “I’ve never—” then stopped.
“It was my brother’s,” he said, taking my hand. “Come on, my family is waiting.”
“Waiting?” But he didn’t stop to explain, and drew me away from the tent. Guards closed in around us, but even through all the noise of the larger camp, I could hear his family and understanding dawned on me. I could hear the cry of mizmaar horns, a dozen hands striking drums, and the voices of ‘Issawa singers, celebrating the marriage. A woman’s ululating cry broke out over the music.
The Salihi standard, a maned lion’s head with a palm tree cresting over it on a green background, flew from a pennant over the tent, whipping in the breeze. It felt as if there were a border around the Salihis and the moment we crossed over something changed. The voices got louder and the crowd parted when they saw us.
My hand tightened around his. I felt, strangely, as if I’d come home. The music beat in time with my heart, and the cries of his family members were in a language I understood, though I couldn’t respond or demonstrate joy or understanding. The silver capsules of rosewater glinted in the sunlight as the women flicked water at us, blessing us. Naima, Idris’s eldest aunt, waited for us at the entrance to the tent, sitting on an ornate cushioned chair.
“Khaltou,” Idris said, and kissed the back of her hand. She smiled at him. I remembered the last time we’d talked—that she’d spoken to me as Maram. She eyed me, her eyes still as sharp as any bird, then came to her feet.
“You will have to kneel,” Idris whispered.
“What?” Maram would not have, ever.
“Do it,” he urged.
The music hadn’t stopped, but I could feel the eyes of his family on me. If this were truly my wedding feast, I—Amani—wouldn’t have hesitated. There was no shame in kneeling to those older than you, to those who commanded and demanded respect. But Maram would chafe at it.
“You will have to help me get up,” I hissed at him. “This dress is heavy.”
I sank to my knees slowly and waited. A serving girl came forward, a veil of sheer gold cloth draped over her arms.
“This belonged to my niece, I’timad,” she said in heavily accented Vathekaar. I froze when she mentioned Idris’s mother. “And to my sister, Hijjou, before her. They had long and happy marriages. May you have the same.”
My breath caught in my throat. It was not a Kushaila custom—likely something more regional, but the symbolism of it wasn’t lost on me. She had no reason to accept me—Maram—into her family. To acknowledge me enthusiastically. But she had. I remained perfectly still as she pinned the veil to the open space behind the crown in my hair and draped it over my shoulders.
I looked up at her, trying to control the emotion in my voice. “Thank you.”
She said nothing, but smiled. Idris helped me to my feet, then kissed the back of my hand.
“Ready?” he asked.
“No,” I replied honestly. Camera probes flew around us, flashing and clicking as they captured the moment. We made our way through the camp to its head, followed by the Salihis, and picking up stragglers as we moved through. The parade itself would be headed by the Salihi cavaliers, all dressed like Idris, behind them were the drummers and ‘Issawa of the Banu Ifran, and then our palanquin. Behind us would be the rest of the families, Vathek and Andalaan. My nerves ricocheted between joy and fear. Mathis would be assassinated soon, sometime while we were en route, and I could not get that out of my head, even as I boarded the palanquin and waited for Idris to join me.
Despite all that, this felt so much different than the last time I’d boarded a Vathek procession. The first wedding rite I’d taken part of had felt like a funeral procession rather than a celebration of marriage. I remembered the heavy mantle of grief that had lain over me. This was not my wedding; it was not the culmination of ceremonies meant to consecrate my marriage and alliance to Idris. And yet—because I knew one day we would be together, that he would be mine—I felt joy. Even if our festivities were not so large or so loud, they would exist.
This was not an end, but a beginning.
The palanquin rose to its full height smoothly. One moment it seemed the entire camp was in chaos, and then, suddenly, we were moving forward.
The city was joyous. Likely in part, I realized, because the probes had broadcast my moment with the Salihi matriarch to the city. They were loud and waved the flags of their cities and the families in the retinue. Not even the presence of the Vath could take away their joy from seeing Idris and his family, or the Banu Ifran. Or, I realized with some joy, me. They loved Maram, even as she straddled the two worlds. I wished, suddenly, that Maram had come in her own place to see this. Wished that she could experience how much her people had come to love her in a short time. That all they’d needed was a show that she was one of them, a part of them. I heard a chorus of women in the back start crying out, “S’laat s’laam,” and grinned.
It seemed to last forever and also be over in an instant. Before I knew it, we reached the foot of the mesa and the palanquin was lowering itself again. The whine of sky-cars roared overhead as Idris helped me disembark, heralding the king’s arrival. There was a stone in my chest. Idris and I would climb the mesa with guards and an escort of the makhzen. The rebels would fire on Mathis’s vessel as we climbed the mesa. I—we—only had to make it halfway up before the old regime was obliterated.
As we climbed, I tried to keep the smile—soft and distant—affixed to my features. My hand tightened around Idris’s the further up the mesa we climbed until at last we cleared the top, and there was King Mathis, alive and well and unharmed.
Something had gone wrong. Something terrible had gone wrong.
I maintained my pleasant expression, though my grip on Idris’s hand must have been agonizing as we crossed the mesa to meet the king. How had they failed? How had his shuttle evaded the rebels? How could he be here, now?
Mathis watched our approach, his eyes cold and hard, his mouth twisted into a small smile. I sank to my knees.
“Your Eminence,” I murmu
red. He watched me sink to my knees, and his smile became more pronounced. Idris knelt behind me, and then the whole escort, as if a wave had rippled through. Mathis’s hand slid under my chin.
“I wondered,” he said, soft enough that I was the only person who could hear, “whose child you were. Mine or hers. There’s some Vathek steel in you.” His grip tightened. “But no cleverness, it seems.”
I kept my face immobile as he drew me to my feet. I had no way to contact the alliance, to get in touch with Maram, to communicate to anyone the cataclysmic failure unfolding in this moment. When Mathis offered me his arm, I took it. Despite everything, he still couldn’t tell the difference between his daughter and her double. Perhaps, I thought, panicked, I could save Maram in all this. Perhaps I could absolve her, and she could live to fight another day.
“Smile for the galaxy,” he murmured as the rest stood and followed us toward the palace entrance. He laid a hand over mine and squeezed. “You have started a game for your life. And you will not be able to finish it.”
I opened my mouth to respond, though what I might have said I had no idea. Before I could speak, a bird’s cry tore through the air. My eyes jerked skyward and I watched in disbelief as the tesleet I’d seen so many weeks ago, its jewel-toned feathers refracting sunlight, streaked across the sky. Seconds later I heard the rapid-fire thud-thud-thud of a fighter’s canon. Just beyond the mesa, high in the sky, the Vathek fleet was engaged.
The rebels.
My hand slipped from Mathis’s grip as I paused in the archway to the palace and looked up. The Vathek fleet was sleek, all curved edges and bright silver. But on the horizon and closer still I could see more ships; Vathek, older, their hulls streaked in rebel colors.
Mathis’s grip tightened painfully on my arm, and drew my focus back. The people on the mesa were silent—among them were dissidents: the makhzen who had allied with Maram.
“Get them inside,” Mathis snarled. “And I want the ground-to-air cannons up and firing immediately. We will crush this insurrection before it is born.”
If the rebels were engaging them in the air it meant Aghraas had gotten the de-armament codes to them successfully. It meant that in at least one of the cities, likely more, they’d not only wrested control of the city, but its defense as well. I turned away from the sky, my face impassive, and met Idris’s eyes. He wore the same mask I did, and when I slipped my hand into his, this time his grip was agonizing. He was frightened. So was I. But hope was not lost. Not yet.
Mathis led us into the palace. We were flanked by a full company of guards, and though none of us were bound, we may as well have been. My heart was stuck in my throat. Sometimes we passed a corridor and the echo of fighting would float down toward us. Idris’s muscles would seize, and I’d have to tug gently and get him moving again. The Mas’udi twins and the Nasiris were in our escort as well, and they too remained silent. Rabi’a and Buchra had gone ahead with the intention of greeting us in the throne room. Every now and then I would catch Khulood or I’timad’s eye. They were terrified. They’d lived through the purge—they knew what was at stake.
The doors to the throne room were enormous—as high as several men stacked on top of one another, made of iron, gilded. There were two guards at the door outfitted in Ifrani regalia, with swords on their left hips and blasters on their right. Their faces were masked, but when I met the eyes of one, my heart went still.
She was Tazalghit and so was her partner.
The spike of adrenaline that followed forced a tremor into my hands, and I tightened my grip on Idris’s hand. The two moved as one, turning toward the door, pushing it open. Mathis and our Vathek escort, who had only ever thought of Andalaans as one roiling mass, this tribe indistinguishable from the other, didn’t mark their presence and strode into the room. But I understood why they hadn’t attacked Mathis on sight when we entered the room.
Nadine stood by the throne, and behind her were the droids she favored so. Lined up along the walls were several directors and generals I recognized from my time in the Ziyaana. It was either an executionary tribunal or a war council. Rabi’a was where she was meant to be, by a side entrance to the room. Her face was pale, her mouth tight, but her chin was raised and her shoulders straight. She was the picture of elegance. Beside her was another Tazalghit in armor.
There was a wide window behind the throne, and I watched as a Vathek vessel, free of rebel colors, hurled itself toward the ground while aflame. Behind me, the doors to the throne room were still open and the sounds of fighting in the palace carried through.
“Now, daughter,” Mathis said, standing on the steps. He made a gesture and the droids came to attention behind Nadine. “Call off your troops.”
He cast a striking figure. Tall, broad-shouldered, plumes of smoke and fire rising up behind him on the mesas beyond. He was cold, his features hard—a conqueror of the stars. But something was wrong.
I released my hold on Idris’s hand and walked to the steps leading up to the throne. The droid’s weapons tracked me, but none of them fired. Where was Maram?
I tilted my head just as she would have, curious and aloof. “Why haven’t you arrested me?”
“You are my daughter,” he said, coming down to meet me. “Shall I humiliate you with chains?”
A shadow of Maram’s smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. “You have another daughter. But not one with a legitimate and lawful claim to this planet.”
“Shall I humiliate you on the battlefield, then?” he asked.
“Who do you think the galactic senate will support?”
His eyes turned cooler still and his mouth flattened. “That assumes you will get off planet.”
My mouth rounded into a sarcastic “o” of surprise. “So, I am under arrest.”
“Your Highness—” Nadine interrupted. I turned a cool gaze to acknowledge her. She didn’t recognize me, I realized with a start. Had she ever been able to tell us apart? She always knew, beforehand, which of us she would be speaking to. Was she like Mathis, unable to discern between us? Or was the Kushaila regalia so obfuscating she couldn’t see past it?
“If you would only call your army off and return to us—” she continued.
I walked slowly up the steps toward her, each strike of heel against stone followed by the ongoing sound of the battle raging in the air outside and above us. I was stalling, hoping that Maram would arrive. Was she alive? Had she survived the fighting in the palace? Was she coming to take her place?
“You mean: return to you. So you can go back to being my puppet master, preying on all my worst fears?”
“I would never presume—” she began.
“You already have,” I replied.
The room shook without warning and all eyes turned to the great window behind the throne.
“Heads down!” someone cried just as the glass blew in and a hot gust of wind followed. A shuttle decloaked, its debarking ramp extended into the new hole in place of the window. My knees went weak with relief: Maram stepped into the room dressed for battle, with Aghraas at her side and a coterie of Tazalghit behind her. The sound of boots striking against ground filled the corridor leading up to the throne room, and a dozen more Tazalghit warriors poured in through the still open doors. The two guards by the door unmasked, and I watched Rabi’a punch a code into a panel by the wall. A tile lifted away, and she pulled several firearms from within. She passed one to the woman beside her—Arinaas, unmasked—and a few more to the other makhzen in the room.
“I think you will find, Father, that your occupation is at an end,” Maram said. She looked like a warrior queen from the days of Houwa or Massinia. Robed in black and gold, shimmering Kushaila script adorned the lapels of her jacket, and she bore a janbiya at her waist and a blaster in her right hand.
Mathis looked from her to me and back. His features were as stone, as cold and hard as they had been when we first entered the room. For a moment I thought he might surrender.
“Kill them a
ll,” he said.
The world seemed to slow in my eyes. Nadine’s hand wrapped like talons around my arm. Aghraas pulled Maram back and I watched a glittering plasma-mesh barricade rise up from the ground between them and the blaster fire from Nadine’s droids. Mathis withdrew with two guards to the other side of the room and Idris climbed the stairs, a firearm braced against his shoulder, its muzzle pointed at Nadine.
“Let her go,” he said. He looked calm, dangerously so, though his grip on the weapon was white-knuckled.
Nadine pressed a blaster against my spine.
“The gall,” she hissed, “to speak to me thus when you are nothing. Less than nothing.”
“Nadine, I’m warning you,” Idris said.
“Would you risk it?” she asked. My eyes met Idris’s. Beneath that calm he was as terrified as he’d been when the first fighters had engaged. I nodded, just a little, even though my hands shook, and my heart beat so hard in my chest I thought the rest of me trembled in the aftershocks.
“Do you trust me?” he asked me.
“With my life,” I replied.
We’d never been in a situation like this before and yet I knew: Idris could do this. I waited two heartbeats and then jerked to the left. All sound turned to wind rushing in my ears except for the burst of noise coming out of his firearm. She jerked, her hand still tight around my arm, and then released me and fell back. I didn’t wait to see where he’d hit her. Idris took my arm, drew me to his side, and together we walked back until we reached a barricade.
The throne room was large, its ceilings high, and our soldiers were spread throughout, camped behind barricades. Idris and I ended up behind the nearest one, beside Maram and Aghraas, who handed me a blaster. I stared at it, uncomprehending.
