Rebel of the Sands

by Alwyn Hamilton

“Can I see him?”

  “I don’t see why not.” Bahi shrugged, gesturing behind himself.

  The heat hit me like a wall as soon as I pulled back the tent flap. Jin was lying as I’d left him, still as the dead.

  Only his brother sat next to him. Prince Ahmed’s shirt was loose at the collar, and I could see the echo of Jin’s sun tattooed on his own chest in the dim light from the lamp. He looked up at the sound of the tent flap falling shut behind me. “Your Majesty.” The words tripped out, unnatural. “I’m sorry, I should—”

  “No, please, stay.” I stopped my retreat. I wasn’t sure how to refuse a prince. I sat down across from Ahmed on the other side.

  I stilled. Ahmed brought the present rushing back in. Jin wasn’t just some foreign boy with a traitor smile; he was the Sultan’s son and I was far out of my place sitting with this pair of prodigal princes.

  “Is Jin even his real name?” I asked when the silence had stretched too long.

  “Yes,” Ahmed said. “But it’s not his full name. Our father named him Ajinahd Al’Oman Bin Izman. Lien, his mother, was the one who nicknamed him Jin.”

  Nearly two months and he hadn’t even told me his real name.

  Ahmed was watching me. “You think he doesn’t trust you. But that’s not true.”

  I scoffed.

  “The compass.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the battered brass thing in his hands. I thought of the tattoo on Jin's back. The compass. On the other side of the sun. Like his heart beat between the two. “It’s of Gamanix make. While the Albish and the Gallan war over magic and mortality, the Gamanix balance the two. A little bit of science, a little bit of magic. Each compass is twinned with another. That compass is our lifeline. In the six years since we got them, I’ve never let mine out of my sight. I would have lost Jin a dozen times if not for this. My brother may have little regard for his own safety, but if he trusted you with his family, there’s no way he could trust you more.

  “It was Jin’s mother who got us out of the palace alive, you know.” I didn’t know that. Just like I didn’t really know anything real about Jin. But he didn’t seem to need me to answer him. I wasn’t even sure he was talking to me. “Lien and my mother were like sisters. They came into my father’s harem near the same time, and Jin and I were born hours apart. I was early and Jin was late. I was fifth of my father’s sons. He was sixth. We were born early enough in our father’s reign that we were treated well, but not so early that he took more notice of us than our mothers liked. Lien called it fate. Jin doesn’t believe in fate.

  “I don’t have a single memory of my mother’s face. I was too young when she died.” The Sultan’s pretty young wife from the story. The one who was beaten to death for giving birth to Delila. She’d been a few words in the tale of the Rebel Prince to me. But she’d been flesh and blood to Ahmed. “All my memories of Miraji are of my brother. The night Delila was born, Jin was sick. Lien and my mother had been planning an escape ever since my mother learned she was carrying a Djinni’s child. It wasn’t safe to move Jin—he was running a fever—but it wasn’t safe for Delila to stay. So Lien had to risk it. I remember little bits from that night. Clinging to Lien’s skirts while she peeled off a sultan’s ransom in gold bracelets to pay for a ship to Xicha.

  “But those things belong to a dream. What I remember better than anything is sitting on a bunk with my hand on my brother’s heartbeat as he burned up on an unsteady ship taking us away from home and Lien making me pray for Jin to make it through the night alive while she rocked my sister to try to stop her screaming.” He swallowed, his throat bobbing. “I’ve lost count of how many prayers I’ve sent up for my brother to keep him alive since then. He has had more than his share of brushes with death for one life.”

  “Some folks are just better at putting themselves in the line of fire,” I said. “Your Majesty.”

  “Please, call me Ahmed. All you need to do is look around to see that my majesty is very much in question.” He looked nothing like his brother in that moment. Jin always smiled at me like we were both about to be in big trouble and he loved it. The prince smiled like he was forgiving you for it. “My brother may have little regard for his own safety, but most of the time, when he’s stepped into the line of fire, it’s been to put himself between death and Delila or me. I’ve never seen him flirt so carelessly with death for anyone other than us before. Until you.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I focused on Jin instead of the Rebel Prince. His foreign features were the one familiar thing in this uncanny place full of purple-haired princesses and golden-eyed shape-shifters, even though he might as well have become a stranger all over again the moment Ahmed called him brother.

  “Winning your throne, your kingdom . . .” I began. “Is it worth all these people dying?” Is it worth his life? “The Sultan killed your mother, the Sultim stole your throne—that’s nothing to do with anyone else. You want to know who killed my mother? Your country.” I didn’t mean it to come out sounding like a taunt. But I wanted to hear him say it. That he really can save this desert.

  “I’m not here for power.” Prince Ahmed was calm, as if I hadn’t just thrown his mother’s murder in his face. Somehow it didn’t come out cocky. “I’ve seen the way my father rules like a man afraid to lose even a scrap of his power to another. He thinks that’s the only way, and that’s why we are poor and occupied and weak. I never planned to come back to Miraji to take my father’s seat.

  “We went everywhere before coming here. We saw the Ionian Peninsula, where they have a council of men and women, chosen from among their people, poor and rich alike, so that they can be heard equally. We went to Amonpour, where their trade and their industry make them wealthy and full instead of poor and starving. We went to Albis, where women can inherit land and hold jobs and are treated as equal to men in all things. And Espa, where on one particular drunken evening we thought doing this”—the prince pulled aside his collar so I could see the whole of his sun tattoo, identical to Jin’s—“was a good idea. It’s a Xichian symbol for luck and fortune. Appropriate when you’re living job to job, ship to ship, like we were then. I didn’t exactly plan on it becoming the symbol for a whole revolution.

  “The people of this desert should have a country that belongs to them, not to one man. Everybody in this country lives like they’re lit with fire at birth. There’s so much greatness in Miraji, and so many terrible things being done by my father and by the Gallan. This country’s people deserve better. Shazad deserves a country where her mind isn’t wasted because she’s a woman. The Demdji shouldn’t fear for their lives just because my father has allied with a country that burns those touched with magic. My mother deserved better than being beaten to death for rebelling against a life she didn’t choose for herself. We could make Miraji the greatest country in the world.

  “My father made it the way it is, a warring, violent place, half in the hands of the Gallan king. And my brother Kadir is like him. With him as Sultim, we will keep living under foreign empires who come in and bleed the sands dry. Or we could change everything.”

  Prince Ahmed’s face came alive when he was talking about the desert. And the more he talked, the harder it was not to believe him. I finally understood the crazy kid in the pistol pit the night I met Jin. That these ideas could make men shout for rebellion even when it meant they would hang for it.

  nineteen

  Dark fell in the oasis earlier than I thought it would. I hadn’t noticed when we’d been crossing the desert, but now it struck me that Shihabian really must be close. At twilight, the colorful world turned to a softer version of itself. Campfires burned among the trees. Each was surrounded by a little pocket of people, sharing food, laughing. I thought of Dustwalk at dinnertime. Everybody shut up inside their houses, jealously guarding every scrap they had. Here the food was laid out on a big carpet in the middle of the camp, with a stack of mismatch
ed plates.

  Shazad and I sat down by one of the small fires. Shazad helped herself to two plates, piling flatbread and fruit on one and handing it to me.

  “Where do all these people come from?” I asked Shazad in between bites. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I started eating.

  Shazad looked around at the hundred or so rebels, as if the question surprised her. “A little bit of everywhere. There were only a dozen of us when we fled Izman after the Sultim trials. But in the last year, the cause has gotten bigger. More people have joined. A few were turned out of their houses or arrested for supporting Ahmed a little too loudly. Some we broke out of prison. Farrouk and Fazia are orphans from Izman.” She gestured to the pair I’d seen tinkering with the bomb that morning, now building some kind of structure out of bread. “We hired them to make an explosive device on a mission a few months back and the Sultan’s army identified them, so they’re refugees now. Fairly useful to have around, although I worry one day they’ll blow this whole place sky-high.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “I’m a girl who could’ve done just about anything if I’d been born a boy.” Shazad took a bite of her food. “But I was born a girl, so I’m doing this. My mother thinks it’s an elaborate stall tactic to avoid getting married.” I’d seen Shazad kill a Skinwalker. Watched her that afternoon run a dozen of the rebels through sword drills with the kind of command that could march a whole army across the desert. If she couldn’t carve out a place for herself in Izman, what hope was I going to have?

  “She’s too modest.” Bahi dropped down next to Shazad by the fire, folding his legs over the pillow. He was balancing a plate on his knees. “Shazad was born to greatness. Her father is General Hamad.”

  I gave them both a blank look.

  “He’s been the Sultan’s chief general for two decades,” Bahi bragged for her. “He had a strong daughter and a weak son. Being a man of unconventional strategies, he trained his daughter to follow in his footsteps.”

  “My brother’s not weak, he’s sick,” Shazad said.

  “Most people,” Bahi said with a bold smile that was all teeth and no humor, “would have killed their son trying to turn him strong. Like my father tried to do with me.”

  Shazad saved me from having to answer. “Bahi’s father is a captain in the army. He reports to my father, which is why Bahi and I have known each other since we were six years old.”

  “And we’ve been friends that long because I’m so charming,” Bahi said.

  “You’re marginally less of an ass than the rest of your brothers,” Shazad conceded. “Captain Reza”—there was scorn in Shazad’s tone and Bahi snapped a fake salute—“has six sons, so he thought he could spare a few. Much as he enjoyed gloating to his superior officer that he has six strong sons, where my father had only one.”

  “And you,” I said.

  “Captain Reza never counted me.”

  “His mistake,” Bahi put in.

  “Does your father know . . .” I wasn’t sure how to put it. “That you’re turning against him?” I probably shouldn’t have put it like that.

  “I’m not against my father.” Shazad smiled fondly. “I’m against the Sultan. My father turned against him a while ago, too. He’s the one who told us about the rumors of the weapon being made down in the Last County. So highly secretive, the Sultan didn’t even tell him—but he has other ways of obtaining information.”

  That made me sit up. Rumor in Dustwalk was that Ahmed’s rebellion was just a band of idealistic fools in the desert. But the rebels had had enough of a hold on Dassama that it’d been worth destroying. And the general was high-ranking in court. If he was loyal to Ahmed . . .

  “You’re saying you’ve got allies in the Sultan’s court?”

  Shazad was easily the most beautiful girl I’d ever met, and when she smiled with all her teeth she looked like the most dangerous one, too. “A few. The stories would have you believe that Ahmed appeared in Izman on the day of the Sultim trials like magic. Same way they’d have you believe that he disappeared from the palace the night of Delila’s birth in a poof of Demdji smoke. But campfire stories are never the whole story.” I remembered what Ahmed had told me, as we kept watch over Jin in the sick tent. That his mother and Jin’s had plotted their escape. But Jin’s mother wasn’t even in the popular story. Neither was Jin, for that matter. “Ahmed came back to Izman half a year before the Sultim trials, on a trading ship. He fell in with an intellectual crowd. A lot of very clever, very idealistic boys, including my brother, who sat around and talked about philosophies and how to make Miraji better. Many of them are children of people in the Sultan’s court.”

  She took a bite of her food. “One night, I found my brother and Ahmed and three of their idiot friends in stocks in the middle of Izman because they’d been preaching that women ought to have the right to refuse a marriage.” That struck down to the bone. “Fortunately, being General Hamad’s daughter gets you a long way when dealing with soldiers. I dressed them down for arresting their general’s only son, and they were rushing to unlock the rest of them. They had no idea they’d accidentally arrested the prodigal Prince Ahmed, or I doubt even being the general’s daughter would’ve done much. Ahmed was renting rooms in the Izman slums under a false name then.” I figured there was a reason things like that didn’t make it into the stories. No one wanted to imagine their hero prince sleeping in a flea-infested bed. “I dragged my brother home, and Ahmed followed us. When we got there I dressed him down about almost getting my brother killed. And the next thing I knew, we were shouting about Ataullah’s philosophy on the role of the ruler in the state, and then I was agreeing to train him for the Sultim trials.”

  “I was locked away in the Holy Order at the time,” Bahi said with his mouth full. “Or I would have talked some sense into her.”

  “Would you like to tell her what you actually did when you got kicked out, or shall I?” Shazad took a bite of flatbread.

  Bahi was suddenly very intent on his food. “I don’t recall.”

  Shazad didn’t miss a beat. “He got very drunk and turned up to serenade me outside my father’s house.”

  I snorted a laugh. “What song?” I couldn’t help but ask.

  “I don’t remember,” Bahi muttered again.

  “‘Rumi and the Princess,’ I think?” Shazad caught my eye, the spark of a laugh there.

  “No.” Bahi looked up defensively. “It was ‘The Djinni and the Dev’ and it was beautiful.” He puffed out his chest as Shazad’s spark exploded into a real laugh. It was contagious, and soon I was laughing, too. Bahi started to call for a drink, saying he’d sing it for us once he had some liquor in him.

  Truth be told I already felt drunk.

  The night and the colors and the laughter and the sense of power and certainty in what they were doing made my head spin. This revolution was a legend in the making. The kind of tale that sprawled out long before me and far beyond my reach. The sort of epic that was told over and over to explain how the world was never the same after this handful of people lived and fought and won or died trying. And after it happened, the story seemed somehow inevitable. Like the world was waiting to be changed, needing to be saved, and the players in the tale were all plucked out of their lives and moved into places exactly where they needed to be, like pieces on a board, just to make this story come true. But it was wilder and more terrifying and intoxicating, and more uncertain, than I’d ever thought. And I could be part of it. If I wanted to. It was getting way too late to rip myself out of this story now, or to rip it out of me.

  “Where the hell have you been, holy boy?” The new voice startled me out of my daydream. I stared at the speaker. I’d thought Delila and Imin were sights to see, but the girl who dropped uninvited next to our fire was made of gold. Everything from the tips of her fingernails to her eyelids looked like she’d been cast o
ut of metal instead of born, except her hair was as black as mine and her eyes were dark. Another Demdji. “Can you deal with this?” She stretched out her arm toward him; it was caked in blood and burn marks.

  Bahi hissed through his teeth as he took it. “What happened?”

  “There was a small explosion,” the golden girl said drily.

  “The burns aren’t that bad,” Bahi said. “It’s hard to burn the daughter of a First Being made of pure fire.”

  “When did you get back, Hala?” Shazad asked. Hala didn’t answer; she just gestured sarcastically to her bloody traveling clothes in a way that seemed to suggest Shazad was stupid for not realizing she was fresh into camp.

  “We were too late,” she said. “She’d already been arrested. I thought she’d have longer. Shape-shifters are usually better at hiding. Imin lasted for two weeks, remember? But apparently this one is stupid. Rumor is they’re holding her for trial in Fahali. I’ve just come for backup. I say we leave tonight, slip in, and scramble their minds before they can hang her.”

  “You mean the girl with the red hair.” I interrupted, before I could think not to. For the first time Hala seemed to notice me. “That’s who you were looking for in Fahali. A Demdji.” The word still tasted strange. “She had red hair and a face that changed.”

  “You! You saw her!” Hala’s golden face glowed eagerly in the firelight as she leaned forward, and I knew we were talking about the same person.

  The next words that fell out of my mouth stopped her short. “The Gallan shot her in the head.”

  The cheery mood that’d been around the campfire a moment before was extinguished. “So how come you’re still alive?” Hala’s golden face hardened.

  Something in her voice said she expected me to grovel. To stumble over myself to explain how I dared to have survived when the person she’d been out to save hadn’t. “Because they didn’t shoot me in the head,” I answered.

  Her sneer reminded me of an ivory and gold comb Tamid’s mother used to have. She waved a hand, like she was urging me to go on. I noticed she had only eight fingers. Two were missing on her left hand that I could’ve sworn were there before. She noticed me noticing, and a second later her hand was whole again.