No.
Except the denial wouldn’t come.
All that I am I give to you, and all that I have is yours.
We had never knelt side by side in front of fires with my face covered, but we had said the words. Not in front of a Holy Father, but last night, tangled up in
Jin’s tent.
Until the day we die.
It was the words that mattered. I had tied our lives together when I said those words. When I made them truth. And I’d knotted our deaths, too.
‘Your daughters tend to lose their hearts very easily, Bahadur.’ One of the Djinn spoke to my father, a hint of mockery in his voice. ‘And their lives with them.’
With those words, he was gone. Blinking out of existence. Already forgetting us as he vanished back to the desert. Another Djinni blinked out after him. And then my father after him, without so much as casting a glance back our way. And then another. One by one, they vanished from the vaults that had held them for so long against us.
Until we were alone.
Blood was pooling around me, warm on my fingers. My hands crawled away from it across the stone floor, feeling blindly. Something solid wrapped itself around my fingers.
Jin had caught my hand. I clung to his.
I lifted my body from the ground, screaming in pain, dragging myself the last few feet between us. I pressed my hand against my wound as I moved, until the side of my body was against his, our knotted hands trapped between us.
I shifted so I could see his face.
So this was how this story would end. The Resurrected Prince Ahmed would win the war. When he took the palace, he would descend into the vaults again. And there he would find us twined together in blood on the stone floor.
They would burn us. And maybe they’d even remember us. But it would be some distant, false, nameless version of us. The Blue-Eyed Bandit and the Foreign Prince. Not Amani and Jin.
The stories might tell that we loved each other. But the stories would never remember what that felt like. They would never know that when we lay together in his tent the night before we died, he traced the small scar along my collarbone. That when he kissed me, he smiled against my mouth. Or what it sounded like when he said my name. We contained our own stories. A thousand tiny parts of the story would die with us.
The world was starting to fade away into unconsciousness. No – into death. I wanted to tell him I was sorry. But I was and I wasn’t. I wanted to tell him I didn’t want him to die, that I loved him. But he knew that.
‘What do you think happens?’ I said instead. ‘When we die?’ Jin didn’t believe in gods. He didn’t believe in heavens or hells or worlds after. Just in this world. Just in now.
Jin traced my face, like he was trying to remember it. ‘I think they burn us and we become dust and ash.’ He ran a finger across the edge of my lips. ‘And I think that the dust that was me will spend until the end of time trying to get as close as possible to the dust that was you out in that vast desert.’
Something that was neither a sob nor a laugh came out of me, and Jin’s fingers clamped around mine.
I only had time to press back before the darkness came.
Chapter 44
The Young Demdji
Once, at the dawn of a long-ago war, the First War, the immortal Djinn created life. And alongside it there was death. They gave their creations bodies that could be hurt and destroyed and scattered like sand and then lit them with a single spark of Djinni fire that would one day extinguish.
But among them, there were those who had a greater spark of fire than had been granted to most mortals. They were called Demdji. Many said it was because they had more fire that they burned so much brighter and quicker than most.
That they all died so young.
Princess Hawa took her last breath on a wall overlooking a battlefield.
Ashra the Blessed took her last breath facing the Destroyer of Worlds when no one else would.
Imin of a Thousand Faces’ last breath came wearing the one face that death was truly seeking.
Hala the Golden breathed in freedom one last time so that she would not have to take a thousand more breaths as a prisoner.
And the Blue-Eyed Bandit took her dying breath in the vaults below a city at war, clutching hands with the man she loved as the world faded away around them.
And then, after her last breath, she took another one.
Chapter 45
The dark cleared like a sudden burst of fire, and for a moment all I could see was light.
I was dead. Death wasn’t darkness and dust and nothingness, like Jin thought. It was blinding light.
Then I realised I could see the outline of a shape through the light, and it was making my eyes water. My lungs were burning for air, and I could feel blood and hard stone under my hand. I sucked in a panicked breath. A breath that felt like the first one in a long time. I bolted upright, rasping, coughing, sputtering.
The light wasn’t death, I realised. It was the sun, shining through the well into the palace vaults. And I wasn’t dust in the desert. I was exactly where I had died. My hands were still sticky with my own blood, my face stained with tears. This was a whole lot more ordinary than death. I was alive.
And then my eyes focused on the single thing that had changed. The room wasn’t empty any more. My father was there.
Bahadur was crouched across from me, watching me with those unreadable blue eyes that matched mine perfectly. Like we were one person. Like I really belonged to him. He waited patiently as I found my footing back in the world of the living. Like I’d seen other parents watch their children take their first steps.
‘I’m not dead,’ I said, and I felt the words slip out like only the truth could.
‘No,’ Bahadur agreed. ‘Not any more.’
There was a sort of quiet then, as he let me settle into that notion. As he let me take another breath, realising that for a few moments, at least, my lungs had stayed still. That my frantic heartbeat had slowed to a stop. And for a moment I’d been gone.
We’d both been gone.
‘Jin.’ My eyes slid sideways frantically, looking for him. His figure was still slumped in a puddle of blood. Not moving. Not sitting up. I scrambled over to him, fumbling to push up his shirt, sticky with blood.
But as I ran my hand across his skin, I could tell already that it was unbroken under the swathe of blood. It was only then that I noticed my side didn’t hurt any more. I touched it, looking for the wound, but it wasn’t there. More than that, the skin felt smooth. The scar. The one from when Rahim had shot me in Iliaz, where the last piece of metal had been pulled from, where the pain radiated from every time I used my power – it was gone, too.
I rested one hand on Jin’s chest. It rose and fell under my palm. Just slightly, but enough. Enough for me to know that he was not dead.
‘He’ll wake shortly,’ my father said from behind me. I twisted around so I could see him over my shoulder. He was still crouched. If I hadn’t known better, he’d have looked like any desert man by a fire. Except he was too still. Like his muscles didn’t feel any strain from sitting like that. He was not flesh and blood. Not human. ‘He needs a little longer than you. He’s not made quite the same as you are.’ I wasn’t entirely human either.
I turned so that I was facing him fully, one leg sprawled in front of me, the other tucked under. One hand still on Jin’s heart, like I had to hold on to him so he didn’t disappear. ‘You saved us,’ I said. How? Only that was a stupid question. My father was among those who had made us. Created humanity out of desert dust and fire. I had watched Zaahir lift Noorsham’s soul from his very body. It wouldn’t take a whole lot to pull some torn pieces of humanity together – like stitching a tear in a ragdoll. ‘Why?’ I asked instead.
He rubbed his hands together. It was the closest thing to a human gesture I’d ever seen from a Djinni. A small tic, a moment to buy time to think. ‘You asked me once if I remembered your mother. You seemed to believe
I wouldn’t. That I wouldn’t care enough to. But you were wrong. I remember everything. I remember the day I tasted fear as I saw hundreds of Djinn fall to the Destroyer of Worlds. And I remember the first woman I loved, who gave me my first child. And I remember watching that child die on the walls of Saramotai. And I remember that your mother had a small scar just above her lip that pulled when she smiled.’ He touched his mouth, the exact place where it had been. I remembered that scar. Even though I didn’t remember her smiling much. ‘I remember everything, daughter of mine. Sometimes I think we feel things more deeply than mortals ever do.’
I felt Jin’s chest rise and fall below my hand. ‘You don’t know what I feel,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘No,’ he granted, bowing his head gently, ‘I don’t. But I do feel as well.’ We were silent for a moment, as he let that hang there. I had only lived seventeen years, and sometimes I didn’t believe that I could contain everything I’d seen and lived and thought. No one ought to be made to contain an eternity. ‘I also remember the wish your mother made for you. What she asked for when I told her that she could have one thing she wanted for you.’
‘What was it?’ I couldn’t help it. I had been wondering what my mother had asked for since that day in the prisons with Shira. I had feared knowing since Hala had told me of her own mother’s selfish wish, and since Noorsham had left his body.
‘I had hundreds of children before you, Amani. Their mothers wished for many things for them. For glory and wealth and joy. But your mother wished for none of that. Though she was desperate to get out of a town that would kill her one day, she never thought to ask for an escape, or for great riches to pave her way out with gold. Her wish was simple: that you should live.’ He smiled then, sadly. ‘That you should live like she hadn’t.’
That I should live. It seemed such a small wish. When she could have asked for riches or power or a great destiny for me. But with my heart still beating when it had no right to, I understood it wasn’t small at all.
‘It was a wish I hadn’t heard for centuries. Not since my first daughter.’
He meant Princess Hawa. My sister. We were separated by centuries, but she was my sister all the same. Daughter of another mother who wished for nothing but life for her daughter in the middle of a difficult war. ‘But Hawa died.’
‘Yes.’ He dropped his head. ‘She did the same thing you did. Fell in love with someone who stood too close to death.’ Bahadur’s eyes flicked to Jin, and for a second I felt like an ordinary daughter whose father didn’t approve of the boy she’d chosen to marry. ‘She tied her life to his, because she knew I would have to protect him. That if he died, she would die. And I did. I protected him in battle a hundred times over. In the end, it was her I wasn’t watching. My eyes were on him instead of her, when an arrow strayed from the battlefield. It was through her heart before I could do anything.’ He paused. ‘I saved her a hundred times, but I couldn’t save her the last one.’
‘But you saved me.’ I suddenly understood why he’d been the one to wield the knife. An arrow through the heart had killed Hawa on the spot. A wound to the stomach, though – that was slower. Slow enough for him to save me without anyone noticing. ‘You didn’t have to.’ It came out more ungrateful than I meant it to. ‘I mean –’ I stumbled to catch up to my words – ‘my mother asked for me to live …’ Djinn thrived on technicalities. On gaps in wishes that they could wriggle through, obeying to the letter but no more. ‘That promise was kept when I drew my first breath. You could’ve let me die any time after that if you’d wanted to.’
‘If I’d wanted to,’ Bahadur repeated knowingly. ‘Fathers will always do what they can to protect their children. I can do a great deal when I need to.’
‘Well.’ I cleared my throat. I had no business crying when I was alive. ‘I suppose bringing me back from the dead goes some of the way towards making up for seventeen years of not doing a whole lot.’
Bahadur surprised me with a laugh. It was a deep and honest sound, and I liked it. And suddenly, stupidly, I wished I had more time to hear it. That I could have a father who would sit across from me and talk to me like this whenever I needed one. And for just a second, I felt that bone-deep wanting I hadn’t felt in a long time. Since leaving Dustwalk. The one that came with longing for something you feared you might never have. The price I paid for being alive now was that after today, I might never be called daughter again. Djinn couldn’t be regular fathers, after all.
‘And the rest of them?’ I looked away quickly, worried he might read what I was thinking in my traitor eyes, like Jin had an uncanny ability to do. ‘When they find out we’re not dead …’ Will they punish you?
Bahadur brushed my words aside. ‘My kind do what they can to keep from crossing paths with yours. We hope the day that we all have to will never come again. I hope that even more since your brother’s death.’ His eyes had a faraway look. He knew, I realised, what Noorsham had done. ‘We fight separate wars. And now it is almost time for you to return to yours.’ I could feel that he was right. The strange sense of suspended time that had hovered around us was fading. The world was leaking in around the edges.
Under my hand, I felt Jin take a shuddering breath. His eyes snapped open, and he stared at me, blinded by the light pouring down the well of the vaults now. ‘We’re not dead,’ I blurted out as he focused on me. ‘We’re still alive. Both of us.’
Jin searched my face, eyes wild, hand reaching up to me. ‘Now would be a terrible time to start lying to me, Bandit.’
And then suddenly I was laughing and crying and kissing him as I helped him sit up. I turned around, looking for my father. Wanting to say something else – I wasn’t sure what. But he was gone. There were only dust motes dancing in the light where he’d been crouched a moment earlier.
I felt something like invisible hands tugging at my clothes. And I remembered what he’d said. It was time to go back to the fight.
Chapter 46
We were the enemy at the gates of the city.
Jin and I emerged on to the palace walls to find a real battle below us. Our people weren’t on the defensive any more. They were attacking.
The Sultan’s unnatural wall was gone, and the city ramparts were scattered with bronze bodies – fallen Abdals, their spark vanished with Fereshteh’s release. The Sultan’s soldiers made of flesh and blood were scrambling to get into position, reaching for their weapons. More rushed through empty streets towards the palace. We matched them in numbers, but they still had the higher ground.
A scream from above drew both of our heads up. Izz flew overhead, releasing something from his claws, a bomb that struck the wall, exploding as it landed, taking stone and soldiers with it but still not shaking the gates open. The Rebellion needed a way in.
I reached for the desert.
And there was no pain. No struggle. My power flowed easily, like it was breathing a sigh of relief as it invaded my whole body.
Involuntarily, I touched the smooth skin of my stomach. My father had healed that old wound, too, along with the new one.
But it was more than the absence of the ache. For the first time ever, I felt my power like it was part of me. Truly in my soul. Not a weapon at my fingertips but like another heartbeat.
I didn’t so much as twitch my fingers as I grabbed full hold of the desert. Of my desert. I was the desert. And it would answer to me.
I pulled with everything I had, raising the sand like the surge of the sea. It crashed into the Eastern Gate, splintering the stones, scattering soldiers and opening the gates.
I flooded the city with the Rebellion.
The streets turned into a battlefield as we raced down from the palace walls. We were unarmed except for my gift, and Jin hung behind me as we entered the fight.
A soldier turned as we rounded a narrow corner, his gun rising to meet us. I moved faster than he did, the sand around his feet surging up around him, blinding him, choking him.
Jin shifted past me. In on
e swift motion, he knocked the soldier in the face, grabbing the rifle out of his hands.
Suddenly there came a gunshot behind us. Jin and I turned as one. But the bullet hadn’t been aimed at us. Sprawled on the street was a man in a soldier’s uniform. Above him in a window was a girl in a gold khalat, her hair tied back off her face, a gun in her hands. She was shaking, and her eyes looked wide with the shock of what she’d just done. She’d just saved us.
Her gaze met mine, and she gave me a small nod. I felt a surge of hope. The Rebellion hadn’t been extinguished inside the city while we were gone.
We had to get back to the rest of the battle.
Shazad’s plan had been to split the Sultan’s soldiers up, divide them among the streets and alleyways, where numbers wouldn’t matter and we could push them back until the palace was in reach.
We started to see the first signs of fighting on Red Reed Way, the thoroughfare that led through the city from west to east.
Jin braced the rifle against his arm, taking aim even as I gathered the sand to me, guiding it together until it would arc like a blade against them.
Together we fought through the fray like a knife through water.
A dozen times a blade skimmed by my neck, close but not close enough. I saw a gun raised towards me even as I brought the force of the desert down on the head of the solider who wielded it. I should have been dead a hundred times over. I wasn’t. I felt like I was untouchable. Like no bullets could hit me. No swords could strike me as we cut through the fight, back to our own side.
Then I saw her in the middle of the fight, dark braid swinging as her sword caught a man in the throat before she dropped to her knees, slicing her blade along the back of another man’s leg, downing him before she executed the killing blow, a knife to his neck.
Shazad had always been a force to be reckoned with, but watching her now it was like she was barely human. She was a firestorm, and she would burn the Sultan’s armies to the ground before she fell to them.
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