Three Sides of a Heart

by Natalie C. Parker

  —from Seven Hundred Declarations of Safiya the Bloody

  There are so many moments I remember from those last days when I had only one heart: leaning close to Grandfather as I helped him design the Moon Eater mosaic for the small dome of his mausoleum; one of the princes, Rabiah za Ziya, coming to me for help convincing the mirza to accept her proposal to rearrange the tax plan for the small kings—we drank rose tea and she flattered me again and again; dancing with Farah and our instructor, stealing kisses between sets; Dalir bringing me sweet cheese and his apology, then the two of us climbing to the top of the Bright Star Minaret to argue ancient philosophy until the morning song rang out across the city; Dalir again, laughing at some silly thing Farah said, his beard shaved to match Enver’s and thin white lines painted in repeating patterns along his cheeks; Dalir and his shadow sparring with het sticks in the Heaven’s Clock Courtyard, while a crowd of Satriya guards looked on and Farah and I held hands so tightly we bruised each other’s knuckles; Farah touching Enver Kirazade’s wrist as soft as a songbird to get his attention, and both of them going still; steam rising from the waters of the women’s bathhouse, turning Enver’s hair into ecstatic waves, and he did not cover himself despite my arrival and Farah’s and three of our girls and two women Satriya. Enver looked at me and then Farah, as the steam stuck our thin robi to hips and breasts and melted the perfect dots painted to our foreheads, turning our faces into streaks of rain. I said, “Did no one tell you, griffin, this is the women’s bath?” and he stepped so close to me the guards unsheathed their curved swords. He said, “You make me forget there is any difference in our bodies, for surely there is not in our spirits.” I smiled. I bit my bottom lip so he could see it. And Farah said, “I rather like the differences between your two bodies.” She touched my wrist, and his wrist, and the moment lasted forever.

  She Who Loves Silence wishes for us to treat our bodies with the respect we give to the finest Designs, for that is what we are.

  —from Seven Hundred Declarations of Safiya the Bloody

  Dalir whispered to me as soon as he returned from war that I should know how to use a weapon, even if I would never carry one as the Moon Eater’s Mistress. “She Who Loves Silence wishes for us to treat our bodies like the finest Designs,” he reminded me. I teased him, disagreed for fun more than principle, until he suggested Enver Kirazade could show me.

  We began one morning nearly three weeks after his arrival. I was fresh and exhilarated from visiting the House of the Moon, eager to show off, but more eager to learn with his hands on me. Farah knelt on the marble floor with ink and parchment, practicing her calligraphy, and our Satriya slouched beside the doors and open archways of this small weapons room. Enver waited in the center of a hexagon of padded carpets, and I leaped onto him immediately, twisting my arms around his neck and sliding a leg between his, in a quick grappling move I’d learned to use my weight against a heavier enemy. He hardly reacted, grunting as he shifted his stance to accommodate me hanging from him. “You should go for my eyes instead of my throat, for you are not strong enough to cut off my breathing.”

  “You were ready for me!” I complained.

  He turned his face slightly; his left eye was beside mine. “I was not ready for you,” he whispered, meaning something far more important than wrestling.

  I forgot who I was, where I was, I forgot everything with that single desert-fire eye on mine, his arm around my ribs. I was nobody except for the thing we were together, for an instant, for a perfect soft breath.

  And then it all came rushing back. I was Safiya za Idris Sahiza, the Moon Eater’s Mistress, and I could never have him.

  He pulled me around his body and kissed me. It was wild and hot, and his large warrior’s hands gripped my hips, holding me against him so I could dangle or cling. I wrapped around him, kissing him back. Never before had I been kissed by a man or boy, or with such roughness and open passion. He wanted me, and he thought he could have me. It was a kiss of offering as much as taking, without the yearning I was used to, without the terrible teasing knowledge that a kiss was all it could be.

  Because he did not know.

  I realized it even as my body burned and melted and I clung to him, as his teeth chewed at my mouth and jaw, devouring me. I slid my hands down his arms, thighs tight around his waist, holding on as he tasted my neck. There at his elbow I found the hilt of a flat knife sheathed in the leather gauntlet. I slid it free and ended our kiss with the tip of the blade in the hollow behind his ear.

  Enver gasped, startled as he’d not been by my grappling. His eyes slowly focused on me, my mouth, then dragged up to my eyes. “I love your ruthlessness,” he said thickly, beginning to smile. “I love you.”

  “No,” I said, cutting his neck.

  He released me as blood streamed in a solid line down to his shoulder, soaking into his robi. I tossed his knife to the rug and backed away an arm’s length. “I am the Moon Eater’s Mistress. You cannot have what you want.”

  Farah appeared at my side, and took my hand. Hers was hot, her breath as fast as mine. Enver looked between us, confused. He said, “It is a religious title, is it not?” Finally he touched his hand to the wound on his neck, fingers finding sticky, flowing blood.

  “Yes,” Farah answered in a whisper. “But so much more. She belongs to the Moon Eater. She is the embodiment of His longing for She Who Loves Silence, when the goddess will not have Him, so that His hunger does not tear even the stars from the sky. We must sacrifice our need for Safi in reverence to His.”

  It made me want Enver all the more for how gutted he looked, how sad. “Both of you?” he asked, touching Farah’s wrist.

  “She belongs to the Moon Eater, and I belong to her,” Farah said, like an apology, and she wove our fingers together, and we left.

  Never think the sacrifices one makes for the Moon Eater are not repaid with gifts such as self-awareness and confidence. Had I not been taught to give, how might I have ever understood the nature of taking?

  —from Seven Hundred Declarations of Safiya the Bloody

  We cried, Farah and I, angry and mournful and even laughing at how we both wanted him and both wanted each other, and mostly just that we were so full of wanting we might die.

  I said, in the last dark hour before the morning song, “Farah, you should have him. You can, both of you, and it would be like I was there too. For you are my body twin, and the twin of my heart. That will keep him here, with us, if you take him and make him your husband.”

  “He wants me differently than he wants you,” she whispered.

  We lay wrapped around each other in the silken pillows and heart-soft sheets, staring up at the constellation of tiny windows cut into the ceiling of our chamber. Gentle moonlight ghosted through, making only our eyes shine in the darkness.

  “Kiss him the way he kissed me, and that will change,” I replied.

  She paused, then touched her cheek to my shoulder.

  I shoved her over and rolled on top of her. I grasped her face in both hands and kissed her hungrily, as I had never allowed myself before. I imagined my hands large and hard from war, my shoulders heavy and strong, my mouth and jaw rough. I became him in my mind’s eye, kissing Farah as if I could have her, knowing we belonged together. I kissed her messily, madly, with my tongue and teeth, toying too closely with giving too much. But I was not Safiya the Moon Eater’s Mistress in the center of that kiss; I was Enver Kirazade.

  Opening up to me, she returned it, soft beneath me, and her hands found my ribs, gripping through my thin robi. She danced her fingers at the collar, eager and sweet. She said, “I love you, Safi, I want you,” and I kissed her eyelids.

  It was not morning, but I got up, groping for her jacket and headscarf. “Go,” I said. “Take this all to Enver, for me, and for you, and for him.”

  “And you?”

  “I love you too,” I said in a dark voice, a longing voice. I had to get to the House of the Moon before I spilled my desire where th
e Moon Eater could not relish it.

  Shoving Farah out the door before me, I ran for the House with two Satriya guards scrambling after me. I splashed water from the ablution pool onto my face. A near-full moon still hung high enough to pierce the smoky glass eye at the pinnacle of the dome. I threw myself at the altar, shoving aside the fossilized teeth. Then I disrobed to stand naked for the Moon Eater. “It is early, but I need you now,” I whispered. “Is that all right? I was never taught to need you, only be ready when you needed me.”

  Though sometimes I woke him slowly, teasing myself and him, sometimes I sat or lay myself back on the altar to show off my loveliness to the dome’s eye, sometimes I stretched out my time alone in the House of the Moon, that morning I pressed my bottom to the edge of the altar and dug into myself immediately. I was desperate and not understanding everything I felt in my heart, the conflict, the sharp line between furious love and wild denial.

  I whispered the Moon Eater’s secret name again and again, beckoning him, begging him, with my voice and my wracked body, until he was there.

  My brother always knew I would make a better king than he.

  —from Seven Hundred Declarations of Safiya the Bloody

  Loose and languid, I made my way back to my chamber, where at least twice as many Satriya waited. The Royal Mask Architect was just ducking out, no doubt surprised to have found me already gone. “Your Glory,” he said, searching the hall behind me for Farah. “His Glory the Sahizada is inside. I have left a pot of paint for you. Shall I return inside to design your lines?”

  “No.” I brushed past him, closing my chamber door. Dalir sat on a pile of cushions beside my low calligraphy table, his legs curled beneath him and cradling a pot of paint divided into three sections: black, white, gold.

  “You’ve been busy, and the sun is hardly up,” Dalir said, a smile brightening his eyes. He dipped the narrow brush into the gold paint and skillfully drew a perfect line along his jaw, mirroring the edge of his carefully trimmed beard.

  I sank to my knees before him and took the brush to finish his gold lines. “Whatever do you mean?” My words were as light as the touch of the brush on his skin.

  He laughed. “Marriage alliance, and a good one.”

  Pleasure infused my answering smile. “You think so?”

  “I do. I also know it is hard for you. I admire your dedication.”

  “It is no more than you would do, were I to be the king of kings and you the Moon Eater’s Mistress.”

  “Maybe.” Dalir shook his head, and I tsked at him for disrupting my design. I chose a different brush for the black paint. He closed his eyes and continued softly, “I am grateful for you, for what you can do. I know our Sahenate will be stronger for it, even though it sometimes curdles my stomach like bad milk.”

  I paused with the tip of the brush just off his cheek, and, full of warmth and the certainty that our futures would be great, I gently kissed his lips.

  “I’ll make you proud too, sister,” he said, and then he bared his teeth.

  “Dalir?” I dropped the brush.

  My brother shook his head, mouth in a rictus twist. His skin suddenly gleamed with sweat. “I can’t—I can’t,” he gasped.

  The lines of gold I’d painted parallel to his beard line sank into his skin as if acidic. Dalir fell sideways, face drained of color, greenish even, as the paint ate into his flesh and his bones caved in.

  It was over that fast.

  My brother, Dalir zada Idris Sahizada, was dead.

  I hovered over him for a shocked moment, unwilling to touch his face, or the remnants of paint there. His beauty had crumbled, wilted, and he was only a body in dark orange robi.

  The pot of paints rested as if innocent beside my knee. Standing with it carefully clutched in my hands, I went to my door. A pounding filled my ears, my heart, my heart, so I could not hear myself as I called for the door to be opened and went out. I told my guards to take me to the Royal Mask Architect and told my brother’s Satriya to wait and allow none but myself inside.

  Every step jarred my skeleton. I thought I would break apart, tendons gone soft, disintegrating, nothing to hold my bones together.

  Through the winding halls of the palace I went, holding the paint pot aloft like an offering, barefoot still and my headscarf untied, loose about my neck. Were it not for the Satriya surrounding me, none would know I was—

  I was the heir.

  Safiya za Idris Sahiza, the Moon Eater’s Mistress, was dead, too.

  The warren of workrooms in the palace’s wing of Design surrounded a central glass-domed library, and it was there I found the Royal Mask Architect, sketching invisible lines of force upon a vellum sheet with a crystal stylus. He looked up, startled, and covered his eyes immediately. “Your Glory!” he said.

  I slammed the pot onto his worktable, drawing all the attention of the Designers and apprentices in the library. “Let no one leave,” I ordered my guard.

  Sun streamed down through the elaborately honeycombed glass dome overhead. All attention was upon me. I pointed to the pot and said to the Royal Mask Architect, “Put that on your face, now. The gold.”

  Without hesitation, he reached to dip a finger directly into the paint. The moment he touched it, I said, “Get it off, quickly, it is poison. And tell me who mixed it, for they intended to murder me.”

  His plain dark eyes widened, and he wiped it immediately onto his vellum, then with the stylus drew strong enough ecstatic force into a protective cage over the pot that even I could see the spark of it for one brief moment.

  “Alis zada Beyar delivered this to me,” he said sadly.

  “Bring him,” I said to my guard. “And find his family and friends.” As they interrogated those present and left to track this boy down, I stood before the Royal Mask Architect and told him to paint a holy design onto my face.

  I closed my eyes as he obeyed, first mixing his own paint. He streaked black in a wide swathe across my eyes, then silver in crescents over it, for he believed me still to be the Moon Eater’s Mistress. My stomach churned, burning up my throat. I swallowed back the fire. He painted dots beneath my lip, traced silver shadow lines beneath my cheekbones, shading my face into an unfamiliar shape.

  Few have known until this confession, oh my children, that I gutted a man with my own hands when I was sixteen. That is the moment I gave up the Moon Eater and became Hers instead.

  —from Seven Hundred Declarations of Safiya the Bloody

  Alis zada Beyar was forced to his knees before me, shaking and tearful. He was hardly older than me: he spat and said I had murdered his niece in my execution lottery. She’d been the youngest blood relation to the rebels, a girl of seven years old. So I understood, even as I took a curved dagger from one of my Satriya. I understood, even as I stabbed it into his side and dragged it around in a smile across his guts. I understood, even as I ordered the Architects to use whatever forces of flow or falling, rising or ecstatic or taboo Human Architecture they needed to keep him alive to face the Sahe Sahenam, to face justice for the murder of Dalir zada Idris.

  The Satriya guard, the Royal Mask Architect, and all the Designers present gasped and bowed when they heard it, covered their eyes, and whispered my name.

  My hands were covered with his blood; scarlet gloves, the brightest kind of paint, and mixed by She Who Loves Silence Herself.

  My husband insists there is no shade to brutality; it is only itself, never too much or too little. My heart twin tells me he is wrong, that I have spent forty years discovering every shallow shadow and deep ravine of my brutal heart. She would know, she insists, but my husband argues he does not need to soften or complicate my legacy; he loves it completely.

  It does not matter anyway, because my bones are eating themselves, and I will be dead soon, before both of them. I am glad. They should have had each other without me, and now they shall.

  —from Seven Hundred Declarations of Safiya the Bloody

  I was safe, surrounded by
trusted Satriya, when I returned to my chambers with Grandfather so that Dalir’s body could be prepared for She Who Loves Silence. There was a roar inside me, a storm of purpose, building toward something I could not yet see. A future, an ambition. I would be both myself and my brother, I would make our Sahenate even greater than Grandfather had done, and no sympathy or hesitation would stop me. I would devour the world.

  As Grandfather bowed over Dalir, eyes shut, his moan like a song sinking below the waves, I whispered to my great-uncle Eskandar that I must find Farah, my body twin, for the assassin had come after me, and her function was to make such attempts doubly impossible.

  And so I went, with blood staining the soft, intimate lines of my palms, blood streaking my robi, hair loose, and face a holy mask of silver.

  Enver Kirazade had been allotted a room near Dalir’s system of chambers, off a looping, elegant corridor tiled with gentle pink-and-gold ceramics. Satriya guard blocked the entrance, but they moved immediately for me, and I shoved through the door.

  They were sprawled across massive red pillows, tangled in scarves and sheets and robi.

  Farah gasped. One hand clutched a scarf over her golden belly, the other clawed at Enver’s fire-dark chest. He lifted onto one knee, hand out. I could not help but focus on the puckered scars constellated on his shoulder and collarbone like an Architect’s dots.

  I stood, disheveled and bloody, and said the first, most salient thing: “I am no longer the Moon Eater’s Mistress.”

  Farah shook her head, confusion and the first spark of anger brightening her luscious brown eyes. Enver’s hand tightened to a fist and he said, “Dalir,” with dry despair, for he understood he had not been present to save my brother’s life a third time.

  “Here is the blood of his murderer.” I held out my hands, hardly recognizing the harshness of the desert wind in my voice.

  Both stood. Farah took Enver’s hand and, naked, they approached me. I touched their hearts, and then touched their faces, smearing blood onto their skin. I had nothing else to say. Tears dripped down Enver’s cheek, onto my fingers. Farah too cried, putting her arms around my neck and head, cradling me, and Enver held us both, trembling with his own grief.