***
“Will you slow down!” Jamilah protested as Trinka dragged her down the hallway and into her mother’s old room. She flung open the drawer beneath the bed and held out the diary.
“What do we have to do?”
Jamilah groaned and sank onto the chair by the vanity, her hand to her forehead, half covering her tired, disgruntled expression.
Trinka knelt down next to her, the diary resting on her open palms, and looked up at her cousin.
“Jamilah, please. I know we haven’t always gotten along, but I need your help. Please?”
Her voice must have hit the same needy tone that Oana had used on Trinka, because Jamilah sighed and picked up the book.
“If my mother ever finds out…”
“I promise if she does, you can put all the blame on me. She doesn’t have to know you’re helping.”
There was a long pause as the two stared at each other, and Trinka’s bright excited eyes looked earnestly into Jamilah’s sleepy ones.
“All right,” her cousin finally sighed. “The first thing to do is bring Ashira down here to her old room and get her to read it. It won’t fix everything, but it might help her recover her early memories. That’s half the battle.”
“What’s the other half?”
“I don’t know. You want her to remember who your father is, so eventually they have to meet, right?”
Trinka thought about that for a moment.
“I guess so. But maybe we should start getting her to read the diary anyway. Maybe once she starts to remember who she is, she’ll be able to help. Right?”
Trinka looked up at her cousin and saw that she was nodding off already.
“Jamilah?”
“Hmm?”
“We can get her to start reading the diary, right?”
“Mmm.” Jamilah yawned again. “Yeah, but not tonight. I’m too tired. And besides, we have to make the potion first.”
“Potion?”
“My mom uses a potion to keep Aunt Ashira from remembering anything.”
Trinka’s eyes grew wide with shock. “But I thought the esperaliss did that!”
“It did at first, but my mom doesn’t want to take the risk that it might wear off and she’ll start remembering anyway. Especially now that you’re here to remind her,” she added. “So we either have to get her to stop taking it and wait for it to wear off, which isn’t likely to happen, or make a counter-potion.”
Trinka sat back numbly for a moment. This was getting worse all the time. It was bad enough that Vashti was taking advantage of her sister’s state, but if she was purposefully making it worse… Trinka wondered: Could she really trust Jamilah to help her? Then again, Trinka reasoned, she couldn’t do without her help either. If it weren’t for her cousin, she wouldn’t have even known about the potion.
Trinka looked at her cousin again. Her eyes were closed, her tousled hair resting on her arm on the back of the chair.
“Come on,” Trinka said as she got to her feet. “I’ll walk you back to your room.”
Jamilah rose slowly and headed for the doorway. “No, I can make it. Besides, you’d better stay in here as much as you can. We can’t let my mom see us together. Or Sabirah,” she added. “She always tattles.”
Trinka nodded. “Well, thanks,” she said awkwardly, feeling that it wasn’t nearly enough.
Jamilah nodded vaguely and shrugged.
“It’s kind of fun to have someone else to talk to, besides my sister.” And with that, she was gone.
Trinka looked over at her own bed and suddenly realized just how tired she was. With a thoughtful sigh, she sank into the cushions and reached to put the diary back into its drawer. She hesitated, and despite her tiredness, she got up, stepped over to the vanity, and laid the book open.
Carefully, she sprinkled a tiny scraping of powder over the last few lines of the last page then watched as her mother’s young, contented image appeared in the mirror once more, blissful in the knowledge that she would soon be escaping to Brace.
“Don’t worry,” Trinka whispered as she pressed her hands to the glass. “We’re going to get you back.”
Trinka and the Thousand Talismans Page 15
