“Know,” I corrected, but the slight tremor in his lips said otherwise. “What are you getting at?”
“Come with me. I’m going to take you out of here. I need to speak with you. With all three of you,” he said.
Faisal had spoken with the Captain of the Shaitan before he came to my cell, and whatever they’d discussed must have been interesting, because I was out of there only a few minutes later. A few of the guards raised their eyebrows when they saw me escorted out, but Faisal ignored them and ushered us out of the small prison, across the jinni city, and to the school. I was flanked on each side by Atish and Shirin.
In his office, Faisal took a chunk of frankincense off a shelf and put it on a thin sheet of metal set above burning charcoal. A sliver of white smoke rose and curled in the air. Faisal squinted through the smoke, looking into my eyes.
I didn’t want him to look at me like that, and I fidgeted. It was as if he could see inside me. Was he using a sort of jinni magic to read my mind?
“What do you want to tell me? Do you know how to get me home?” I asked.
He took one of my hands, turning it over so that my thumb was at the top. That was the place Najwa had her mark, I guessed, but on my hand there was only a bit of worn-off henna.
“What are you doing?” I asked. I meant to sound stronger, but he had unnerved me, and my voice came out cracking, unable to hold itself together. Even though they’d taken me out of the stone prison room, I was still on edge.
“There can be no other explanation.” He dropped my hand and ushered me to one of the floor cushions. I sat between Atish and Shirin and watched him go to his desk and bring out a shard of green crystal the length of my arm. “I never thought I’d see you again.” Then he sat across from me and laid the crystal on his lap. “Why don’t you tell me how you got here. And where you’ve put Najwa.”
The incense was growing thick, and the smell made me woozy. I fanned it away and said, as nicely as I could, “She came to me when I was in the barge—”
He cursed under his breath, and I paused until he motioned me to go on.
“Anyway, I didn’t want to be there, and suddenly there was a jinni. I thought it was a gift.”
“Did you wish on her?” His words became fire in the air, and I backed away, almost falling off my cushion.
“Yes,” I squeaked. “But she was a jinni, and I needed to get out of there. I didn’t know—”
“What did you wish?” Faisal had grown red-faced, glaring at the crystal.
“That she take my place and send me home.” His eyes were so hot, I could feel them heating up the room. “I didn’t want to marry the prince,” I said lamely.
“I don’t think Najwa wanted to, either,” Shirin said.
Faisal looked grim. “No matter your reasons, you had absolutely no right to make a wish on your sister.”
The room was silent. I shook my head and stared at the flame beneath the incense, trying not to look at the others. I was afraid of what I might see in their faces. “You said Najwa is my sister,” I said as softly as I could. I waited for him to correct himself, but he only stared, tight-lipped.
“Najwa is your twin.” I opened my mouth to protest and he held up a hand, silencing me. His face was changing—the skin was turning dark blue across his cheekbones. “Your mother and I—”
“You haven’t met my mother,” I said. “Have you?” I couldn’t imagine my mother consorting with a jinni, but so much had happened since I left home that I didn’t know what to believe anymore.
He rubbed at his wrist and frowned, as if he’d expected something to be there. “The woman you think is your mother is, indeed, not your mother.”
“Yes, she is.” I’d been with her my whole life! And I didn’t have a twin. Rahela had known me when I was a baby. She would have said something about that.
“I think it’s time you looked at this,” he said, holding up the crystal. “I meant to show Najwa first, but she isn’t here. You will have to be the first, come what may.” He pressed his hand over his heart and looked at the floor.
“You’ve just said I have a jinni for a sister and my mother is some other woman, and you want me to—look at a crystal?”
Two tears ran down his cheeks, leaving shining streaks as they fell. He nodded and held out the crystal. “Take it, Zayele. It’s one of my memories, and it’s about your mother.”
I held back, staring at the green shard, realizing now it wasn’t entirely solid. The crystal was clear, and something greenish swirled inside, as the frankincense was doing in the room.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“It’s a memory,” Shirin whispered, her voice full of awe.
“We look at these to learn about our history,” Atish added. He moved closer, sitting only an inch away from me. “It won’t hurt you.”
“Close your eyes and listen to what it has to say,” Faisal said. His voice reminded me of my mother’s. It was soothing, lilting, and made me ache for home.
33
Najwa
By that evening, I still hadn’t had a chance to read the book I’d taken from the library, so I waited until Rahela was asleep, then went back into my garden. I couldn’t bear to pick up the Memory Crystal, so I carried only the book with me, then stood in the middle of the courtyard, waiting for the moon to rise. So far, I had seen the sun, felt rain on my fingers, and found out what peacocks did when startled, but I hadn’t seen a moonrise.
In the Cavern, one of the bridges over the canal was made of alabaster bricks. It had been there for centuries, but the bricks were older than that. They had been used for something else, something no one remembered. Each brick had a tiny moon carved into a bottom corner. Some of the bricks had full moons, some had crescents, and some had half-moons. When they built the bridge, they paid attention to that and put them in order, even though we didn’t have the moon. When I was much younger, I never stepped on the bricks with the full moons, because they were darker than the others.
Now I would see the real moon hanging in the sky, and I didn’t even know which phase to expect.
A sliver peeked above the stone wall, slippery and silent. Then I heard footsteps on the other side of the wall, in Kamal’s garden.
Whoever was on the other side thumped a hollow object and began plucking at the strings of an instrument. It had to be Kamal, with his oud. He tested the strings, then began playing. The music was delicate and haunting, like night. I sat on my bench, set the book aside, and twisted a feather on my lap while I listened.
He played faster now, and a tingling feeling spread down my arms. I was sitting in a human palace, listening to a prince play music beneath a nearly full moon. There was nothing real about my situation.
The song ended, and he began playing another. The notes clashed, and he sighed. He started the song three more times, then stopped. He had been silent for a while when he called out tentatively, “Zayele, is that you?”
I cleared my throat. “Yes?”
He must have heard me, even though I was sure my voice hadn’t been louder than a mouse’s, because in the next second, his face appeared in the cutout in the wall. His eyes swept over me and I checked to make sure my veil was in place. He held up the oud to the hole in the wall.
“They told me your room was that one, but I wasn’t sure if I believed them. Anyway, did you hear?”
“Yes. It was beautiful.”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t as good as it should be. I’ve been playing for a year now and I sound like I just started. But that’s not the point.” He bowed his head.
I stood up and went to the wall. “Then why do you play?”
“When I’m playing, I have to pay attention. I can’t think of anything else or I’ll make a mistake. So it takes my mind off things.”
“Do you play in front of other people?” I asked. It wouldn’t ma
tter how much I paid attention; playing for others would make me too nervous. I’d mess everything up.
He laughed, shaking his head. “I can’t imagine what they’d say if I held a concert, out in public. No. It’s just for me.” The moon lifted off the wall and hung in the air. “And for those who listen in,” he said, grinning at me.
My face was burning. “I’m sorry. I was out here waiting for the moon—”
“Waiting for the moon?”
“Ye-e-s,” I said, drawing out the word while I thought of an excuse. “I hadn’t seen it in Baghdad yet.”
“Is this something you do often?”
“Yes,” I lied. “And we always had music while we looked at it.”
“Right. And I suppose you all sang ‘My Mother’s Garden’?”
How did he know that song? It was one every schoolchild in the Cavern knew. It was the type of song that tiptoed into your soul and danced on it while you slept—lilting, romantic, and a little sad. “That song,” I whispered, “I haven’t heard it in a very long time.”
He looked surprised. “I think I can play it.” He picked up the oud. “Want me to?”
I wasn’t sure I did. What if it wasn’t the same? What if it was? “You don’t have to.”
“No, it’s fine. Just don’t laugh when I mess up.” He went to the bench, sat down, and bent over the oud.
The song was the same. I shivered, feeling the same ache in my heart that it had always given me. He was humming the tune, keeping his lips pressed together. They were thoughtful lips, full of the tune but not willing yet to let the words out.
When the music slowed, he glanced at me. The music and moonlight had left me open, and something dove into me and squeezed my heart.
“Sing,” he whispered.
I would never have agreed to it before, but something in me wanted to hear the words, so I sang, clutching my fingers around the cutout’s frame:
“He left me at the well,
saying his soul was dry.
I grew, I breathed,
I danced, I cried.
The sun hid behind the moon.
The water turned blue.
He came home with pockets of silk
but his soul was dry.
I took him to my mother’s garden,
gave him hope to drink.”
I sang the last line three times, and was done. The oud lay still on his lap, and I stared at the carvings on its body. They swirled, like the carvings along the palace walls. I could feel his eyes on me.
“That was beautiful.”
I shook my head. “Is it the same as you sing it?”
“Yes, but we say ‘love’ instead of ‘hope.’ ” He tapped the strings, and they shook, making a rich sound. Then he stood up and spun on his heels. “I think I better go now. See you in the morning?”
I nodded automatically, and he bowed and retreated to his room. I sat back down on the bench while the rhythm of the song pulsed inside me.
Gave him love to drink.
The words echoed in my mind till long after I had climbed into my bed.
34
Zayele
“I don’t remember when I met your mother. She—Mariam—was always there,” Faisal said. “We were Dyads—a bonded pair, united to multiply our power. She was the Shaitan, and I was the magus. They had paired us up even before we took our first transport test. Then, when that day came, we were all supposed to find a plant and return with a part of it. But something happened to Mariam that first trip, and she kept returning. After a while, she admitted she had fallen in love with a human. She swore me to secrecy, and of course I agreed.” He smiled, wistful. “When she told her father about the human, he banished her to the surface. I visited her whenever I got the chance, and this is what I want you to see. Look into the shard. Remember, you will be in my memory, so you will be watching as though you were me.”
I was pulled into the crystal. Faisal’s voice lulled me until all I could hear was a woman humming.
I listened, listened, listened. And then I blinked and I was Faisal.
A woman leaned back against a bolster with an infant in her arms. She had tumbling black hair, a straight nose, and wide green eyes. Mariam. I was sitting in front of her, also holding an infant. My hands were larger, callused, and tattooed with a crescent moon between my thumb and forefinger.
We were in a tent, and she was cooing to the babe in her arms. The infant in my arms was tightly wrapped in a blanket and was asleep. She had pomegranate cheeks and long lashes, just like her mother.
“I wish he would at least look at them,” Mariam said. She was talking about her father, who had scorned her daughters before they were even born.
I shook my head. “You need to wait. At least until the caliph dies and his son takes his place.”
Mariam bounced her baby, who had started to twist and pull against the blanket. “They’ll be grown by then.”
“Perhaps. But it is better for them to grow here, don’t you think? No one will know what they are.”
She nodded, then started to sing to the fussing baby.
“The sun hid behind the moon,” she sang. “The water turned blue.” She continued, and I stared in awe and love. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and even though she loved a human, I still loved her. I hadn’t expected that when I’d arrived, but it was a pleasant surprise. More surprising still was that the moment I held her daughters in my arms, they felt like extensions of me. I was not their father, of course, but was something more than an uncle.
Mariam kept singing until Najwa was asleep and I grew drowsy, cuddling the child she had named Zayele.
Then the mist returned.
When I opened my eyes, they were wet, and so were the wrinkled ones looking into mine.
“You were so tiny,” Faisal said. “And after everything, I couldn’t give up this memory. I had to keep it for myself.”
“That was me,” I said. “And Najwa …”
Shirin sniffed. “You should have warned us,” she said, wiping at her cheeks.
I was holding back tears, biting my lip as hard as I could bear. “What happened to her?”
“I have kept only a few memories from Mariam herself,” Faisal said. He held out another crystal, but this one was heavier, and blue as the sky. “Look into it, but be warned it does not end well. These were the last memories I was able to get from her.”
“Why doesn’t it end well?”
“What you have heard, about the night your village was attacked, has never been the truth.”
“You mean Hashim didn’t save me?”
Faisal spat on the ground. “Hashim didn’t save you. I saved you. Look into the crystal, and watch.”
I took the crystal. It was heavy and cold. “Is everyone watching, or just me?”
“I will,” Atish said. He reached over and placed his hand on mine. “You shouldn’t do this alone.”
“Atish, I can understand why you want to accompany her, but I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Faisal said.
Atish nodded and looked down at his lap, but he didn’t let go of my hand. “We’ll be here when you’re done, Zayele.”
A moment later, I was twirling around in an orange grove, breathing in the scent of young blossoms. My skirts were a full circle, swirling with me, catching on the weeds between the trees. I ran along a row of trees, reaching out as I passed to brush the blossoms. A trail of loose petals followed me, dropping like flakes of snow.
I ran like this until a man came around the last tree in the row and stopped in his tracks. I halted, breathing heavily. Then I turned away and tried to run, but he called out to me.
“Wait!” he shouted. “Don’t run.”
I looked over my shoulder.
“I know what you are,” he said. “But I won’t hurt yo
u. I won’t even touch you.” He reached out to one of the trees and picked a handful of orange blossoms. With a tentative step forward, he held them up to me.
The image blurred, then was clear again. I was with the man somewhere else, but this time I knew his name. Evindar. I leaned in his arms, watching the village men make a fire. My dress rounded out in front, revealing my pregnant belly. Evindar whispered in my ear and smiled, then pulled me into the darkness of a tent.
Again, the image shifted, but now everything was rushed. I was wrapping a child in a blanket when a woman came in with worry lines etched into the corners of her mouth. A little girl, Rahela, had followed her into the tent, and she pushed her back outside.
“You don’t have to go,” Rahela’s mother said to me.
“I do have to,” I said. I laid Zayele on the floor along a wall and went to a pile of blankets. Najwa was there, wiggling free. She began to whimper, and I lifted her up to my breast. The whimpering stopped. “Hashim is coming tonight. Last time, he saw me. If he touches me, then—”
“Just go away for a little while. Till he’s gone back to Baghdad. I’ll watch the babes.”
“I won’t leave them. No.”
“Then let me go talk to my sister. I won’t tell her what you are. Just that Hashim has made … advances.”
I nodded, and Rahela’s mother disappeared out the door.
Alone now, I looked at my daughters. One was nestled in my arms, nursing, and the other lay on the floor, asleep. How could I leave them behind?
Just then, Evindar rushed in, flushed and sweating. “He’s here. Now.”
I felt faint. “But—”
He picked up a bag and handed it to me. “Go, Mariam. Take the girls, and go.”
“Evindar,” I said with a croak. I had frozen in place, staring at the man behind Evindar.
Hashim stood there, holding the flap open. He held a sword in the air and knocked Evindar to the ground with the blunt side of it. His eyes were bright and glaring, and when he looked from me to the baby in my arms, he growled.
The Fire Wish Page 17
