I woke to a setting sun and the feeling of movement below me. I blinked blearily, feeling like I was coming back to life.
‘She lives,’ a familiar, rueful voice said quietly in my ear. I tilted my head back. Jin was behind me. I was settled against his chest, his arm around my middle steadying me. We were on a horse, I realised. A blue one. Izz. And around us, walking at a slow but steady pace, were our people. We were making our way down the mountain, by the look of things. ‘You passed out,’ Jin said from behind me. I felt his hand slip away from me momentarily, and then he was pressing a flask of water into my hands. I gulped from it gratefully.
Everything was a blur after I released Zaahir.
In the stories, Djinn appeared and vanished in great claps of thunder and smoke. But the truth was, when I released Zaahir, he was just there one moment and gone the next. It was like waking up from a dream. And all that was left was destruction.
The last thing I remembered was Jin finding me, sitting among the ashes, and gathering me to him. And then nothing.
‘Tamid says you must’ve hit your head when you got knocked down,’ Jin was saying. When he spoke, I could feel the vibrations through his chest and into my spine. ‘Hence you passed out. But we had to keep moving. So we moved you.’
We, he said. As if it was the most casual thing in the world. But it wasn’t. We meant all of us now. Because we’d done it. We’d got everyone out.
The realisation settled over me as I looked around, seeing faces in the light of day. Shazad was walking a few paces ahead, Sam next to her, talking at the rattling speed of a runaway train. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but every once in a while, a small smile danced over her face. To one side of us, Tamid was limping painstakingly down the mountain, eyes on the path to keep from tripping, sometimes leaning on Delila for help. Or maybe she was leaning on him, it was hard to tell. Ahmed led the way up ahead, Rahim next to him, the rabble of former prisoners dragging themselves to safety in his wake. We were a sorry collection: wounded, burned, half-starved, bedraggled, exhausted.
But free. We had done it. The impossible. We’d left Eremot alive.
‘Where are we?’ I asked. My voice came out raspy.
‘Nearly at Sazi,’ Jin said. He nodded upwards, and I noticed a small bird swooping in circles over our heads. Maz, I realised, our scout.
A sudden panic gripped my chest. We needed to slow down. We needed to be careful.
‘I can walk,’ I said hastily. ‘Izz, stop.’ Our blue Demdji did as I said, and I swung one leg over him, sliding off his back. Jin followed close behind, steadying me as I hit the ground, head swimming.
I pushed through the tired mass of rebels and released prisoners. I needed to talk to Ahmed. We couldn’t just barge into Sazi like this. But it was too late. As I broke through to the front of the pack, I saw the outskirts of Sazi. People were already gathering at the bottom of the slope, staring up at us expectantly. But I knew they weren’t waiting for us. They were waiting for Noorsham.
‘Where is he?’ someone called out from the assembled crowd, as we got closer. ‘What have you done with him?’
Ahmed’s brow furrowed as he turned to me. ‘What are they talking about?’ But I didn’t answer Ahmed. I called out to the crowd instead.
‘He’s …’ Dead stuck on my tongue as we drew to a stop a few paces away. That wasn’t true. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t alive either.
‘Noorsham is not coming back.’
A rustle went through the crowd around us as this news settled. I shifted nervously; it wouldn’t take long for it to turn to anger. ‘You killed him.’ An accusation came from a skinny woman at the front of the crowd.
‘No,’ I protested, shaking my head, scrambling for the right words. Shazad pressed through to the front now to stand beside me. I could feel the tension building in her like it did before a fight.
‘Liar!’ another cry came up angrily from the back. The rest of the crowd was shifting uncertainly, but I didn’t think it would be long before they turned against us.
‘She’s not lying,’ Tamid said, but his voice was drowned out by the shouting.
‘Well.’ Sam came up behind me. ‘This doesn’t look good.’
Emboldened by the mob forming at his back, a man stepped towards me. Shazad might be weak, but she still moved faster than most, and she was between us in a second. ‘Try it,’ she challenged.
The man took another step, seeming like he fully intended to try to take us on. I felt drained. Too drained to fight. But we didn’t have a choice. Ahmed had led us back here when we should’ve steered clear. And now we had a mob facing us. I had seen what they were capable of when they had forced us to confront the Eye. We might match them in numbers, but we were a sorry collection of bedraggled prisoners, and they were an angry mass of devotees.
Behind the belligerent man, a woman picked up a stone from the ground, preparing to throw it.
Then, just as the last of the sunlight started to fade, a light bloomed from the mountain face. Right between Shazad and the first man who had challenged us, the air turned itself inside out, changing the darkness into dozens of colours. And then it spread, in the open space between the belligerent inhabitants of Sazi and our people, forming into a collection of bronze soldiers facing a fiery wall. An illusion in miniature of what had awaited us outside Eremot.
The woman staggered back, dropping the stone from her hand as tiny Abdals blossomed around her feet like flowers. And Delila stepped forward, out of the crowd.
‘She’s not lying.’ Delila spoke softly, but that didn’t keep her from being heard. Not when she was conjuring images from thin air. ‘He wasn’t killed. He walked into the arms of death like a hero.’ Even as she spoke, a small figure of Noorsham materialised out of thin air and started to advance.
Delila’s voice was gentle and melodic. It always had been. It was what made everyone think she was so fragile, that she needed to be protected. But it was a good voice for stories, too. She held the attention of the crowd easily as her words and her illusions worked together to tell the tale. She chose her words carefully, stopping and pausing at the right moments. Delila, who had been the subject of so many stories, about the Sultan’s unfaithful wife and the Rebel Prince’s return, was now telling one for herself. Her voice cracked as it got to the end, as Noorsham’s soul evanesced from his body, taking the place of Ashra’s Wall.
‘So you see –’ Delila’s illusions melted away as she finished – ‘he can’t come back. We are here instead.’
Darkness and silence followed those words for a long moment. As the spell of her words slowly began to drop away.
Then a man fell to his knees. Another one dropped down behind him, and then another and another, until in the space of a few moments every single one of Noorsham’s people was kneeling before Delila.
She had done it. Delila had saved us. And she’d done it without a single weapon. I’d forgotten how powerful a story could be.
Suddenly, from the middle of the crowd, a boy stood back up abruptly. I knew him, I realised. He was from Dustwalk. His name was Samir, and he was a year or so younger than I was. My hand strayed for a gun that wasn’t there. But he made no move to fight.
‘Are you really the Rebel Prince?’ he asked.
All eyes turned to Ahmed. ‘I am.’
‘I could fight for you,’ the boy declared loudly. ‘Against the Sultan. He killed our leader. He drove us from our homes.’ A murmur of ascent went through the crowd. ‘I would fight for you.’
‘I would fight for you, too.’ Another man stood up, this one older, more hardened. ‘If our leader was willing to die for you, so am I.’
‘So would I.’ It was a girl who stood up now, sweeping short dark hair behind her ears, speaking a little more quietly than the men.
‘And so would I.’ I knew that voice. It was Olia, my cousin who was nearest to me in age now that Shira was gone. If there was ever someone I didn’t think cared about a damn thing enough to fight for it, it was her. But then, Hala had been that way, too. So had I, once. I noticed Olia’s mother, my uncle’s second wife, grab for her arm, as if to pull her back. But Olia jerked her arm out of her mother’s reach, standing tall as others rose around her, declaring their allegiance.
Delila had done a whole lot more than save us. She had rallied for us.
All eyes were on Ahmed when I noticed Shazad moving slowly away from the front of the group, melting away from all this.
Sam saw her, too. He gave me a raised brow as we caught each other’s eye. I shook my head quickly. Stay, that gesture told him, as I slipped away behind her.
For once he did as he was told.
‘Shazad.’ I didn’t call out to her until we were out of earshot of the others. Ahead of me, on the slope of the mountain, Shazad started, almost losing her footing. I’d never encountered anything quick enough or quiet enough to startle her.
‘Sorry,’ she said when she realised it was me. ‘I had to go. I couldn’t breathe.’ She dropped down to sit on the slope of the mountain. ‘I needed to …’ She trailed off. Not sure what she needed. I wasn’t either.
‘Do you want me to go?’ I hovered uncertainly.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be—’ She cut herself off, laughing ruefully. ‘I wasn’t afraid of the dark when I was young.’
‘We’re still young,’ I said, dropping down next to her. She’d been alone in the dark for three days. That’d be enough to make a lot of people worse than afraid.
‘So are they,’ she said. Her face shifted in and out of the gloom of early night, like she was slipping away, and I was struggling to hold on to her here and now. ‘We’re going to get some of them killed, you know.’ I did know. But saying it out loud would make it true and I didn’t want that.
‘I sent Imin to die,’ she said, after a long moment of silence. I stayed quiet. Though I’d figured it had been Shazad who had come up with the plan to send Imin to die in Ahmed’s place. She was the strategist. She was the one who made the hardest choices for us. ‘Which means I killed Navid, too.’ That one caught me off guard. I suddenly realised that I hadn’t seen Navid as we fled Eremot. But there were plenty I hadn’t seen. ‘He dropped dead in the prison below the palace. Just stopped breathing. As the sun set.’
‘When Imin’s head was taken off,’ I realised. They’d made a vow when they’d married: My life is yours to share. Until the day we die. An oath made by a Demdji was a dangerous thing. Lord Bilal had counted on it to save his life. But it had robbed Navid of his.
‘I thought I was going to die down there. And I saw them both, over and over again. Waiting for me.’
I didn’t think Shazad had been alone in the dark. I didn’t think those images were just guilt. But right now I didn’t think telling her that would help. ‘I killed Hala,’ I offered instead, my voice cracking. Shazad’s head darted up as she took in my words. Not that I had let Hala die, or sent her to her death. I had taken her life.
‘How did it happen?’ she asked after a moment. She sounded more measured, more like herself. Like a general absorbing every detail of this latest casualty.
‘The Sultan. I had to either kill her or let him have her …’ I trailed off. ‘I did what I had to do. Because it was what you would’ve done.’
We fell silent, sitting side by side on the mountain, the rustle of the camp far below drifting up to us on the air, mourning those we had lost: Hala, Navid, Imin, Shira, Bahi and more I couldn’t count. Mourning that not everyone down below with us in Sazi tonight would live to see Ahmed sit on the throne – if he ever did.
Me among them.
‘Tamid said …’ I started, then hesitated. I had to tell someone. Nobody knew about what Tamid had told me back in the Hidden House. It hadn’t mattered until today. Until Tamid had read the words painted above the doorway that led to Zaahir. The same words he had been searching for high and low, the ones that could release what was left of Fereshteh into death from the confines of the machine and give us a fighting chance against the Sultan. ‘Tamid reckons there’s a good chance that I’ll die if I release Fereshteh.’ Shazad’s head snapped up. ‘But if someone doesn’t deactivate the machine, then we have to face the Abdals. And no matter how many people stand up to fight with us I don’t think we stand much of a fighting chance against them.’
Shazad pressed her hand against her mouth as she considered this. ‘Have you told him yet?’
She meant Jin. Not Ahmed. We both knew without saying it that I couldn’t tell Ahmed. He would try to find a way out of this for me. But I wasn’t sure I had it in me to tell Jin either. I was telling Shazad because I knew she understood. She would fight for me as long as she could, and she would mourn me if she could not win. But she wouldn’t try to stop me. Because she would do the same.
I remembered, way back at the beginning, on a runaway train, holding her hand, keeping her from slipping on to the tracks and dying. Her telling me to let her go, just like Hala had in the Sultan’s grip. For the greater good. She’d never been afraid. I thought of what Sam had said back at the White Fish – that anyone who wasn’t frightened of dying was stupid or lying. I knew I couldn’t be the second. I didn’t like to think I was the first. But what would I be if I asked others to die for this cause but wasn’t willing to give myself up to it?
‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said. ‘If I die, we sure as hell better win this war.’
Shazad let out a short, honest laugh as she pushed herself to her feet. ‘Well then, I guess we’d better do something about our new recruits,’ she said, offering a hand down for me. I clasped it.
As she pulled me to my feet, I felt something knocking against my hip. When I glanced down I knew what it was, even in the barest flash of moonlight on metal. It was the knife Zaahir had given me. Somehow it had made it out of Eremot, tucked into my belt.
And I realised, with a sinking sense of dread, that I had a way to win this war hanging at my hip. One simple way to make sure that my death was worthwhile.
All I had to do was kill a prince.