I found Leyla in Bilal’s rooms.
I hadn’t expected to. I didn’t need to be involved in the aftermath of Bilal’s death. Rahim and Ahmed and Jin and Shazad could take care of that. So I’d gone to Bilal’s rooms looking for his books. I was hoping that he had more on the man in the mountain. That I might find answers about the Sin Maker.
It had been an easy thing to think of giving away Zaahir’s kiss to Bilal. But now … if I was going to give it to someone I really cared about, I needed to know if it was a trick. He’d promised they would live to an old age. But I knew Djinn’s ways. It could mean that whomever I gave his gift to would age a hundred years when I kissed them. It could mean I would grant them a cripplingly ancient life so they were forced to watch everyone around them die. I couldn’t do that to Ahmed. Or to Jin.
I came desperate for answers.
Instead, I found a princess curled up like a little girl on Bilal’s bed, letting the smoke from his funeral pyre billow through the open window.
I paused in the doorway, looking at her tiny figure in the dark, knees tucked to her chest, bare feet burrowing into the stitching of the heavy blanket covered in hunting scenes that was sprawled over the bed. I knew she was aware of me, but she didn’t turn around.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I asked Leyla’s back. ‘You poisoned his mind into the idea of killing all those soldiers so that we couldn’t have them. So that your brother couldn’t go to war against your father. How did you do it?’
Leyla’s shoulders shook silently, like in a laugh. It was the first sign of life I’d seen from her. ‘You have seen me fool and manipulate you and others dozens of times. You have seen where I grew up, within those walls, with women who used their bodies and their minds like weapons.’ Slowly she turned to face me. She looked different from the girl we’d left here. The burning, indignant anger in her had turned to a twisted, ugly kind of rage. ‘And yet, after all this, you still think I’m too innocent to play this game?’
Her eyes were rimmed with red. I didn’t know whether it was from crying or from the smoke. I strode across the room, past the bed, to the other wall. From the window I could see down on to Bilal’s pyre. It was surrounded by soldiers. Doing their duty to him even though he hadn’t done right by them.
‘I guess the Rebellion has made me more of an optimist about folks than I used to be,’ I offered. I closed the window and turned back to Leyla.
‘Have you come to kill me?’ she asked.
‘No. Your brother will probably come looking for you soon. It would be too obvious who’d done it.’ It was a joke. Mostly.
I considered Leyla on the bed. I’d come here looking for information.
We’d had a plan back in Izman. Before Ahmed had been captured and Imin executed. Get an army, disable the Sultan’s machine, take the city.
We had the army.
We had the words to free Fereshteh’s captured soul from the machine and bring down the wall, and the Abdals with it.
Now we just needed the city. And for that, we needed to disable the machine.
I might as well ask. ‘If I free Fereshteh’s energy, that machine’s not just going to quietly turn itself off, is it?’
‘Who knows.’ Leyla slid back down on to the bed, like she was suddenly exhausted, propping her head on one arm. ‘It’s never been tested before. It’s all just a theory until you test it. That’s what my mother taught me. Rahim thinks I don’t remember her. But I think I’ve proved that I am more of both my mother and my father than he will ever be.’
‘And if you were theorising?’ I pressed, before she could stumble down some path I couldn’t bring her back from.
‘If I were theorising –’ she closed her eyes – ‘I would say no. I don’t think it will.’
Tamid and Leyla were both smart. And now that they’d told me the same thing, it was a safe bet they were probably right. It had seemed far away until now. But suddenly it seemed very near.
I felt myself reaching out for something to hang on to as everything seemed to spin around me. My hand closed around an earthenware pitcher next to the bed. It did nothing to keep me standing when it slid off the table and into my hands. Anger rushed in. Sudden, violent, irrational rage took over. Without thinking, I hurled the pitcher across the room, sending it splintering against the wall before I stormed out.
I wasn’t sure who I was looking for as I headed back into the courtyard, on the opposite side from the funeral pyre. Jin, maybe.
Instead, I ran straight into Sam. He caught me by the arms as I walked into his chest. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘isn’t this very Leofric and Elfleda of us?’ The love story he’d been babbling about back in Sazi. The one that ended with them both dying. ‘Meeting in secret in the dark …’ And then he trailed off as he saw my face. That I was in no mood for jokes. ‘Are you all right?’
I glanced over his shoulder. The twins were standing there, looking at me anxiously. I must really not look all right. ‘What are you three doing out here?’ I asked instead of answering.
‘Oh, well.’ Sam stepped away from me, releasing my arms. ‘Rahim got the news from one of his soldiers. After we left here, my former queen, long may she reign, struck an alliance with the Gallan king, may he die a painful death and rot in a ditch.’ For once, Sam sounded serious.
So the alliance had gone through. Since we hadn’t taken the captain’s deal, they had gone and made another ally. Made Miraji their enemy. The Gallan hated our kind, hated anything that wasn’t wholly human. Sam might’ve turned traitor on Her Highness, but his queen had betrayed a whole lot of her people by striking this alliance, too. ‘Captain Westcroft and the rest of all those nice fellows who want me dead marched down to join the siege three days ago.’
‘So we’re going to scout things out,’ Izz interjected, chipper as ever. He was clearly glad to be moving; the twins hated being in one place too long.
‘Shazad said we needed to use all our advantages now,’ Maz added.
‘How come you both get to be the Blue-Eyed Bandit and we’re known as advantages?’ Izz asked.
‘Yeah,’ Maz agreed. ‘We demand a better legendary nickname.’
I forced a smile and got the satisfaction of the pair of them grinning back, pleased that they’d amused me.
I glanced at Sam, understanding. ‘You’re going with them?’ The twins didn’t need an escort to report to Shazad. Maybe Sam thought this would impress her, acting like a real soldier. But then I saw the troubled look on his face. He might be one of us now, but he was born in Albis. Those were his people laying siege to our city. He needed to see it.
‘All right.’ I moved towards Izz. ‘Let’s go.’
They didn’t need me with them any more than they did Sam. But they didn’t question me coming with them either. The twins burst into Rocs as Sam and I wrapped our sheemas around our faces against the wind. I had to see whatever was awaiting us down in the city.
Night had fallen completely by the time we reached Izman, but we could still see everything from the air. The light from the dome of fire made it glow faintly in the dark. But more than that, the ground around the city burned like an ember.
The siege camp had been destroyed. The Gallan tents, which had stood in perfect military lines when we’d left just a few weeks back, were now smouldering ash. The bodies of the Albish who had joined forces with them would be among them, too. Thousands of men who’d lined up around the walls had been annihilated, the ground still burning from the force that had destroyed them: the Abdals turned against our enemies.
I couldn’t see Sam’s expression in the dark, but he would mourn his people, no doubt. In a way I couldn’t. The Sultan might be our enemy, but he had dispelled Miraji’s enemies.
Maybe it was right that it should end like this. This was a war between the people who belonged in this desert. Not the people who wanted to own it.
We would decide it for ourselves – no one else.
All I could hear were Izz’s wingbeats as we soared over the city. It reminded me of the destruction Noorsham used to cause. Fire. Annihilation. A force that wasn’t natural, that came from the Djinn, sweeping across armies and destroying everything in its path.
They’d dared to try to take power from the Sultan. So he’d shown them his true power.
This was what would happen to us if we tried to face the Sultan while he still controlled the Abdals. If we went to face armies of metal with an army of men.
We would burn, too. Everyone would: Jin, Ahmed, Shazad, Delila, Sam, Rahim, the refugees from Sazi, the soldiers from Iliaz, the hopeful men and women who had joined us in village after village.
Unless I dispelled Fereshteh’s power. Unless I used the words Tamid had given me. The first language, in a voice that could tell no lies. The same tongue that had trapped the Djinn, used to free him.
Either I died or we all did.
*
‘All right, here’s what we do.’ A map of Izman was rolled out in front of Shazad. Rahim had taken over Bilal’s rooms, but there was no time to clear them out. So for now, Shazad’s room was our war room. ‘We can march from here to here in a day.’ She pointed to a spot on the map that she had marked, in the desert west of Izman. ‘That puts us out of sight and out of range of the city when night falls. We wait here for morning. At dawn, you two fly to the east.’ She pointed at me and Sam with the tip of her knife. ‘Get into the tunnels and to the machine. While you do that, our army marches under cover of one of Delila’s illusions towards the city. When the fire drops, the Sultan will be unprepared for us to storm the walls. We want to break through Ikket’s Gate first to get access to Wren Street before the army is fully mobilised.’ She pointed in turn at the streets of the city she had grown up in. ‘From there, we can take the western ramparts and have the upper ground. Trained soldiers should be on the front lines; the less trained should hang back in the artillery.’
‘No,’ Rahim disagreed. ‘We should mix as many of the untrained rabble among my soldiers as we can.’
‘That’s too risky. It will be harder for untrained men to hold a line. The Sultan’s soldiers will break through that much quicker.’
‘It’s better than if they break through the first line to find no second line of defence,’ Rahim argued, ‘our soldiers would be mowed down like wheat.’
‘So you want to throw untrained men and women in the middle of soldiers so that they can draw fire away from trained soldiers.’ Shazad didn’t raise her voice. It was a steady kind of anger.
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘But you know they’re more likely to die.’
‘They’re untrained – of course they’re more likely to die,’ Rahim said, every inch the commanding officer.
‘That’s enough.’ Ahmed held up his hand, stopping both of them. He looked at me. He wanted to hear what I thought. I’d seen the city. The destruction. I knew what we were facing.
I still had Zaahir’s gift. I could decide this battle here and now if I gave it to Ahmed. It wouldn’t matter what we did, he would live. He would survive even if it were a massacre. But if I gave it to him, I couldn’t give it to Jin.
‘I reckon you should listen to Shazad,’ I said. ‘Don’t throw bodies in your father’s way to slow him down.’ They weren’t just bodies. They were the too-eager farmers’ sons and daughters, who had laughed when Shazad tossed them in the dust like war was a game. The people of the desert who came to us because we were offering better than they had, and all we were asking in return was that they lay down their lives.
‘We still need greater numbers.’ Rahim shook his head. ‘We might be able to win this fight if we’re very smart and very lucky. But I don’t like counting on luck.’
‘Well, lucky for us, I am very smart.’ It was Shazad’s turn to interrupt him this time. A flicker of a smile flitted over Sam’s face. He had been quiet since we’d seen the destruction outside the walls of Izman, but he was clearly enjoying Shazad and Rahim arguing.
‘What about the people in the city?’ I asked. I was thinking about the machine. About what disabling it would mean if it really did go up in flames. If a Djinni’s dying energy really had razed cities and armies in the past.
‘Amani’s right,’ Shazad said. ‘There are still rebels in the city, and others who are loyal to us.’ That hadn’t been what I’d meant, but the result was the same.
‘We can’t spread the word in Izman that we’re coming,’ Rahim said. ‘If we lose the element of surprise, my father can annihilate us before we even reach the walls.’
‘But if we can get them out, then they can fight,’ Jin said, understanding what Shazad was saying where Rahim didn’t.
‘Fine.’ Ahmed nodded. ‘Sam and Delila –’ he turned to the two of them – ‘take a small number down to the city with you and start evacuating.’ I knew why he’d picked them: Sam to get people through the tunnels and Delila to hide what they were doing. ‘Get as many people out as you can. Leave now.’
I realised suddenly that this might be the last time we were all together like this. Some of us definitely weren’t going to survive the battle that was coming. We’d already lost so many to the war.
But as I looked from them to Ahmed to Jin to everyone else around the table, I suddenly knew exactly who was most likely to die: the one of us who was least afraid. The one who needed to be saved the most.
When we were finished, everyone dispersed, leaving just me and Shazad behind.
‘You should tell him, you know,’ she said when we were alone. I didn’t need to ask what she meant. She wanted me to tell Jin what I was walking into under that city: possible death.
We’d made a habit of saving each other, Shazad and I, of having each other’s back. Except I couldn’t watch her back on the battlefield this time. And she couldn’t save me from my fate.
‘Yeah,’ I said, leaning towards her, looping my arm around her shoulders. I leaned my head against hers and dropped a quick kiss on her cheek. Like a gesture between sisters when one of them was headed away from home for a little while.
Except we weren’t sisters. We’d chosen each other. And now that I’d given her that kiss from Zaahir, and the promise of a life longer than this battle, she wouldn’t be coming anywhere with me. ‘I probably should.’