Hero at the Fall

They said that when the Rebel Prince Ahmed entered Izman, flowers rained from the windows, thrown by jubilant people grateful to be freed. His Demdji sister, Delila, who had begun this fight with her birth, blew kisses to the men as they passed, happy to at last be returning home to the palace she had been forced to flee. And the Blue-Eyed Bandit caught the flowers, weaving them into a crown for her prince as they advanced towards the palace.

But those were stories. They would never tell the truth of what I remembered of that day.

I remembered carnage on the streets, not carnations. The confusion after the Sultan fell, as men continued to fight. Good men, not wicked. Men who were just following orders given to them by a dead ruler. Men whose families would pour from their houses later to weep over their bodies. I knew how the Sultan fell, because I killed him, and I would have nightmares about that for months afterwards. And sometimes his face would change to Hala’s. Sometimes to Shira’s. Or Sam’s.

But the storytellers would never know that. No one would know that except for Jin, who would wake in the night when I did, ready to fight until he realised that the threat was in my mind and he couldn’t defend me from it.

Even if people had known the truth, they wouldn’t have been interested in telling it. Flowers pouring from windows like falling stars made a better tale.

The stories would never tell that after the Sultan fell, as we crossed the city, we were reminded of the cost of war with every single body. That as I pushed my way through the streets, I found Samir, a bullet through his chest. A kid from Dustwalk, like me, who’d joined us in Sazi. It didn’t matter how well we had trained him. War took lives and changed the ones that were left behind.

The stories would remember that Izz survived his fall at the Sultan’s hands but not that his mangled, burned wing would turn to a mangled arm that would never fully heal, no matter what shape he took. He had a limp when he was on all fours, and his wing flapped hopelessly when he tried the shape of a bird. Maz stopped shifting into creatures that could fly altogether, because he didn’t want to go somewhere his brother couldn’t follow.

I remembered how thick the air was with the smoke from funeral pyres that night. We burned as many bodies as we could. And we burned four empty pyres, too.

The first one was for Sam. There was nothing left of him to burn, though we tore up the tiles of the palace looking all the same. But it was only ashes and collapsed Abdal bodies down there. If I hadn’t known better I might’ve thought he’d just slipped away through a wall after all, run off to some other adventure. Captain Westcroft told me that in Albis they believed that when you died and were buried, your body blossomed into a tree or a field of flowers. A new life. So we covered Sam’s funeral pyre in flowers, cut from the vines in the harem. The same kind Sam had plucked the first night I met him.

We set a ring on Hala’s empty pyre, gold for our lost golden girl.

For our Demdji of a thousand faces, we used one of Shazad’s khalats that Imin had liked to borrow.

A crown for Shira, our dead Sultima.

Bodies long lost because they died in the war, not this battle. Other ones. But we finally had the time to mourn them now that it was over.

*

We burned the Sultan, too, and his sons stood next to the pyre as they ought to do. Even if they were the reason he was dead. But that was the way. We were mortal. Sons were always meant to replace their fathers.

The pyres burned until the moon wasn’t visible through the smoke.

I remembered finally collapsing into a bed that was familiar because I had slept in it when I was a prisoner of the harem. I didn’t know where else to go in the huge empty palace we had conquered. I woke to the noise of the pillow moving under a new weight as Jin came and lay down. I shifted just enough to let his arms curl around me and pull me to him.

‘No men allowed in the harem,’ I remembered mumbling half-asleep into his shoulder as he tried to get comfortable. When he laughed, I felt it through my whole body, and the joy at still being alive swelled so quickly through me all at once that I thought I might shatter.

‘I think they make an exception for princes,’ he said into my ear before kissing me.

I remembered noticing that we were both still wearing our weapons and wondering how long it would take for the fight to really leave us, even now that we had won.

But the stories were not made from our memories; those were of interest only to us. The stories were made to tell a tale people wanted to hear. And people wanted to know that we had won and all was well.

Ahmed became a legend across the desert within days: the Resurrected Prince, come back from the dead to save the city. The whole country. The stories said that he had burned the foreign invaders in his path before taking on his father.

But it was the Sultan who had done that. Who had dispelled our would-be occupiers. He had helped us and made Miraji safe from foreign rule. The massacre of the Gallan was the only reason we were able to seize the city at sunset without risk of losing it at dawn.

But stories liked things to be simple. The Sultan was the villain. We were the heroes. And we had given the people of Miraji a new prince, kinder than his father. A new desert, free of occupation. A new dawn.

*

I struggled to clasp the sun-shaped medallion around my neck as I walked, fumbling awkwardly with the chain for a few moments before I finally had to stop moving.

I was late.

I leaned against a mosaic of some swans that stretched the length of this hallway through the palace, facing a line of arches that opened on to a placid-looking pond as I fumbled with the tiny hook at the back.