Hero at the Fall

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.