Rebel of the Sands

“What about you?” I asked.

“I’m a girl who could’ve done just about anything if I’d been born a boy.” Shazad took a bite of her food. “But I was born a girl, so I’m doing this. My mother thinks it’s an elaborate stall tactic to avoid getting married.” I’d seen Shazad kill a Skinwalker. Watched her that afternoon run a dozen of the rebels through sword drills with the kind of command that could march a whole army across the desert. If she couldn’t carve out a place for herself in Izman, what hope was I going to have?

“She’s too modest.” Bahi dropped down next to Shazad by the fire, folding his legs over the pillow. He was balancing a plate on his knees. “Shazad was born to greatness. Her father is General Hamad.”

I gave them both a blank look.

“He’s been the Sultan’s chief general for two decades,” Bahi bragged for her. “He had a strong daughter and a weak son. Being a man of unconventional strategies, he trained his daughter to follow in his footsteps.”

“My brother’s not weak, he’s sick,” Shazad said.

“Most people,” Bahi said with a bold smile that was all teeth and no humor, “would have killed their son trying to turn him strong. Like my father tried to do with me.”

Shazad saved me from having to answer. “Bahi’s father is a captain in the army. He reports to my father, which is why Bahi and I have known each other since we were six years old.”

“And we’ve been friends that long because I’m so charming,” Bahi said.

“You’re marginally less of an ass than the rest of your brothers,” Shazad conceded. “Captain Reza”—there was scorn in Shazad’s tone and Bahi snapped a fake salute—“has six sons, so he thought he could spare a few. Much as he enjoyed gloating to his superior officer that he has six strong sons, where my father had only one.”

“And you,” I said.

“Captain Reza never counted me.”

“His mistake,” Bahi put in.

“Does your father know . . .” I wasn’t sure how to put it. “That you’re turning against him?” I probably shouldn’t have put it like that.

“I’m not against my father.” Shazad smiled fondly. “I’m against the Sultan. My father turned against him a while ago, too. He’s the one who told us about the rumors of the weapon being made down in the Last County. So highly secretive, the Sultan didn’t even tell him—but he has other ways of obtaining information.”

That made me sit up. Rumor in Dustwalk was that Ahmed’s rebellion was just a band of idealistic fools in the desert. But the rebels had had enough of a hold on Dassama that it’d been worth destroying. And the general was high-ranking in court. If he was loyal to Ahmed . . .

“You’re saying you’ve got allies in the Sultan’s court?”

Shazad was easily the most beautiful girl I’d ever met, and when she smiled with all her teeth she looked like the most dangerous one, too. “A few. The stories would have you believe that Ahmed appeared in Izman on the day of the Sultim trials like magic. Same way they’d have you believe that he disappeared from the palace the night of Delila’s birth in a poof of Demdji smoke. But campfire stories are never the whole story.” I remembered what Ahmed had told me, as we kept watch over Jin in the sick tent. That his mother and Jin’s had plotted their escape. But Jin’s mother wasn’t even in the popular story. Neither was Jin, for that matter. “Ahmed came back to Izman half a year before the Sultim trials, on a trading ship. He fell in with an intellectual crowd. A lot of very clever, very idealistic boys, including my brother, who sat around and talked about philosophies and how to make Miraji better. Many of them are children of people in the Sultan’s court.”

She took a bite of her food. “One night, I found my brother and Ahmed and three of their idiot friends in stocks in the middle of Izman because they’d been preaching that women ought to have the right to refuse a marriage.” That struck down to the bone. “Fortunately, being General Hamad’s daughter gets you a long way when dealing with soldiers. I dressed them down for arresting their general’s only son, and they were rushing to unlock the rest of them. They had no idea they’d accidentally arrested the prodigal Prince Ahmed, or I doubt even being the general’s daughter would’ve done much. Ahmed was renting rooms in the Izman slums under a false name then.” I figured there was a reason things like that didn’t make it into the stories. No one wanted to imagine their hero prince sleeping in a flea-infested bed. “I dragged my brother home, and Ahmed followed us. When we got there I dressed him down about almost getting my brother killed. And the next thing I knew, we were shouting about Ataullah’s philosophy on the role of the ruler in the state, and then I was agreeing to train him for the Sultim trials.”

“I was locked away in the Holy Order at the time,” Bahi said with his mouth full. “Or I would have talked some sense into her.”

“Would you like to tell her what you actually did when you got kicked out, or shall I?” Shazad took a bite of flatbread.

Bahi was suddenly very intent on his food. “I don’t recall.”

Shazad didn’t miss a beat. “He got very drunk and turned up to serenade me outside my father’s house.”

I snorted a laugh. “What song?” I couldn’t help but ask.