Traitor to the Throne

‘Left it?’ Finally the knot came apart in his fingers.

‘The morning after you vanished.’ His shoulders were taut as he unwound the red sheema from his arm. ‘You were gone, and this was outside my tent.’ I must’ve lost it in the scuffle with Safiyah. When I’d been standing outside his tent. Deciding whether to go in. ‘It seemed like a message.’

The skin under where it had been tied was paler. Like it hadn’t seen the sun in a while. He handed me the sheema. I took one end. Our history hung between us, a dozen tiny reminders of the first days we’d known each other. When things had been simpler. He’d been the Eastern Snake and I’d been the Blue-Eyed Bandit and it’d been just the two of us, not the two of us and a whole revolution. A whole country.

I started to say something about how stupid it was to think I’d leave and tell him with a discarded sheema. But then, we hadn’t been all that good at telling each other things.

‘You left first.’ I pulled at the edge of the sheema. ‘When I was hurt, you left me.’

‘You walked into the path of a bullet, Amani.’ He smoothed back a piece of hair from my face gently, his fingers running down it to where it ended bluntly from the wound inflicted by Ayet’s scissors. He looked at me like he was relearning my face. I didn’t need to memorise him again. He looked exactly the same as when I’d left him. Did I look different from my time in the harem? ‘You walked into it without a care for your own life.’

‘That’s what I do,’ I said. ‘That’s what you do, too.’

‘I know.’ Jin’s hands fell away from my hair, settling on my shoulders instead, lacing at the nape of my neck. ‘But that doesn’t mean I had to like it.’

‘You were mad at me for almost dying?’ I was so close to him that all I had to do was breathe for us to be touching. I felt like he was holding me together between his hands, but the heat of them made me feel like I might vibrate out of my skin.

‘At you, at Ahmed, at myself, at everyone.’ He was finally looking at me square on. The dying embers cast his face in a warm glow as his thumb ran circles over the back of my neck. ‘I’m not good at losing people, Amani, and you know I don’t give a damn about this country.’ The rest of him was still now, something solid to hang on to. But his fingers were sliding into my hair, making me shiver. ‘Not the way Ahmed does and not the way Shazad does. I came here because I give a damn about him, and I give a damn about Delila, and they both love this place. I give a damn about you and you are this place. I thought I had to do without you if you were so determined to leave the world. But then you were gone and I would have torn the desert apart looking for you.’

I wanted to say something that would help. I wanted to say that he didn’t have to be scared of me dying. But that would be a lie. We were in a war. No lives were safe. I couldn’t promise him a future where I didn’t take another bullet and he couldn’t promise me one, either. The same reckless hope that had us fighting at all was as likely to kill us.

So I didn’t say anything as I closed the last of the distance between us.

He said he would have torn the desert apart looking for me. And I felt in that kiss his desperation as his mouth found mine.

It wasn’t enough with Jin; it was never enough. His hands were in the mess of my torn palace clothes, trying to find me under the too-heavy stitching and the weight of the gaudy khalat. One hand tangled into my hair, pulling away the delicate gold circlet that still clung there. He freed it from my hair, casting it aside, pulling pieces of the palace away from me, trying to return me to him.

It was like being caught in a wildfire, desperate for breath, like if we stopped we would extinguish. Without thinking, I pulled my hands away from his chest. It took one quick movement for my torn khalat to come off and join his shirt in the heap on the ground, until I was wearing nothing but the thin linen chemise underneath.

His fingers found the hem, pushing it up, and then they were against my stomach, grazing the scar on my hip. I suddenly realised I was shaking. I pressed against him, skin to skin, looking for some kind of warmth. His hands found the small of my back, stilling me against him.

I felt us slow. My heartbeat slow. The wildfire turned to embers as Jin held me flush against him. I realised how close we were to the edge of doing something more. His skin against mine, his hands climbing my body, sinking me into him.

The door to the kitchen clattered open, wrenching us violently apart. Sam stumbled into the kitchen carrying an unconscious Leyla.

‘What happened?’ I was on my feet in a second. Jin was easing himself up the wall carefully behind me.

‘She made the crucial error of resisting.’ Hala followed through the door, dropping the illusion of looking human as she did, her skin going back to its normal golden hue. ‘She was fighting us, saying she couldn’t leave her brother behind. Turns out she could.’ She took my still-glittering skin in with one sweeping glance, though half the gold dust had faded in the escape. ‘Well, this is a sorry sight,’ she said by way of greeting. Her eyes danced to Jin.

Some of the dust from my skin had rubbed off on Jin, a smear of gold from his left ear to his mouth. Jin wiped a hand absentmindedly across his jaw. It was no good; the gold from my skin was all over his hands, too. I might’ve been embarrassed if it wasn’t for the unconscious princesses and old friends in this tiny kitchen pulling my mind in other directions.