Traitor to the Throne

The Holy Father didn’t try to kill me, though I heard I came pretty close to dying once or twice all on my own. The bullet had just missed about three different ways of killing me. I’d only barely stopped bleeding by the time they had to move me again. The Holy Father warned them against it but Izz had been spotted. They got me back to camp as quickly as they could and handed me over to our Holy Father.

It turned out it was being a Demdji that’d saved me. I’d burned away any chance of infection, quick and hot, all on my own. So the only thing the Holy Father had to worry about was the bleeding.

Near a week had passed the next time I opened my eyes, fighting my way out of a haze of drugs that’d been forced down me along with water. Shazad was asleep next to me. That was how I knew I must’ve been close to death. The sick tent had been Bahi’s territory. She hadn’t set foot in it since he’d died. Not even when she’d gotten hurt herself, the one time I’d ever seen a sword get past her guard. I’d stitched the thin slice across her arm instead.

She woke instantly as soon as I shifted, her eyes flying open, going for a weapon that wasn’t there before focusing on me. ‘Well, look who’s back from the dead.’

*

Shazad found me in one of the pools of water that had been designated for washing. Dark cloths hung between the trees on all sides to shield it from view of the camp. It was shallow enough that I could sit in it and be covered up to my shoulders, and clear enough that I could see my toes at the bottom. The bottom of the pool was scattered with white and black pebbles smoothed by the water. I pushed them around the bottom with my toes. I’d been in here long enough that I’d scrubbed the dust out of my hair, and it had already dried in strange wild waves, curling around the edges of my scalp, like it had a habit of doing.

I was carefully using sand to scrub away the flecks of blood that were still clinging to the wound at my collarbone from Saramotai. I’d thought about going to the Holy Father for stitches but I figured he had enough on his hands with the refugee women. Including the one who had called me by my mother’s name. I didn’t know if she’d have woken up yet, but if she had, that was another reason to steer clear of the sick tent.

Shazad had stripped the desert off herself, too. She was wearing a white-and-yellow khalat that reminded me of the uniform of Miraji. It made her desert skin look all that much darker against the paleness of the linen. She had a bundle tucked under one arm.

‘Jin has as much flight in him as he has fight, you know,’ Shazad said. ‘That’s how Ahmed wound up alone in Izman in the first place.’ I knew the story. When Ahmed had chosen to stay in the country where he was born, Jin had decided to move on, staying on the ship they’d been working on. He’d come back a few months later with Delila, after his mother died. ‘He did it at the Sultim trials, too.’ She shucked off her shoes. ‘Vanished the night before and came back with a black eye and cracked rib he never explained to any of us.’

‘He got in a brawl in a bar with a soldier about a girl.’

‘Huh.’ Shazad considered that, rolling up her shalvar. She sat at the edge of the pool, dipping her feet in to cool off. The sounds of the camp drifted around us on the slight breeze. Birdsong mingling with indistinct voices. ‘All right, we’re low on time. So I’m going to hurry this up. You’re going to ask me if I knew he’d asked to leave. And I’m going to tell you that I didn’t. And you’re going to believe me because I’ve never lied to you before. Which is half the reason you like me so much.’

Well, she wasn’t wrong about that. ‘What’s the other half, if you’re so clever?’

‘That you’d be constantly undressed if it wasn’t for me.’ The bundle under her arm unfurled into a khalat I’d seen at the bottom of her trunk of clothes before. It was the colour of the sky in the last moments before it turned to full desert night and dotted with what looked like tiny stars. I realised as it clinked in Shazad’s hands that it wasn’t stitching. They were gold beads. I hadn’t exactly arrived at the Rebellion with enough clothing to fight a war, but Shazad had enough for the two of us. Even if nothing of hers ever fit me exactly right. But this was by far the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen her pull out of that chest of clothes.

‘What’s the occasion?’ I asked, dragging myself through the water to lean on the edge of the pool next to her.

‘Navid has somehow convinced Imin to marry him.’

I sucked in a breath so fast I inhaled some of the water and started coughing. Shazad slapped me on the back a few times.

Navid had been totally taken with Imin from the moment he arrived at the camp. It didn’t seem to matter what shape Imin wore; Navid could spy the object of his affections across the camp without hesitating. He had very drunkenly declared his love on equinox a few months back, in front of the entire camp. I remembered grabbing Shazad’s arm, bracing myself for the inevitable mockery and rejection from Imin. For some baffling reason it never came. Baffling, because Imin treated everyone but Hala with the sort of disdain that came only from true hurt. The kind the Rebellion had saved the Demdji from in the first place.

Imin had glanced around at all the staring faces with sardonic yellow eyes before asking us why we didn’t have anything more interesting to stare at. Then Imin slipped a hand into Navid’s, pulling him away from the firelight and our stunned silence.

‘You have to attend,’ Shazad said as I recovered from my attempt to breathe in water, ‘and you have to be dressed to do it. Imin has already stolen three khalats from me for the occasion, because, and I quote, “none of my own clothes fit at the moment.”’