Traitor to the Throne

‘Not the first time for that, either.’ I picked a needle at random before turning around to face her head on. She looked a whole lot better than she had when we’d found her in that cell in Saramotai and she’d barely been able to focus on me. Her fever seemed to have broken and she was alert now, her face almost a normal colour.

‘I—’ she started and then hesitated, running her tongue along cracked lips. ‘I’ve got some talent with healing. If you’d rather not.’

I didn’t need her help. I could take the supplies and leave. I could forget I’d ever been the girl from Dustwalk who had a mother named Zahia. But if I left now I’d have to face Jin. And I was having trouble thinking of a single time running away from my problems had actually worked. Besides, it wasn’t like I was all that excited about shoving a sharp object into my own skin.

I sat across from her, handing over the bottle, thread, and needle. She seemed skittish as she pulled away the collar of the khalat. Her fingers drifted over the wound, dabbing the liquid over where the blood had caked, making a hundred tiny pinpricks of pain sing behind it. But I wasn’t paying it much mind. I was watching her face in the dim glow of the lamplight. Trying to recognise something there I might know.

‘You’ve been drinking,’ she said finally. ‘I can smell it on you. That’ll be why it started again. Thins the blood. You don’t need stitches, just a bandage and to learn how to hold your drink.’

It was the way she said drink that made me sure. Her accent had been worn smooth by years in other places, places that didn’t swallow that word like they were always thirsty, but there was no mistaking it. Not with the way the rest of the words dropped and rose. I could’ve picked out that accent in the cacophony of a bazaar. It was my accent.

‘You called me Zahia,’ I said, biting the bullet so fast I didn’t have time to lose my nerve. ‘That was my mother’s name. Zahia Al-Hiza.’ I watched her close for a reaction. ‘But she was born Zahia Al-Fadi.’

The woman’s face folded like a bad hand of cards. She pulled away from me, dropping the collar of my khalat, and pressed the back of her hands to her lips, stifling what sounded like a sob.

I stared at her, unsure of what to do. I ought to give her some privacy or some comfort. But I couldn’t tear my gaze away from her.

‘That would make you Amani, then.’ Her voice sounded choked when she finally spoke again. She shook her head angrily, as if to dispel the tears. Desert girls didn’t cry. ‘You look exactly like Zahia at your age.’ I’d heard that before. She reached out a hand like she was going to touch me. There were tears in her eyes. ‘It’s like seeing my sister the day I left Dustwalk all over again.’

‘Your sister?’ I pulled away before her fingers could so much as graze my cheek. ‘You’re Safiyah Al-Fadi?’ I saw it as soon as she said it. I might be the spitting image of my mother but I saw her in this woman, too. She was the middle sister of the three Al-Fadi girls. My mother and Aunt Farrah’s mythical third sister. The one who had famously vanished out of Dustwalk to make her own life. Who my mother always talked about running away to find. Who I’d been headed for when I first left Dustwalk. Before I’d chosen Jin and the Rebellion. ‘You’re supposed to be in Izman.’

‘I was in Izman.’ She suddenly busied herself, pulling bottles out of the Holy Father’s trunk, checking them over with a quick, practised eye. ‘I went there to find my fortune. I was there for nearly seventeen years.’ She uncorked one without a label to sniff the contents, carefully avoiding meeting my eye.

I didn’t like that she was here. It didn’t seem right that in this whole huge sprawling desert we would find each other somewhere neither of us was ever meant to be. It seemed like the world had bent itself over backwards trying to push us together. Had I done this? I raked my mind for the things I’d said in the days Jin and I had walked across the desert, when I’d still thought I was going to wind up in Izman. Had I told some truth by accident? Before I’d known I was Demdji and that I couldn’t lie – before I’d understood how dangerous it was to speak truths about the future, that it would twist the universe to make them true? All I’d have to have done was tell Jin I was going to find my aunt and the universe would rearrange the stars to make it so. And give me some kind of poisoned version of the truth.

Or was this just dumb luck?

Her nervous fingers finally settled on a bottle. She tipped out something thick and foul-smelling onto her fingertips and dabbed it across my wound.

‘So how come you left Izman?’

‘Because fortune is a funny thing.’ I waited, but it seemed that was all the explanation I was going to get for how she’d wound up in Saramotai. ‘Though I must admit I didn’t think it was going to lead me to being imprisoned by a revolutionary who wanted to overturn the world order.’

‘Malik wasn’t ours,’ I argued, wincing against the pressure of her fingers on my collarbone.

‘Do you hand pick all your followers?’ She pressed a little harder on my wound than she needed to. ‘He did things in your prince’s name; that’s enough for me. He nearly killed me doing it, too. You know, some of this desert didn’t ask for a rebellion that might get us killed.’ She pulled away from me, wiping her fingers on a cloth. ‘But I suppose, as the Holy Father in Dustwalk would have said, Fortune and Fate.’