There were about a dozen of them. I caught glimpses of their faces in the swinging lamplight as I was led through. A pale girl with ivory blonde curls, in the rags of a foreign blue dress that looked like it had once been shaped like a bell; a dark-skinned girl whose eyes were closed, her head tipped back – the only sign she was still alive was her lips moving in prayer; a Xichian girl with a curtain of jet hair and pure murder in her eyes as she tracked the man holding me; a single other Mirajin girl in a plain khalat shivering against the cold. They looked as different from each other as day and night and sky and sand, but they were all beautiful. And that was what frightened me the most.

I’d heard the stories from Delila of how Jin’s mother had been brought to the harem. A Xichian merchant’s daughter who lived her life on the deck of a ship – a deck that turned slick with the blood of her family on the day they were boarded by pirates. Lien, sixteen and beautiful, was the only survivor, taken in chains and silk rags to the new Sultan of Miraji, who’d just killed his father and brothers to take the throne for himself. Who was building a harem to assure his succession.

She was sold for a hundred louzi into those walls, where she would bear a son to a man she loathed. Where only the death of a friend she loved like a sister would give her the chance to escape back to the sea, clutching a newborn, with two young princes clinging to her hem.

Sometimes I doubted if Jin even knew those stories of his mother. They weren’t the sorts of things women told their sons. They were the sorts of things women told other women. Beware, they told their daughters. People will hurt you because you’re beautiful.

I wasn’t beautiful. I wasn’t here because of that. I was here because I was powerful.

This time the iron manacles bit hard into my skin. Safiyah and the man turned to go, taking the light with them. I couldn’t just let them leave me here in chains. It was too much like surrendering.

‘You know what they say – that betraying your own blood means you’ll be forever cursed in the eyes of God,’ I called after Safiyah. The water was already lapping at my clothes. I was still wearing Shazad’s khalat, I realised. The water was soaking through it to my skin. ‘The Holy Father preached that a whole lot in Dustwalk, too.’

I didn’t expect Safiyah to stop. But she did. She stood in the doorway a long moment, her back to me, as the man vanished ahead of her.

‘That he did.’ She turned back to face me. And for the first time, she scared me. It was the calm in her face. It told me she hadn’t hesitated in doing this to me. Not even for a minute. ‘Your mother and I always used to go to prayers. Every single day. Not just holy days, not just prayer days. Every day. We’d take up prayer mats next to each other and squeeze our eyes shut and pray like we were told to. We prayed for our lives. To get out of Dustwalk.’ I hadn’t noticed it before, this coldness in Safiyah. But it was clear as daybreak now as she crouched across from me. ‘I loved my sister like the sun loves the sky. I would have done anything for her. And then she died, and left you. And you look so like her. It’s like seeing a Skinwalker wearing my sister’s face. Do you have any notion of what that’s like? Looking at the thing that killed someone you loved, a thing that isn’t even wholly human but seems to think she is?’

I watched the lamplight swing threateningly across her face, casting her into startling light and then darkness as it went. ‘Dustwalk killed my mother.’

‘Because she was protecting you. She was protecting you from the man who called himself your father. Would you like to know what her last letter to me said?’

I wanted to say no. But that would be a lie.

‘She told me you weren’t really her husband’s. That he knew. He’d always known. That she feared for you now that you were older. That it was time to run. That she would die to protect you if she had to, but if she did, she would take him with her.’

I was back in the desert, that day. The day the gunshots had come. They said my mother had gone crazy. She hadn’t. She had killed her husband knowing full well that she might die. And she’d done it for me.

‘She was going to come and join me, you know. Before you. I hated you from the moment she told me that she would have to delay leaving because she couldn’t cross the desert while she was with child. Or when you were too small. And yet still, I built my life thinking one day I would be able to share it with my little sister. I did terrible things to make a life for both of us. Dustwalk killed my sister. But she died because she was your mother. And now I’m going to take the life I should have always had. And you are going to buy it for me.’

‘If you hate me so much, why not take my eyes out here and now?’ I spat out at her. Let her show if she really hated me as much as she thought she did. ‘Just get it over with.’

‘Believe me, if I could have saved myself from carrying you across the desert I would have.’ My aunt tossed a smile back at me lazily. ‘But you’re worth your weight in gold, you know.’

I’d heard that before. In Saramotai, about Ranaa. And again from Hala, after rescuing Sayyida from Izman.

She wasn’t just going to take my eyes to sell on to some rich Izmani whose heart was going to give out on him. She was taking me to the Sultan.

Chapter 13

I was blind. Everything I saw was inside my mind, and outside that was just a darkness that went on forever and ever, sometimes punctured by noises.

In my better moments I knew it was the drugs. I was trapped in nightmares of fire and sand. Of sand on fire. A desert full of people burning. People I knew but whose names didn’t exist in this dream. And a pair of blue eyes like mine watching it all. Because I still had eyes. I just couldn’t figure out how to open them.