I leaned my head back against the trunk, my hair snagging in the rough bark. She wasn’t wrong. Through the crisscrossing branches of the huge tree I could see the dark sky, but with the lights from the palace and the city, I couldn’t make out the stars.

‘So.’ Shira broke the silence after a moment. ‘Are you really with the Rebel Prince?’ She was fiddling with something, and I realised it was a rope that ran the length of the tree, like a pulley. She was tugging it absently, up and down. At the top, above the line of the harem walls, a piece of cloth stirred in the wind.

‘I really am.’ She was signalling someone. It could be a trap for all I knew. I couldn’t do much about it if it was except face it when it came.

‘Who would’ve thought it?’ Shira smiled. ‘Two girls from Dustwalk, with royalty. What was it the Holy Father used to say?’ Her accent was slipping. I wondered if she noticed. ‘Men who worship at the feet of power either rise with it—’

‘—or get trampled,’ I said, filling in the saying. ‘Good thing we aren’t men, then.’ I didn’t know why I was buying into her game. But I was real low on people I could talk to in this place. Leyla was sweet enough, but she was still the Sultan’s daughter. And Tamid wasn’t worth thinking about. He might be alive, but my friend had still died in the sand in Dustwalk. Shira’s dark eyes met my pale ones. A moment of recognition passed between us. We’d both hitched our wagons to powerful folk, just on different sides. If that was the choice, to rise or be flattened, chances were one of us was going to wind up rising and the other one dead.

‘Shira—’ I started. I wasn’t sure how I was going to finish.

I never did. Because a man stepped out of the Weeping Wall.

I’d seen a whole lot of Demdji do impossible things, but I’d be lying if I said I’d been expecting that.

The man was flesh and blood, and though at first glance he was dressed in desert clothes, he was distinctly un-Mirajin. He had hair the colour of sand, held back by a sheema that looked like it had been tied by someone with no hands, and pale skin that glowed in the lamplight. And his eyes were nearly as blue as mine. For a second I thought he was a Demdji.

‘Blessed Sultima,’ he said, his voice low and tinged with an accent. Not a Demdji, then, just a foreigner.

He pulled himself to his full height, giving me a better view of him. Dark polished boots different from anything I’d ever seen in the desert rose to his knees, his loose desert trouser legs stuffed inside, and he wore a white shirt open at the collar. I got the strangest impression he was pausing for effect. After a beat, he stepped forward dramatically.

That was when his arm got stuck in one of the vines that hung from the wall.

It sort of ruined the effect.

He recovered as well as he could, untangling his arm. Then he plucked one of the flowers from the vine and offered it to Shira with an extravagant bow. ‘Your beauty grows with every passing day.’

His badly tied sheema flopped open, falling off his face so I could see him clearly. He wasn’t a whole lot older than we were, and a light constellation of freckles over his pale nose made him look even younger. He was northern but not Gallan; his words sounded wrong, and I’d seen enough of the Gallan to know he wasn’t one of them. He straightened and flung the sheema over his shoulder like the sweep of a cloak. Shira took the flower and pressed it to her nose.

So this was how Shira smuggled things into the harem. And, judging by the look he was giving her, this was how she’d managed to get herself pregnant, too.

Finally the foreign man seemed to notice me.

‘This is—’ Shira started, but he didn’t let her finish.

‘Allow me to introduce myself.’ He snatched up my right hand without asking. I resisted the urge to yank it out of his grip. Shazad would call that undiplomatic. ‘Especially to such a beautiful young woman.’ He raised my hand to his lips, in some strange foreign gesture, and kissed it. ‘I,’ he declared, straightening dramatically, ‘am the Blue-Eyed Bandit.’

I choked on a snort that got stuck in my throat and turned into an uncontrollable cough. Shira patted me awkwardly on the back as I doubled over, bracing my free hand against my knees.

‘Yes, I know, my reputation precedes me.’ My reputation precedes you. But I still couldn’t talk through my coughing. ‘Don’t let it intimidate you. I didn’t really defeat a thousand soldiers in Fahali.’ He leaned forward conspiratorially, still clutching my hand, now twining his fingers through mine. ‘It was merely hundreds.’

‘Is that right?’ I’d finally managed to catch my breath. I remembered Fahali like a blur. Gunpowder and blood and sand, and myself in the middle of it. ‘So tell me, how did you flood the prayer house at Malal?’

‘Well.’ There was a glint in his eyes. He talked from the top of his mouth, unlike the Gallan, who talked from the back. ‘I could tell you, but I’d rather not give you any dangerous ideas.’

I probably ought to stop enjoying this. But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had something to laugh about in this damn rebellion. Definitely not since we’d fled the Dev’s Valley. ‘And how about the fight at Iliaz? Is it true what they say? That the Blue-Eyed Bandit was outgunned and outnumbered and surrounded by enemies on all sides?’

He didn’t miss a beat, his chest swelling as he drew me towards him. ‘Oh, well, you know, what others call outnumbered, I call a challenge.’