The Sultan laughed, throwing his head back as he clapped his son on the shoulder proudly. There was no mistaking the look of pure joy that passed over the young prince’s face. For just a moment, in the late afternoon sun, they might’ve been any father and son sharing a moment of happiness.
And then the Sultan’s eyes fell on me, hovering on the edge of the garden. He patted his son on the shoulder again, squeezing it tightly with pride before sending the boy on his way, carrying the dead bird slung over his shoulder.
When his son had vanished, he gestured me over.
‘Hardly anybody uses bows any more, you know,’ I said when I was close enough to be heard. ‘Guns are cleaner.’
‘But not so quiet when you are trying to hunt,’ the Sultan said. ‘They scare your prey off. Besides, this is a tradition. My father did it for me, and his father did it for him.’ And the Sultan had killed his father and now a handful of his sons were counting on following that tradition, too. ‘What do you want, little Demdji?’
I ran my tongue along my teeth nervously. Chances were, he’d see right through me. But Shazad had said it herself the day Sayyida was brought back: we needed eyes in the palace. The whole palace. I could be those eyes. ‘I want to be able to leave the harem.’
I couldn’t leave the palace, but information could. Shazad had put Sam on the Rebellion’s payroll. The past three nights, since the day Izz had dropped paper from the sky, I’d had a standing meeting with Sam at dusk by the Weeping Wall. Shazad would figure out what to do about him later, but for now, his only task was to slip into the harem every night to meet with me and make sure I hadn’t sold out the whole Rebellion on a royal order. It was an awfully boring task. Or as Sam put it, it was the easiest money he’d ever made, being paid to come look at a pretty girl every night. If I succeeded here, I could make his job a little more interesting.
The Sultan played with the string of his bow. ‘And you want to leave because …?’
‘Because I can’t stand it there much longer.’ It was a truth. A half-truth. And it wasn’t going to be enough. ‘And I can’t stand your son.’
The Sultan leaned on the bow. ‘Which one?’ he asked wryly. There it was again: that faint prickle down my skin, like we were both in on a secret, like we were both playing some game. No, that was ridiculous. If he knew I was allied with Ahmed, all he had to do was command me to tell him where he was. He could use me to lead him to Shazad and from there the rest of the Rebellion.
‘Kadir.’ I shook off the feeling. ‘He looks at me like I’m a flower in that garden for him to pluck.’
The Sultan twanged the string of the bow again, like he was playing a musical instrument. ‘You know that you are my prisoner, little Demdji. If I wanted to, I could order you to lie in one spot, completely still, until I needed you for something. I could make you grow roots and stay there waiting for an order. Or’ – the Sultan paused, twanging the bowstring pointedly – ‘to be plucked.’ My skin crawled. ‘But … I admire you coming to find me here. Tell me, little Demdji: can you shoot?’
‘Yes,’ I said, because, as much as I didn’t care for him to know just how good I was with a gun, I couldn’t lie. Shazad always said our greatest strength was being underestimated. But the Sultan always saw through me when I tried to dodge around a truth with a half-truth. ‘I can shoot.’
He extended the bow towards me. I didn’t take it immediately. ‘You want something,’ he said. ‘People who want things have to earn them.’
‘I know how to earn things. I didn’t grow up in a palace.’
‘Good,’ the Sultan said, that hint of Jin’s smile lingering. ‘Then you should understand this. Take the bow.’
I did as I was told because I didn’t have a choice, though I didn’t know if he’d meant to give me an order.
‘If you can bring down a duck, I will give you free range of the palace – at least, as much as anyone else has. If you don’t … well, then I hope your bed is comfortable, because you will lie there a very long time.’
I ran my fingers down the taut string of the bow. It was an old weapon. Something from the storybooks. Before guns. I remembered some legend about the archer who took out a Roc’s eye with an arrow.
I stood in a shooting stance and tried to pull the string back.
‘Not like that.’ The Sultan’s hands were on my shoulders. I tensed automatically. But there was nothing lingering in the way he touched me. He gripped my shoulders like he had the young prince’s. Like I’d seen fathers in Dustwalk do when they were teaching their sons to shoot a gun. No one had ever done that for me. I’d taught myself to shoot while my father was drunk. And not really my father anyway. Though he cared about whether I lived or died just as much as my real father did, as it turned out. ‘Widen your stance,’ he ordered, lightly kicking my ankles apart with his instep. ‘And draw the bow across your body.’
I was keenly aware of him watching me as I drew the bowstring back. I took aim at the nearest duck the same way I would with a gun. I lined up my sight carefully. If I had a gun, my bullet would go straight through the bird.
I’d gotten good at killing birds in the past few months. When you were camping in the mountains, it was helpful to be able to hunt.
I loosed the bowstring. It scraped painfully along my arm. The arrow flew and missed the bird by a foot, plunging into the water. The flock of birds panicked at the noise, spiralling upwards into the sky in a flapping mess of feathers and squawking.