‘I did.’ Sam winked at her. ‘But you can’t deny it’s a good policy.’

‘Shazad nearly slit your throat when you first met,’ I pointed out. ‘And you’re here.’ I was keeping one eye on the gate into the garden, in case anyone wandered our way. It was morning and the sunlight glaring down on our meeting, with the rest of the harem awake, made me nervous. But dawn had beaten Sam back to the rebel camp with Rahim’s offer. And Shazad wasn’t willing to wait another day.

‘Well, that’s just because Shazad’s charm trumps all wisdom.’ Sam winked at Shazad, who ignored him. ‘Besides, I’m just the messenger. That’s how I’m going to avoid getting shot.’

‘What?’ He was doing that thing where he talked nonsense again.

‘It’s an Albish expression, it means – never mind.’ He shook his head, fighting a laugh. It was one of those rare smiles on him that looked real, not calculated or designed to charm me. The ones that actually made me like him.

But Shazad’s eyes had a faraway look. Like she was working through a problem quickly in her mind. I already knew where she would get to. She’d been telling Ahmed for ages we needed a real fighting force. And now I was offering her one. She was taking it seriously enough to come here herself. She hadn’t even made a comment about my missing hair, even though I knew she’d noticed.

‘We can trust him?’

‘He’s hiding something,’ I said. ‘He won’t tell me why he’s frightened for Leyla, for one. But he hasn’t lied to me. He hates his father, and he has no designs on the throne.’ No matter what Shira suspected, that truth fell easily off my tongue.

‘What do you think?’ Shazad turned to Sam. He looked taken aback for a moment by the full force of her attention.

‘I think it’s not my place to make decisions about whom you should trust,’ Sam said, recovering. ‘I mean, you obviously have excellent taste.’ He gestured to himself.

‘She meant about being able to get Leyla out of the palace.’

‘Oh, well.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I can walk her out of here. As easily as I walked you in.’ Sam’s smile looked pasted on again. ‘Only, in my experience, someone usually notices when princesses go missing from palaces.’

‘You’ve got a lot of experience kidnapping princesses, do you?’ Shazad said.

‘I’ll have you know that princesses find me irresistible.’ He leaned in conspiratorially. ‘I’m still working on bandits and generals.’

‘He’s right,’ I interrupted before they could descend into arguing again. ‘Wives seem to disappear from the harem all too often, but the daughters seem to be a little bit more closely watched. She can’t just vanish; she’d be missed.’

‘And then you’ll be questioned. Rahim will get found out along with the rest of us and we’ll lose any shot of getting both you and that Djinni out of the Sultan’s hands.’ Shazad was steps ahead as usual. I’d told them about my encounter with my father. Or at least as much of it as mattered. That the only way we were going to get him free was if we broke the circle. We’d need some kind of explosive. And even I knew you couldn’t exactly blow something up in this palace without people noticing.

‘So we’ve got to strike a single blow,’ Shazad was working it through out loud. ‘We get everyone out at once or no one at all.’ She was right. If we got my father out, we lost any chance of helping Leyla and Rahim escape. If we walked the two of them out of the palace, my father was left in the Sultan’s hands. So we’d have to get all three of them out at the same time. One shot was all we were going to get. One shot for three targets.

‘Auranzeb,’ I said, drawing Shazad’s and Sam’s eyes my way. ‘We can use Auranzeb as our cover. This isn’t the sort of thing that you and I and a handful of good luck can pull off on our own. We’ll need backup, and from what I’ve heard, there’s enough strangers coming in at Auranzeb that we ought to be able to get a few more in.’

Shazad considered it for a long moment. Neither Sam nor I spoke as she ran through past celebrations at the palace in her mind. ‘Auranzeb could work. We could get Imin in easily. Hala, too, if she gets back from Saramotai in time. Maybe two or three more, without pushing our luck too much.’ She could see the celebration laid out in front of her like a battlefield, and I could tell she was looking for openings and escape routes. A smile started to dawn slowly across her face. It died suddenly as she looked up. ‘What about you?’

She was right. It wasn’t three people who needed to be freed from the palace. It was four. I couldn’t stay here. No matter what blow we struck at Auranzeb, everything could be undone if I didn’t leave with them.

We could break the circle. But so long as the Sultan had me in his control he could just summon my father back. They could abduct Leyla and Rahim to safety and win a whole army. But the Sultan could make me give away every name in the Rebellion before they could strike.

‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.’ I tried to sound easy about it. ‘For now, I’ll tell Rahim that we’ll take his deal. We’ve got a while before Auranzeb yet.’

Sam started talking again, laying out the plan. But Shazad wasn’t fooled. We were both thinking the same thing.

I couldn’t be left behind at Auranzeb. At least not alive.