Traitor to the Throne

Chapter 29

War was building. Everybody could feel it. Even those of us who hadn’t been alive for the last war, when the Sultan took his throne.

And nobody seemed to know exactly what side they were on yet.

Inside the palace, I saw it in the rising tension in the council room. I saw it in the way the Xichian general’s hand slammed down, knocking over a pitcher of wine that drenched the papers sprawled across the table. I saw it in the number of guns and swords that surrounded the Albish queen when she arrived at the palace, taking the place of her elderly ambassador in negotiations.

Having Rahim as my guard made getting around a whole lot easier. After a few days I understood why the Sultan had allowed Rahim to talk his way into the role of my protector. He and Kadir despised each other. And the Sultan had made clear he didn’t approve of Kadir’s eyes on me by putting another one of his sons as my shield.

Rahim fed me more information that made it back to Sam as fast as anything. I was able to warn him when the Sultan’s city guard thought they were closing in on the new location of the rebel camp in the city. They never found anything. And two days later they had brand-new intelligence that would lead them in circles at the opposite end of Izman.

The news that the Sultan was negotiating with foreigners slipped out somehow, too. Nobody had forgotten how much they hated Gallan rule. New tracts circulated in the streets reminding the Mirajin people what they had already suffered at the hands of our occupiers and our Sultan. But when the soldiers tried to trace where they might have come from, they wound up chasing their own tails.

The Rebellion was rising up like bursts of gunpowder all over Izman. Most exploded in neighbourhoods that had suffered under Gallan rule. A NEW DAWN was burned onto walls in the night. Bombs made in kitchens were flung at soldiers in the streets. Folk had started painting Ahmed’s sun on hulls of ships. The Rebellion was spreading, further than it ever had before. The Sultan’s army came after the culprits. But the names of those they planned to arrest were in the Rebellion’s hands before the army’s. By the time men in uniform got to their doors, their homes were empty.

I brought Sam a report of thirty Izmani citizens languishing in prison, due to be hanged as examples of what happened when you supported the Rebellion. Last time, it’d been a whole tavern arrested when a bit too much alcohol had them standing on the table chanting Ahmed’s name. The Rebellion had managed to get half of them free of the noose before the trap opened below their feet. The rest had choked to death slowly. The Sultan’s hangman had made the rope too short, deliberately. So they’d suffer.

So Ahmed would watch them suffer.

We’d get there first this time. Or we hoped we would.

We had the people. We had the city. But there was no taking the palace. Not without the army Rahim had promised us. And there were a whole lot of fires to keep burning until then. Fires we’d started, for the most part. Sam told me it felt like we were trying to plug holes in a wicker basket. I couldn’t remember when Sam had started saying we instead of you.

‘There’s a plan to rebuild the factory in the Last County,’ I told Sam when we were a few short weeks away from Auranzeb. ‘The one outside Dustwalk. Once they’ve reclaimed our half of the desert.’ As a gesture of goodwill to the Gallan, of future willingness to continue to provide them with weapons in their war against any other country that didn’t share their beliefs. ‘They’re sending a small party down there, soldiers and engineers, to assess the feasibility of it.’

‘What am I missing?’ Sam might be a posturer most days, but he wasn’t stupid, either, even though he behaved like he was half the time.

‘Dustwalk is where I’m from,’ I said, leaning back against the tree. I was tired. Cool air ran its fingers through my hair, lulling me. ‘I was born there. It might not be that nice a place, but it still deserves better than this.’

Sam nodded. ‘So we make sure their party never makes it back.’

He listened to me rattle off the rest of what I’d gathered since I last saw him. But when I was done, he didn’t leave straightaway. ‘You know,’ he said, still leaning on the wall across from me, ‘I heard a lot of stories about the Blue-Eyed Bandit. Granted, some of them were about me. I particularly like the one about how the Blue-Eyed Bandit stole the necklace right off a woman’s neck, got caught, and still managed to seduce her.’

‘Is there a point to this, or are you just trying to remind me that the longer I’m in here, the more sullied my reputation becomes?’

‘My point,’ Sam said, ‘is that none of those stories said the Blue-Eyed Bandit was a coward.’ That got my attention.

‘Oh, so is your point actually that you’d like to get punched in the face?’

‘If I’d known the famous Bandit, who fought at Fahali and struck fear into the Sultan’s soldiers, was this lily-livered, I probably wouldn’t have taken her reputation. It’s bad for business to be known as a cowardly bandit. And you should take my stealing your reputation as high praise. I could easily have chosen to be the Blond Bandit or the Dashingly Handsome Bandit or—’

‘I swear to God, Sam.’

‘No, really, go ahead and tell me I couldn’t rightfully call myself the Dashingly Handsome Bandit – eh, truth-teller? Tell me I’m not handsome, I challenge you. See? You can’t.’

‘You really seem to think I’m not going to break your nose.’