Rebel of the Sands (Rebel of the Sands #1)(54)
“My father made it the way it is, a warring, violent place, half in the hands of the Gallan king. And my brother Kadir is like him. With him as Sultim, we will keep living under foreign empires who come in and bleed the sands dry. Or we could change everything.”
Prince Ahmed’s face came alive when he was talking about the desert. And the more he talked, the harder it was not to believe him. I finally understood the crazy kid in the pistol pit the night I met Jin. That these ideas could make men shout for rebellion even when it meant they would hang for it.
nineteen
Dark fell in the oasis earlier than I thought it would. I hadn’t noticed when we’d been crossing the desert, but now it struck me that Shihabian really must be close. At twilight, the colorful world turned to a softer version of itself. Campfires burned among the trees. Each was surrounded by a little pocket of people, sharing food, laughing. I thought of Dustwalk at dinnertime. Everybody shut up inside their houses, jealously guarding every scrap they had. Here the food was laid out on a big carpet in the middle of the camp, with a stack of mismatched plates.
Shazad and I sat down by one of the small fires. Shazad helped herself to two plates, piling flatbread and fruit on one and handing it to me.
“Where do all these people come from?” I asked Shazad in between bites. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I started eating.
Shazad looked around at the hundred or so rebels, as if the question surprised her. “A little bit of everywhere. There were only a dozen of us when we fled Izman after the Sultim trials. But in the last year, the cause has gotten bigger. More people have joined. A few were turned out of their houses or arrested for supporting Ahmed a little too loudly. Some we broke out of prison. Farrouk and Fazia are orphans from Izman.” She gestured to the pair I’d seen tinkering with the bomb that morning, now building some kind of structure out of bread. “We hired them to make an explosive device on a mission a few months back and the Sultan’s army identified them, so they’re refugees now. Fairly useful to have around, although I worry one day they’ll blow this whole place sky-high.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“I’m a girl who could’ve done just about anything if I’d been born a boy.” Shazad took a bite of her food. “But I was born a girl, so I’m doing this. My mother thinks it’s an elaborate stall tactic to avoid getting married.” I’d seen Shazad kill a Skinwalker. Watched her that afternoon run a dozen of the rebels through sword drills with the kind of command that could march a whole army across the desert. If she couldn’t carve out a place for herself in Izman, what hope was I going to have?
“She’s too modest.” Bahi dropped down next to Shazad by the fire, folding his legs over the pillow. He was balancing a plate on his knees. “Shazad was born to greatness. Her father is General Hamad.”
I gave them both a blank look.
“He’s been the Sultan’s chief general for two decades,” Bahi bragged for her. “He had a strong daughter and a weak son. Being a man of unconventional strategies, he trained his daughter to follow in his footsteps.”
“My brother’s not weak, he’s sick,” Shazad said.
“Most people,” Bahi said with a bold smile that was all teeth and no humor, “would have killed their son trying to turn him strong. Like my father tried to do with me.”
Shazad saved me from having to answer. “Bahi’s father is a captain in the army. He reports to my father, which is why Bahi and I have known each other since we were six years old.”
“And we’ve been friends that long because I’m so charming,” Bahi said.
“You’re marginally less of an ass than the rest of your brothers,” Shazad conceded. “Captain Reza”—there was scorn in Shazad’s tone and Bahi snapped a fake salute—“has six sons, so he thought he could spare a few. Much as he enjoyed gloating to his superior officer that he has six strong sons, where my father had only one.”
“And you,” I said.
“Captain Reza never counted me.”
“His mistake,” Bahi put in.
“Does your father know . . .” I wasn’t sure how to put it. “That you’re turning against him?” I probably shouldn’t have put it like that.
“I’m not against my father.” Shazad smiled fondly. “I’m against the Sultan. My father turned against him a while ago, too. He’s the one who told us about the rumors of the weapon being made down in the Last County. So highly secretive, the Sultan didn’t even tell him—but he has other ways of obtaining information.”
That made me sit up. Rumor in Dustwalk was that Ahmed’s rebellion was just a band of idealistic fools in the desert. But the rebels had had enough of a hold on Dassama that it’d been worth destroying. And the general was high-ranking in court. If he was loyal to Ahmed . . .
“You’re saying you’ve got allies in the Sultan’s court?”
Shazad was easily the most beautiful girl I’d ever met, and when she smiled with all her teeth she looked like the most dangerous one, too. “A few. The stories would have you believe that Ahmed appeared in Izman on the day of the Sultim trials like magic. Same way they’d have you believe that he disappeared from the palace the night of Delila’s birth in a poof of Demdji smoke. But campfire stories are never the whole story.” I remembered what Ahmed had told me, as we kept watch over Jin in the sick tent. That his mother and Jin’s had plotted their escape. But Jin’s mother wasn’t even in the popular story. Neither was Jin, for that matter. “Ahmed came back to Izman half a year before the Sultim trials, on a trading ship. He fell in with an intellectual crowd. A lot of very clever, very idealistic boys, including my brother, who sat around and talked about philosophies and how to make Miraji better. Many of them are children of people in the Sultan’s court.”