This Woven Kingdom(This Woven Kingdom #1)(30)

“You worry yourself overmuch,” the prince said, affecting indifference. “Certainly the situation is far from ideal, but we have the better of her now. We know who she is, how to track her. We may yet get ahead of any sinister plotting.”

“She is not a spy, sire. Nor is she a mercenary.” Hazan did not appear to rejoice in the statement.

“An assassin, then? A turncoat?”

“Your Highness—”

“Enough of your filibustering. If she is neither spy nor assassin why are you so aggrieved? What could possibly—”

A sudden oof from his minister and Kamran took an elbow to the gut, knocking, for a moment, the air from his lungs. He straightened in time to hear the sharp splash of a puddle, the retreating sound of footsteps on slick stone.

“What the devil—?”

“Forgive me, Your Highness,” Hazan said breathlessly. “Some ruffian barreled into me, I didn’t mean t—”

Kamran was already stepping away from the protection of the awning. It was possible they’d been knocked into by a drunkard, but Kamran’s senses felt unusually heightened, and intuition implored him now to explore.

Just an hour ago the prince had been convinced of his own ineptitude, and though he took some comfort in his recent vindication as pertained to the servant girl, he worried now that he’d been so willing to doubt his better judgment.

He had been right to mistrust her all along, had he not?

Why, then, was he disappointed to discover that she was somehow duplicitous, after all?

Kamran’s mind had been thoroughly exhausted from the upheaval of the day’s emotional journey, and he thought he’d rather drive his head into a wall than lose another moment to the dissection of his feelings. He decided right then that he’d never again deny his instincts—instincts that were now insisting that something was amiss.

Carefully, he moved deeper into the night, fresh rain pelting his face as he scanned for the culprit.

A blur. There.

A silhouette struck gold in a flicker of gaslight, the figure illuminated in a flash.

A girl.

She was there and gone again, but it was all he needed to be certain. He saw her snoda, the length of linen wrapped around her neck—

Kamran froze.

No, he could not believe it. Had he conjured the girl to life with his own thoughts? He felt a moment of triumph, quickly chased by trepidation.

Something was wrong.

Her movements were frantic, unrehearsed. She ran through the rain as if she were afraid, as if she were being chased. Kamran followed swiftly, homing in on her before panning out again, surveying the area for her aggressor. He saw a fresh blur of movement, a form heavily obscured by the torrential downpour. The figure sharpened into focus by degrees; Kamran could only make out the true shape of him when he reached out, grabbing the girl by the arm.

She screamed.

Kamran did not think before he reacted. It was instinct that propelled him forward, instinct that bade him grab the man and throw him bodily against the pavement. Kamran drew his sword as he approached the fallen figure, but just as he lifted his blade, the cretin disappeared.

Jinn.

The unnatural act was enough to sentence the lout to death—and yet, how could you kill a man you could not catch?

Kamran muttered an oath as he sheathed his sword.

When he spun around, he spotted the girl only paces away, her clothes sagging with rainwater. The skies had not ceased their torment, and Kamran watched as she struggled to run; she appeared to be balancing packages in one arm, stopping at intervals to pull the wet snoda away from her face. Kamran could hardly see three feet in front of him; he could not imagine how she saw anything at all with a sheet of wet fabric obscuring her eyes.

“Miss, I mean you no harm,” he called out to her. “But you must remove your snoda. For your safety.”

She froze at that, at the sound of his voice.

Kamran was heartened by this and dared to approach her, overcome not only by concern for the girl, but by an impassioned curiosity that grew only stronger by the moment. It occurred to him, as he dared to close the gap between their bodies, that the wrong move might spook her—might send her running blindly through the streets—so he moved with painstaking carefulness.

It was no good.

He’d taken but two steps toward her and she went flying into the night; in her haste she slipped, landing hard on cobblestone, scattering her packages in the process.

Kamran ran to her.

Her snoda had slipped an inch, the wet netting sealing around her nose, suffocating her. In a single motion she tore the mask from her face, gasping for air. Kamran hooked his arms under hers and dragged her to her feet.

“My—my packages,” she gasped, raindrops pelting her closed eyes, her nose, her mouth. She licked the rainwater from her lips and caught her breath, keeping her eyes shut, refusing to meet his gaze. Her cheeks were flush with color—with cold—her sooty lashes the same shade as her sable curls, wet tendrils spiraling away from her face, some plastered to her neck.

Kamran could hardly believe his fate.

Her reluctance to open her eyes provided him the rare opportunity to study her at length, without fear of self-consciousness. All this time he’d been wondering about the girl and now here she was, in his arms, her face mere inches from his own and—devils above, he could not look away from her.

Her features were both precise and soft, balanced in every quadrant as if by a master. She was finely designed, loveliness rendered in its truest sense. This discovery was surreal to him to the point of distraction, all the more so because Kamran’s calculations had been wrong. He’d suspected she might be beautiful, yes—but this girl was not merely beautiful.