This Woven Kingdom(This Woven Kingdom #1)(33)

Her throbbing, bandaged hands. The medicine had been all but washed out of her wounds, and the ache had returned in full force. If she allowed herself to consider for even a moment the devastating loss of her packages, she thought she might faint from heartache.

Six coppers.

The medicine had cost her nearly all the coin she had, which meant she’d not be able to afford replacements without further work. And yet, without her medicine, Alizeh didn’t know whether her hands would recover quickly enough; Miss Huda would no doubt require the five dresses in short order, as the royal festivities would be arranged without delay.

Hers was a simple tragedy: without work Alizeh would not be able to afford medicine; without medicine she might not be able to work. It tore her heart to pieces to think of it. No longer was she able to conquer her despair. She felt the familiar prick of tears, swallowed against the burn in her throat.

The cruelty of her life seemed suddenly unbearable.

She knew her thoughts to be infantile even as they arrived, but she lacked the strength to stop herself from wondering then, as she’d done on so many other nights, why it was that others had parents, a family, a safe home, and she did not. Why had she been born with this curse in her eyes? Why was she tortured and hated merely for the way her body had been forged? Why had her people been so tragically condemned alongside the devil?

For centuries before the bloodshed between Jinn and Clay had begun, Jinn had built their kingdoms in the most uninhabitable lands, in the most brutal climates—if only to be far from the reach of Clay civilization. They’d wanted to exist quietly, peacefully, in a state of near invisibility. But Clay, who had long considered it their divine right—no, duty—to slaughter the beings they saw only as scions of the devil, had mercilessly hunted Jinn for millennia, determined to expunge the earth of their existence.

Her people had paid a high price for this delusion.

In her weaker moments Alizeh longed to lash out, to allow her anger to shatter the cage of her self-control. She was stronger than any housekeeper who struck her; she was capable of greater force, greater strength and speed and resilience than any Clay body that oppressed her.

And yet.

Violence alone, she knew, would accomplish nothing. Anger without direction was only hot air, there and gone. She’d seen this happen over and over to her own people. Jinn had tried to flout the rules, to exercise their natural abilities despite the restrictions of Clay law, and they’d all suffered. Daily, dozens of Jinn bodies had been strung up in the square like bunting, more charred at the stake, still others beheaded, disemboweled.

Their divided efforts were no good.

Only the unification of Jinn might hope to affect real change, but such a feat was hard to hope for in an age where Jinn had fled their ancestral homes, scattering across the globe in search of work and shelter and anonymity. Their numbers had always been small, and their physical advantages had offered them much protection, but they’d lost hundreds of thousands of people over the last centuries. What was left of them could hardly be cobbled together overnight.

The fire snapped in its brick cove, flames flickering urgently. Alizeh wiped her eyes.

It was rare that she allowed herself to think on these cruelties. It did not comfort her to speak aloud her agonies the way it did for some; she did not enjoy reanimating the string of corpses she dragged with her everywhere. No, Alizeh was the kind of person who could not dwell on her own sorrows for fear of drowning in their bottomless depths; it was her physical pain and exhaustion tonight that’d weakened her defenses against these darker meditations—which, once torn free from their graves, were not easily returned to the earth.

Her tears fell now with abandon.

Alizeh knew she could survive long hours of hard labor, knew she could persevere through any physical hardship. It was not the burden of her work or the pain in her hands that broke her—it was the loneliness. It was the friendlessness of her existence; the days on end she spent without the comfort that might be derived from a single sympathetic heart.

It was grief.

The price she still paid with her soul for the loss of her parents’ lives. It was the fear she was forced to live with every day, the torment that was born from an inability to trust even a friendly merchant to spare her the noose.

Alizeh had never felt more alone.

She scrubbed at her eyes again and then, for the umpteenth time that day, searched her pockets for her handkerchief. Its disappearance had not bothered her so much the first few times she searched for it, but the loss was beginning to worry her now that she considered it might not be misplaced—but well and truly lost.

The handkerchief had been her mother’s.

It was the only personal possession Alizeh had salvaged intact from the ashes of her family home. Her memories of the dreadful night she lost her mother were strange and horrible. Strange that she remembered feeling warm—truly warm—for the first time in her life. Horrible that the roaring flames that engulfed her mother had only made Alizeh want to sleep. She still remembered her mother’s screams that night, the wet handkerchief she’d used to cover her daughter’s face.

There’d been so little time to flee.

They’d come in the night, when Alizeh and her sole surviving parent had been abed. The two tried, of course, to escape, but a wooden rafter had fallen from the ceiling, pinning them both to the ground. Had it not been for the blow she’d taken to the head, her mother might’ve been strong enough to lift the beam from their bodies that night.