This Woven Kingdom(This Woven Kingdom #1)(7)

It was a grim thought.

Carefully, Alizeh retrieved the boy’s blade from the snow, examined its crude workmanship. She appraised the boy, too. His face was nearly as young as she’d suspected. Twelve? Thirteen?

She knelt beside him and he stiffened, his sobs briefly ceasing in his chest. “Nek, nek, lotfi, lotfi—” No, no, please, please—

She took his unbroken hand in her own, uncurled the dirty fingers, pressed the hilt back into his palm. She knew the poor boy would need it.

Still.

“There are other ways to stay alive,” she whispered in Feshtoon. “Come to the kitchens at Baz House if you are in need of bread.”

The boy stared at her then, turned the full force of his terrified gaze upon her. She could see him searching for her eyes through her snoda. “Shora?” he said. Why?

Alizeh almost smiled.

“Bek mefem,” she said quietly. Because I understand. “Bek bidem.” Because I’ve been you.

Alizeh did not wait for him to respond before she pushed herself to her feet, shook out her skirts. She felt a bit of moisture at her throat and retrieved a handkerchief from her pocket, which she pressed to the wound. She was still standing, unmoving, when the bell tolled, signaling the hour and startling into flight a constellation of starlings, their iridescent plumage glittering in the light.

Alizeh breathed deep, pulling the cold air into her lungs. She hated the cold, but the chill was bracing, at least, and the perpetual discomfort kept her awake better than any cup of tea had done. Alizeh had slept maybe two hours the night prior, but she could not allow herself to dwell on the deficit. She was expected to start work for Mrs. Amina in precisely one hour, which meant she’d have to accomplish a great deal in the next sixty minutes.

Even so, she hesitated.

The knife at her throat had discomposed her. It was not the aggression she found unnerving—in her time on the streets she’d dispatched far worse than a hungry boy wielding a knife—it was the timing. She’d not forgotten the events of last night, the devil’s voice, the young man’s face.

She’d not forgotten; she’d simply set it aside. Worrying was its own occupation—for Alizeh, a third occupation. It was a job that required of her the free time she seldom possessed, so she often shelved her distress, leaving it to collect dust until she found a moment to spare.

Still, Alizeh was no fool.

Iblees had been haunting her all her life, had driven her near to madness with his indecipherable riddles. She’d never been able to fathom his abiding interest in her, for though she knew the frost in her veins made her unusual even among her own people, it seemed an insufficient reason to recommend the girl for all this torture. Alizeh hated how her life had been plaited with the whispers of such a beast.

The devil was universally reviled by Jinn and Clay, but it had taken humans millennia to discern this truth: that Jinn hated the devil perhaps more than anyone else. Iblees was responsible, after all, for the downfall of their civilization, for the lightless, unforgiving existence to which Alizeh’s ancestors had long been sentenced. Jinn suffered dearly as a result of Iblees’s actions—his arrogance—at the hands of humans who for thousands of years considered it their divine duty to expunge the earth of such beings, beings seen only as descendants of the devil.

The stain of this hatred was not so easily lifted.

One certainty, at least, had been proven to Alizeh over and over: the devil’s presence in her life was an omen, a portending of imminent misery. She’d heard his voice before every death, every sorrow, before every inflamed joint upon which her rheumatic life turned. Only when she was feeling particularly soft of heart did she acknowledge a nagging suspicion: that the devil’s missives were in fact a perverse sort of kindness, as if he thought he might blunt an inevitable pain with a warning.

Instead, the dread often made it worse.

Alizeh spent her days wondering what torture might befall her, what agony lay in wait. There was no telling how long it—

Her hand froze, forgot itself; her bloody handkerchief fluttered to the ground, unnoticed. Alizeh’s heart suddenly pounded with the force of hooves, beating against her chest. She could scarcely draw breath. That face, that inhuman face. Here, he was here—

He was already watching her.

She noticed his cloak at almost the same time she noticed his face. The superfine black wool was heavy, exquisitely crafted; she recognized its subtle grandeur even from here, even in this moment. It was without question the work of Madame Nezrin, the master seamstress of the empire’s most eminent atelier; Alizeh would recognize the woman’s work anywhere. In point of fact, Alizeh would recognize the work of most any atelier in the empire, which meant she often needed only a single look at a stranger to know how many people might pretend to mourn them at a funeral.

This man, she decided, would be mourned by a great many sycophants, his pockets deeper, no doubt, than Dariush himself. The stranger was tall, forbidding. He’d drawn the hood over his head, casting most of his face in shadow, but he was far from the anonymous creature he hoped to be. In the wind, Alizeh glimpsed the lining of his cloak: the purest ink silk, aged in wine, cured with frost. Years, it took, to create such a textile. Thousands of hours of labor. The young man likely had no idea what he wore, just as he seemed to have no idea that she could tell, even from here, that the clasp at his throat was pure gold, that the cost of his simple, unadorned boots would feed hundreds of families in the city. He was a fool to think he might disappear here, that he might have the advantage of her, that he might—