Traitor to the Throne (Rebel of the Sands, #2)(17)

‘Oh, forgive me, I didn’t ask after the particulars of her torture while I was rescuing her all by myself, while also trying not to hand my Demdji self straight over to the Sultan,’ Hala sniped. ‘Maybe you’d like me to go back and trade myself in for some useless information?’ Hala was normally short-tempered, just not with Shazad. Folk didn’t exactly do well when they got smart with Shazad. Hala must be worse off than I’d realised.

‘If the Sultan knew about you, we’d already have heard,’ Ahmed said.

‘We need a new spy in the palace.’ Shazad drummed her fingers across the hilt of the sword at her side. ‘Maybe it’s time for me to return from my holy pilgrimage.’ As far as anyone in Izman knew, Shazad Al-Hamad, General Hamad’s devastatingly beautiful daughter, had come down with a bad bout of holiness. She’d retreated to the sacred site of Azhar, where the First Mortal was said to have been made, to pray in silence and meditate. ‘It’s nearly Auranzeb. It would be a good reason to go back.’

‘You get invited to Auranzeb?’ My ears perked up. Auranzeb was held every year on the anniversary of the Sultan’s coup for the Mirajin throne. A commemoration of the bloody night when he struck a bargain with the Gallan army and slaughtered his own father and half his brothers.

Even down in Dustwalk, we’d heard stories about the celebrations. Of fountains full of water flecked with gold, dancers who leapt through fire as entertainment, and food made of sugar that was sculpted so fine the folk who made it went blind.

‘General’s daughter privileges.’ Shazad sounded bored already.

‘No.’ Ahmed cut across us quickly. ‘I can’t spare you. I might not be as good a strategist as you, but even I know you don’t send your best general into the fray as a spy if you can help it.’

‘And I’m so very dispensable?’ Hala asked from where she was still slumped on the ground, a tinge of sarcasm in her voice. Ahmed ignored her. It was impossible to respond to every sarcastic thing Hala said and still have time to do anything else with your day. I reached out a hand, offering to help her up. She ignored me, stretching to steal a half-peeled orange from the table instead.

‘We have to do something.’ Shazad smoothed her hands compulsively over the map that was rolled out on the table. It used to be a single clean, crisp sheet of paper showing Miraji. Now it was a dozen different pieces showing far corners of the country. Cities with the names of rebels stationed there scrawled and crossed out; other pieces of paper overlapping one another as the desert shifted in our hands. There was a fresh note next to Saramotai. ‘We can’t just hide out in this desert forever, Ahmed.’ I recognised the beginning of the same argument that Shazad and Ahmed had been having for months now. Shazad kept saying we needed to take the Rebellion to the capital if we wanted a shot at winning. Ahmed would say it was too risky, and Shazad would say nobody ever won a war on the defensive.

Ahmed rubbed two fingers across a spot at his hairline as he started his reply. There was a small scar there, almost invisible now. I’d noticed he rubbed it like it still hurt, though, every time he sent one of us off to do something that might be our death. Like that scar was where he kept his conscience. I didn’t know how he’d gotten it. It was from the life Jin and Ahmed had before they came to Miraji.

Jin had told me the stories behind some of his scars once. On one of those dark nights in the desert between camp and a mission. Right after he’d earned a wound that would make a new scar right below the tattoo of the sun on his chest. We were a long way from any Holy Father to patch us up. Which left me. In the dark of his tent my hand had travelled across his bare skin, finding new bumps and marks while he told me where they’d come from. A drunk sailor’s knife in a bar brawl in an Albish port. A broken bone on deck in a storm. Until my fingers found the one on his left shoulder, near the tattoo of the compass that was on the other side of his heart from the sun.

‘That one,’ he’d said, so close to me that his breath stirred the hair that had escaped from the hasty knot on my head, ‘was from this bullet I caught in the shoulder when a pain-in-the-ass girl who was pretending to be a boy ditched me in the middle of a riot.’

‘Well, it’s a good thing that pain-in-the-ass girl stitched you up, too,’ I’d joked, tracing his tattoo with my thumb.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jin’s mouth pull up in the smallest edge of a smile. ‘God, I knew I was in trouble even then. I was running for my life, bleeding on your floor, and all I could think about was kissing you and damn if we got caught.’

I’d told him that would’ve been idiotic. And then he’d kissed me until we were both stupid from it.

‘What about Jin?’ It slipped out without my meaning it to, interrupting the argument that had been going through its usual steps while my head was in a tent in the middle of the sands.

Ahmed shook his head, knuckles still resting against his forehead. ‘No word.’

‘And you don’t think it’s worth sending someone after him like we did for Sayyida?’ It was out before I could check the anger in my words.

‘So, you are angry about Jin.’ Ahmed sounded tired.

‘We’re in the middle of a war.’ It would be petty of me to be mad about Ahmed sending Jin away while my life hung in the balance. I supposed I was petty, then.