Traitor to the Throne (Rebel of the Sands, #2)(32)

She was in Saramotai for no good reason. No good reason except that the Emir of Saramotai had just started bragging to the world he had a child with eyes like dying embers who wielded the sun in her hands. Ranaa had been worth something. But my aunt had missed her chance to take the little Demdji girl. So she’d taken me instead.

‘It’s not true, you know.’ I remembered what Mahdi had told me, his knife held to Delila’s throat. ‘What they say about carving us up like meat to cure your ills.’

‘The thing is,’ she said, not quite looking at me as she twisted the piece of cloth back around her own hand, ‘what really matters is that they’re saying it at all.’ She was right. Stories and belief meant more than truth. I knew that as the Blue-Eyed Bandit. But I wouldn’t be the Blue-Eyed Bandit any more after she took my eyes.

Then to the man holding me, she said, ‘Put her with the other girls for safekeeping.’

*

We went deeper into the ship than I’d come from. Far deeper. Back down into the deepest dark of its heaving wooden stomach and then down further still. I didn’t know where we were going, but I knew we were getting close. I could hear the crying long before I could see them.

The room where the other girls were being kept made the tiny cell I’d woken up in look like the lap of luxury. They were chained to the wooden walls by both arms, and a shallow swamp of water sloshed around where they were sitting, lapping in the dark at their shivering bodies.

There were about a dozen of them. I caught glimpses of their faces in the swinging lamplight as I was led through. A pale girl with ivory blonde curls, in the rags of a foreign blue dress that looked like it had once been shaped like a bell; a dark-skinned girl whose eyes were closed, her head tipped back – the only sign she was still alive was her lips moving in prayer; a Xichian girl with a curtain of jet hair and pure murder in her eyes as she tracked the man holding me; a single other Mirajin girl in a plain khalat shivering against the cold. They looked as different from each other as day and night and sky and sand, but they were all beautiful. And that was what frightened me the most.

I’d heard the stories from Delila of how Jin’s mother had been brought to the harem. A Xichian merchant’s daughter who lived her life on the deck of a ship – a deck that turned slick with the blood of her family on the day they were boarded by pirates. Lien, sixteen and beautiful, was the only survivor, taken in chains and silk rags to the new Sultan of Miraji, who’d just killed his father and brothers to take the throne for himself. Who was building a harem to assure his succession.

She was sold for a hundred louzi into those walls, where she would bear a son to a man she loathed. Where only the death of a friend she loved like a sister would give her the chance to escape back to the sea, clutching a newborn, with two young princes clinging to her hem.

Sometimes I doubted if Jin even knew those stories of his mother. They weren’t the sorts of things women told their sons. They were the sorts of things women told other women. Beware, they told their daughters. People will hurt you because you’re beautiful.

I wasn’t beautiful. I wasn’t here because of that. I was here because I was powerful.

This time the iron manacles bit hard into my skin. Safiyah and the man turned to go, taking the light with them. I couldn’t just let them leave me here in chains. It was too much like surrendering.

‘You know what they say – that betraying your own blood means you’ll be forever cursed in the eyes of God,’ I called after Safiyah. The water was already lapping at my clothes. I was still wearing Shazad’s khalat, I realised. The water was soaking through it to my skin. ‘The Holy Father preached that a whole lot in Dustwalk, too.’

I didn’t expect Safiyah to stop. But she did. She stood in the doorway a long moment, her back to me, as the man vanished ahead of her.

‘That he did.’ She turned back to face me. And for the first time, she scared me. It was the calm in her face. It told me she hadn’t hesitated in doing this to me. Not even for a minute. ‘Your mother and I always used to go to prayers. Every single day. Not just holy days, not just prayer days. Every day. We’d take up prayer mats next to each other and squeeze our eyes shut and pray like we were told to. We prayed for our lives. To get out of Dustwalk.’ I hadn’t noticed it before, this coldness in Safiyah. But it was clear as daybreak now as she crouched across from me. ‘I loved my sister like the sun loves the sky. I would have done anything for her. And then she died, and left you. And you look so like her. It’s like seeing a Skinwalker wearing my sister’s face. Do you have any notion of what that’s like? Looking at the thing that killed someone you loved, a thing that isn’t even wholly human but seems to think she is?’

I watched the lamplight swing threateningly across her face, casting her into startling light and then darkness as it went. ‘Dustwalk killed my mother.’

‘Because she was protecting you. She was protecting you from the man who called himself your father. Would you like to know what her last letter to me said?’

I wanted to say no. But that would be a lie.

‘She told me you weren’t really her husband’s. That he knew. He’d always known. That she feared for you now that you were older. That it was time to run. That she would die to protect you if she had to, but if she did, she would take him with her.’