Traitor to the Throne (Rebel of the Sands, #2)(33)

I was back in the desert, that day. The day the gunshots had come. They said my mother had gone crazy. She hadn’t. She had killed her husband knowing full well that she might die. And she’d done it for me.

‘She was going to come and join me, you know. Before you. I hated you from the moment she told me that she would have to delay leaving because she couldn’t cross the desert while she was with child. Or when you were too small. And yet still, I built my life thinking one day I would be able to share it with my little sister. I did terrible things to make a life for both of us. Dustwalk killed my sister. But she died because she was your mother. And now I’m going to take the life I should have always had. And you are going to buy it for me.’

‘If you hate me so much, why not take my eyes out here and now?’ I spat out at her. Let her show if she really hated me as much as she thought she did. ‘Just get it over with.’

‘Believe me, if I could have saved myself from carrying you across the desert I would have.’ My aunt tossed a smile back at me lazily. ‘But you’re worth your weight in gold, you know.’

I’d heard that before. In Saramotai, about Ranaa. And again from Hala, after rescuing Sayyida from Izman.

She wasn’t just going to take my eyes to sell on to some rich Izmani whose heart was going to give out on him. She was taking me to the Sultan.





Chapter 13

I was blind. Everything I saw was inside my mind, and outside that was just a darkness that went on forever and ever, sometimes punctured by noises.

In my better moments I knew it was the drugs. I was trapped in nightmares of fire and sand. Of sand on fire. A desert full of people burning. People I knew but whose names didn’t exist in this dream. And a pair of blue eyes like mine watching it all. Because I still had eyes. I just couldn’t figure out how to open them.

At some point I became aware that something had changed. I was being moved. And I could hear voices. Like I was listening from the bottom of a well.

‘You know the Sultim likes Mirajin girls.’

The Sultim. I knew that name. Far away, I knew what it meant.

‘This one isn’t for the harem.’ Another voice. A woman’s. One I knew. It made me want to reach for my power. I stretched out my mind for it. The darkness started to creep in again. I lost my grip on the sand and the voices. The last thing I heard before it swallowed me again was ‘—dangerous.’

A spark of consciousness woke at the very back of my mind.

Dangerous.

They’d better believe I was.

*

I came to all at once, a dozen bits of awareness competing for my attention. The cold of the table under me, the sharp pain riddling my body. The crystal-white glare of sunlight on my eyelids, a cacophony of birds, and something else, something that tasted unnatural. More drugs, I realised.

But I finally managed to open my eyes. The room was bright and airy and flooded with light reflecting brightly off a marble ceiling above me. The stone was the colour of every sky I’d ever seen all at once. It was the pink and red of the wounded dawn, the dark violet of a calm dusk, and as brilliantly unsettling as the clear blue glare of high noon.

I’d never been anywhere this rich before. Not even the emir’s house in Saramotai.

The palace. I was in the Sultan’s palace.

We’d spent long hours trying to figure out ways to get more spies into the Sultan’s palace. Months easing people from our side in through the kitchens. And I’d just been carried unconscious over the threshold like it was nothing.

And now I needed to get out.

I might’ve laughed at the irony of it if I didn’t think it’d hurt so much.

The world was starting to put itself back together as I took stock of the situation. I was weaker than I ought to be. And I could already feel my eyelids getting heavy again, wanting to return to sleep. I had to sit up. I pressed my elbows into the cold marble slab and tried to push myself up. Pain stabbed across my entire body at the movement. I hissed air through my teeth and the sheet that’d been covering me slithered away.

I grabbed at it, and pinpricks of pain screamed back at me across my arms. Then I caught sight of myself for the first time. Under the soft white sheet I was wrapped in bandages. They covered almost every part of my body. Wrists to shoulders. Around my chest and all the way down my back. Tentatively I reached down and grazed my fingers over my legs. My hand met cloth instead of skin. I looked like a doll sewn out of linen. Only dolls didn’t usually spot fresh blood like I was.

And here I’d been figuring nothing would be worse than waking up shackled on a ship.

I didn’t exactly like being proven wrong.

And as the pain of whatever was under the bandages subsided, I realised I was alone. That was a nice surprise. I spied a familiar blue khalat flung over a nearby chair. The one Shazad had given me before Imin’s wedding. I didn’t even know how many days it’d been since then.

Moving awkwardly with my sore muscles and bandaged limbs, I retrieved the stained fabric and pulled it on, fumbling with the tiny buttons that ran up the front. At least my hands seemed undamaged. Now I just wished I had a fistful of sand or a pistol to fill them. Hell, at this point I’d even take a knife. But I couldn’t see any weapons among the clutter of the room.

Gauzy pink curtains fluttered from a huge archway. I moved gingerly toward them. Wind that tasted of familiar desert heat rippled them as I passed out onto the balcony.