Traitor to the Throne (Rebel of the Sands, #2)(42)

They pulled me out of the steaming water. I let one of the girls wrap me in a big, dry linen sheet and lay me down gently next to the bath. Something warm dripped across my skin, like oil. It smelled of flowers I didn’t know. The other girl ran a comb through my hair, scraping gently at my scalp.

I’d spent my whole life fighting. Fighting to stay alive in Dustwalk as the girl with the gun. Fighting to escape death in that dead-end desert town. Fighting to get across the desert. The Blue-Eyed Bandit. Fighting for Ahmed. For the Rebellion. A new dawn. A new desert.

But as the comb scraped through my hair over and over again, I wasn’t sure I had any fight left in me.

I let sleep claim me.

Tomorrow. I’d fight tomorrow.

*

It didn’t take a whole lot of time for me to figure out that the harem was full of invisible chains and walls meant to look like they weren’t there.

It felt like a maze, designed to turn me around, over and over, until I wasn’t sure how I’d come in or if there was a way out any more. There were dozens of gardens, which fit together like honeycombs. Some of them were plain stretches of grass, with a single fountain gushing endless water and pillows scattered throughout. Others were so thick with flowers and vines and sculptures I couldn’t even see the walls any more. But the walls were always there.

I couldn’t count how many folk lived in the harem. Dozens of wives belonging to the Sultan and Sultim alike. And children, too – the princes and princesses born to the Sultan’s wives. All of them younger than sixteen. The age they were finally released from the harem. To pass from their father’s hands to their husbands’. Or to die for him on the battlefield like Naguib had. All of them Ahmed and Jin’s brothers and sisters.

Finally I found one of the borders: a gate crafted out of iron and gold that stood ajar. My legs stumbled to a stop as I tried to pass through. I fought against the feeling holding me back, but it was no good – my body seized like I’d been grabbed by some invisible hand. My blood turned to stone and a fist twisted in my gut, pulling me back.

I’d been ordered not to leave.

I couldn’t go any further.

I needed to get word back to the Rebellion. Even if I didn’t know exactly where the Rebellion was. Shazad’s family was in Izman, though. And Izman was on the other side of these walls. A few feet away. It might as well have been a whole desert between us.

There had to be a crack, some way out of the harem. Even if I couldn’t get out, there had to be some way to get out a warning, at least, that the Sultan had a Djinni.

That he had my father.

I pushed that thought away. He wasn’t my father any more than my mother’s husband had been.

If he were my father he would’ve cared if I’d died or not.

My mother had raised me on a thousand stories of girls who were saved by the Djinn, princesses rescued from towers, peasant girls rescued from poverty.

Turned out, stories were just stories.

I was on my own.

It ought to be a familiar feeling. I used to think I was on my own in Dustwalk, too. But that had never been true. I’d had Tamid back then. Now there were dozens of tiny incisions healing all over my body reminding me why I couldn’t trust my oldest friend. My fingers found one of the tiny pieces of metal under the skin of my arm. It hurt when I pressed my thumb against it. I pushed harder.

For the first time in my life I really was alone.

*

It was on my third day in the harem that I stumbled into the menagerie.

The noise was the first thing I noticed – a riot of different screams coming from iron cages crowned in intricate latticework domes. There were hundreds of birds perched among the iron bars, dressed in colours to make a Djinni jealous. The yellow of fresh lemons. Green like the grass in the Dev’s Valley before we fled. Red like the sheema I’d lost. Blue like my eyes. Only not quite. Nothing was really the same blue as my eyes. Except for Noorsham’s. And Bahadur’s. The ones that had watched, burning low with indifference, as the knife inched towards my skin. The ones that hadn’t even blinked or deigned to turn away. Like watching me wouldn’t cause him any pain.

I turned away from the birds.

Huge peacocks fanned their tails as I passed another cage. In another, a pair of tigers lounged in a patch of sunlight, sprawled across each other, yawning wide enough so I could see teeth the length of my fingers. There had been some painted on the walls of the secret door leading into the rebel camp, too. But those were pictures, a thousand years old, the size of my hand. These were far from that.

I stumbled to a stop at the furthest cage.

The thing inside was nearly as big as a Roc. A solid behemoth of grey skin and thick limbs and unnaturally large ears. I caught my body pressing up against the bars. Like I might be able to squeeze through and touch it.

On the opposite side of the cage was a girl, sitting with her knees drawn up to her chin. She couldn’t be more than fifteen. Too young to be one of the Sultim’s wives. She had to be the Sultan’s daughter, then. One of his brood of princesses, who were never spoken about half so much as the princes. Something about her reminded me of Delila, even though, I realised, she’d share blood with Jin, which Delila didn’t. But still, there was a softness in the curve of her cheeks, like she hadn’t fully finished unsticking herself from childhood yet, either. And she was handling something that looked like a toy she was modelling out of red clay around a metal skeleton, making a tiny model of the beast. She nudged one of the legs as I watched; it bent naturally, guided by small metallic joints inside.