Traitor to the Throne (Rebel of the Sands, #2)(44)

I spied Leyla then, the only person I could see sitting by herself. She was almost done making the toy elephant, by the looks of things, and the modelled clay was taking shape around the articulated metal joints. As I watched her, she wound up a small key in the back of the toy. It marched with jolting, violent steps towards one of the small children sitting with the huddle of women nearest her. The little boy reached for it excitedly, but his mother snatched him away, pulling him onto her lap, knocking the thing over in the process.

The moment of joy that had bloomed on Leyla’s face at operating the tiny thing disappeared, as she ducked her head. A girl like that would be eaten alive in the desert. Then again, a girl from the desert could get eaten alive in the palace.

I picked up the toy from where it was now lying uselessly on the ground, legs still jerking forward. I held it out to her. She looked up at me with eyes that seemed to take up her whole face.

‘You helped me today, in the menagerie.’ She just stared at me. I wanted to say that I could’ve handled myself. And that would’ve been true if I weren’t trapped by a hundred tiny pieces of metal under my skin. ‘Thank you.’

She nodded and took the toy. I sat down next to her without invitation. I didn’t really have anywhere else to go. I was being nice to her because I was going to need allies in the harem. That was what I told myself. Not because she had big lost eyes that made me think of Delila’s.

Ayet and her two parasites were in a tight knot a little way off. Waves of disdain were rolling off them even from this far away. When they caught me looking back Ayet whispered something to Mouhna. They descended into fits of giggles like crowing birds.

‘They’re afraid of you,’ Leyla volunteered. ‘They think you’ll take their place with Kadir.’

I snorted. ‘Believe me, I have no interest in your brother.’

An attendant appeared, handing me a plate heavy with savoury-smelling meats. My stomach growled in grateful answer.

‘He’s not my brother.’ Leyla’s jaw set firmly. ‘I mean, yes, I suppose. We’re both children of my most exalted father the Sultan. But in the harem the only people we call brother or sister are those who share the same mother. I only have one brother, Rahim. He’s gone from the harem now.’ She sounded far away.

‘And your mother?’ I asked.

‘She was a Gamanix engineer’s daughter.’ She turned the small toy over in her hands. Jin had told me about that country. It was where the twinned compasses he and Ahmed each always kept had been made. A country that had learned to meld magic and machines. This explained how she’d learned to make little mechanised toys. ‘She vanished when I was eight years old.’ Leyla said it so calm and straightforward it caught me off guard.

‘What do you mean, vanished?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it happens in the harem,’ Leyla said. ‘Women disappear when they lose their use. That’s why Ayet is so afraid of you. She hasn’t been able to conceive a child for the Sultim. If you replace her, she could vanish just like the others. It happens every day.’

I took a bite of my food absently, listening to Leyla talk. It hit my tongue like an ember, igniting my mouth. Tears sprang to my eyes as I spat the food in the grass, coughing violently.

‘Can’t handle our fine food?’ Mouhna called from across the garden. Next to her Ayet and Uzma were doubled over in fits of giggles as Mouhna popped a piece of bread in her mouth, puckering her lips at me deliberately as she savoured it. ‘A present from the blessed Sultima.’

Leyla picked up something red from my plate. Her nose wrinkled. ‘Suicide pepper,’ she said, tossing it into the nearest fire grate.

‘What in hell is a suicide pepper?’ I was still coughing. Leyla pressed a glass into my hands. I downed it, cooling the burning on my tongue.

‘It’s a foreign spice. My father tries to keep it out of the harem, but it’s—’ She ran her tongue over her lips nervously. ‘Sometimes girls here use it … to escape.’ It took me a heartbeat to realise what she meant by ‘escape’.

Suicide pepper.

So some folk had found a way out. It wasn’t the sort of escape I had planned. But if those peppers were coming in from the outside, there had to be a way to get things out, too. Some way for the whispers to make it through these walls.

‘Who is the blessed Sultima?’ I’d heard her mentioned already. When I first arrived. In the baths.

‘The Sultim’s first wife.’ Leyla looked up, surprised. ‘Well, not the first that he took. He took Ayet as a wife the day after he won the Sultim trials. But the blessed Sultima is the only one of Kadir’s wives who has been able to conceive a child.’

They must hate her. My aunt Farrah had hated Nida, my uncle’s youngest wife. But Farrah’s place as first wife had been secured by three sons. It was Nida who had to kiss her feet to get anything. They might be talking about the Sultim instead of a desert horse trader, but they were still just jealous wives. And I understood how these things worked. The first wife was the most powerful woman in the household – in this case, in the harem.

‘Where would one find the Sultima?’





Chapter 18

The Sultima was a legend in the harem.

Chosen by God to be the mother of the next heir of Miraji. The only woman worthy of conceiving a child by the Sultim. She kept herself locked in her rooms most of the time. Women in the harem whispered that it was because she was praying. But I remembered something Shazad had told me once: if you could stay out of your enemy’s line of sight, they’d always count your forces stronger than they were.