Traitor to the Throne (Rebel of the Sands, #2)(50)

I wished I could punch him.

‘How did you get in here?’ I asked instead.

‘I’m Albish.’ He said it like it explained everything. When he was met with my blank expression, he continued. ‘Our country is crawling with magic. My mother is a quarter Faye and my father half.’ Faye. That was the northern word for their Djinn. Only they were creatures of water and soft earth. ‘If it’s stone, I can walk through it. See?’ He’d allowed himself to sink back while he was talking to me and was now elbow deep in the stone wall of the palace.

It was as impressive as anything I could do; I’d give him that. ‘What’s an Albish thief doing in Izman?’

‘My talents were wasted in Albis.’ He righted himself and the stone shifted just a little bit back into place. ‘Thought I’d bring them to your desert, where people wouldn’t expect a man of my talents to come after their jewels. The habit of locking valuables in an iron box doesn’t seem to have made it here yet.’ He wasn’t lying. I could tell that much. But he was hiding something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. There were easier places to go than Izman if it was just money he was after. Countries that weren’t in the middle of a war, for one. But he was what I’d been waiting for, someone who could get in and out of the palace at will. And I’d been raised in Dustwalk, where we didn’t look gift horses in the mouth.

I grabbed my cousin’s arm and pulled her away from the wall, out of earshot of Sam, the Blue-Eyed Bandit impostor. She shook me off with a roll of her eyes that needled at me, but this wasn’t the time to get annoyed at her. ‘Can I trust him? Truthfully, Shira – can I trust him with something important? A whole lot of lives?’

‘I’ve had him send letters for me to Dustwalk,’ she said after a moment. ‘To my family.’ I wondered if I was imagining the hardness in the way she said my. Even now she couldn’t help but remind me that, though we shared blood and had lived under the same roof, I’d never truly be part of her family. ‘Well, letters and some money.’ I’d barely given any thought to Dustwalk in months, except to thank God that I was out of there. But I cast my mind back now. Dustwalk without a factory, with nothing, destroyed. It would be a miracle if the whole town hadn’t decamped or starved to death by now.

Shira trusted this man with her family. I could trust him with mine. I turned back to Sam, who was incompetently trying to tie his sheema back up. ‘Could you carry a message out for me?’

‘Of course.’ I winced as he tucked the edge of his sheema in all wrong. It was painful to watch. A toddler could do better than that. ‘How much?’

‘How much what?’

‘How much will you pay me to carry this message?’ He repeated it carefully, like it might be his Mirajin that was at fault.

I glanced at Shira, who splayed empty hands at me pointedly. ‘The Sultim thinks I’m too modest to wear any of the jewellery he gives me.’ Now that I thought about it, I realised she was surprisingly unadorned for the harem. Ayet wore gold bangles from wrist to elbow some days. She clacked with metal with every gesture. ‘Truth is, I just put them to very good use. Everything that happens within the walls of the harem is a trade. The sooner you figure that out, the more likely you are to survive.’

‘I don’t have any jewels,’ I said to Sam. ‘You’ve already taken my reputation. Isn’t that enough?’

‘Well, you weren’t making very good use of it. I think I’ve done you a favour. Besides, stories belong to the people,’ he said. ‘And considering you are very much trapped, it’s going to take more than that.’

I ran my tongue across my teeth, thinking. I could probably get something to trade with if I had a few days. Some of the girls in the harem weren’t all that careful. It wouldn’t be that hard to take a bangle off them when they slept. But I wasn’t sure I had that much time to waste. And there might be another way. ‘The message I need you to carry, it’s for Shazad Al-Hamad, General Hamad’s daughter, he’s—’

‘I know who General Hamad is,’ Sam said, and for a moment the cocky, smiling man was gone.

‘Then you ought to know he’s got money. A lot of it. And so does his daughter.’ I paused, then added, ‘His breathtakingly gorgeous daughter.’ Shazad would have my head if she could hear me describe her like this to some foreign thief. I wasn’t even sure she was in Izman, but she was still my best shot.

‘I like her already,’ Sam said. But there was a note of sarcasm under there. He rubbed a spot on the base of one of the fingers of his left hand. It was a distracted gesture, far away. I got the feeling he didn’t even wholly know what he was doing. ‘Why should she believe me? The general’s rich, spoiled daughter.’ Shazad would definitely have Sam’s head for calling her spoiled. Here was hoping he had the good sense not to do it to her face.

‘Just tell her the Blue-Eyed Bandit is in the palace.’ I didn’t dare give him anything else to pass on to her. Not about the Sultan having a Djinni or anything else. Not yet, anyway. I’d risked enough by giving him my identity. ‘The real one. And that she needs someone to watch her back.’





Chapter 20

The Nameless Boy

In a kingdom across the sea, a farmer and his wife lived in a hovel with their six children. They were so poor, they had nothing to give their children but love. And quickly they learned that love was not enough to keep their children fed or warm. Three of their children died in their first winter, too weak to survive the cold. So when their seventh child was born, a son, on the darkest, coldest day of the bleak winter, they did not give him a name, so prepared were they for him to die.