Traitor to the Throne (Rebel of the Sands, #2)(58)

From my position sitting by the iron gate that led back into the heart of the harem, it looked like a picture printed in a storybook. The Sultan was standing on the shore with a boy I guessed was Bassam. This son was thin and wiry and trying hard to look older than he really was. He held a longbow drawn back across his body, arms shaking just a little bit from the effort, clearly trying to hide it from his father.

I’d watched him miss a dozen shots already, the arrows splashing uselessly into the water. After each shot came an exercise in patience as Bassam tossed a handful of bread into the lake and then withdrew to wait for the birds to come back and settle. Until they felt safe enough again for him to try to kill them. Now his father reached out, resting one reassuring hand on his shoulder. The way the boy swelled happily under his touch, I half wondered if he’d been missing on purpose, to steal a bit more time with his father.

I imagined a younger Jin standing there in Bassam’s place. I’d never seen a person need anyone else less than Jin did. It was hard to picture how he would react to his father’s hand on his shoulder, if he would have held himself straighter, too, eager for his father’s pride.

Bassam loosed the bowstring with one easy gesture. I knew with the practised eye of a girl from Dustwalk that this shot was different from the others.

The arrow flew true, passing straight through the neck of the nearest duck. The bird let out a pained squawk that sent the rest of the flock darting up in the air in a panic. A servant scrambled forward, pulling the bird out of the water by its long neck.

The Sultan laughed, throwing his head back as he clapped his son on the shoulder proudly. There was no mistaking the look of pure joy that passed over the young prince’s face. For just a moment, in the late afternoon sun, they might’ve been any father and son sharing a moment of happiness.

And then the Sultan’s eyes fell on me, hovering on the edge of the garden. He patted his son on the shoulder again, squeezing it tightly with pride before sending the boy on his way, carrying the dead bird slung over his shoulder.

When his son had vanished, he gestured me over.

‘Hardly anybody uses bows any more, you know,’ I said when I was close enough to be heard. ‘Guns are cleaner.’

‘But not so quiet when you are trying to hunt,’ the Sultan said. ‘They scare your prey off. Besides, this is a tradition. My father did it for me, and his father did it for him.’ And the Sultan had killed his father and now a handful of his sons were counting on following that tradition, too. ‘What do you want, little Demdji?’

I ran my tongue along my teeth nervously. Chances were, he’d see right through me. But Shazad had said it herself the day Sayyida was brought back: we needed eyes in the palace. The whole palace. I could be those eyes. ‘I want to be able to leave the harem.’

I couldn’t leave the palace, but information could. Shazad had put Sam on the Rebellion’s payroll. The past three nights, since the day Izz had dropped paper from the sky, I’d had a standing meeting with Sam at dusk by the Weeping Wall. Shazad would figure out what to do about him later, but for now, his only task was to slip into the harem every night to meet with me and make sure I hadn’t sold out the whole Rebellion on a royal order. It was an awfully boring task. Or as Sam put it, it was the easiest money he’d ever made, being paid to come look at a pretty girl every night. If I succeeded here, I could make his job a little more interesting.

The Sultan played with the string of his bow. ‘And you want to leave because …?’

‘Because I can’t stand it there much longer.’ It was a truth. A half-truth. And it wasn’t going to be enough. ‘And I can’t stand your son.’

The Sultan leaned on the bow. ‘Which one?’ he asked wryly. There it was again: that faint prickle down my skin, like we were both in on a secret, like we were both playing some game. No, that was ridiculous. If he knew I was allied with Ahmed, all he had to do was command me to tell him where he was. He could use me to lead him to Shazad and from there the rest of the Rebellion.

‘Kadir.’ I shook off the feeling. ‘He looks at me like I’m a flower in that garden for him to pluck.’

The Sultan twanged the string of the bow again, like he was playing a musical instrument. ‘You know that you are my prisoner, little Demdji. If I wanted to, I could order you to lie in one spot, completely still, until I needed you for something. I could make you grow roots and stay there waiting for an order. Or’ – the Sultan paused, twanging the bowstring pointedly – ‘to be plucked.’ My skin crawled. ‘But … I admire you coming to find me here. Tell me, little Demdji: can you shoot?’

‘Yes,’ I said, because, as much as I didn’t care for him to know just how good I was with a gun, I couldn’t lie. Shazad always said our greatest strength was being underestimated. But the Sultan always saw through me when I tried to dodge around a truth with a half-truth. ‘I can shoot.’

He extended the bow towards me. I didn’t take it immediately. ‘You want something,’ he said. ‘People who want things have to earn them.’

‘I know how to earn things. I didn’t grow up in a palace.’

‘Good,’ the Sultan said, that hint of Jin’s smile lingering. ‘Then you should understand this. Take the bow.’

I did as I was told because I didn’t have a choice, though I didn’t know if he’d meant to give me an order.