Traitor to the Throne (Rebel of the Sands, #2)(6)

There was one small window at the top of my cell that gave just enough light that I wasn’t fumbling around in the dark. Through the iron bars I could see into the cell across from mine. A girl no older than ten was curled up in the corner, shivering in a pale green khalat that had gone grubby, watching me with huge eyes.

I leaned my face into the bars of the cell. The cold iron bit deep into the Demdji part of me.

‘Imin?’ I called down the prison. ‘Mahdi?’ I waited with bated breath as only silence answered. Then all the way at the other end of the prison I saw the edge of a face appear, pressed against the bars, fingers curling around the iron desperately.

‘Amani?’ a voice called back. It sounded cracked with thirst, but an annoyingly nasal, imperious note remained. The one I’d gotten to know over the last few months since Mahdi and a few others from the intellectual set in Izman had made the trek out of the city and to our camp. ‘Is that you? What are you doing here?’

‘It’s me.’ My shoulders sagged in relief. They were still alive. I wasn’t too late. ‘I’m here to rescue you.’

‘Shame about you getting captured, too, then, isn’t it?’

I bit my tongue. It figured I could count on Mahdi to still be rude to me even from the inside of a jail cell. I didn’t think a whole lot of Mahdi or any of the rest of the weedy city boys who’d come to the heart of the Rebellion so late. After we’d already spilled so much blood to claim half the desert. But still, these were the men who’d supported Ahmed when he first came to Izman. The ones he’d traded philosophies with, and first started to fan the spark of rebellion with. Besides, if I let everyone I found annoying die, we’d be mighty thin on allies.

‘Well’ – I put on my sweetest voice – ‘how else was I meant to get through the gates after you bungled your mission so badly that they put the entire city on lockdown?’

I was met with a satisfyingly sullen silence from the other end of the prison. It would be hard for even Mahdi to argue that he hadn’t failed from the wrong side of a prison door. Still, I could gloat later. Now the last of the daylight was starting to retreat, I was going to have to move quickly. I stepped away from the iron bars. Rubbing my fingers together, I tried to work some blood back into my hands.

The sand that had stuck between them when I’d pretended to trip at the gates shifted in anticipation. It was in the folds of my clothes, too – in my hair, against the sweat of my skin. That was the beauty of the desert. It got into everything, right down to your soul.

Jin said that to me once.

I brushed aside that memory as I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath and pulled the sand away from my skin – every grain, every particle answering my call and tugging away from me until it hung in careful suspension in the air.

When I opened my eyes I was surrounded by a haze of sand that glowed golden in the last of the late afternoon sun streaming into the cell.

In the cell across from mine, the little girl in the green khalat straightened a little, leaning out of the gloom to get a closer look.

I sucked in a breath and the sand gathered together into a shape like a whip. I moved my tied hands away from my body as far as I could, shifting the sand with the motion. None of the other Demdji seemed to understand why I needed to move when I used my power. Hala said it made me look like some Izmani market charlatan of the lowest order. But she’d been born with her power at her fingertips. Where I came from, a weapon needed a hand to use it.

The sand slashed between my wrists like a blade, severing the rope. My arms snapped free.

Now I could do some real damage.

I grabbed hold of the sand and slashed my arm downwards in one clean arc, like the blow of a sword. The sand went with it, smashing into the lock of the cell with all the power of a whole desert storm gathered into one blow.

The lock shattered with a satisfying crack. And just like that, I was free.

The little girl in green stared as I kicked the door open, careful not to touch the iron as I gathered the sand back into my fist.

‘So.’ I sauntered down the length of the hallway, tugging away at what was left of the severed rope on my wrists. The rope came away from my right hand easily, leaving a red welt behind. I worked at the knot on my left hand as I came to a stop outside the cell that held Mahdi. ‘How’re those diplomatic negotiations going for you?’ The last of the rope on my hands slithered away to the floor.

Mahdi looked sour. ‘Are you here to mock us or to rescue us?’

‘I don’t see any reason I can’t do both.’ I leaned my elbows into the cell door and propped my chin on my fist. ‘Remind me again how you told Shazad you didn’t need us to come with you, because women just couldn’t be taken seriously in political negotiations?’

‘Actually’ – a voice piped up from the back of the cell – ‘I think what he said was that you and Shazad would be “unnecessary distractions”.’

Imin moved to the door so I could see him clearly. I didn’t recognise his face but I’d know those sardonic yellow eyes anywhere. Our Demdji shapeshifter. Last time I’d seen Imin, leaving camp, she’d been wearing a petite female shape in oversized men’s clothes – to lighten the load for the horse. It was a familiar body I’d seen her wear more than once now. Though it was just one in an infinite deck of human shapes Imin could wear: boy, girl, man, or woman. I was used to Imin’s ever-changing face by now. It meant that some days she was a small girl with big eyes being dwarfed by the horse she was riding, or a fighter with the strength to lift someone off the ground with one hand. Other days he was a skinny scholar, looking annoyed but harmless in the back of a cell in Saramotai. But boy or girl, man or woman, those startling gold eyes never changed.