Traitor to the Throne (Rebel of the Sands, #2)(72)

‘Well, at least I know you won’t be able to outrun me in that,’ Rahim said, taking in my khalat. He offered me his right arm.

‘Isn’t being my escort a bit below the station of a prince?’ I asked, pushing past him and heading towards the now-familiar path to the council chamber. He fell into step behind me.

‘I managed to convince my father that you might need someone with a little more experience to watch you. Possibly someone bright enough to know that the Sultima isn’t due to give birth for weeks. Not a bad trick, though.’

‘Am I supposed to be flattered,’ I asked as we passed under a blue-and-white mosaic archway, ‘that I get a commander watching me?’

Rahim’s lip twitched up. ‘You don’t remember me.’ It wasn’t a question.

We’ve never met before. It was on the tip of my tongue. But it wouldn’t go any further. I looked at him curiously out of the corner of my eye as we walked, my mind racing to place him. I thought he looked familiar when I first met him but I’d chalked that up to his resemblance to Leyla. And to their father. ‘Then again’ – he tapped the place my scar was, by my hip – ‘you did go down awfully fast with that bullet.’

A blast. The smell of gunpowder. A shooting pain in my side. Then darkness. In Iliaz. A soldier behind Jin raising a gun, finger already on the trigger. I knew him all at once.

I stopped short. ‘You shot me in Iliaz.’

‘I did.’ Rahim kept walking, apparently satisfied now that we were such old friends with a history of gunpowder and near death between us. ‘Although, luckily for us, it looks like I didn’t do an especially good job of it. So here’s hoping you can forgive me and we can start over.’

He knew. He’d seen me in Iliaz, which meant he knew who I was. He knew I wasn’t just a Demdji from the Last County.

Rahim realised I wasn’t following him any more. He stopped, too, turning back to face me. ‘I had my suspicions as soon as I saw you at court that day. But I wasn’t sure until my brother’s charming wife decided to … expose you a little.’ He looked embarrassed saying it, at least. But I still felt the heat of the old humiliation prickle across my skin. ‘I knew as soon as I saw the scar on your hip.’

‘So why am I walking to a council meeting with you instead of hanging by my ankles in a cell telling your father all the secrets of the Rebellion?’

‘We hang people by the wrists now instead of the ankles,’ Rahim said. ‘Keeps prisoners more lucid if all the blood doesn’t rush to their head.’ I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

‘You don’t have much of a way with words, anyone ever tell you that?’

‘That’s why I’m a soldier, not a politician. Or I used to be.’ Rahim drummed his fingers across the sword on his belt. ‘My father and I aren’t on the best of terms.’

‘And selling out the Blue-Eyed Bandit to him wouldn’t put you back in his good graces?’ I asked.

‘My father doesn’t have any good graces. He’s just very good at pretending he does when it suits him. Which puts you and me on the interesting same side of hating my father.’

I watched him carefully. This had to be a trick. Some ploy of the Sultan’s. Only I was at his mercy. He didn’t need to send me a fake traitor; he could just order me to tell him everything I knew about the Rebellion. You’re lying to me. I tried it out, but it wouldn’t get past my tongue. He wasn’t lying. But he wasn’t telling the whole truth, either.

‘What is it you want? From us being on the same side, that is.’

‘A new dawn.’ Rahim flicked one of the tracts that had fallen from the sky out at me between his fingers. It was creased from the pocket of his uniform. ‘A new desert.’

‘Are you saying you want to put Ahmed on the throne?’ It seemed Shira was dead wrong about him having designs on being the new Sultan.

‘I’m saying I want my father off the throne and I can help you. On one condition. I want you and your rebellion to get my sister out of the palace.’

‘Leyla?’ Little round-faced Leyla who made toys for the children in the harem and who reminded me of my littlest cousins even though she had a decade on them. ‘Why? She’s as safe here as anywhere else and she told me herself it could be a lot worse.’

‘If I’m right, she’s in danger.’

I thought of Shira, asking me for Leyla’s secrets, watching her out of the corner of her eye, ready to take down any threats to her child before they could do the same to her. But somehow I didn’t think that was what Rahim meant. Men weren’t usually aware of the politics of women.

‘What kind of danger?’

He didn’t answer the question. ‘You’re a Demdji. I’ve seen you do your little trick every day in my father’s war meetings. So, am I telling the truth?’

‘Yes.’ It came out easily.

‘Am I trying to trick you?’

I tried yes again, but it wouldn’t come out. ‘No.’

‘Can you trust me?’

I don’t trust anybody in here. ‘Yes.’ But I wasn’t giving up that easily. ‘But I want to know why. A lot of folk don’t get along with their fathers.’ I’d learned that first-hand the day before in the vaults. ‘Doesn’t mean most want them dead.’