Traitor to the Throne (Rebel of the Sands, #2)(74)

‘What do you think?’ Shazad turned to Sam. He looked taken aback for a moment by the full force of her attention.

‘I think it’s not my place to make decisions about whom you should trust,’ Sam said, recovering. ‘I mean, you obviously have excellent taste.’ He gestured to himself.

‘She meant about being able to get Leyla out of the palace.’

‘Oh, well.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I can walk her out of here. As easily as I walked you in.’ Sam’s smile looked pasted on again. ‘Only, in my experience, someone usually notices when princesses go missing from palaces.’

‘You’ve got a lot of experience kidnapping princesses, do you?’ Shazad said.

‘I’ll have you know that princesses find me irresistible.’ He leaned in conspiratorially. ‘I’m still working on bandits and generals.’

‘He’s right,’ I interrupted before they could descend into arguing again. ‘Wives seem to disappear from the harem all too often, but the daughters seem to be a little bit more closely watched. She can’t just vanish; she’d be missed.’

‘And then you’ll be questioned. Rahim will get found out along with the rest of us and we’ll lose any shot of getting both you and that Djinni out of the Sultan’s hands.’ Shazad was steps ahead as usual. I’d told them about my encounter with my father. Or at least as much of it as mattered. That the only way we were going to get him free was if we broke the circle. We’d need some kind of explosive. And even I knew you couldn’t exactly blow something up in this palace without people noticing.

‘So we’ve got to strike a single blow,’ Shazad was working it through out loud. ‘We get everyone out at once or no one at all.’ She was right. If we got my father out, we lost any chance of helping Leyla and Rahim escape. If we walked the two of them out of the palace, my father was left in the Sultan’s hands. So we’d have to get all three of them out at the same time. One shot was all we were going to get. One shot for three targets.

‘Auranzeb,’ I said, drawing Shazad’s and Sam’s eyes my way. ‘We can use Auranzeb as our cover. This isn’t the sort of thing that you and I and a handful of good luck can pull off on our own. We’ll need backup, and from what I’ve heard, there’s enough strangers coming in at Auranzeb that we ought to be able to get a few more in.’

Shazad considered it for a long moment. Neither Sam nor I spoke as she ran through past celebrations at the palace in her mind. ‘Auranzeb could work. We could get Imin in easily. Hala, too, if she gets back from Saramotai in time. Maybe two or three more, without pushing our luck too much.’ She could see the celebration laid out in front of her like a battlefield, and I could tell she was looking for openings and escape routes. A smile started to dawn slowly across her face. It died suddenly as she looked up. ‘What about you?’

She was right. It wasn’t three people who needed to be freed from the palace. It was four. I couldn’t stay here. No matter what blow we struck at Auranzeb, everything could be undone if I didn’t leave with them.

We could break the circle. But so long as the Sultan had me in his control he could just summon my father back. They could abduct Leyla and Rahim to safety and win a whole army. But the Sultan could make me give away every name in the Rebellion before they could strike.

‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.’ I tried to sound easy about it. ‘For now, I’ll tell Rahim that we’ll take his deal. We’ve got a while before Auranzeb yet.’

Sam started talking again, laying out the plan. But Shazad wasn’t fooled. We were both thinking the same thing.

I couldn’t be left behind at Auranzeb. At least not alive.





Chapter 29

War was building. Everybody could feel it. Even those of us who hadn’t been alive for the last war, when the Sultan took his throne.

And nobody seemed to know exactly what side they were on yet.

Inside the palace, I saw it in the rising tension in the council room. I saw it in the way the Xichian general’s hand slammed down, knocking over a pitcher of wine that drenched the papers sprawled across the table. I saw it in the number of guns and swords that surrounded the Albish queen when she arrived at the palace, taking the place of her elderly ambassador in negotiations.

Having Rahim as my guard made getting around a whole lot easier. After a few days I understood why the Sultan had allowed Rahim to talk his way into the role of my protector. He and Kadir despised each other. And the Sultan had made clear he didn’t approve of Kadir’s eyes on me by putting another one of his sons as my shield.

Rahim fed me more information that made it back to Sam as fast as anything. I was able to warn him when the Sultan’s city guard thought they were closing in on the new location of the rebel camp in the city. They never found anything. And two days later they had brand-new intelligence that would lead them in circles at the opposite end of Izman.

The news that the Sultan was negotiating with foreigners slipped out somehow, too. Nobody had forgotten how much they hated Gallan rule. New tracts circulated in the streets reminding the Mirajin people what they had already suffered at the hands of our occupiers and our Sultan. But when the soldiers tried to trace where they might have come from, they wound up chasing their own tails.