The Bird King(72)

“I haven’t decided yet,” she said, her mouth dry.

The woman laughed and pulled away. Fatima felt her face go hot. She retreated again into Gwennec’s cloak and palmed the grip of her knife.

“What do you want?” she demanded. Her voice sounded harsh and silly in her own ears, like that of a child pretending to be big. The woman must have thought so too, for she shook her head, making a dozen tiny bells dance and giggle in her hair.

“Why have you come?” asked Fatima in a humbler tone. “A week ago, I’d never met a jinn in my life, and now I can’t seem to avoid you.”

“You’ve met plenty of jinn,” the woman replied, stretching her velvet limbs. “You’ve passed us in the twilight and in the empty places. If you didn’t see us, it’s because you lived between safe, well-lighted walls. Now that you’re out in the dark, your fear makes you see more clearly.” She smiled. The lamplight glinted on a double row of pointed teeth as bright and closely packed as shards of glass. Fatima fought the urge to run.

“But as for your questions,” the woman continued, “my brother sent me. He says he told you to expect me, but that you might not remember.”

Fatima searched her mind and could indeed remember nothing.

“Your brother,” she repeated.

“You were dreaming,” said the woman in a patient voice. Fatima sat up straighter.

“Vikram,” she said. “I dreamed of Vikram on the ship.”

“You didn’t dream of him. You dreamed, and he visited your dreaming.”

“Then he really is alive? Why didn’t he come himself?”

“We don’t heal as neatly as you do. He can’t come to you in any form you could understand. If you saw him now, it would drive you mad. We’re not meant to have these little conversations, your people and mine, sitting in the same room, in the same moment, and every time we do, it requires an effort of the will.” The woman rose and drew Fatima to her feet also. “My name is Azalel,” she whispered, her voice merry, leaning toward Fatima as if relaying a secret. “I’ve been all about the camp, looking and listening. Your ship is still in the harbor. Walk with me now and you might reach it. These men are used to looking at girls without seeing them. It would take very little to convince them you aren’t important. It would take very little more to convince them you aren’t even here.”

Fatima looked out at the quiet camp, the ghostlike peaks of canvas where men were sleeping.

“I’d never make it,” she said. “There are too many of them. And I wouldn’t try, not without Hassan.”

Azalel tilted her head, and Fatima once again saw the cat, its ears translucent with the light behind them.

“Why not? Isn’t saving yourself better than saving no one at all? Your death won’t prove a point—and even if it did, you won’t be around to enjoy the satisfaction.”

Fatima could smell newly fallen dew on the trampled grass, the bloom of sweet water over the tang of the sea.

“I’m tired of being told no,” she muttered. “Especially tired of being told no by make-believe beasts who are supposed to say yes to things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. I won’t leave without Hassan. I’m not trading one prison for another.”

Azalel flopped on the furs and stuck out her lower lip.

“This isn’t a proper adventure,” she said. “My brother never told me you’d make speeches about prisons. I wouldn’t have come if he had.”

Fatima lay down also and let her arms fall outward. She remembered what Vikram had said about jinn not loving very much, or very often, and wondered what they felt instead.

“Vikram told me he had a sister,” was all she said. “But he never mentioned your name.”

Azalel turned on her back with a smile.

“Vikram only talks about nonsense. We’ve known each other so long that neither of us can remember what we are, so brother and sister is what we call each other. We lie together sometimes, so perhaps we’re really something else. Who can tell? When you’ve been alive a very, very long time, you learn to forget certain things. There’s a great deal in this world that one is better off not knowing.”

Fatima turned on her side. Azalel’s face was close to hers, and no longer so terrifying, or at the very least, less terrifying than the florid leer of the general that interposed itself over her vision at odd intervals, rendered unspeakable by its very ordinariness. A glass-toothed jinn was simply the most frightening thing she could think of: the general and, for that matter, Luz were something far worse.

“Do you really—you and Vikram—do you really lie together?” she found herself asking.

“Once in a while.”

“How?”

“Would you like me to show you?”

“No! No. I only meant—” Fatima paused, frustrated at her own lack of subtlety, at the dissembling that seemed to come instinctively to everyone but herself. “Half the time you look one way, and half the time you look another way, and it made me wonder how you’re born and how you die and how you do all the other things people do in between.”

Azalel studied her with puzzled admiration.

“I see it now,” she announced.

“See what?”