Mirage (Mirage #1)(25)

“Tala,” I said softly.

She looked up from my hair and caught my eye in the mirror with a smile. “Hm?”

“I never thanked you.”

“For what?”

“For … saving my majority night dress,” I said. I couldn’t thank her for the poetry. That seemed a dangerous thing to speak out loud, and I knew in all likeliness she wouldn’t acknowledge it. But it had carried me through all my weeks here ever since I’d found it. And I wanted her to know how grateful I was to have it. “I know you didn’t have to.”

She looked back down at my braids, the smile gone. “Say nothing of it,” she said at last.

I watched her for a moment, then nodded. “Of course.”

We sat in companionable silence for a few minutes. I imagined this was the way Tala preferred it. She had shown kindness to me, to be sure, but she had never tried to be my friend. I imagined she knew firsthand the costs of friendship in the Ziyaana.

“I meant to ask,” she started. “How was the ball? How was the amir?”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. She’d never asked me about how I spent my days, and I wasn’t sure whether this was meant to be an opening.

“Oh, come now,” she said with a sweet smile. “Maram is the envy of every Andalaan girl in the world. Idris ibn Salih is handsome and tragic. How did he seem to you?”

To my horror, I flushed. Handsome had seemed an understatement to me. But he was too charming by half, with his elegant dancing and his light touches and his quick rejoinders, and I knew he had to be clever to have survived in Maram’s presence for so long. Still, even knowing that, I’d been hard pressed to resist his charm.

I smiled without meaning to. “He was a prince,” I said at last. “What else is there to say?”

She made a soft chiding sound. “How vague.” And then, “Oh,” she said, as a droid arrived, summoning me away.

*

I’d never visited Maram’s royal apartments. In truth, I’d rarely left the deserted east wing. It seemed dangerous to venture out, but the droid had offered a veil before we left, and I wore it now, terrified it would slip.

Maram’s apartments were, I suspected, unchanged from their Kushaila stylings since before the occupation. The walls were layered in red and orange and green tiles, the ceilings and moldings along the wall were carved with geometric shapes in the zelij style and the old Kushaila script. There were no carpets, just cool stone floors beneath my feet, and dark wood furniture, upholstered in rich fabrics, stuffed full with feathers. Everything was situated low, in the Kushaila style, and there was a tea table to my left with floor cushions, and a Kushaila tea set.

I had imagined that she, with all her hate for her own blood, would have stripped the room of any Kushaila design. The script, at least, which I knew had to be from the Book, I thought she would have sanded down. And yet …

Maram herself was sprawled out on a divan, and facing the open balcony doors. I could see the wooden trellis, and hear birdsong and a babbling fountain, the rustle of leaves as a false wind passed through the courtyard below. It carried with it the smell of fruit—fig, I thought, and oranges. It smelled like home.

“It’s so beautiful here,” I said without thinking, forgetting for a moment that this was not a casual interaction between friends. But Maram seemed pleased.

“I’ve always wanted to hold our sessions here, but Nadine refused,” she said, more to herself than to me.

I slid the cloak from my shoulders, and the veil I wore with it, and hung it over the back of a chair, before sitting next to her.

“Aren’t you the princess?” I said without thinking. “Why don’t you decide?”

Her mouth quirked briefly into a smile. “If—when—I am queen, I will do as I please,” she said with a shrug. “Nadine is Father’s steward.” Her mouth twisted at the word. “She can do as she likes whenever she likes.”

Again, I could not control my mouth. “That seems—”

“She is High Vathek. Pure,” she interrupted, staring into the distance. “My father … he values that. They all do.”

There was nothing I could say to that. We sat in awkward silence as she seemed to mull over what she’d said, and I was uncomfortably reminded why we looked like one another. Maram was not only Vathek. I could imagine, suddenly, the neglect she’d suffered at the hands of her father, and how it might have been a result of the circumstances of her birth. Few of those outside the Ziyaana believed the old queen had married Mathis willingly. It had been a necessary thing; the only way to stave off the bloodshed, to save the last families remaining, to ensure peace.

Peace among the makhzen, at least.

A bird cried out from the courtyard, and Maram startled, coming out of her reverie.

“That isn’t why I called you here,” she said, standing.

I straightened.

“We have an assignment for you.”

“Some plan to send me to my death, then?” I asked, before I could think better of it.

The words hung between us, said in her voice, in her dry humor, perfectly sharp and royal. If only they hadn’t come out of my mouth.

She laughed, a burst of crystalline sound. I eyed her uneasily, but her shoulders relaxed and she dropped back into the seat beside me.