Mirage (Mirage #1)(27)

“Village girl,” she said, as I turned away.

I paused, the hairs on the back of my neck raised in warning.

“Take care of Idris,” Maram said, and came around to face me.

My eyes widened. I hadn’t realized he was coming. I’d barely managed when we’d only spent a few hours together. Now I would have to manage him—fooling him—for weeks. “He … Gibra is often difficult for him.”

I frowned. “Difficult?”

For a moment, she stared at me, as if trying to discern a hidden truth. Then she shook her head. “He is—we are friends,” she said, as if it pained her to admit it. “But he gets bored easily and there’s nothing but sand and rocks on Gibra.”

My eyes widened further and I considered pushing. Idris seemed to have little difficulty, no matter what it was. I could not imagine that being on Gibra, free of the machinations of the Ziyaana, would prove difficult for him.

“Village girl,” she said, and gripped my arm. “Do you understand?”

I nodded, the warning in the back of my mind rising. “Yes, Your Highness.”

She nodded back. “Good.”

*

We were not departing from the main concourse, as we had when leaving for Atalasia. Our group was much smaller this time around; all of Maram’s ladies in waiting were staying behind, so that it was myself, Idris, Tala, and a handful of handmaidens. This landing zone looked more like a garden than a place to leave the planet. There were trees everywhere, heavy with out-of-season fruit. The cruiser we were taking off-world was smaller than the luxury liner we’d boarded only a month ago. Shaped like an ocean floor–dwelling creature with wide, curved wings, and a bulbous center, it was only two levels high, long enough that the serving girls and boys would remain separate from the handmaidens, and they separate from Idris and I.

Idris, for his part, stood on the other side of the concourse flanked by two droids. He’d not bothered to tie his hair back this morning, and there was something missing—as though he had not put on all his armor as he usually did. He looked tired, I realized. There were no bags under his eyes, and he stood up straight, as though there were a rod of steel in his spine, but he lacked his usual gloss.

I was used to quiet, so I thought little of Idris’s silence when he offered me a hand as we boarded. We were led to a sitting room, lushly carpeted, with a wide window at the far end. There was a low table in the Kushaila style, and several cushions for sitting. Idris and I settled ourselves into our seat, and waited while a droid put down a tea set and poured.

We were very quickly clearing the cloud cover on the surface of Andala. The only time I’d been so high up was my journey to the planet’s surface, and I remembered that only in bits and pieces. The sun was only just rising, and the air above the clouds was velvet blue and pink and violet. I could see Cadiz, pale green, threaded with gold lights of the dozen cities on its surface.

A soft pang twisted itself in my chest. I’d had few opportunities to look up at the sky in the last months and had not seen my home since leaving. Now I looked for it hungrily. I missed the image of the mountains painted against a sunrise, missed the sounds of my village, and the smell of snow just a few days away. I was determined to get back to it somehow, Dihya willing.

Of the two moons, Gibra was the larger, a round rusted red giant. Botanists had settled Cadiz, and I didn’t know who terraformed Gibra, but none of the verdant and lush life clear on Cadiz from millions of miles away showed on Gibra’s surface. There was no evidence of water, though I’d heard a large portion of it existed underground. The lights that twined around Cadiz were largely absent on its sister moon. Fewer cities, fewer citizens, and populated by an altogether harsher people.

I could not imagine what sort of life the Dowager Sultana lived on its surface. I knew that her continued survival depended on her removal from Andalaan politics, both physically and in spirit. But to go from queen of the free people, to their freedom fighter, to a prisoner on a faraway moon—it would have been a difficult, bitter pill to swallow. In her long life she’d battled would-be usurpers, civil war, traitorous family, and our Vathek conquerers. To be exiled after all that …

No one ever saw her in the public eye. The few times I’d glimpsed her face were in old holos from before the occupation. She lived a quiet life, away from her past, away from the present.

A prickling on my scalp prompted me to pull my gaze from the window. Idris was watching me. He was leaning away from the table just a little, one hand resting idle, the other playing with his signet ring. When my eyes landed on it he stopped and folded his fingers over it. I raised my eyes back to his face and found him just as focused as he’d been moments ago.

“Do you know why I told you the story of Massinia?” he said at last. “I wanted to see how much you would remember.”

“Remember?” If he’d been telling the stories to Maram, she’d failed to mention it to me. I was in dangerous territory here.

“From your childhood,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows. “You were testing me?”

He smiled. “Yes.”

“Did I pass?” I forced myself to say.

“You didn’t contribute,” he said.

“It is my understanding that it is rude to interrupt a storyteller,” I said. “No matter how poor the telling.”