Mirage (Mirage #1)(35)

I saw logic, and yet I could not shake the feeling that he was as aware of me as I was of him as I walked all the way out of the grotto and back into the open air.





18

I slept and I dreamed.

My majority night wound down to a close. Touched with the ether of dreams, the festivities went on uninterrupted. The trees were strung with small orbs of light, and the trill of a loutar filled the air, punctuated by the sound of someone beating a bendir. The loud rush of wings against air came and went, though no birds appeared. From my shoulders fell a cloak, black embroidered with feathers in gold thread. Like Massinia’s cloak, my mother’s voice said. I laughed, though at what I had no idea. In the center of the courtyard, my friends danced, beckoning me to join them.

“Look,” Husnain whispered, sitting beside me. “To your right.”

Idris.

He stood beside my eldest brother, dressed like one of us, smiling easily. Aziz was taller than him, I knew this for a fact, but they seemed of a height with one another tonight. My eldest brother clapped a hand on his shoulder, then pointed at me.

Idris’s smile changed when our eyes met. Sweeter, bolder, touched with a different kind of happiness.

And then the dream faded away. I was coaxed into wakefulness by the soft notes of another loutar. The sound that played in my dream had not stopped. I rose from bed as though there were a string tied to my breastbone that drew me gently closer and closer to the sound.

In the back corner of the courtyard was a short wooden gate that led to a small garden. There I found Idris, seated at a table, on a collection of cushions. The garden was less than half the size of our courtyard, and boxed in by wooden trellises on all sides. A tree grew just beside him, and he cradled his loutar in its shade.

He lay his hands over its strings, quieting them, when the wooden gate shut behind me. “Did I wake you?”

I shook my head. He looked so much like the version I’d dreamed. His hair fell down just below his chin, and the bristle of his beard had grown just a little more. He wore a djellaba, though the sleeves had been shortened and there was no hood.

“I … I’ll let you play,” I said at last, and turned to leave.

“You’re welcome to stay,” he said.

I paused. I should leave, I thought. The longer I spent with Idris, the easier it was to forget who we were. He a prince and I a slave in all but name. There was no happy ending to this story, no way for the two of us to make one.

And yet …

“Have you eaten?” I asked, instead.

I brought back a tray with tea and bread, and a spread of butter. He fiddled with the strings on his loutar as I poured tea and set a glass close to his elbow. He’d arranged a cushion against the tree, and gestured that I could take my seat there. Comfortably seated, with a glass of tea warming my hands, I closed my eyes and listened as he began to play again.

It was easy to welcome the answering shivers in my heart as the music built and changed, rising and falling softly. I wondered who had taught him to play. He couldn’t speak or read Kushaila, so who would have taken the time to teach him how to play a Kushaila instrument so well? Procuring it would not have been difficult for a prince, but learning it was another matter. The Vath had not outlawed all our cultural and religious practices, but their stance on it was clear. And among the makhzen, especially, such a hobby would have been quickly snuffed out.

The tune changed again and I opened my eyes. “I know this song,” I said, smiling.

He smiled back. “Will you sing it?”

I laughed. “I have a villager’s voice.”

“Beautiful, then, I’m sure.”

I resisted the urge to call him a flatterer, though his eyes told me he noticed the wry twisting of my mouth, and began to sing. It was an old song that had come to the Kushaila by way of the south. A girl wandered a garden and found a man swaying and singing, and though she asked for mercy, nothing could free her from love, nor was she sure she wanted to be free. The sound of the loutar faded away before the song was done, and I let the sentence hang, unfinished.

“You—” he began, then stopped.

“I?”

It unsettled me when he looked at me as he was doing now. Not critical, but sharp. He missed nothing when he looked at me like that, and he always came away having learned something I had not offered. I thought of how he’d guessed who I was, how he’d seen through weeks of hard-earned training. Could another have done the same? I’d been angry with myself for my failure, but the truth was he hadn’t only seen that I wasn’t Maram—he’d picked up on the clues of who I was.

We sat close enough that he could reach over and sweep my hair over my shoulder and pull at the chain hanging around my neck. I caught his wrist to stop him, but he’d already found the pendant hanging on the end. The pendant was half the length of my thumb, and just a little wider. On one side it was etched to look like an ornate hand, and on the other someone had carved a verse from the Book.

Believe, for We know things you do not. And We see what you do not.

Maram would never have worn such a thing.

“Something from your old life?” he murmured.

The sharpness softened when I met his gaze. “I have nothing from my old life.”

I’d found it two nights ago, stashed among Maram’s jewelry. Likely it had been a gift from the Dowager that she’d never worn, or a piece of jewelry commissioned before her mother’s death. Such charms were common among Dihyaans, and the Kushaila in particular. They were worn to ward off evil and invite good, to turn away envious gazes, to safeguard the fortunes in your life.