Mirage (Mirage #1)(41)

I struggled to control my expression when I saw her face.

This young woman looked exactly like Massinia.

She couldn’t have been much older than me, though she was significantly taller. Sunlight reflected off her dark skin, and caught on the silver coins hanging from her ears. Her mass of tightly curled hair was tied down to a single braid that ran from the crown of her forehead and in a thick rope down her back. She bore two black daan, one on each cheek, though her forehead was clear of the crown of Dihya. There was a scar that ran from the corner of her ear and disappeared beneath her jaw.

I could not dismiss her resemblance to Massinia any more than I could dismiss my own resemblance to Maram. She was younger than most depictions of her, but the fierceness of her features, the hard line of her mouth, her face—the resemblance was not uncanny, it was exact.

Furat lowered her mouth to my ear. “They are not here to hurt you,” she murmured, then walked away.

Gooseflesh pimpled up and down my arms as a revelation shot through me. The whispers about the rebels on Cadiz came hurtling back to me in flashes: Massinia reborn, and rallying the rebels. It couldn’t be true—could it? And yet … I was looking at living proof of it. Here she was, the rebel leader. The blood never dies wasn’t a figure of speech. It was the reality.

I almost spun around as a second wave of shock hit me. Furat. Her determination to return to the Ziyaana was suddenly made clear. Duty, she’d said. A different sort of duty than I’d imagined. She was spying. She was spying for Massinia. My head spun thinking about it.

But why had she brought me here?

The girl made a sharp movement with her hand and her party turned their horses, including the white stallion, and rode away. A smile spread across her face, as though she found something in my appearance amusing.

“Join me,” she said in Kushaila. It was clear she was used to being obeyed.

There was a table further in the garden bearing a metal chest and two small goblets. She took a seat on one side, folding her legs beneath her, and I took the other. The chest held shaved ice; she filled the goblets and set them between us so the ice could melt, then set her hands flat on the table deliberately, as if to do otherwise would invite the loss of control.

“Were you born with your face?” she asked. Her Kushaila sounded different from mine, sharper, slicker.

“Yes.” My voice was thick with shock.

Like everything about her, the gaze she directed at me was sharp and critical. Perhaps it was her way, the Tazalghit way, to search out weaknesses in everyone she met. Or perhaps, like me, she could not believe I was a double.

She huffed a laugh when I lifted my chin. “You must feel quite lucky, then, to have been raised out of poverty.”

I could not contain my derision. “Only a fool would hope to be raised to the Ziyaana. A cage is a cage even if gilded. Even if it softens my hands.”

She smiled and her face transformed—younger, more radiant, the daan in her left cheek creased inside a dimple. “You are not stupid, then,” she said, and pulled one of the goblets to herself. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“And your given name?”

I was wary of her. “Amani.”

“Pretty,” she replied. “My mother named me Arinaas, though few people use that name anymore. I was nine when my mother realized the rebels were tracking our camp through the plains. You can guess what they wanted.”

“Massinia reborn.”

She lifted the goblet in confirmation. “They’d seen the mark on my shoulder, and took it as a sign from Dihya.”

My eyes widened. Surely she didn’t mean—? “The mark?”

She set the goblet down and pulled at the collar of her robe until she’d revealed most of her collarbone and shoulder. Warmth drained out of my face. The scar started just below her throat, a starburst of white, and stretched out across her shoulder in a dozen thin lines. It looked as if a company of flares had erupted from the scar, searing her flesh. And woven through all of it was gold. Not paler flesh or inked lines, but gold, shining and glittering in her skin.

“And did the rebels get what they wanted?”

She lifted an eyebrow, her mouth curling in amusement. “My mother was not a fool. She knew what would happen—I would survive perhaps a year as they paraded me around. Then the Vath would find me and execute me.”

“But now—”

“She told them if she found them following our camp again, she would kill them. And then she went to Andala just after the Purge to see what had driven desperate men to this moon looking for a savior.”

It was not hard to imagine what she found. Even if I did not remember the Purge, I remembered that year. It felt as if the mothers in our village would never stop crying. As if the Garda would never leave. As if there was never enough food or water or money. My mother’s last living brother and his family disappeared that year.

“What happened when she came back?”

“She called the other queens of the Tazalghit,” Arinaas said, meeting my eyes. “And they planned. The rest of my life, the future of our world, the destiny of billions.”

The newly emerged softness on her face turned hard. Her anger was likely a constant thing, always banked just below the surface, fighting for air against all the demands her body represented. I knew, Dihya I knew, what that felt like. Neither of us asked for such faces, for marks, for fate, and they’d been thrust on us anyway.