Mirage (Mirage #1)(53)

I leaned back in surprise. “I’m surprised she didn’t claw your eyes out. Or that you risked her clawing your eyes out at all.”

“It felt worth it,” he said, looking at me. “As if now … I have more at stake. More reason to … care, I suppose. It’s easy to do or say nothing,” he continued quietly. “I don’t want to take the easy path anymore.”

I felt a flush work its way up my throat and looked away. We were both silent and the room quiet, but for the crackle of the fire. He broke the silence first.

“You want first move?” he asked.

We didn’t speak for a while after that. My skill had not progressed as much as I would have liked, and more than once I leaned forward, trying to plan an escape. Idris was methodical, working his way slowly over the board and into my territory. If he was ever given command of real armies, I imagined he could do a great deal of damage. His patience astonished me.

“You’re cheating,” he chided.

“I’m not!”

“Your hair is obscuring the board,” he said, and flicked a finger at a lock.

For a moment I had no idea what he meant. And then I laughed and leaned back.

“Sorry,” I said, and began to gather the hair spilling over my shoulders and down my back into one hand. He watched, eyes sharp, as though he expected to find a shatranj piece hidden in my curls. “It’s never been so long before. I forget.”

His mouth curled with skepticism.

“Frown all you like,” I said. “Farmer’s daughters do not have the time that noble women do to tend to an excess of hair. My mother cut it in the winter. Why are you staring?”

The braid was only half finished but I knew the sudden tremor in my fingers would keep me from completing it. He watched me as if all his patience had been honed and transformed into a gaze that could cut through metal. It was the same look he’d given me at Ouzdad. We had not seen each other since that afternoon, and a part of me thrilled to think what might happen. The rest of me, however—

“I don’t understand how anyone can mistake you for her,” he said at last.

My eyes widened. “Is this about Galene? Did I not do well?”

He breathed out a half laugh. “No, in that you were Maram to perfection.”

“Then what do you mean?”

He rested his chin on a fist. The firelight cast his face in shadow so that I could see the ghost of his lashes against his cheeks, but not his eyes. He mesmerized me as no one ever had. It wasn’t only that I wanted to look, I wanted to touch. My fingers itched with the desire to reach forward and comb through his hair.

He shook his head as if coming out of a dream. “My apologies,” he said. “I’m being—I’m more tired than I thought.”

I could breathe again, though I watched him still. He did look suddenly tired, his shoulders slumped, a hand shielding his eyes.

“We can pick up the game next time we see one another if you like.”

“We don’t know when the next time will be,” he replied.

I laid my forehead against his and linked our hands firmly together. The only sound in the room was the crackle of the fire. Its flame cast him in sharp relief—the flecks of dark brown in his eyes, a thin faded scar on his chin, the black-red in his hair.

“I never—I used to not think about having to marry Maram,” he said. “It always seemed so far away.”

“How far?” I asked, though I didn’t want the answer.

“After she turned eighteen and her inheritance was confirmed,” he said. “I always—” His grip tightened around my hands.

“What?”

“My marriage felt necessary.” His voice had dropped to a near whisper as if he were struggling to admit something to himself. “For Andala. For its future. But now…”

I raised my hands to his face. “Now?” I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to that, either.

He didn’t complete his sentence. Instead, he leaned forward and kissed me. It felt like relief and desire. I—we—had avoided thinking about our future, about what it meant that I was a standin for his fiancée. I’d avoided examining my feelings too closely. But I wanted him for myself, for all time. I could admit that much at least.

I poured all that feeling into this, my fingers tight in the folds of his robe as his hands found the tangle of my braid and undid it, as if he’d been planning to since I’d put it up.

When at last we parted, I struggled to breathe and laid my head on his shoulder.

“Every time I see you, Amani, feels like a gift and a reprieve,” he said, threading a hand through my hair. “But every moment together means that her confirmation, and our marriage, draws closer.”

The thought gave me pause, and I felt my earlier excitement drain away. Did we have a choice, I wondered. We lived in the world of the Vath, and their chains had tied him to Maram. He was welded to her and to the throne in the same way I was welded to her shadow.

“We have this,” I said, and laid a hand on his heart. “But the world will decide what becomes of us.”

He pressed a kiss to my forehead. “I am tired of being at the mercy of the world.”





the ziyaana, andala