Mirage (Mirage #1)(61)

“But—they’re your mother’s people, too,” I said without thinking.

“I don’t think anyone sees it like that.”

I had a hard time believing it for some reason. I knew exactly what Maram was like. I had experienced her cruelty firsthand. But as I’d seen with the Dowager, many of Maram’s Andalaan family mourned her loss. It was a cruel person that judged a child by their parent’s legacy. And while Maram had proven herself a worthy inheritor of Mathis’s regime, a person who knew the circumstances—how she’d been treated by everyone on Luna-Vaxor, by her own half sister—would not hate her for it. Would they?

“You are lucky,” she said.

“Me?”

“You know exactly where you belong. You have your family, and your traditions, and no one is … is screaming at you to be something else. All my Vathek family can see is my lesser blood. And all my Andalaan family can see are their conquerors. I am treated like a bad omen of a horrible future no matter where I go.”

It was a strange thing to feel such a strong swell of pity for her. But we’d come far, she and I. I touched her arm without asking and waited for her to look up at me.

“You can choose who you want to be,” I said. “You can choose what you are.”

She scoffed. “Everyone has already decided what I am not— I am not Vathek and I am not Andalaan.”

I squeezed her arm. “You are the trueborn daughter of the last queen of Andala. They can’t choose what you are.”

I was surprised when she raised a ringed hand to cover mine, though she wouldn’t meet my gaze. “I know it’s unfair of me to say, but … I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re you. I don’t think anyone else in the world would be kind to me after what I’ve done.”

I had nothing to say to that. I couldn’t tell her why I was so kind, what I saw. She would resent me for my pity and my worry.

“Why don’t I go for you?” I suggested.

I’d become quite good at controlling my expression and tone and it served me well with Maram. I needed to be the one in the Eastern Reach to deliver my information to Arinaas’s agent. And I wanted the time with Idris. But more than that, to my surprise, I wanted to help her. Despite all she’d done to me, all I could see now was a scared girl who didn’t want to face the disapproval of her relatives, or worse: their rejection.

“Really?” She sounded small and young—younger even than me.

“Really,” I said, and bumped my shoulder against hers.

“What’s that smell?” she asked a moment later.

I sighed. “You’ve burned the bread.”

*

The meal wasn’t ruined. The soup finished cooking, so we took the remaining unspoiled pieces of bread into the courtyard, along with tea and bowls for the soup. We sat in companionable silence. For the first time there was no undercurrent of tension, no fear. It was a strange feeling, but one I liked.

She toyed with a pendant I’d never seen her wear before, swinging the gold piece lazily up and down the chain between her fingers.

“I wanted to ask you something,” she said. She’d caught the pendant in her hand and closed her fingers around it.

“Of course.”

I watched as she lifted the chain from around her neck and held it out to me, the gold charm swinging lazily to and fro.

“Can you—do you know what this is?”

My eyebrows raised as I got my first clear look at it. “Probably no better than you…” My voice trailed off when I flipped it over.

“What? What is it?”

“Nothing,” I said with a laugh. “It’s a royal seal. If you’d been born before the occupation, you would have had the same design inked on your back.”

Maram rolled her eyes. “Thank you for that clever deduction. I gathered that much from the roc on the front.”

“It’s not a roc. It’s a tesleet bird.”

“A what?”

“Tesleet,” I repeated. “The bird of the Banu Ziyad is the tesleet. And on the back is your name and this line: I was marked before my husband. I shall be marked after.”

“What in the world does that mean?”

“It’s a quote attributed to Massinia—she had a scar with gold twisted into it on her back. Many took the scar as a sign from Dihya, that she’d been chosen by Him to be a prophetess before her husband’s death. Historians like to argue that his death was the making of her—it wasn’t.”

She leaned forward. “And why is that strange?”

“The seals are like daan. They are meant to denote family, ancestry, faith—all the things prized by the Kushaila. Whoever made this seal meant for you to prize this above all else.”

“Wonderful,” she drawled, taking the seal back. “My mother wanted me to remember she hated my father.”

I tried not to laugh. “That is not what the quotation means.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Massinia loved her husband very much. Many sources say she was of a higher class than him, and she was Tazalghit. She married him in secret anyway. That is unheard of, even today.”

“So…?”

“It means she—you are not defined by the men in your life, no matter how powerful. You lived before them and you shall live after them. You can’t let them determine your path.”