Rebel of the Sands (Rebel of the Sands, #1)(50)

A new dawn. A new desert.

Which meant Jin was a prince, too.

He’d told me about breaking his nose and his brother setting it. About how he’d been born in Izman but was from Xicha.

He’d never told me he was a prince.

I’d kissed a prince.

I felt the barrel of a gun press into the side of my neck, interrupting the spiral of my thoughts. “Drop the knife,” a girl’s voice said. “You owe me that much for saving your life.”

The instinct to fight reared its head, but my body was too tired to obey it. I uncurled my fingers so the knife planted straight at my feet. The gun moved away from my neck as the girl—the same one who’d killed the Skinwalker—walked around to face me, still aiming the gun at me. I remembered Ahmed had called her Shazad. She raised her voice. “Bahi, I found her.”

“Oh, thank God and every First Being.” A third figure dashed into the tent. It was the curly-haired boy who’d been dozing when I woke up. “I swear I only fell asleep for a second.” He wagged a finger at me like a scolding mother. “It’s not very polite to sneak away from someone after he’s saved your life.”

“Not the first time I’ve done that,” I admitted. My mind was still racing, but having a gun pointed at you had a way of making a girl focus.

“Not the first time a girl has snuck out on you while you were sleeping, either,” Shazad muttered at Bahi, low enough that I was the only one who heard. I hadn’t noticed when she’d been slaying the Skinwalker, but her accent was as northern and sharp as Commander Naguib’s, and it made me want to pick the knife back up.

“Are you going to shoot me or not?” My own accent scraped bumpily against hers as I stared down the barrel of the gun. “Seems like a waste of your saving my life.”

Shazad raised an eyebrow at me appraisingly, then lowered the weapon.

“Wow,” the curly-haired boy, Bahi, said to me. “I’ve never seen her give up so easily. She must like you.”

Shazad ignored him, “She knew the password,” she said simply. “Jin must trust her.”

Sakhr, I remembered.

“The door didn’t open, though,” I argued.

“It only opens from the inside,” Shazad said. “Any mortal who knows the true name of the Djinni who built this place can speak his name to request entry. It alerts us on the inside. We found the story of this place in an old book, along with the Djinni’s true name. Lucky for us, it turned out to be true when we had to flee Izman.”

True names had power. Shazad said, “So who let you lot in?”

“There are other ways in, if you’re able to fly.” Or willing to climb. I looked at the tops of the cliffs that surrounded us. If you knew the path, you could probably make your way in over the top of the canyon. How long until the Gallan from Fahali found their way in?

“Forgive us—” Ahmed paused expectantly.

“Amani,” I supplied.

“Amani.” He stepped around the table. “You’re tired. Would you like to sit and eat something and—”

“Bahi!” A new voice made everyone’s head turn. The girl who rushed in was younger than I was. Her hair was a dark purple, spreading in soft waves framing a round face earnest with panic. “Something’s happening to my brother. Jin’s babbling in his sleep.”

There was that word again. Brother.

She looked even less like Jin than the Rebel Prince.

“That’s normal,” Bahi said. “The Nightmare venom’ll be burning out of his system.”

“You’re sure?” The purple-haired girl’s voice was thin with tears.

“Delila.” The prince reached out for her comfortingly. For his sister, I realized.

“You’re the Djinni’s daughter,” I blurted. My head was spinning, trying to remember what was real and what was only something I’d heard around campfires. “From the story.”

Delila was momentarily distracted from her worry. She brushed her violent purple hair back behind her shoulders, like she could hide it.

“Expecting fangs and scales?” Prince Ahmed smiled like it was a joke, but there was a tinge of wariness there, too.

“Wings and horns, actually,” I half joked. That was what they’d said the prince’s monster sister looked like in Dustwalk. The younger girl’s eyes dashed to the ground, embarrassed. The air shifted around her head, like heat in the desert. The tinges of purple disappeared and her hair was as pure black as her brother’s. She fiddled with it self-consciously. I was suddenly sorry for having said anything at all.

“I’ll go check on him anyway.” Bahi scratched his neck, looking awkward in the tension. As he did, I saw blue ink etched into his palm in a perfect circle thick with lacing symbols.

My heart sank.

“You’re a Holy Man.” Back in Dustwalk, we stitched up our own gunshot wounds and missing fingers. You had to be missing a pair of limbs or a bucket of blood before it warranted the Holy Father’s intervention. We only called him when everything but prayer was hopeless—to heal in part, but also to bargain at the doors of death. The presence of a Holy Man was never a good sign. It was a last resort.

The thought must’ve shown on my face. “Don’t worry.” Bahi held up his other hand. It was blank. The matching tattoo that ought to have been there was missing. “I’m not a very good one.”