The Forbidden Wish(6)

“You destroyed a monarchy once,” he says after a moment, his voice low and dangerous, a dark current beneath a still sea. “I want you to help me do it again.”

I close my fingers, my flame disappearing in a puff of smoke. “So. You’re some kind of revolutionary, then?”

Again with that short, bitter laugh. He keeps walking, his words carried over his shoulder by the wind. “A revolution of one, that’s me.”

“Very well.” I run ahead of him, turning and walking backward so that I can look him in the eye. “What is your first wish, Master?”

“Well, to begin with, stop calling me Master, as if I were some kind of godless slaver. I have a name.”

Names are dangerous. They’re personal. And the last time I got personal with a human, it ended badly. The evidence is buried just a few spans beneath my feet.

“I don’t care to know it.” Better that way.

“If I tell you my name,” he says, “you must tell me yours.”

I stop walking. “I don’t have a name.”

He stops beside me, watching me with his head cocked a bit, like a chess player waiting for me to make a move. “I don’t believe you.”

How can one so mortal be so positively infuriating? “Don’t your songs mention my name?”

His lips slide into a half grin, and he resumes walking, the wind blowing his hair across his face. “Not any you’d like to hear, I think.”

He leads and I follow, a boy and a jinni striding across the moon-blue dunes. Beneath our feet, the sand shifts treacherously. Halfway up a particularly steep hill, it suddenly gives way, and I cry out involuntarily as I slide backward.

But suddenly a hand grasps mine, holding me in place, though I have already half shifted to smoke to catch myself.

“Careful, Smoky,” the boy says, pulling me to the top of the dune. “You haven’t granted me any wishes yet. I can’t have you disappearing on me already.”

“My name’s not Smoky.” I yank my hand away. His touch still burns, leaving me shaken, the echo of his heartbeat resounding through me. Looking away, I shake sand from my robes. I’ve transformed my clothes from rich silks to sturdy white cotton, so that I blend into the desert.

“It is until you give me something better.”

“Where are we going?”

“Why? Bored already? I’d think you’d want to stretch your legs after lying around in that cave for—how long were you in there, anyway?”

“Since the war ended. Five hundred years ago.”

With a whistle, he slides down the other side of the dune, and I transform into a small silver cat and spring after him, shifting back into a girl at the bottom.

He stands still for a moment, watching me. He has tied the lamp to his belt, and his hand strokes it absently. It’s an affectation common to Lampholders, and he’s picked it up already.

“How old are you?” he asks.

A cool wind flows between the dunes, pulling my hair across my face and ruffling his patched cloak.

“Three thousand and one thousand more.”

“Great gods,” he says softly. “But you look no older than me.”

“Looks are deceiving.” I don’t tell him that the face I wear is stolen, its possessor five hundred years dead. Of course, I have a face of my own, one slightly younger than yours. I was seventeen the day I was first put into the lamp, when I ceased aging and became the timeless slave I am now. I have little desire to wear that face anymore. It is the one that betrayed you to your death, Habiba. The face of a monster.

At times I feel as old as the stars, but mostly I feel just the same as I did that day—lost, small, and afraid. But I keep that to myself. I square my chin and meet his gaze challengingly.

“Strange,” he murmurs.

“What’s strange?”

“It’s just . . .” He pushes his hair back. “You’re not like the jinni in the stories and songs. That jinni was a monster. You seem . . . different.”

Then he turns and begins trudging up the next dune, wrapping his cloak around him to keep the wind from tearing at it.

I stand still a moment longer, watching him. “Zahra.”

He pauses and looks over his shoulder. “What?”

“My name,” I stammer. “I mean . . . one of them. You can call me Zahra.”

He turns around fully, his grin as wide and as bright as the moon. “I’m Aladdin.”





Chapter Three


WE WALK FOR TWO MORE HOURS before Aladdin finally says, “We’re here.”

He drops to his hands and knees and crawls slowly up the side of a dune, and when we reach the top, Aladdin goes flat and motions for me to do the same. Slowly, cautiously, he peers over the crest of windswept sand, and his expression turns grim.

“There,” he murmurs.

I look over and see a small camp tucked in a sandy depression, out of the wind. Several soldiers sit around a small fire of burning horse dung, their mounts hobbled nearby. One finely dressed young man stands alone between two tents, his shoulders hunched as he studies a map by the firelight.

“That’s him. Darian rai Aruxa, prince of Parthenia.”

“Friend of yours?”

Aladdin snorts and slides down a bit, until the sandy ridge blocks the camp from view. “He’s been tracking me for two weeks, ever since I left Parthenia. Not that I can blame him, really. He’s after this.” Aladdin tosses the ring and catches it with one hand.