The Forbidden Wish(76)

“Guards to the left,” murmurs Khavar. “Don’t look, but they’re coming this way.”

“Have they seen us?” asks Caspida.

“Not yet. We should split up. They’re looking for a group of girls. Separately we’d have a better chance.”

But it’s too late. The guards catch sight of them, shouting out and drawing their weapons. The Watchmaidens peel away in all directions, and the princess bolts into an alley. She ducks into a doorway, swiping aside the curtain covering it and overturning a stack of pots behind it, bursting in on a startled family sharing a loaf of stale bread. A baby in the room begins to cry. Caspida holds a finger to her lips, slipping into their midst, drawing her cloak tightly around herself and covering the lamp.

“Please,” she whispers, dropping her hood. “Don’t say anything.”

The peasants stare at her, then cry out in alarm when a guard storms through the door. He looks around, and the people recoil, faces averted. Caspida lets her hair hang over her face, hiding her features. The guard lifts a lip as he looks around, then wordlessly steps out again.

Caspida stands and pulls her hood back over her face. “Thank you,” she says. “I . . .”

She stares at the meager meal they are sharing, at the crying baby and the four skinny, half-starved children. “I’m so sorry. I will not forget you. I swear it.”

She slips out the door and dashes back the way she’d come, wandering at random up and down streets, all the while gradually heading south. She is shaken and afraid, her breathing fast, her pulse racing. I can sense the clamminess of her skin.

Eventually she reaches the southern city gates, only to find the traffic going out has been reduced to a trickle as the guards question every person attempting to leave. Caspida stands uncertainly, tucked out of sight between a stall selling fig jam and a pair of men arguing over the price of a cart filled with fish.

After a short deliberation, the princess starts forward. The square in front of the gate is growing crowded with murky forms that seem to swim in the gloomy light. Several people carry torches, flickering beacons that circulate through the darkness. Voices, still hushed and yawning, murmur like a flowing current, into which Caspida dips and flows like a minnow. When she reaches the gate, she sidles up to a man holding the reins of a half dozen camels, waiting his turn to exit the city.

“What’s going on?” she asks the drover.

He shrugs and scratches a sore on his cheek. “They’re looking for someone, I’d guess.”

She nods absently, then suddenly lashes out, cutting through the camels’ ropes with a blade that she seems to conjure out of the air. As the drover cries out indignantly, she grabs a torch out of the hand of a startled spice vendor and waves it in the camels’ faces. The animals bray in alarm and bolt, kicking and tossing their heads. Screams break out as people and stalls are knocked over, and the guards at the gate are distracted just long enough for Caspida to slip past them.

Outside the city, the princess breaks into a run. She barrels down the dusty street, dodging the incoming fishermen bringing up their first catches of the day, as shouting and cursing break out around the gate, where the spooked camels are causing a panic that spreads to the other animals in the area.

The road takes a sharp downward turn, zigzagging across the face of the cliffs to the beaches below, which glitter with the fires of the fishermen and their huts. Farther out, ships rest quietly in the bay, rocking back and forth on the incoming tide. Everything is still and quiet outside the city walls, waiting for dawn.

Caspida leaves the road and crosses the wide crest of land until she comes to where the cliff drops away, her boots and trousers turning damp from dew in the tall grass. She walks along the cliff’s edge until the beach below dwindles and she is standing on the farthest point of land, staring out at the wide, wide sea. To her left, the horizon burns red, where the gods light their hearths in preparation for the day.

It is nearly dawn.

Aladdin is minutes from death.

My mind is filled with the last image I have of Aladdin: being dragged away to his death. Despair closes on me like the jaws of some great beast. Is he dead already? Would I feel it if he were? Even if he’s still alive, even if there are a few minutes remaining to him, his last and only hope is standing on the edge of this cliff, too far away to do him any good, on the verge of destroying the one thing that could save him.

Perhaps I’d have a chance if I were free, but Nardukha is either taking his time or not coming at all. Even if he does fulfill his end of the bargain, it will be too late for Aladdin.

Caspida draws out the lamp, letting her hood fall back. A salty breeze rustles her hair. Far, far below, the black sea froths at the cliffs. I recoil inside the lamp, immobilized with dread.

Please, please just let me out. Let me speak, oh, just let me have one last chance!

If Caspida lets the sea take me, I will sink to its depths and likely rest there until the end of days. I have spent five hundred years sleeping in darkness. Five hundred more, and I will crack. I will split into a thousand pieces, and I will go mad.

I have known mad jinn. They are worse than monsters.

I begin to rage inside my lamp, throwing myself against the brass walls with the force of a stampeding bull. It will not make a difference to her. I could be a feather, I could be a lump of stone—the lamp would feel no lighter, no heavier. I could crash into one wall with all my force, but she would notice nothing. The interior of my prison is a pocket in the fabric of the universe. When I am in it, I am like a man with one foot on sand and one foot in water—neither here nor there, neither in this world nor out of it.