The Forbidden Wish(77)

I have one hope.

Rub the lamp, I urge the princess. Rub the lamp, rub the lamp, give me just one chance—

The feel of the sea is stronger now; she must be holding me over the cliff, dangling me over the water. Any moment now and her fingers will release the lamp and I will fall and the waves and darkness and eternity and madness will suck me down, down, down—

All I need is a brush of finger on brass, the caress of palm . . .

Then I feel it: Caspida pulls back and rubs the lamp vigorously, her hands shaking.

I plunge out of the spout and pour downward. Below me is the dark sea and the white froth and the sharp rocks, crashing like a storm, hungry like a beast.

I quickly reverse direction and stream, scarlet smoke, over Caspida’s hands and wrists. As I rise, my airy tendrils coalesce into hard, sleek scales, until I am a white snake with blue eyes coiling up her arm, fast as lightning. I slither over her shoulder and around her neck and, as I intended, she stumbles backward in horror, away from the edge.

I shift to a less threatening form: a soft gray kitten the size of her hand. I perch on her shoulder and mewl in her ear, so pitifully that the Blood King of Danien himself would have melted for a moment.

Caspida is tense as stone. She freezes, but her eyes watch me sidelong, her breath shallow. It seems she has been struck dumb by my escape.

“Zahra.” A tremor weakens her voice.

Shifting again, this time to my usual human form, dressed in ethereal white silk that flutters in the ocean wind, I stand in front of her and meet her gaze.

“I am the Slave of the Lamp,” I whisper. “The mighty Jinni of Ambadya. I hold the power to grant your desires thrice.” She stares, eyes as cold as the northern sky, as the required ancient words fall from my lips. I feel the edge of the cliff beneath my heel; a few clumps of dirt come loose and tumble down. “Princess, why did you let me out? Why did you not drop the lamp?”

“I had to know.” Her eyes harden. “You’re her, aren’t you? The monster who betrayed Roshana. You’re what the ring led to, and the thief had you all along.”

I look aside, at the eastern horizon, where the fires of dawn leap ever higher. Not much time. I envision a sword falling on Aladdin’s neck, and I shudder.

“I was there when Roshana died, it is true.” My voice is hard and clipped. There is no time for secrets, no time to pretend that the past does not have its hands locked around my throat. Aladdin will die if I cannot convince this princess to set aside five hundred years of hatred and fear.

“You killed her.”

“I loved Roshana,” I whisper. Unable to meet her gaze any longer—there is far too much of you in her, Habiba—I turn away and face the sea. “She was dearer to me than a sister. After more than three thousand years of slavery to cruel and selfish masters, I met your ancestress, the great Amulen queen. Not only clever and diplomatic but a fierce warrioress. Very like you, in fact. And unlike those countless masters who came before, she was kind to me. She saw not an enemy, not a monster, but a . . . a girl.”

“Then tell me why you did it.”

Bowing my head in submission, I draw a deep breath. “I had no choice. I didn’t want to. When the king of the jinn learned how close Roshana and I had become, he came to punish us. We had broken the cardinal rule of Ambadya: that no jinni may love a human. There, on the summit of Mount Tissia, he commanded me to kill her—to strike down my dearest friend. I had no choice, for his power over me is absolute. I destroyed her, and then Nardukha sent his jinn to ravish the city of Neruby as a warning to all humans that his laws must be obeyed. But make no mistake: I can offer no excuses for what happened that day, for it was at my hand that Roshana met her fate. My love was her destruction.”

Caspida stares at me, the lamp gripped tightly in her hands. It is then that I realize it’s not Roshana’s death she is trying to understand, but her mother’s. I may not have killed her myself, but to Caspida, I may as well have.

“For five hundred years my sisterhood has passed down a sacred vow,” says Caspida coldly, “to destroy the one who destroyed our queen. You know this, and you speak these words only to deceive me as you deceived her. You would have me believe that you are capable of love.”

“Believe me when I say I wish that I were not!” Angrily I round on her. “I do not tell you this for myself! Aladdin will die any moment, and the only way to save him is if you make a wish! Please, Caspida—they will kill him at dawn!” I point at the horizon, where the sun is minutes away from rising. “Let me save him, I beg you!”

I drop to my knees before her, doing what I never thought I could: grovel before a human. My pride unravels into smoke, carried away on the wind. Always I have thought myself above these mortals—I, immortal, powerful, able to shift from this form to that. But I let all of that go now, and I beg as I have never begged before. “Do what you like with me after that, but just let me save him!” I dig my fingers into the earth, my eyes damp with tears. My voice falls to a cracked whisper. “Please.”

“Why?”

I raise my face, finding her gaze unyielding. “Because it was my idea. Him wishing to be made a prince. Courting you. Lying all these weeks. I manipulated him and used him, and now they will kill him for it.”

“Why would you lead him into the palace knowing that eventually the truth would come out and he would have to pay the price?”