In the limpid light of morning, I sat up, heart pounding with anticipation.
Today was the Falsa Mawk, and I was to meet Kas to watch the parade. I would tell him that perhaps he and I might find a place to live together. I was choosing him, leaving the palace behind, leaving Altasa behind.
Leaving Saalim.
As I rushed to dress, splashing my face with water and rubbing jasmine oil into my skin, I heard a commotion in the kitchen.
Altasa was at the counter, pulling jars down with a fervor I had never seen.
“An urgent request?” I asked. She had promised me we weren’t working today.
“I want you to make something.” The tip of her tongue pressed her upper lip as she stared at the wall of ingredients. “Yes.” She pulled two more jars down then patted the counter by way of invitation.
I went to her. “Now?”
She tapped a page in her book. “Follow the recipe.”
“But the Falsa Mawk . . .” My eyes drifted to the page. The recipe was called Haraki. “Cricket?” I clarified, not understanding. “Altasa,” I glanced out the window, the pale purple light quickly turning blue. “My sister and I plan to meet.”
“And you’ll miss your meeting if you keep talking. I need you to do this. Now. Before . . . I need to know . . .” She mumbled incoherently and pushed the ingredients to the edge of the counter toward me.
Sighing, I looked down at the recipe. It was unusual, prompting me to turn the mixture several times in one direction or the other. To use a specific water source that Altasa provided to me. Once mixed, the instructions stated to turn it onto the counter surface. I hesitated, looking to Altasa. It would spill everywhere and be a horrendous mess to clean.
She nodded excitedly. “Do what it says.”
So I did.
Turning the bowl upside down onto the counter, I tapped the bottom several times, then removed it.
When I saw what lay on the counter, I screamed, flying into the table behind me.
There was no slopping wet mixture. Instead, there was a single cricket that leapt off of the counter and onto the ground. Within a moment, it was gone completely. Lost in the labyrinth of furniture.
“What?! What happened?” I said, out of breath and terrified at what I had just done. I remembered the first time I had released Saalim from his vessel—the impossibility of what I saw.
This felt the same.
Fatigue washed over me, as though I’d just climbed up the palace tower three times its height. Altasa sat me down at the table, a strange spark in her eyes. She had a vibrancy that made her seem even younger, especially with her silver hair hidden beneath her scarf.
“Magic, child,” Altasa whispered. “You did it. You can do it.”
“Magic?” I leaned away from her. “But how?”
“With my ingredients.” She fluttered her fingers at the items on the counter. “I could teach you the preparation of such ingredients. How to wield her providence.”
I was barely listening, my mind racing to catch up with what had just happened. What she was telling me now. “You know magic.” It was a question, but it wasn’t.
“Yes. I want teach you.”
“I don’t want to learn,” I said, thinking of Sabra, the scars on my back, my father’s empire.
“Lies!” She slapped her hand on the table, the other holding a single finger in the air. “To use Masira’s gifts to speak with her? To wield her power as your own? You would not want that?”
“It is not so simple—”
She laughed then, a loud and musical laugh I had never heard from her. Chills crept down my back.
I continued, determined. “It leaves traces of confusion and ugliness behind. It has consequences.”
“But see here,” she hissed, “the more important question is how do you know that?”
Hesitating, I interlocked my fingers and squeezed.
“Twin golden cuffs. A vessel of sand. That necklace you wear.” She pointed at my neck, where my mother’s golden necklace hung behind my clothes. “Where did those come from, hmm?”
“Tavi is waiting for me.” I stood.
Her hand softly held me back. “Where did you get them? Tell me,” she pleaded, her voice gentle. “The truth could change everything.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again.
“Did you steal them?”
“No.”
“Did you get them from him?”
Him? “Altasa, I—”
“I have gone about this all wrong,” she said to herself. Then she looked at me again. “We seem dusty and worn in this city of lives built atop salt bricks, but we are more. You are marked by Masira.” How had she known? “You can wield Masira’s will. You can be more powerful than them all. And that is without even knowing what you were doing.” Her eyes were alight with excitement and . . . almost a crazed jealousy. “These people think they know us, think they can ridicule us because we are ‘salt chasers.’ They are wrong, we are sun-seekers, and we can show them that we are not something to mock but something to celebrate. Something to fear.”
Her words stoked a small pride.
“You can do amazing things,” she pressed. “We could do them together.”
Together. That did not sound so bad.
“I could teach you to rein hate, craft a fountain of endless magic, to hold sway over love.”
Love. Kas flashed in my mind. Then Saalim.
The healer’s hands clasped tightly together as she waited for my answer. There were thoughts running behind the words she said aloud. Things she would not say.
Power thrummed through me. That which I held the potential for, that which I wielded now.
“I need time,” I said. It was not a decision I could take back.
“Good,” she said. “Tonight, we will talk. Enjoy your evening on the rooftop with that boy.”
My mind reeled with what had just happened.
Then I realized I had never told Altasa that I had chosen to meet with Kas instead of Saalim that night. More curiously, I had never told her where.
There was a huddle of women dressed in bright colors in the front room of Saira’s, and I could see Tavi seated in the middle of them all.
Saira was in the kitchen smiling to herself as she prepared a sweet breaded something that she turned out of the sizzling pot and into a basket. Her children fought with one another as they reached up to grab the hot bread.
“Well,” Tavi said. “It was often worn like this.”
As I moved to the cluster of women, I saw Tavi placing an embellished veil over her brow. The strangeness of my morning with Altasa washed away as I cringed, unable to look at the faces of the women that watched Tavi, fearing they mocked her.
“Emel! Come here!” Tavi exclaimed when she saw me. The women parted when they saw me. “This is my sister. She can show you even better perhaps than me.”
Reluctantly, I knelt beside Tavi. In front of her were two long dresses dyed a vivid blue; the hems, a pale purple the color of dawn. They were colors we would have worn as ahiran. In her hands Tavi held two veils decorated the same as our mothers’ back home, glinting discs hanging from the fabric.
“What is this?” I said, touching the bronze discs, distracted from my unease by the familiarity. It was not dha that decorated the fabric, as our mothers’ would have been.
“Old bronze Yakub found for me.” Tavi smiled shyly.
“Saira showed us. They are so beautiful,” a women said, bright yellow flowers woven in her hair.
I smiled at the genuine praise.
“You should have seen the ones our mothers wore,” Tavi said, handing the veil to another woman, whose eyes sparkled as she touched the fabric. Tavi described how they looked, how our mothers wore them.
“How many threads for the embroidery?” a woman asked, peering at the veil being passed to her. When Tavi explained, she nodded and said, “I am sure Jameelah could do something like that for me.”
The women’s attention broke off, and they began discussing the veils amongst themselves.
“You made me one, too?” I said to Tavi, looking at the second veil still lying with the dress. I could not take my eyes from it—the lines had been embroidered on the veil just as Mama’s would have been, the obvious work Tavi had gone through to recreate something that was of both Madinat Almulihi and our home.
Nika said that the city would be dressed in its finest today, and the people would be, too. On the way to Tavi’s, I had seen that the streets—the cleanest I’d ever seen them—were thickly lined with potted, strung, and arranged flowers. Stray petals blew along the stone. Now, at Saira’s, I was beginning to understand what Nika had meant.
When I saw how these women—dressed so beautifully—peered at our veils, I felt a stirring of pride.
“You can use beads, too,” I said. “To decorate them.” Picking up the fabric, I showed them how.
Hearing the activity from outside, others came into the house. Saira doled out food to those who came through with wishes for a bright Falsa Mawk, and as they chewed their sweet bread, they learned from Tavi and I how to wear the abaya, the veil.
“And this is how all women dress where you’re from?” one asked as she peered into a mirror with the veil draped over her head. She pulled her shoulders back just so, admiring herself.
“Not all this elaborately, but yes,” I said.
The morning was spent with people I did not know, celebrating the traditions of Madinat Almulihi while showing the traditions of my home. Had Tavi told me of this prior to my coming—that I would walk into a room of people who examined something of our lives with scrutiny—I would not have come. But there was no mockery here, no fun at our expense. These people seemed as envious of me as I was of them. One even exclaimed she would like to wear something like it next year.
It felt as though I had barely arrived when Saira was clucking at everyone to leave. “They need to get ready, too! The parade starts soon.”
“Soon?” I gasped, looking outside. Sure enough, midday was fast approaching. I had to meet Kas soon! My breath caught. It was time to find him. Time to tell him.
Tavi and I rapidly dressed.
“Will you be with Yakub today?” I asked.
She nodded, adjusting the bronze discs in the mirror so that they lay exactly right. “He told me he’d go early to find us a good spot on the street. Where will the king’s party watch it?”
“I don’t think I am going to join them . . .”
She spun to me. “But you’ll have the best view!”
“Kas knows where we can watch from the roof in the baytahira.”
“That sounds nice, too.” She sounded disappointed, but I did not want to argue with her. Instead, we said our goodbyes.
Even the smaller streets were decorated. Some homes had flower wreaths as bright as the sun hanging from their doors; others had strung cloth in vivid colors from ropes to flap in the wind. Petals sprinkled the paths to some front doors; very few were left undecorated. Almost everyone I saw was dressed as the women in Saira’s home, and many carried food to and from their neighbors’ homes.
The air was sticky sweet with excitement, and with every step, my smile grew.
This was why I had come to Madinat Almulihi. This was the life I’d dreamed of, the life I’d hoped Tavi would share. My smile widened as I made resolutions that stuffed away my pride. There was no need for grandness, for big dreams.
Here I was living in a beautiful city with my sister and friends. That was enough. I didn’t need magic if I had Kas and Tavi . . . if I had everything else. With newfound joy, I nearly ran to find Kas.
Never before had I approached the baytahira from the neighborhoods that bordered it. The homes were small, cramped. They were not as decorated as the homes near the canals. The smell of sweets had drifted away, and lingering in their place was the smell of Bura-dens and drink houses. Babies cried, people shouted, goats bleated.
“Lost?” a man asked, staring at my festival clothes, garish in the shadowed alley.
“Salt chaser, eh?” I heard another man whisper to a woman.
When I turned the corner, three cloaked people huddled together in a doorway. Chills swept down my back, my arms. With gloved, black hands, one pulled the hood over his face.
The Darkafa. If I hurried, I could run back to the palace to alert a guard.
A door opened into the alley, and someone stepped out.
I stared at the ground as I passed.
“Are we all ready?” a voice asked.
No.
Anything but that voice.
Turning my head slightly, praying I was wrong, I saw Kas standing amongst them.
We, he had said.
My vision blurred, roaring filled my ears. My feet carried me from the alley and back toward the palace. People lined the streets in droves. I stepped on petals and over pots mindlessly. Finally, I was on the steps of the palace, trying to squeeze between guards to get to Altasa’s.
Suddenly her offer of magic was the most appealing thing in the world. I would accept it, and the first thing I would do was curse Kas to a life of—
“Emel!”
Saalim stood outside of the viewing box by himself, only a pair of guards at his back. He fidgeted for just a moment before he approached me.
“I worried you weren’t going to make it,” he said as he gestured to the crowded street.
He had been waiting for me.