By the time evening fell, I still had not had an opportunity to tell Saalim what I suspected about Kassim. I wanted to find him alone, fearing others would think me mad, but it proved impossible. Too, I had not yet seen Altasa. I wanted to tell her my decision, tell her goodbye. People said she had died in the fire, but I know she had not been home, and her room was untouched by flames.
It would be Saalim, Tamam, Nassar, and Amir I traveled with. I was pleased Amir would join us. Of Saalim’s men, I liked him best.
“I hate camels,” Saalim said to me as he held the reins of the camel carrying our water.
“They are not all so bad,” Amir said, leading his out of the pen at the city’s edge.
We arrived here under the disguise of traders, so that none would realize that their king had left. Most, anyway, were catching up on the sleep they hadn’t gotten the night before.
The Falsa Mawk seemed so long ago.
“Where will we go?” I asked. Tamam walked on my other side. He eyed me carefully. Earlier, he and Saalim had exchanged stern words with each other while Amir happily showed me his map. Distracting me, I assumed, from the conversation.
“To the closest settlement,” Saalim said, pointing in a vague direction. “The Hayali are just a few nights away.”
“You expect to find Kassim there?”
“No. I hope to find someone who has seen them, if they are even willing to share this information.” His voice was strained. What was it about the Hayali that he did not like? “We will follow the common trade route. It’s likely the route he took.”
“Better than the one from your home,” Amir explained to me. “With this route, there’s only a day or two of travel between oases and settlements. I think you’ll find the journeying easier.”
“I hope,” I murmured.
Saalim glanced to me. “I hope so, too.”
The journey that night was anything but easy. I hadn’t slept the night before, barely slept during the day, and now we had traveled nearly the entire night without sleep. My eyelids were heavy as iron, my feet the same.
When dawn came, I nearly collapsed beneath the olive tree where we were to rest for the day. It had been a long time now since I had traveled across the sands, and I had already forgotten the exhaustion that comes from staying awake until sunrise. Saalim and Nassar themselves were already lying back onto the sand. Tamam and Amir topped off the water stores at the shallow pool a ways off.
“Saalim,” I whispered, seeing that his eyes were closed. He needed to know about Kas.
“Hmmm?” Saalim hummed, not moving.
He was nearly asleep. I watched his hands, linked across his chest, rise and fall with each breath. I wanted to reach out and lay my hand atop them. Glancing toward Nassar, I saw his eyelids had cracked just enough to watch me.
I curled into my mat. I would tell Saalim about his brother later.
“Get some rest.”
Days later, and still with no opportunities to separate Saalim from his overly watchful guards and Nassar, we descended into a shallow canyon just before sunrise. Within the valley, little orange flames dotted along the cliff faces around us.
“The Hayali can be hostile,” Amir said to me as he took the lead of our small caravan. We fell into line behind him, our camels carrying us slowly.
“Someone approaches,” Nassar said, resting his free hand on the hilt of his sword. Saalim mirrored his movement. Tamam was behind me, but his hand was never away from his sword. I suspected this news instilled in him no new sense of vigilance.
Before long, I could hear the clank of tack and chuff of breath as a man arrived on horseback.
“Why have you come?” he asked.
Amir said, “We are of Almulihi, on the king’s orders.”
“Answer the question, sea citizen.”
Saalim stiffened as Tamam settled his camel between him and the stranger. Saalim glanced back to me.
Still here! None have taken me yet. I was glad he could not hear my pounding heart. The men had said little about these people other than that their preference was to kill first, talk later. They could afford it, Saalim had explained. They lived amid a salt mine.
“We search for two people,” Amir said, voice level. He was undisturbed by the violence in the man’s voice. Amir described Kassim. He was with a woman who was not old—in the middle of life—and suspected to be of the desert.
“Not sickly, like you,” the Hayali man laughed.
Amir did not pause. He proceeded to describe Edala.
The Hayali man grunted and led us deeper into the valley, each step pulling tautness through the men like they were attached to string.
As the sun crested, I finally understood what I was seeing around me.
When Saalim had said they lived amid a salt mine, I had not realized it meant that they lived within one. I did not know a mine could be so deep. These were not cliffs that towered around us. They were walls of salt. Carved into them were what looked like homes.
Stairs led up the sides of the mine, breaking off at different levels to lead into dwellings or onto platforms with burning cookfires.
We passed piles of salt bricks—men beside them eyed us carefully as they held curved metal picks in their palms.
More and more Hayali came out to see us, some watching from their ledges while others moved down to the mine floor to view us up close. As we arrived at the center of their village, so many crowded around us that the man leading the way was soon lost amongst them.
These people felt feral in the way they gazed at us with bright eyes and hungry sneers, gripping their sharp metal tools tightly. They wore little clothing and had dark ink painted in complicated stripes down their arms, backs, and legs.
Most stared at me.
There was a shifting in the crowd as a woman came toward us. Her sleeveless robe was belted at her waist with ivory. The bone-white crown on her head was of the same. Her robe was so thin, it covered little.
“Descend,” she said, fluttering her hand. The ink on her arms was intricate and fastidiously painted. This woman was their leader.
Amir and Tamam did, the latter helping his king down, the former assisting me.
“You did not tell me the king was among them,” she snapped at someone behind her.
So she knew him by face.
“I was sorry to hear the news of my sister,” she said, dipping her head.
Sister? I glanced to the men. They appeared unsurprised.
Saalim said, “Her death was swift and honorable.”
“How does the throne treat you in her absence?” she approached Saalim and offered her hand. He pressed his lips to her knuckles.
“Well, I am here.”
She laughed. “Kena said to give you a chance.”
Kena. This woman was the queen’s sister? The queen of Almulihi had been of the Hayali?
The woman dropped her hand to her side. “Now, Sul told me of your questions. What do you offer?”
Amir pulled two large bottles from the pack slung across the camel’s back.
“From our sea,” he said.
Her smile was broad and greedy as she took them from Amir. She curled the bottles into her chest and with a fan of her fingers, invited us to follow.
We walked into the dark mouth of the mine—much like the cave Kassim had taken me to—and arrived in a wide audience room. Striations of salt lined the walls, lit by the several torches. The woman seated herself on a narrow chair and poured the bottled sea into a goblet. She took a small sip and sighed.
“Please sit,” she said. “I can’t imagine you’ve changed your opinions of this?” she asked Saalim, holding her goblet aloft.
“I have not.”
She gestured to all of us, and we declined. “Good. More for me. Did Kena enjoy it to the end?”
Saalim shook his head. “She lost her taste for it.”
“A shame. Just a little keeps the body strong.” She swirled her goblet as her gaze flashed to mine. “This is unexpected,” she whispered, smiling again. “Sul did not tell me about you, either.” In the firelight, I could see that she was older than I first realized. Though her body appeared young, there were lines through her brow, around her mouth. Her hair, too, had gray twisting through it. “Did you bring her here for your protection, then?”
Protection?
Saalim set his heel on his opposite knee and leaned back into his chair. “She knows much of the desert, so she travels with us, Liika.” The use of her name snapped her attention back to him, away from me.
This woman—Liika—was clearly a well-respected ruler. But Saalim met her and rose above.
“Will you stay here for the day?” Liika asked.
“It is best we return to our site.” Saalim gestured at the room around us.
“But I am grateful for your generosity.”
“Your soft skin,” she chided.
It is true that already I felt my skin to be drying from the salt walls.
“If that is what you want to call it.” Saalim shifted again, seeming to relax further despite the conflict.
Liika and Saalim countered each other’s remarks like they had a world of history behind them, and if Queen Kena was Liika’s sister, then clearly they had. It was nearly hostile, almost toppling into conflict. Although Amir and Nassar appeared at ease, Tamam and I sat rigidly.
Liika’s eyes met mine again. There was more talk of nothing, and Saalim grew frustrated with the drivel. Finally, Liika said, “Your brother, my people have not seen. Your sister, I could not say. I would know her face if I saw it myself, so much does she look like Kena.”
Saalim exhaled. The hope that held his shoulders back was gone. “She does.”
Liika went on. “There is magic that lingers out there, though. Sometimes disguised as a nomad or a hatif. Sometimes as a woman. It has been impossible to lure it here, to pry the magic away and learn of it.” She looked at me. “But then you bring me this, and I feel satisfied.”
I stiffened.
Liika’s gaze drifted up and down me. “What else does she do? I can’t place it.”
“She is my companion and brings her knowledge of the desert,” Saalim said, but I saw the silent question when he looked at me.
“My people will delight in her presence. The goddess follows her.”
“If you have no other information for us,” Saalim said sharply, rising from the chair, “then we will take leave.”
Liika waved her hand. “Kena would be displeased. Stay for the day.”
Being outside the cave was a relief—I felt like my body could breathe, that my mouth was not so dry. To endure that, the salt-born must be a different people entirely.
We were taken to an area beneath the shade of the cliff that Liika demanded be kept quiet for us. So instead of people crowding near to peer at our peculiarities, they stood a stone’s throw away.
When the man who brought us water—nothing had ever tasted so fresh—left, and it was just us, I could wait no longer. I turned to Saalim.
“There is something I must tell you,” I said.
They all turned to me. Saying it aloud would sound absurd, but Liika had mentioned magic in the desert. They all needed to know what it was.
“Kassim is, well, I think . . .”
Saalim waited.
“A jinni.”
He tilted his head in the same way he used to when I asked him something about the Dalmur or jinni magic or the salt trade. The question of why do you know this, and why do you want to know this?
Nassar tipped his head back. “Ah.”
Saalim ignored him. “If you had told me on our journey from your settlement, I would have denied its possibility and claimed you a fool.” He pulled the fabric of his tunic into his fist, then let it ago. “But I received a letter.”
Tamam and Amir had their eyes trained on the people who watched from afar, but Nassar watched Saalim.
Saalim went on, “From my sister, Edala. She told me that if I was reading the letter—well, wait.” He reached into the sack that he carried and pulled out a letter. He handed it to me, then hesitated. “You can read?”
Nodding, I took the note and opened it. The writing was curving and fluid, so I had a harder time with it than Altasa’s recipe book or the Litab. For a moment, my mind took me back to Altasa’s home, to sitting at her table and going through the words on the pages. She would lean over when she heard a pause in my whispered words and ask which I struggled with. My chest tightened when I thought of her home, of how she would feel when she finally returned and saw that her gardens, her whole life, was gone.
Slowly, I read the letter. When I finished, my hand trembled.
Edala knew everything.
“I wonder,” Saalim whispered so only I could hear, “if you perhaps understand more of what is in that letter than I do.”
If you have this letter in your hands, then she has done it. How did Edala know? I searched around us, expecting his sister to be a face in the crowd.
Saalim said, “So when you tell me that Kassim might be a jinni, I cannot understand how nor why, but I believe it.”
“I think he is the jinni that Zahar keeps.”
Saalim nodded. “The woman he left Almulihi with.”
Hiding behind her jinni, just as my father was able to do. Still, it did not all make sense. “I can explain why Kassim would want the throne, but what does Zahar have to do with it? What is it she would gain?”
Nassar broke in. “Perhaps Kassim promised her power. It’s why anyone would seek to take the throne, or aid someone in doing so.”
Saalim said, “She and I always were at odds. Edala loved her for her supposed magic, but I never believed it possible.” He let out a breath that sounded like an attempt at a laugh. “I do not understand how this came to be, though. Has he willingly become a jinni?”
Nassar nodded. “If it gave him unlimited power, it seems it would be worthwhile.”
I shook my head. “Being a jinni does not offer unlimited power.” I explained how they were limited by their master, tethered to that person. Free will with many, many limitations. “But I would be surprised if he was changed by force.” I conveyed what I understood of jinni-forging.
“How do you know all this?” Saalim asked. Behind him, Nassar’s eyes were narrowed. Even Amir had turned to listen. I could not tell them it was from stories Saalim had once told me.
I opened my mouth, then closed it.
Saalim looked at the crowd of people. Quietly, for only me to hear, he said, “There are so many questions I have, and you will not answer them.”
“It is an impossible truth.”
“Like Edala, Kassim.” Amidst the silence, he reached into his pocket. He removed two smooth stones and rolled them in his hand. The same two were sitting in the basin in his sisters’ tower. Like Tavi’s shrine to Wahir that celebrated my mother and sister, it had been a memorial for his lost family.
Except he had removed two of the stones. The two that lived.
“Sometimes,” he said staring at the stones, “I wonder if the she that Edala refers to is you.”