Emel pushed herself onto her feet and stumbled to Jawar’s wife.
“Emel!” the woman cried. Her hands shook over her mouth, and at first, I could not understand if she was horrified or ecstatic. Maybe both. “You are here?” She looked at all of us, then back to Emel.
Emel pulled her into her chest. “Raheemah, it is you!”
“You promised me you’d come, and you are here!”
They hugged each other like reunited family, and we watched them speechlessly.
“Jawar,” the girl said. “It is my sister! The one I’ve told you about!” She blinked away tears, and I could see it then, the slight familiarity.
Jawar smiled broadly at his wife. He waved his hand. “I am happy for you. Go talk to her. Spend time. Maybe I can convince our guests to stay an evening.” He raised his eyebrows as Raheemah and Emel left. Rotating on his cushion, he faced us around the table.
He had no weapons, I noticed. It was a disarming gesture. I feigned to scratch my side, my gaze skirting around the room, through the windows, and beyond. There were no guards. It took much trust to allow strangers into your home without guards or weapons readied.
Though it made little sense, I knew Jawar was trustworthy. I had an understanding of him that I could not pin down. Raheemah, too.
“Raheemah has said many things to me about Emel,” Jawar said. “When she went back home, she looked for her. Was distraught when she heard she’d left. She needs this happiness.” Jawar looked at his hands, his mouth pulling into a grimace.
After we had finished our yassa and our frivolous talk had dwindled, Nassar said, “Our guide has said you know something of the people we seek.”
Jawar nodded as he nudged aside his empty plate. He rested his elbows on the tabletop.
“Three days ago, a group of four came through. Dressed in black, skin pale. They lingered in our village, asking after a goddess and her servant. They were not violent,” Jawar said. “But they were crazed, leaving black hand marks on our trees. Talked of the rightful Son. That the desert needed its true heir.
“The group left us, and the next day,” Jawar continued, touching his fingertips together and resting his chin against them, “a man and a woman came. The woman in the middle of her life, the man perhaps the same as you.” Jawar gestured to me. “They spoke to none about their business, but they asked if any others had come through. I told them of the crazed people, but that did not interest them. They seemed relieved when I told them there was no one else.”
The man he described sounded like Kassim. When I told Jawar how my throne was threatened, his eyes darkened with worry.
“That man seeks to take the throne from me. We must find him.” Then, I described Edala. He shook his head, knew of no one who looked like her. Jawar detailed for us the timing of Kassim and the woman’s departure and the direction they went. Amir marked a wide area on his map in front of him.
Finding two people in the desert was like trying to find salt grains in sand. What had I been thinking when I insisted we take this journey?
“Saalim?” Amir asked.
I looked up from the tabletop.
Amir continued, “It is your choice.”
“What is?”
Jawar hummed for a moment then repeated his question. “If you will stay? We have lodgings for guests. Plenty of space for five.” He pointed somewhere behind him.
If we stayed, it was more time lost in finding Kassim. Finding Edala. But then perhaps it was time to give up the chase. It seemed impossible, after all.
Tomorrow evening we would begin the journey home. Almulihi needed me more than I needed to find my sister and my Wahir-forsaken brother. If he returned for me, I would be there waiting.
“We will stay,” I said. “You have my gratitude.”
Jawar led us to three more houses buttressed in trees. A single ladder led up to the complex, and like Jawar’s, these homes were connected by bridges.
“The ladder can be pulled up, so that you might all sleep at ease,” Jawar said, placing his hand on a rung.
“They are clever, these homes.” I stared up at them, wondering how I might be able to devise something as easily defended back home.
“Yes. My grandfather conceived of them. But they are not easily made, otherwise our entire village would be up in trees.”
Unlike Almulihi, which sat on the ground waiting for invaders. For Kassim.
Dusk was fast approaching, the darkness arriving more quickly in the shade of the forest. Emel and her sister were still in Jawar’s home.
I thought to wait for her, but with our sleep getting turned around each day and night, I was ebbing and flowing like I’d had one too many drinks of wine. And surely Emel would wish to remain close to her sister.
“I will take first watch,” Tamam said.
I shook my head. “We can all sleep. We’ll bring up the ladder.”
The idea made him uncomfortable.
“We shouldn’t sleep the whole night anyway,” I conceded. “At least sleep for some.”
Though I still braced for the pierce of my wound, each step up the ladder was painless. What had that woman done to me? It was impossible my leg could be healed in the span of a day.
My room was well-prepared. Oil clusters were burning, filling the room with scents from a souk. The carpet on the floor was thick and comfortable, the cushions of similar quality. There was a fine mesh over the windows and doors—I had noted the same at Jawar’s home. For insects, I presumed. That, at least, was not a problem we had in Almulihi.
Lying back, I closed my eyes. Through the din of the life in the forest, I could hear the scrape of skin against parchment as Amir fussed over his map, Nassar confirming the direction of his bawsal. Beyond them, the river hissed.
The slap of shoes against wood roused me from sleep, the house swaying just a bit as someone crossed the bridge.
A silhouette appeared in the doorway. “Who is there?” I asked.
Emel started. “Sorry. I thought this one was empty,” Emel said. She began to leave, the net falling back in front of the doorway.
“No, please come in,” I said in a rush, standing up to light the lantern. My exhaustion fled as soon as she came inside. The room flared orange. I turned. “You’re wet.”
Emel smiled and gathered the dripping strands of hair over her shoulder.
“Raheemah took me to the baths. A waterfall, it’s called. Do you hear it?” She tilted her head and pointed outside. “Sounds like the sea.”
“It does.” I searched the shelves for a reason for her to stay, not ready to lose this opportunity to be alone with her. Tell me more about our shared past. A silver kettle sat on a tray. Warmth radiated from its side. Praise Wahir!
“Please sit,” I said, preparing the tea.
She gathered a few of the cushions and leaned against them.
As I set the steeping cup in front of her, she said, “You pour tea like a woman.”
“My mother made us learn so we wouldn’t always rely on servants. For times like this, I suspect.”
“Dutiful host.” She sipped the tea.
“It is not sweet, though.”
She grinned. “Did your mother make you remember that, too?”
“No.”
There was silence. Emel traced the rim of her cup with her finger. Such a delicate gesture for someone so resilient. She looked up at me. “Did you know your birth mother?”
“No. She did not want to be a part of my life.” Not wanting to talk of my past, I asked her about Raheemah.
“I was terrified when he chose Raheemah. I was so worried he would be wrong for her, but you—” And the cadence of her words skipped just a beat. “You have to trust that Eiqab will not do wrong.”
Each you was different. The second could have been anyone. The first was for me.
It reminded me of my fevered dreams, where there was an us in a hazy past. I was not the same me—it was someone restrained, held by powerful hands—but it was undoubtedly Emel. There was an easiness in these dreams, a freedom between us. She had been mine to hold and touch as I pleased. When I awoke from those dreams, I was delirious with pain and heat. At first, I thought I wanted to return to them to escape the suffering. But now, I suffered no longer, and still I wanted to return.
Helena’s pale face flashed in my mind, so I looked to Emel’s to wash it away.
“What are you thinking of?”
“Helena.”
She picked at the threads of the rug. “When will the wedding be?”
“When everything is settled, I suspect.” I leaned back on my hands, looking out the window at the night. The buzzing, hissing, and croaking creatures were cacophonous.
“Do you want to marry her?”
I hesitated, unsure even if I knew the answer to that question. “For my father, I did.” I filled our cups again. The water was dark, the leaves steeped far too long.
“Your father?”
“He made a mistake.” I pointed at myself. “I am not to err in the same manner. It is the responsibility of the king to marry for power. My father ended up loving my mother. He was very lucky.”
“The Hayali queen.”
Nodding, I said, “It was a valuable match. She was nothing like her sister. All soft where Liika was coarse.”
Emel was both.
“Did he love the salt chaser who carried you?”
“He regretted what harm he had caused her and me.”
“And you will not make the same mistake.” Her words were flat, final.
“He made a mistake, yes. He and I would disagree on what the mistake was.” I met Emel’s gaze. Her eyes were even darker in the shadows, beckoning me. “The decision to marry Helena was so easy . . .” I took a breath. I should not do this, but the table had already been set. Damn me if I did not sit down at it. “Before you.”
She pressed her mouth together. “Me.”
The need to tell her everything spilled from me like water. “If I can burden you with another confession . . .”
“Of course.”
“There are things I feel when I am around you—things that are good, things that make me feel whole. And what is more . . .” I searched around, trying to find some way to explain how I felt. “Layered beneath all that is something old. An echo, a foundation—I don’t know how to describe it—that tells me, yes, this is right. Like a palimpsest. Do you know what that is?” I was blathering now. “I feel happy, Emel. It terrifies me, because I fear I shouldn’t feel this way.”
“Because it would be a mistake?” Her voice was softer than my bed back home.
“No. I know it would not be a mistake. It is the same fear I have when my eagle hunts. Each time I let her fly, I do not know if she will return to me.”
“You fear that I do not feel the same.”
Stomping from outside grew louder.
“Saalim!” We sat upright as Tamam stumbled into the room. “Emel has,” he looked down at us as he said, “not returned.”
She stood in a rush, turning up the cup to finish her tea. “I was just leaving.” And before either of us could utter a word, she had slipped past him and was gone.
“My apologies for interrupting,” Tamam said as he fidgeted at my doorway.
Falling back into cushions, I said, “Don’t you ever sleep?”
When I opened my eyes, the torch had burned through all its oil and left behind a suffocating darkness. Feeling my way around the dark room, I found the door.
Moonlight barely filtered in through the leaves, and I could not at first find the ladder. I dropped to my hands and knees, searching in front of me until I felt it. It had already been lowered. I descended the ladder to find who else was out of bed.
When my feet hit the soft ground, there was a voice. “Couldn’t sleep either?”
Tamam.
He leaned against one of the trees holding up the homes, finding a way to keep guard even when there was no threat of an attack.
I moved to the bushes to relieve myself. “No, I suppose not.”
“I am not blind,” he said.
“Say what you mean, Tamam.”
“You and Emel.”
“Ah.”
“You will not regret it?”
“No,” I said, certain.
He sighed, but it did not sound weary. Instead, it sounded . . . relieved? He said, “A warrior will kill for the love of a woman. But for the right woman, he will stay his hand.”
When I was back on the path, our eyes met. What did Tamam know of women? I’d never seen that man anywhere but the palace.
“When she asked with the nomad, you stayed your hand,” Tamam said. “Foolish though it was.”
“I am going for a walk.”
“I will stay here.” His gaze was trained on a large fire at the end of the path.
“Yes. Sit down. I will not be far.”
Beside the fire, the woman who had healed me sat with half of a large fruit in her lap. She was not surprised to see me.
“This is the best spot to avoid insects,” she said as the smoke collected around her. She spat a cluster of black seeds onto the ground.
“May I?” I asked, gesturing to a tree stump out of the path of the smoke.
She nodded.
“Where did you go when we arrived?” I asked as I sat.
“To find you all lodgings. Though I see Jawar provided his own. He regards you very highly, to allow you to sleep in the trees.”
“He has been very kind to us. It helps that his wife is Emel’s sister.”
The woman smiled now, her mouth glistening like that of a child who had been indulging in sweets. “I thought as much.” She was occupied suddenly with her fingers, wiping them carefully one by one as she tossed the carcass of the fruit into the fire. “Did Jawar tell you what you needed to know?” she asked.
I stretched out my legs, again preparing for the pain and instead feeling relief.
“He knew some, but not enough. We will begin our return to Almulihi tonight. Tomorrow night?” I looked up. “I cannot see the damned moon.”
The woman smiled. “Tonight. Sunrise is closer than sunset.” She drank from her goatskin. “You will give up?”
“If you want to call it that. But,” I took a deep breath, feeling that just as Emel decided she could trust this woman, I could do the same. “My city is without its king. I cannot leave it long. I was being foolishly hopeful, I think, wanting to find my family.”
“Wanting your family does not make you a fool.”
“No, but abandoning your duties to find them does. My brother poses a risk, and it was not wise to seek him out here. If he wants me gone, he’ll come to me. If he hears of my absence in Almulihi, I worry what he will do.”
“I have heard of that brother. The second to the throne. Of course he poses risk. People talk of both seaside sons. Spoiled, entitled.”
“Ah, yes.” I had heard it hundreds of times. Before, I did not care. Let them think what they want. Now, I wanted them to know I was not the same man I was before. I was changed.
The woman folded her hands together and leaned on her knees. “But I can see they were wrong about at least one.”
The pleasure that resulted from her compliment was indulgent. I did not need the approval of a stranger. Yet here I was, unable to meet her eyes.
She said, “And the woman you sought?”
“My sister. I want her to be alive.” I took a deep breath, uncaring of my candor. “Desperately. She might be, but I do not know how to find her.”
“What made you think she was alive?”
“I received a letter from her that made me think it true.”
“A letter.”
“Arrived without address, without seal. No way to find her. Almost like magic.” I met her stare then. My conviction hung in the air.
“Magic?” she said, taking my bait. Her brow creased as she leaned away. “This is something you believe?”
“Only when things go unexplained. Like an impossibly-healed wound.”
The woman frowned at the accusation. “And what of the girl you are with?”
“Emel?” It was a strange change in topic.
“Where does she come into this? Why is she here with you?”
“Her life was threatened.” By my brother, I could not bring myself to say. Too much shame. It is one thing to have a brother want your throne. Another entirely for that brother to attempt to kill an innocent.
“Why?”
Why? It was a strange question, and one I realized I could not answer. I had not asked her why Kassim had tried to kill her. Did Emel know?
“So that is the only reason you have brought her. For protection?”
I was silent.
“I thought so,” the woman said. “The way she watched you when you were ill . . .” She turned her hands, knuckles to palms, palms to knuckles. “Like she owed you everything. Like she would give anything in return.” She leaned forward. “Saalim, do you know when she left you and your men that night she found me? She came to me, running, wild-eyed. She could have been lost. She would have lost you all in the dark like that. It was a fool’s move. Do you know what she said when I told her so? That she had nothing more she could lose.”
The flames were tall in front of me, illuminating the branches above, creating shadowed movement though there was nothing there.
“Have you considered,” she asked, “what you might owe her?”
The question was strange. Something in her words struck cords of thought I had been holding taut. Something was there, but I did not understand what she knew about it.
She grew stern. “Tell her now if you plan to refuse her. While she can still return to her home.”
“I won’t tell her . . .” I stopped myself. This woman had no business discussing this with me.
“Look at you, fidgeting with your hands, staring at the ground, unable to finish your words. A boy in love, indeed.” Though she chided me, it was done gently, and I did not take offense. “So this is how the king of Almulihi feels about a salt chaser?” I heard the surprise in her words.
“I am betrothed.” Elbows resting on my knees, I watched the fire.
Who was this woman who called me Saalim and called my home Almulihi as if she had been born there? The flames were reaching, reaching, reaching up high. Reaching for air, for something they could not grasp. I felt like this woman and I were reaching for the same thing.
“Have you figured it out?” she asked, and her voice was changed. It was naggingly familiar. I turned to her, and the woman sitting there was no longer the stranger who had healed me. She was changed. She was someone else entirely . . .
She said, “Never did I think I would see the day my brother turned soft for a woman of the sand.”
I barely heard the words, barely registered their meaning.
“Edala?” I stood up in a swift movement, both wanting to move toward her and away from her. She smiled, and I knew she could be no one else. I went to her, desperate for my family. She was all there: the impatience, the slyness, the self-satisfaction. “How?” I asked as I drew her to me. She felt the same as I remembered her. All bones and sinew.
When we sat back down, I stared at her, unable to turn away from the sister I thought I would never see again.
“That same magic you speak of,” she said.
“But . . . how?” I pressed. “It was you this whole time?”
She nodded.
“Why did you not reveal yourself sooner?”
“I had to be sure of who you were.” She waved her hands to stop me before I even started. “I knew you were my brother. But who you were, eh? Had you changed as the legends promised?” She smiled, then nodded. “You have.”
I stiffened. “Legends?”
“The lost prince who is a slave until he—” Seeing my face, she stopped. “Do you know of what I speak?”
I shook my head, feeling a little sick. Something about what she said felt both right and wrong. There were no legends about me. But then, why did I crave hearing the words like a lost nomad craves water?
“Don’t you have . . . ? Do you know . . . ?” She could not frame her question, chewing so much on her words. “Tell me: After Almulihi was attacked, what happened?”
I told her about how our father was so weak—had grown sick, did she know this?—that our mother had to kill him lest he be killed by the invaders. I told her how so many of the people died trying to fend off the army from the palace, how so many soldiers died, how Nadia was killed.
Edala looked away, holding her hand to her mouth, when I mentioned Nadia.
Our army defended the palace enough that eventually they retreated. I thought Kassim dead, Edala dead, because neither ever returned home. It seemed the news of what happened in Almulihi spread through the desert like wind, so many correspondences did I receive from people across the desert, across the sea, sending their condolences and mourning gifts. How could Kassim and Edala be alive and not have returned home immediately?
As I told this to Edala, the anger I had harbored toward her and my brother surfaced anew. That they left us, left our father sick. And to know that they were both alive. Gripping my knees, I thought of how I had grieved for them, for the loss of my entire family. They had been alive this whole time, selfishly biding their time until whenever they decided it was right to return.
And for Kassim, apparently, it was to steal the throne.
I wanted to lash Edala with my words, but her expression made me hold my tongue. Her cheeks were wet when she looked at me again, horror pulling her eyes and lips down. Her hands came up over her brow and she groaned.
“The worst part was that I could not return home. I could not return to you.”
“It was selfish of you to stay away,” I said.
“Masira,” she murmured, “is so cruel. Oh, Saalim.” She looked up at me, pleading. “There is so much that you are missing, so much that has happened. Does Emel know?”
“Know what?” I snapped, growing impatient.
“She must,” Edala whispered to herself. “That would explain everything. Of course, I thought she would have told you, but then perhaps not.” She looked at me again. “Let me start at the beginning.” She took a deep breath, then began.
The palace had never felt like home for Edala. Maybe it was because there was always tension—between Kassim and myself, between my mother and father, between Edala and my mother—or maybe it was because life as a royal was not what she had ever wanted.
“Being a princess, to smile and be dressed in beautiful gowns to receive gifts, never did attract me as it did Nadia. And I fell in love, Saalim,” she said quietly. Never would I have thought Edala and I confessing our secret loves to each other. She stared in the direction of the tree homes as she spoke. “Father forbade it, see, because he was not royal.” So Edala went to Zahar.
Zahar let Edala spend days and nights at her home, allowing Edala the escape from the life she resented. Hidden in the palace gardens, Zahar taught her magic.
“She saw my unhappiness and was so kind to me that I couldn’t see that she was driving the wedge further. I couldn’t know what she planned . . .” Remorse made thick her words.
Zahar was a very capable enchantress. She was powerful. But Edala saw what it took to get that power, and knew she could have more. She went into the desert. “Father wouldn’t allow me the life I wanted with the man I loved, so I would leave. I went to study, not to visit settlements, as I had said.”
She learned about sacrifice and what was needed to take what she wanted from Masira.
“When I thought I could give no more and still had not achieved the connection to the goddess I wanted, I decided I would try once more. I would give her my soul.”
Edala left her tent at high sun and journeyed well away from shade or shelter. She lay on her back, letting the sand burn her skin, letting the sun burn her body. It was painful, torturous, as the heat sucked her dry. If she died, she would die trying to have more magic than any enchanter could ever have. Finally, when she thought she could bear it no longer, she pretended she was a scorpion with a hard shell that protected her from the sun. She closed her eyes and believed it. When she opened her eyes again, she had become exactly that.
“Masira took my soul,” Edala said. “But she did not keep it. She gave it back and with it, she gave me everything. I am not at her mercy like an enchantress, who is fatigued by her use of magic. Or like jinn, who are bound by the ropes of their master and Masira. I am a si’la. I am free.”
I was silent. I had only heard of si’la from legends. A shape-shifting, all-powerful spirit often described as evil. I told her what I knew, and she laughed.
“Yes, well they say that about jinn, and I can tell you that is not always true.” She looked at me with a knowing glance that I did not understand.
“So you are magic.” I exhaled. “That does not yet explain everything.”
“No,” she agreed. “It explains nothing. Saalim, have you heard the legend of the jinni and the ahira?”
Puzzled, I stared at her. “No, but Emel told me something . . .” It was when I was ill. I did not remember it well.
Edala nodded. “She does remember.” Then she told me the story again.
A prince was trapped in a vessel after he begged an enchantress to save his home. He was forced to serve the wishes of others while his city crumbled to ruins, transformed into a place only of legends. His home would only be able to be restored when the prince was freed. He was a slave to one man after another until one day, an unusual master found him. She was an ahira, bound to her father’s court. A slave like the jinni.
They fell in love, and when she was threatened to be sent away from her home—from the jinni—she made a final wish of freedom. The wish made the jinni human again so that he could become the king of his restored home.
“And what of the ahira?” I asked, heart racing.
“It seems she followed him home,” Edala whispered. “Madinat Almulihi was his home. The enchantress was Zahar. You were the prince.”
Chills swept down my neck. I clenched my fists tightly, willing this story to be false. “It is impossible.” But even as I said it, I knew it was not.
“I can prove it.”
“How?” The word was barely audible over my pounding heart.
“I can give you back the memories Masira has kept from you.”
My eyes flashed to hers. “What do you mean?”
“When Emel wished for freedom, Masira gave her what she wished. But the goddess covers her tracks. Those who would be affected by the change—by the resurrection of Almulihi when before it did not exist, by the change in the salt trades, by the presence of a king who had been absent for hundreds of years—had their memories smudged away. That includes you, Saalim. But you feel that emptiness, don’t you? That press of something that isn’t quite what it seems. That lingering feeling that there is something more. You feel it with Emel, don’t you?”
Searching through my mind for these memories felt like swimming in the canal. Open water, freedom, and then a wall of stone. Now that she said it, I felt it. The traces of what Masira had done.
“You can give me my memories back?”
“I can uncover Masira’s tracks. If you want me to,” she said. And I saw it again in her face: deep-seated pleasure that she had power, had out-smarted even a goddess.
It was not a question. I wanted all of what was rightfully mine back in hand. I looked up at the trees, the shadows still dancing above us, and saw the sky brightening from black into a deep blue.
What would those memories show? What would the ground reveal, turning up all that was buried? Was I ready to face that unknown and finally understand what had happened between Emel and me?
No.
Not yet.
First, I must finish with the past I knew.