Duriya

This scene takes place a year or so after the previous one and contains spoilers for all three books.

The djinn woman picked up one of the freshly washed bandages by its very edge, as if dangling a spider. She sneered. “Is this a joke?”

Duriya glanced at the bandage. It looked perfectly respectable to her, scrubbed in water so hot it had left Duriya’s hands cracked, and then bleached dry by the sun.

“I don’t understand, ma’am,” she said, making herself sound as cowed as possible. She hated acting like this, but had long ago learned to school her tone around these demons. There was little a djinn enjoyed more than an opportunity to put a “dirt-blood” back in their place.

“They’re still damp. Can you not tell the difference between dry and wet cloth? If I put the bandages away like this, they’ll get musty. And unless you’d like to explain to Banu Manizheh why there’s mold growing in her supplies, you’ll go wash them again.”

The woman threw the rag back at Duriya. Duriya caught it, staring in despair at the laundry she’d just brought in. It was to have been her last basket before she was allowed to go home.

“Perhaps I could let them dry in the sun a bit longer,” Duriya offered. “I just took them off the line, I swear. They haven’t been—”

With a single kick, the djinn woman knocked the basket of bandages over. They spilled across the supply room floor. Not that the floor was dirty—nothing attached to the infirmary or its terrifying inhabitants was allowed to be unclean. The small army of shafit servants to which Duriya belonged spent all day and night sweeping floors, scrubbing laundry, and mopping up spills. The magical patients inside—to say nothing of the ebony-eyed bone-breakers who treated them—could not possibly be subjected to unsanitary conditions, not for a moment.

I wonder if they have any idea that the servants they rely on to keep their rooms so clean have to wade through wastewater in the shafit district every time it rains. I wonder if they’d care. None of that mattered, though. The rules of the infirmary were inviolate.

Duriya bowed her head. “Yes, ma’am.” Then she gathered her laundry and left.

It was an achingly gorgeous day, the sky bright and blue with jewel-toned songbirds warbling dreamy notes up in the trees. But Duriya pulled her scarf lower over her face as she left the infirmary wing and made her way along the isolated paths that led to the canal. It was best not to attract attention while alone in the palace: very few djinn came to the aid of a shafit maid. Such danger was one of the many risks of working here, the bargain one had to strike for the comparatively decent wages a palace position offered.

Risks that Duriya feared had grown more numerous. When she’d first taken a job at the palace, it had been serving Queen Saffiyeh and her little son, the heir to the djinn throne. The queen had been soft-spoken but kind, one of the few djinn who bothered to learn the names and see to the well-being of their shafit servants. Duriya had felt safe; no one touched a maid wearing the queen’s colors.

Now the queen was dead, and Duriya doubted her new Nahid masters had even noticed another face among their shafit washerwomen, let alone cared about her safety. Or even her life. Shafit were warned of many things upon being dragged to Daevabad, but there was one warning given above all others:

Avoid the black-eyed djinn, the ones who called themselves Daevas.

Gruesome stories circulated about these Daevas, who were said to live apart from the other djinn and worship flames instead of God. Duriya had been cautioned never to meet the gaze of a Daeva, never to speak in their presence unless spoken to, and never, ever to touch one—shafit had lost a hand for less. And her new Nahid masters were not only Daevas—they were the leaders of the Daevas. The last of an ancient dynasty said to have presided over a war to exterminate the shafit, fought by an army of magically enhanced warriors who could shoot sixty arrows at a time and bury entire cities alive.

Duriya wasn’t sure she believed all the rumors: this was a city of liars, after all. But the constant presence of armed soldiers in the infirmary—soldiers who didn’t take their hostile gazes off either of the Nahid siblings while they worked on djinn patients—was enough to make her wonder if perhaps it was time to start looking for another job.

The bank of the canal where they did laundry was empty. Duriya dunked the basket in the water and then set to laying out the wet bandages on a line of twine stretched across a sunny break in the trees. Despite her show of obsequiousness, she had little intention of actually scrubbing these damn rags a second time. Maybe musty bandages would help the djinn with their foul dispositions.

She worked fast. The canal had become a grim reminder of just how trapped she was in Daevabad, and she didn’t like to linger here. When Duriya had first started working in the palace, she had nearly wept upon seeing the rushing dark water that coursed through the garden. There were no rivers or streams in the shafit district, but here, at last, a chance presented itself.

For contrary to what she let most people believe, Daevabad and its djinn had not been Duriya’s first introduction to magic.

That introduction had come much earlier, on the banks of the Nile where a lonely little girl had made a most unusual lifelong friend. And so the first opportunity she had, Duriya had raced back to the canal. She called that friend the only way she knew, a way that had never failed her: biting her finger until it bled and plunging her hand into the cold water.

“Sobek!” she’d begged. “Please . . . please hear me, old friend. I need you!”

But if Sobek had been able to hear her cry in these foreign waters, he hadn’t followed it. Nor had he come any of the other times she’d tried to summon him. Perhaps he could not. He was the lord of the Nile, after all, and she was on the other side of the world from their Egypt. And yet that hadn’t stopped such a rescue from haunting her dreams. Dreams of the lake turning the rich brown of the Nile at flood and devouring the djinn city. Dreams of standing at Sobek’s side as he ripped apart the bounty hunter who’d captured her, his crocodile teeth stained with blood.

“Are there any djinn who can become animals?” Duriya had once asked Sister Fatumai. She and her father had met Hui Fatumai their first week of being dumped in the shafit district by the bounty hunter who’d kidnapped them. The Daevabad-born woman was an organizer among the shafit and made a point of helping new arrivals settle in. It had been Sister Fatumai who explained to them the ways of the magical city and put them in the care of the small Egyptian community who’d taken the pair into their homes.

When it came to Sobek and the question of magical creatures, however, Sister Fatumai had not been encouraging.

“I have heard the stories your people tell of djinn,” she’d replied. “Of their taking residence in cats and winged serpents, of hot breezes that sigh through trees and haunting cries that lure human victims to riverbanks. These are not those djinn. These ones are more like us; they believe they are the descendants of the great djinn that the Prophet Suleiman—peace be upon him—once punished. They are supposedly the weakest of the creatures of fire.”

Duriya had remembered the way the bounty hunter had whisked them away to Daevabad on a boat that flew across sand and sea and her first sight of the awe-inspiring city with its floating glass minarets, markets of shimmering cloth and dragon-scale ornaments.

“These djinn are the weakest?” she had repeated.

“Puts things in perspective, does it not?” Sister Fatumai had remarked. “Of the other creatures, I can tell you little. Much is a mystery even to the so-called pureblooded scholars of this city. It may be a mystery for God alone.”

There had been a quiet warning in those words, a diplomatic effort to change the subject. But desperate to find a way out of her situation, Duriya had pressed on. “I have met one of them.”

Sister Fatumai had dropped the basket of food she was unpacking. “You’ve what?”

“I’ve met one of them,” Duriya had insisted. “Back home. I’ve had a companion since I was a child, a spirit in the form of one of the crocodiles of the Nile. If I could summon him, I know he would bring my father and me home. He owes me a fav—”

Sister Fatumai’s hand had shot out to cover Duriya’s mouth, her brown eyes wide with alarm. “Daughter, if you want to survive this place, you need to forget you ever said such a thing. By the Most High . . . if a djinn heard you speak of summoning a river spirit, you and your father would be executed by the next morning—if you were lucky enough to live that long. Do you understand?”

Duriya did understand. She just hadn’t listened. She had still tried to summon Sobek. But as her years in this miserable city ground on, her hopes had died a slow, ugly death.

“Your face hasn’t changed since we arrived here,” her father had said softly the other week, touching her cheek. He always spoke softly now, the things that had happened during the long nights on their journey to Daevabad scarring them both. “Maybe you will age as the djinn do. Maybe God will grant you a long life like theirs.”

Just what I need—more centuries of scrubbing bloody rags in the canal. Duriya knew shafit did make lives for themselves here. They had no choice. They married and had children and made the most of things, believing in a justice that came in the next world.

But that wasn’t what Duriya wanted.

She stepped closer to the canal now and knelt on the damp bank. Her reflection came back to her in ripples on the surface. Would Sobek hear her if she gave more than a fistful of blood? If she cut deeper, deep enough to turn the water red? Would she fall into a sleep below the canal and be whisked home?

A sleep that would break your father’s heart, you mean?

Duriya shuddered. No, that was not an option. She took a few steps back, trying to shake off the despair that seemed to weigh upon her shoulders heavier each day. Her laundry wouldn’t be dry for some time, but she needed to get away from the canal.

So she headed for one of the few places that brought her pleasure.

 

The molokhia seeds had cost two months of Duriya’s salary, a sum she carefully stashed away each week until she had enough to visit the shrewd vegetable vendor at the market who made a business of smuggling seeds in from the human world with which to price-gouge his homesick shafit customers. Upon hearing her accent, he’d actually tried to charge her more—a trick he’d given up on the moment she threatened him with the curved razor-sharp knife she’d bought to mince the leaves once the plants had grown.

In truth, she would have paid even more. She and her father had lost so much: the jokes of their village, the thatched home that had housed generations of their family, the shawls and tapestries her late mother had weaved, and the raucous music of the festivals of saints. Duriya couldn’t bring any of that back, but she could make her father’s favorite dish. He was a far better cook than she was—so talented that he’d earned a spot in the palace kitchen—but the soup was simple enough that given the ingredients, Duriya could pull it off. And while a meal from back home might seem a small thing, she knew how much it would mean to him.

Having spent a fortune on the seeds, Duriya had been extra judicious in deciding where to plant them. Hers was a careful eye—she’d been raised in a farming village and under the tutelage of the lord of the Nile himself. And she’d found a great spot . . . well, sort of. There was one place in the garden that everyone seemed to avoid: the monstrously oversize orange grove that dominated the outer boundary of the infirmary grounds. The grove grew so thick that the fruit-laden boughs and enormous white blossoms formed an impenetrable wall. But on its eastern edge, the canal darted close, forming a narrow hidden triangle near the menacing jungle that offered her the perfect conditions of sun, moisture, and discretion. It was close enough to the infirmary that Duriya could easily sneak away to tend to her plants even if she had to take care to avoid the Daeva gardeners; they were the only ones permitted to touch the Nahid healing herbs grown nearby.

Absorbed in her thoughts and briefly dazzled by the bright sunshine as she left the shadow of a towering cedar, Duriya was nearly upon her bed of covert plants before she realized she was not alone. A gardener—dressed in a dirt-streaked tunic with the sleeves rolled up to reveal pale golden arms—was on his hands and knees on the rich patch of soil that until recently had hosted molokhia plants tall enough to brush her waist. Plants that had cost her weeks of wages and which she had tenderly coaxed from the ground, inhaling the scent that reminded her of home and praying that the gift she would prepare for her father might make him finally smile again.

The plants had been violently ripped out by the roots. Her hard work and lost wages now lay discarded on a pile of weeds. Only a single molokhia plant remained rooted in the ground, and as she watched, the gardener, his back still to her, reached for it.

Duriya’s good sense—the wisdom that led her to lower her head before her dry-linen-obsessed mistress and shut her mouth about Sobek—vanished.

“Don’t touch that!” She lunged for the gardener’s hand. He jumped and turned around in surprise . . . which meant that instead of wrenching his wrist away, Duriya struck him hard across the mouth. He yelped and fell back, landing flat on his ass in the dirt.

Wide, astonished black eyes met hers. She’d hit the man hard enough to tear the white veil from his face and draw blood from his lip. He stared at her, completely speechless.

Then the gash in his lip began to heal. The skin knotted together, scabbed over, and then the wound was gone, leaving nothing but a few drops of ebony blood on his ruined veil.

The veil . . . oh, God. There was only one man in the palace who wore a white face veil and whose injuries healed in moments.

Duriya had just punched the Baga Nahid himself in the face. Over molokhia.

Her hand flew to her own mouth in horror. By the Most High, what had she just done? Should she run? The shafit were all the same to these people; surely if she fled, Baga Rustam would never be able to pick her out of the crowd of part humans who tended to his needs.

But if he did? If they came for her father?

Duriya dropped to her knees. “Forgive me, my lord!” she cried in halting Djinnistani. She had always struggled with the language and did so even more when she was anxious. “If I . . .”—oh, for God’s sake, how did she express had known?—“I do not hit you, the Nahid.”

Confusion knit his brows together. Duriya was clearly not saying that correctly.

She tried again. “I do not . . . see?” Is that the word? “Aware—”

“Speak your tongue.” The Baga Nahid’s Djinnistani was clear and slow. “Your language.”

“My language?” she repeated, torn between uncertainty and fear. But when he only nodded, she switched to Arabic, figuring it was worth the slim chance of avoiding execution. “Forgive me,” she said again, far more smoothly. “I did not realize who you were. If I had, I would never have dared touch you. Or interrupt you,” Duriya added in a rush, remembering this was technically his patch of dirt she was commandeering to grow her plants.

The Baga Nahid had been watching her face while she spoke, his gaze moving between her mouth and her eyes as though studying her response. “So you would have hit another person?”

He asked the question in Egyptian Arabic so flawless Duriya jumped. “How did you . . . I mean, no,” she said quickly. This was not the time to question how some fire doctor from another realm spoke Egyptian Arabic. “It’s only that . . . these plants are precious to me. When I saw you about to pull the last, I reacted without thinking.”

His eyes narrowed. By the Most High, they were unsettling, blacker than coal, blacker than any that could be construed as human. She shivered, and once she started, it was impossible to stop. Oh, God, this was it. He was going to kill her. To break her neck with a snap of his fingers or, worse, give her to his sister. People said Banu Manizheh liked to experiment on shafit, that if she caught you, she’d force poisons down your throat that would melt your organs from the inside out and grind your bones to dust for her potions.

“I’m sorry,” Duriya whispered again. She stayed on her knees and dropped her gaze. That was how djinn liked shafit. “Please don’t hurt me.”

“Hurt you? Creator, no.” Now it was the Baga Nahid who sounded flustered. “You just surprised me. I get lost in my thoughts when I garden and was not quite expecting to get set upon by a mysterious woman bursting out of the jungle.” From the corner of her eye, she saw him rise to his feet and brush the dirt from his clothes. “Let me help you.”

Baga Rustam reached for her hand, and Duriya was too astonished by his doing so to do anything but let him pull her to her feet. Once she was standing, she promptly stepped back and snatched her hand away.

The Daeva healer didn’t seem to notice—or perhaps if he did, he was simply accustomed to such a reaction. “Why do you say they’re precious?” he asked.

Duriya stared at him. “What?” She was still trying to wrap her mind around the fact that she had attacked one of the most dangerous men in Daevabad. Having a conversation with him about molokhia seemed too far into the world of the bizarre.

“The plants I was weeding.” His Arabic had gone from Egyptian to the exact dialect and accent of her village, and the effect was thoroughly disconcerting. She did now recall hearing the Nahids had some sort of sorcery with language, but this went beyond her wildest imaginings. “Why did you say they’re precious?” he pressed.

There seemed little harm in answering honestly. “They’re not weeds. They’re a vegetable called molokhia. I bought the seeds at the market.”

“And decided to grow them in my garden?”

Duriya flushed. “You have good soil. But I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have. It’s just—my father has been so homesick. I thought if I made his favorite dish . . .”

His expression immediately softened. “I see. Well. I would not wish to thwart the hard work of a kindhearted daughter.”

Rustam knelt back on the ground. He slid his fingers into the dark earth, and it burst into life.

Seedlings shot up and around his hands in pale green swarming tendrils. They rose as if time itself had sped up, unfurling leaves and stalks that soon dwarfed the Baga Nahid’s hunched form. Duriya’s mouth fell open in astonishment as a bed of molokhia even lusher than her own grew tall around them. The emerald leaves tickled her arms.

“There,” the Baga Nahid said. He had to beat back some of the plants to escape; the leaves were grasping and clinging to his arms and legs like needy children. “I pray that makes up for my indiscriminate weeding.”

“How did you . . . why did you?” she breathed.

“There were enough roots remaining.” Rustam wiped his hands on his knees and then shrugged as if he hadn’t just performed a miracle. “I feel like I should be asking you how. It’s not the average person who can get a new plant to take root in my garden.”

Pride warmed in her. “Well, like I said, you do have good soil. It didn’t take much else besides the usual methods.”

“The usual methods?”

Was she really discussing gardening with the Baga Nahid? Duriya was starting to wonder if perhaps she’d hit her head during their tussle and this was all a dream. “Back home, we use a blend of ash and rotting water lily to encourage the seeds to grow. And of course we mix manure in with the dirt.”

Rustam frowned. “Manure?”

Surely a gardener as skilled as himself knew what manure was. Maybe his language abilities weren’t as adept as they seemed. “Animal droppings.”

His eyes went wide. “Animal droppings?” he repeated. “You used animal droppings—next to my orange grove—to grow your seeds?”

“It’s what we do back home,” she protested. “I swear! I meant no disrespect. It’s a genuine technique, honestly, something even a child would know. I would never—”

Rustam laughed. It was an almost strangled sound, as though he didn’t laugh often, but it matched the bright mirth shining in his too-dark eyes. A smile flitted across his face, and Duriya found herself blushing deeper.

“Animal droppings . . . ,” Rustam marveled. “I suppose the Creator has yet some mysteries in store for me.” He met her gaze again. “Who are you?”

She hesitated, considering and disregarding a fake name. Perhaps it would have been best to remain anonymous, but she found herself wanting to tell him. “Duriya.”

“Duriya. I am Rustam, though I suspect you know that.” There was a hint of self-deprecation in the curve of his lips. “And where is your land of molokhia grown in this manure?”

Duriya could not help but return his smile. “Egypt.”

“Duriya of Egypt.” Rustam said her name as though it were a title, and though the effect might have been mocking from another djinn, there was nothing but warmth in his voice. “I have seen you before. You are a washerwoman in the infirmary, yes?”

“I am, but I’d be surprised if you’ve noticed me. We try to stay out of the way.”

“I’ve seen you doing laundry at the canal with the other women. You—you have a rather memorable smile.” He colored slightly as he said it and faltered. “Do you . . . ah, do you like your work?”

Did she like washing rags for vicious djinn? Was he asking in truth? “The wages are acceptable,” she said evenly.

He chuckled. “A diplomatic response.” He hesitated, dropping his gaze. “Would you perhaps like to work here instead? In the garden, I mean. For me.”

“You want me to work in your garden?”

“What can I say? I find myself intrigued by these human methods of which I am so ignorant and a human child so informed. Who knows what else you may teach me?”

Duriya was wary. The Baga Nahid seemed friendly enough—far kinder than the stories had made him out to be—but Duriya had learned the hard way not to trust djinn. “Is that an invitation you often extend to women who leave you bloody?”

Rustam met her eyes. “It’s an invitation I’ve never extended to anyone.”

Oh. Duriya’s heart beat a bit faster. She wondered if he heard it. People said the Nahids could do that.

People said the Nahids could do so much worse. These were the holy men and women of the black-eyed Daevas she’d been told to never, ever get involved with. The ones under guard day and night because they were considered so dangerous. And now she was flirting—she might as well admit they’d moved into that—with the Baga Nahid himself in his garden.

People said so much, and she wondered just how many had actually met a Nahid.

Her courage returned. “I’ve heard your people don’t like mine,” she said bluntly. “You’d have someone with human blood working in your garden? Is that even allowed?”

“Deciding who works in my garden is one of the few freedoms I have left.” His mouth twisted in a bitter expression, but then it was gone and Rustam merely looked nervous. He reached for his veil, fumbling with the ties. “But only if you’re interested. Truly. I would not fault you a rejection.”

A rejection was probably the wise choice. Duriya was neither young nor a fool, and even as he veiled his face once again, she did not miss the redness in Rustam’s cheeks. Washing rags for vicious djinn could be insufferable, but catching the eye of the Baga Nahid seemed dangerous on an entirely different level.

And is that how you’ll spend your decades here? Your centuries? Feeling a bit bolder, Duriya studied his hands, his long fingers stained with the dirt from which he’d regrown her molokhia, and then looked into the darkness of his gentle eyes.

She took a deep breath. “Do you like soup, Baga Rustam?”

He blinked. “What?”

Duriya ran a hand through the molokhia plants. “You’ve grown them to maturity. Perhaps I can make the soup I attacked you over and we can discuss a fair salary?”

Rustam’s eyes crinkled in a smile. “That sounds delightful.”