I take care to remove all my jewels, especially the anklets, lest their tinkling wake the entire serai. Tiptoeing barefoot over the stone floors, I slip in and out of the darkness. The full moon could reveal me, but she’s consented to hide her beauty behind passing clouds, offering me safe passage through the latticed corridor. Valide would have me killed if she knew where I was going, but Si’la has assured me that Valide sleeps through the night—lulled into a slumber by the dream spells of the ruya peri who dwells in the serai. Still, I step lightly through the Courtyard of Eunuchs. If I rouse any of them, my wiles will be useless to dampen their suspicions.
The Passage of Concubines leads to the Forty Steps . . . down, down, down to the hastanesi reserved only for the women of the serai. With no trace of the moon, I am in utter darkness. But I have passed these stones thousands of times, and my fingers follow the cool walls until they reach a door that is almost forgotten.
Tonight, it is my portal to a tiny world outside my golden cage.
I step through the door into the second courtyard. The smallest of the courtyards, it lies abandoned. Even the gardeners have forsaken it in fear of the jinn that lurk in the trees. Though their branches arc and reach to the heavens, heavy with green leaves, the trunks of all the trees here are hollowed, carved out into perfectly smooth caverns. They say the jinn whittled away the trunks to create hiding places. In the center of the courtyard, two trees grafted together over the years stretch to the sky, branches intertwining like lovers’ arms. Their hollows meet to form the heart of the courtyard.
The night smells of damask roses.
He is near.