“Please,” she whispers, dropping her hood. “Don’t say anything.”
The peasants stare at her, then cry out in alarm when a guard storms through the door. He looks around, and the people recoil, faces averted. Caspida lets her hair hang over her face, hiding her features. The guard lifts a lip as he looks around, then wordlessly steps out again.
Caspida stands and pulls her hood back over her face. “Thank you,” she says. “I . . .”
She stares at the meager meal they are sharing, at the crying baby and the four skinny, half-starved children. “I’m so sorry. I will not forget you. I swear it.”
She slips out the door and dashes back the way she’d come, wandering at random up and down streets, all the while gradually heading south. She is shaken and afraid, her breathing fast, her pulse racing. I can sense the clamminess of her skin.
Eventually she reaches the southern city gates, only to find the traffic going out has been reduced to a trickle as the guards question every person attempting to leave. Caspida stands uncertainly, tucked out of sight between a stall selling fig jam and a pair of men arguing over the price of a cart filled with fish.
After a short deliberation, the princess starts forward. The square in front of the gate is growing crowded with murky forms that seem to swim in the gloomy light. Several people carry torches, flickering beacons that circulate through the darkness. Voices, still hushed and yawning, murmur like a flowing current, into which Caspida dips and flows like a minnow. When she reaches the gate, she sidles up to a man holding the reins of a half dozen camels, waiting his turn to exit the city.
“What’s going on?” she asks the drover.
He shrugs and scratches a sore on his cheek. “They’re looking for someone, I’d guess.”
She nods absently, then suddenly lashes out, cutting through the camels’ ropes with a blade that she seems to conjure out of the air. As the drover cries out indignantly, she grabs a torch out of the hand of a startled spice vendor and waves it in the camels’ faces. The animals bray in alarm and bolt, kicking and tossing their heads. Screams break out as people and stalls are knocked over, and the guards at the gate are distracted just long enough for Caspida to slip past them.
Outside the city, the princess breaks into a run. She barrels down the dusty street, dodging the incoming fishermen bringing up their first catches of the day, as shouting and cursing break out around the gate, where the spooked camels are causing a panic that spreads to the other animals in the area.
The road takes a sharp downward turn, zigzagging across the face of the cliffs to the beaches below, which glitter with the fires of the fishermen and their huts. Farther out, ships rest quietly in the bay, rocking back and forth on the incoming tide. Everything is still and quiet outside the city walls, waiting for dawn.
Caspida leaves the road and crosses the wide crest of land until she comes to where the cliff drops away, her boots and trousers turning damp from dew in the tall grass. She walks along the cliff’s edge until the beach below dwindles and she is standing on the farthest point of land, staring out at the wide, wide sea. To her left, the horizon burns red, where the gods light their hearths in preparation for the day.
It is nearly dawn.
Aladdin is minutes from death.
My mind is filled with the last image I have of Aladdin: being dragged away to his death. Despair closes on me like the jaws of some great beast. Is he dead already? Would I feel it if he were? Even if he’s still alive, even if there are a few minutes remaining to him, his last and only hope is standing on the edge of this cliff, too far away to do him any good, on the verge of destroying the one thing that could save him.
Perhaps I’d have a chance if I were free, but Nardukha is either taking his time or not coming at all. Even if he does fulfill his end of the bargain, it will be too late for Aladdin.
Caspida draws out the lamp, letting her hood fall back. A salty breeze rustles her hair. Far, far below, the black sea froths at the cliffs. I recoil inside the lamp, immobilized with dread.
Please, please just let me out. Let me speak, oh, just let me have one last chance!
If Caspida lets the sea take me, I will sink to its depths and likely rest there until the end of days. I have spent five hundred years sleeping in darkness. Five hundred more, and I will crack. I will split into a thousand pieces, and I will go mad.
I have known mad jinn. They are worse than monsters.
I begin to rage inside my lamp, throwing myself against the brass walls with the force of a stampeding bull. It will not make a difference to her. I could be a feather, I could be a lump of stone—the lamp would feel no lighter, no heavier. I could crash into one wall with all my force, but she would notice nothing. The interior of my prison is a pocket in the fabric of the universe. When I am in it, I am like a man with one foot on sand and one foot in water—neither here nor there, neither in this world nor out of it.
I have one hope.
Rub the lamp, I urge the princess. Rub the lamp, rub the lamp, give me just one chance—
The feel of the sea is stronger now; she must be holding me over the cliff, dangling me over the water. Any moment now and her fingers will release the lamp and I will fall and the waves and darkness and eternity and madness will suck me down, down, down—
All I need is a brush of finger on brass, the caress of palm . . .
Then I feel it: Caspida pulls back and rubs the lamp vigorously, her hands shaking.
I plunge out of the spout and pour downward. Below me is the dark sea and the white froth and the sharp rocks, crashing like a storm, hungry like a beast.
I quickly reverse direction and stream, scarlet smoke, over Caspida’s hands and wrists. As I rise, my airy tendrils coalesce into hard, sleek scales, until I am a white snake with blue eyes coiling up her arm, fast as lightning. I slither over her shoulder and around her neck and, as I intended, she stumbles backward in horror, away from the edge.
I shift to a less threatening form: a soft gray kitten the size of her hand. I perch on her shoulder and mewl in her ear, so pitifully that the Blood King of Danien himself would have melted for a moment.
Caspida is tense as stone. She freezes, but her eyes watch me sidelong, her breath shallow. It seems she has been struck dumb by my escape.
“Zahra.” A tremor weakens her voice.
Shifting again, this time to my usual human form, dressed in ethereal white silk that flutters in the ocean wind, I stand in front of her and meet her gaze.
“I am the Slave of the Lamp,” I whisper. “The mighty Jinni of Ambadya. I hold the power to grant your desires thrice.” She stares, eyes as cold as the northern sky, as the required ancient words fall from my lips. I feel the edge of the cliff beneath my heel; a few clumps of dirt come loose and tumble down. “Princess, why did you let me out? Why did you not drop the lamp?”
“I had to know.” Her eyes harden. “You’re her, aren’t you? The monster who betrayed Roshana. You’re what the ring led to, and the thief had you all along.”
I look aside, at the eastern horizon, where the fires of dawn leap ever higher. Not much time. I envision a sword falling on Aladdin’s neck, and I shudder.
“I was there when Roshana died, it is true.” My voice is hard and clipped. There is no time for secrets, no time to pretend that the past does not have its hands locked around my throat. Aladdin will die if I cannot convince this princess to set aside five hundred years of hatred and fear.
“You killed her.”
“I loved Roshana,” I whisper. Unable to meet her gaze any longer—there is far too much of you in her, Habiba—I turn away and face the sea. “She was dearer to me than a sister. After more than three thousand years of slavery to cruel and selfish masters, I met your ancestress, the great Amulen queen. Not only clever and diplomatic but a fierce warrioress. Very like you, in fact. And unlike those countless mas
ters who came before, she was kind to me. She saw not an enemy, not a monster, but a . . . a girl.”
“Then tell me why you did it.”
Bowing my head in submission, I draw a deep breath. “I had no choice. I didn’t want to. When the king of the jinn learned how close Roshana and I had become, he came to punish us. We had broken the cardinal rule of Ambadya: that no jinni may love a human. There, on the summit of Mount Tissia, he commanded me to kill her—to strike down my dearest friend. I had no choice, for his power over me is absolute. I destroyed her, and then Nardukha sent his jinn to ravish the city of Neruby as a warning to all humans that his laws must be obeyed. But make no mistake: I can offer no excuses for what happened that day, for it was at my hand that Roshana met her fate. My love was her destruction.”
Caspida stares at me, the lamp gripped tightly in her hands. It is then that I realize it’s not Roshana’s death she is trying to understand, but her mother’s. I may not have killed her myself, but to Caspida, I may as well have.
“For five hundred years my sisterhood has passed down a sacred vow,” says Caspida coldly, “to destroy the one who destroyed our queen. You know this, and you speak these words only to deceive me as you deceived her. You would have me believe that you are capable of love.”
“Believe me when I say I wish that I were not!” Angrily I round on her. “I do not tell you this for myself! Aladdin will die any moment, and the only way to save him is if you make a wish! Please, Caspida—they will kill him at dawn!” I point at the horizon, where the sun is minutes away from rising. “Let me save him, I beg you!”
I drop to my knees before her, doing what I never thought I could: grovel before a human. My pride unravels into smoke, carried away on the wind. Always I have thought myself above these mortals—I, immortal, powerful, able to shift from this form to that. But I let all of that go now, and I beg as I have never begged before. “Do what you like with me after that, but just let me save him!” I dig my fingers into the earth, my eyes damp with tears. My voice falls to a cracked whisper. “Please.”
“Why?”
I raise my face, finding her gaze unyielding. “Because it was my idea. Him wishing to be made a prince. Courting you. Lying all these weeks. I manipulated him and used him, and now they will kill him for it.”
“Why would you lead him into the palace knowing that eventually the truth would come out and he would have to pay the price?”
“Because . . .” I grind my teeth together, wishing the earth would swallow me up. “Because I was trying to win my freedom. Your people had captured the prince of the jinn—Nardukha’s own son. The Shaitan sent me to free him, and in turn, he would free me from my lamp. If I failed, he planned to sink your city into the sea. I had to get into the palace. Aladdin was my only way in.”
“So you don’t deny that you’re a monster. You used him for your own ends.”
I drop my head. “I know what I am. I know nothing can excuse what I did to Roshana, or to Aladdin, or to you. I’ve wronged so many, and there is so much I wish I could take back. I can’t save Roshana. But please—I beg of you—let me save him.”
Caspida lowers to her knees and studies me. I meet her gaze, humbled utterly.
“You want me to believe that you love him,” she whispers.
“Yes.” The word is but a breath, a stir of air in my treacherous lungs. “We’re running out of time. I cannot reverse death or the hours. Time is the strongest magic, and no jinni—not even the Shaitan—can rewrite the past. Once Aladdin is gone, he is gone. Let me save him, and I can help you win your city.”
She stares at me long and hard before shaking her head. “No,” she says at last. “If I must rely on the magic of the jinn to deliver my people to me, then I don’t deserve to rule them. I will not be the latest fool you trick.”
She rises, her eyes hard, and I know nothing I can say will sway her. I plummet into despair, unable to move or think or breathe. This is it. Aladdin will die. I’ve killed him as surely I killed you, Habiba.
Caspida walks to the edge of the cliff, the lamp held in front of her. Her face is solemn, almost sorrowful, and I wonder if she has any regret for what she is about to do. I don’t have the will or energy to stop her. I can only stare blankly at the grass as my spirit drains from me.
“Goodbye, Zahra,” says the princess, and she pulls her arm back, preparing to throw the lamp.
“Do it, Princess,” says a voice, “and I will tear your head from your shoulders.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
I’M ON MY FEET IN A TRICE, throwing an arm out protectively across the princess, who lowers the lamp and stares.
Zhian stands just feet away, deceptively calm and well disguised in a human form, tall and darkly handsome, dressed in brilliant red robes that fade to black at the hems. They swirl around him, likely more his own doing than the wind’s. Zhian has always been fond of dramatic entrances.
“Who are you?” Caspida demands, and I can sense the effort she puts into making her voice remain strong.
Without taking my eyes from him, I whisper over my shoulder, “It’s Zhian. The jinn prince.”
She inhales sharply, but doesn’t flinch.
“Why are you here?” I ask Zhian.
He spreads his hands. “I bring good news, Zahra. I have been to Ambadya and back, and am here to tell you that my father is well pleased with you.”
Catching my breath, I feel Caspida’s eyes on me, narrow with suspicion. This isn’t helping my case, to have the King of the Jinn bestowing his favor on me in front of her.
“Well?” I ask softly.
Zhian’s mouth splits into a draconian smile. “He has agreed to grant you your freedom.”
My spirit leaps. I take a half step forward, hardly believing the words. There may be a chance to save Aladdin yet.
“You’re to come with me,” Zhian continues. “Back to Ambadya. You’ll receive your freedom before Nardukha’s throne.”
“No. It has to be here. It has to be now.” I look to the horizon, where a brilliant line of gold burns ever brighter. We have minutes left, maybe seconds, before Aladdin’s sentence is carried out.
“Don’t be ungrateful,” he growls. “Or you might inspire the Shaitan to have a change of heart.”
“He has no heart,” I spit. “Zhian, you must do it, this moment.”
“You know I can’t. You’re being invited home, to freedom and to me!” He scowls, his eyes darkening.
I am pulled in two directions, my soul quailing in the face of the choice in front of me. How long have I waited for this moment, these words? Freedom is mine for the taking—but if I take it, I will lose Aladdin forever.
“I—I can’t go yet. I have business to finish here.”
His gaze flickers to the princess. “With her?”
I know then that he didn’t overhear our conversation and that he still doesn’t know about Aladdin. I turn slightly to whisper to Caspida, “Princess, I know you don’t trust me, but you must believe me when I tell you this jinni will kill you. You have to make a wish. It’s the only way I can protect you. Take us back to the palace before—”
“What’s wrong with you?” interrupts Zhian, baring his teeth. He steps closer. “Zahra, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for. If you won’t come willingly, I’ll make you come. Give me the lamp, human!”
He makes a move toward Caspida, and the princess sucks in a breath and steps back, drawing her small blade. This only makes Zhian grin.
“And what will you do with that?” he says. “Prick me? I will crunch your bones and cast you to the ghuls for their sport.”
“No,” I murmur, stepping between them. “You won’t touch her, or the lamp.”
Zhian stiffens, his eyes flashing angrily. He looks from me to the princess, calculating, until at last a dark fury descends on his features.
&nbs
p; “The boy,” he murmurs. “The boy who had the lamp, the boy you argued with the night you found me in that jar.”
He rushes forward suddenly and grabs my wrist, twisting my arm savagely. I grit my teeth and hiss at him but don’t cry out. “Didn’t you learn your lesson? Or will my father have to make you kill this one too?”
He wraps a hand around my jaw, lowering his face until his breath is hot on my cheeks. “You little fool. You could have been free, you could have been with me, but instead you betray your own nature for another human. How many of them will you destroy with these whims of yours? How many cities must burn? I recall the last human you thought to call friend, and I recall how my father had you strike her down.” I feel Caspida gasp beside me as Zhian continues. “Yet you would commit the same crime again?”
I shift to smoke, and his hand closes on nothing, as I swirl around him and take shape again when I am out of reach. He turns away from Caspida. She still holds the lamp, and I throw her a pleading look. Come on, Caspida. You must make a wish!
“Do you realize what you’ll lose,” Zhian says, “if you do this?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
Zhian holds out a hand, suddenly quiet. “Forget this boy, Zahra, and come with me. All will be made right. This doesn’t have to end like last time.”
Swallowing, I shut my eyes, my skin clammy. A part of me yearns to take his hand, to give in to him, to finally, finally seize my freedom. I can almost picture it, the greatest prize, the deepest desire of my phantom heart. It tempts me more than anything ever could.
I think of all the places I could go, the things I could do, with no one to command me. No one to shut me up in my lamp. What it would feel like to finally be in control of my own power.
To grant my own wishes.
“Would you really trade an eternity of freedom,” Zhian says, and I open my eyes to meet his, “for a moment with this boy?”