Exquisite Captive (28 page)

More time, she needed more time. If Malek hadn’t wished for Draega’s Amulet, Raif could have killed him long ago—slipped her master a poison or used Nalia’s jade dagger to paralyze him. But neither Nalia nor anyone else could harm him. The client’s attempt to shoot Malek was proof of that. She longed for another way out of her bind with her master, but she kept coming back to what she knew had to be done. Telling him about Bashil wouldn’t help—she’d tried so many times over the years. Once, she’d even shown him an image of Bashil in smoke, but Malek had been impervious to her pain.
Nalia, I’m not letting you go to Arjinna to attempt a prison break. You’ll get yourself killed and I don’t want that on my conscience.
To which she’d replied,
I thought you didn’t have one.

Nalia tossed and turned, throwing off the covers one moment, then gathering them up to her chin the next. She had spent so many nights stranded on this unfamiliar shore. Nearly a thousand sunsets. It never became easier, knowing yet another day had passed in exile. Every night was a hopeless reckoning. Nalia thought she might burst with longing for the music of the phoenix cries around the palace’s highest towers or the smallest glimpse of the Qaf Mountains’ majesty. To have Bashil’s tiny hands around her waist and the taste of the cold, sweet water from the Infinite Lake. She wanted the soft, supple Ghan Aisouri leathers on her body, to be surrounded by the easy camaraderie of her sisters-in-arms.

Finally, when the homesickness became too much to bear, Nalia closed her eyes and pictured the palace garden, a refuge when her duties as a Ghan Aisouri became too much. She hardly breathed as she recreated it from memory, rendering each detail with painstaking precision. Then she opened her eyes and slipped out of bed.

Slowly, the antique furnishings of her room on Earth faded away. In their place rose the royal garden. Vines clung to the wallpaper, soft grass carpeted the wooden floor. The ceiling dissolved until it became the open sky itself, the layers of paint and plaster peeling back as rays of sunlight streamed over her. Nalia spun in a slow circle, grinning.

She could feel the heat of the Arjinnan sun on her face and the gentle caress of the breeze. A tinge of salt lacing the fragrant air told her the wind blew from the distant east, where the Arjinnan Sea licked the edge of the Qaf Mountain range. Nalia sat on the ground and brushed her hand over the tufts of soft grass that pillowed her aching body. Her bones whispered
home home home.

It was so real.

She lay on her back and gazed at the shimmering silver leaves of the large
widr
tree that had been her closest friend and confidante throughout her childhood, even more so than her gryphon, Thatur. On the hardest days—the days of blood and sick-making magical training—Nalia would throw herself upon its ancient roots and pour out her misgivings and fears, all those moments of indecision and shame. The tree took her mangled heart and made it new, harboring her confessions in its thick sap, entombing them forever.

Now Nalia placed the tips of her fingers against the smooth bark and brought her lips close to it. The tree didn’t feel like an illusion—her skin remembered the velvety wood and the spicy scent of the leaves.

“I am a coward,” she whispered.

The tree sighed beneath her words.

“I am a killer.”

She’d never forget the look in the revolutionary’s eyes as the light dimmed in them. Her hand had pressed against his heart, squeezing until the beats grew faint and finally stopped altogether.
Kir.
That was his name. Her mother had been so proud.

“Arjinna’s suffering is my fault.”

Why had she had the courage to save the Ifrit prisoner and not Kir? Maybe her remorse over the dead revolutionary was what had given Nalia a courage she’d never had before. Courage, but not wisdom.

“Malek.”

She wasn’t sure what she was confessing as she said his name; she knew there was something undeniably
wrong
in their relationship, and acknowledging that seemed like confession enough. He had woken up some part of her that had, she suspected, always been sleeping. She abhorred the bits of her that clung to him, that found comfort in his arms.

She wondered if she should confess the same about Raif, about how touching him felt like the most intimate thing she had ever done. She opened her mouth, ready to renounce him, but then realized,
no.
Whatever she’d felt with Raif hadn’t been wrong. Just unexpected.

The tree took in her words and left her blissfully empty. Not happy, no, never. But absolved, if only for a few forgetful moments. None of it was real—the tree or the feeling of suspended condemnation—but Nalia had done this so many times that she could pretend it was.

“Shundai,”
she whispered.
Thank you.

She pushed away from the trunk and lay back on her bed—now a soft tuft of grass—drinking in the sight above her.

Sunlight glinted off the
widr
leaves so that all Nalia saw was their diamond light and the sapphire sky peeking through them. She clutched long blades of grass in her fists and let the
widr
’s calming magic wash the death of this night off her.

A gust of wind brought the heady scent of a nearby bush bursting with vixen roses, so named because of their sumptuous, large petals and the hypnotic sway of their thin stems that hid minuscule, deadly thorns. Nalia turned her head: where her dresser had been, there was now a large bush of blood-red roses. The blossoms beckoned to her and she smiled. Behind them rose long purple grasses, home of trysts and other clandestine meetings that usually took place under the iridescent glow of Arjinna’s moons.

The garden was a riot of color, with flowers and vines covering the walls and twining around a gate made of pure gold. The air carried their rich aroma—honeysuckle and
calia nocturne
, rose and frangipani. Nalia stared at a patch of grass and willed her memory of Antharoe’s fountain into reality. The statue that stood in the center of the fountain was a perfect likeness of the famed Ghan Aisouri. Carved from a single slab of pink marble, the fountain’s base depicted the writhing forms of dozens of vanquished ghouls, so lifelike that Nalia could almost hear their guttural screams of agony. Antharoe stood above them, fierce and lovely, holding a sword which she plunged into the heart of a ghoul at her feet. Water spewed from the monster’s wounded chest, filling the fountain’s shallow base. Though Nalia knew Antharoe’s heroics were somewhat exaggerated, not the least of which because she’d apparently battled the monsters of children’s stories, Nalia still looked upon her with deep admiration.

If Antharoe had been wronged as Nalia had, witness to the massacre of her people and sold into slavery, would she have been willing to do what Nalia must in order to save the one person she loved? Nalia looked into the face of her ancestor for a long time. As her eyes grew heavy, the garden shivered and slowly faded away, like the last rays of a sunset. Soon, all that remained of the illusion was the faint scent of the
widr
tree and then, that too, disappeared.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

THE DREAM BEGAN, AS IT ALWAYS DID, RIGHT IN THE
middle of hell.

             
Ghan Aisouri blood is everywhere.

             
Thick pools of it soak into Nalia’s clothes, coat her lips, drip into her ears. Her blood, their blood. Red like fire, then brown like shit.

             
Nalia lies beneath the bodies, their weight pressing against her, still warm but growing cooler. The panic grows in her until she thinks she might scream—the weight of bones and flesh is crushing her.

             
She holds her breath, afraid that Haran and the other soldiers who tower over the bodies will see her chest rise and fall. They think her dead, and dead she will be unless she finds a way to escape the palace. It doesn’t matter that she can barely stay conscious or that the pain is whispering to her, telling Nalia to let her spirit go. She has to find Bashil. The image of her brother being whipped by the Ifrit soldiers pushes against her heart until she thinks it might burst.

             
She takes a breath. The air stinks of last words and meat left to rot in the sun.

             
“What should we do with them?” A gruff, Ifritian bark.

             
“Burn the bitches,” says a high, thin voice somewhere to Nalia’s left.

             
“No. The soldiers will not burn the bodies. They do not deserve eternity in the godlands.” Haran—she knows it is the Ifrit captain because he doesn’t speak, he commands. “They will hang the bodies above the castle gate. Let Arjinna know it has new masters.”

             
There is shuffling, cursing, spitting.

             
The pain cuts into her—how is she still alive?

             
If she has to die, she wants to go down fighting. She doesn’t want it to be from those fire rocks that have already ravaged her body and killed the other Ghan Aisouri. Guns—that’s what they are called. Human weapons. She learned about them from books, but never thought she would see them in real life. They are a human invention, beneath the jinn. Not magical. Not from the gods.

             
“Too bad we didn’t save some live ones, if you know what I mean,” says a voice over her. Bile rises in Nalia’s throat.

             
The body above her shifts. “This one would have been fun.” The sound of ripping fabric. “Look at the tits on her.”

             
A snort from across the pile of bodies. “Wouldn’t want what’s between her legs, now it’s cold as a fish.”

             
Her chiaan sparks, only a tiny flame, but maybe it’s enough to kill one of them—wrestle its spirit into the depths of the underworld.

             
The weight above her lightens and she hears a thump as the body joins a different pile. She knows her body is on top because the light suddenly burns behind her eyelids. She doesn’t breathe. This isn’t real—she and Bashil are playing the game in which one of them pretends to be dead while the other must use magic to bring the “dead” companion to life. Bashil loves this game because he will only be alive again if Nalia manifests his favorite sweetmeats. The game only works if you really seem dead.

             
There is a sharp intake of breath. Strong hands grab Nalia’s shoulders, shake her until her eyes fly open. Nalia screams as the face of her family’s killer smiles down at her. Haran. Suddenly, Nalia knows she is dreaming. But she can’t wake up. WAKE UP. She can’t, she can’t.

             
This isn’t how it happens,
Nalia thinks as she struggles in Haran’s grip. But somehow past and present are colliding and the dream is beginning to warp. Instead of being discovered by the slave trader before she can be strung up with the rest of the Aisouri, Haran knows that Nalia is not dead. This time, she cannot trick him. You lose the game if you open your eyes and take a breath.

             
“So here is Haran’s little mouse,” he says. The Ifrit cocks his head to the side, as though he is listening to a far-off, whispered conversation. “Somewhere in America, yes?”

             
He roughly brushes her hair aside and stares at the birthmark on the right side of her face, near her temple. Touches it. “Haran remembers you now.”

             
He holds up his hand where Nalia had bitten him when he’d captured her in the throne room. Her teeth marks make a half-moon in the space between his thumb and wrist.

             
Nalia spits in his face and he backhands her so hard she is certain her skull will burst open. Pain radiates from her stomach wounds as he pulls her body off the pile of corpses. Haran’s dirty nails dig into her arms, the skin cracking and bleeding.

             
“It is time for the
salfit
to die,” he growls.

             
The body next to her tumbles to the floor and she sees the corpse’s face: the sound that comes out of Nalia’s mouth is a howl, a shriek of pure pain, more animal than jinn.

             
Her mother’s lifeless violet eyes stare at nothing. A perfectly round bullet hole pierces the center of her forehead, like a crude jewel.

             
“No. Nononononono,” she screams.

             
Haran smiles and runs a finger along the line of blood that has dripped down her mother’s face. He licks it, moaning with pleasure.

             
“Delicious,” he says. “Come closer,” he whispers. “Haran wants to know what royalty tastes like.”

             
The ends of Haran’s teeth drip with her mother’s blood and he licks his lips as he shoves Nalia to the floor, straddling her. She thrashes in his arms, kicking and scratching, but he is too strong. She can’t get away—

“Nalia!
Hayati
, wake up.”

“Let go of me!” she screamed. She pushed at the hands that held her down.
“Hala shalinta! Hala shalinta!”

Gods forgive me. Gods forgive me.

She shouted the words, praying the gods would give her mercy when she died for all the deaths that were her fault and the thousand other transgressions she had committed.

Nalia squeezed her eyes shut against Haran, waiting for him to kill her, but instead, she heard a familiar voice, as though it were at the end of a tunnel, coming closer:

“Hayati
!”

She awoke with a start, kicking and screaming against the weight that held her against the bed. Her room was pitch black, but she felt her fists connect with flesh. A muffled curse and the body was off her. Her fingers immediately reached for the jade dagger under her pillow. One cut from the enchanted blade and her attacker would be paralyzed. It was in her hand and at Malek’s throat before she recognized him. She looked at her master, eyes wide, her blade a breath from his neck.