The Forbidden Wish (22 page)

I let my sixth sense wash over her. Her hands are still decorated with her wedding henna, but she looks far from bridal. Her black waistcoat and leggings hug her athletic form, and there are blades of every size and shape tucked into her belt, shoes, and even her tight braid.

Moving carefully, she lifts the lamp. When the bond forms between us, I am stunned at how remarkably familiar it feels—so much like being bonded to you, Habiba. Caspida hovers a moment longer over her sleeping uncle, her free hand straying to a knife at her belt.

But then there is a knock at the door, and she freezes.

“Lord Vizier?” calls a voice. “It is nearly dawn, my lord.”

She ghosts across the room, tucking herself behind the door as it slowly swings open. A guard pokes his head inside, and Caspida springs on him. She hooks an arm around his neck, plunging his head down to meet her rising knee. He drops, unconscious, and she drags him into the room. Sulifer stirs but does not wake.

Two more guards stand watch, and before they can shout out, Caspida drops one with a kick to his groin and a blow to his head, and the other with a blade across his throat. He sinks, blood running down his chest, and she steps over him, wiping scarlet specks from her cheek with a shaking hand.

Breathing a little harder, Caspida wraps the lamp in her cloak, ties the ends together, and slings it across her shoulders before heading out into the hall. She sets off, drawing her knife from her belt.

Faster and faster she moves, until she's running through the halls, making for the nearest exit. But then the creak of an opening door stops her short, and she sucks in a breath when Darian steps into the hall. He stiffens at the sight of the princess, and he looks around, his hand moving to his sheathed sword.

“Cas?”

“Hello, Darian.”

“What are you doing here? I've orders to throw you in the dungeon. Cas, they're going to
execute
you!”

Caspida's forehead wrinkles. “Cousin, surely you don't believe these ridiculous accusations. I was fooled by Aladdin as much as anyone. More so, in fact. I agreed to
marry
the bastard. You think I don't want his head as much as you?”

He bites his lip as he studies her, his gaze conflicted. “Ever since we were kids, Cas, it was supposed to be you and me.”

“I know,” she groans, rubbing her temples. “I've been such an idiot. My first duty has always been to our people, Darian, and I thought I was fulfilling that.” She lifts her eyes to meet his, and tears dangle from her kohl-lined lashes. “I can't expect you to forgive me, but I must beg it of you anyway. I've been monstrous to you.”

“Cas . . .” He opens his arms and she runs to him, her body shaking. He embraces her tightly, one hand around her waist, the other caressing her hair. “Cas, it's all right. Look, I believe you. I know Father will too, once we have a chance to talk about it. Everything just happened so fast today, we panicked. And you
ran
. Why did you run? It only made things worse for you.”

“Like you said, it all happened so fast.” She lifts her face to look at him. “I panicked too.”

“Oh, Cas.” He wraps her in his arms and kisses her hair. “This is why you need me. Ruling is difficult enough for a man—a girl like you can't expect to carry this burden on your own.”

“You're right,” she says softly. Her hands run down his back, gentle and inviting. “I've been such a child. So naïve. No wonder I fell for the thief's lies.”

“Marry me, Cas. Forget him.”

She tenses. “You . . . you'd take me back? After everything I've done?”

He smiles and lifts her chin. “It wasn't your fault, love. He manipulated you. You were alone and afraid, and he offered you strength. Naturally you were drawn to that. But he was a lie, and I am the truth. Let
me
be your strength. Let
me
help you see through the deceptions. I can protect you, Cas.”

He bends his neck and presses his lips against hers. Her eyes slide shut, and she melts into him.

“I love you, Cas,” he whispers.

“I know,” she says. “I'm sorry.”

He pulls away, his brows drawing together. “What?”

“Oh, cousin.” She cups his face in her hands, her eyes filled with pity. “You want so desperately to be loved. If you'd stop being an ass for five minutes, maybe someone could.”

He begins coughing, and his legs weaken. He topples forward, and Caspida supports him.

“You
whore
 . . .” he gasps.

“Sh. It'll go easier if you don't talk.”

Darian's lips and fingernails are turning bluer by the second, and he fights to breathe. Caspida gently lowers him to the floor, stroking his hair and murmuring consolingly as he gags and twitches. She pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the rest of the creamy red crimsonleaf poultice from her lips. His eyes fix on her, wild and frightened.

“You'll pass out, then wake in an hour,” she murmurs. “You'll have a terrible headache for days, but you'll live. I could have killed you, Darian. But we were friends once, you and I, so I'll give you this one chance.” She kisses his forehead, then bolts upright when shouting breaks out down the corridor, from Sulifer's rooms. Dropping Darian, she flees.

Footsteps pound after her, and Sulifer's angry shouts ring out. Torchlight begins bouncing wildly on the walls behind and ahead. Caspida is trapped.

The princess skids to a halt, her braid whipping as she looks back and forth between the guards sprinting toward her. Then she runs to a window, kicking out the carved trellis covering the opening. She gets one leg over the casement as Sulifer, flanked by guards, runs into view and calls out, “Stop her!”

Caspida throws herself out the window.

W
E'RE ON THE SECOND STORY,
and her landing is painful. She hits the ground and rolls, but still the impact knocks the wind out of her and wrenches her ankle. Sucking in the pain, she is up and running by the time the guards reach the window.

Arrows slam into the ground around her. Caspida ducks and runs faster, hopping on her wounded ankle.

“Kill her if you must!” Sulifer yells. “She is a traitor!”

The palace grounds are extensive, thick with night guards and with little cover to shelter Caspida as she flees across the wide stretch of grass in front of the palace. A storm of shouts fills the air, and torches flare up along the outer wall, toward which she is sprinting. The lamp bounces on her back until I am quite dizzied.

Two guards intercept her, and the princess doesn't hesitate. She swings the cloak with the lamp inside, clouting one on the head—and sending sparks of pain dancing through me—while she uses the momentum of the swing to whirl into a kick. Her foot strikes the
second guard's jaw and sends him reeling. Without waiting to finish him off, Caspida dashes the rest of the way, grimacing with pain.

When she reaches the wall, she clenches the cloak in her teeth and begins climbing, finding footholds in the eroded mortar between the bricks. Arrows stud the wall around her, striking sparks as they clash with the stone, before falling away. The walls are nearly as high as the palace, and her climb is perilous, but she continues doggedly on.

“Hand!” cries a voice from above. Khavar and Nessa are leaning over the top of the parapet, and they grab Caspida's hands and pull her up.

“Looks like it went smoothly,” says Nessa, frowning at the oncoming wave of soldiers.

The guards posted on this section of the wall lie senseless, hands bound with their own belts. But farther down the walls, to the right and left, others are now charging our way.

“Cas, you all right?” asks Nessa.

“Let's just keep moving,” says the princess stonily.

Khavar already has a rope tied around the rampart, and she throws it wide. Without waiting to check if it's secure, Caspida wraps the end of the cloak around her hands, grabs the rope, and slides down, planting her feet against the wall to slow her descent. The other girls follow.

Ensi and Raz are waiting below, furiously fending off a handful of guards. The air glitters with crimsonleaf powder, which Ensi slings in wide arcs. The quarters too close for Raz to use her bow, she makes do with a small curved scimitar.

“Hurry!” Ensi cries. “I'm running out!”

Caspida, Khavar, and Nessa drop to the ground in quick
succession, just as the one remaining guard reaches Ensi and raises his sword, poised to take off her head with one strike.

Moving in a blur, Caspida whips out a knife and throws it. The blade sinks into the man's shoulder with such force that he drops the sword and stumbles backward, screaming.

“Let's
go
!” Caspida yells.

The girls cut right and race along the outer wall. When guards take position above and begin firing arrows, they dive behind an abandoned cart of cabbages.

“What now?” cries Ensi.

“We have to go south, through the city,” says Caspida.

“This is a disaster,” moans Khavar. “Poor Gao is so stressed.” She strokes the head of her snake, which emerges from her collar.

“Your
snake
is stressed?” hisses Nessa.

“Everyone quiet!” Caspida orders. “Get this cart moving. Stay low, and it'll block their shots.”

The girls, still crouched, grab the side of the cart and begin rolling it forward. Arrows pound into the other side and sink into the cabbages with a wet sound very much like flesh. Bits of leafy greens rain down on their heads.

“Ugh,” says Ensi. “I
hate
cabbage.”

Caspida hazards a look over the cart, ducking swiftly when an arrow drives into the wall above her head. “Not much farther.”

I have a sickening sense of where we are going, and trapped as I am, there is no way to plead my case, to make her see the truth. Panic begins pulsing through me. I swirl around and around, curling and twisting with dread.
Stop, please, let's talk, let's think this through, I can help you . . .

The girls reach the wall separating the palace district from the
common one and hurtle over it like a troupe of acrobats, dropping to the other side, oblivious to my cries.

Caspida glances up and down the wall. “They'll not stop here.”

The city is waking as the girls hurry through the streets. Though the sun is still hidden, the sky is turning faintly lighter, and the smells of baking bread and brewing tea waft through the air. The girls are forced to slow their pace, to blend in to the early crowd of yawning commoners on their way to set up stalls in the market. Caspida leads the way, moving with familiarity along the alleys and side streets that bend crookedly between the looming buildings. The others keep a sharp eye out, all of them walking in a tight knot, still hidden in the predawn gloom by their dark clothing. Caspida ties the lamp to her belt so she can draw her cloak around herself, her hood low over her face.

“Guards to the left,” murmurs Khavar. “Don't look, but they're coming this way.”

“Have they seen us?” asks Caspida.

“Not yet. We should split up. They're looking for a group of girls. Separately we'd have a better chance.”

But it's too late. The guards catch sight of them, shouting out and drawing their weapons. The Watchmaidens peel away in all directions, and the princess bolts into an alley. She ducks into a doorway, swiping aside the curtain covering it and overturning a stack of pots behind it, bursting in on a startled family sharing a loaf of stale bread. A baby in the room begins to cry. Caspida holds a finger to her lips, slipping into their midst, drawing her cloak tightly around herself and covering the lamp.

“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 masters who came before, she was
kind
to me. She saw not an enemy, not a monster, but a . . . a girl.”