Rebel of the Sands (18 page)

T
here were three pomegranates hanging from the branch. And then there were two and then four. I glanced over at Delila, who smiled sweetly. “See, it's not that hard.”

It'd been a week since Jin woke up and Ahmed promised they could help me unearth my powers. A week of meditating with Bahi and of Delila instructing me that the way she cast illusions was that she just
did
. Somehow she thought a demonstration would help.

“This is useless.” It didn't help. “We don't even know that my gift is with illusions.”

“It is the most common Demdji gift,” Bahi offered philosophically from the sidelines.

“Just try,” Delila said.

“Yes,” Hala put in, looking on. “Make one disappear and you'll be on par with the street performers in Izman.”

I stared at the tree. I wasn't sure what I was reaching for. Hala said it came from her mind. Delila seemed to think she pulled her power out of her chest. I couldn't find anything in either one. The whicker of horses nearby unraveled whatever attention I'd had. I glanced over my shoulder. It was the party Ahmed had sent out three days before. A raid on a mountain outpost to bring back more guns.

I'd asked to go with them. I knew guns. Ahmed had said no. That it wasn't worth it sending out a Demdji before she had her powers in check. Just like he had the time before that. I was starting to wonder what the point of staying was if I wasn't any use at all.

As I watched their saddlebags, clinking heavy with guns, the frustration that had been rising in me whipped itself into a frenzy. I couldn't manage to change my shape or my face, or climb into anyone's head, or conjure images out of the air. Folks in camp had started taking bets on how long it would take me to figure out my powers. Or maybe I didn't have any, the whispers had started to suggest.

As I stared, one of the three pomegranates split open, spilling angry black ooze. I knew it was Hala's work. My gun sprang into my hand on instinct. I aimed with easy certainty and pulled the trigger. The pomegranate exploded in a violent burst of seeds and red juices, Hala's illusion disappearing with it.

“There,” I said, holstering the gun. “Now there are two.”

A laugh made me turn my head. I realized Jin had been watching. He was passing by us, carrying a stack of firewood toward the center of camp on one shoulder. He'd recovered quickly from the Nightmare bite. I'd seen him training at hand-to-hand combat with Shazad yesterday. She still beat him. Badly. But he held his own for a while.

Fresh humiliation burned my neck as Jin saluted me and I turned away. We'd been doing a dance all week where Jin pretended nothing was wrong between us, and I pretended he didn't exist.

Like he thought it didn't matter that he'd tricked me to get me here. That he'd pulled me off that train to keep me from going to Izman, not to keep me safe. That he'd convinced me the best way to get there was the caravan, preying on my ignorance about my own country. That I'd gone along with it because I was stupid enough to think we really were a team.

I brushed the thought off. It was petty of me to hate him. This was a war. He'd done what he needed to do. Even if I turned out not to be all that helpful.

“Do you know that you cast illusions while you sleep?” I asked Delila. It came out sharper than I meant it to. “I'm not going to become some all-powerful Demdji overnight just by focusing.”

“We should take a break in any case,” Bahi interjected before Delila could reply. “It's only a few hours until dark, and tonight is Shihabian.”

Hala glanced at the sky. The sun was getting low. Something that wasn't a sneer flickered over her face for
once. Delila saw it, too. She dropped a hand on Hala's shoulder.

“Imin is on her way back,” Delila said. My mind fell back to my first day in camp, when Imin had been sent out shaped like a Gallan soldier. She was meant to be back by Shihabian.

“How do you know that?” I asked Delila. The more time I spent in camp, the more worried I'd gotten about the Gallan in Fahali. The oasis was like nowhere I'd ever been, and if everyone here from all over Miraji was to be believed, it was like nowhere else that existed. All it would take to destroy it would be the Gallan and their weapon.

Delila looked faintly embarrassed. “It's something I picked up when I was little. When my brothers started taking work on ships and sailing away, leaving me behind, I never knew when they were coming back. So every morning I opened my mouth to make sure I could say that they were still alive, they were safe, they were coming home. Then I'd try to say that today would be the day that they'd dock. And if I couldn't say it, then it wasn't the truth and it wouldn't happen. Imin is on her way back.” She said it with the confidence of a prophecy.

We couldn't speak anything if it wasn't the truth; what if it could work the other way? I'd done it once before, I realized, with the Gallan soldier. Told him that he wouldn't find us in the canyon. And he hadn't. But the Skinwalker had. “What would happen if I just declared that tomorrow my powers will show up? Or if I said—”

Delila's eyes went wide and Bahi's hand was over my
mouth whip-quick. The one with the tattoo on it. It smelled of oils and smoke, like the inside of a prayer house. For once he looked serious. “Demdji shouldn't make truths of things that aren't. You can never predict how they're going to turn out.”

“No,” Hala added, sounding bitter. “You might say Ahmed will win the Sultim trials but neglect to say that he will take the throne. For instance. And if you'd just left it alone, then he'd have been a great Sultan and ruled until he was old and gray.”

The look on her face was the kind that only came from experience. I thought of all the stories I knew of men making foolish demands and wishes of Djinn that were granted to them in some misshapen way that robbed them of their happiness. The Gallan soldier hadn't found us in the canyon. He'd been eaten alive instead. Bahi paused, like he was making sure I understood, before taking his hand away from my mouth.

When I looked at Hala, she was staring at her feet. No wonder she hadn't forgiven me for the red-haired Demdji. She'd been holding a grudge against herself for a year now. And just because she'd tried to cheat the universe into Ahmed becoming Sultan by saying that he would. “I reckon I would've done the same thing.”

Hala treated me to an image of my hands catching fire, the agony of it searing through me before it vanished. Whatever sympathy I felt vaporized. “Yes, but you didn't. I did. And if I hadn't, we might never have needed a war and people might not have needed to die.”

And without another word, Hala stormed off.

Bahi clapped his hands together. “You know, I think now would be a great time for that break.”

•   •   •

DELILA AND I
made our way slowly back into camp, through the preparations for Shihabian. Folks were stringing lanterns between the trees, and the whole of the camp was rich with the smell of roasting meats and cooking bread. Even when I'd dreamed of Izman, I'd never imagined a place like this. Everyone seemed to fit easily into their roles, working with one singular purpose: putting Ahmed on the throne. To make the rest of Miraji like this tiny part of the world.

“How come Jin didn't compete in the Sultim trials?” I asked, breaking the uneasy silence that had fallen between us since Hala's outburst. “Tradition claims the twelve eldest princes are to compete.”

“Ahmed is the fifth born, and Jin is sixth, so he had the right. If he'd come forward as another surviving son.” Which meant he'd chosen not to. That Ahmed had decided to step up and claim his chance at his birthright and Jin hadn't. But then, the stories didn't mention Jin at all. Not the disappearance of another son on the night that Ahmed and Delila's mother was beaten to death, let alone his return.

“Why are you asking me and not my brother?” Delila had been chewing on her thumbnail nervously. She pulled it out of her mouth self-consciously.

Because I'm avoiding him
. “Your brother has a bad habit of not telling me things straight.”

“They fought about it,” she admitted finally. “Shazad said it would be a tactical advantage to have an ally in the trials to watch Ahmed's back. Hala said no one would believe either one of them if we suddenly started claiming it was raining returned princes. Jin said no one would believe him because he didn't look a thing like the Sultan. Bahi said it would distract from Ahmed's impact. Then Shazad said the Holy Order had given him too much of a flair for dramatics. And they went on and on,” she said shyly. “But in the end, nobody's ever been able to make Jin do something he didn't want. And the truth was, he never wanted anything to do with Miraji.” She reached up, plucking an orange from a tree as we passed under, and started peeling it, avoiding looking me in the eye. “Ahmed fell in love with Miraji the moment he came back. Like a piece of his soul he'd almost forgotten had been returned to him, he said. When Ahmed decided to stay behind, Jin never understood why. I didn't understand until I saw it myself. It just . . . feels like home. They fought when Ahmed decided to stay as well. Jin sailed away without him. He always figured that Ahmed would change his mind and go back out to sea. Then our mother, Lien—Jin's mother really, but mine, too.” She looked uncomfortable, like she'd spent a long time fighting with that fact. “She died, and Jin and I came to Ahmed instead. It was only a few months before the Sultim trials. Jin had been waiting for Ahmed to change his mind, and in the meantime he'd built up this following in Izman. I thought Jin might break
his nose when we finally tracked him down with the compass. Shazad broke Jin's nose first.”

Jin had told me a girl broke his nose and his brother set it. I'd just figured on some lover's quarrel in a foreign port, not Shazad. Nice to know it wasn't all lies, though.

“He figured the best we could hope for was for Ahmed not to get killed in the Sultim trials. And then we'd leave and Ahmed would stop fighting.” She gestured around herself at the camp. “He was wrong.”

“So why does Jin stay?”

“Jin has fought for Ahmed since they were boys. He'd throw a punch whenever anyone would call Ahmed a . . .” She stumbled over the translation of the Xichian word. “It means ‘dirty foreigner,' I suppose. He'll do the same now. I still don't think he's forgiven Ahmed for falling in love with something outside of our family, though. Well . . . it might be he's starting to now.” That small shy smile was back on her face. I felt the back of my neck get hot.

“It's not . . .” I stumbled over the words. “Jin and I aren't . . .”

“If it were true,” Delila singsonged in a little girl's voice, “you'd be able to say it.” She laughed as she spun away from me, jumping over a small campfire, leaving me even more confused.

•   •   •

IT WAS LATE
afternoon, which meant Shazad would likely have finished training and be back in our tent. Or
rather, her tent. I'd slept there the first night, too drained from the revelation of being a Demdji to put up much of a fight. And then I'd just stayed. She still hadn't kicked me out, and there was a small pile of her clothes that she had loaned me piling up in a heap on the floor on my side, dividing me from her militarily clean side. It was almost like home.

Stepping into the tent, I was greeted by a flying cloth bundle to the face.

“Catch,” Shazad said too late. I picked it up off the floor. A bright swathe of gold cloth with deep red stitching unfurled between my fingers.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A rare occurrence for which it's traditional to wear your finest clothes.” I realized Shazad was already dressed for Shihabian. It couldn't be natural to be as pulled together as she was. Her dark hair was piled in tight waves against her head, golden pins catching the dimming light, a khalat—so green it made the trees look dull—draped across her.

“I didn't think to grab my finest clothes while running for my life.” I ran my hands across the fabric and imagined putting it on and turning into some phoenix creature from the stories, fire and gold.

“Well, in this case, your friend's finest clothes,” Shazad said.

Friend
. The simple word grabbed my attention. I'd been shedding friends since Tamid.

Shazad must've caught my hesitation. “I have other
khalats. If you don't like it,” she added quickly, pushing a loose piece of hair back behind her ear like she was nervous, only that was impossible.

“Is Imin back yet?” I asked. No matter what Delila said, I was nervous about the yellow-eyed Demdji in the Gallan camp.

“No.” Shazad became serious. “Not yet. I'm giving her until the end of Shihabian, and then tomorrow we're going to look for her.” To make sure she hadn't wound up like the red-haired Demdji.