This Woven Kingdom (31 page)

The nosta glowed warm.

Stunned, Alizeh said, “You wondered why I would care if your mother might actually murder you?”

“Is that not what I just said?”

“Are you— Are you quite serious, miss?” Alizeh knew Miss Huda was serious, but somehow she couldn't help asking the question.

“Of course I am.” Miss Huda sat up straighter. “Have I ever seemed to you interested in subtlety? I'm in fact quite known for my candor, and I daresay Mother hates my lack of refinement even more than she hates my figure. She says my mouth and hips are a product of that
woman
, that
other woman
—which is how she refers, of course, to my biological mother.”

When Alizeh said nothing in response to Miss Huda's obvious effort to shock her, the young woman raised her
eyebrows. “Is it possible you didn't know? That would make you the only person in Setar ignorant of my origins, for mine is an infamous tale, as my father refused to hide his sins from society. Still, I am quite illegitimate, the bastard child of a nobleman and a courtesan. It's no secret that neither of my mothers have ever wanted me.”

Alizeh continued to say nothing. She didn't dare.

Miss Huda's performance of indifference was so obvious as to be painful to witness; Alizeh didn't know whether to shake the girl or hug her.

“Yes,” Alizeh said finally. “I knew.”

She saw a flicker of emotion in Miss Huda's eyes then, something like relief, there and gone again. And just like that, Alizeh's heart softened toward the girl.

Miss Huda had been worried.

She'd been worried that Alizeh, a lowly servant, had not known of her parentage; she worried a lowly servant would find out and judge her harshly. Miss Huda's attempt to scandalize had in fact been an effort to out herself preemptively, to spare herself a painful retraction of kindness, or friendship, upon discovery.

This was a fear Alizeh understood well.

But that Miss Huda would lower herself to be bothered by the worthless opinion of a snoda taught Alizeh a great deal about the depth of the young woman's insecurities; it was information she would file away in her mind, and not soon forget.

Quietly, Alizeh said, “I would've found a way to protect you.”

“Pardon?”

“If you'd told me,” Alizeh clarified, “that your mother had been trying in earnest to murder you. I would've found a way to protect you.”

“You?” Miss Huda laughed. “
You
would've protected me?”

Alizeh bowed her head, fought back a renewed wave of irritation. “You asked for my confession—for the thought that crossed my mind. That was it.”

There was a brief silence.

“You really mean that,” the young woman said finally.

Alizeh looked up at the gentle sound of the girl's voice. She was surprised to discover the sneer gone from Miss Huda's face; her brown eyes wide with unvarnished feeling. She looked, suddenly, quite young.

“Yes, miss,” Alizeh said. “I really mean it.”

“Goodness. You are a very strange girl.”

Alizeh drew a deep breath. That was the second time today someone had accused her of being strange, and she wasn't quite sure how she felt about it.

She decided to change the subject.

“More to the point,” she said, “I've come to you today to talk about your gown.”

“Oh,
yes
,” Miss Huda said, eagerly getting to her feet and moving toward the large case. “Is this it, then? Can I open—”

Alizeh darted for the box and claimed it, bracing it against her chest. She stepped several steps back as her heart beat hard against her sternum. “No,” she said quickly. “No, this—this is something else. For someone else. I actually came here to tell you that I haven't finished making your gown. That, in
fact, I won't be able to finish making it.”

Miss Huda's eyes widened in outrage. “You— But how
could
you—”

“I was dismissed from my position at Baz House,” Alizeh said quickly, grabbing blindly for her carpet bag, which she hauled into her arms. “I desperately wanted to finish the commission, miss, but I've no place to live, and no place to work, and the streets are so cold I can hardly hold a needle without my fingers going numb—”

“You
promised
me— You said—you said it would be done in time for the ball—”

“I'm so sorry,” Alizeh said, now inching slowly toward the door. “Truly, I am, and I can well imagine your disappointment. I see now that I should go, for I fear I've disturbed your day quite enough—though of course I'll just leave the gown”—she released the latch on her bag, reached inside for the garment—“and leave you to your evening—”

“
Don't you dare.
”

Alizeh froze.

“You said you needed a place to work? Well, here.” Miss Huda gestured to the room at large. “You might as well stay and finish the work. You can manage a discreet exit once everyone leaves for the ball.”

The carpet bag slipped from Alizeh's frozen fingers, fell with a dull thump to the ground.

The suggestion was outrageous.

“You want me to finish it now?” Alizeh said. “Here? In your room? But what if a maid comes in? What if your mother needs you? What if—”

“Oh, I don't know,” Miss Huda said irritably. “But I see no possibility of your leaving now anyway because Father's guests have certainly”—she glanced at the wall clock, its golden pendulum swinging—“yes, they've certainly arrived by now, which means the house is sure to be flush with all the ambassadors ahead of the ball, as their lot is terribly prompt—”

“But—perhaps I could climb out the window?”

Miss Huda glared. “You will do no such thing. Not only is the idea preposterous, but I want my gown. I have nothing else to wear, and you, by your own admission, have nothing else to do. Is that not what you said? That you were discharged from your position?”

Alizeh squeezed her eyes shut. “Yes.”

“So you've no one waiting for you, and no warm place to go on this winter evening?”

Alizeh opened her eyes. “No.”

“Then I do not understand your reticence. Now remove that godforsaken monstrosity from your face at once,” Miss Huda said, lifting her chin an inch. “You're not a snoda anymore; you're a seamstress.”

Alizeh looked up at that, felt the pilot light in her heart flicker. She appreciated the young woman's attempt to raise her spirits, but Miss Huda did not understand. If Alizeh had to wait until the whole of Follad Place departed for the ball, she herself would be terribly late. She'd no choice but to arrive to the event on foot, and had planned, as a result, to leave a good deal early. Even with preternatural speed she couldn't move quite as fast as a carriage, and would certainly
not dare move too quickly in such a delicate gown.

Omid would wonder whether she'd abandoned him. Hazan would wonder whether she'd been able to secure safe passage to the ball.

She couldn't be late. She simply couldn't. There was too much at stake.

“Please, miss. I really must go. I am— I am in fact a Jinn,” Alizeh said nervously, employing now the only tactic she had left. “You need not worry that I will be seen, as I can make myself invisible upon my exi—”

Miss Huda eyes widened in astonishment. “Your audacity shocks me. Do you even know to whom you are speaking? Yes, I am a bastard child, but I am the bastard child of an Ardunian ambassador,” she said, growing visibly angry. “Or did you forget that you stand now in the home of an official hand selected by the crown? How you gather the nerve to even dare suggest—in my presence—doing something so patently illegal, I cannot fathom—”

“Forgive me,” Alizeh said, panicked. Only now that she was being condemned for it did she realize the weight of her error; a different person might've already called for the magistrates. “I merely— I wasn't thinking clearly— I only hoped to provide a solution to the obvious problem and I—”

“The most obvious problem, I think, is that you made me a promise you've now unceremoniously broken.” Miss Huda narrowed her eyes. “You've no good excuse for not finishing the work, and I demand you do it now.”

Alizeh tried to breathe. Her heart was racing at a dangerous speed in her chest.

“Well? Go on, then,” said Miss Huda, her anger slowly abating. She gestured limply at the girl's mask. “Consider this the dawn of a new age. A new beginning.”

Alizeh closed her eyes.

She wondered whether the snoda even mattered now. One way or another, she'd be gone from Setar at the end of the night. She'd never see Miss Huda again, and Alizeh doubted the girl would go gossiping about the strange color of her eyes—something she more than likely would not understand, as most Clay were uneducated in Jinn history and would not know the weight of what they saw.

It had never been for fear of the masses that Alizeh hid her face; it was for fear of a single, careful eye. Exposure to the wrong stranger and she knew her life was forfeit; indeed, her precarious position in that very moment was proof. Somehow, impossibly, Kamran had seen through her guile, had seen through even her snoda.

In all these years, he'd been the only one.

She took a deep breath and cleared her head of him, spared her heart of him. She thought instead, without warning, of her parents, who'd always worried about her eyes, always worried for her life. They'd never given up hope of her taking back the land—and the crown—they believed to be rightfully hers.

Alizeh had been raised from infancy to reclaim it.

What would they think if they saw her now? Jobless, homeless, at the mercy of some miss. Alizeh felt quietly ashamed of herself, of her impotence in that moment.

Without a word, she untied the snoda from around her
eyes, and, reluctantly, let the scrap of silk slip through her fingers. When Alizeh finally looked up to meet the young woman's gaze, Miss Huda went rigid with fear.

“Heavens,” she gasped. “It's you.”

KAMRAN FLINCHED.

The seamstress stuck him with yet another pin, humming quietly to herself as she worked, pulling here, tucking there. The woman was either oblivious or heartless, he'd not yet decided. She never seemed to care that she was maiming him, not even when he'd asked her, several times, to desist from these nonessential acts of cruelty.

He looked at the seamstress, the ancient woman in a velvet bowler so diminutive in stature she hardly reached his waist, and who tottered over him now on a small wooden stool. She smelled like caramelized eggplant.

“Madame,” he said tersely. “Are we not yet finished?”

She started at the sound of his voice and stabbed him yet again, causing Kamran to draw a sharp breath. The older woman blinked big, owlish eyes at him; eyes he'd always found disconcerting.

“Nearly there, sire,” she said in a weathered voice. “Nearly there now. Just a few minutes more.”

Soundlessly, Kamran sighed.

Kamran loathed these fittings, and could not understand why he'd needed one, not when he owned an entire wardrobe full of clothes still unworn, any number of which would've been sufficient for the night's festivities.

It was, in any case, his mother's doing.

The princess had intercepted him the very moment he'd stepped foot inside the palace, refusing to listen to a word of reason. She'd insisted, despite Kamran's protests to the contrary, that whatever the king and his officials needed to discuss could wait, and that being properly dressed for his guests was far more important. Besides, she'd sworn, the fitting would take only a moment.
A moment.

It had been nigh on an hour.

Still, it was quite possible, Kamran considered, that the seamstress was stabbing him now in protest. The prince had neither heeded his mother upon arrival, nor had he flatly refused to accompany her. Instead, he'd parted with a vague promise to return. An enemy on the battlefield he might've cut down with a sword, but his mother in possession of a seamstress on the night of a ball—

He'd not been properly armed against such an adversary, and had settled for ignoring her.

Three hours he'd spent discussing the Tulanian king's possible motivations with Hazan, his grandfather, and a select group of officials, and when, finally, he'd returned to his dressing room, his mother had thrown a lamp at him.

Miraculously, Kamran had dodged the projectile, which crashed to the floor, causing a small fire upon impact. This, the princess had ignored outright, instead approaching her son with a violent gleam in her eyes.

“Careful, darling,” she'd said softly. “You overlook your mother at great cost to yourself.”

Kamran was busy stamping out the flames. “I'm afraid
I don't follow your logic,” he'd said, scowling, “for I cannot imagine it costs me anything to avoid a parent who so often takes pleasure in trying to kill me.”

The princess had smiled at that, even as her eyes flashed with anger. “Two days ago I told you I needed to speak with you. Two days I have waited to have a simple conversation with my own son. Two days I have been ignored repeatedly, even as you made time to spend an entire morning with your dear aunt.”

Kamran frowned. “I don't—”

“No doubt you forgot,” she said, cutting him off. “No doubt my request fell right out of your pretty head the moment it was spoken. So swiftly am I forgotten.”

To this, Kamran said nothing, for if she'd indeed asked for a moment of his time, he could not now recall such a summons.

His mother stepped closer.

“Soon,” she said, “I will be all you have left in this palace. You will walk the halls, friendless and alone, and you will search for me then. You will want your mother only when all else is lost, and I do not promise to be easily found.”

Kamran had felt an unnerving sensation move through his body at that; a foreboding he could not name. “Why do you say such things? Of what do you speak?”

The princess was already walking away, gone without another word. Kamran made to follow her and was halted by the arrival of the seamstress, Madame Nezrin, who'd entered the dressing room promptly upon his mother's exit.

Again, Kamran flinched.

Even if he deserved it, he did not think Madame Nezrin should be allowed to stab him with impunity. Surely she knew better. The woman was the crown's most trusted seamstress; she'd been working with the royal family since the beginning of his grandfather's reign. In fact, Kamran often marveled that she hadn't gone blind by now.

Then again, perhaps she had.

There seemed little other explanation for the ridiculous costumes he regularly discovered in his wardrobe. Her ideas were meticulously executed, but ancient; she dressed him always on the edge of a different century. And Kamran, who knew little of fashion and fabrics, understood only that he did not like his clothes; he possessed no alternative suggestions, and as a result felt powerless in the face of such an essential problem, which drove him near to madness. Surely the mere act of getting dressed should not inspire in a person such torment?

Even now she dressed him in layers of silk brocade, cinching the long emerald robes at his waist with more silk, this time a beaded belt so heavy with jewels it had to be pinned in place. At his throat was yet more of the awful material: a translucent, pale green scarf artfully knotted, the coarse silk netting like sandpaper against his skin.

His shirt, at least, was a familiar linen.

On a single, regrettable occasion he'd once said to his mother—distractedly—that silk sounded
just fine
, and now everything he owned was an abomination.

Silk, it had turned out, was not the soft, comfortable textile he'd expected; no, it was a noisy, detestable fabric that
irritated his skin. The crisp, stiff collar of his robes dug into his throat now not unlike the edge of a dull knife, and he turned his head sharply away, unable to keep still any longer, paying for his impatience with yet another needle in the rib.

Kamran grimaced. The pain had at least done a great deal to distract him from his mother's ominous parting words.

The sun had begun its descent in the sky, fracturing pink and orange light through the lattice screen windows of the dressing room, the geometric perforations generating a kaleidoscope of oblong shapes along the walls and floors, giving him somewhere to focus his eyes, and then, his thoughts. Too soon, guests would begin arriving at the palace, and too soon, he would be expected to greet them. One, in particular.

As if he'd not been delivered enough suffering this day.

The news from Tulan had been less distressing than Kamran had expected and yet, somehow, so much worse.

“Remind me again, Minister, why on earth the man was even invited?”

Hazan, who'd been standing quietly in the corner, now cleared his throat. He looked from Kamran to the seamstress, his eyes widening in warning.

Kamran glowered.

None of this was Hazan's fault—logically, the prince understood that—but logic did not seem to matter to his abraded nerves. Kamran had been in a hateful mood all day. Everything bothered him. Everything was insufferable. He shot an aggravated look at Hazan, who'd flatly refused to leave the prince's side in the wake of the recent news.

His minister only glared back.

“There's little point in your sitting here,” the prince said irritably. “You should return to your own rooms. No doubt you have preparations to make before the evening begins.”

“I thank you for your consideration, sire,” Hazan said coldly. “But I will remain here, by your side.”

“You overreact,” said the prince. “Besides, if you should be concerned for anyone, it should not be me, but th—”

“Madame,” Hazan said sharply. “I must now escort His Highness to an important meeting; if you would be so kind as to finish the work in his absence? No doubt you have enough of our prince's measurements.”

Madame Nezrin blinked at Hazan; she seemed uncertain, for a moment, which of the two young men had spoken to her. “Very good,” she said. “That should be just fine.”

Kamran resisted the infantile impulse to kick something.

With great care, the seamstress slid loose the robes from his body, collecting every meticulously pinned article into her small arms, and nearly toppling over in the process.

Briefly, Kamran's upper half was left bare.

Kamran, who spent little time staring at his own reflection, and who'd not been facing the mirror when he'd first undressed, was disquieted to see himself so exposed now. The triple-paneled looking glass loomed before him, revealing angles of his body he seldom studied.

Someone handed him his sweater, which Kamran accepted without a word. He took a tentative step closer to the mirrors, drew a hand down the length of his bare torso.

He frowned.

“What is it?” Hazan asked, the anger in his voice tinged now with concern. “Is something the matter?”

“It's different,” Kamran said quietly. “Is it not different?”

Hazan drew slowly closer.

It was the tradition of Ardunian kings to hand over their heirs, on the very day of the child's birth, to the Diviners—to have them marked by an irreversible magic that would claim them, always, as the rightful successor. It was a practice they'd stolen from Jinn, whose royals were born with such markings, sparing their kingdoms any false claims to the throne. Clay royalty had found a way to incorporate such protections into their own bloodlines, though what had once been considered a serious precaution had, over centuries, become more of a tradition—one they soon forgot had been borrowed from another people.

On the day of their birth every Ardunian royal was marked by magic, and it touched them all differently.

King Zaal had found a constellation of dark blue, eight-pointed stars at the base of his throat. The prince's own father had discovered black, branching lines along his back, ominous strokes that wrapped partially around his torso.

Kamran, too, had been marked.

Every year of his boyhood the prince had watched, with a kind of horrified fascination, as the skin of his chest and torso gave the illusion of splitting open down the center, revealing at its fissure a glimmer of gold leaf. The burnished gold mark appeared, as if painted, straight down his middle, from the shallow valley of his throat to the base of his abdomen.

The Diviners had promised that the magic would display
its final form by the end of his twelfth birthday, and so it had. The glittering lash had long ago lost his interest, for it had become as familiar to him as his eyes, the color of his hair. It had become so much a part of him that he seldom noticed it these days. But now—suddenly—

It looked different.

The fissure seemed a fraction wider, the once dull gold shining now a bit brighter.

“I do not see a difference, sire,” Hazan asked, peering into the mirror. “Does it feel unusual in some way?”

“No, it feels no different,” Kamran said absently, now running his fingers along the gold part. It was always a bit hotter there, at his center, but the mark had never hurt, had never felt strange. “It only looks . . . Well, I suppose it's hard to say. I've not noticed it in so long.”