Chapter 1
Yalon, Winter Capital of Azadniabad
The glow of dusk spills through the stained-glass portrait towering over the throne room as the emperor of Azadniabad sits cross-legged on the circular throne with a blade gripped across his lap.
Once, Uma told me that a story can be found on the palms of one’s hands. Are the hands soft and supple like a na?ve sparrow bird soaring high on its first flight? Or are the hands rough and scarred like a hawk set on seizing its prey?
Studying the emperor’s marred hands as he unsheathes his dagger, I think, hawk.
I stand behind a wooden divider that partitions me in the women’s quarters behind the throne room. In the three days since our arrival to Azadniabad, I’ve been stowed inside the royal monastery, under the monk’s care.
Today, the emperor will declare my existence to his courts. I wonder if he will give me a name.
I watch him through the latticed partition, as he lifts his khanjar blade to his temple.
Before him, seated in a honeycomb formation, is the Zahr clan in their entirety.
My mouth dries as I lean to get a better look at my new clansmen in such neat, fine attire.
Warriors garbed in heavy dark blue and gold qaftans with sewn crane feathers, pale felt capes dragging at their heels and thick bronze velvet waist-sashes, stoop below the throne dais.
With a fisted hand at the torso, they incline their heads.
Amongst them are young women with their curly hair loose, or in half topknots, pinned with crane feathers – not at all the thin, long braids of the girls I grew up with.
Even their peculiar jewellery is made up of flower garlands woven intricately into bangles, dangly earrings and head ornaments.
And there are some shrouded in headdresses and veils – the oldest and wedded court women, it seems.
Every clansman, from young to old, bears an ivory-hilted blade strapped on to their right arm. Even from a distance, I see a flash of blue-threading dyed along their skin: cranes, arks and lotuses, in the designs of this empire.
‘Forged by blood, bound by duty, I offer my soul by the white blade,’ the clan chants, pressing their blades to their foreheads.
‘ . . . Slave to the Zahr clan,’ the emperor finishes before folding his hand over his fist, circling it above his belly: a greeting of peace in Azadniabad. It is strange to me how these customs mimicked the movements of the Heavenly Crane, who represented a circle of life according to the monks.
As the emperor proceeds with his session of court, I step back from the partition, wincing at my tight shoes. Moccasins of delicately beaded leather and woven crane feathers; strange and beautiful, and yet much too small for me.
‘Must I wear these– ?’
‘Hush.’ Uma stands before a wide mosaic mirror in the chamber, tightening the knot of her modest headdress. ‘Look and learn, if you wish to be a part of your dada’s court,’ she orders me. ‘Soon you will have a Zahr blade.’
‘If the emperor does not have her head first,’ my attendant bemoans quietly from behind us, catching our gazes in the mirror.
‘Nonsense, Andaleeb,’ Uma says with a scowl.
‘Have a look at her and tell me she isn’t a disgrace.
’ My attendant glances at my attire. She had buttoned me into a qaftan of indigo linen falling in frills to my ankles; white puffed sleeves were adorned with floral embroidery.
Around my ribs, she fastened a velvet waist-sash entwined with lotus patterns.
I ripped much of it off.
With a pleading look at Uma, Andaleeb waves her hand.
‘We have time, still. Let me change your daughter before she offends the great martial clans. I begged her to wear the Zahr clan’s clothes, but no.
The girl’s braids are like your steppe-tribe; she covers our qaftan with your tribe’s leathery vest; there’s even a stain of blood on it!
Worse, she wears her khan’s hat.’ Andaleeb glares up at the tetragram-shaped yak wool, the last symbol of the khan’s reign.
She snatches it off me. ‘Wear the Azadnian one.’
She holds out a conical cap with a singular crane feather. To my grief, she even touches my silver earrings gifted by the khan. ‘And you must remove these. They are crooked and cheap; they do not belong to the floral jewellery of the capital.’
‘You are wrong. I wear your garb. But I also wear pieces of my tribe.’ My hand grazes the lotus shawl of this empire, tucked under my vest of yak and camel skins. ‘My clothes are a marriage of both worlds.’
‘Why so stubborn?’ Andaleeb studies me in disbelief.
I glance into the mirror, gnawing at my lip to keep the tremble stiff.
How could I explain this to her? That, despite my promise to the emperor, I cling on to my past as much as my future.
I should not have survived the raid. Do I deserve to live?
No. But I vowed to carry the stories of the khan and their ways.
Babshah would say to forget would be a betrayal.
‘She is a stubborn one,’ Uma agrees, less concerned.
‘You are encouraging her?’
‘Not at all,’ Uma says, but she purses her lips and I know she is lying. She wants me like this, as if the parts she’d left behind in the Camel Road are in me now.
My attendant shakes her head with a perpetual frown that, in the three days of being here, always seems to deepen at the sight of my presence.
‘This will cost you, girl,’ she warns me.
‘The different branches of the Azadnian courts are protective of their own. And in the eyes of the great clans, you are a foreigner, a barbarian from the pastoralists. You must earn your clan’s loyalty.
Not open yourself to attacks. And if they try to kill you along the way,’ her lips curve down, ‘then you must thwart their threats before they strike.’
‘My own half-siblings would hurt me?’ I glance through the partition in disbelief.
‘These are Azadnian clans. They use the bounties of nature and clay – both in healing and in weapons – like flora, herbs, plants . . . poisons. The Divine only knows how many times the emperor’s siblings attempted to assassinate him when his mother favoured him for the throne.
Seeing how you act now . . . his wives would not hesitate to kill you. ’
A faint nausea takes hold of me. This is normal to them all. Death. Deception. My chest clenches, a fierce longing for the routine under Babshah—
I tear myself from the thoughts. ‘Worry not,’ I tell my attendant. ‘In these three days, the emperor trained me himself in poison tests. He told me it’s the weapon of his courts.’
Without replying, the attendant turns toward the lattice gaps in the partition, watching the court procession.
It passes long and slow. A weekly ritual, which many nobility join for.
I struggle to make sense of it, grasping only that subjects from far and wide petition the Zahr clan’s elders, the emperor’s being the highest court for the most pressing petitions.
He waits and listens, and his scribes write furiously into bunches of rolled papyrus.
It ends with a long prayer and the court gates shut behind the last subject with a creak.
At last, the emperor orders, ‘My Zahrs, at attention.’
The attendant drags us from around the partition, toward another light blue archway into the throne room, so low, in fact, it forces people to bow their heads as they enter. The attendant informs me this was intentional on the emperor’s part – and in case of an attack.
We walk toward the centre of the court, into a gathering of women who are wearing nearly identical clothing to Uma. These must be the emperor’s other wives.
Now out from behind the partition, I see the familiar throne room.
Unlike felt yurts, the surroundings are hard walls.
Above us, looping cobalt domes refract dapples of waning sunlight.
Below the ceiling are thatches of thorned vines and blue wildflowers that crawl along the cupola niches of the great hall’s ivory walls toward the throne, as if the plants are living creatures.
Dark shapes move against the branches. Birds.
Diminutive chirping blue tits, fluttering black francolins and ivory myna, and delicate halcyon birds perched upon the branches of olive trees breaking from the brambly throne.
I do not see a source of dirt nor water, as if magick courses from the crane throne to the quivering roots.
The court is filled with the gathering of notables, lounging on rich white felt rugs and divans under the olive trees, drinking rose tea from palm-sized glasses.
Some hold long sticks of lavish hand fans, fashioned from blue parchment decorated in coins; and others speak with scribes, small doves perched on their shoulders.
The interior flings rays of setting sunlight. My reflection refracts in the stained glass, the radiant blue like a vast lake from Nuh’s flood, and my lips curve up.
Gooseflesh rises up my arm, for in my reflection my lips do not move. In the reflection looking back at me, my eyes grow darker and, I swear to the Divine I see a familiar shadow behind me. At once, I move back, tripping over my feet.
‘D-did you see that?’ I hurry toward my attendant.
‘Pay attention,’ Andaleeb snaps, turning me to face the throne.
The emperor steps around a divan supporting a cage of courtly cranes. In the reflection of the emperor’s heavy black eyes, the trees and flora around the dais shimmer.
‘Peace unto the daughter of my fourth wife, third child of the Usur tribe, who has returned to Azadniabad at my order. After thwarting Sajamistani invaders at the Tezmi’a pastures, and protecting our borderlands, the child has proven worthy of the Zahrs.
’ The emperor turns to appraise me and pauses in disbelief. Murmurs spread amongst the court.
‘One of us?’ speaks a grasping woman standing beside Uma. ‘The girl is dressed like her people instead.’ Another voice to my left asks, ‘Might she be confused about her loyalties? Her place?’