Chapter 26
The first step in getting me ready to impress a court of feathery bastards apparently required having my clothes yanked off
and then being dragged to a freshwater creek, where my estranged husband forcibly bathed me. I resisted at first, but soon
gave in. Raksh had already seen everything, we were still technically married, and it felt heavenly to be scrubbed and massaged.
It was only when he loosened the grimy remains of my turban and began to wash my hair that I stopped him.
“You-you don’t have to do that,” I said, flustered at the unexpected intimacy of the act.
Raksh’s exasperated huff was hot against the back of my neck, a not entirely unpleasant contrast to the cool water. “There’s
a sea snail living in your hair, Amina.” He returned to unsnarling the knots. “I’m fairly certain I do.”
God, but I hated how good his touch felt. Hated the memories it drew from where I had buried them: stolen moments in the Marawati ’s galley and hot, languid nights on lonely stretches of beach. It was exceedingly unjust that the backstabbing motherfucker
should be so skilled at this.
“I know but—” My protest died as his fingers kneaded my scalp, a sigh slipping my lips. All right. Maybe I’d let him continue.
Just this once because of all the troubles he’d caused me.
After the completely platonic bathing experience during which I never contemplated ripping off his briefs and letting him really make things up to me, Raksh vanished for several hours. When he reappeared, it was with a bundle of astonishing garments.
“Where did you get these?” I asked, marveling at a hooded cloak constructed from what seemed to be porcupine quills—if that porcupine had been
made of diamonds. A tunic of woven, brilliantly violet leaves was folded underneath a gossamer sea silk sarong.
“I stole them.” At my wary glance, Raksh shrugged. “Don’t worry. The court will almost certainly help us off Socotra or execute
us themselves before the owners of these clothes track us down.”
“You are a deeply unreassuring person, do you know that?” But I dressed in the filched clothing anyway.
I was not eager to delay, but Raksh seemed convinced I would present a better case if I was stronger, and so I forced myself
to rest, moving only to stretch my limbs and take a walk in the cool dusk. I ate and drank as much as possible. The water
was sweet and the food bizarre if nourishing—the bright orange coconuts were meaty, heavy things; the plump fish with mirrorlike
scales had flesh that made me jittery; and the midnight-hued berries crackled in my mouth. Raksh made some sort of salve from
a plant with wriggling, serrated fronds and applied it to my skin. In a single afternoon, my sunburns were gone, and my wounds
scabbed over. Even my bad knee felt... well, not good as new, but as though a decade of hardship had been removed from
the troublesome joint.
“I could be a miracle worker in the human world with a plant like this,” I mused while we sat beside a fire that evening.
“You better make sure the court doesn’t hear you speaking so. That’s the exact sort of scenario they seek to avoid.”
“Humans thriving due to magical means?”
“Precisely.” Raksh handed over a coconut shell of mashed gourd. “Eat.”
It smelled awful and tasted metallic, but I ate without complaint. After my days at sea, I would likely eat without complaint for the rest of my life. “Is there any more?”
“No. And if you keep eating at this rate, you’ll starve the entire island.”
I scarfed down the mash and set it aside. I suppose I was eating a lot, my stomach feeling like the bottomless pit of a youth undergoing the world’s most severe growth spurt.
“Have you seen any of those water trees?” I asked. “The one with the white blossoms and cuplike leaves?”
“I have not, though that means little. Things tend to move around here on their own, including the plants.”
Of course they did. I stretched out my legs, studying the familiar scars and fading bruises beneath the coarse black hairs.
I’d always been strong, my well-muscled limbs attesting to a life of labor. But not like this. Not capable of breaking a demon’s
nose or accidentally knocking over a tree. This strength had not erased my physical sufferings and yet it had lessoned them.
I felt like a feverish bull calf, sick and yet capable of destruction, my body feeling bizarrely unfamiliar.
“And you’ve never heard of such a thing? Of a plant whose water—”
“A plant whose water gives an already violent human woman the ability to be more effectively violent? No, I told you a dozen
times. I don’t know what has happened to you. It might have been the plant or it might have been the very act of washing up
on these shores.” Raksh retrieved a pair of birds roasting over the fire. “Either way, I’d think you’d be pleased. Being more
effectively violent makes it more likely you’ll be able to stop Falco from enslaving me. And, you know, doing bad stuff to
your crew or whatever,” he added without much conviction when I glared at him.
I took the birds he handed me and tore into them with my teeth. I suppose he did have a point: I would welcome nearly any
development that helped me save my crew and keep Falco from making my daughter his thrall. But since I could now hurt Raksh...
“Why didn’t you kill me?” I asked, finally voicing the question I’d wondered weeks ago. “Back in Socotra, when you were so determined to ‘sever our bond’?”
“I do not like the sight of blood.”
“Oh, fuck off. That’s not even a good lie.”
Raksh rolled his eyes. “ Fine . I once tried a pact similar to your marriage contract, all right? Many, many eons ago though it was less about paper contracts
and more about exchanging looms and walking around a vat of warm beer.”
“It was about what ?”
“That part isn’t important,” he said flippantly. “Like you and me, we were akin to spouses and the bond made me quite powerful.
But I was also young and not always the most... attentive when it came to completing tasks. Point is, there might have been a brewing incident at my hands that fatally poisoned the entire village, including my spouse, and accidentally
killing them nearly wiped me out. No magic for centuries.” Raksh shuddered. “I had to eat so many hearts before I stopped feeling like a ghost of myself. It was really very troubling.”
I opened and closed my mouth. “Just to be clear... the only reason you didn’t kill me—the only reason I am currently alive —is because you accidentally murdered your last spouse with a batch of bad beer and it left you weak?”
“Yes.” Raksh picked up a hairy purple melon he’d gathered from the forest, broke it in half, and slurped out the still-quivering
insides. “Though I suppose it worked out in the end.”
“And how’s that?” I asked, feeling slightly faint.
“Because I’m glad I didn’t kill you. Because as much as I hate to admit it, I still mean what I said the night we first met:
your ambitions are a feast, Amina al-Sirafi, and I would enjoy nothing more than making you a legend.” He twirled a lock of
unbound hair around his finger like a spinner twisting thread. “It is what I was made to do, and I have not had such an opportunity
for a very long time.”
There was no guile in his voice. Raksh had yet to shift to his human form since we’d been here and it was unnerving to see him such as he now was: the moonlight gleaming on his tusks, the beating heart around his neck.
With the waves crashing on the beach and the smell of the sea air, it suddenly did feel like the night I’d met him, the night before everything had gone wrong.
But gone wrong it had.
“So why did you betray me?” I asked, barely concealing the hurt in my voice. “You could have stayed at my side, we could have had those legendary
adventures! You were the one to ruin it by going after Asif.”
He let out a disgruntled sound. “It is more complicated than that.”
“How is it compli —”
Raksh held up a hand to interrupt me. “Not that you will understand any of this, but if it will put the topic to rest, let
us try. First, I was always going to be preying on you. That was part of the deal, a part I made clear before I set foot on
your boat. I granted you luck, and in exchange, I fed on your ambition, which would have only grown as my presence made you
more successful, to the benefit of us both. And though our time together was short, I did enjoy it. I would have been happy
to voyage around the sea with you and your crew for decades.”
“The crew you swore you had no interest in,” I reminded him. “I know you ended up striking deals with all of them.”
“What can I say? Your companions were more fascinating than I had imagined. But they were not deals . Not properly. Not like what I had with you. Not like what I was in the process of making with Asif.”
“So you did go after him.”
Raksh tutted. “You have it wrong. Dunya isn’t the only al-Hilli who knows her family’s history. Asif may not have had his
spawn’s scholarly urges, but he did have her ambition. And enough familiarity with the unseen to spot that I wasn’t exactly
the aspiring sailor I pretended to be. He approached me .
Told me his parents had unreasonable expectations and that he feared the wife he barely knew would never forgive him for abandoning her and their child.
So he wanted to return to them in style.
Wanted to be responsible for leading you all to a life-changing score, a discovery that mattered , and go home to his family richer than a sultan and more admired than a saint. ”
Oh, Asif... I wish I could have denied Raksh’s words, but I could so easily envision my dreamy, na?ve friend speaking such. Asif had been
so young, so eager to impress. “What did you say?”
“Amina, do you think you would have found me in the Maldives begging to be taken aboard a ship if I had that kind of power?
I laughed at him. Said, ‘Sure, I shall find you a gilded cave of kingly treasure and forgotten magical cure-alls. All it will
cost is your soul.’ It was a jest.” Raksh shrugged. “Then he said yes.”
A jest. Asif had condemned himself because of a demon’s joke. If I had ever seen a starker power disparity between the human and
magical realms...
“You could have turned him down,” I snapped, unable to check my anger. “You could have told him it was a joke!”
Raksh shook his head. “There are some hungers I cannot deny. It’s what I am. The moment he said yes sealed us both. If I regret
anything, it is that I did not act with more haste in completing our pact. Doing so might have preserved his life, and even
if it had not, I could have taken his soul properly when he died rather than see it be wasted.” Raksh took a sip from his
cup. “It was... a messy end.”
A messy end. Is that what you call it? I remembered Asif wailing for his mother and God’s forgiveness as his soul was blotted out of existence, consumed by a void
I will never unsee. “So you truly have no remorse over hurting the humans you partner with?”
“I neither seek harm nor take pleasure in it. But I am a creature of ambition, and it is rarely bloodless.”
“Then you are a demon.”
Raksh put his cup down. “That is your word. You do not—”
“Yes, yes, so I’ve been told. My people don’t have a word for you. But from where I’m sitting, demon fits well enough.”
He stared at me for a long moment, his eerie eyes going black and impenetrable as a shark’s. “What would you call yourself
to a person who had no concept of water?”
Baffled by the question, I drew up. “What do you mean?”
“Imagine for a moment a people who have no concept of water. No understanding of liquid or rain, let alone vast oceans. How
would you begin to describe your profession? How you sail? The currents you travel? The way that the ocean created an entire
world of trade and transportation, stories and diasporas that made you you ? Would you spend centuries trotting out useless comparisons? Or would you finally give up when they keep calling you a ‘cow’
and say, ‘Yes, that works.’”
It was a strange analogy, an imperfect one, I suppose, but one that hinted at a far wider gulf between myself and the creature
beside me.
“There must have been a word for you once,” I countered. “A name. Something we called you.”
“There was. In a tongue forgotten before your race built even the most primitive of rafts.” Raksh suddenly sounded weary.
“Leave it alone, Amina. Yours is not the mind that is going to break through in comprehension after all these centuries.”
It was a conversation that in typical Raksh fashion explained nothing and left me only more aware of how different we were.
Except there was a bridge between us, one beloved to me and unknown to him. It had once been easier to deny Marjana’s heritage, yet I now
feared such avoidance had only put my daughter at risk. What else didn’t I know about these so-called spirits of discord?
“Then tell me of your kin,” I urged. “In our time together, you never mentioned having a family.”
Raksh let out a harsh laugh. “ Family is a human concept.”
“But you called them cousins,” I pressed. “Kin. And surely baby spirits of discord come from somewhere. You must have had parents or—”
“I know what you’re doing.” Raksh threw me a glare so suspicious it briefly stopped my heart. “You’re prodding for weaknesses
in case you need to trap me again. Save your breath; my kin are nothing to me.”
The brusque response sent ice flooding into my veins. “Nothing to me” did not necessarily translate to “wish harm upon,” but
it sounded closer to that sentiment than anything that could be interpreted as beneficial to Marjana.
You are stuck with this creature as your only ally right now. No need to make things worse . I swiftly changed the topic. “Then tell me of this island court we need to petition. Do they have a name?”
Raksh gave me one more wary frown but answered. “It would do better to let them tell you. The less you know about the magical
world in their mind, the better.”
“I am literally wedded to a primordial chaos spirit with a name so old it’s forgotten.”
“And there is no reason the court needs to know that. Our story will be that Falco tricked us into helping him and all we
want is to go back and stop him.” Raksh gestured to the sloping emerald peak at the island’s heart. A sheer stone plateau,
like a pillar draped with lacy weeds, jutted straight up from the jungle, so tall it melted into the clouds. “They are creatures
of air, so we will go to them, as high as we can.”
My stomach dropped at the sight of the lethally elevated formation. Of course it had to be someplace high. “I cannot climb
that.”
“You won’t need to. Once we catch their attention, they will come to us.” Despite his confident words, Raksh showed a trace
of fear. “Sleep well, wife. We have quite the adventure ahead of us.”