Chapter 16
Jou Boulka, the night of skins: A festival with roots in Hazmaggi tradition that has been adopted over the years by the mainstream culture of Mekchaouen.
Some say its rituals represent the cycle of birth and rebirth; others say it is a celebration of fertility.
It is believed to be bad luck to light a fire in your home on this night, therefore meat is cooked outdoors on public fires instead.
Citizens dress up in furs to honor the spirits of the animals that have been sacrificed to provide nourishment.
Children are known to knock on doors and ask for money or wool or goat skins.
It is believed that a child who manages to touch the skin of one of the costumed festivalgoers, who often thwart the children's attempts by hitting them playfully with a severed animal limb, will have good fortune in the coming solar cycle.
—Encyclopedia of Holidays and Celebrations
The first step of Khawla's plan is to dress them up in disguises.
She clips small horns into their hair and loops bracelets adorned with the hooves of mini-goats around their wrists.
She then lines up tubs of paint in the colors of red, white, black, and green, and proceeds to employ them with an artistry that makes Shay think her earlier comment about the gift of painting was something more than a random comparison.
Khawla stains Shay's skin in the deathly pallor of a wraith who hasn't glimpsed a drop of sunlight in ages.
Black circles hang around her eyes. Tiny marks around her mouth create the illusion of threads stitched into her flesh.
On her own face, Khawla draws black veins that wind around her eyes, appearing to twist under her skin and seeming to carry a substance much darker than blood.
The maid paints another mouth over her own in sweeps of red and uses white to set rows of jagged teeth within it.
The results render them indistinguishable from the nonhuman inhabitants of Ard Al-Ghul.
The girls creep down red clay streets up to the edge of Al-Ghaba Mayita.
Here, Khawla walks to a poplar tree with a symbol carved upon its bark—the yaz—made of a straight line with an intersecting upward curve on the top half and an intersecting downward curve on the bottom half.
It's a motif that symbolizes freedom, often seen in Hazmaggi tattoos.
Khawla presses her hand to the symbol, her eyes fluttering closed again, her face bearing that look of concentration.
When she opens them, she reaches into the thick cloth sash tied around the waist of her skirt and pulls out a tapered candle. She holds it with two fists and cracks it, but instead of breaking in half, the stick illuminates with a fluorescent glow. A grin tugs the corners of Shay's mouth.
Not a candle—a jinn stick.
The same lava used to straighten hair can also be encased in beeswax to form a child's toy. Shay used to collect them from the ground on the mornings after festivals when Ghita wasn't watching. Once broken, the stick will stay aglow for about a day.
Her palms dampen right along with her sense of adventure when she recalls the gruesome animals from her last forest foray, the way red moonlight reflected in the eyes of those that had any.
The shadows of night that seemed to conspire to hide the girls in their escape now sway like thick ropes ready to coil about her neck.
It may not be too late to convince the maid to turn around. In fact, if what Deebi told her is true, getting to the festival tonight shouldn't even be possible. “Khawla, I'm confused. Doesn't it take at least one whole day for humans to cross Al-Ghaba Mayita by foot?”
“Not if you know the right shortcuts.” The maid's eyes sparkle with mischief and starlight. As though sensing Shay's growing apprehension, she grabs her hand and squeezes it lightly. “Listen to me. I want you take a deep breath. And then look up.”
She does. A dark sky unfurls above her, bedecked with the flickers of a thousand candles, a star for every wish tightly held in someone's heart.
“Now, if we're to play the part,” Khawla whispers, her voice suddenly near Shay's ear, “we have to summon our inner beasties.”
Shay smiles nervously. “Our inner what?”
The glow of the jinn stick sharpens the effect of the maid's face paint, her smile transformed into a fang-toothed snarl. “Ready to show me how loud you can be?”
“I—” Before Shay responds, Khawla tosses her head back, releasing a roar. Laughing in turn, Shay musters a growl of her own.
“You can do better than that!” Khawla urges. “Think about someone who hurt you. Someone who deserves to be devoured.”
Tarik rises in her mind. Shay again tilts her head toward the moon, silver and swollen and shimmering, thinking now of the hjabat's crystal face.
How Hind lied to her. Ghita, too. A rage that feels both unfamiliar and strangely natural bubbles into her chest. She opens her mouth, and the sound that emerges is raw and howling. And full of power.
They plunge into the forest's depths, met with the cling of moist air.
Each brisk step they take over the sodden earth releases the stench of rotten eggs.
As they move from tree to tree, Shay spots more of the yaz symbols, and other symbols she can't identify.
It hits her how little she knows about this Sisterhood she's agreed to confer with.
“Can you tell me more about this friend of yours we're meeting?” she asks.
Khawla's arrival felt like nothing less than a life raft appearing at the critical moment when she needed one to stay afloat.
Shay neglected to consider that the maid already had family and friends of her own, had a whole life before coming to live with the bone-eaters that Shay isn't privy to.
“What's his profession? Well, besides being a rebel, I suppose.”
Khawla laughs, the sound cut short by a far-off cry, the not-distant growling that closely follows it. “He's a bit of a yahyah of all trades. And speaking of professions, I'm curious, is it common practice for midwives to take on multiple apprentices at once?”
“They take one at a time usually.” Shay points out the scarlet leaves of a patch of venomous vine, and they both step carefully around it. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, you know me,” Khawla answers coyly. “Just being nosy as usual.”
Animals rustle, near enough to make their presence known without stepping into the girls’ path.
“How do you do it?” Shay asks. It's obvious Khawla knows where she's going, a confidence born of well-trodden familiarity.
Everything about the forest gives Shay the uncomfortable feeling of having one foot in the real world and the other in the world beyond, of being between.
If it has any such effect on Khawla, she doesn't show it.
“How do you spend so much time in the forest?”
“You get used to it.” The maid ducks beneath a low-hanging branch fringed green in glowing moss. “It wasn't always a scary place, you know.”
“It wasn't?” Shay asks as the girls join hands, crossing the slippery rocks of a stagnant creek. Fingers of blue mist clutch at their ankles.
“When magic thrived, so did the forest. This was a place of abundance. It provided plentiful shade and cover for prey animals. Grassy meadows for grazers. Everything had its balance. Mature trees and young saplings. Pristine lakes and flowing creeks.” Khawla leads Shay inside the dark belly of a cave where they can only see as far as the small bubble of light thrown by the jinn stick.
“When magic died, the forest died, too. Men used to hunt here, you know, when the birds didn't possess more legs than a spider and the bears didn't have fur as coarse as jabberfish spikes or bellies filled with maggots the size of salmon.
Now, men who dare pass through are more likely to be hunted.
If not lost for eons. What with landmarks known to rearrange themselves on a whim maps aren't useful here anymore.”
Shay is quiet for a moment. She never thought about magic impacting the natural world the way it impacts human politics, but the last thing Khawla said seems significant. “Don't you ever get lost?”
“Me? Oh, I have a special affinity for directions and finding things. That's why the Sisterhood often sends me to relay messages or conduct reconnaissance missions,” Khawla says, that edge of pride flushing back into her voice.
The jinn stick flickers then, and blinks out, resigning them to darkness.
“Devil be damned,” she says, and though Shay can't see her shaking the stick to no avail, she guesses that's what's happening. “It must have been an old one.”
A special affinity sounds an awful lot like an echo, or maybe even the fledgling gift of a hizoura.
Never having called someone a friend, Shay can't be sure how much sharing is considered appropriate, but she doesn't want to keep secrets from Khawla.
And if Khawla really sees their emerging friendship as more than a job, she won't pressure Shay to join the Sisterhood if she doesn't want to.
Shay always thought she had to be one thing or another, that her existence required a purpose, a label. Apprentice. Daughter. Outcast. But what if she could just be, and that was somehow enough? Maybe the answer she's been praying for has been right in front of her all along.
“I want to show you something,” she whispers, brushing Khawla's arm in the inky darkness.
Shay takes a deep breath and reaches out with the part of her mind where her Shawafa resides.
She directs her flow of consciousness to the kindle worms hidden deep within the crooks and crevices of the limestone ceiling.
Nothing happens for long enough to make her think she's only going to embarrass herself, but then glowing dots of blue emerge one by one.
They illuminate en masse, transforming the cave ceiling into a theater of cosmic lights.
“Glory to heaven.” Khawla gasps in delight. “Wait—how did you do that?”
“I guess you could say I have an affinity with living creatures.”
“Hmm …” Khawla bumps her shoulder into Shay's. “I knew there was something special about you the moment I laid eyes on you.”
The caves make a kind of tunnel system that Khawla explains serves to shorten the distance to Nezjar. Shay continues to summon the kindle worms to light the caves they pass through, and in the alternating stretches of forest between them, she enlists the assistance of friendly fireflies.
They reach the parts of the forest recognizable to Shay from her foraging excursions more quickly than it seems possible.
Soon, she's stepping from the trees into a clearing where the lights of Nezjar line the hilltops in greeting.
Shay's first thought is it should feel like she's come home.
But the notion is at odds with the hollow ache of her chest, as wistful as the notes of a half-forgotten song.
She wonders how Ghita has fared in her absence. And Sami. And her beloved crew of strays. The truth, she now perceives, is she always needed them more than they needed her.
A sigh slips from her throat like a ghost. She never really belonged here, did she? In a strange way, Hind has spared her. Prevented her from accepting a life she may not have chosen had more than one path ever been offered.
Her second thought is more of an observation.
The moon hanging over Nezjar wears its natural face of gold-white marble.
No glowing film of ominous red, icy blue, or mystical silver.
It's as though within Al-Ghaba Mayita, and Ard Al-Ghul beyond, things appear differently.
Perhaps, in some ways, they appear truer to the way they really are, the hidden made visible.
A whistle from the darkness interrupts her introspection. The boy who must be Khawla's friend steps from the shadows. Shay can only blink. A long headdress made of a goat's pelt frames the face of someone she hasn't thought about in some time but has also never quite forgotten.
He squints back at her for a long moment, and then he smiles.