Chapter 24 #2
“Devil be damned!” Walid exclaims. “The earlier delivery must have been delayed by the rain.”
“Don't worry,” Shadi tells him. “We'll find a way through the front gate.”
Hind looks even paler now. Her eyes are red and tearing. She keeps holding tightly to Shay's hand, even when everyone else has let go.
“I don't think my mother can make it back through the smoke again.” Shay eyes the lingering fumes. They're dissipating, but not quickly enough. “Let's keep to the walls? Make our way around the perimeter?”
“Good thinking,” Khawla says.
They're on the move again, going a little more slowly now to accommodate Hind. But it's alright, because the Moulays seem to be looking for them everywhere but along the perimeter wall. That is until they're in the final stretch, the front gates visible in the distance.
A lone Moulay appears in their path.
Hind and Shay take cover behind Walid because he's the only one still holding a weapon.
The new Moulay turns his musket on the boy, nostrils flaring when he snarls, “Drop the weapon, traitor!”
Shay nearly drowns in the booming of her heart. Shaking, Walid slowly lowers his weapon to the ground, and Shay couldn't be angry at him if she tried.
She should be protecting him.
Not only is she old enough to be, well, if not his mother, his teacher or governess, but she's the one wearing armor. Shame flashes through her, and everything inside her wants to hug the boy to her chest, to reassure him all will be well.
A sudden crack like a split down a frozen lake captures everyone's attention.
The woman who storms toward them with a guard on each side is tall.
She wears a crown of twisted branches and white feathers.
A light-blue gown cascades around her, layered with lace and fur.
Her skin glistens, as if every part of her is covered by a thin sheet of ice.
Her eyes are twin pits as dark as open graves, her lips like blue leeches clinging to a pale-white face.
“Lower your weapon, fool.” Her words flourish the air with delicate puffs of mist. “I won't have the precious cargo Sayeda Hibachi carries exposed to harm.”
The Moulay immediately complies.
“Take her inside.” The Snow Queen addresses the two Moulays who accompany her, stout-looking brutes with hateful eyes who have somehow already secured Khawla's arms behind her back. The Queen turns to the original guard. “Round up the others.”
Khawla struggles, fearless as ever, refusing to be dragged inside.
The Snow Queen casually lifts her hand, now glowing with blue light.
She brings it to her mouth as though blowing a kiss.
Sudden wind whips Khawla's hair back from her face and leaves her eyebrows crusted in frost. A seam of ice glues her eyelids closed, depriving her of sight and allowing the guards to overtake her.
Shadi yells wildly, running forward. The guard leaps in his path, and Shadi punches him squarely in the face. The guard turns instead toward Hind, perhaps judging her a more manageable target, and brandishes the butt of his weapon threateningly.
The air itself has turned sharp with violence, nails springing out like a cat. A desperate clawing Shay can feel across her skin, inside her chest. None of this was part of the plan. But birthing has taught Shay that when things take an unexpected turn, you improvise.
She reaches for the musket Walid laid on the ground. Her heartbeat echoes like a chanted blessing inside her head as she cocks the hammer the way she watched Khawla do it and aims the barrel at the Snow Queen.
The queen simply laughs. “Go ahead.”
Shay must act before the guards get Khawla inside the building. Hesitation builds in her chest, but then she remembers that hesitation got Ghita killed. She jerks the trigger. The ball releases with a bruising kick to her shoulder, filling the air with the rotten stench of gunpowder.
Her ears clang.
Through the smoke, a flick of the Snow Queen's hand creates a shield. Floating ice shimmers, hanging in midair long enough for the ball to ricochet off on a new path. It strikes the Moulay who called Walid a traitor, felling him in an instant.
“You'll need to reload if you want to try shooting at me again.” She smiles mockingly at Shay, who keeps glancing at the Moulay's still body, expecting him to get up.
But the Moulay is not screaming, no one is going over to help him, and Shay thinks, with a sick twist in her gut, that she was right.
Red is good camouflage. “Not that it will do you any good.”
She looks around in panic. Khawla and the guards are already gone. Walid is nowhere in sight. Shadi is carefully regarding the Snow Queen, shielding Hind behind him.
The Snow Queen watches, still smiling, as a new batch of Moulays approaches. Leisurely, she lifts her hand. Her palm swells like the touched one with the Shawafa of Hadiqmin back at the farmhouse and releases not a thorn but a long, pointed icicle, sending it spearing into Shadi's thigh.
He crumples. Shay cries out, anguish washing over her. While scanning the scene for some last-beaker way to turn things around, her sight snags on the exact moment Hind pulls a small glass bottle from her pocket.
“No!” Shay pushes her way toward her as she lifts it to her lips, but the distance is too far, Shay's feet too slow.
Hind tosses back the Snow. Not only is she endangering the child she carries, but Shay can't understand how the Shawafa of Shifamin will help them.
Hind raises her fingers. Green smoke billows from them, a rippling wave suspended in the air as though coiling to strike.
All at once, it writhes a serpentine trail through the melee and plumes into the Snow Queen's face.
The queen doubles over, spontaneously stricken with an uncontrollable fit of coughing.
“Run,” Hind cries.
They make for the gate, Shay lifting the loose fabric of her skirt to grant her legs greater range, Shadi limping at a stilted sprint. A trumpet blasts, its peal echoing from a high tower. The feet pounding behind them swell in number.
Another blast. Shay stumbles as a ball whizzes past them. A near miss, this time, but proof that someone either missed the Snow Queen's directive against gunfire or has decided to ignore it.
With Shay's arm around Shadi's back to support him, they reach the gate, which is blessedly still unlocked. The bloody stain on his pant leg is growing, the icicle jutting out like protruding bone.
Shadi pauses for the briefest moment, looking back, whether searching for Khawla or Walid, Shay isn't sure. Then they're back out on the cobblestoned streets. He quickly ushers them down a dark alley and stops in front of a circular sewage port, where he squats and shifts aside the heavy lid.
“You're jesting, right?” Hind backs away from the hole. She looks over her shoulder in the direction of the kasbah as the sounds of shouting and footfalls grow closer, seeming to weigh her options between imprisonment and contact with human excrement.
Shay, a veteran of the messiest of life's biological processes, has no qualms. Besides, she's starting to trust that Shadi really knows what he's doing.
“Please.” She squeezes Hind's hand, making her eyes soft and pleading, not sure in this moment if she feels more like a child begging an adult or the other way around. “It's our best hope to conceal ourselves.”
Hind nods reluctantly. Despite his injury, Shadi refuses to go first. Shay knows she doesn't have time to argue with him.
She descends the ladder, followed by Hind.
Shadi clings to the ladder rungs last, handing down the stolen musket and sliding the cover into place, like closing the lid on a coffin.
He hobbles down by feel alone. Shay waits at the bottom with her arms outstretched, meeting him in the dark as he maneuvers the last few steps.
They huddle in the darkness, shoulder to shoulder, their heavy breaths bouncing off damp stone walls. Stomps and commands fly back and forth overhead.
Shay realizes the jinn sticks were in Khawla's bag, but she pushes the thought away before it sets in, the shape of it too jagged to hold, too blistering to touch. Seeming to intuit her need, Hind raises her hands, and they glow.
Shay quickly examines Shadi's thigh. “Is it melting?
“Not fast enough.”
“I can help him,” Hind says, the green of her Shawafa reflecting in her white-cast eyes. “You pull it out. I'll close the wound.”
“Just do it quickly,” Shadi groans, his lips drawn thin and beaded by sweat.
Shay cuts the material away from the leg of his trousers with her pocketknife, both to see the wound better and for staunching the initial gush of blood. It takes more force to remove the icicle than she's prepared for.
She feels the tearing of flesh and muscle, as though the spear causes as much damage coming out as it did going in. Shadi doesn't scream, not out loud. His face contorts in a silent agony that rivals any laboring mother's expression Shay has ever witnessed.
What small relief she feels as Hind takes over is short-lived.
The world above them has gone silent, indicating they are no longer being hunted, at least not in the immediate vicinity.
They are safe for the moment. She hopes Walid will be spared, since the Moulay who saw him with them is dead.
She wonders what that young man was like before he enlisted.
Of the friends and family who will mourn him. His parents.
And then there's Khawla.
All Shay can see are Khawla's eyes frosted shut. All she can think about is the terror Khawla must have felt, being sightless, not knowing where they were taking her. She imagines the moment Khawla's finally able to pry her eyes open again and finds herself alone.
That's the thought that breaks her.