5 - Jafar

U nder a merciless sun, Jafar led his younger brother and Iago deeper into the shadows as villagers hurried past, sand stirring in their wake. People rushed with buckets of water, voices crashing one into the next, panic rising as thick as the smoke billowing to the skies. No one noticed as the three of them huddled in the remains of an old shack.

Jafar had never been so happy to leave that broom closet. His prison. His sanctuary.

Baba’s manor was on fire. Devastated. Jafar hadn’t known stone could crumble so quickly, but there was enough that was combustible within to send the entire thing crashing down on everything Jafar knew. It only served Baba right for having rid the house of everything Mama had once touched.

“Are we the only ones who escaped?” Jafar asked Iago. He still couldn’t quite believe he was conversing with a talking parrot.

The parrot looked grave as he settled on the jutting stone nearest him. “I nearly singed a wing out there.”

“You—you talk?” Rohan sputtered, swiping at his eyes.

“Not this again,” Iago moaned.

“Answer the question,” Jafar snapped.

Iago narrowed his eyes at Jafar, clearly irked by the command, but he finally relented. “Yes, I talk.”

Jafar dragged a hand down his face. “ My question, Iago.”

“Yes, Jafar.” Iago sounded bored. “I didn’t see any other survivors.”

Jafar slumped back against the wall, unsure if it was in relief or exhaustion. He couldn’t bring himself to care about the rough stone snagging at his robes. No other survivors . They were all dead. The maids and servants and kitchen staff. Baba. The house, shredded like the remains of the awarded scholarship, much of which was still in his pocket.

He could not summon tears nor sorrow. The fire had scrubbed at his insides, leaving him raw, untethered in a way. Numb. Relieved to be unharmed. Guilty to be alive. He envied Rohan and his emotions.

“Do you think it was Barkat?” Rohan asked, staring into the distance. “Baba went and yelled at him after we finished our food.”

“Vengeful cooks have more subtle ways of getting back at people,” Iago said, and when neither Jafar nor Rohan asked him to elaborate, he did so anyway. “You know, like poison. No? Guess I have to do all the talking around here.”

Iago couldn’t understand their silence, and how monumental a moment this was.

Jafar had been waiting for his scholarship for more reasons than one. Acceptance into the House of Wisdom would have been a way to squeeze distance between himself and his father. That desire for space was what eventually led to him feeling some sort of twisted enjoyment whenever he was locked in that broom closet, wasn’t it?

An entire realm separated him and Baba now.

Armed men marched past their dilapidated hideout. The village’s governing caliph was just, and his guards were always quick to respond. If they were here, both Baba’s supposed cohorts and enemies might not be far behind.

The village of Ghurub was small and insignificant, lost in the crossroads between several kingdoms, but that was where an advantage was to be had. And their father, despite his numerous decisions gone wrong, had known it. He had been establishing trade routes and carving out a place for Ghurub on the map of the world. He had stepped on toes and created one too many foes—even his own allies respected him about as much as soldiers respected a heartless general.

Jafar wasn’t about to face them.

Rohan sniffled. “Baba—”

“Shh,” Jafar hissed.

But Rohan didn’t care about the platoon of guards. He didn’t even care for the snot running down his face. He never had. Jafar understood that he was hurting and grieving, but he really could have been more presentable.

“He could be hurt, Jafar. He could be—”

“Dead?” Jafar asked flatly, and Rohan flinched.

“He’s probably nice and crispy,” Iago added.

Jafar shot him a look.

“What?” Iago asked. “I thought we didn’t like him. I certainly didn’t.” He shuddered and lifted a wing in a way that was very much like a man waving an arm in dismissal. “All those stale crackers.”

But the words made Rohan look more appalled than sad, which Jafar considered a triumph. It meant he wasn’t spiraling.

The flames soon died down. Embers shone like diamonds in the rough, taunting him. Everything that he was had been reduced to a pile of ash and crumbled stone.

No one could have survived that fire. If not for the broom closet, neither Jafar nor Rohan would have survived, either. Jafar could already hear the cries of alarm and hushed whispers from the rubble where they hid now, paces from the remains of their house. Like a feather slowly drifting to the ground, the truth settled in him with finality.

Their father, one of the city’s most prosperous merchants, was dead.

“... the sons died, too? What a shame,” a guard was saying, shaking his head as he passed. Jafar watched from a hole in the wall, breath held. “Came from nothing and back to nothing they go.”

Rohan straightened. Iago perked up, too. “We’re not—”

Jafar slapped a hand over his brother’s mouth and yanked the parrot back with a hand around his scrawny neck.

“What’s gotten into you?” Iago asked, as if he knew Jafar. Then again, he did . Jafar was the one who knew nothing about this relationship.

“What is wrong with you?” Rohan echoed, slowly teetering toward hysterics. “Why are we even hiding? You’re acting like we killed him! You’re acting like the man that’s—that you say is dead isn’t our father! Our blood!”

Jafar bit back a snort, because if what Iago had said about the scholarship was true, Rohan had acted like Jafar wasn’t his blood. They weren’t too different. Iago opened his mouth, and Jafar knew he was thinking the same. He silenced him with a look.

Because Rohan was still his brother.

“I’m sorry,” Jafar said, and he truly was. He wiped away Rohan’s tears with the edge of his sleeve and bent closer to him. “I know that he was our father. I know that he was all we had. But when a powerful man like that winds up dead, his enemies come looking, and I won’t risk our getting hurt. I will always put you first.”

He could tell Rohan was trying not to cry again, and Jafar wanted to shake him. Rohan was seventeen years old, not four.

“He has a point, you know,” Iago said, crossing his wings. Jafar was starting to like having the parrot on his side.

“There’s nothing left for us here, Rohan,” Jafar continued. He tried dusting off his clothes, but it was futile. The sand and dust in this little hovel had sat undisturbed long enough to be eager for something new upon which to cling. “Nothing. Not Mama or Baba, not our belongings, not our home.”

Nor did they have anyone else. They were at that age when no one wanted anything to do with them, oftentimes not even their father.

“Baba’s business,” Rohan said, grasping at straws for whatever reason. “We can’t just throw away all his work.”

The ground beneath their sandals rumbled, sand and little pebbles shaking loose with the distant thunder of hooves. Horses. “Hear that? Everyone who wants a piece of Baba’s fortune— our fortune—is already on the way. You know as well as I do that they won’t give us what we’re owed by right.”

Rohan stood on weak legs to face Jafar in the meager light. His brow was creased. “So that’s it? We’re giving up?”

“Yeah, what’s the plan here?” Iago asked.

Jafar wrapped a checkered keffiyeh around his neck and the bottom half of his face before doing the same for his brother. The sands were calm, but he didn’t want to take a chance at being recognized. He stepped into the open, pulling Rohan behind him, and the dry heat assaulted them as readily as the sun.

Jafar guided Rohan away from the plumes of smoke still huffing into the sky. “Iago, stay close. No, that doesn’t mean sit on my shoulder.”

Iago remained on his shoulder, talons digging into his robes and settling just on his skin. Jafar let him be. He had more pressing concerns, like remaining unseen.

“Ah, he wants me to pry,” Rohan said to no one in particular, but if he was exasperated by Jafar, it meant he was distracted from everything else, and that was yet another victory. “What are we going to do, then?”

The scholarship weighed heavily in Jafar’s pocket. But his chance at admission might yet exist, even if it hung by a thread, and with Baba gone, Jafar had never felt so hopeful. And cautious, as Iago’s words about Rohan still rang loud.

Jafar looked to the skies and the sands dusting the blue with gold and grit. The heat of the early afternoon sun across his robes was not unlike a mother’s embrace. Presumably. He remembered less and less of his mother as the years went on.

“Remember the last story Mama ever told us?” Jafar said finally, knowing it was his brother’s favorite.

“The golden scarab and the genie in a lamp, yes,” Rohan said, though he looked a little guilty when he said it, for reasons Jafar couldn’t place.

Jafar would have liked to say that he still wanted to apprentice in the House of Wisdom—that, instead of seeking out the scarab or the lamp, he wanted to find those enchanted rubies from a whole other story for reasons Rohan couldn’t understand.

A falcon swooped through the air with a cry, its limber form silhouetted against the light, and as Iago dug his talons deeper into Jafar’s shoulder in fear, Rohan looked up at it with a soft expression. He would take it as a good sign.

Jafar smiled. “That’s the one. We’re going to get our three wishes.”

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