29 - Rohan
R ohan woke the next morning as dawn crested the horizon. Birds cried out in the distance, free and untethered from the world. When his father would join them for dinners, irate and strained from his work, Rohan would always wish he could ask him why . He, not anyone else, had made his own life difficult, and he had continued to do so every day, tangling himself deeper and deeper into a web from which he could never escape.
Rohan understood it now.
To live was to venture into that web. The center promised the best of lives, like a mirage in the desert, and the deeper one went, the stickier it became and the harder it was to retrace one’s steps. Rohan was in the thick of it now, but he was so used to Jafar holding his hand that he didn’t know how to navigate any of it alone.
Rohan tumbled out of bed with the knowledge that he would have to see Jafar today. He couldn’t avoid him forever. It had been barely more than a day since they’d last spoken, but it felt like a lifetime.
He brushed his teeth with a siwak and washed his face, then pulled on his robes before picking up a bottle of attar that had been left on the alabaster counter in a bathroom as large as Baba’s living room. Rohan uncapped the glass vial and took a sniff of the fragrant oil: orange blossoms and sugar, two of his most favored scents. He swiped some on with a smile.
Rohan always had believed in signs.
Jafar was in the dining hall.
He lounged on the cushions as if he were royalty. Iago sat on his shoulder, snickering at something. Jafar had always been a prince without a crown, even when he was eight and Rohan was six and they’d stolen food to survive.
He looked like he’d been waiting for him.
Rohan sat down with a gulp, not the least bit hungry anymore.
“How did you sleep?” Jafar asked, as if nothing were different between them.
“Fine enough,” Rohan replied. There were still bits of red under Jafar’s fingernails, remnants of the dungeon’s horrors.
Jafar caught him looking. “Apparently, the false prisoner is fine. They were able to reverse everything I’d done.” He looked down at his hands. “Can’t say the same for myself.”
False prisoner? Rohan couldn’t hide his confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, did the Sultana not tell you?” Jafar asked. He seemed to be enjoying this. “It was all a ruse. She’s been testing us because she wants one of us to replace her dead son.”
Iago laughed, and Rohan wanted to throttle him and those vermillion feathers.
“Just throw it all on him at once, I guess,” Iago said.
Jafar smirked.
Everything made sense now: the Sultana’s telling them about the prisoner and materializing at the door to the dungeon in the dead of the night. Asking how and why and every question beside what the secret truly was.
Sickening . That was the only way to explain it. Rohan had never felt closer to Jafar than when Baba had died, and the Sultana had stepped between them and torn them apart, and for what? Something they had no say in, something that would serve only her in the end.
And her people. The people of two great kingdoms were counting on the treaty, on the marriage, on the prince. Rohan wondered if Jafar knew of the marriage treaty, or if the Sultana had only given them the information that she knew would speak to each of them more.
Jafar had shared his half. For whatever reason, Rohan decided not to do the same.
A sound drew their attention to the servants’ door at the far end of the dining hall. A man walked through, and Rohan thought nothing of it at first, but the man wouldn’t stop staring. Fidgeting. Edging toward the main exit.
Something glinted under his sleeve.
Rohan recognized the look in his eye and his dubious movements. Jafar did, too.
“Thief,” Jafar whispered, rising to his feet. “That man is a thief.”
Rohan didn’t move. He scanned the room, only to find it empty of guards. Strange, there had been a number of them here just a moment ago—where had they all gone?
“Stop!” Jafar shouted.
The man startled and began running for the door. An odd kind of run, as if his body didn’t quite match his movements. Jafar rushed forward, and Rohan felt a moment’s confusion thinking Jafar might throw himself at the man. That wasn’t Jafar. That was—
The man froze in place.
Jafar’s right hand was raised, his brow creased. He whispered a long string of words, and the man fell to his knees, gasping for air and clawing at his throat until Jafar released him from an invisible hold.
Rohan watched as his brother walked toward the thief, chin high, nose turned in a look of disdain that was eerily similar to the way Harun regarded the two of them. Iago settled on his shoulder with the same level of scorn on his tiny face.
“You could lose a hand,” Jafar drawled at the man. “Or die as pitifully as you live.”
He kicked at the man’s arm, and an ornament coated in gold slipped out of his sleeve.
“N-no,” the man stuttered. His headdress was dirty, his robes tattered. He was clearly a servant escaping for a better life, and he reminded Rohan of the prisoner, in a way. “It won’t be missed.”
Jafar laughed. “And who are you to decide that?”
Rohan couldn’t understand why Jafar was behaving as if he’d never done the same. As if their childhood wasn’t shaped by the pair of them running through the streets, stealing all that they could in order to keep themselves and their parents alive.
“Let him go, Jafar,” Rohan said, and cursed the warble in his voice.
“Let him go?” Jafar asked, turning his scorn to Rohan. “He stole.”
“As did we. For years.”
Jafar’s eyes flashed. “Never from a palace. Never something of value.”
The man would take that trinket and sell it for coin, money he would later trade for food. There was no difference between them and him—except that he got caught.
Which is his fault .
Rohan shook his head free of the thought. They had caught him, which meant they had the power to let him walk free. Who were they to judge someone when they’d done the exact same?
“He loses a hand,” Jafar said. Interrogating a prisoner was one thing, but a thief was different. Closer to home. Why was Jafar being so ruthless? So heartless?
“No,” Rohan rasped. “We can let him go. No one will know about this but us.”
“P-please,” the man whimpered.
Rohan couldn’t stop his lip from curling. He hated begging. “Or we take him to the Sultana and allow her to decide.”
“Allow the Sultana to decide? Ask her like she’s your mother?” Jafar asked. He left his post towering over the man to circle Rohan. “Just a trinket, just an orange, just a bit of bread—what kind of prince would you be if you let every criminal walk free? Your kingdom would be full of rats.”
Iago shuddered at the image.
Rohan had to hold back a shudder himself, because Jafar was right, but that didn’t mean he was going about it the right way.
“You would kill him instead?” Rohan asked, refusing to let Jafar goad him.
Jafar studied the man, still whimpering and on his knees. He didn’t even try to rise. He had accepted whatever fate was being cast upon him, and that disappointed Rohan more than anything else. The longer Rohan remained in the man’s presence, the more he felt it was folly to compare him to them. They had been better thieves than this failure.
“I’d make an example of him,” Jafar replied simply. “That could mean killing him or taking a hand, or even doing something far less permanent.”
A crackle broke the silence, along with a heavy rustling and more crackling—like bones being reshaped with a series of sickening crunches.
It was coming from where the man was kneeling.
The two of them whirled to face the thief, and Rohan’s jaw dropped as he watched the man transform, rising up and up and—
“Sultana,” Rohan whispered.
“Alchemy,” Jafar murmured.
The Sultana stood in the place of the kneeling, whimpering servant, gown and jewels intact, without a single hair out of place.
“Indeed,” she said, an aura of electric blue still sizzling around her figure.
“We didn’t know,” Rohan said.
“As was the intention,” the Sultana said, looking between the two of them. “One of you wanted to kill me, one of you wanted to send me away. You both still have much to learn, but time is not on our side.
“The crown must be donned today, and one of you will wear it.”