Chapter 13 #3
Tears filled Aicha’s eyes, and she blinked rapidly to keep them at bay. She gripped Samira’s hand just as tightly, an earnestness she did not ever use with Samira bleeding into her words. “And you are the best part of me. Anything remotely admirable within me is because of you.”
A comfortable silence settled between them, with their hands still entwined, for what felt like several minutes. It was only disturbed when Rachid stepped through the curtain, his eyes casting over the sisters’ joined hands, and a satisfied smile settled on his full lips.
“A truce, at last,” he said, “and all because of me.”
He came to stand beside them as Samira and Aicha released their grips, the elder sister rolling her eyes at Rachid’s irritating smirk. She ignored him, instead placing her palm out expectantly to her sister. “Let me sharpen your blade before you embark on your suicidal journey.”
Fouad had a secret. One that he had convinced himself was of no importance, and instead best left in the past. It would do no one any good to drag it to the surface, because Aicha was fine. Healthy.
In the first few weeks that followed his wife’s death, Aicha had become a sickly newborn.
Sickly enough that he feared every time she slept, she would not wake.
What remained of his sanity amid the grief had begun to crack, each fissure growing large enough that he felt as though his world might topple in.
When her fever failed to break, causing her skin to burn red hot and her cries to cleave his heart in two, desperation clawed within his chest. There were many steps he had taken prior to arriving on Ilham’s doorstep; healers he had visited who had told him there was little to be done, that either the fever would break or Allah would take her.
His desperation caused him to sink low enough to beg the Portuguese healers for help, only to be turned away.
If he looked back, he would have said madness had consumed him.
A fear that ran so deeply under his skin it felt like a sickness had invaded him, evoking memories of his wife’s screams as she had given birth, and of the first and last time she had looked at Aicha before slipping away.
The tiny bundle in his arms was the last surviving memory of his wife, and he was desperate enough to fight against her being taken.
And so he stood at Ilham’s door.
He was greeted by one of her younger girls, ushered in as the newborn in his arms had stopped crying. Instead, her skin had become pale, her breathing laboured and slow.
“Save her,” he had ordered, his voice only wavering by a fraction as he held his baby girl out to Ilham. “You must save her.”
It was the first thing he had said to her as he strode into her living quarters, ignoring the look of alarm until something calmer settled across her dark features.
Fouad had always found her both devastatingly alluring and terrifying, the magnitude of her gift and what it meant when you followed the path of Allah instilled a need to keep his distance.
But this was the second time he had sought her help, the first had been when his wife had passed and he had begged for Ilham to bring her back.
She had convinced him it was not a path he truly wished to go down, and that his faith would only waver for a fraction before regret replaced his grief.
This time, though, he knew the moment she saw the depths of panic in his eyes, because she reached forward to take Aicha from his hands and he felt the loss of her presence so keenly that it pained him.
She held the baby closely to her chest, pulling her wraps back to flutter her hands across the child’s forehead. Her touch was gentle, coated with a maternal care that Aicha had barely known, except for the healer that nursed her—a woman that Ilham had found for Fouad in the earlier days.
“She’s fading,” she said quietly, and fear wrapped its hand around Fouad’s throat. “She will not last the night.”
“Do something!” he begged. “Please.”
“There is no going back if yo—”
“I do not care!” Fouad roared, hands pulling at the roots of his hair. “I have lost my wife, Samira has lost her mother. I will not lose my child!”
He was not a proud man—he knew when to concede in a debate and when he needed to plead for someone’s grace or help. And so, in that moment, he had found himself unable to stand without his knees buckling, forcing him to kneel. “She is so young, and small. She is all I have left of Tadla. Please.”
Desperation can do atrocious things to a man; even compel them to seek the help of a shawafa to bring his daughter back from the brink of death.
There would be no clarity in his mind that night, no guilt would follow him for the years to come as he watched Aicha’s health improve, as she learned to say “Baba” for the first time and count using her fingers.
There would be no guilt when she crawled into bed beside him on stormy nights, nor would he feel it when she took a sword for the first time and pride surged through his chest. Instead, he would watch as Ilham’s girls lit bakhoor, the smell potent enough that it would be all he could taste on his tongue, leaving a bitter trace.
He would watch, with his heart in his throat, as Ilham waited for Aicha’s breathing to slow to a stop, motioning him to remain where he was.
“Wait,” she ordered, before she placed a kiss on the child’s head. “I cannot save her from her sickness, but I can intercept her path.”
She whispered quietly as her forehead gently pressed against the delicate one of Aicha’s.
“What lingers in that realm has never been mortal, Fouad. It may follow her back.”
“I do not care,” he muttered, dark eyes unwavering. “Just do it.”
It would only be for seconds, he reasoned, seconds where her soul would be adrift; it could not possibly be long enough to draw in unholy forces.
He watched as Ilham descended into silence, her whispers fading as her eyes closed and darkness abruptly eclipsed the room.
All candles had been doused out with a sudden gust of wind, one that had appeared unexpectedly.
Fouad felt an ice-cold chill ascend his spine, a chill that he had not experienced in his thirty-five-year existence.
It was not the chill of cold weather, but of a presence that was not visible, as if a figure hovered over his shoulder.
Of an eye keenly watching him, as if they knew every unsavoury secret he had ever harboured, every sin he had committed.
Freezing his veins like he had been pushed into the early-morning tide, and the cold water forced him into a brutal awakening.
Despite the darkness that blurred his vision, he would not turn around, would not dare to tempt whatever unholy being lingered behind him in that moment.
Its presence pressed into his back as if it would crush him in the palm of its hand.
That was the one moment, the only moment, that he would ever question the severity of his decision.
And then the pitiful, ear-splitting cry of a newborn broke the silence, triggering the relighting of the candles and illuminating the room that he and Ilham resided in.
He would focus only on the thrashing of Aicha’s little fists from the bundle she was wrapped in as he stumbled towards her.
Her paleness was replaced with rich, light-brown skin and full cheeks.
Her tiny feet and fingers, which he loved to place soft kisses on, moved with a vigour that had been absent in the days prior.
“Thank you. Thank you.” The words spilled from his lips as he pulled Aicha out of Ilham’s arms and into his own, his shoulders curling inwards as he held her to his chest, to protect her from everything that surrounded them.
Ilham would not speak as she watched them both, a breath away from Fouad as he fussed over his baby.
A tenderness pulled out of him as his callused fingers stroked her soft head, one that had been missing for the days Aicha had initially been born.
Lost in his grief. He would remember, in the decades to come, the peace he felt in that moment.
Then the way horror had choked his throat, like a sunflower seed lodged there, when Aicha cracked her eyes open, and stole his breath when both he and Ilham found the pitch blackness that lay where her irises should have been.
And then she blinked, and the terrible, terrible darkness was replaced with the honeyed brown that had only just begun to emerge in the weeks prior.
Fouad refused to look up at Ilham, unwilling to acknowledge what they had witnessed.
“It was nothing,” he explained, his head only momentarily shaking as he pulled his newborn closer. “It was nothing.”