Chapter 17
Rachid’s parents had been taken from him at the age of three and ten.
Crimes against the crown, it had been called.
Insurrection. For a royal family that did not claim its roots from Maghrib, but instead from a land across the seas.
A crown that planted its flag in soil that did not belong to them.
In soil that they had never set foot on, had never dug their boots into the sand to watch the sun rise or descend.
He remembered being forced to watch as they had been hanged, his head forcibly facing them, the laughter of settlers piercing his ears.
Rachid did not look his mama or baba in the eye, he couldn’t.
Instead, he focused his dark gaze on their bare feet, nightclothes dirtied and stained with dried blood.
When the lever had been pulled, he watched their feet dangle in the air, convulsing in what he assumed was a desperate attempt to breathe.
Heart in his mouth, and on the precipice of exploding, he could not even clutch at his chest in a vain attempt to halt the pain.
His pulse pounded loudly, feeling like it might burst his eardrums. Rachid had sunk to his knees, waiting for tears that did not come.
When Rachid was ill equipped to see through his own anguish, it had been Fouad who guided him back, like a lantern in the darkness.
He was respected, idolised—perhaps a little too much—for his dedication to their freedom.
Best of all, Fouad loved his daughters dearly—a fierce form of adoration that was consistent with his belief in their abilities, and encouragement of who they were.
If Rachid was forced to admit feeling a slither of jealousy, then he would confess.
The Sanhajis were a pillar in their community because they believed in each other as much as in their own selves.
And yet, despite knowing the capability of Fouad’s daughters, he was unable to deny the protectiveness he had always felt towards Fouad’s youngest.
He found Aicha exactly as he suspected he would—sunk into the depths of her rage and violently thrashing the face of a soldier in the ransacked workroom.
Blood coated her cheeks, dripping down her chin and all over her hands.
It was not the degree of carnage that shocked him, but the speed and force with which she continued to cave in the soldier’s skull.
As if exhaustion did not exist as his skull turned to mush.
He subdued her the only way he knew how: wrapping his arms around her from behind and tightening his hold until her arms could not move.
She screamed at the sudden intrusion, kicking out as she struggled to free herself from his grasp.
“It’s me, habiba. It’s me.” He felt the tension slowly ebb away from her limbs, her shoulders soothed by his voice.
Rachid buried his head into the crook of her neck, her scent sullied by the blood and sweat that clung to her clothing and skin.
There was no softness in it, just hard edges and a venom that he feared he would never be able to tame. Not any more, at least.
“Tell me it is not true!”
But he couldn’t, nor could he find any words of comfort.
His chest had been cleaved open, tender and red raw, and the truth was evident on his face.
The horror that bled into Aicha’s eyes only rubbed salt into his open wound.
She screamed, and his arms tightened, in a desperate attempt to absorb and ease her pain as her heart shattered into pieces.
An anguish so all-encompassing that it seemed endless and sewn into the bone of her very being. He felt all of it.
“I am sorry, habiba. I am so sorry.” The words were worthless on his tongue.
Fouad and Samira had been stolen, and their pain had been drawn out enough to elicit joy from those who had been responsible.
Rachid knew the rage that would force its way into Aicha’s heart as soon as she was relieved of this acute grief.
Fire would take a seat, subsuming her pain and demanding action.
And she would listen to it, because he knew Aicha’s thirst for retribution was insatiable.
When the time came, with her eyes burning like a flame in the night, and her grip on a blade forming blisters, she would look behind her.
Expecting Rachid to be stood there, until the end. And he would. He always would.
The stah where Rachid lived had also been raided, and if he had been there—instead of aiding Aicha in her reckless quest—he would have stood beside Fouad and Samira, facing the gallows at dawn.
Her impulsiveness and his need to protect her from it had saved his life.
Something he was not entirely surprised to realise, because it felt so inherently “Aicha” to have inadvertently saved his life in such a way.
Instead of the stah, he took her to the Gardens.
The once loud home, bustling with the warmth of Ilham and her girls, hosting lavish parties and readings, was now barren.
Ransacked and destroyed, whatever valuables that Ilham had left behind had been stolen by Duarte’s soldiers.
For now, it was the safest place in the citadel for them.
A beacon of solace among those who had managed to escape the execution that had taken place that morning.
They had been lucky that the compound had not been set ablaze, something that had been done to multiple other homes already.
As night descended, and the moon reached the sky, a calm presided over the citadel.
Like a gentle hand placed on the shoulder of a grieving widow.
The smell of smoke lingered in the air, and a silence that felt too still, full of pain and fear, spread within the walls like a sickness in the winter season.
Rachid had placed Aicha in Naima’s room, and in the silence he had cleaned her face with a damp cloth.
The stains of dried blood smudged as he continued to gently wash her skin.
Aicha had remained obedient, vacant in a way that indicated the rage and anguish she had been overwhelmed by back in her home had left her—for now—as he had instructed her out of clothes.
He cleaned away the blood as he went, scrubbing at her fingernails where it had crusted, or from her collarbone.
He used a needle and thread to sew the wound in her hand, which she had not flinched at.
It alarmed him, her silence, because above all else Aicha adored complaining.
His cheeks had warmed at seeing the skin beneath her tunic, and the soft, scarred skin of her thighs.
A guilt settled deep in his chest as the thought of betraying Fouad—by seeing his daughter in such a vulnerable state—consumed his mind.
When he had dreamed of undressing her, it had been under different circumstances.
It would have been on the night of their nikkah, with his heart beating out of his chest erratically, and her soft, plush lips desperate to kiss his own.
Not like this. Not to wash off the blood of the soldier she had mutilated until his face was unrecognisable, nor to mend a wound she had willingly received.
Aicha’s eyes were vacant as she forced her mind to drift to a place that did not place the weight of her reality, her losses, on her shoulders like a man chained to a cannon and gifted to the depths of the ocean.
When he placed her on the sidari, freshly clothed and wrapped to stave off the chill, she turned to him.
“We must continue.”
He had anticipated this, had prepared for it from the moment he’d watched the litany of hangings that had taken place that morning.
It still did little to stave off the dread that had taken residence in his chest. “Aicha,” he said, voice weary, “our numbers have dwindled. We were executed by the hundreds. It is a foolish thing to do.”
She sat up, and Rachid sensed this was the beginning of the end. “The rebel armies arrive in two days, do they not?”
“At dawn.”
“And they need to get inside the citadel; they need our help.” He hated the confidence that lingered in her tone.
“Duarte’s men will be outnumbered by thousands, tens of thousands. They will surrender.”
It was a fool’s errand to convince her to leave, but he was desperate to try, desperate to at least offer an ending in which she could find peace. “I am taking you out of the citadel. We can leave all of this behind us.”
When he looked at her, Rachid could not help but notice the look of betrayal that burned in her amber gaze. If his bones did not ache with exhaustion, he would not have missed the flicker of a flame burn gold within them.
“He will never surrender; he will flee to his homeland and continue his life as if he never destroyed mine.”
“Aicha—”
“I need to kill him!” she shouted, and he noted an edge of desperation in her words. “I need to feel his life slip away, painfully, by my own hands! He cannot get away with this.”
“Revenge will not bring you peace, habiba.” He placed his hand around her wrist, gentle and coaxing, but she shrugged it off. It was the first time she had ever done so.
“I do not want peace! I want his suffering, and I want to remember it for whatever remains left of my life.”
She was wild, eyes wide and cheeks red with anger.
A sight that usually would have endeared her to Rachid, because past reasons had been so amusing and juvenile.
Now, he wished for those times, because the way she looked in that moment was reminiscent of a wild animal backed into a corner, moments from slaughter.
He reached out to her, but was met with thin air as she stood and stepped away from him.
“Your father would not approve of this,” he said, shaking his head. “He would not wish to see this consume you. He wanted you and Samira to have a good life.”
“We cannot just abandon those of us still left here! I will not flee to fulfil a dying wish that I live out my life in a fantasy my baba dreamed up. I was born for this, raised for this.”
“So, which is it?” he challenged, gaze hard and unyielding.
Amber clashing with dark brown as neither of them, Rachid realised, would back down.
“Do you stay to free those too weak to fight, to defend our people and take back the land that has always belonged to us, or do you stay to enact revenge on Duarte?”
“Why can it not be both? Why do my intentions matter?” she countered.
“Because if we stay and fight, if we choose to go ahead with our plans, it has to be for honourable reasons. It cannot be because you are in pain, and angry, and seeking to return it to others.”
“But—”
“There is no battlefield I would not follow you into!” he burst out, chest heavy and heart aching as he pulled Aicha towards him.
His grip on her shoulders steady as he leaned in close.
Pressing his forehead against her own. “No reckless mission of yours that I would not join in order to stand behind you. I would follow you into the depths of the sea if that is where you wished to go. I would burn to the ground with the citadel, if it was what you wished to do. I will never abandon you. But I need to know it is for the right reasons.”
The silence between them was only disturbed by their heavy breathing, and he felt the softening in her shoulders as her resolve ebbed away.
As the anger deflated and her pain returned, and he feared it as much as her anger.
Because as much as he could not contain her anger, Rachid was also powerless to cradle her despair.
“Is avenging Baba and Samira not the right reason?” Her voice was small, and it picked away at his bruised heart like a scab still yet to heal.
Rachid breathed deeply, inhaling her familiar scent.
The sweat and iron that had at once felt like home.
His nose grazed her cheek, and his eyes closed as he took himself back to one of his hated days.
A day that brought nothing but pain, and longing and rage.
A day that would be forever etched into his mind like a raw wound that refused to heal.
“When they hanged my parents, the only thing that numbed my pain was rage. I never stopped wishing for vengeance, but Fouad—” His voice cracked. “Fouad asked that I only act on it with the intention of protecting others.”
Pulling away by only a short distance, Rachid ran his hand through the tangled curls, his other resting on her jaw as he lifted her head. He forced her gaze to lock with his own, thumb sweeping across her cheek to wipe at a stray tear that Aicha had fought to contain, before he continued.
“That I act to try… to ensure that what I suffered was not repeated. That is all I ask of you now, habiba. That when you continue down this path, it is with the safety of others—our people—in mind. Not just yourself. It’s what he and Samira would have asked.”
He seldom witnessed Aicha cry, because—much like Samira—it was not something she often did. Now, with her eyes darkening in a way that elicited nervousness, Rachid watched her fill to the brim with agony. He braced for her heart to shatter once more.
These were the cries of someone who had reached the end of their journey, and had no one there to greet them.
The aching loss of someone who had had two pieces of her heart burned to ashes.
Because despite Rachid being there, despite his shared anguish, with his soul tethered to hers and their link making her loss as potent as the smell of rain, he could not heal her.
“I want Baba,” she said, a sob escaping.
A heavy stone lodged in his throat, one that prevented him from being able to offer any soothing words. He fought to say something. Anything.
“I want Baba!” she said again, this time with tears erupting to cascade down her cheeks and drip onto her collarbone. “I want Baba!”
He pulled her close, her repeated words muffling by only a fraction as her volume rose to a crescendo that forced him to bury her face into his chest in order to stifle the sound of her cries.
Cradling her head and burying his face into the crook of her neck, he offered the only words he knew would not make things worse.
“I know, habiba. I know.”