Chapter 7 #3
"They wanted to know what I keep for the merchant guilds. I have never dealt with the guilds in my life, Zohra, I told them so twice." Her jaw tightened. "They knew my father's name. One of them said the man who fathered you, as though it were a threat they meant to make good."
Dawud had gone very still.
"And you are unhurt," he said. Not quite a question either.
"I am unhurt. There was a fourth man, waiting behind me, out of my sight." She hesitated, unsure why the next part felt harder to say than the rest. "A foreigner saw him before I did. Northman. He fought beside me until the others broke and ran."
Zohra's gaze flicked to Dawud. It lasted only a moment, the barest exchange, gone before Samira could be certain she had seen it at all, but she caught it.
"Father." Her voice came out sharper than she meant it to. "What was that look?"
Dawud did not pretend not to understand her.
He glanced once at Zohra, a question, and Zohra answered it with the smallest nod, as if giving permission. Then he turned and went into the house without a word, leaving Samira and Zohra alone in the courtyard with the fountain running quietly between them.
"Zohra." Samira turned to her. "You have known something. All this time."
"I have known a great many things all this time, habibti.
That is rather the nature of being old." But there was no lightness in it tonight.
Zohra's hand found Samira's shoulder, and the grip was gentler than the one on her wrist had been, and far more tired.
"Come inside. Whatever your father is about to show you, I would rather you sit for it. "
***
DAWUD RETURNED WITH the cedar chest carried in both arms and set it on the table with a care that made Samira's chest go tight before he had even reached for the key.
"Your mother's things," he said. Then, for the first time, he did not stop there. "I told you once I would show you when the time was right. I do not know that I ever believed the time would come. I think some part of me hoped it would not have to."
He drew a small iron key from beneath his robe, one she had never once seen him wear, and fit it to the lock.
Inside, beneath a folded length of indigo cloth gone soft with age, lay a single object: a key, longer and more ornate than the one Dawud had just used, its bow worked in a pattern of interlocking eight-pointed stars, tarnished dark with time.
Samira stared at it. "A key to what?"
"To a room within the walls of al-Qarawiyyin.
" Dawud's voice had gone quiet and careful, the voice of a man setting down something he had carried a long distance and was afraid to drop even now, at the end of the journey.
"You know its founding, Samira. Every child in Fez does.
Fatima al-Fihri built it with her own inheritance, nearly two hundred years past, and made certain from the first stone that a woman's mind would always have a place within those walls, same as any man's.
It is why your mother trusted it. It is why I have trusted it, all these years, to hold what I could not. "
"What does it hold?"
Dawud looked once more at Zohra before he answered.
"A pendant," he said. "Left there by your mother, before you were born, for safekeeping. She trusted very few people with the knowledge of where it was hidden, and fewer still with why."
"Why would my mother hide a pendant behind a locked door in a scholars' library, rather than simply leave it to me?"
"Because, habibti, some things are not safe to carry until the one who carries them is ready to be hunted for them." He closed his hand briefly around the key before holding it out to her. "And I begin to fear, after tonight, that the waiting is over."
Samira took it. It was heavier than it looked, cold at first and then, strangely, not.
"Who guards this room?" she asked. "Surely a library does not simply hand a stranger the key to a locked chamber and stand aside."
"No one hands anyone anything at al-Qarawiyyin without Sitt Zaynab's word on it.
" Zohra spoke for the first time since Dawud had begun.
"She has kept the western archive for longer than I have kept you alive, which ought to tell you something of her patience.
Your mother trusted her with this. I trust her with you.
" She rose, already reaching for the light shawl she kept by the door.
"We go tonight, while the streets are watched less closely than they will be tomorrow.
I will not have you walk to that library alone, not after what came at you today. "
"Zohra—"
"I did not ask, habibti." Zohra was already at the door. "I have buried one woman I loved who kept too many secrets alone. I do not intend to bury her daughter the same way."
Samira looked down once more at the key in her palm, at the small worn stars catching what little lamplight reached it, and then at her father, who looked, for the first time in her memory, entirely unlike the composed man she had known her whole life.
She followed Zohra out under the cover of darkness.
***