Chapter 9
Dear Amma,
I wish you were here to tell me what to do. I wish I had gone with you across the River.
—Letter from Yaseema Nazir to Mahira Nazir, unsent
Yaseema
I raced back home, Queen Azari’s bracelet feeling heavier with every step, and each press of my satchel like an anvil against my back.
My shoulder throbbed, and I needed something to dull the pain, but didn’t have time.
Once Winthrop and Sophie discovered Queen Azari’s haath phool was missing, they would come for me.
But they wouldn’t find what they were looking for.
Determination powered my steps, helped me ignore my burning muscles that had sat too long behind desks and books, researching and discovering secrets for others to pursue. But thoughts of Safiyya and my grandmother gave me speed I wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
Because I knew the Citadel would come for them too.
I burst through the door of our cottage, my breath trapped in my chest like a hive of bees clamoring to escape.
“Yaseema? What is it?” Nani was hunched over whatever was simmering on the stove, the fragrance perfuming the air with cumin and chili. Safiyya was huddled in a blanket on the threadbare divan, drinking a nearly translucent cup of chai.
At my entrance Safiyya looked up. “Yas, where have you been, and why do you look like garbage?” Her voice was still ragged with illness, but she sounded much better than she had last night, and her eyes were brighter and more focused.
“You have to go, both of you,” I huffed out, my wording coming out stilted. “Can you head to Sidrah Aunty? The Citadel won’t find you there for a long while.”
“What have you done, Yas?” My cousin’s black eyes found mine, her mouth pinched. “Did you drop a book at the archives?” Her tone was mocking, still thinking I was a good scholar who did nothing to anger the Citadel.
She would find out the depths of my treason soon enough.
I narrowed my eyes at her, placing my hands on my hips. “No, I stole something from them.” I put my hand in the waistband of my skirt, finding the hole I’d cut earlier and pulled out the golden bracelet and hand chain once owned by an ancient fae queen.
Safiyya inhaled sharply, her eyes blowing wide at the piece of jewelry in my hand.
“That cannot be what I think it is.”
Instead of responding, Imet Nani’s searing gaze, the one that always knew what I was thinking, no matter how I tried to hide it.
I wasn’t hiding now.
“You did it,” Nani said, her voice filled with awe. Something warm flooded my chest at the reverence and pride in her tone. “I thought you might.”
“Eh?” Safiyya whirled on her. “You thought she might steal an ancient fae haath phool from the Citadel and sentence us all to death? You might have let us know sooner, then. We could have all packed our bags earlier.”
“Hush, Safiyya,” Nani chided. “We have more important things to do than bicker. You always have conflict with Yaseema, but she is not the enemy. You must save your energy and ire for those truly at fault, like the Citadel.”
“Trust me, I have enough ire for the both of them,” she muttered while rolling her eyes.
“This isn’t something to joke about, Safiyya!” I cried, advancing on her. “You know what they’ll do when they discover one of their most important relics is gone.”
She curled her lips in a vicious smile. “Why did you steal it, then?”
I gestured to Nani’s shriveled garden patch outside, that had nothing but a few onions left. Then to the rotting mango trees in the orchard.
“You don’t think there’s a reason for all this?
Our food isn’t growing anymore. Astolans are getting weaker and the Empire stronger.
With every fae artifact they take, with every piece of fae gold removed from Astola, we lose our life magic that the land depends on.
But what if there’s a way we could get it all back? ”
Safiyya stared at me. “Now you grow a spine?”
Nani put her hands on my shoulders, her eyes bright and wet. She was a frail woman, but her arms still had weight, as if she were a statuesque queen and not a starving Astolan, watching her life drain away.
Safiyya whirled on her. “I suppose you’re going to say it’s Yaseema’s destiny? To follow her mother across the River, even though she never came back for her own daughter.”
“Go and pack, Safiyya,” my grandmother said abruptly, censure lacing her tone.
Safiyya scowled, but didn’t seem upset by what she said.
Just like I wasn’t offended with Safiyya’s words to me.
It was true.
My mother had crossed the Basrol River; she had left me and waded into the fae lands looking for a way to destroy the wall. And she had likely ended up dead. I knew that was the only way she wouldn’t have come back for me.
And now I was going to finish what she started.
A cool calm settled over me, the feeling I got when I found exactly the right book I’d been searching for. This was the right choice.
I met my cousin’s rageful gaze and knew my own contained a quiet resolve.
I was doing this for my mother, and I was doing this for Astola.
“This is about more than my mother, Safiyya, and you know it. And this is about more than us. Nani is right, we are not each other’s enemies. We want the same things.”
Safiyya’s lips tightened. Then she stood up on shaky legs, the effects of her illness still impacting her. She shook off her blanket and staggered to the kitchen, her steps growing stronger with each one. She pulled something out of the cupboard and tossed it at me. I caught it in midair.
“I’ll let you have the last edible mango.”
A shocked laugh bubbled out of me. Safiyya threw me a tight smile and then went to her room. I followed her, watching as she rummaged around her closet, throwing clothes into a bag. Then she slung a rusted rifle over her shoulder that I didn’t even know she had.
Safiyya looked me up and down, taking in my torn skirt and bruised arm, and then finally resting on the fae Queen’s bracelet I still held.
“Finally, you’re acting like a Nazir.”
My chest felt tight, pride, shame and guilt all warring with one another.
I am a Nazir, I wanted to shout. I’ve always been a Nazir.
“I couldn’t just let them take it,” I whispered instead, looking at the gleaming gold haath phool in my hand. “Not when it could change everything for us. Not when they won’t use it how it should be used.”
“And you wanted to use it for yourself,” she said bluntly.
My eyes widened, shock stabbing at my gut. “What—”
Safiyya held her hands up in placation. “I don’t mean it as an insult.
We should be able to use it for ourselves.
And if there’s anyone that can find a way to fight back against the Citadel and fix what’s happening to Astola, it’s you.
There’s got to be some use to all that book reading you’re doing. ”
I frowned at her and pushed my spectacles higher on my face. “I didn’t want to steal it to use it for myself.”
She watched me for a moment, her eyes flickering. “But maybe you should.”
With that she packed up her final items, a thin sheen of sweat coating her forehead. She nodded to my grandmother who had also packed her bags.
Together, my cousin and grandmother left our small house on the edge of Ginshal village, putting as much as they could onto their backs and packing as many provisions as they were able to. My cousin was still sick, but steady on her feet, as if fueled by rage and adrenaline.
Maybe we all were.
I prayed the Citadel wouldn’t be able to catch up.
Our abandoned cottage felt hollow without them, like the husks of the mangoes hanging from the weakened trees outside that my mother told me used to be teeming with succulent fruit.
Our mulberry trees, once plentiful, were now filled with little inedible pellets of black.
Every time the Citadel came for one of our relics, it got worse.
And that’s why I was going to stop it.
I packed up my few belongings—two tanned skirts and white blouses, wishing I had one of Nani’s kurtas instead of the buttoned-up Citadel clothes.
Then, I gathered dried mulberry for tea, a piece of flatbread sprinkled with mustard seeds that Nani had made that morning, and a waterskin.
I rolled the last good mango carefully in an old cloth and put it at the bottom of my satchel.
The final thing I packed was hidden under the floorboards of my room.
After prying the loose board up, I unearthed the flour tin I’d had out just that evening.
Inside was my mother’s soft green dupatta, and I unrolled it to reveal two thick gold bangles.
The bangles were as big as cuffs, but still felt weightless as I slid them carefully onto my wrist. They took up almost a third of my forearm, coating my dark skin like gold armor, especially next to the Queen’s delicate bracelet and chain that lay over my hand like a thin net.
I remember when my mother had given the bangles to me, telling me never to wear them in public and never to tell anyone about them.
“They’ll take them from you,” she had whispered in the moonlight as I held them with awe. “Your father gave me the gold, and I made these bangles for you. Never sell them. Never part with them. They are part of who you are.”
At night I would slip them on my wrists and think of her singing to me, rotating the gold around my arm.
But now, I wouldn’t wear them only at night, or in hiding.
They were going to grace my skin in the sunlight, the way Astolan gold was meant to be worn.
They are part of who you are.
I walked out the door with gold on my arm, leaving the husks of the mulberries and the shriveled mangoes behind.
If they came for me, they wouldn’t be able to follow where I was going. No one would, not unless they possessed the shimmering gold hath phool belonging to a long-dead fae queen that would allow me to cross into the peri lands.