Chapter 19 #3
But no matter which direction I tried, I was returned each time to the same view.
Hasan finally emerged from the bushes.
“You have crossed me nearly twenty times,” he said softly.
“Do you not understand? There is no escape from this place unless she lets you go.” He pointed up the tall line of pine trees.
Tangled among their highest branches were colorful banners, like ribbons or prayer flags tied around a shrine. “You cannot pass those.”
I immediately recalled the similar banners that had greeted us on the path to Khatti Ugal, rippling gently in the breeze from upon wooden poles like sails from a mast. “And if I climb up and rip them down?”
Hasan shivered, seeming to reach out to stop me before thinking better of it. “They cannot be harmed. Please,” he begged. “We were once two.”
I shook my head. “That isn’t possible. We landed on a beach north of the city. My crew returned there to repair our ship . . .” Alarm took root in my heart. “I need to find them. And one of my companions is still in the palace.”
“If you go back to the palace, you will never leave,” Hasan warned. “The queen, she is a devil. And if she learns you are suspicious, she will use all of her magic against you. There is only the edge of the forest, where her control is less secure.”
“To hell with the queen.” I knelt, trying to peer into Hasan’s face, but he refused to look at me, dirty hair veiling his eyes. “I will return, I promise. And I won’t leave you behind when we depart.”
Hasan was muttering in Persian again, too low to be comprehended, and tracing shapes in the sandy soil with his stained hands. But then his head snapped up, so abruptly that I jumped.
“We will never see each other again.” Hasan burst into laughter, then a sob, but before I could entreat him to stay, he had raced off into the scrub.
I watched him go, torn. But my duty to my crew pulled harder.
The polite denials the steward had been giving when I asked to check on the Marawati’s progress .
. . Dread crept through my blood. I needed to get to my ship, palace permission be damned.
But it lay hours away, not only on the other side of the city but beyond a jungle path I’d be lucky to find and traverse again.
Even if I was successful, it would take me most of the day. I was going to be missed. Questioned.
If she learns you are suspicious, she will use all of her magic against you. But for my men, that was a risk I was willing to take. So praying I did not entirely undo all Dalila’s hard work in getting me back on my feet, I raced off.
* * *
As it turned out, the journey did not take me all day.
I got as far as the most desolate fields, the very last edges of worked land that ringed the city before the hungry forest announced its rule, the trees dark and dripping.
The path was familiar and yet the surroundings already seemed changed.
The hills were worn down and the fields fallow.
Much of the once-verdant jungle now glowed with saffron-hued leaves, as though seasons and generations had passed.
A few lonely sheep bleated sadly as I passed.
But no sooner did I try to step beyond the line of flying banners and into the shade of the forest that separated me from the Marawati than I was abruptly facing the fields and distant city as though an unseen hand had picked me up and turned me around.
I attempted again and again, leaving the path, trying different approaches, cursing in frustration as I desperately tried to hurl myself into the woods.
Nothing worked. All that lay before me was Khatti Ugal.
The peculiar city, the queen and her palace.
At my back, the sounds of the jungle returned; the discordant call of birds, the smell of rot.
The sun scorched the back of my neck; I had sweated through the thin white clothes that never stopped reminding me of a shroud.
Glancing up, I realized that the colors of the banners had changed, to ones far more vivid than those we had originally passed beneath.
They’ve been replaced. What did that mean?
And far more importantly—where were my men?
This was no hallucination. Dalila and I had been somehow parted from the rest of the crew and trapped.
What in God’s name had happened at that feast in which we’d all been bewitched and aslumber?
For the queen had seemed supportive of our desire to rebuild the Marawati, but she’d also been dismissive of Majed and Tinbu.
Had she cast them all out? Hurt them? Hasan hadn’t even been able to speak aloud the fate that had befallen his long-dead companions not deemed “useful.”
Reaching into my tunic, I instinctively touched Khayzur’s feather from its cord around my neck. Did I dare try to call him? Perhaps he wouldn’t “help,” but if his arrival inadvertently broke the spell keeping us here . . .
Not without Dalila. If Khayzur showed up and Hasan’s warning about the queen was correct, I could not risk summoning him while Dalila was still behind her walls. I would have to try and retrieve my skeptical friend first, no easy task.
“Lord, please lighten this hardship,” I whispered. “We are in your care, and I beg that you make our journey home possible.” I pressed my fingers to my brow, and then—as quickly as my feet would take me—returned to the palace to find my companion, hoping I wasn’t already too late.