Chapter 21
The urgent business must have also been sensitive, for Mitanni refused to say more, waving off even Dalila’s polite inquiries.
But considering the animosity radiating off his body and the freshly armed guards, I doubted it was for another friendly intercultural exchange.
We proceeded into an unknown part of the palace, and the light-filled windows were replaced by steps that turned this way and that in haphazard fashion.
The stone grew older and grimy as we descended, crude mudbrick walls plastered with lime and the crushed bones of ancient sea creatures.
It smelled of mold, the air uncomfortably humid.
Dalila had been holding her tongue but spoke now. “You had to shout. Twenty years telling you to be more discreet and you’ve yet to stop bellowing like a hit bull.” Her expression stayed pleasant, the words too low to be overheard by anyone else.
I kept my voice equally hushed, resisting the urge to snarl.
“I was just ensuring you could hear me. One never knows when your hearing will go the same way as your vision.” The retort was probably unfair, but it had been a damnably long day and the short steps were playing a cruel game with my bad knee.
Dalila’s eyes flashed. “Just keep your mouth shut. Let me deal with the queen.”
“There is no need to deal with her at all,” I hissed under my breath, watching to make sure the steward was still out of earshot. “I can take these guards, Dalila.”
“If you do that, we’ll only have gained her enmity.” She shook her head. “Let’s try and fix this first.”
Considering that my men were inaccessible and likely at the queen’s mercy themselves, it was impossible not to see the wisdom in Dalila’s words, but my skin crawled with the need to fight, to flee.
“You will be handing over what you stole,” I warned instead. I had little chance of stealing Khayzur’s feather back myself; I was a talented pickpocket but there was no one like Dalila. “Else it will be your blood summoning him.”
“Later,” Dalila replied, offering Mitanni a bland smile when he glanced back. We picked up the pace, descending deeper into the bowels of the palace, and no matter Dalila’s assurances, my trepidation grew. Everything about this screamed a trap.
“Stop here,” the steward said as we emerged at one end of a long passageway lit by flickering torches.
The torches didn’t offer enough light to fully illuminate the foreboding space; they did shed enough light, however, to see that wooden doors enforced with iron bars lined each side of the corridor.
Dalila and I had been brought to a dungeon.
I cleared my throat. “I thought there was no crime in Khatti Ugal.”
“Things were once very different.” It was the queen who spoke, emerging from one of the cells.
“My forebears did not always have the privilege of ruling over a stable, secure society. It took work to make Khatti Ugal the idyll we enjoy, and we are ever careful not to backslide. Which is why I am quite concerned about our most recent arrivals.”
“Your most recent arrivals?” Dalila repeated, with polite disbelief. “Surely, Resplendency, we have not given—”
“I am not referring to your people, Doctor,” the queen interrupted.
“Early this morning, scouts discovered the remnants of another vessel beached on the western side of the island—far from your Marawati. There were a handful of survivors struggling in the surf. My people tried to help—an act which the ingrates repaid by attempting to rob them. My scouts were saved from disaster only because their would-be assailants were both too weak and too divided. Halfway through the attack, they turned on the one member of their group attempting to stay apart, accusing him of leading them to ruin.” She glanced at Mitanni. “Has that man been located yet?”
The steward bowed his head. “Not yet, Resplendency. He ran into the jungle, but we have guards pursuing him.”
My heart skipped. New arrivals were supposedly common, no? I schooled my face, not trusting Lab’s false civility. “Is there something we can do to help, Resplendency?”
She gestured to the open cell door. “They speak Arabic, and I hoped the presence of another castaway might prove useful. Perhaps you can assure them they have nothing to fear if they behave?”
If I’d been apprehensive of going near that cell, it now felt like the yawning jaws of a great beast. And yet what choice did I have?
“Of course, Resplendency,” I murmured, resisting the urge to reach for my weapons. My promise to Dalila be damned; if Lab shoved me in this cell with some sort of magical menace, I was going to kill everyone here.
One of the guards raised a torch as I stepped through the barred door, throwing light into the cell’s dark depths.
It was immediately clear that the queen wasn’t lying, not entirely.
There were bodies crammed in the filthy interior.
Three—no, four. The newest castaways looked miserable, bruises and bloodied skin testifying to a nasty brawl with the Khatti Ugalans, their gaunt bodies and yellowed eyes testifying to a voyage gone terribly wrong.
Two had blood staining their tattered garments, a third man’s arm hung in a crude sling, and a fourth lay unconscious on the dirty ground, his limbs swollen and his face turned away.
I opened my mouth to call a greeting when I realized one of the men was not a man at all, but a woman. Her long black hair was matted with debris, and she sported an oddly shiny vest streaked with dirt.
My gaze locked on her vest. That suddenly and horribly familiar azarshost vest . . .
I tried to step back, but one of the other castaways was already straightening up, blinking bloodshot, disbelieving eyes. The band of shipwrecked bandits were in such awful straits that it had taken me too long to recognize them.
But al-Uqab had no such problem.
“Al-Sirafi?” he wheezed. “Fucking, cursed cunt . . . it is you, isn’t it?”
The woman in the azarshost vest spun around. It wasn’t Taumuriya, the arsonists’ boastful leader, but rather one of her lackeys. Poorly healed burns shone against her skin. Her face fell when she saw me, bitter resignation creasing her eyes as she cut a wrathful look at al-Uqab.
“We warned you not to trust him,” she snarled at her cellmate. “We told you his whispers about treasure were pretty lies.” She jerked her head at me. “That’s who he wanted.”
He? If this situation had not already spun out of control, that single word was like a battering ram to my ability to smoothly react. No. Surely, I was not that cursed . . .
The queen took my momentary shock as the damnable tell it was.
“Well, I suppose that settles my hunch as to whether or not you know each other.” Anger simmered in Lab’s very lovely, very disappointed voice.
“When they’re not brawling, they’ve been shouting a great many interesting things: ranting and raving about pirates, accusations of demons leading their ship to ruin, and how women cannot be trusted.
A few familiar names cropped up.” The queen gave Dalila and I each a long, intent look.
“I fear, my Doctor, my Captain, that you have perhaps not been entirely honest with me about your journey. About your intentions.”
My heart dropped like a stone. There was bad luck and then there was bad luck. I cleared my throat, preparing a lie. “Resplendency.” My voice was strained, all of this having fallen apart faster than I could scheme. “I can explain.”
“I’m sure you can, Captain,” Lab replied. “Yours has always been a silvered tongue.”
From the other side of the door, Dalila made an attempt. “Your Resplendency, please: this man is a vile criminal. Does his behavior not indicate as such? You cannot trust—”
Al-Uqab interrupted. “Is that the Mistress of Poisons I hear? So the Leopard Whore brought her viper along?” Raw hate burned in his eyes; al-Uqab must have known he was doomed and he was clearly determined to drag a hated rival to the gallows if it was the last thing he did.
“I hope Your Resplendency hasn’t been sharing any cups with the Blight of Basrah. ”
Queen Lab pursed her lips, her dark eyes falling to take in the leopard-headed dagger at my waist before she glanced at Dalila.
My friend held her tongue, looking hesitant for the first time, and the queen’s expression turned inscrutable.
Lab liked Dalila, that was obvious. She had seemed to enjoy both her quirks and her sharpness, easing my companion’s path into the company of the kingdom’s finest minds in a way that made my own welcome clearly simple hospitality and pragmatism.
Ignoring al-Uqab, Lab turned to the arsonist. The young woman had been holding her tongue, clearly taking stock of her circumstances rather than engaging in outbursts.
“You,” the queen demanded. “How old are you?”
The arsonist blinked. “I-I do not know for certain. Not yet thirty if I had to guess.”
“Good. It is a rare gift when the sea brings us women, let alone those who can still bear children. Tell me the truth of this . . . situation. Swear your allegiance, and I will welcome you to my land with every pleasure,” Lab offered.
A storm of emotions went across the young woman’s face—that comment about childbearing sent ice into my veins as well—but then resigned fear won out. Any criminal worth admission to Sarilaglag knew when it was time to cut a deal. “Yes, Your . . . Resplendency,” she stammered.
The guards turned to remove the arsonist.
Al-Uqab went red with fury. “So, you only listen to the word of women? Should I—”
But his protest was interrupted by the sounds of a scuffle from the staircase behind us, the march of boots and the beat of spears on the ground. The rattle of shackles and then—with timing only the devil could devise—came the caress of all-too-familiar magic around my nape.
“There really is no reason for all this unpleasantness,” a man complained, his words both tart and honeyed, a voice by which one couldn’t help but be captured. “I assure you: I hold a great many talents any monarch would be delighted to possess.”
Except it wasn’t a man who stepped away from the stairs.
It was Raksh, and the string of coincidence and bad luck all clicked together.
My husband wasn’t malnourished, though he was clad in the ragged ruins of what had once been his fine silk robe, twigs snarled in his ebony hair.
Raksh appeared so shockingly different from the starving, broken bandits in the dungeon, however, that it was as though a celestial being had fallen from the heavens to take a tumble with mortals.
Or had climbed up from hell.
He was shackled, however, and clearly unhappy—his face so wrinkled in distaste that he didn’t notice me at first. “The stench of your land, for one; it is as though . . . Amina?”
“Raksh,” I returned curtly. I didn’t want to greet him, I wanted to pitch him out the nearest window, but I didn’t dare make obvious any further enmities for the queen to take advantage of.
Raksh clearly didn’t possess similar wisdom. Or enmity. Instead, his eyes lit up and he surged toward me like a wave drawn to the tide.
“Oh, wife, did I not tell you . . .” But then Raksh trailed off. His black gaze shifted beyond my shoulder. Turned curious. Confused.
And just as Raksh’s eyes went wide with genuine shock—the gaze of a gazelle who has too late spotted a hunter—Queen Lab moved.
She moved like me. Fast. Faster than she had any right to. Her hand knifed into a fold in her gown and shot back out, her fingers uncurling like a blossoming flower. Dazzling glimmers of sand swirled in her palm. She blew on them, a short burst that sent the cloud flooding toward Raksh.
My husband—the cunning demon who could not be felled by mortal blades, who survived being buried alive in a sunken chest—collapsed at her feet.
I had grabbed Dalila’s wrist and was pulling her away before the first cries of surprise even came from the cell. But there was nowhere to go, the guards fanning out to stop us. I drew my meteor dagger.
“That would not be wise, Captain al-Sirafi.” The queen contemplated my fallen husband a moment longer before meeting my gaze.
There was not a trace of fear in her handsome face.
“Not while your crew is still hard at work and presumably unaware of this development. Though, considering you are their captain, I hope it’s understood that whatever fate is accorded to you will be passed upon them, yes? ”
At my shoulder, Dalila swallowed. “Amina, stand down. We are outmatched.” To the queen, she asked warily, “What do you want?”
“Truthfully?” Lab spread her hands. “A way forward for us. I meant what I told your captain: new arrivals are the lifeblood of Khatti Ugal, and you both have so much promise.” Her gaze hardened, like that of a disappointed mother ready for the switch.
“But I believe you both owe me more . . . honest accounts, understand?”
I wasn’t ready to surrender, but then I glanced at Raksh.
He’d been defeated, felled in a manner I hadn’t known possible before he could even raise a hand to defend himself.
He was not entirely unmoving; his chest stirred, and I’d swear his long hair seemed to be undulating across the floor, confused tentacles searching for a way out.
If Lab could do that to the nigh-immortal chaos spirit . . . My fingers clenched around the hilt of my weapon, but I nodded. “Understood,” I finally replied.
“Excellent.” The queen seemed to consider the scene around her, before looking to Mitanni and pointing to the arsonist still in the cell.
“Take the woman to be bathed and fed, her wounds treated before I speak to her. The doctor can be brought to my chamber. As for the captain . . .” Her attention shifted back to me.
“Prepare her for a journey into the hills.”