Chapter 31
Queen Lab had not been pleased about my surprise visit to the apothecary.
Whether it was Orinth’s warning or Dalila publicly insinuating that I was a degenerate, Lab had stopped pretending that I wasn’t a prisoner.
I now spent my days caged in my quarters, only allowed out under armed escort to the unnerving courtyard, where I taught men who felt like automatons to sail a miniature of my beloved Marawati, any warmth I might enjoy from Arno’s eager curiosity drowned by the sorrow of what had befallen the other local who’d befriended me.
I saw Dalila from afar only a handful of times and could not help but note that she appeared ill herself—shadows marring her eyes, fatigue in the exhausted slump of her shoulders.
Her nights with the queen were clearly taking a toll.
My nights were taxing in their own fashion.
Raksh—whether he was serving his own desires or Lab’s—came to my bed every evening for a tumbling embrace that never ceased to fall short of our usual fire.
Once he was asleep, snoring in a tangle of sheets, I’d sneak away, racing through the underground tunnels to the textile workshop as swiftly as possible.
I would wait for a moment when the baskets of unspun wool were left untended and then creep close, leaving strands of shorn hair among the darker fibers.
Spreading my hair across as many baskets as possible, over the course of an entire fortnight, I prayed at least some of them would be spun into thread and woven into the vast tapestry at the heart of the temple workshop.
What I was hoping for, I didn’t even know.
That the strands of foreign humanity might weaken the tapestry?
That my own magic might cause new additions to fray and unravel?
That in knitting myself into Khatti Ugal’s power, I might become a force to rival Lab?
(No, I was neither that hopeful nor delusional.) This was nothing more than shoving sticks in the spokes of a wheel large enough to crush me, praying something—anything—might help.
That was what one did when faced with those who exercised overwhelming power.
I’d seen it enough in my own life; tyrannical captains brought low by the crews they treated unjustly.
Sometimes when the work was too onerous, the pay was delayed, or the winds were deadly, sailors were forced to be creative.
The water needed to be emptied out of the cistern, the sails had to be struck.
A bit of chaos, a little disruption and sabotage.
It was desperation more than any scheming.
Desperation that at first seemed to only affect me.
Whether it was sleeplessness, Sheikh Sasan’s poisoning, or my hair being spun into thread, my visions doubled.
I could close my eyes, let myself drift into the enchantment, and open them to see another reality, one I suspected was closer to the truth.
A ruined hall, a lonely soul weeping for home, for release, for death in a dozen different languages.
My dreams were no longer my own, but memories.
Washing up upon a foreign shore, seeing my cousin turned into a sheep for daring to talk back, being forced to bear child after child for “the greater good of Khatti Ugal,” existing in a family, a home, of the dead.
It was madness. So much madness. But very soon, I wasn’t the only one affected.
I was being escorted to the tiny, inferior Marawati when shouts rang out in the crowded palace hall.
“Let me go!” It was a garbled mixture of Khatti Ugalan and sailor’s creole. “Let me die!”
There was the running of footsteps—guards, frightened courtiers, who knew—a mob of people coming to see what all the commotion was about.
I edged one of my guards to the side as though I’d tripped and then staggered around the corner.
There was still a sea of locals in front of me, but being the tallest person on the island had some benefits and I could see clearly to the throne room doors.
The pair of tattooed young shield bearers were struggling with the guards, wrestling for control of a spear.
The young man finally grabbed it; however, he turned it not on the guards, but rather on his sister, the woman who’d tried to stop me from entering the throne room after my battle with the griffins.
Horrified, I watched from afar as he seemed to hesitate.
His sister did not. Rushing at her brother, the shield bearer snatched the spear and buried it in her throat.
Startled screams erupted from a few of the observers, but only a few.
The others seemed transfixed in some sort of knowing horror, a nightmare one couldn’t escape.
A nightmare that only grew worse when no blood spurted from the woman’s throat—instead, a patchy green-and-red .
. . substance dribbled out, matching the colors of her cloak.
She wailed, not in pain, but in a despair so bone-deep it made my heart ache.
The guards were trying to regain control.
They grabbed the pair again, but the maimed woman was wild: panicked, screeching in an unknown tongue.
Her brother tore away, trying to reach her, and as he did, he wrenched so hard from the guards that his cloak tore from its fastenings.
He made it perhaps two steps before going still, his dark eyes wide.
There was an expression of wonder, of relief upon his face . . .
And then he collapsed into dust.
Now more people started screaming.
His sister let out a cry before ripping at her own cloak.
The guards tried to grab her hands, but it was too late.
She slipped from her garment and was dust the next second.
Then it was pandemonium, as though a spell had broken.
Some of the Khatti Ugalans seemed genuinely terrified, shouting for help, for a physician.
But a few others—all wearing dyed cloaks—they had looks of wonder in their eyes similar to that of the young guard.
They drew closer to the dusty remnants, reaching their hands out.
One, a broad-shouldered man about my age, fell to his knees.
“I want to see my wife,” he whispered in an oddly dated Arabic. Then he closed his eyes and with trembling fingers, untied the knot of his cloak.
It fell to the ground, thick with dust.
“God preserve me,” I gasped, horror-struck at the unfolding scene.
Another woman ripped away her cloak and vanished so fast that a breeze stole the garment away.
A courtier besides me tore his away and his cloak fluttered to my feet, his body gone.
I lurched back, aghast and bewildered. Was this another vision?
But then the pieces were falling into place, the puzzle of Khatti Ugal I’d not been able to put together.
The Arabic that sounded archaic to my ear.
Orinth’s relatives saying it was best to “choose rites” in the flush of one’s life rather than having them thrust upon them.
Arno’s embarrassment at having to explain that going through those rites meant one could no longer bear children.
The visions of the constant flood of distressed locals begging for death, for release.
The dizzying number of skeletons interred in the catacombs below the palace, enough to mirror the population above.
Dead, these people are all dead. I staggered back, a hand pressed against my mouth.
The astonishingly vibrant cloaks, the ones dyed with impossible hues seemingly snatched from a rainbow, from the colors of Paradise—the cloaks given to the Khatti Ugalans in “rites” of which the locals were so secretive, the cloaks that nearly everyone wore—they weren’t cloaks.
They were shrouds.
Impossible. This is impossible! My mind rebelled at the revelation all too apparent before me.
Had Lab somehow . . . resurrected them? Captured their souls in cloth and kept them as ghostly puppets in an eternal play set for her amusement?
I stared in shock at the frantic Khatti Ugalans scrambling to remove their shrouds, wrenching the garments away so hard that pins and clasps were flying, as though this was a sliver of opportunity they’d been desperate to seize.
Mitanni charged out of the throne room, shouting in Khatti Ugalan, and I melted backward into the waiting arms of my guards. I could not let the queen catch me here.
But it was only the start.
* * *
By the next day, I’d heard rumors that an entire wing of the palace had vanished, replaced by crumbling, overgrown ruins.
The marketplace turned into a field of wildflowers and a potter’s workshop into a pond.
Goats ran roughshod through the palace, the songbirds all escaping their cages.
Arno whispered that his neighbors were nervous, there were rumors that griffins were picking people off at night, leaving nothing but dusty cloaks.
Even so, it all happened so fast. I slept that night with my weapons hidden under the bed, expecting to be arrested.
There was a final hank of hair to slip into Lab’s spinning wool, but I didn’t sneak away.
I hadn’t expected my wisp of a plan to bear such ghastly fruit, nor so quickly, but if the queen was suspicious, it didn’t show, not yet.
Apparently, Lab had other things on her mind.
“A handmaid will be sent to dress you later this evening,” Mitanni announced the next day as I finished taking my “students” through the finer points of raising a miniature sail.
Exhausted from spending much of the night contemplating a future as a sheep, it took me a moment to catch his words, and when I did, I was even more confused.
“Dress me?” I asked. “For what?”