Chapter 33 #2
To her credit, Dalila answered. “Getting more goats to shear.” She glanced over her shoulder.
“She had Mitanni bring me here after the ceremony. She said there was an emergency, that we would need to spin and weave through the night . . .” Then Dalila looked at me again, clearly taking in my disheveled state.
“By the Most High, Amina . . . please tell me you’re not the emergency.
” When I grimaced but did not deny it, frustrated rage erupted across her face. “I told you to stay out of the way!”
“You threw me out of the apothecary implying that I was a drunk and you had some suicidal scheme,” I hissed.
“Apologies if that brought little confidence.” I gestured rudely at the wool around her.
“So, you know what she’s doing? That she’s using the spindle to twist threads weaving an illusion of peace, of a happy queendom, all while binding her people’s souls into compliance? ”
“And?” Dalila’s voice was harsh.
“And? Why is that not enough to make you turn away from her?”
“Because maybe that’s what our world needs. No one is burning temples and lynching the poor in Khatti Ugal.” The words ripped from her, from a deeper place than Dalila usually went.
I tried once more, pleading, “Dalila, please just come with me. This place is falling apart. Perhaps the boundaries will have fallen. We can try to return to the Marawati, leave this madness behind. To hell with the peris, to hell with the spindle—”
“I can’t,” she snapped. “How many times must I say that before you will get it through your thick skull?”
“Apparently a great deal more!”
“I made a deal, you witless pirate. Is that not obvious? I said nothing because I knew you would warn me off it, but Lab is not Raksh. And I do not give a damn what the peris think about us using the Transgression. The spindle is a tool and should God place it in my hands . . .” Her voice grew fierce.
“Who is to say that it is not my place to spin a new fate?”
“Dalila . . .” I was aghast. “This is not you. By the Most High, you sound like a deranged king. You sound like Falco Palamenestra, out to change the world and die in a cave!”
Her shoulders slumped. “I’m not out to change the world, Amina. I just want to save my best friend.”
I gaped. “This is about me?”
She looked incredulous. “Do you know any other heedless nawakhidha dying of poison?” I opened my mouth, still speechless, and she pressed on, sounding angrier, the rare occasion of honesty making her hostile.
“You were right, is that what you wish to hear? I made a mistake. I was wrong to go after Raksh and it set into motion a whole slew of tragedies, falling tiles of lethal blunders.”
“Oh.” My head spun. “She hasn’t yet possessed you, right? You’re not some type of construct?”
Dalila narrowed her eyes. “A construct? What . . . have you finally gotten into the wine?”
“I’m not used to you admitting fault!” I shot back. “And at length.”
“Yes, you made very clear what you believe about me.” Furious red spots blossomed in Dalila’s cheeks. “And that’s fine. You were right; if I’m not Dalila the Crafty, if I’m getting old and making mistakes, I’m a liability. So let me fix it.”
“Dalila, I wanted an apology, not for you to sacrifice yourself! Has she told you what happens? She intends to possess you, to take over your body! You’ll be trapped in your head, trapped in this kingdom. Not even death will release you!”
She glanced away, but not before I saw a glisten of tears in her eyes.
“Then I will wait for the Day of Judgment.” She dashed a hand across her face.
“It doesn’t sound terrible, Amina. I will have decades before I am called upon to take the spindle, years I can spend in the most magnificent apothecary I could have ever envisioned.
And I . . .” She faltered. “I do not mind her company.”
I fought for words. Part of me did believe a real Khatti Ugal could have offered Dalila a better life, a chance to reinvent herself, to be the great mind she would have been in a different world.
But Khatti Ugal was a dream, a gilded prison.
And from the dread in Dalila’s voice, I knew part of her understood that.
“But the antidote,” I pushed. “Surely—”
She was already shaking her head. “It isn’t working fast enough. Sasan knew; he knew they were my weak spot.”
“Then you keep experimenting! Isn’t that your obsession?” I tried to crack a confident smile. “I’m a hard woman to kill, Dalila. Surely we can beat the odds.”
But Dalila only looked more lost. “I cannot take that gamble, Amina. I cannot be the reason you don’t return to your family, the reason Tinbu and Majed and all the rest are stuck here with no captain to lead them home. This—this will offer certainty.”
“Will it?” Dalila wasn’t listening to emotion; maybe after finally losing the decades-long battle to keep her heart an icy trap, that was a dam that couldn’t be bridged.
So best to appeal to her other nature: brutal, suspicious logic.
“Ay, look at me,” I demanded. “You’re the cleverest person I know; I don’t truly believe you’ve fallen into this web of lies the queen has woven.
If she can save me, why hasn’t she?” I raised my palm, showing the blisters.
Dalila flinched at the sight of them. “Because that’s not how it works.
Come, nakhudha . . . do you really think I was going to broker a deal solely on faith?
” But there was only misery in the poor jest. She picked up the belt that Lab had given her, running her fingers over the woven colors.
“I told the queen that Sheikh Sasan had poisoned me. That I didn’t want to die and that if she could teach me how to seize another fate, I would give her anything. ”
“I don’t understand.”
“Lab doesn’t spin fates with the spindle. Not anymore, not here. But there is magic in the textiles and together, we created this.” She held out the belt. “We spun the thread and then she wove it with patterns to ward off harm. To ward off illness. To ward off . . .”
“Poison,” I finished faintly, all the pieces coming together. I stared at the belt in shock. Forget the Mortar of Mithridates, what Dalila was implying this could do . . .
“Yes. And it works, Amina. When I put it on, every last pain I had vanished. My head felt clearer . . . God, it was as though I was twenty again.” She smiled sadly. “When we were young women, running around the Persian Gulf sowing mayhem.”
I recalled the ceremony. Dalila had practically glowed when she’d donned the belt, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it now. Like all the textiles of Khatti Ugal, it was stunning, the colors so vivid they seemed enchanted. “That’s for me.”
“Yes. Obviously.” She thrust the belt at me. “So put it on already. Put it on and this will all be worth it.”
Was that truly all I had to do? I stared at the belt. Wrap this thing around my waist, pin it, and the poison would be gone? My injuries would be gone?
All it would cost was Dalila’s freedom.
That isn’t the only cost. Was part of Orinth spun into those strands?
Al-Uqab and the bandits who had wailed for God?
How many tortured castaways did it take to provide thread for the cloaks that enslaved countless Khatti Ugalans, leaving them mute, joyless pawns?
How many to weave the great tapestry that maintained their pretty cage?
“I cannot accept this, my friend,” I said, hating the words as they slipped my mouth.
“I have been touched by magic. I know God has given shape to the Unseen Realm as He has ours, but this . . .” I gestured to the belt.
“I will accept the fate that my Creator has ordained. Not something spun by an entity who has used her magic to cause untold chaos and violence for millennia, woven with the pieces of people she’s harmed. ”
To say Dalila was unimpressed by that argument would be an understatement.
She gaped in disbelief. “You cannot ‘accept it?’ What? Did you hit your head again? Amina, this will save your life! Surely for that, you can bend your principles a bit. For God’s sake, you came here as a thief!”
“Dalila . . .” I felt sick but no less resolute.
“I cannot. Besides, for all we know there are additional charms woven into its stitches to control its wearer. And even if there aren’t .
. .” Again I saw Orinth’s kind eyes, her fierce hope that I would reunite with my family.
I would not use magic crafted from her torment. “I cannot.”
Dalila didn’t look incredulous now; she looked mad.
“Then you’re a fool,” she said bluntly. “A selfish one. You claim I put the crew at risk, concealing my fear that you’d been poisoned? What are you doing now, nakhudha, if not charting a more dangerous course due to some misguided sense of honor?”
I stiffened. “It’s not the same.”
However, Dalila wasn’t listening. Instead, still cursing my stubbornness under her breath, she retrieved something from inside her gown. She seized my hand, holding it tight when I tried to jerk back and wrested open my palm.
But it wasn’t the belt she was trying to press upon me. It was Khayzur’s feather.
“It’s time for you to go, my friend,” Dalila said, her voice thick. “Wait until you get to the edge of the city to summon him. Someplace where it is safer. Where the magic won’t be as strong.”
I stared at the lime-green feather in my palm. God, how badly I had wanted this so many times, the admittedly slim promise of help from the nigh-invincible peri. I still did. My fingers closed tightly around the soft quill, nearly crushing it.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I lied quickly. “Come with me and I’ll put on the belt. There is no reason for you to stay behind.”
“There is,” Dalila said, hesitating a little. “I can keep her from coming after you.”
“But that’s not necessary!”
“No,” Lab’s voice cut through our argument, cold and clear as a cloudless night. “It really is not.”