Change had come to Sadina, mostly in the shape of more work. Naila Asina could train for hours on end, but the moment she had to work for someone who wasn't herself, then a single hour was a torturous sentence.
For a girl who preferred the sword over the quill, office work was not for her. Unfortunately, the abrupt departure of the scribe of commoners had left her with a lot of work to do. Because the fugitive woman had been doing part of her work, but that was an unimportant detail.
The new scribe of commoners, Naila still hadn't learned her name even though she had been at the palace for two weeks, and could not even compare to Ayad. At this point, Naila couldn't even care if the scribe had been an assassin or not, her work ethic had been too excellent to let it pass.
Now I understand why Mother keeps talking about talent and exportation of education… The sultanzade sighed and put the quill aside.
It wasn't that the new scribe was bad, but Ayad had been too competent. The only commoners who had an education in Sadina were either scholars – who were snatched by Nuha, the scribe of scholars – or merchants driven away by Tamara. Unlike the Nuha, the scribe of commerce did run enterprises that were affected by competition.
So Sadina was an impossibly rich city but with little to no educated elite. Lowborn, in any case.
Nobles surely had an education, but they were just parasites on the system. Naila couldn't understand why the Sultanah kept them around, if she were in power, she would cull them. No questions asked. The real military might of Ydaz was that of the cultivators, not the armies of the noble houses.
All this rambling was to say that the problem wasn't with the city – or the emirate – of Sadina, but rather herself. After having had most of her workload handled by others, it was hard having to do it all herself.
Ah, how difficult it is being a princess. Naila scoffed and went for a stroll. There wasn't enough time to afford a training session, but nobody would howl at her if she just stretched her legs a bit.
As she looked at the peaceful and beautiful city of Sadina through the arches of the palace, Naila could only think how badly she needed some conflict.
"Come on, Mother, declare a war already," she commented lazily as her eyes were glued to the clear blue skies.
Considering Aaliyah-al-Ydaz's isolationist government, there hadn't been a war involving the country even decades prior to Naila's birth. The princess had never known war, but she knew fights and skirmishes. Her body ached for violence, to solve the problems with a swift and clean cut of a blade instead of a slow and messy stroke of a quill. She wanted to write with blood, not with ink.
However it may be, she was forced to return to her office soon.
At the door, a guard waited for her. Nesrine, a palace guard, had acted as Ayad's personal guard in lieu of her lacking mobility. The pretense of having her around was to check if she was related to the assassins, but after weeks of observation, Naila hadn't found anything.
She had even reaped her not that long ago.
It had been a difficult task as the guard herself didn't swing both ways nor she was mandated to please the sultanzade by contract like the palace servants, but after seeding some guilt in the woman and giving her one too many beers, Nesrine had fallen to her bed.
And Naila had gotten nothing out of it.
Information, that was. She did reap the guard twice in their heated session, and as their eyes met, Nesrine blushed and avoided her gaze. The guard was ashamed of her actions, of course. From her point of view, she hadn't been assaulted by a sultanzade, but rather, she had assaulted a minor.
Whilst Naila didn't take much joy in reaping or sex, only doing it to boost her vitality, she couldn't help but find it amusing leading adults to bed and seeing their regret written on their faces after their heads cleared.
The sultanzade snickered and made her way into her office.
The thing about office work was that technically speaking, her Nurture could help her with it, but at some point, her speed was so elevated that it was detrimental. What need had she to write thousands of words per minute if she could even think a couple dozen?
She didn't count the time, mainly because it would make her depressed knowing how much she was losing by having to work, but a solid while later someone knocked on the door.
"Nesrine here," the guard announced, "there is an update on the… Ayad case."
"Enter." Naila didn't remove her eyes from the parchment, she was too behind in work to afford that.
"It is a letter," Nesrine slid a paper on her desk.
The princess sighed and assumed the speed stance. In the fraction of the time, the guard needed to blink, she grabbed a letter opener, slashed the paper open, and stored the knife again in the drawer. That got a step backward from the guard and minimal amusement from Naila at the reaction.
The contents of the letter were just a report on the incident of the expropriated greenhouse. Nothing she didn't know, besides the identification of the body that they had found there.
"Bring me the person who has written this letter. Now." Naila's commandeering tone made the palace guard shiver, but the woman took the letter and promptly obeyed.
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It didn't take Nesrine more than a handful of minutes to come back with the captain of the palace guard.
"Did you call me, princess?" The man was so dull and unworthy of being called the captain of the palace guard that his name didn't stick in Naila's mind. Not that she was a particularly colorful woman, but if people didn't have some fanfare or fire to them, she was bound to forget their existence.
"Tell me why it has taken you this long to identify a corpse," the princess ordered.
"The family of the deceased hadn't come forward until now, ma'am." There was this hint of hate at having to hear orders from a 'child' in the man's eyes, but unfortunately, he lacked the spine to show more than that. "It didn't help that the body was in a… less than recognizable state."
The excuse wasn't that believable considering who the dead man ended up being.
"Yes, yes, calcinated, I remember that." Naila dismissed with her hand. "Is the family here right now?"
In any normal case, she wouldn't care about a family of afflicted people. But they weren't any family.
"Yes, ma'am," the captain nodded. "Do you want me to bring them over?"
"Yes," Naila taciturnly added. This pathetic waste of muscle didn't deserve a scowl on her part. How could someone who had trained their bodies to such levels as the captain guard had done be so useless?
She then ordered Nesrine to search for some documents for her after knowing who the dead body at the oasis was to have a bit more information.
The speed stance boosted her reading capabilities, but it was more of a byproduct of her training that she could process so much information at reduced windows of time, so the stance wasn't needed for reading. It did soothe her, though.
After a few more minutes and a sun threatening to set on the horizon, a busty woman and a girl appeared at the doors of her office.
"Can we leave my daughter out of this?" The woman inquired.
"No," Naila taciturnly said as she didn't value the mother of the girl worthy of anything more, but as the woman's eyes scowled at her, she found a hint of amusement in the situation. "Make yourselves comfortable," she pointed at the chairs in front of her desk.
The mother guided her daughter by the arm with care, and the girl looked like she hadn't had much sleep as of late. Naila had never had a father and she didn't recognize her own mother as a paternal figure, so she couldn't even imagine what the girl must be feeling like.
Not that she tried imagining it in the first place.
"Mirah, am I right?" Naila questioned the mother as she tapped some scattered papers on the desk.
"Indeed," Mirah nodded, but she didn't add any honorifics to her words.
Rani would probably have had her whipped or something, but Naila always considered honorifics too bothersome. She let the woman have that pitiful act of defiance.
"Let us go straight to business," the sultanzade started, "why was your husband on the former scribe of commoner's lands the day of the murder?"
The little girl shrunk at the mention of the word 'murder', but Naila ignored it.
"Aloe was a friend of the fami-"
"I asked why the man was there, not your life story," Naila interjected. A common interrogation tactic, destroy their argument to make them rethink their words. Non-intrusive yet astonishingly effective.
Mirah looked at the princess with an unapologetically murderous gaze which Naila could only respect. Not many people even dared to look at sultanzade, let alone in that way.
"My husband, Jafar, went to Aloe's greenhouse because he discovered that Aloe had been gifting money to us through me."
Lie. Naila didn't have a magical ability to detect lies, but she expected the woman to lie, so it felt like a lie.
Either way, she decided to play into the lie.
"I guess because the captain," the sultanzade was aware of the dead man's former position, "wanted to be the one providing for the family?"
Mirah nodded. "He was enraged, so without thinking it twice, he followed Aloe to her lands."
This one didn't feel like a lie to her, but honestly, Naila was bullshitting herself into believing her own gut feelings.
"And then Ayad killed him," the sultanzade unceremoniously said.
The expressions of her spectators shifted drastically; this was what she had been expecting. Nesrine coughed at the mention of the scribe killing someone, but Naila didn't care about the guard. What mattered were the faces of the family.
Mirah's visage twisted with rage, quite an interesting feeling for someone who had been told their husband had been murdered. Surprise was the expected reaction nine times out of ten. Though Naila guessed the woman had been long suspecting the death of her husband.
That expected reaction was left for the daughter. The sheer disbelief in the little girl's face made it all worth it.
"Wait," Mirah raised her voice, "we have been told that it was the assassins who killed him."
Of course, Naila didn't know if Aloe Ayad had personally killed Captain Jafar, but if the Sultanah's statement was to be believed, then the former scribe was an assassin, and therefore not a lie that the assassins had killed the man.
"Haven't you heard, Ayad was an assassin." So she told them that.
"Impossible," the housewife was surprised, yes, but that reaction was not out of denial. She was completely and utterly confident that Ayad wasn't an assassin.
"Was?" The girl interjected with tears in the corners of her eyes. "Is cousin Aloe dead too?"
"Ah, a slip of words," Naila admitted. "No, Ayad is very much alive and on the run. She is currently charged with murder, being an assassin, and oathbreaking."
The last one was pushed by Rani rather than the Sultanah because there was one law that allowed people to intercede in executions in the case of the affected party by the broken oath, normally substituting the execution for indentured servitude. But Naila smelled the bullshit there. What oath had exactly been broken?
Anyhow, that wasn't the subject at hand.
"Did cousin Aloe kill Dad?" The girl asked Naila. The sultanzade almost expected rage in her eyes, for the girl to make an oath of revenge or something, but no. That was the gaze of someone who just wanted answers.
"I was not there when it happened." For once, Naila decided to be honest. "And the only person that may know the answer is Ayad."
Truth be told, the sultanzade still doubted the former scribe was an assassin. Ayad had too many opportunities and had misplayed even more times to be one. So unless it was a recent recruitment, it made no sense in her timeline of events. Unless the very woman was a mastermind who had played them all for fools.
Which Naila highly doubted.
"I see…" The girl's gaze fell to the ground.
There was something in the situation that made Naila think. Something uncommon as she was more of an instincts type of gal. Mirah was a rare woman, with soft skin and silky hair for a commoner, enough so to make Naila want to reap her out of curiosity. But with Ayad in play, she had a better idea.
The princess' eyes diverted to a parchment mentioning Jafar's daughter.
"Aya, was it?" The girl raised her head, looked at her with a hint of fear, and nodded. "From what I have seen you are quite the performing student."
Mirah grabbed her daughter to protect her and talked for her. "Yes, she is a brilliant girl with a brilliant mind blessed by the heavens and the sultanate."
Naila could recognize the ass-kissing from days away, she had grown up in a palace of sycophants after all. That was precisely why such tactics didn't work on her.
"I know little Aya here is young, but I would like to present her with an option for the future." Naila Asina only wanted one thing, and that was time to herself. The disappearance of Aloe Ayad had removed that from her, so either she recovered it by baiting her, or… "Would you like to be the scribe of commoners of Sadina?"
She would steal from her.