Old Layla and Azim murmured together as the pair of donkeys rode up the hill. Dark was settling, and the donkeys brayed. Yellow flowers were beginning to grow upon the hill, a sign of spring arriving. The cart swayed and shook over rough dirtpaths strewn with tangled weed and wildflowers growing ever more wild as the road inclined. Somewhere, a lone bee buzzed. The chirping of cicadas began to rise from the depths of the trees. The air was alive with the humming of small creatures as the rain dwindled.

The trees soon grew denser into a thick forest of evergreens to the right, climbing up the hill in the near distance.

I looked back to see the city twinkling in the darkness behind us down the hill, lanterns coming aglow. My eyes searched in the horizon for the Tower.

“I’m certain Ifsharan would never forgive me if I let Mamun uncle die,” the scarred man said, watching the distant city rolling past. He appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties with stark eyes rimmed in dark lashes and framed by thick, firm brows. Strands of dark hair ran awry around his head. He wore a grey tunic beneath a leather jerkin, with straps of dark leather around his wrists.

Mamun uncle mumbled to himself, groaning, his eyes closed.

The scarred man turned to the boy, who was watching the donkeys eagerly, his shoulder wrapped in the tourniquet. “And I’ve seen him around Ifsharan enough times with those damned pieces of leather of his.” He turned to me. “But you – I do not think I know you. Do you always fight with a penknife like that?”

“I did not plan to get blood on my penknife, no,” I said, digging the knife deeper into the edge of my boots. “I do not know you either.”

A slow smile crept upon the man’s face, the scar over his cheek curving slightly over his skin. “My name is Imraan.”

Mamun uncle coughed. Imraan took out a canteen and tilted it to his mouth.

As I watched him, I said, “My father carved it of ironwood.”

“What?” said Imraan, glancing up.

“The penknife,” I said.

“Ah,” he said, twisting the cover back on the canteen. “A woodworker’s daughter then? Not a thief?”

I raised a questioning eyebrow. The man laughed, motioning to my robe smeared with mud and blood worth of five nights in the Shayfahan cell.

“Yet despite looking a little rough, you do not seem to be of the streets — the linen is of too high a quality, the robes – you nearly resemble one of those scholars at Ifsharan,” Imraan said.

“So if I am a thief, will Al-Ghazan, a physician, turn me away? What is the purpose then of a physician?” I watched the donkeys rolling up the hill, shaking their heads against the flies that tackled them.

“No, he would not turn you away,” Imraan said.

“Alright then, I am Rahena the thief,” I said.

“Rahena,” the man said, as if testing the name on his tongue. “You wear those robes naturally…” Imraan mused. “Hm, but the Tower does not have any women scholars.”

“No, they do not,” Rahena said.

The shrubbery on each side of the path grew higher as they approached level road, leading up to a long, wide stone perimeter. It stretched down the length of the ground, overgrown with creeping foliage.

From over the wall peered out a stone-slab house rising two stories high, latticed shutters closed against the night, lights flickering through the gaps. The tall foliage provided ample privacy, but just barely through the leaves could be distinguished a single open window, a flame casting shadows against indistinct walls within. From over the edge of the rooftop, lilac foliage caressed the surface: its soft rustling in the wind audible like a small, modest storm. Surrounded by the forest on nearly all sides, a serene quietness reigned here, far from the sounds and eyes of the city.

“Here you are, beta,” old Layla announced. Azim leaped out of the cart and helped Imraan carry out Mamun.

A wooden gate opened to a narrow entryway that led through a small courtyard up to the house. Children’s laughter rose from somewhere around the corner, and light bare footsteps padded across the stone.

“Get inside now, you little rascals,” Imraan called. “It’s getting dark, you know you’re not supposed to be out.”

There came giggling, and then the voices hushed away, the laughter fading.

Imraan put Mamun uncle’s arm around his shoulder, and Azim carried in the boy. Beneath a stone arch and into a hallway across from which stood a jade-green door, they carried Mamun uncle and the boy inside, laying him down on the cushions spread across a majlis floor.

“Thank you, uncle, ma. You should get back before it gets dark,” Imraan told Layla and Azim.

“We’ll inform Khadijah of what has happened to Mamun bhai,” Azim said. “She must be worried if she has not heard the news already, the poor woman.” They mounted the cart again, and the donkeys rode back off down the hill.

The hallway opened up to a low sitting room, with walls of geometric woodcarvings reaching up to the ceilings. High above, muted dusklight filtered in through a window of the same geometrical latticework, casting in light shadows on the floor.

Imraan rushed away up a set of stairs to get the physician.

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I pressed the fabric tightly to the wound on Mamun’s head. Next to him, the boy was muttering something to himself, his eyes closed, his bloody head resting against the cushion; but Mamun did not stir any longer. His hands, which were accustomed to molding dough for sweets and pouring in rich thick cardamom-laced syrup — now lay flat, still against his knee. I shook him by the shoulders. “Mamun uncle, I swear Sahan would never forgive you if you gave up.”

A tall man with a head of shaggy lion-maned hair, a golden beard to match, and broad shoulders strode in to the room carrying a cattle-hide satchel. The voluminous head of hair gave him the appearance of a great halo around him. His eyes and the lineaments of his face were lined with age. He seemed nearing seventy. And yet as I watched him — as he leaned over the boy, his brown stony eyes examining the child’s wound — he worked quickly, moving with the vigor and spirit of a younger man.

“It’s getting worse out there every day, Al-Ghazan,” Imraan was murmuring, pacing back and forth down the room.

Al-Ghazan’s brows furrowed, and his lips pursed. “They’re all out of control, the lot of them. If Salman can’t rein in his own men, then what can he do?”

“You can’t rein him in either, can you?” Imraan asked.

Al-Ghazan’s hands stopped in their work, and something pulsed at his forehead. Then he carried on wrapping the bandage around the boy’s head. “I have told you, Imraan,” his voice was stony. “Do you truly think he allows his physician to be his court advisor?” He turned back to dabbing at the boy’s arm with the disinfectant. “What do you expect me to do?”

The boy breathed in sharply at the sharp sting of the wound in his arm.

And I realized where I was. This man named Imraan had brought me to the physician of the Emir himself.

I needed to leave.

The boy pulled his arm away. “Hold still, child. You need to rest, boy, and then you can go. In no shape to be stumbling around the streets,” the physician said. “Imraan, bring that lantern over here closer.”

Imraan brought the lantern from a table and held it over the patient.

Soon, finished with his first patient, the physician turned to the sweet-seller, shaking him by the shoulders. “Mamun, can you hear me?” he asked.

“He’s unconscious,” I said. “He’s lost too much blood.”

Al-Ghazan felt Mamun’s chest. “And I believe he has some broken ribs. Imraan, let’s get them upstairs. They will need to rest properly.” His eyes turned to me.

“I am alright, it is they who need tending to,” I murmured, covering my wound with my hand. The blood had seeped in through the makeshift tourniquet.

“That tourniquet won’t hold for much longer, unless you want an infection with it; I’ll see to it once I’m done with them, ” Al-Ghazan said.

The two men carried Mamun and the boy upstairs with the satchel of medical instruments, and a silence settled around the room.

I made to get up from the floor, but a tiredness had settled in my bones. From down along the halls came the scent of zaa’tar herbs, sweet tones of cloves and thyme filling the house. It was unlike anything I had smelled in over a week.

I leaned against the cool stone wall and watched the light fading through the geometrical lattice above me. But I needed to get up, to walk out of that door, back down the hill.

It was the first time since Bayrun that I had found myself in a home, a true home. For a moment, Abba was there, sitting against the other side of the wall beside the hearth, a pipe of jasmine tobacco in his mouth, leaning in to whisper to Amma, sitting with a sewing needle. They looked back at the stranger across from them, a woman in robes stained with dirt and blood, dark hair in unruly clumps, a blade tinted with red hidden inside her boots; with eyes cold, resigned. They would look back at this woman and wonder why she looked back at them with longing.

I imagined the calligraphers clearing away sheafs of paper and ink and pen shavings. Bilal would be brooming the floor right about now, and Sulayman complaining that he needed more tea. And Master Farhan — I did not want to think of him, of what he thought of me now. But they would go on without me, writing and scribbling, playing Bilal’s unnecessarily complicated version of skeet at the top of the east tower; and floors below them, Ardashir would be preparing to finalize the treaty with the ink I had bled onto the page.

I could not stay here. I rose, my aching limbs resisting, and walked back out towards the settling darkness.

“Where are you going then, thief?” a voice called. Imraan stood at the edge of the winding steps. “Stealing off into the night? I told you Al-Ghazan does not care who you are.”

“I am grateful for your help, but I must go. I don’t need a physician—”

“Perhaps not, but you do look a little — forgive me, but famished. They are making lamb tonight, with lemon zest,” Imraan said. “My favorite in all of Ifsharan, I would say, perhaps all of Khardin. I tell Layla the cook all the time, but she thinks I’m merely trying to flatter her. Anyway, it would be a crime not to taste some before you leave.”

The sound of footsteps clambered back down and Al-Ghazan’s thick red mane appeared. “I will see to that arm now, daughter,” he said, setting down his satchel and motioning for me to sit.

I hesitated. Behind me, the cold of night was settling in, a harsh wind against the back of my neck raising the hair on my skin.

“Imraan, why aren’t you setting up a fire yet?” Al-Ghazan said. “The cold is here to stay a while longer up in the open land.”

Imraan went to the firewood that lay in a heap in a corner of the room.

Finally I turned away from the cold night, the wooden door shutting behind me with a final thud.

Al-Ghazan unraveled the fabric around her arm to reveal a deep gouge, a slanted cut running across my arm. He sucked in his teeth and shook his head. “This is a deep cut. Why did they attack you? But I should not be surprised, after hitting a child.”

“Because she fought them off,” Imraan said, hurling in the wood.

“You serve the Emir then?” I asked lightly as Al-Ghazan cleaned the wound with disinfectant.

“Yes,” he said. “Alas, I do.”

“Why would Salman let you so far away from the Shayfahan – it is far, is it not?”

Al-Ghazan dipped his needle in the alcohol and held it up in the light. “I have other responsibilities besides. There are other physicians at court, but I conduct experiments for him, some of which take place here in my quarters.”

“Experiments?” I asked, trying to maintain my nonchalance. “What kind of experiments?”

“You like to ask questions, do you?” Al-Ghazan plunged in the needle. I sucked in a breath at the sharp sting of pain. “What is your name, dear daughter?”

But Imraan raised his head from stoking the flames at the hearth. “Hold on,” he said. “Wearing Ifsharan scholar robes…” He turned around to face me, one hand holding the heated tongs in his hand, glowing orange. “You are the woman who escaped from Ardashir’s cells. Aren’t you? What was the name — Rahena?” The flames glinted in his eyes as he considered the name.

“Rahena Ansary,” I said, for the first time in many years speaking my true name. It did not matter anymore now who knew it, for it was too late.

Al-Ghazan had nearly finished wrapping the bandage, but his hands stopped. “What woman? You are running from Ardashir?”

“They branded you a traitor, didn’t they?” Imraan said, moving away from the flames, his eyes narrowing in understanding.

I pulled my arm back away from the physician and stood up, holding Imraan’s stare.

“And what of you?” I asked him. I suddenly felt very aware of every movement, every inch of space and the air between us. I remembered now, why the scar running down his cheek seemed familiar: not because I had ever seen him nor the scar — but because I had heard of a man named Imraan with a scar down his face. “How unfortunate it must be for you,” I said, not looking away from him. “To bear the name of the Traitor of Khardin.”

A stretched, uneasy smile thinned the man’s face. The flames flickered over him, casting shadows along the hollows of his eyes. “Ah, I presume there is no danger in telling you now, is there, since it turns out, you too are hunted…” He raised his head. “Yes, I am Imraan al-Hunayn.”