We were a week into the lessons and I had already begun regretting the decision. I did not expect Surayyah to be such a grueling trainer.

In the mornings I practiced summoning the Liyyisin dimension with Al-Yaser, and in the evenings, sword practice with Surayyah. I had not yet learned to summon the Liyyisin myself, trying day after day but failing. I could not understand what painting would do.

But as I made my way down the rocky cliffside of the Keep down to the courtyard, I began to feel that I could stay in Arassan. For the first time in my life, it did not feel as if this power I’d held for so long was choking me — for there were others, hundreds, who had also felt the strange visions.

For the first time since a child, I felt hope that my powers did not need to consume me, that I could live alongside it. I thought perhaps I could even begin to settle here in the Raqini Tower, and learn and practice the art of venturing into the Liyyisin dimension with Al-Yaser.

“Let’s get to it before the sun goes down, Rahena!” Surayyah called.

I grabbed one of the practice swords and we began our parry slowly, building intensity. I swiveled to avoid Surayyah’s strike, then attacked her from the right. She blocked it in the blink of an eye.

The clanging of swinging swords rang through my arm into my bones. “By the Creator, you’re finally getting somewhere,” Surayyah said.

I took another swing. “Give me another few sessions, Surayyah, and I’ll have you flat on your back.”

Surayyah grinned.

Only when the sun began to lower did she finally end the lesson, as I knelt on the ground breathing hard.

Panting, I stood up and went to Surayyah, who sat down on a patch of grass to clean her sword.

I sank down next to Surayyah.

“I need to be grueling in training. If you want to learn, this is how,” Surayyah said, wiping her sword with a rag vigorously. “That is what Tariq says about his students’ studies — “You must fight through the pain if you want to learn.’”

“Tariq. Did he teach you as well?” I asked tentatively, uncertain how to ask what I wanted to.

“Do you mean to ask me, why is there a cold knife between us?” Surayyah stopped her cleaning. She laughed at the look on my face. “I know what you are thinking, you do not have to pretend.”

“That knife was cold enough for me to feel all through the journey here, yes,” I said.

“Tariq went to Ifsharan when he was thirteen, to make a living for us,” Surayyah said, returning to her vigorous cleaning as the sun began to set. “He returned for a while when he was twenty, to marry me off to Yaseen’s family, to establish a stable life for me, he said.” Her face darkened.

“But you did not want to?” I asked.

“It’s not that. Yaseen is a great man, a loving one.” she said. “But to be thrust into a home that is not yours — to play the role of the smiling bride-daughter even as you are trampled on; to be bound to the whims of another, your time, your space, your very being — every move watched, weighed, judged. For years, my house was the place I feared. Yet I could not go back to my own home, for it would bring shame upon my family name.”

Her hands moved furiously as she cleaned now, a vigor, an energy of something that had long been suffocated, trapped. “I became something I did not recognize in those days, a shell following the motions, day in day out, a spiritless creature.”

“But you…from the moment I met you, you seemed the very opposite,” I said.

She smiled. I saw a sadness I had not seen in her before. “I had to fight for myself to get out of there, didn’t I? For who else would? I had to find my own spirit again.”

Surayyah returned to the steel, her hands now carefully running down the edges to test their sharpness. “There was something my Nanu told me when I was a young girl that I did not understand until much later. She raised Tariq and I, you see,” she said. “She would tell us story after story of my mother, of fables, of warriors. She told me stories of others’ misfortunes and journeys. One day, when I asked for her stories, she became very quiet.”

The courtyard was awash in a glow of faint rose and orange, tinged by a darkness. One of the Keep’s orange-and-white spotted cats ambled up to the courtyard, brushing against Surayyah’s knees.

“Nanu said this to me,” Surayyah continued. “‘Suri, remember, they will try to tell you that a woman’s dignity lies in smiling and accepting: without thought, like a flat plate, shiny and ornamental. They will try to tell you that a woman’s anger is unbecoming, disgraceful. But that is why, sometimes, you have to be ‘disgraceful,’ dishonorable.” Surayyah looked up to the setting sun, her hands frozen upon the forgotten steel.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“‘Because it is a lie: no one’s dignity lies in smiling while they tread on your soul; it lies in fighting for yourself. And sometimes you have to break out of their definition of a ‘noble and dignified woman’ even if it is appalling to others — especially if it is appalling to others.’ I never understood at the time what she meant, until many years later.”

The cat leaped up to Surayyah’s lap now. She looked down as if she’d just noticed it, and began to pet it, her hands running through its fur as it purred. “You know, for so long, I used to have this fantasy of leaving everything behind, of going to live in a shack by the riverside up north in the forgotten marshes of Shinar, just sit by the misty river and write up there; go fishing, grow my own olive trees and squashes and eggplants. Run through fields by myself with no one around, no watching eyes or tongues or hands trying to shape you however they want to, dragging you away from yourself until you don’t even know who you are anymore.”

I could not speak, I could only watch her as she raised her head. She looked up to the heavens, the glow of the skies against the silhouette of her face.

“If it was not for my people, I would have left a long time ago.” The glow of the sunset faded, disappearing as if it had never existed at all, and her eyes came back down to earth. She smiled. “But it is alright, for now it is only Yaseen and I, and I do love him.”

****

The weight of the stone was always shifting, I discovered. As I climbed up the steep slope up to Abbasid’s Keep, it seemed heavy inside the pocket which I had sewn hidden into the lining of my robes. Sometimes it seemed to be so light I nearly forgot I carried it; at other times, it weighed down as if I carried five times its size.

The wind tangled at my robes as I reached the edge of the cliffside up to the Keep, and my muscles ached from the sword practices with Surayyah. I had not told her of the stone, for I did not need a mythical object to hammer in my reputation as a sorceress — not when Surayyah had already once shunned me before.

Firthun and Nilo’s voices floated out to me from the entrance gates, where it seemed they argued over the proper way to judge a roll in tavla. The yellow-scaled clusters of buds that draped down from the tree swayed over the boys.

“Arre, you can’t just do that, Firthun,” Nilo was saying.

“Why not?” Firthun said. “I say you can. Who made up the rules anyway?”

“I don’t know, but it must have been someone with more brains in their head than you.”

Firthun glanced up, noticing her approach. “Salaam, begum…?”

“Rahena,” I returned his salaam.

“Begum Rahena,” he smiled, as if the name was a gift I had presented him with.

“Just you two today, Firthun?” she asked.

“Begum, you remember my name!” he declared. “Yes, but Hazari is inside, he is the only one guarding inside today.”

The morning felt light, a warmer sun reaching the depths of the keep. I wound my way through the halls, growing familiar with its winding stairs and the narrow halls of the Raqini tower.

And then shouts rose from the library. I ran back down, as glinting metal moved along the halls. Mizaran armor.

I pulled back around a corner.

Scholars screamed, running. A Shayfahan soldier grabbed one of the scholars, a man in — “Where is Irfan Ad-Din?” the cold voice demanded.

From around the corner of the wall, I pulled out my penknife. I flinched as the man muttered something. He could not give it away — he could not. At Jalal’s Teashop, Imraan, Surayyah, Tariq and Asfan were training the new Jhansari recruits in the courtyard of Jalal’s Teahouse.

“I — I don’t know,” the man muttered.

A sharp stinging of steel rang in the air, and a bloodcurdling scream that was throttled by choking, and the thud of a body on the floor. The Shayfahan grabbed another scholar. “Would you like to meet the same fate, scholar?”

“I — he is in the Western Tower —” the voice choked out. “But he might be on his way to the —”

“The what?”

But the man said, “The teahouse, he was going to Jalal’s teahouse.”

The Shayfahan guard motions to the soldiers to go check the Western Tower and sends some to the bazaar. And some he sent to the Eastern Tower — “And find Al-Yaser. We must take her alive.”

Al-Yaser. They were coming for her.

I watched two of them head up to the Raqini Tower.

I furtively followed them up. From around a corner, I launched my blade, swinging for the leg.

The man whirled around, striking me across the face. All I could see was the stone floor, a stream of red, and blackness.

****

I woke to find an empty silent hall. Feeling my head, and standing up slowly, I ran up to the Raqini room.

Al-Yaser lay on the floor in a pool of blood, bleeding from the throat, a knife in her hands.

She had been prepared all along.

Her open, cold eyes reflected the light in the room like marble. For they were no longer eyes, becoming something else. Her sight, her visions, she had taken them with her.

And she’d made that decision herself.

I knelt to the stone floor, Al-Yaser’s blood seeping into the light linen of my own robes.

I brushed the eyelids closed, murmuring the words of the dead, the same words for taking the oath of the faith: La ilaha illallah — There is none but the Creator. I pried the knife from the dead hands, already cold.

She’d taken the knowledge of the Ardth-stone with her, furtively protecting me. She could have told them she did not have the stone, that she had given it away to another. And they could have pursued me. But she had chosen to die than give away herself, or the stone. She and the stone had become one, as she’d said. Once it was no longer hers — “What purpose do I have to remain alive at an age I should no longer be?” She had said.

Tears stung my eyes, and as I remained knelt on the cold floor, a loneliness entered my bones, as I looked at the last person who understood who I was.

I stood up, blood on my hands and knees, and rushed down to the halls.

Everything was silent and the scholars had all fled or been captured. The echoes of their earlier musings and laughter no longer lingered, replaced by their last horrors. But there was one man left on the floor, still choking on his own blood.

“They took Irfan,” he gasped out as I knelt down to him. “They are going to execute him in the square.”

Running footsteps down the hall made me reach for my knife. But it was Firthun, as bloody as herself, carrying a wounded Hazari.

“The bastards stabbed him!” Firthun cried. “Bhai, please, I need your help, I need to take him to physician Ruhi.” Two of the scholars came running and hoisted Hazari up.

“Firthun, wait,” I called. “I need you to go to Jalal’s Teashop.”

“Jalal uncle’s? Why?”

I held him by the shoulders. “I need you to warn them in the training yard. If it is not too late…The Shayfahan are coming. Get them out of there. Tell them they are going to execute Irfan.”