On the afternoon Surayyah returned, Maryam found her stumbling through the inner courtyard gates while on her way to climb Al-Ghazan’s pomegranate tree.

Maryam’s cry of joy at finding Surayyah was quickly shot with fear. Surayyah was bleeding through her robes, her hands at her sides. Her horse nickered at the gates, Surayyah’s blood trailing from its flank.

Maryam screamed for Imraan.

Tariq soon arrived after her.

On the return journey carrying a message from Waqar Marouf, Surayyah and Tariq had been attacked on the roadside as they neared Ifsharan.

Surrounded by robbers from the recently starved villages, Surayyah tried to protect her brother.

“Fought off the damned mizaran army only to get stabbed by a robber,” Imraan teased her as she sat up days later by the fire in the sitting room.

I sat by Surayyah changing her bandages, cleaning the wound. Al-Ghazan was gone off to the emir’s court, and I’d had to rifle through whatever medicines and tools I could find to sew her ip.

“They were just villagers, I didn’t want to kill them,” Surayyah muttered, sucking in her teeth as I dabbed at the wound.

“Hold still, Surayyah,” I said.

“And anyway,” Surayyah said, “There were too many of them, and you weren’t there, Imraan.”

Imraan turned over the letter from Marouf again. “I’ll have to meet him at the border,” he murmured to himself, studying it.

***

Maryam and Omar chased each other down to dinner, their shouts echoing down the hall.

Tariq shouted, “Pipe it down over there, the lot of you, and come to supper like proper children. Or there won’t be any haleem left for you two.”

That shut them up: haleem was their favorite dish, stewed with lentils and mutton in a thick savory broth.

Moonlight filtered in through the curtains between the grounds outside and the dining veranda, lanterns lit about the walls. I was beginning to dole out the haleem onto plates when Imraan emerged at the frame of the door. He stood still, staring at us.

“Imraan?” Tariq called. “Are you alright?”

Imraan said nothing, staring ahead into the air. A silence fell slowly as the others noticed him.

“Imraan?” Al-Ghazan asked. “What happened?”

Imraan took a seat across from Al-Ghazan. “The White Rider. He massacred protesters outside of Shiraz Road.”

A heavy silence fell. My heart froze, and Surayyah dropped the ladle over the pot of haleem and it rang with a clatter against the wooden pot.

Shiraz Road was not far from the square — the same corners of the city where I would walk with Sahan.

“It was in front of Aliya’s house,” Imraan said. “I am surprised they didn’t go after Adnan right then.”

“It’s beginning to get bad…just like in the old days before the Purge,” Al-Ghazan murmured.

“I heard talk of something else...” Tariq said. “There is word that Ardashir is leading a raid at the border of Ifsharan villages, to bring back what he calls the Third Purge.”

I clenched my fists tight. I should have done it when I had the chance. I should have killed him.

Maryam and Omar watched the adults talk. They sat very still, as if with one move or a sound from them, the adults would remember their presence and halt their conversation that for once, the children were privy to.

A swift breeze flew in through the opening from the grounds, and the lanterns flickered.

“We are going to have to begin mobilizing all of our old forces,” Imraan said.

“Jalal Uncle’s been successful in gathering recruits in Jhansar. The poor man’s grown restless since his son’s death.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“But we will need more than our old forces,” Imraan said. “And recruiting is…more dangerous than it ever was.”

Nobody spoke of what that meant. Al-Ghazan motioned his head to the children, and the others remembered their presence. They resumed their motions again, picking up plates and naan and the ladle.

I unconsciously tore a piece of naan in my hands to shreds. I needed to find Sahan.

Surayyah changed the subject: “Maryam, Omar, have I ever told you the story of how a jinn stalked your Uncle Yusuf for a year?” She waved her hands away. “Never mind, it will probably scare you too much. You won’t be able to sleep.”

Maryam and Omar perked up and forgot about the somber adult conversation they had been so studiously listening to. “No, tell us! Tell us! We won’t be scared, I promise,” Maryam clamored.

Surayyah grinned, and began to tell them her jinn story.

***

I tread a path through the lilac petals that had accumulated in the hall. Through the windows, the night was visible, awash with stars. The lights of the city loomed like a mirage in the distance.

In the hearth room, Surayyah played a game of tavla with Maryam and Omar, while Tariq lay down on cushions by the corner. Their chatter floated out to the darkness in the hall.

I looked out to the city; the firelight from the other room flickered against the walls in my periphery. I listened to the sounds of Maryam and Omar giggling as they played. But the laughter of the children seemed to come from very far away, as if it was not in the next room but as if the hall stretched for miles and miles across the land in a narrow tunnel, stretching past buildings and streets and I was hearing them through that long tunnel: sounds echoing from a time that was already moving away, already in the past. Only the future lay before us: the horizon of the city and the silhouette of the Shayfahan hovering over the skies.

“What will you do then, calligrapher?” A voice called from the end of the hall. Imraan stood there, framed by the firelight against the entrance. He came to stand next to me by the window.

The clatter of pots and dishes came from the kitchens, the sound of furious scrubbing under running water and the chatter of the maids as they cleaned up for the night.

“If the war is truly coming, I have to be here,” I said.

He smiled. “A calligrapher fighter then?” he said. “We will need you. I will need you.”

“It would be a shame to waste all that effort getting beaten up by Surayyah,” I said.

Imraan laughed. “I want to show you something,” he said, heading through the hall towards the grounds.

The wind blew fiercely as we walked towards the fig tree, as if the wind too was preparing for the coming war.

“What do you know of Adnan Ilman?” I asked as we walked. “I have been hearing for years even all the way back home in Bayrun, of his mother. Now people would say that her son will save Khardin.”

“People will see what they want to see if it is the last strand of hope they can hold on to,” Imraan said.

“Why do people talk of this boy as if he has been given divine powers?”

“Its a story that got out of control,” Imraan laughed. “After his mother’s death, Adnan fought off three Shayfahan soldiers who were attacking a merchant in the streets. I know his father used to train him, but I didn’t know the boy was a hell of a fighter. Three Shayfahan! By himself!”

Lights slowly began to flicker in the distance of the city.

“Suddenly I was hearing that Adnan had hands of iron and the great healing powers of Sakina. I thought it was all ridiculous at first, but I understand why people began to do it, why they needed it.”

The tree stirred above us, the ripened dark violet figs scattering to the ground from the breeze. Imraan picked one from the tree, dusted it with his fingers a bit and offered it to me. “It’s considered a fruit from the heavens,” Imraan grinned.

I took the fig from his hands and bit into the leathery skin, the ripeness of its juicy textures filling her mouth. “Heavenly,” I agreed. “Did you know that the fig is not really a fruit at all? It’s an inverted flower.”

Imraan plucked one into his own mouth. “What does that mean?”

“The fig wasps have to enter through a narrow gap to pollinate it,” I said. “But then it’s trapped, it can’t escape back through the passageway. It gives life but slowly dies in the process.”

“What a tragic story for a wasp,” Imraan muttered.

We sat there for a moment, the breeze blowing over us with the stench of the city, the muddy banks of the river mixed in with the smell of smoke.

“So — you never did tell me — did you find what you were looking for in Arassan? The room?” Imraan asked.

I stiffened as if remembering. I had spent so long trying to suppress who I was, trying to hide the truth, that I did not know anymore how to speak of it; if I had ever known.

Imraan stopped chewing his fig and let out a mocking laugh. “You still don’t truly trust me, do you?”

The Raqini relic throbbed in the pocket over my chest. And my heart throbbed faster at the prospect of telling him, telling anyone. What would he think of me then?

“Don’t take it so personally,” I said. “I hear you have a heart of stone.”

“You are right, I should not have bothered,” Imraan murmured, rising and beginning to walk away.

“Wait,” I called. “I did not mean that.” Imraan halted without looking at me.

“Imraan…when I met Al-Yaser…”

He sighed and sat back down next to me.

“I always thought I was alone in these…visions, this power. But when I met Al-Yaser, I learned I am not.” I tried to gather the words, and it was like clutching at drifting motes of dust. They were there, tangled in a web that I did not know how to disentangle. But slowly, stumbling over my speech, I gathered them.

“What…do these visions feel like?” He whispered.

“Sometimes, it is…like looking into a black hole, an abyss, that nothing can fill; like looking behind a veil,” I said. “But the veil flickers sometimes: a strange flickering of light and dark, until it becomes like wings, a blur, melding into one.”

I dug my fist into the earth below my feet. “It feels like crawling through mud, I feel like an insignificant bug crawling through the earth. Is it only because I am I weak?”

“I think,” Imraan said. “If we were to wholly see each other’s minds and hearts, we would break. We would not be able to carry it within us. And you cannot carry it all.”

The darkness of his lashes were striking as he looked at me then. His face was silhouetted against the pinpricks of light from the city. He said, “You don’t have to bear it alone.”