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The shuffle of feet grows closer, followed by a clamor of voices and cackles.
I can bet my life on a guess as to their destination.
My eyes dart around the room. I won’t have time to hide all the items I’ve collected over the years. The swords with swirling leaves stolen from the armory. The set of books on an unauthorized loan from the library. The sketchbooks with shimmering gems and golden paint on their covers. Even if I could, it wouldn’t matter. After the betrothal, I’ll join my husband’s household with the rest of his wives. All my trinkets will lie forgotten in one storage room or another until the sand claims even them.
I tear the parchment to pieces and let it slide through my fingers as if doing so could change my destiny. As if I had a chance at another life. As if I could flee from the path my father has charted for me and see the world outside the high walls that have held me prisoner for eighteen years.
The last piece glides to the floor just as the door swings open. A woman appears on the other side surrounded by a flock of my sisters and, further away, a cluster of servants.
The air is as thick as syrup, sweat beading on my skin, but a shiver still runs down my back. Even the servants hover an arm’s length away as they follow the woman with jingling bracelets on her wrists. Her back straight, her gaze hard, her dark hair drawn back in a tight coil, the most powerful woman of the empire, the second wife of Our Sun and Light has graced me with her presence.
“I’ve heard about your little adventure last night,” Ofara says, looking at anything but me.
“Mother, I would never—”
Her slap rattles my bones all the way down to my toes and erases any trace of sleep still lingering on my mind. I stumble away, tripping on a pile of clothes strewn on the floor, and land hard on my already bruised side.
“Stand up,” she says sharply.
My foot stuck in the sleeve of a shirt, I battle to stand up when another slap sends me back down. “Can’t you hear me when I speak to you?”
I stagger to my feet, rubbing my bruises as my mother gives the room another glance. My sisters lower their heads and divert their gazes as soon as they feel Ofara might take even a speck of interest in them. When she clicks her tongue, even the most brazen of my sisters stiffen.
“Come,” my mother says, gripping my hand with another jingle of bracelets. “We are already late.”
We cross the palace yet to be awakened in a silent procession. My mother doesn’t care if she disturbs anyone’s sleep, but today even she must feel nervous. Her nails, coated with gold flecks and genuine rubies, dig into my skin, and she doesn’t let go until we step into a room filled with polished mirrors, enamel baths, and a heated pool. I fell into it once, when I was younger. Back then my sisters already avoided my presence as if I was cursed by Livith, the god of death and oblivion. My throat tightens at the memory, fighting the water dribbling into my lungs. I’m on the other side of the room, but my vision still blurs.
“Get into the tub already. We don’t have all morning,” my mother says, yanking me back to reality and, for once, I’m grateful.
I pull my shirt off, my muscles screaming in agony. A gasp, muffled by the shuffling of robes, betrays Tylea’s indignation. Her eyes run over different shades of purple and yellow painted on the canvas of my skin. Some are from my mother’s last beating, but the bright violet ones are from my altercation with the guards last night.
Dismissing her worried glance, I hurry to shrug off my dirt-stained garments and get into the tub before Ofara can be distracted from the cup of strong coffee in her hand and the jeweled kaftans of every shade of green being brought forward for her evaluation.
A gasp breaks out from my lips as servants pour biting-cold water all over my body. Every bathroom in the palace has heated water running through copper tubing, and yet, my mother has me sitting in a tub of melting ice. I don’t dare to protest. Not when it would only earn me another beating. My teeth clattering, unable to stop the trembling, I wait as the servants rub my skin with perfumed oils and struggle to disentangle my hair with a comb of obsidian and diamonds.
Ofara floats across the room, her cup with swirls of golden paint still resting between her bony fingers. She catches the hand of the servant working on my hair, a cry escaping the lips of the young girl. “We wouldn’t want her to go bald in your care, would we?”
Tylea steps closer, her hands rolled into fists.
“You won’t like it no matter what the girl does to my hair,” I say from the tub before my sister can open her mouth. “If only for that simple reason that it’s attached to my head.”
Ofara lifts her hand, and I stiffen, waiting for a blow that never comes. When I dare to meet her gaze, I see a smile grow sharper on her lips. A smile that never fails to steal my breath. “Soon, it’ll be your husband teaching you manners, and you’ll remember how kind your mother was to you, how much she has sacrificed for such an ungrateful brat.”
Ofara turns away, her attention seized by a new set of kaftans presented by the servants. Their hands shake. Their eyes are cast down. I open my mouth, the retort sitting on the tip of my tongue. Maybe if she beats me like the last time, Ajaia won’t want any part of me, and I won’t have to leave. Or maybe she’ll beat me into a sleep that will be my last.
Tylea takes the comb from the servant’s hand and runs it through my hair with a soft caress. “It’s not worth it,” she whispers with her next breath.
Of course, she’s right.
I press my lips into a thin line before I can say anything else that’ll inevitably attract my mother’s attention. Willing my heart to stop hammering in my chest is harder. Even more so when I see my mother pick a kaftan for the ceremony in which I don’t want to partake. My sisters observe the proceedings with a glimmer of jealousy in their eyes. They would kill me in a heartbeat if it only meant they could take my place, but they don’t have green eyes like my father does. Like I do. A jewel of his empire, I’m his property. Even more valuable than any of his wives or other daughters. I was always destined to be a reward for a man who has offered Magnar something he couldn’t refuse. A coin bargained in a trade.
Tylea catches a tear that has formed in the corner of my eye just as my mother glances our way to check on the progress. Satisfied with whatever she’s seen, she turns away and clicks her fingers. The servants dash across the room to usher me out of the bath and into the thick towels.
An hour later, the girl who has been working on the intricate braid woven around my head slides the last pin adorned with emeralds into my rusty-red hair, and brings a crushing migraine with it. My mother merely glances at me from the divan where my sisters have clustered around her, gossiping and giggling. They all lift their gazes to me from time to time, like they do now, as servants rush to cloak me in a kaftan of deep green. The silk woven from lotus stems shifts and glides, making my skin itch, and if I dare to move, the countless gems stitched to the fabric sparkle under the sun climbing higher into the sky.
My mother gives me one last hard look before she snaps her fingers again, with a jingle of bracelets echoing through the bathroom. Like an army waiting for her command, my sisters form a semi-circle, waiting for the jewel of the Empire of Usmad to complete the crown.
With a stroke to the back of my hand, Tylea offers me a reassuring smile. Now that I am coated in powder and with kohl and gold lines around my eyes, I wonder if she can see how grateful I am that she’s here.
