“If you go in, I'm coming with you,” Shadi says.
“We may need this, then.” Khawla pulls a jinn stick from her sash. “Found it on the ground on the way over.”
They step inside as Khawla breaks the stick. She holds it out like a magician's wand to light the way ahead. Wind gusts through a shattered window, which explains how Qamar got in. As Khawla waves the glowing stick, its sweepinglight reveals overturned chairs and broken decorations. They move to the kitchen, where cabinet doors hang from their hinges like broken wings and shards of plates and mugs crunch like packed snow beneath their slippers.
The horror is incomprehensible, but Shay can't look away from it. In a wordless daze, she stumbles to their sleeping room. The midwife's books are torn, reservoirs of wisdom and knowledge now piles of shredded pages, tossed like leaves and debris after a storm.
Shay kneels before the empty bassinet Ghita made for Sami. She splays her fingers over the plain wool blankets, half expecting to find them warm. Their utter coldness confirms that whatever took place here happened days ago at least.
She doesn't register the tears streaming down her face until Khawla and Shadi kneel quietly to either side of her. “Who could have done this?”
Their silence is answer enough. Shay thinks they know as well as she does. The soldiers came for Shay, just as they had come for Shadi's brother. But none of them, least of all the midwife, had done anything wrong. Things look so much clearer now that she's spent time away from her medina.
The people don't follow Al-Mukhtar for their good providence. They follow them because they're afraid. Like the neighbor upstairs, who'd rather invent a story about the midwife being sick than talk about what really happened here. Maybe she even made herself believe it. How could Shay have ever believed Mekchaouen's leaders’ so-called miracles came from God? She prefers to believe in the God who led Shadi to that cave, a God of mercy and beauty and hope, not one who condones control through brutality and violence.
And if it wasn't a raid, if it was robbers or the type of deviants who prey on women living alone, what is the sense in this destruction? Whoever did thiswantedsomeone to find the aftermath, to be reminded how thin the illusion of safety is and has always been. And what of Sami? Would he be raised to train as a Moulay? Or returned to a mother unfit to care for him?
Through her tears, Shay makes out the blurry shapes of parchment strips strewn among the rubble. Suspecting they are not made from the same thin paper that filled Ghita's books, she lifts one between her fingers. Yes, these arethicker, the kind of parchment reserved for official decrees. Each torn strip holds another fragment of an image. Is that … an eye?
A quick sweep of the room produces two mostly intact halves. She holds them flush, and her heart twists at the sum of her own face—depicted not on a wanted poster, but a sign for a missing person.
Ghita was trying to find her.
“Wow.” Khawla stands next to her, appraising the handmade flyer. “The midwife could draw quite well. Her line variation and blending techniques really capture your nature,” she says with the authority of someone speaking as an artist herself. “Do you think this could be the sign the bone-eaters saw in the medina? Is it possible they were in a hurry and mistook it for a wanted poster?”
Shay can't speak, busy adding and subtracting facts and lies. She distinctly remembers Kabeer's assertion that he could read, so a lack of literacy is not a viable excuse. Her mind quickly crafts another scenario, one where the bone-eaters knew the posters were one thing but told her they were another. But why? And how had Aidi known the ring was amagicaltalisman when Ghita's posters made no mention of it? Did he trick her into thinking he was helping her so he could keep the hjabat for himself?
Shay feels the effervescence of laughter bubbling deep inside her, jagged and bitter when it hits the back of her throat. It's a joke at this point, the way everyone keeps lying to her. She's a joke. Ghita didn't raise her to bethisgullible. She feels so stupid. And angry, at herself mostly.
But then, if Shay'snota fugitive, whywasGhita's apartment raided?
“We should go,” Khawla says, regarding Shay worriedly. “In case the building is under any kind of surveillance.”
The words raise an alarm inside her, breaking through her shock. As desperately as Shay wants to know exactly what happened here, she won't learn anything more tonight. Besides, she still can't be certain she's not a wanted criminal. The neighbor saw her; would Zaytuna turn her in? That's what Al-Mukhtar brought the people of her realm to. They turned them against one another, making enemies of neighbors.
“You're right.” Shay turns to the door as Khawla's jinn stick illuminates an oblong stain set beside it. A dark, shapeless splotch, blemishing the burnished wall. Blood—dry now, but cast in long ribbons where it once dripped toward the floor.
Her body collapses into Khawla's ready arms, and Shay sobs into her warm chest as loss renders her senseless. She thought she knew what grief was before, but this—this is true grief. It's cruel, and it's relentless, and it feels like being pummeled by a thousand hurled stones.
19
The Legend of Ard Al-Ghul
Once, two sisters traveled across the wide forest to visit a sacred shrine. They each packed food, but one sister ate all of hers as soon as she felt the first pang of hunger, while the other restricted herself, portioning out her servings to make them last over the course of a long journey.
They rested briefly after visiting the shrine, then headed homeward, but the first sister had saved no food for the return journey. Seeing that her sister had set aside half of what she packed for this purpose, she asked her to share. To teach her a lesson, her sister cruelly asked for payment in the form of one eye. Rather than starve, the first sister gave one eye, but before long, she became hungry again and gave her other eye for more food.
Now blind, she needed to be led along by her sister, slowing her down. Eventually, the second sister abandoned the first. She cried out so loudly that the spirits in the unseen world were drawn to her rage and despair. One was a ghoul who fell immediately in love with her. Because she could not see what he really looked like, she imagined him to be a handsome hero who had saved her and allowed him to take her to the land beyond the forest. There, he married her.
The ghoul would care for his bride by day and cross the forest to visit the medina where her sister lived by night, tormenting her for what she had done. The couple had monstrous children, and their children had children, who took up the task of terrorizing the human realm each night.
And these made up the original inhabitants of Ard Al-Ghul.
Shay shouldn't be able to take a breath in and let it out again when Ghita never will. But she does. She shouldn't be able to move, to command her legs and lift one foot in front of the other, but she does that, too.
It helps that Khawla and Shadi are with her. It's strange, this feeling that if she falls, one of them will catch her. If she cries, they won't accuse her of being weak. She tries to pull herself together for Ghita's sake. Breaking apart won't help her get to the bottom of what happened, but in her mind, the blood on the wall isn't dry. It keeps dripping, dripping, dripping, when the stuff that flowed within the veins of someone so formidable should never have been so easy to shed.
Khawla guides them back to the forest's edge, to another tree marked with the yaz. Shay turns to Shadi before they part ways, the hjabat's pull a heavy drag around her neck. Its cold weight is a reminder of the decision she must make.
