I glanced at the house to confirm her whispered words. I had been too busy looking at the smith to notice the door was wide open.
My steps barely left a mark on the dusty walkway as I rushed inside. The house was cast in shadows, with no candle glow to signal life inside.
Where is he?
“Baba?” I called out, my heart in my throat, my eyes roving wildly about the empty room. The mango wood bench in the front room was overturned, and the desert scrub mat shredded. A bead of sweat ran down my temple even though the house was cold.
It was the kind of cold that felt uninhabited, stale. I rushed to the back of the house, until I made it to my father’s bedroom.
Everything was destroyed.
His bed was torn apart, the pillows ripped open, and the date palm mattress split in half. All the daggers my father normally had displayed on the walls of his room were removed, with only the darkened outline of their presence imprinted on the walls to signify they were ever there. I walked over and placed my palm on the outline of the dagger that had a gold handle in the shape of a jackal’s head, as if to convince myself that my memories were real, that my fatherhadlived here.
That this house had been warm and alive the last time I had seen it.
I shouted again and again, calling his name, shouting for my cat, Jalebi, letting the words echo through the house, looking for any sign of life.
“Where are you?” I whispered into the broken room.
“Maybe he fled?” Noor’s quiet voice came from behind me, tentative, as if she didn’t want to startle a wild animal. It broke through the vacancy of the room and despite her careful words, anger rose inside me.
“Not like this,” I snapped, combing the empty, ravaged space for any clue as to where he would have gone.
There was nothing, not even any sign of my cat. It was as if no one had lived here in a long time.
I turned to face Noor. “He would have tried to leave me a message.”
He wouldn’t have left like this, not with his house destroyed and no word about where he had gone.
“Perhaps he didn’t have time to leave you one.” I heard the doubt in her voice. It was the same doubt that had dread pulling me down to the floor with its weight.
“Do you think Emperor Vahid took him too?”
Her mouth flattened. “That’s possible. Though it doesn’t explain why his belongings are missing and everything is wrecked. Perhaps the house was raided?”
Raided.
At Noor’s words, I bolted to the opposite end of the house, to my room.
The same white baked brick walls I had grown up with greeted me, the same sturdy bed frame and wide window allowing shafts of sunlight to illuminate the dust in the air. Except my room was in the same state of disarray as my father’s—there were a few plain kurtas strewn about the floor, but all my other clothes were gone. The room was upended, as if multiple hands had hunted through everything and took whatever they wanted.
I felt an awful, sick feeling—like I had been arrested all over again, taken from everything I loved and given a vacant cell in return. And that ever-present fear weighing on me since arriving, nearly taking me to my knees.
I pulled the bed away from the wall and worked a loose brick by the bedpost. It was stuck, and I felt a flicker of relief. I tugged and twisted until it broke free, crumbling in my hands and revealing a small compartment, a secret space only I knew about.
There.A small dark bag sat undisturbed in the corner of the hole.
Air whooshed out of me, my shoulders sagging as I pulled it out.
I loosened the indigo sack hiding my few items—a pouch of money, a braided piece of my amma’s dark hair, along with her looping gold earrings, a pocket-sized folding knife made by my father, and the final piece—a necklace with a miniature dagger pendant, given to me by Mazin. I held it up in the light, watching the glow of the blade in the dawn sun. It was a real dagger, albeit small, but the blade as sharp as any of my father’s. Its hilt was the head of a halmasti, the large, wolf-like creature in folklore tales of the north. It was a re-creation of a bigger dagger my father made, my favorite knife. I curled my fingers around it, the prick of the blade stinging my palm, the memory of when Mazin gave it to me fresh in my mind.
You’ll wear it, won’t you?
I’ll never take it off.
But I had forgotten it that day, which kept it safe when they arrested me. Only for Maz to stab me in the back with a different knife.
“Whatever you’ve come for, there’s nothing left. They’ve taken everything already. Don’t you have any shame?”
