“Ah.” I leaned toward her, keeping my face a mask of calm, as if I casually welcomed visitors to my dingy cell all the time.
“Don’t they notice you digging?”
She shook her head. “I’m always back to put my waste and food bucket out. I’m never gone more than a day—I don’t really have enough candle left for the light.” She waved her hand over the bag of supplies she had dumped on the floor. A small stub of wax and a dented tin cup spilled out from the opening.
My eyes widened at the two foreign objects. I’d never been given so much as a spoon to eat my lentils.
“How did you get those?” I never thought I’d have wonder in myvoice as I looked at a rusted tin cup, but it was funny the things I missed when they were taken away.
The girl grinned, but no humor lit in her eyes. “You really want all my secrets, don’t you? The guards are very interested in why I’m here and what I have to offer them. Sometimes they give me things in exchange for information, or with the expectation that one day I will return the favor.”
“Well, they certainly don’t offer me any kind of favor.”
“Didn’t you just kill one of them?”
I scowled. “What did you do that was so special?”
Noor leaned back on her hands. “I was an assistant to a chieftain who cultivated Emperor Vahid’s crops of zoraat.”
I sucked in the air against my teeth, surprised she’d said the words so simply.
As if she hadn’t just admitted that she helped grow the entire source of the emperor’s power—the coveted seeds he’d bargained for with a djinn to take over the empire. Djinn were powerful magical beings who did not part with their gifts lightly and with whom you did not want to bargain if you could help it. They didn’t even exist in our world, but in the world of the unseen.
“My chieftain stole a large amount of zoraat and hid it, along with a small fortune,” she continued.
I whistled low. Ever since Vahid struck a bargain with a djinn for those first magical seeds, they had been guarded intensely—after all, they were how he had forcibly annexed the five kingdoms and the northern tribes under his new rule. Zoraat had given him healing magic, an endless food supply, and an indestructible army. But Emperor Vahid solely controlled that power, and he wasn’t willing to share.
“I can’t imagine the emperor took kindly tothat.”
“No.” She looked away, her eyes shadowed. It was a moment before she spoke again. “The emperor killed my chieftain for his betrayal.” She swallowed, a harsh smile twisting her lips. “And Emperor Vahiddidn’t believe I knew nothing about where he had hidden the seeds, so he had me tortured and thrown in here.”
I grew still. “And did you? Know where he had hidden them?”
Another shadow of a smile passed her lips. Instead of answering me, she swept her gaze around the room again, lighting her eyes on the tally of days I had etched into the wall, a macabre countdown to my death.
“Comfortable lodgings, don’t you think? This is the ends of the earth, a barren island where they throw those they don’t want others to find.”
I sat up straighter at my unanswered question. Access to the emperor’s stash of djinn magic was considerable power.
If Noor possessed it, she could control anything.
The kingdom. The emperor. The world.
As if Noor could read my machinations, she focused those sharp eyes on me once more. “Why are you here, Dania? What didyoudo?”
I swallowed. The truth felt hard to say out loud, even though it repeated through my mind on a daily basis. Saying it out loud meant it was real, and that I hadn’t just imagined it. The lump in my throat grew thick.
“I was tricked. Accused of murdering a chief from the northern tribes.” I kept my eyes down, studying my hands, trying not to think of the burned husk of a body that had sat at my feet the day they arrested me, devoured from the inside out.
“Murder and treason.”
Noor whistled. “And did you do it?”
An echo of my own question. Two could play this game. “As soon as you start telling me the truth, I’ll start telling you.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “If you’re going to join me, I need to know whether you’re likely to stab me in the back.”
“After a year in here, I would do anything to escape. But to answer your question, no, I didn’t kill him.”
