“Desert marauder? That sounds quite dashing.”
A laugh escaped me, which abruptly ended when the pad of his thumb began tracing the underside of my arm. My stomach flipped. But it was a slow, contented touch, one that felt soothing and not like he was trying to instigate something. I relaxed back against him, and silence stretched out long and easy between us. His breathing was steady as his hand dropped away and fell softly to my waist. My eyes were growing heavy, but I wanted to stay awake a little longer to savor this feeling, to experience his arms wrapped around me for the first time.
I was certain he was asleep until he spoke.
“Thank you, Dani.”
Twenty-five
“Tell me everything.” I leapt on Noor as soon as the carriage took off, trying to get the thought of Mazin pressing my hand to his lips out of my mind.
“Well, while you were making moon eyes at Mazin, I was gathering some useful information. The security in the palace is atrocious. I managed to get to the kitchens and gossip with the kitchen maids.”
I leaned back as we hit a bump in the dirt road, the cloud of dust in our wake causing Noor to cough and rub her eyes.
“What did you hear?” I didn’t wait for her to recover. I was eager to get back to the plan. Back to reality. Back to hating Mazin. I could feel myself slipping into familiar ways, and cursed myself for the hold he seemed to have over me.
“There is a group of rebels in the city,” Noor said, still rubbing the dirt from her eyes, “fighting against emperor Vahid and calling him a usurper. They’ve caused significant problems throughout Basral, but apparently Vahid has tried to crush them with a crackdown on all protests.”
“Hence his awful display today. Anam mentioned something similar—that there was a protest recently that turned into a bloodbath. And Mazin had been there.”
Noor nodded. “Yes, Mazin was there. The rebels wanted to bring down Vahid and the control he has over zoraat in the empire. They say he doesn’t belong on the throne, that he was only given it by a djinn.”
“Not a terribly original argument,” I said, looking out of the tanga at the red-gold city streets around us. The breeze from the speed of the tanga whipped through my hair as I watched people turn to us curiously. Most people kept their heads down in fear, scuttling through the streets as the noise of the carriage reached them. Of course they would; if they dared to protest against anything, the emperor would burn them alive.
Vahid had promised freedom, choice, a way out of poverty. Instead, the djinn power had corrupted him.
“Vahid himself tells the tale of being gifted zoraat from a djinn. He just acts like he was chosen to rule because of it, instead of being polluted so much by the magic of the unseen that he wanted to control it all.”
I flexed my fingers, thinking of the last dose of zoraat I had taken just this morning. I thought of that black tendril of power curling around my finger like a snake under my skin. I still wasn’t even sure if that was real, but if I wasn’t careful, Vahid’s greed might happen to me. I needed to remember that in all this, I couldn’t allow myself to be taken by the djinn power too.
“You and I agree with the rebels’ cause at least,” Noor reasoned, and turned to look out to the city as well. The wind brushed the ends of her short curls, and she looked much younger in the afternoon sun. Something had changed about her, something I couldn’t put my finger on. She seemed a little more focused after leaving the palace, and I wondered if being in Vahid’s house had made her think of Souma.
“I think there is opportunity here,” she continued.
“You mean work together with them? The rebels?” I leaned back against the plush seat and folded my arms over my chest.
It was a good idea. The seeds of antagonism were already there, we just had to add to it.
“Or at least help their cause. They want the same thing we do, to see this empire of lies fall.” She hesitated and looked at me.
I noticed her nervousness. “What is it?”
“We can also use the zoraat in… other ways. Ways that Vahid won’t see coming.”
I looked back at the passing streets. A mother was on her knees clutching at her child who appeared ill. She wailed in distress, crying out for help. People walked past her doing nothing, leaving her to fend for herself. I signaled to our tanga driver to stop and handed him a bag of coins to give to the woman.
The emperor had the resources and power to help people, but he had chosen not to. In the end it would be his own actions that would bring him down, not ours.
I had been hesitant to use zoraat; the feeling of power flooding through my fingertips was far more seductive than I had thought. I didn’t need its full power to achieve my revenge.
But perhaps it was about more than just my revenge. Maybe it was about giving Basral—about giving the empire—something different to hope for. And maybe it was time to step things up.
“Tell me how,” I said to Noor, watching the sobbing woman clutch at the bag of coins with hysterical relief as she ran off with her child to visit a healer.
“When I was working under Souma, there were blends that we created to help the crops, to bring the rains, to flood the clay earth with growth. The emperor uses it all to help his own crops, to control the amount of food production and the prices of resources. But I can also do the opposite.”
I chewed on my lip. “Target the crops, you mean?”
