I spooned a bowl of too-thin lentils into a chipped bowl and handed him a flat piece of bread dusted with mustard seeds to accompany it. It wasn’t much, but Bair stared down at the offering as if it had been a viceroy’s feast. I looked away as he devoured the soup, the familiar buried anger rising in my blood at seeing how starved he was, but Bair was not self-conscious about eating in front of me.
“Thank you, Haz Yaseema,” he said between hurried bites, not even pausing to consider if he should call me by the honorific.
I stiffened. “It’s just Yaseema, Bair. I’ve known you since we were both babes.”
He nodded, but didn’t look up at me when I corrected him.
After a few spoons, his hands no longer shook. I stepped into the hall, my feet pressing into the date palm mat. Pausing before Safiyya’s door, I let out an exhale before cracking it open.
“Safiyya,” I whispered, my voice soft in the darkness. She was a small mound on the bed, her black hair strewn about the pillow looking almost as wild as mine. The hoarse bark of a cough answered me, so rough it hurt my chest to listen to it.
There was no way she could go out sounding like that. I’d already spoon-fed her crushed black cardamom seeds in honey and made her a very weak kahwah tea with the last of the cinnamon and ginger, but she needed medicine, something that was in short supply to us.
She certainly couldn’t slip into the night with Bair, illegally bury bodies as our funeral rites demanded, and then run back to our house without attracting attention.
But something heavy sat in my chest at the thought of telling Bair that Safiyya couldn’t help him, at the villagers who desperately wanted to bury their dead having to burn them instead.
Could I do her job?
Should I?
I had been searching for the key to the fae vault that might change everything for Astola, that would bring the magic we once had back to us. I couldn’t afford to do anything that would jeopardize my search.
Something like this might be too foolish of a risk.
It was one thing to ignore what Safiyya did when she left the house in the middle of the night, to pretend she wasn’t actively engaging in open rebellion every time she slung the shovel over her shoulder, but it was another thing to do the same.
It was sopublic.
Everything I did was done alone and was relatively untraceable. But for her, everyone in our village knew what she was up to at night. Her acts against the Citadel were smaller than mine, but no less deadly.
It isn’t treason if I haven’t pledged loyalty to them.
It isn’t treason if they invaded.
Safiyya’s sharp retort filled my mind, what shewouldhave said had I run the options by her.
But for now, moonlight spilled across Safiyya’s supine form on the bed, and I could make out the sheen of sweat on her forehead. She coughed again, and her entire body shook.
“Safiyya,” I said softly into the room. “Bair’s here.”
“Hold on,” she croaked, trying to rouse herself. “I’m coming.”
“You shouldn’t be going out. Not when you’re so ill. Leave it for tonight. The dead will keep.”
A heavy, wet cough wracked her body, and I winced.
“No, I have to go with him. It’s the only time we have. Soon the Citadel patrols will find the body and we won’t be able to bury him anymore.” It was painful to listen to her voice, and even worse to watch her struggle to rise from the bed.
It’s the only time we have.
I felt the same every night. Poring over the ancient texts, trying to find clues to a key I didn’t know if I’d ever locate. It was the last piece of the puzzle I needed to be able to cross the wall into the fae world.
And from there I could finally find the crown that could take down the wall completely, bring the magic back to the earth, and stop the famines decimating our people.
Safiyya come to a seated position and then swayed, as if she were about to pass out.
My breath caught in my chest, and I clenched my hands tight at my side. How many hours had I devoted to searching for a key to an ancient fae storage chamber, only to come up empty-handed? And here my cousin was, about to pass out on the wooden floor of her room.
