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Yet Danyal’s recent behavior did not fit with that of Razak’s cruel handler.
The wagon trundled on. Swathes of bare forest swept by the back of the cart, and when the sun dropped, a bone-deep chill set in. I pulled the blanket tighter and drifted, dreaming of pools of blood and the horror on Arin’s face when the black carriage had taken him away. He’d despise me for forcing him to leave and that was probably for the best. Even if I missed his brilliant grin and the way laughter sparkled in his eyes like sunlight on Dallin’s ocean.
Those few days we’d had in Palmyra had been the best days of my life. I clung to their memory and kept them with me as night set in, and so did the dreams.
* * *
The daysthat followed were a stream of nightmares and memories merged together; the past was the present, where I stood on a street corner singing for coin, playing my fiddle to fill my belly. Then Razak’s touch branded my chest, and my soul. I woke wrecked and shivering, with my own screams echoing in my head.
A fever,someone said. Malnourished, weak.Then the voice I knew to be Danyal’s would tell them they were wrong, and that I was stronger than they realized.
I didn’t feel strong.
When I woke again, a campfire licked at the dark, and through the flames I saw Danyal. He sat opposite the campfire, stirring a steaming pot. The wagon was parked up behind him, and to my right, a lone horse chomped on a shrub at the forest’s edge.
The fire roared, but my back was exposed to the forest, and an icy cold. I shifted, trying to tuck the blanket tighter.
“Are you back with me?” Danyal grumbled, in the same monotone drawl he’d used to ask me what secrets I had that month for Razak.
This was very real then. I hadn’t been sure, until he’d spoken.
“Water?” I rasped, my tongue thick.
He poured some water from a leather pouch into a wooden cup and handed it over.
After struggling to prop myself up on a trembling arm, I took the cup and sipped.
“You’ll be all right,” he muttered, to me or himself.
Why was he beingnice? “What do you want?” He must want something for saving me. We weren’t friends, and he wasn’t a good man. The marks on his face made that clear. Was this about Razak’s bounty? Danyal seemed the sort to sell anyone for coin, and I assumed Razak had offered a great deal of it.
He returned to his upturned log, sat, and smiled into his pot of simmering broth. “I don’t blame you for being suspicious. You don’t know me, but I know you, Zayan. Iknewyou. What they did to you, to you both…” He shook his head and clamped his mouth shut.
I hunched over, pulled the blanket over my shoulders, and huddled closer to the fire. “You knew my mother?” He’d said as much, I remembered that.
“I did. I helped her escape the court when you were just a babe.”
The memories of my mother were few and far between. I recalled her voice, telling me I was her lark, and the tune she’d hum with me tucked in bed. I’d been too young to understand the world then. And it was only when I was older, when Umair had sent people to find us, that I’d witnessed my world crumble. My good memories were buried beneath all the bad. “Tell me of her.”
“She loved you. You were her whole world. She’d have pulled the moon from the sky and given it to you, if she could.”
“Until I killed her.”
“Is that what you think?” His gnarled face screwed up even more. He glared as though hating me, but I was beginning to suspect that was how he looked at the best of times.
“If it wasn’t for me, she’d have survived.”
“No, boy. Is that Razak talking? Did he tell you that?”
“I don’t recall.” But it was likely. Much of what I knew of my past came from my brother. He’d shaped the truth, twisted it, turned it into the stories he wanted to tell. Perhaps when it came to telling tales, we weren’t so different.
“She worked in the court as an administrator, close to Umair. And when the king’s wife perished, your mother, with her kind heart, tried to ease Umair’s burden. I warned her. Kindness does not belong in the Court of Pain. But she disagreed. She was adamant the king had goodness in him. Then she vanished and returned some months later with a babe—you. She did not speak of Umair after that. A light had died inside her. She lived at court for a time but confessed to me how Umair had taken an interest in you, his son. So, we plotted her escape.”
I recalled none of this, nobody had said a damn word about my beginnings. I’d always been the traitor’s son and nothing more. I listened now, absorbing each piece to build my own picture of the past.
Danyal had fallen silent, and although he appeared as gruff and distant as I’d always assumed him to be, his hesitation spoke of deep emotion. “How do you know this?”
“I worked alongside her.”
