The Sultan dismissed his daughter with a wave of a gold-ringed hand. She blushed deeply red, the shade of harem silk, and walked out of the throne room with a stiff spine, holding her dark head high.
“That girl is a little autocrat. It is a pity she was not a son. She would have made a fine Sultan,” the monarch mused, turning to his supper.
Of course Dinarzad was bound to obey her father’s word. But as she wove through the halls like a swift loom, she rubbed her shoulders where one of her mothers had beaten her for allowing such treason in their house. She was cruel because it was necessary—the Sultan did not take the time to know that the indiscretions of the children were visited on her by the harem. The bruises flared blue and yellow on her skin like wings, and her eyes watered painfully. In her mind, she was already devising a new punishment as she ascended the thin spiral of the tower, and it grew in her like a slim stalk of wheat.
Turning the heavy key in the lock, she entered the high room where she had left her brother. She was entirely prepared to find him gone, the room empty as a dried well. She steeled her stomach for it, hardening her flesh against blows to come.
Instead, the boy lay sleeping in the windowsill, his tousled head resting against the wind-washed stone, eyes darting beneath his lids as though he was deep in dreams as thick as mulled wine. The sun shone through his hair, turning it to embers in an iron grate, to black-rimmed flames. Dinarzad allowed herself a soft smile, pleased at his reluctant obedience. Nevertheless, when she shook him awake, her voice was rough as crocodile hide.
“Get up, you little urchin. You have slept far too long. Today you will work in the kitchen. If you like to roll around in the Garden like a dog, you might as well go beg for scraps. And the Royal Guard is dining at the Palace tonight, so there is plenty for you to do. By the end of this day you will be so exhausted you will not even dream of your little demon friend.”
The boy woke quickly—he knew better than to show her grogginess or the sand of his night eyes. He followed her in a sullen humor down from the tower and into the bowels of the Palace. The kitchens were as noisy as a stampede of oxen, oven fires leaping and steam bubbling from copper pots as though some magic brew steeped within them. Cooks and maids moved with great gestures, bellowing at each other with equal fury, their smocks stained with all manner of colored sauces, syrups, and spices. Dinarzad gave him a harsh shove into the room.
“Cook will look after you. You obey her, now. I don’t fancy returning to this inferno today. One prefers to see food only when it is pleasantly on the plate. Have a lovely day, little brother.” With this she disappeared in a flurry of white skirts and dark, flowing hair.
Cook towered over him, a great, hulking cow with cheeks fat as a hound’s jowls and a belly that tumbled over the waistline of her apron in a massive heave of flesh. Her eyes were a pale, fishy shade of blue, and her right one had gone a bit rheumy, so that when she looked him over her gaze seemed to slither on his skin like a snail. She appraised him like a general sizing up a soldier.
“Eh,” she grunted, her belly shaking with the sound, “soft thing like you isn’t fit to cook a scrap of toast, so you’d better get to washing the flagstones. Stay out of the way of my feet and no stealing, hear?” She gestured at a wooden bucket of gray water that stank of lye and hurtled towards a clutch of chefs faster than he would have thought possible, like a hippopotamus after hapless river boats, squalling at one of the helpless maids.
The boy scrubbed until his fingers were raw and wrinkled as paper pulp, but he was secretly filled with delight, hiding it within him like thieves’ gold. He would be able to bring the girl such a feast tonight, anything she could possibly want from the vast kitchens. They were preparing a huge banquet for the Royal Guard, who were so rarely barracked within the Palace gates that their entrance caused lavish holidays to spring up like dandelions in the courtly soil. A gargantuan boar had been killed earlier in the day, and it sat on the central table like a mighty lord, glistening with fat. All he had to do was wait until the maids left, scurrying like muskrats, to serve at the banquet hall, and the cooks went to report the menu to the stewards. Then the great boar would be unguarded.
And indeed, as night drew on the sky like a bodice, lacing it with the last beams of sunlight, the kitchen cleared of all its citizens and he was alone. Cook, by this time, had probably forgotten his existence entirely.
Slicing off a few fat pink hunks of boar flesh with his little dagger, he rearranged the slick green garnish to cover the missing meat, and cast about for further treasures. He smuggled sugared loaves and a rind of cheese into his vest, packing them in with smoked fish and a few of the little dormice soaked in pepper and honey that the Sultan favored. As he made his escape, the boy looked back over the sorry prison his sister had devised, and with a grin, snatched the shining red apple from the boar’s mouth. He crept out the door on his quietest feet, stealing past the glittering silver Gate and into the Garden, clutching his prizes to his chest, where his heart beat like a hammer striking an ivory bell.
In the Garden
BUT THE BOY DID NOT FIND HER THAT NIGHT.
He sat on the lip of one of the great marble statues, his feet resting on the stone tail of a dancing mermaid, and ate his cold pork and apple alone. He could not understand why she would break her promise, why she would not appear as she always had, as if by magic, to deliver her stories to him all dressed in silk and silver. As he chewed the honeyed meat in the dark, he looked into the spray of stars and pictured her face to himself, the private face that was revealed when she was deep in her tales, her smoky eyes shut and moving bene
ath black eyelids. A terrible fear was born in him suddenly—perhaps she did not like him at all, and only wanted to tell her tales so that her curse would be broken, so that whatever strange miracle dwelt in her stained eyes would release her from the Garden. Perhaps he was nothing to her but an ear. He trembled with it, the crawling cold that chewed his bones. She had abandoned him, and what was left was the roiling weight of sorrow and silence, her absence like a statue in the glowering moon.
That night of all nights, he accomplished his deception easily, and drew the bedsheets over his knees as the sky was beginning to flush an icy gold.
On the last night of the full moon, he wandered out into the western wing of the Garden, where a small lake lay glittering in the cool light, filled with gilt-eyed fish. He had not brought food, having not much hope of finding her. He had returned to eating meals with his brothers after the term of his punishment was complete, and food was difficult to smuggle. Dinarzad redoubled this by eating solemnly at his side each night, ignoring the stares of the other sons. He hated her, her thin fingers peeling back the skin from roasted quail, holding her knife at the angle they had all been taught as though it were an effortless habit, not the result of years of slapped knuckles.
He crouched at the grassy edge of the clear water, scowling into the sparse mist and picking at pebbles underfoot. The boy’s mouth had taken on a permanent sicklelike frown, a little moon whose horns were drawn ever downwards to the black earth. He began to skip stones on the placid water, listening to their satisfying plink-plink-plunks, when suddenly a gleam of star and shadow on skin caught his eye, and his heart leapt into his throat like a starving fish after a dragonfly.
The girl stood waist-deep in the water, her long charcoal hair clasped into a wet nest at her neck with willow whips, the lake beading on her stomach, her small breasts, her arms, outstretched as though she were trying to catch the moon in her arms like a child. Her eyes were shut; she did not yet see him. And so he watched her unabashedly, unable to move or to call to her, rooted to the mossy soil by the vision of her rising out of the night, pale as the gasp of a star’s breath—and the closed eyes, floating black and secretive in her ghostly face. His own breath would not come at all.
The girl opened her eyes slowly—though truly it was as though she closed them, hiding the dark stains of her eyelids with the cold light of her eyes. She looked directly at him, and he flushed deeply, expecting her to be angry, to retreat from him in shame. Instead, she simply stared at him calmly, the moon and the water still pooling on her body, and made no move to cover herself. They stood this way without motion for some time, as the wide-leaved trees whispered to each other overhead. Finally, the girl waded to shore and pulled her ragged shift over her head. He rushed to the mound of thick grass where she sat and, without meaning to, reached out and gripped her by the shoulders.
“Where have you been?” he choked. “I have looked for you for seven nights!”
The girl cocked her head to one side, like a sparrow considering a hand full of seeds.
“You… you said that you would tell me another story… more strange and wonderful than the last… I thought…” He stared down at his hands helplessly. “I thought you wanted to tell me your stories. I thought you would tell me all of them,” he finished lamely.
“I will tell you another, if you like,” she answered, her voice still and cool.
“What’s wrong? Why have you hidden from me?” the boy cried.
The girl brushed a fluttering strand of hair behind her ear. “I have not hidden, or at least, I have not meant to hide. It is only that you have not found me. The Garden is wide, and I am sorry. Folk have come and gone since last you heard my voice, and I could not be seen.” She looked at him in that strange, birdlike way again, a light sparking deep in her eyes. “Would you like to hear another tale from the folds of my eyes, a tale of ships and saints, of maidens and beasts and a dreaming city?”
The boy bit his lip. He felt that the polite thing to do was to ask how she had fared, if it had been very hard to escape the notice of one or another noble lord, if she had eaten well without him—but he had not heard the promises of her fantastic creatures in so long that they sounded in his belly like the tolling of church bells, like anchors dropping in a soundless sea, and he felt such a desire for them that he could not be polite.
“Tell me the tale, please!” he whispered.