After a short deliberation, the princess starts forward. The square in front of the gate is growing crowded with murky forms that seem to swim in the gloomy light. Several people carry torches, flickering beacons that circulate through the darkness. Voices, still hushed and yawning, murmur like a flowing current, into which Caspida dips and flows like a minnow. When she reaches the gate, she sidles up to a man holding the reins of a half dozen camels, waiting his turn to exit the city.
“What’s going on?” she asks the drover.
He shrugs and scratches a sore on his cheek. “They’re looking for someone, I’d guess.”
She nods absently, then suddenly lashes out, cutting through the camels’ ropes with a blade that she seems to conjure out of the air. As the drover cries out indignantly, she grabs a torch out of the hand of a startled spice vendor and waves it in the camels’ faces. The animals bray in alarm and bolt, kicking and tossing their heads. Screams break out as people and stalls are knocked over, and the guards at the gate are distracted just long enough for Caspida to slip past them.
Outside the city, the princess breaks into a run. She barrels down the dusty street, dodging the incoming fishermen bringing up their first catches of the day, as shouting and cursing break out around the gate, where the spooked camels are causing a panic that spreads to the other animals in the area.
The road takes a sharp downward turn, zigzagging across the face of the cliffs to the beaches below, which glitter with the fires of the fishermen and their huts. Farther out, ships rest quietly in the bay, rocking back and forth on the incoming tide. Everything is still and quiet outside the city walls, waiting for dawn.
Caspida leaves the road and crosses the wide crest of land until she comes to where the cliff drops away, her boots and trousers turning damp from dew in the tall grass. She walks along the cliff’s edge until the beach below dwindles and she is standing on the farthest point of land, staring out at the wide, wide sea. To her left, the horizon burns red, where the gods light their hearths in preparation for the day.
It is nearly dawn.
Aladdin is minutes from death.
My mind is filled with the last image I have of Aladdin: being dragged away to his death. Despair closes on me like the jaws of some great beast. Is he dead already? Would I feel it if he were? Even if he’s still alive, even if there are a few minutes remaining to him, his last and only hope is standing on the edge of this cliff, too far away to do him any good, on the verge of destroying the one thing that could save him.
Perhaps I’d have a chance if I were free, but Nardukha is either taking his time or not coming at all. Even if he does fulfill his end of the bargain, it will be too late for Aladdin.
Caspida draws out the lamp, letting her hood fall back. A salty breeze rustles her hair. Far, far below, the black sea froths at the cliffs. I recoil inside the lamp, immobilized with dread.
Please, please just let me out. Let me speak, oh, just let me have one last chance!
If Caspida lets the sea take me, I will sink to its depths and likely rest there until the end of days. I have spent five hundred years sleeping in darkness. Five hundred more, and I will crack. I will split into a thousand pieces, and I will go mad.
I have known mad jinn. They are worse than monsters.
I begin to rage inside my lamp, throwing myself against the brass walls with the force of a stampeding bull. It will not make a difference to her. I could be a feather, I could be a lump of stone—the lamp would feel no lighter, no heavier. I could crash into one wall with all my force, but she would notice nothing. The interior of my prison is a pocket in the fabric of the universe. When I am in it, I am like a man with one foot on sand and one foot in water—neither here nor there, neither in this world nor out of it.
I have one hope.
Rub the lamp, I urge the princess. Rub the lamp, rub the lamp, give me just one chance—
The feel of the sea is stronger now; she must be holding me over the cliff, dangling me over the water. Any moment now and her fingers will release the lamp and I will fall and the waves and darkness and eternity and madness will suck me down, down, down—
All I need is a brush of finger on brass, the caress of palm . . .
Then I feel it: Caspida pulls back and rubs the lamp vigorously, her hands shaking.
I plunge out of the spout and pour downward. Below me is the dark sea and the white froth and the sharp rocks, crashing like a storm, hungry like a beast.
I quickly reverse direction and stream, scarlet smoke, over Caspida’s hands and wrists. As I rise, my airy tendrils coalesce into hard, sleek scales, until I am a white snake with blue eyes coiling up her arm, fast as lightning. I slither over her shoulder and around her neck and, as I intended, she stumbles backward in horror, away from the edge.
I shift to a less threatening form: a soft gray kitten the size of her hand. I perch on her shoulder and mewl in her ear, so pitifully that the Blood King of Danien himself would have melted for a moment.
Caspida is tense as stone. She freezes, but her eyes watch me sidelong, her breath shallow. It seems she has been struck dumb by my escape.
“Zahra.” A tremor weakens her voice.
Shifting again, this time to my usual human form, dressed in ethereal white silk that flutters in the ocean wind, I stand in front of her and meet her gaze.
“I am the Slave of the Lamp,” I whisper. “The mighty Jinni of Ambadya. I hold the power to grant your desires thrice.” She stares, eyes as cold as the northern sky, as the required ancient words fall from my lips. I feel the edge of the cliff beneath my heel; a few clumps of dirt come loose and tumble down. “Princess, why did you let me out? Why did you not drop the lamp?”
“I had to know.” Her eyes harden. “You’re her, aren’t you? The monster who betrayed Roshana. You’re what the ring led to, and the thief had you all along.”
I look aside, at the eastern horizon, where the fires of dawn leap ever higher. Not much time. I envision a sword falling on Aladdin’s neck, and I shudder.
“I was there when Roshana died, it is true.” My voice is hard and clipped. There is no time for secrets, no time to pretend that the past does not have its hands locked around my throat. Aladdin will die if I cannot convince this princess to set aside five hundred years of hatred and fear.
“You killed her.”
“I loved Roshana,” I whisper. Unable to meet her gaze any longer—there is far too much of you in her, Habiba—I turn away and face the sea. “She was dearer to me than a sister. After more than three thousand years of slavery to cruel and selfish masters, I met your ancestress, the great Amulen queen. Not only clever and diplomatic but a fierce warrioress. Very like you, in fact. And unlike those countless masters who came before, she was kind to me. She saw not an enemy, not a monster, but a . . . a girl.”