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So you’ve returned for another story about the boy and the girl. The princess and the refugee, the zawenji and the ulraji—yes, I know the next part of their tale. We will return to their story in due time, I promise.
But before that, allow me to take you back to a night that had nothing to do with either, but everything to do with a different young boy hearing his adopted mother scream for the very first time . . .
The first contraction had hit the sultana of Ziran in the middle of a council meeting, and the viziers had been so deep in their debate about allocating grain for the upcoming stormy season that no one noticed the queen’s distress until she was bent over the table, a blooming patch of water turning the bright scarlet of her gown bloodred.
By the second contraction, the palace midwives had the sultana secured in the birthing room. By the third, all seven of the High Priestesses had arrived at Ksar Alahari, sacred herbs and holy oils in hand to anoint the newest member of the royal family with blessings from the gods.
The fourth contraction was when the screaming began.
“Is having a baby supposed to sound like that?” whispered the queen’s elder daughter as another of her mother’s cries filled the air. As there was little an eight-year-old could do to aid the birthing process, Princess Hanane had been relegated to guarding the door, a task she took very seriously, and one that the soldiers actually protecting the birthing room allowed her to pretend she was doing. But now, several hours into the endeavor, her giddy excitement at the prospect of a new sibling had been overtaken by the harsh reality of what bringing a new life into the world actually entailed.
The princess shuddered as a series of low moans and frantic whispers slipped through the door. “She sounds like she’s dying.”
“That’s not what a dying person sounds like,” replied the princess’s companion. Farid, the queen’s ward who followed Hanane around like a second shadow, was prone to such ominous statements. He’d been this way since he’d arrived at Ksar Alahari almost a year prior, the sole survivor of the bandit attack that had massacred his diplomat parents, and even now he spoke in a soft voice almost devoid of emotion, eyes deeper and murkier than any ten-year-old’s should be.
Farid’s gaze shifted from Hanane’s worried face to the sky beyond the balcony. Thick black clouds laced with white streaks of lightning roiled across the horizon, unusual for this time of year. “I would know.”
Another scream rang through the air, and Hanane’s eyes grew wide. After several agonizing minutes, the door finally opened. But instead of her silver-haired mother and a squealing infant, there was only the king.
“Baba!” Hanane scurried over to her father with Farid, as always, close behind. “Is it done? Is my baby brother here?”
“Not yet,” sighed the king as he rubbed the bags lining his eyes. “And we don’t know the baby’s gender yet. You could have a sister.”
“It’s going to be a boy. I just know it,” she declared, and at the sight of his daughter’s childish bravado, the king laughed for the first time in days. However, the laugh died as the sultana’s screaming began anew. Hanane’s lip quivered, her eyes flitting between her father and the birthing-room door.
“T-They’re both going to be fine, right?” she asked. The spirits of all the babies who had not survived seemed to hang in the air between them. If this one did not live, that would make four siblings who had never made it past the womb. Only Farid knew the secret names Hanane had given each one, for the subject was too painful for her parents to acknowledge.
“Of course they are,” said the king, and he meant it, for what was left of his heart refused to consider otherwise. A bright flash of lightning rent the sky in two, followed by low peals of thunder that echoed like drumbeats. No doubt the acolytes at the Wind Temple were in an absolute panic trying to decipher what message Santrofie, He Born of Wind and patron deity of all Wind-Aligned, was trying to send.
The king glanced at the storm, muttered something too low for either child to hear, and lowered himself to the ground, ignoring the startled looks from the guards that he would do something so beneath his station. He opened his arms, and though they were nearing the age where such comfort seemed juvenile, both Farid and Hanane gratefully folded themselves within his embrace. “Your mother has faced far worse odds and survived. She is going to survive this too, and when she does, you’ll have a new baby to play with.”
Farid chimed in, “And even if you can’t play with the baby, you’ll always have me.”
Hanane smiled at the boy. “That’s true. I’ll always have you.”
A flutter of unease ran through the king at the way his ward brightened at those words, but he pushed it away. Farid had been more ghost than boy when he’d first come to Ksar Alahari, so withdrawn that one could be in the same room with him for hours and never know. The fact that Hanane had been able to pull him out of his shell was something to celebrate. And besides, wasn’t that what every parent wanted, to have their children be as close as these two were?
The king began to speak again, but he was cut off by the midwives frantically calling his name. He jumped to his feet and sprinted into the room, and all the princess saw before the door slammed shut was a flurry of movement, her mother’s sweat-slicked face, and several piles of bloodstained rags. Hanane began to shake, and when Farid reached out to comfort her, she shoved him away and clasped her hands together in prayer. She was Sun-Aligned, and so she prayed to her patron deity, Gyata the Lion, that her new sibling—ideally a brother—would be happy and whole and would always want to play with her, even when she did not feel like sharing her toys or sweets.
The priestesses had taught her that the gods rewarded those who gave offerings alongside their demands, and so she declared, “I’ll do anything you want, anything at all, if you just let them live.”
The last word was barely out of her mouth when the loudest peal of thunder yet tore through the alabaster walls around them. The princess opened her eyes, and that was when she saw it: for a single instant, less time than it took a butterfly to take flight or a dead man to breathe his last, every drop of rain hung suspended in the air like a thousand tiny pearls. Hanane yelled for Farid to look, but as soon as he did, the rain was splattering to the ground once more.
Years later, this evening would become just another hazy blur among the stream of the young princess’s childhood memories. But in that moment, she knew with a faith as strong as a mountain and as vast as the sea that she had spoken to the gods and they had spoken back—for not even a minute later, the unmistakable cry of an infant filled the palace, and all thoughts of promises and the deities who collected them left her mind as Hanane ran to go meet her sister.
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Malik
In the center of a shining palace of alabaster and silver, on a crested hill deep in the heart of a golden desert, there was a boy. And in the center of this boy, there was a tree.
Of all the trees in the grove, this one was the most magnificent, its leaves reaching the highest and the lemons hanging from its branches the brightest yellow. Neither the tree nor the grove it stood in were real, but that was of little concern to Malik. For years he’d been convinced that his mind was a broken, barren place filled with nothing but the scars of his childhood; if it was capable of creating something this warm and full of life, then perhaps there was a chance he was not as broken as he’d been led to believe he was.
Yes, the lemon grove was perfect. Or it might have been, were it not for the snake.
“Foolish, stupid boy,” the Faceless King roared in a voice formed of jagged skies and crashing waves, dark magic and darker obsession, as he thrashed against the binding that held him tight to the tree at the center of the grove. “You cannot keep me here forever.”
Malik shuddered as the depths of the obosom’s wrath radiated through the connection they shared. Long ago, the Faceless King had been worshipped throughout the Odjubai Desert as Ɔwɔ, the embodiment of the once-mighty Gonyama River. At the height of his power, he’d possessed the strength to drown empires and remake kingdoms.
Now he was here, stuck inside the mind of a simple human boy who barely understood what magic was, let alone how to use it. The indignity of the whole situation seemed to upset the spirit more than anything else.
The Faceless King twisted against his bindings once more, and the part of Malik’s mind that the spirit occupied pushed sharply against his consciousness. It felt like being ripped in two from the inside out, and Malik fell to his hands and knees as he bit back a scream. This wasn’t real. As soon as he woke, this would be over.
But Malik’s hold over his mind was at its weakest when he was asleep, which was why the Faceless King had chosen now to make another escape attempt. As another wave of pain racked through his core, Malik reminded himself of all he had to lose if the obosom got free. The spirit also known as Idir, beloved of the ancient queen Bahia Alahari, held a vendetta against Ziran that only destruction could quell. If even a sliver of the obosom’s immense power slipped through the binding, he would flatten the entire city and every person Malik loved without hesitation.
All this wrath in the name of a wrong that had occurred a thousand years before any of them had been born. A wrong that had only been committed in response to the tyranny of Malik’s own ancestors, the Ulraji Tel-Ra.
Malik did not regret trapping the spirit inside his mind—but Great Mother help him, it hurt.
“You dare compare yourself to the ulraji of old?” asked Idir, and even though Malik had been sharing his mind with the spirit for nearly five days now, he still flinched at the sensation of Idir reading his thoughts. “Your powers are a mere fraction of theirs, and even they at their strongest would not have been able to hold me captive for long.”
Another wave of the Faceless King’s power pressed against Malik’s skull, sharp as a scalding iron. Surely this should have been enough to wake him, but Malik remained locked in the struggle with no way to call for help. Would anyone looking at him see his body convulse with the strain of what was happening inside, or only his sleeping face? If Idir killed him and took over his body, would anyone even know?
“Trapping me in here was a clever trick, but you misjudged one thing,” hissed Idir. “Just as all that I am has been revealed to you, so too has all that you are been laid bare before me—I know each twist and turn of your thoughts, all the dark corners of your mind that even you cannot face.” Though Malik had bound the Faceless King in his emaciated human form, the obosom had retained the serpentine eyes of his true body, and it was those eyes that leered down at Malik with a hatred thousands of years deep. “And that is why I know you are not strong enough to keep me here forever.”
Familiar tendrils of panic wormed their way into Malik’s gut. What if Idir was right? After all, what was Malik’s paltry understanding of ulraji magic against a spirit who had been revered as a god? Even with his storyweaving, what was he but painfully and ridiculously human? He couldn’t do this, he never should have done this, he was only delaying the inevitable, he was—
No. No.
Malik knew that if he followed that spiraling thread of anxiety, it would lead to him begging for Idir’s mercy like a coward. That was what the old him would have done.
However, the old him had died the moment he had plunged a dagger into his own heart on the last day of Solstasia. And the new Malik might not have been a god, but he was far from powerless.
“I don’t have to be strong,” said Malik, and even though every inch of his body screamed in protest, he forced himself to his feet. The words of his grandmother’s old grounding mantra filled him, pushing back against the onslaught of pain and uncertainty.
Breathe. Stay present. Stay here.
Malik lifted his head to meet the Faceless King’s challenging gaze with one of his own.
“I just have to be stronger than you.”
If the spirit had been angry before, it was nothing compared to the surge of pure rage that Malik’s words brought forth. The entire lemon grove reverberated with the Faceless King’s indignation, and Malik tried to grab one of the trees as an anchor, only for his hands to blister from the heat of it. The ground turned to ash beneath his feet, and then Malik was falling deep into a recess of his mind from which there would be no escape. He pushed with all he had against the ever-growing void beneath him, but he still could not force his body to wake.
And then through the swirling chaos came a golden light—a single thread of nkra, the basic element from which all magic flowed. Though there was no way to know where it led, Malik grabbed on to it, for it was the only thing to grab on to. The warm scent of the earth after a spring rain flooded his senses.
Karina’s scent.
The thought had barely crossed Malik’s mind before he was falling again, away from the lemon grove and even the Faceless King, into a corner of his mind tucked away from all the rest.
The sensation stopped. Slowly Malik opened his eyes to a world filled with . . . green.
His surroundings were hazy in the way that places in dreams often were, but what stood out to Malik was the lush vegetation all around him, unlike anything that could be found in the Odjubai. The throaty calls of turacos and other birds, mixed with children’s laughter, rang through the air, and the few squat mudbrick dwellings Malik could see had been painted in swirling geometric patterns from no culture that he recognized. He had never been here before, and yet somehow, deep in the core of everything Malik understood about himself, he knew this place.
The source of the laughter quickly made itself apparent as two girls ran past him, their faces blurred like paint running together on an artist’s palette.
“Faster, Khenu! The elders will make us chop firewood if we’re late again!” yelled the taller of the two girls, who ran by Malik with no indication that she’d seen him.
“I’m coming!” cried the smaller one—Khenu, apparently—and the quick, bird-like nature of her movements reminded Malik of his younger sister, Nadia. Khenu made it halfway across the path before she tripped over a tree root and went sprawling into the mud. She immediately burst into tears, and the bigger girl doubled back to help her with an exaggerated sigh.
“What kind of ulraji cries over a little fall?” teased the taller girl as she pulled her friend onto her back. Malik’s eyes widened—this tiny child was an ulraji? This must be a memory of the past then, for only in ancient times could such information be shared so freely. But whose memory was this—the Faceless King’s?
Malik took a step toward them, then froze as the scent of rain filled his nose once more. A buzz of energy that had nothing to do with his magic coursed through his veins as he glanced over his shoulder to see Karina standing beside him.
Her eyes remained on the two girls walking into the jungle, allowing Malik a moment to simply take her in. She seemed unharmed after her frantic, storm-fueled escape from Ziran several days before, her amber eyes bright and alert, her cloud of silver coils hidden beneath a green scarf wrapped around her head. Only when the girls were gone did the princess look his way, and though this was nothing more than a dream, the buzzing energy in Malik thrummed higher as her eyes swept over his face, lingering a moment too long on his lips and forcing him to recall the last time they had been alone together.
Five days since they had stood on the roof of the Sun Temple and shared the kiss that had undone him completely.
Five days since he had attempted to kill her to save his younger sister.
Five days since Karina had vanished from Ziran in a rush of wind and lightning as her older sister rose from the grave.
Such a short span of time, and yet the world as they knew it had rewritten itself completely. There was so much Malik wanted to say, explanations and apologies all crowding for space on his tongue. He took a step toward the princess, and then another when she did not move away.
“Karina,” he began, and that was all he managed to say before her fist collided with his jaw.
“Malik? Malik!”
Malik’s eyes snapped open in an explosion of pain as someone touched his shoulder. All at once, the instincts he’d honed over years of surviving his father kicked in. The ink-black wraith tattoo that normally swirled around his bicep scurried down to his palm, where it morphed into a dagger with a black blade and golden hilt. Malik grabbed the assailant by the front of their shirt with his free hand and pressed the knife against their throat with the other. The person balked, unable to pull away.
“Malik, it’s just me! Put the spirit blade down!” they cried, and just as Malik realized it was his older sister, Leila, squirming in his grasp, he became aware of a second weapon pressed against the soft skin of his neck.
“Release her,” said the Sentinel, and the only thing louder than the rapid beating of Malik’s heart was the high-pitched keening in his ears from the warrior’s proximity. He immediately let Leila go, and the Mark sank back into his skin as he placed his head in his hands, struggling to breathe. Where was he? What was going on?
Breathe. Stay present. Stay here.
He wasn’t in the center of his mind fighting Idir for control over his own body or in a dream about Karina and the past. He wasn’t a child cowering in a corner and praying to the gods that his father wouldn’t find him, not this time.
He was in the infirmary of Ksar Alahari, where he’d been since the end of Solstasia. His sisters were safe. He was safe, though that might change if the Sentinel did not withdraw his weapon.
Leila took one look at Malik quivering in fright beneath the spear and snapped at the warrior, “Get that thing out of his face, you’re scaring him!”
Back in their hometown of Oboure, an Eshran speaking in such a way to a member of the Zirani elite forces would have warranted a beating at best, death at worst. But it was a testament to how drastically their status had risen that the Sentinel simply looked Malik over, nodded once, and then withdrew to his post in the corner of the room. Leila clicked her tongue and muttered under her breath, though Malik did not miss the way she kept her hands placed defensively between them.
“I am so, so sorry,” he choked out.
“Don’t apologize, I’m the one who startled you awake.” She uncurled her hands and wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s all right. I’m not hurt.”
But she could have been. That was why the Sentinel was here—not to protect Malik from the world, but to protect the world from Malik. He couldn’t even blame Farid and the council for wanting to be prepared in case Idir escaped, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed being under surveillance every moment of the day.
“Was it the Faceless King? Is he giving you trouble?” asked Leila. The Sentinel’s fingers, tightening around the shaft of his spear, was the only sign that he was listening at all. Malik noted the red-and-silver sash slung over the man’s chest; was that some sort of status symbol?
“A little bit—but I have him under control now!” Malik added at his older sister’s look of alarm. Just to be sure, he reached deep inside himself and pushed against the binding that separated him from Idir. It held, the pain from his dream gone.
Unlike Malik, Leila was not an ulraji, so she did not fully understand what had occurred when Malik let the spirit into his body. In the days since the end of Solstasia, he had often caught her looking at him as if she expected a demon to burst from beneath his skin and kill them all.
Which, given what had just occurred, was not as unlikely as Malik wished it was.
But they would not have to worry about the spirit breaking free for long, as today was the day Malik was to begin his formal ulraji training with Farid. Under the former palace steward’s tutelage, he would learn to control his powers and to fortify his mind so well that the Faceless King would never escape.
Malik’s eyes fell to Nadia, who slumbered peacefully on the bed beside him, completely unperturbed by what had just happened. Good—this was the first night since returning from her time as a hostage in the spirit world that she had been able to sleep at all. She let out a gentle breath as he tucked the blanket under her chin.
Everything Malik had done, everything he had sacrificed, had been for that breath. Any pain he had to live through was worth seeing it again.
“He won’t be able to hurt us anymore,” Malik vowed, and a tremor ran through his mind.
Believe that as you will, little ulraji, Idir hissed. Even the best-built wall has its weak points.
An overwhelming urge to dig his nails into the flesh of his arms took hold of Malik, an old habit born from years of having no outlet for the magic burning inside him.
But instead he snapped at the woven rubber bracelet around his left wrist, the one his friend Tunde had given him during Solstasia.
This was still his mind. He was still the strongest person here.
The discomfort must have shown on his face, for Leila gathered one of his hands with one of her own and used the other to touch the bruise purpling at the edge of his jaw. “Where did this come from?”
That was an excellent question. Malik wasn’t sure how to explain the strange dream he’d had of Karina without mentioning how close the Faceless King had come to escaping right before it.
He had no right to dream about Karina anyway, not when the last time they’d been alone together he’d shoved a dagger into her heart. And though he didn’t regret what he’d done, for Nadia’s life had been on the line—or so he’d thought—the guilt was clearly affecting him more than he’d realized if he was conjuring up dreams of the missing princess attacking him.
And Karina’s presence had felt so real too, as if he could have just reached out and touched her. Was there a chance that . . . no, what was he even thinking? His magic could create illusions, but no illusion could make a dream real.
“I bit my lip during the nightmare,” he said. That must be it. He’d accidentally hurt himself in his sleep, and his fatigued mind had interpreted it as Karina punching him. That was all this was, nothing more.
The more Malik tried to unravel the meaning of Karina, the little ulraji girl, and the strangely familiar location he’d seen, the more tangled his thoughts became. Though he knew he should try to rest as much as he could before Farid came to fetch him, he simply sat there with Leila’s hand wrapped around his own long after she had fallen asleep once more. The Faceless King’s presence was easier to bear when he was awake, and Malik let himself focus on his sisters’ breathing, the sharp scent of the herbs the healers had strung up through the infirmary to ward off the grim folk, the tickling sensation of the Mark scurrying across his back, anything except what his first day of ulraji training might entail.
It was in this exact position that Farid found Malik when he entered the infirmary just after sunrise.
“I didn’t expect you to be awake so soon,” said Malik’s new mentor. The man was dressed as impeccably as ever, his dark hair combed neatly to the side and every thread in place on his blue kaftan, showing no fatigue despite the turmoil he and all of Ziran had been through since Solstasia’s end. Farid didn’t even glance at the Sentinel as he came to the bed, and Malik wondered what it must be like to not grow up in constant fear of the warriors. “Did you sleep well?”
“Yes,” he lied. Leila bolted upright, her expression going from the soft confusion of sleep to hardened alertness the moment she laid eyes on Farid.
“Is today the day you finally stop treating him like a prisoner?” she demanded, and heat rushed to Malik’s face. He loved his sister with all he had, but he wished she wouldn’t be so sharp with someone who had been so generous to them.
“The man brought a girl back from the dead and staged a coup in the same day,” she’d hissed when Malik had first told her of his plan to become Farid’s apprentice. “We don’t know what he’s capable of.”
But they did not know what Malik was capable of either, which was exactly why he needed Farid’s training.
The older ulraji returned Leila’s frosty glare with a gentle smile. “Indeed it is. In fact, I’ve arranged new lodgings for all three of you, and I’m certain you’ll find them preferable to the infirmary. If all goes well today, we can have you settled by this evening.”
Malik could hardly believe it. Permanent rooms for him and his sisters here in the palace. It was more than they could have ever imagined—but wait.
“What do you mean by ‘if all goes well today’?” Malik forced himself to pull away from his sisters, wanting to appear strong and confident before his new teacher.
“I’ll explain all that in due time. Come with me—just you, for now. Your sisters can join later,” said Farid, and though Leila’s frown deepened, Malik quickly moved to do as he was told. The lack of sleep caught up with him, but he fought the wave of nerves and fatigue down as he hurried to match his teacher’s quick strides. “But first things first. You need to get changed, for you’ve been summoned by the princess.”
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