Zeid left the Citadel of the Sun by the eastern postern, a narrow door cut into the Heredan masonry that opened onto a flight of stairs so steep and so old that the stones had been polished to a high, treacherous gloss by centuries of feet. He descended into the city alone, because he had dismissed the guards his rank entitled him to—a habit his father deplored and his enemies, had they known of it, would have called an invitation to the knife. But Zeid had learned long ago that solitude was its own kind of armour. A prince who walked without retainers was a prince who had nothing to hide. The logic was circular and entirely false, and it had kept him alive for twenty years.
Solymer in the morning was a city of contradictions, and Zeid moved through them with ease. The Street of the Armourers gave way to the broader Avenue of the Pools, where the great cisterns of the old Illuminant kings still fed the public fountains with water that tasted faintly of limestone and antiquity. From there he turned south, into the warren of alleys that spiralled around the Haram al-Nur—the Noble Sanctuary, which the Esberians called the Elyon’s Mount and which both faiths claimed as the navel of the world. The Sanctuary of the One Covenant rose at its centre, its golden dome catching the morning light and throwing it back in a blaze that could be seen, on clear days, from the mountains of Mardun. Zeid did not look at it as he passed. He had learned not to look at beautiful things that reminded him of eternity. Eternity was a concept that made his chest tighten in ways that had nothing to do with the bindings.
Instead, he watched the city. The long plaza before the Sanctuary was filling with the day's petitioners and pilgrims: Sufari mystics in their patched cloaks, swaying in the slow circles of the dhikr, their voices a low drone that vibrated in the stones like the hum of a beehive. A preacher from the northern valleys stood on an overturned crate near the Gate of the Seven Links, haranguing a small crowd about the virtues of endurance and the certainty of divine victory. No one paid him much attention; the people of Solymer had been hearing sermons about divine victory for three generations, and they had learned that the One's timetable rarely aligned with a preacher's rhetoric. A water-seller jangled his brass cups. A knot of Ibrani merchants, their heads covered in the yellow turbans that the Sultan's sumptuary laws required of them, argued in rapid, guttural Jaludi about the price of indigo. The air smelled of cumin and old stone and the faint, acrid tang of the dye-vats that operated without cease in the tanners' quarter to the south.
Everyone knew the young prince. A baker's apprentice, a boy of perhaps fourteen with flour dusting his eyebrows like snow, looked up from the tray of sesame rings he was carrying and called out, "Peace upon you, Prince Zeid! My uncle says the Infidels are eating their own belts. Is it true?"
"It is possible," Zeid said, without breaking stride. "Though I suspect they boil them first. Your uncle's shop is on the Street of the Weavers, is it not? The one with the green door?"
The boy's face lit up. "Yes, my lord! You remember!"
"I remember that your uncle's sesame rings are the best in the quarter. Tell him to save me a dozen for the Feast of the Covenant. I will send someone to collect them."
He did not slow to enjoy the boy's astonishment. The exchange had cost him nothing—he did, in fact, have a remarkable memory for faces and shopfronts, a skill his father had drilled into him as essential for any ruler—but the effect was out of all proportion to the effort. The people of Solymer loved Zeid because he made them feel seen, and he made them feel seen because he had spent his entire life learning to see everyone before they saw him. It was a survival instinct, refined into an art.
A beggar woman sat at the entrance to the shuk, her legs wrapped in filthy bandages, her hand extended with the patience of the truly desperate. She was perhaps sixty, toothless, her face a collapsed ruin of wrinkles. Zeid passed her, and as he passed, two coins left his hand and dropped into hers with a soft chink that only she could hear. The movement was so smooth, so integrated into the rhythm of his walking, that no one else noticed. The beggar woman looked down, then up at the retreating back of the slender prince, and her lips moved in a prayer that Zeid did not hear and would not have acknowledged if he had.
Generosity, in Zeid's experience, was best performed invisibly. Public charity was a form of self-congratulation, and self-congratulation was a luxury that people with secrets could not afford.
He turned into the shuk proper, a covered labyrinth of stalls and alcoves where the light fell in thin, dusty shafts through a roof of woven palm fronds. The merchants were still setting out their wares: bolts of silk from the eastern provinces, copper pots beaten into improbable shapes, baskets of sumac and za'atar and cumin that the coastal traders brought from the east. A spice merchant with a beard like a grey waterfall called out to him in the sing-song chant of the professional haggler: "Prince Zeid! I have saffron from the gardens of Qadariyya! One pinch will make your rice taste like the laughter of houris!"
"My rice already tastes like the laughter of houris," Zeid replied, and the merchant guffawed and slapped his counter, and the moment passed.
He was performing. He was always performing. The slender shoulders relaxed, the easy stride, the half-smile that suggested a young man at peace with the world and with himself—all of it was a fabrication of such meticulous craftsmanship that he sometimes forgot it was a fabrication at all. Underneath the performance was a body at war with itself. The heat of the day, already oppressive, pooled beneath the fabric of his tunic and made the skin beneath the bindings prickle and itch. He could not scratch. He could not adjust. He could not, in public, even acknowledge that there was anything beneath his clothes except the body of a man—lean, hard, unremarkable. The discipline required to maintain this fiction was, he sometimes thought, the only truly masculine thing about him. Everything else was a matter of opinion.
Rafiq was waiting at the entrance to the Street of the Glassblowers, a narrow defile that cut south toward the palace storerooms. The eunuch stood with the perfect stillness of a man who had learned patience in the desert and perfected it in the palace. He was tall for a Nabatir, his skin the colour of burnished bronze, his face a smooth mask that revealed nothing except, perhaps, a mild and perpetual disappointment in the state of the world. A leather flask of cool water dangled from his left hand, and his right hand rested, as it always did, on the hilt of the long knife concealed beneath his robe.
"I was beginning to wonder," Zeid said, accepting the flask and drinking deeply. The water was tinged with rose and a hint of something bitter—the herbal mixture that Hakim Ruhullah prescribed for the monthly bleeding. Zeid had learned to like the taste, or at least to stop noticing it.
"You were not wondering," Rafiq replied, his voice as dry as the desert he had left twenty years ago. "You were stopping to give money to beggars and exchange pleasantries with spice merchants. I counted four pauses between the gate and here. Four pauses in a journey that should take a quarter of an hour."
"You count everything."
"I am your servant. Counting is my profession. The storerooms are being prepared. Umm Amin has been informed of your arrival. She is not pleased."
"Umm Amin is never pleased."
"On this occasion she is less pleased than usual. Something about the wine. She called it an abomination in the sight of the One, and then she called it several other things that I will not repeat."
Zeid allowed himself a thin smile. "The wine is my father's order."
"I informed her of that. She said that the Sultan's piety was a matter of public record, but his taste in diplomatic gestures was becoming distressingly eclectic." Rafiq paused. "She said this while holding a cleaver. I thought it prudent to withdraw."
They walked together through the Street of the Glassblowers, where the workshops glowed with furnace-light and the air smelled of molten sand and sweat. The glassblowers did not look up from their work; they were absorbed in the delicate, dangerous ballet of their craft, the pipes turning, the glass swelling like living things, the sudden decisive snips that separated vessel from stem. Zeid had always found the glassblowers comforting. They worked in an environment of constant, visible peril, and yet they produced objects of extraordinary fragility and beauty. There was a lesson in that, though he had never quite managed to articulate it.
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"Your brother Zayn was seen leaving the Citadel shortly after you entered," Rafiq said, very quietly. "He was walking quickly. His face suggested a man who has bitten into an unripe persimmon."
"Zayn's face always suggests that. He was born with that expression. The midwife probably held him up and he scowled at her."
"Perhaps. But the scowl was more pronounced than usual. He was heading toward the kitchens."
Zeid's stride did not falter, but something in his jaw tightened. "Then we shall have company. Excellent. I was beginning to find the morning tedious."
The kitchens of the Sultan's palace occupied a complex of vaulted chambers beneath the great hall, a subterranean kingdom of fire and steam and the ceaseless percussion of cleavers against wooden blocks. The air was thick with smoke and the rich, complicated aroma of a hundred dishes being prepared simultaneously: lamb braising in pomegranate molasses, rice steaming in great copper pots, bread baking in clay ovens that had not been allowed to cool since the day the Sultan took the city. Servants darted through the chaos like fish through a reef, their arms laden with platters and sacks and the occasional live chicken, which protested its fate with a resigned and throaty clucking.
At the centre of this inferno, planted like a citadel upon the only patch of dry floor in the entire complex, stood Umm Amin. She was a woman of such enormous physical presence that it was easy to forget she was barely five feet tall. Her arms were thick as a wrestler's thighs, her face was the colour of teak and perpetually sheened with sweat, and her voice could carry from one end of the kitchens to the other without discernible effort—a gift she exercised frequently and with considerable creative invention. She had been the chief cook of the Sultan's household for eighteen years, and in that time she had reduced three emirs to tears, expelled a Vestimarian ambassador for asking for butter with his rice, and produced a wedding feast for Prince Zayn's first marriage that was still talked about in the storytellers’ benches of Azran.
When Zeid entered, she was standing over a terrified scullion who had committed some unspecified crime involving the misarrangement of saffron jars, and the scullion's face was the colour of old dough.
"—and if I find the Yamni saffron mixed with the Qadariyyan again, I will personally ensure that your next position is as a eunuch in the household of the Governor of Basran, who is known to be very specific in his requirements. Do you understand me?"
The scullion gibbered something that might have been assent and fled.
Umm Amin turned her gaze upon Zeid, and for a moment even the prince—who had faced his father's war council without flinching—felt the atavistic urge to confess to crimes he had not committed.
"The Prince of the Blood," Umm Amin said flatly. "Come to inspect my kitchens. Shall I have the scullions line up for review? Shall I present the lamb for your approval like a conscript at a military parade?"
"I have come to see the gift," Zeid said, keeping his voice very level. "My father the Sultan has placed the preparations in my charge."
"The gift." Umm Amin's nostrils flared, an event of geological significance. "You mean the gift of wine. The gift of fermented grape juice, which the Prophet—peace be upon his name—specifically forbade his followers to drink or to serve or to touch or to look at in a manner suggestive of thirst. That gift."
"That gift." Zeid met her eyes without wavering. "The Sultan has ordered it. The Sultan's reasons are his own, and they are not subject to my judgment or to yours. The wine will be included, and it will be the best wine in the cellars, and it will be presented in amphorae that have been polished until they shine like the sun on the Kedrayan plain. If this troubles your conscience, you may delegate the handling of the wine to someone whose piety is less easily bruised. I will not ask you to touch a single drop."
Umm Amin stared at him for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, her face cracked into something that was almost a smile—a grudging, crooked thing, like a door opening a sliver on a room full of uncomfortable furniture.
"You have your father's tongue," she said. "Smooth as almond oil. It will get you into trouble one day, but not with me, and not today." She clapped her hands, a sound like a thunderclap, and three assistants materialised at her elbow as though they had been conjured from the smoky air. "The bread is ready for inspection. The lambs are browning as we speak. The dates have been stuffed with almonds and honey, and I will admit—to you, and only to you, and I will deny it if you ever repeat it—that they are very good dates. The wine is in the cool room. I have not looked at it directly, for fear of damnation."
"I will inspect it on your behalf," Zeid said gravely. "When you meet the One, you may tell him that your hands are clean and that the sin, if sin it is, belongs entirely to the House of Tahir al-Din."
"That is a great deal of sin for one family to carry. I hope your shoulders are broad."
"They are broader than they look."
He moved through the kitchens with Umm Amin trailing in his wake like a thundercloud. He tasted the bread—excellent, with just the right proportion of sesame and salt. He examined the roasted lambs, their skin crackling and brown, their flesh falling off the bone at the slightest pressure of a knife. He inspected the pyramids of fruit, the wheels of cheese wrapped in vine leaves, the clay jars of olives swimming in oil and lemon. Everything was perfect, and he said so, and Umm Amin received the compliment with the air of a woman who had never doubted her own perfection and was merely gratified to see it acknowledged.
The wine was stored in a small chamber off the main kitchens, a room cooled by a clever arrangement of water channels that ran beneath the floor. Zeid examined the amphorae, checked their seals, selected six of the best vintages—three red from the coastal vineyards, three white from the terraced hills of the north, all of them laid down in the reign of Seylim's father and never tasted by Unitarian lips. The inclusion was a deliberate provocation, but it was also a gesture of extraordinary courtesy: Seylim was offering his enemy something he denied himself. The Esberian king, if he understood anything at all, would understand that.
Zeid was finishing his inspection when he heard the footsteps behind him—heavy, purposeful, the stride of a man who wanted to be heard coming. He did not need to turn around.
"Little brother," said Zayn. "Playing housekeeper again."
Zeid turned. The crown prince stood in the doorway of the wine chamber, his emerald coat glowing in the dim light, his handsome face arranged in an expression of studied contempt. He had been sweating; the heat of the kitchens had wilted the perfection of his beard, and there was a damp patch on the back of his collar that gave Zeid a small, petty satisfaction.
"I am preparing a gift," Zeid said. "As our father requested. Surely you have duties of your own to attend to? The cavalry, perhaps? The provisioning of the northern garrison?"
"The cavalry are resting. The northern garrison is fully provisioned. There is nothing to do but wait while our father plays diplomat and you arrange pretty baskets for the Infidels." Zayn stepped into the room, and his shadow fell across the rack of amphorae. "You know what they are calling this, in the barracks? The Feast of Fools. They say the Sultan is going to feed the Esberians until they are strong enough to storm the walls."
"Then the barracks are full of fools, which is not a revelation." Zeid lifted one of the amphorae and handed it to a servant, who scuttled away with it. "The Esberians are starving. A single feast will not restore their strength. It will break their morale. There is a difference."
Zayn's mouth tightened. "You have never led men in battle. You do not know what breaks morale and what strengthens it. You have spent your entire life in palaces and libraries, arranging things—gifts, negotiations, the careful management of our father's moods. You are good at that, I admit. You are very good at being our father's little peacock. But peacocks do not win wars."
"No," Zeid agreed. "Peacocks end them. Or they try to. Which is more than can be said for cavalry charges that never happen."
The silence that followed was very thick. Zayn's hand moved, almost of its own accord, to the hilt of the curved dagger at his belt. The blade did not leave its sheath—they were, after all, in their father's palace, and killing a brother was the sort of thing that required paperwork—but the gesture was unmistakable. Zeid watched the hand, and watched the dagger, and did not move.
"Careful," Zayn said softly. "You are clever, and you are our father's favourite, and you are very, very good at arranging things. But you talk of truces. You had better hope peace does not come. War is the only place where a man like you can hide his… softness."
He smiled. It was a smile full of splinters. Then he turned and walked out of the wine chamber, and his footsteps echoed down the corridor, and the servants who had been holding their breath exhaled in a ragged chorus.
Zeid stood very still. He was aware, in a distant, clinical way, that his hands were trembling. He clasped them behind his back, where no one could see. The performance required that he be calm, and so he was calm. The performance required that he be unafraid, and so he was unafraid. The performance required that he not think about the word softness and all the ways that Zayn, who was not clever but was observant, might have meant it.
Rafiq appeared in the doorway. He did not speak. He simply held out a fresh flagon of water, its surface beaded with condensation, and waited. Zeid took it and drank, and the trembling in his hands slowed, and the performance resumed.
"We should go," Zeid said. "I have an appointment."
Rafiq nodded.