The Sultan's private garden was not a garden in any formal sense. It was a small courtyard tucked behind his personal chambers, accessible only to the household and guarded by two mamluks who had served Seylim since the northern campaigns and who would, Zeid knew, permit no one else to pass. The walls were of undressed stone, their crevices furred with moss, and a single fig tree grew against the southern wall, its branches spreading across the courtyard like a blessing. Jasmine climbed the trellises on either side, filling the air with a sweetness so dense it felt almost drinkable, and at the centre of the space a small fountain shaped like a lotus flower murmured its endless liquid syllables. The water came from a hidden aqueduct that ran beneath the palace, a secret known to perhaps six people in the world. Seylim valued secrets.
But the Sultan was not alone when Zeid arrived. He was never entirely alone in this garden; the garden was where he permitted himself to be seen in the fullness of his life, which meant that his wives and his younger children and his sisters and his nieces were always drifting in and out, bringing trays of tea and complaints about household expenses and the occasional squalling infant. Seylim the Sword of the Covenant, the Victor of the Northern Valleys, the man who had broken the armies of three kingdoms—this same man sat cross-legged on a cushion with his back against the fig tree, a dispatch scroll in one hand, while his youngest daughter braided jasmine flowers into his grey beard.
"Baba, hold still."
"I am holding still, Nur. I have been holding still for the past quarter-hour. I am the most still sultan in the history of the Sultanate."
"You moved your chin."
"That was a blink. Blinking is permitted, even for tyrants."
The girl giggled and resumed her work. She was perhaps eight years old, the daughter of a Cherkassi concubine who had died giving birth to her and whom Seylim had never quite managed to mourn properly—the Cherkassi had been beautiful and kind and possessed of a singing voice that made hardened mamluks weep, but she had never learned to read, and Seylim, who valued literacy above almost all other virtues, had found himself unable to love her as she deserved. He had loved the child instead, with a fierce and guilty affection that manifested in the indulgence of every whim and the purchase of every conceivable variety of sweetmeat. Little Nur was consequently spoiled beyond repair and charming beyond resistance, and the entire court had long since accepted that she would grow up to be either a terror or a saint, with no middle ground available.
"Nur, my heart, my soul, my liver," Seylim said, "your brother Zeid is here. He has come to speak with me about matters of state. Matters of state are very dull, and you will hate them, and I will hate them, and Zeid will pretend not to hate them but secretly he will hate them as much as anyone. Go and find your Aunt Munira and tell her I have decided to double her household allowance, purely out of the goodness of my heart and not at all because she has been sending me pointed letters about the cost of silk."
"Munira doesn't need more silk," said a voice from the far side of the courtyard. "Munira needs a husband. She has been a widow for eleven years. She is becoming eccentric. The other day I caught her trying to teach her parrot to recite the The Names of the One."
The speaker was Sitt Malika, the Sultan's eldest sister, a woman of fifty-three whose face was a handsome arrangement of strong bones and stronger opinions. She had been married twice—once to a prince of the Hamrani line who had died of a fever before consummating the union, once to an emir of the southern provinces who had died of a stroke while shouting at a tax collector—and had long since declared herself finished with the institution. She now occupied a set of rooms in the eastern wing of the palace, where she read philosophy, bullied her servants, and dispensed unsolicited advice to anyone foolish enough to make eye contact with her. Seylim adored her and feared her in roughly equal measure, a condition he described as the natural state of all siblings.
"Aunt Munira's parrot is a very intelligent bird," Zeid said, bending to kiss his aunt's forehead. "I have heard it recite the Verse of the High Seat in three different recensions. That is more than most qadis can manage."
"The parrot is an infidel. It bit the hand of a visiting scholar from Qurtaban and then laughed at him. I am forced to conclude it is a Vestimarian spy." Sitt Malika settled herself on a cushion beside the fountain, arranging her robes with the precise, deliberate movements of a woman who had never in her life been accused of hurrying. "But you did not come to discuss parrots. You came to speak with your father, and you have that look about you—the look that means you have been counting things on the walls and worrying about the state of the world. You are too thin, Zeid. You are always too thin. I have told the kitchens to send you extra portions of lamb, and I am told they are ignored. Do you wish to fade away into nothing? Is that your ambition?"
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"My ambition is to be left in peace by aunties who have decided I am a walking tragedy. But I see today is not the day that ambition is realised."
"Cheek," Sitt Malika said approvingly. "You are the only one of your father's children who has any. Zayn is all bluster and no wit. The others are too young to be interesting. And the girls—well, the girls are clever, but they are girls, and the world will not let them be clever where anyone can see." She gave him a long, appraising look, the kind of look that made Zeid wonder, as he had wondered since childhood, exactly how much she knew. Sitt Malika had been present in the palace when the decision was made. She had been his mother's closest confidante. She had never spoken of it, not once, not in any way that could be pinned down and examined, but her silences were freighted with a knowledge that Zeid had learned to accept and to fear. "Go. Talk to your father. I will take Nur to the kitchens and see if Umm Amin can be persuaded to part with some of the honey cakes she is forever hiding from the rest of the household."
"I am not finished with Baba's beard," Nur protested.
"Your father's beard will survive without your attentions. It has survived two decades of war and intrigue; it can survive a few hours free of jasmine." Sitt Malika extended a hand, and the little girl took it with a sigh of theatrical resignation. "Come, child. Let us leave the men to their important and tedious affairs. When you are older, you will learn that the only power women have is the power of interruption, and that to wield it effectively, one must know when to withdraw."
Nur considered this. "Is that why Aunt Munira never leaves her parrot?"
"That and other reasons. Walk properly, Nur. You are a princess of the House of Tahir al-Din, not a camel."
They departed, and the garden fell quiet, or as quiet as a garden in the heart of Solymer ever fell—the fountain, the distant call of an adhan-caller from the minaret of the Sanctuary, the even more distant clatter of the kitchens, where Umm Amin was presumably defending her honey cakes with the ferocity of a lioness guarding her cubs. Seylim set aside his scroll, and for a moment the two of them sat in silence, father and son, the fig tree shifting its leaves above them like a green thought.
"The physician sent a report," Seylim said at last.
"I assumed he would. He sends reports about everything. If I sneeze, a report is filed. If I have a nightmare, three secretaries are summoned to debate its significance."
"He says your ribs are showing signs of stress. He says the bindings are too tight. He says you will damage your lungs."
Zeid shrugged, a gesture so slight it was barely perceptible. "The hakim is a conscientious man. He worries about everything. He once told me that eating too many figs would imbalance my humours. There were figs in the garden at the time. I ate them anyway."
"You are deflecting."
"I am a prince of the House of Tahir al-Din. Deflection is half of statecraft. The other half is patience. You told me that yourself, when I was twelve and trying to learn the sword."
Seylim looked at him—looked at him with the particular intensity that Zeid had learned, long ago, to recognise as the prelude to something difficult. The Sultan's eyes were dark and tired, the eyes of a man who had been fighting wars since before his youngest son was born and who had not, in all that time, found a way to lay the sword down without someone else picking it up.
"I would not have done this to you," Seylim said quietly, "if I could have found another way. When you were small—you could barely walk, you could barely string a sentence together—you came to me and told me you were not a girl. You were four years old, Zeid. You could not have known what those words meant, but you said them with such certainty that I believed you. It was the easiest decision of my life. I believed you, and I acted on that belief, and every choice that has followed has been a stone added to your burden." He paused. The fountain whispered. "I am sorry for the weight."
The silence stretched. A nightingale began to sing in the jasmine, a liquid ribbon of sound that seemed, impossibly, to be answering the adhan-caller's distant call. Zeid did not look at his father. He looked at the fountain, at the water falling and falling and never reaching the ground.
"You gave me a self," he said, and his voice was fierce and soft at the same time, a blade wrapped in silk. "I can carry the weight of that gift. Do not insult me by apologizing for it."
Seylim reached out and clasped his son's hand. His grip was dry and warm and surprisingly strong—the grip of a man who had held a sword for forty years and was not yet ready to let it go. They sat like that, hand in hand, as the stars came out above the courtyard and the nightingale sang its complicated song and the fountain murmured its endless, meaningless consolation.
"Peace, when it comes," Seylim said, very quietly, "will require something from each of us. Something precious. I may have to ask for more than I have ever asked before."
Zeid heard the foreboding, a cold thread winding through the warmth of the evening. But he did not press. He trusted his father—had trusted him since the moment the man had looked at a four-year-old child and said, against all the laws of the One and nature, Yes. You are my son. Trust was a habit, and habits were hard to break, even when the stone underfoot was beginning to crack.