Chapter 207: Malik’s Head

Time passed, and no news came from the front lines.

Nothing came from outside Eden at all.

The place felt like a different world.

Snow pressed against the crystal roof, the lantern-moss glowed a dull green along the tunnels, and the people moved through it softly, like guests in a house where someone had just died.

Children stopped playing halfway through their games and looked up at the ceiling.

Old men sat at the mouth of the tunnels and listened for footsteps that never came.

It was a silent world, and it held one fleeting hope.

Every person in it wanted an update.

A rumor would have done.

A single scrap of word about what had happened, and about what remained.

Hakim was not heard of.

The Sultan was not heard of.

Surprisingly, Huda was not heard of either.

That was the strange part, once someone finally said it aloud.

She had never come through the circle with the rest of them.

Safira had looked for her for two days, and the crimson hair that was so easy to spot in any crowd was simply missing.

The guess that spread through the tunnels was a quiet one.

She, going against the Sultan’s orders, had stayed behind and slipped away to defend the Holy Palace, alone or with others; nobody could say.

Her disappearance hurt.

But the hurt had to wait, because every mind in Eden was fixed on one man.

Their Sultan.

The pillar.

If he fell, there was nothing left for them to stand on.

So they spoke of Huda in whispers and of him in silence.

By the end of the first week, most of them had begun to think his life was lost.

That was why Sinbad was nowhere to be found.

He had left Eden in secret, slipping out before anyone could stop him.

The Crimson Owl only wanted one thing, and it was not a thing he could ask for permission to do.

He wanted to find any sign of his Elder Brother, alive or otherwise, and he did not intend to come back without it.

After however long it was, Sinbad returned.

Layla and Amal sat in a small stone room deep inside the Garden, facing a fireplace that gave off more light than warmth.

They had been sitting there for hours.

Amal’s head rested against her mother’s arm, and neither of them had said a word since their last meal.

Sinbad landed before them with a crash.

The landing was far from smooth, as he skidded across the floor and struck the hearthstones.

Accompanying the rough landing was a thud.

It came from the thing he had carried in his talons.

An arm.

A strong arm, thick with muscle, the sleeve burned away and the skin scorched dark.

It was bloodied from the shoulder down; thin cracks ran along it, and a faint gold light still leaked out of them, so weak that it flickered.

Sinbad looked at Layla.

He said nothing.

His pink eyes held everything he did not say.

Layla read it in the space of a single breath.

But it wasn’t only her.

Amal did as well.

She began to wail immediately.

Her face pressed further into her mother’s side as though she could hide inside the cloth.

Layla did not comfort her; she could not.

She pulled herself up from the floor slowly, and dragged herself across the stones toward the arm.

Once upon it, she knelt and took the hand in both of hers.

It was cold.

It was so cold.

She knew the shape of those fingers, the long knuckles and the calluses of a swordsman, the little scar across the base of the thumb that he had never told her about.

She had held that hand through years of silence, and it had held hers back.

Especially that once, at the edge of a banquet hall.

Her body began to tremble.

Tears fell onto his knuckles, one after another.

Nobody had said a word until the end.

***

A woman with crimson hair walked beneath two killing Suns.

She wore a pink fighting dress, cut for speed and stitched at the seams with thin plates of silver.

It had been beautiful once.

Now it hung in strips from her shoulders, gray with dust and stained brown at the hem.

Both her arms were chained.

Her legs were chained too, with iron links that ran between her ankles and clinked with every step.

The cuffs had been made to drain Rukh, and they had done it very well.

She could feel nothing inside her.

No wind in the air for her to call.

She was an ordinary woman, sunburned and bleeding from the wrists.

The woman was a hostage.

Her name was Huda.

She was the Sultan’s little sister.

They had made her walk for days across the cracked plains of Devil’s Maw, without a drop of Rukh in her body and without any shoes even.

The sand was hot enough to blister.

Her feet had burned, split open, and burned again, until each step left a faint red print on the ground behind her.

The Suns hung overhead, and the heat pressed on her skull like a hand.

Yet, even then, she did not stumble.

Her pride didn’t allow it.

Ahead of her rolled a caravan.

It was one of the factions that still remained in Devil’s Maw, a rag-tag train of wagons and hard-faced men on horseback who had seen the Sultanate fall and rushed to pick over the bones.

They were very pleased with themselves.

Leading the caravan were men with spears.

Spears held high, shafts lifted over their shoulders.

On the point of each spear sat a head.

They were soldiers, mostly.

But some were neighbors.

Lords.

People who had once laughed in the Sultan’s Hall.

And at the front of the column, leading the whole parade, rode a man with a banner.

Above him, on the longest spear of all, sat a head she knew so very well.

It held a face she dreamed of.

A face that never left her mind.

They paraded it through the dead streets of the villages.

They held it up for the crows and tilted it towards the Suns so that the light caught in the hair and the blood, making the men cheer and the horses stamp, for what a treasure they had.

It was Malik’s head.