Chapter 209: An Oath Shared By Many

O Sultan...

The words came to Layla in the dark, a tune coming back to someone who thought they had forgotten it.

O Sultan, don’t apologize for your departure, my love.

She sat in the little stone room with the dead fireplace in front of her and his arm in her lap. Someone had brought a cloth and clean water, and she had washed the hand finger by finger.

She had washed the blood from under the nails, and she had done it very slowly, because when the washing ended, there would be nothing left to do.

O Sultan, you lost your Soul, and mine went with it.

Beside her, Amal had stopped crying hours ago.

Her small body lay curled against her mother’s hip, and her eyes were open, fixed on a spot in the wall that held nothing at all.

O Sultan, after you, my crying hasn’t stopped.

The fire was out.

Nobody had thought to feed it.

Sinbad had gone to a perch near the ceiling and had not moved since. Isha had crept across the floor to him and pressed herself against his side, and the two crimson shapes sat together in the shadows like a single wounded thing.

O Sultan...

Only minutes ago, a small voice had come to Layla, tugging at her sleeve with her cute little beak.

"Where’s Uncle?"

It was Isha, of course, looking up with her round, pink eyes.

She had been a happy little owl all her life, and she did not yet understand what their silence meant.

Layla had crouched down and smoothed the feathers on her head.

"He’ll return soon."

The wife had said it with a smile.

She had heard her own voice say it, steady and warm, and she had gone cold all the way through.

You took a break, didn’t you?

That was how she held it.

He was resting somewhere.

Malik had done a hard thing, and he had gone off to be quiet for a while, the way he always did.

He would walk back through the circle one morning with dust on his boots and some blunt, ridiculous remark, and she would be so angry at him that she would not know what to do with her hands.

Layla looked down at the arm in her lap.

It only lay there, cold.

What else could an arm do?

After that night, Amal became nearly inanimate.

She moved only to eat, and barely at that. The little girl usually sat with a spoon in her hand for an hour before lifting it.

She did not speak. She did not ask questions. She sat by the cold hearth with her knees drawn up and her chin on her arms, and when anyone said her name, her eyes turned toward the sound a moment too late.

She had lost him once already.

She had lost him on a night she wasn’t there to remember, when he welcomed his "break."

Her father had come back to her.

He had held her and burned the darkness out of her chest with a single bright finger. And so she had learned the one thing a child should never have to learn: that the person she loved could be taken and could also be returned.

Now she did not know what to believe.

She could not afford to hope a second time, because there was nothing left in her to survive it.

Layla held her every night.

She hummed the old songs. She braided the ribbons into her hair, the ones from the dance, until the girl’s head sagged against her arm.

It did not help.

Nothing helped.

But a mother’s hands had to do something.

No one in Eden could bear it any better.

Because yes, Layla had told them.

She had made that choice herself, on the third morning, and she had not asked anyone to approve it.

The mother of Devil’s Maw stood on the ledge above the Garden with the Twelve Moons still hanging pale in the crystal overhead, and she looked down at a thousand upturned faces.

They were his children.

Every one of them.

The old bakers and the orphans and the soldiers with their arms in slings. They were his people, and they deserved to know what had happened to him.

"Peace be upon you."

Her voice carried across the hollow stone.

"I have no more hope to offer you. I have only the truth."

Layla told them everything.

She told them about the road and the army and the Angels.

She told them about the arm without dressing it up or making it gentler than it was, and when she said the words:

"Our Sultan is gone."

The sound that rolled up from the Garden was something she would remember until the end of her life, perhaps far after.

Once that passed, only the sound of people sitting down on the ground remained.

Their bodies could no longer hold them.

Their minds were barely holding on.

Truly, the Sultanate had fallen.

***

Not long after, one could see Aladdin training.

He trained until his hands bled through the wrappings and the wooden sword splintered.

He trained in the empty eastern tunnels with a rack of blunted blades and a pile of straw dummies, and when the dummies ran out, he trained against the wall.

His bright voice had gone.

The cheerful boy who shouted promises at the dunes now worked in silence, and each swing of the blade came down a little harder than the last.

’I will kill them all.’

He said it to the wall.

He said it to the straw.

He said it until his arms shook and his knees gave out, then he lay on the stone and stared at the ceiling, thinking of a desert, a pillar of white light, and a stranger who had saved him and had given him an unattainable life.

’Those bastards will not leave this place alive.’

That was his promise, his Oath.

An Oath shared by many.