06. Maram

M’GAADIR ROYAL PALACE, PRESENT DAY

Maram’s hands shook.

The tour wouldn’t start for another week. The gathering was Amani’s idea—to invite members of the local college for a feast and celebrate culture and historical preservation in the place many people thought the world had started. A first of many college visits, or so the makhzen hoped. The professors and their students had come to the palace for a small feast where Maram believed Amani would have done better. They bantered and laughed about poetry and history, and though Maram had read extensively, she was not a poet, and she did not speak Kushaila.

She left the dinner feeling lost and confused and had returned to her quarters listless and worried. A month of such things—traveling from city to city, speaking to Kushaila and Tashfin and Zidane, balancing all the cultures of the world and their conquerors. She knew at the end, as Amani said, that she would be forced to make a choice. The tightrope she walked now would snap and the world—her world—would come tumbling down. She’d sat down at her writing desk for the fourth time in as many days, trying to write a letter—a request, a plea—and failed. And that failure had seemed to highlight what a dangerous road she walked, how quickly it would crumble under her feet at any moment. All of this, she might have withstood if the eldest professor had not requested a private audience. He was old enough to be her grandfather, though his beard was shorn quite close, as was his hair. He wore a thawb in dove gray, its edges hemmed in gold, which seemed to be the mark of a scholar at the college. His hands, she remembered, had been wrinkled and spotted with age.

“We have kept this in trust for many years,” he said, and his voice shook. “But they belong to you.”

A sheaf of holosheets sat on the low table between them, along with an old wooden box.

Maram was not predisposed to seem happy or delighted at any occasion, and now particularly, all she could feel was dread.

“Letters penned by your mother. Do…” And at last he seemed to wonder if he had made a mistake. “Do you not wish to have them?”

“I didn’t know my mother’s correspondence had survived,” she managed, and then remembered how she had even wound up in this situation. Diplomacy. A public show of faith. She forced a smile. “I’m sorry, sayidi. My mother—”

“Lost parents are hard for all children,” he said gently, and she hated him for his sympathy. “By your leave?”