My eyes widened but I remained silent. My heart ached but my pride stung—and it was my pride that refused to make this easy for him. He had asked me not just to give up the rebellion. It was the implicit belief that I should be made to kneel before the Vath. That life, even in slavery, was better than struggling for something better.

“I was wrong,” he continued.

“About what?”

“Before the wedding I returned to Al Hoceima,” he started, voice soft. “There was a family who’d come from an oasis close to the city. The Vath poisoned the water to drive them out. They brought their daughter’s body—she was five. Maybe six. There was … nothing we could do. We could not demand reparations. We couldn’t purify the water. Nothing.”

The grief twisting his voice was palpable, and I couldn’t stop myself from reaching to twine my fingers in his hair. I had never seen him cry, and he did not do so now, but his eyes glimmered.

“I cannot bear the guilt. And yet we are powerless. Paralyzed by fear.” He paused and swallowed. “Except you. You are not.”

He clasped my hand and rose to his feet. “I regret every day that you must think me a coward. Worse, that I have behaved as one.”

“You are not a coward,” I told him, bringing his face to mine. “Fear is natural.”

“But what I do in the face of fear determines the man I will be,” he replied. “And I will not kneel to it anymore.”

I searched his face as joy rolled through me. “You mean—”

“I will help you in whatever way you need,” he said.

The tentative joy flowered and surged through me.

“Idris—”

“It’s not only that I love you, Amani,” he said. “I love this world—and I cannot be a prince and stand idly by.”

Here then, I thought, was the boy I knew. Kind and brave, stubborn, who understood the weight of the world as it lay on his shoulders. I felt, in that moment, all the love and desire I’d ever experienced with him, churning through me, pressing against my fingertips. The Vath had taken enough from us, I thought as his lips brushed mine. They could not have this, too. He was mine as I was his, and we would stand together no matter what.

“Tell me to go,” he murmured.

“No,” I said, burying my fingers in his hair. His mouth was hard on mine, and his hands tightened around my ribs—I felt as if my breath had been stolen from me.