“I had to perform,” he said louder, through gritted teeth.

I felt joy bubble up in my chest. “Perform?” I repeated.

“Poetry.”

“And you are so skilled, clearly,” I said, grinning. “Else-wise you would not have won the necklace back.”

“Amani,” he groaned.

“You will have to declaim. Fair is fair,” I said, leaning my forehead against his.

“I am not half so talented as you,” he said, looking up at me beseechingly.

“And yet I require a performance all the same.”

“My Kushaila is not— I pieced it together from a performance on a holo.”

I combed my fingers through his hair. “Idris … I don’t tease. It is the performer that matters to me. Not the performance.” When he remained silent, my eyebrows raised. “You’ve recited before—what’s the difference now?”

“I did not know what I said then,” he said softly. “I did research this time.”

Something soft twisted in my heart. Idris had researched poetry for me before, but this he must have done during our separation. I thought too of the difficulty of barely speaking what was meant to be his mother tongue and piecing poetry together. Kushaila was not an easy language; it was one that existed in layers and transformations. There was never a single meaning to anything.

I pressed a kiss against his forehead. I would not force it, as he had not forced me. But I had heard him declaim once, and he had a voice suited to it, a regal manner that conveyed beauty in the telling of the poem. And I imagined that his understanding of the poetry this time would only deepen its beauty.

“Morning came,” he started softly in Kushaila, “—the separation—substitute for the love we shared, for the fragrance of our coming together, falling away…”

My mouth fell ajar. His Kushaila held just a thread of Vathekaar, but the words rumbled out of him, beautiful, smooth, and clear.

Our enemies envied us as we drank lovers wine.

They prayed for it to spoil and the world complied.

What was bound together was unbound

And what we held between us withered away.

Our souls were as one, never to be parted,

And now there is no world where they can join once more.

Would that I knew that nothing would satisfy our enemies.

Has their satisfaction brought us fortune?

For long moments I remained motionless, my hands braced on his shoulders, my eyes fixed on his face. He looked down, at my lap, his hair obscuring his eyes. The first and only other time he’d declaimed had been in Al Hoceima; a later part of this same poem that he hadn’t understood but remembered because his father often recited it to his mother. It had been a beautiful recitation, but a blind one.

This—

If he asked me anything, I thought hazily, in the next few moments I would agree to it without thought.

“Amani,” he said, voice strangled. “Say something.”