He smiled ruefully. “You should bring such audaciousness to your shatranj playing,” he said, and I hit him on the arm. A moment later, he sobered. “I understand. And for what it’s worth—I think it’s a risk worth taking. I think it’s time we stopped underestimating our future queen and asked for the courage we expect of her.”

07. Maram

07. Maram

Maram had sent the letter.

After days of agonizing, on the eve of their departure from M’Gaadir she’d sent it and had heard nothing. And now they were heading to Qarmutta—they would leave Ghufran in the morning—and her grandmother was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. To many she was Mathis’s daughter and not Najat’s. Perhaps her grandmother thought herself a woman without a granddaughter.

She’d hoped that her grandmother’s presence would decide her. That it would lay something awful and devastating inside her to rest. There was a storm inside her. Fear of change. Anger at her marriage. Grief because she had to pretend. She felt as if she would fall apart at any moment.

She donned the gown the serving girls laid out for her—a blue silk qaftan, with a high collar and a feather fan design over her chest. Rimming the hem were crossed scimitars. She’d seen Idris’s robes; she knew they were meant to complement him. This is what she would wear at the feast ending her visit in Ghufran. To celebrate her marriage. To a man.

A horrible pain wracked its way through her and she shuddered and turned away from the mirror. She was her mother’s daughter, her heir, the rightful inheritor of this planet. She had to do what was necessary.

But she would have given the world to do what made her happy instead.

A knock on the door. “Your Highness?”

“A moment.” Her voice was steady, for which she was thankful. The only time she’d felt anything like this was after her mother’s death. Gritty eyes and a throat filled with rocks. She hadn’t cried; she hadn’t dared. But the impulse was there, waiting for her to be weak and give in.

The doors to her dressing room opened as she approached them and all the serving girls bent their knees in greeting. The room was dim; all the lanterns had been turned low, and the room was accented in dark woods and dark reds so that it seemed wreathed in dark shadow.

But the woman sitting in a chair by the window was familiar to her, even if they had not met for more than a year now. She had come. After all this, her grandmother had come.

“Leave,” she said to the girls, before her voice cracked.