I saw, too, what Maram saw in Aghraas. There was a sweetness to her in this moment, and a warmth that would have drawn Maram to her like a moth to a flame. At last she inclined her head.

“Get some rest, sayidati,” she said. “The new world requires a great deal of work.”

Coda: Maram

Coda: Maram

ONE WEEK UNTIL CORONATION, DAR AL-ZAHRA’

Maram stood in front of the image of her mother, grandmother, and herself. There was still much to do, and in truth taking this short reprieve at her estate was a selfish luxury. She’d wanted three days to herself, away from the planning and celebrations and reconstruction efforts. She wanted to breathe—Mathis’s assassination had thrust the world into motion and there never seemed a moment for her to stop. But they had come here—Maram, Aghraas, and her grandmother—without wizaraa’ or cabinet members or makhzen. Her small and very immediate family.

For the first time in many years she wished her mother were alive to see her. To see the world she so loved struggling back toward freedom. The daughter she had borne trying to shepherd it out of tyranny and decay. The mother she’d been forced to exile returned to the planet of her birth.

Aghraas’s feet made no sound on the stone and yet Maram knew the moment she’d crossed the courtyard to her. She slid her hand into Maram’s and drew her to her side.

“She would be proud,” Aghraas said.

“Do you speak to the dead now?” Maram asked without looking away from the portrait of her mother.

Aghraas squeezed her hand. “I don’t need to speak to the dead to know the truth.”

Maram turned at last to look at her. She wore a sleeveless brown tunic and loose trousers, and a heavy robe over it. Her braids were down and unadorned and her feet bare. Maram thought very few people ever saw Aghraas thus—she presented to the world as a warrior, implacable and unapproachable. But dressed thus and in the light of brass lanterns and the moon, she was closer to the falconer who’d first startled her on the estate. Before Aghraas could catch her watching, she lowered her gaze and turned Aghraas’s hand over in hers. Aghraas was still as Maram traced the tendons on her wrist and the love line bisecting her palm. She was patient as Maram contemplated the way her hand fit in hers.

She had done many difficult things in the past months. She could do one more.

“I don’t read very much Kushaila literature,” she said, voice hoarse. “But in Vathek literature, in the old stories, when marriage must be deferred people—lovers—plight their troth.”

“Oh?” Aghraas said. She lifted a hand and twined a curl of Maram’s hair around her finger. “Why would marriage be deferred?”