Her eyes widened as she took in the verdant center of the palace. It seemed to go on forever—nearly the full length of the palace. They were on a rise—several steps would take them down to the floor level—and from the rise she could see the tops of orange trees, the gleam of water winding its way through. A sharp cry echoed through the air.

“You’ve introduced peacocks?” she said, trying to hide the delight in her voice.

“Your mother loved them,” Fatiha said. “I imagined you might like them too.”

“Should I be on the lookout for other wildlife?” she drawled.

“A small family of gazelles,” Fatiha said.

Maram stared at her, eyes wide. “You can’t be serious.”

“Of course I am,” Fatiha said, her voice perfunctory. “Now come along.”

Maram followed quietly as if she were a young child and not the Vathek heir. Her eyes remained wide as they swept over vegetation and wildlife—aside from the peacocks and gazelles she saw pheasants, and the air was filled with birdsong. Every few minutes she’d see a brilliant flash of jewel-toned feathers as a small bird darted from one branch to the next.

“And here is my favorite part of the estate,” Fatiha said, her voice laced with warmth. “The Ziyadi triptych—the artist did it in the classical style.”

Maram’s breath punched out of her on a quiet gasp as she looked up. The image was threefold: her grandmother, her mother, and Maram herself. Her grandmother was resplendent in a Kushaila hunting outfit, astride a horse, with a great golden eagle on her fist. The Golden Punishment—the eagle was legend for having taken down a deer on its own and lifting it into the air for several minutes. On the right was a good likeness of Maram herself, turned away from the viewer, bow in one hand, arrow in the other. Hovering over her head was a small falcon, a freedom falcon, its wings outstretched as if it were ready to pierce the vault of heaven at any moment. Like her grandmother, she wore a green Kushaila hunting jacket, but she’d explicitly asked the artist to have her turn away so that the absence of daan on her face would not be so clear to the viewer.

Maram almost walked away before looking at her mother’s image. But there was an inexorable pull to her, as in life so too in death. This was the greatest departure of the painting—elsewhere in the palace generations of Ziyadi women hunted on horseback and with falcons and spears, but here Najat bint al-Ziyad stood in ivory and black, with a tesleet on her fist, its crown of feathers a brilliant white. Though Mathis had scoured Najat’s Kushaila daan from her face as a stipulation of the peace and marriage treaties, here they were depicted on her brow and cheeks, and clutched in her left fist were gold-tipped arrows.