Idris caught my hand in his and drew me close as we walked. He seemed to know this place as well as I did, which was to say not at all. Eventually what little sun’s light we had was swallowed up by the dark, and Idris drew several small orbs from his cloak. One sharp whistle and they all began to glow and lifted up into the air, lighting the path for us.

“Here we are,” he said, and led me out into a smaller cave with an opening facing the sea. But that, I knew immediately, was not why he’d brought me here. A vast mural sat inside.

“Dihya,” I breathed, walking toward it. It was twice or three times as high as I was and took up the entire wall. It was ancient, too, I could tell, and yet well preserved. A woman sat atop the promontory outside M’Gaadir, the ocean behind her. She was robed in Kushaila clothes, a deep, arresting green stitched with gold and white. At her shoulders were brooches in the shape of half diamonds, etched with Kushaila design. Her hair was threaded with pearls—white and coral and gray—and from her neck hung what looked like half a hundred strings of white pearls. Her daan was a sharp pictograph of a feather, its end situated perfectly between her eyebrows. She cast no shadow.

“Tala said you would know her name,” Idris said, coming up behind me.

“Houwa,” I said without looking away.

Houwa was prized among the Kushaila before they were ever called such, for she was clever and beautiful, and she had just a little magic in her blood that the tesleet taught her to use. And when her people were under siege by a conqueror king, she and her brothers plotted how to defeat him: she would marry the king and learn all the secrets of his army.

Each night Houwa suffered the advances of the king, and each night after he fell asleep, she would unstitch her shadow from her shoulders and her feet and loose it into the world to gather his secrets. Bit by bit, her brothers destroyed her husband’s armies with the information she and her shadow provided, until only a few of his generals remained. And on the eve of the final battle Houwa’s shadow led her brothers through the king’s war camp and into his royal tent where Houwa waited.

Together the brothers killed him and declared victory.

For most storytellers, the tale ended there. But my mother had told me a different ending. That with her service done, the shadow asked for a boon: to be made real so that she might live separate from Houwa’s demand and have her own life. Houwa used the last of her magic to free her shadow.