The sky was still lit with stars. Dawn was coming, but the air was still chill, the grass frosted with ice, the stars suspended in heaven. Maram stood in front of the balcony, one hand on its engraved railing, the other clutching a string of red beads. They’d belonged to her mother and were meant to be used for religious remembrance. Maram was not Dihyan—she wasn’t really anything. She only ever thought of Dihya when she thought of the dead. But the beads were her mother’s and she couldn’t wear them, couldn’t hold them at court, in the Ziyaana, anywhere her father’s people and Nadine might see them. Weakness or treason—they were the same, weren’t they? There was no room for grief. There never had been.

She’d risen early, before the first cry of birdsong, and bathed and dressed. Around her, Dar at-Tuyyur was waking up—servants lit sconces, the kitchen was accepting food deliveries, the gardeners and arborists were making their way through the estate. In the wan lantern light of her room she’d nearly broken her mirror looking at herself. Did she look Kushaila? She’d bound her hair away from her face, and the bulk of it hung down her back in a thick braided rope. There were no gold pieces in her hair, no fabric woven through it. It was just her, her eyes lined with kohl, her face stark and plain.

She looked like Najat, but was that enough? Did she want to look Kushaila?

Her hand tightened around the beads.

The door to the office opened, but Maram didn’t turn around. She knew Fatiha’s gait, that she would first set a tray down on the table by the door, then turn on an extra lantern.

“When were you going to tell me you’d hired a falconer?” she said quietly.

Fatiha paused, then joined her at the balcony. “It’s in today’s dossier as I continue to hire and delegate staff, Your Highness. How did you find out about the falconer?”

“I ran into her on the property,” Maram said dryly, and turned away from her view of the garden. Fatiha was old, she thought suddenly. Old enough to have been her wet nurse—old enough to have raised her, in another world where her mother yet lived. Perhaps she shouldn’t have hired her to be stewardess of a hidden retreat. Perhaps she should have given her a pension and let her retire.

Fatiha rolled her eyes, a move that elicited a surprise grin from Maram, and gestured toward the food.

“I told her to tread lightly until you’d overseen her approval,” she said as Maram sat. “But she was eager—apparently there are some species of raptor on this part of the continent that don’t breed anywhere else.”