Amani didn’t look like her, she thought. Amani looked as a true Kushaila monarch might—the gown and her soft smile and the steel with which she carried herself. She seemed warm and alive. Maram’s elder half sister Galene was not so, and indeed neither was Maram herself. She rarely smiled so kindly to those she loved, and never to strangers. Nor did she touch Idris as Amani did, hand gently on his arm, shoulder to shoulder—the sort of touching that hinted at an intimacy that only ever bloomed in private.

Her hand pressed against her belly.

The door to Fatiha’s office opened, then shut. She expected the soft murmur of voices as Fatiha conversed with yet another page, and instead there was silence.

Maram considered shutting off the holo and didn’t. Instead, she turned to face Aghraas, face as blank as she could make it. The falconer was dressed in a modest high-collared coat today, along with her customary trousers and boots. Her braids were bound up at the back of her head in a single clip, and slung over her back was a bag Maram knew was filled with various instruments of her trade.

Aghraas examined her in silence and then lifted her gaze to stare at the holo of Amani and Idris.

“You don’t wish to be present at your own wedding?” she said, voice low.

Maram’s jaw tightened. “No. I do not.”

“Why?”

Aghraas’s gaze had returned to Maram, and she fought the urge to squirm. Her gaze was direct and unavoidable. There was no fear, no desire to look away. For the first time Maram had to fight not to look away, not to cast her gaze down.

She wanted to say many things in reply, but the core of her was reliable. Deflection was an old friend.

“You have not earned the right to ask,” she said.

Aghraas inclined her head. “Apologies for my tardiness. I didn’t count on having such a hard time finding my way out of Shafaqaat.”

Maram waved her hand at the holovision, watched it wink out, then turned back to Aghraas.

“Shafaqaat is thirty minutes away at most,” she said. “You are three and a half hours late.”

“By air car, Your Highness. Few in Shafaqaat want to lease an air car to a woman wearing daan,” Aghraas said.

“Don’t tell me you walked?”

“Normally a family is willing to let me ride on the back of their wagon,” Aghraas replied.

“Wagon?” Maram could not keep the horror from her voice. “That’s … two hours?”

“Four,” Fatiha interjected from her desk without looking up from the stack of tablets.

“Indeed,” Aghraas said with a smile. “Not to worry. Most nights I don’t go all the way to Shafaqaat. There’s plenty of land outside the estate that’s good for camping. The journey most days is much faster.”

“Camping?”

“Indeed, Your Highness.”