At that Maram could not control the way her hand seized and pulled away from her, nor the sharp intake of breath. It no longer felt as if it were a battle of wills—something she’d lost and won at the same time—but something else entirely. She looked away from Aghraas and pressed her hand against her ribs as if it might relieve her difficulty in breathing.

A shaft of moonlight hit the pool behind them and seemed to illuminate the entire courtyard.

I’ve stepped into a dream, she thought, and stepped past Aghraas.

“Your Highness?”

There was a feather floating on the surface of the pool. It was night-black and seemed to absorb the silver light around it. She’d heard no bird fly by to drop the feather, no coo to signal one might be nearby. Nor had they stored any falcons in the aviary yet. Maram knew what it was even as she chided herself in believing such a thing.

An extinct bird was extinct. It did not come in times of difficulty or need, did not revive itself as a species for one girl. And yet.

She stepped into the water without thinking and it rippled out around her ankles. The tiles at the bottom of the pool were cool and clean—there was no algae or dirt. She almost didn’t pick up the feather. It was light, and when her finger brushed over its curve, color sparked as if following the trail of heat she left behind.

She hadn’t asked for a sign or an answer. She didn’t even know she had a question. The breath in her lungs thinned and chilled—was the cosmos reminding her of her duty?

“Maram!”

Her head jerked up. Aghraas stood over her, her face solemn, her feet as wet as hers, her hands cradling Maram’s elbows.

Aghraas was beautiful. That was an easy thing to admit, a thing she’d admitted to herself long ago. And now, haloed by the moonlight, her eyes wide, she seemed more so than before. Maram felt a well of grief rise in her chest, a great spike of pain.

“I’m married,” she said hollowly.

And Aghraas did something no one had ever done before. She laid her forehead against hers and sighed. “I know.”

14

I could not spend the day traveling abandoned corridors and observing Maram. I returned to the abandoned suite and the tower where I’d found her before Nadine’s arrival, and took with me a stack of books to pass the time. This was not the sojourn out into the city that I’d wanted, but it was the respite from court and the strange play my life had become that I needed. The sounds of the city rose as the day progressed, the clamor of carts and carriages, the cries of goats and sheep and donkeys, and the screaming of both merchants and seagulls.