“Aghraas is beautiful. I don’t know that I would have been able to resist.”

She smirked. “I take it you did not resist my husband,” she drawled.

My smile turned into a grin. “You seemed to have little use for him.”

Maram threw her head back and laughed.

15

I had not visited the beach since my outing with Idris, when he had shown me the mural of Houwa and read my palm. But I stood there now wrapped in black velvet, a mantle about my shoulders whipping in the ocean wind. Our excursions out of the estate went from almost never happening to happening regularly. With Nadine in residence and in a foul mood at her expulsion from Maram’s inner circle, Maram and I concocted a strategy where she could both retain the freedom she’d found in her relationship with Aghraas and not undermine her new position.

This was made easy by the Ifrani sisters, the Mas’udi twins, and the Banu Nasir siblings. The collection of former Andalaan royalty and current makhzen, tied loosely together by history and some blood, numbered almost twenty. Maram complained that they were difficult to keep track of, but I could tell that they offered a respite she hadn’t expected. Every court came with pitfalls and the need to navigate it carefully, but since the event at the races, the core among them showed a distinct warmth toward Maram, and so the rest fell in line.

My mind treaded the same paths it had treaded since the night before, turning over my conversation with Maram. I had never considered the differences in rank between Idris and me—that he was a prince and I was not anything close to that. Or rather I had, but I had never thought of it as a difference that mattered. Kushaila stories were littered with people who found their way to each other despite that sort of gap, and, as Maram pointed out, our nobility was littered with such unions. But there was a large difference between being a wealthy merchant’s daughter, from a family that had many galactic trade agreements in hand, and being the daughter of a pair of villagers who worked in a state orchard many months out of the year. Idris had only ever treated me as an equal, but—

I’timad’s cheerful cry interrupted my thoughts and I turned away from the sea.

Stable hands had set up a horse paddock on the sand, which struck me as a risky endeavor, but none would be swayed away from it. Many in our entourage meant to race horses on the beach, among them the two Mas’udi scions ‘Imad and I’timad. Servants had set up linen awnings a ways from the paddocks and the racing strip, against a cliff that sheltered us from the worst of the wind.