“I don’t know. I just wish I could be more … useful.”

“Why not take those college courses you mentioned?” Ali suggested. “They’ll keep you busy. Unless …”

“Unless what?”

“Unless you’re afraid of offending my sister, Munira,” he said with a smile. “She rather fancies herself the palace intellectual, you know. She might not approve of a rival scholar.”

Amira laughed. “I’m sure she wouldn’t. But what would I do with a degree here?”

“A great deal, Amira. As an educated wife and mother, you’ll be even more precious. And one day, if you’re patient, you can be part of the changes that are coming. They’ll be slow, to be sure, but they are occurring even now. A few short years ago, my father never would have allowed a mixed gathering like the one we had at the museum tonight.”

O

As if to further prove his point about progress and change, Ali announced that they would be entertaining a foreign guest. “Dr. Philippe Rochon … he’s come to al-Remal to treat my father. I’ve invited him to dinner.” Amira was doubly impressed. Dr. Rochon was a well-known internist and diagnostician whose brilliant mind and healing skills were much in demand not only in his native France but throughout the Middle East.

Normally, a dinner like this would be a male-only affair. For Ali to bring him here, to their private quarters, that was, indeed, progress.

“And you may wear one of those dresses you brought from France,” he added. “Without the veil.”

Amira was shocked—and pleasantly surprised.

So was the palace staff, especially some of the older ones. The younger ones were simply excited. Amira empathized with both reactions. Regardless of what she did when she traveled abroad, she had never been unveiled in al-Remal, not since she was a girl.

She fussed over the menu and lingered longer than usual with her toilette. As she prepared for dinner, she felt as if she were wearing only a negligee. The feeling gathered force and nuance when the Frenchman arrived.

“Peace be with you, ya Ali,” he said, his voice deep and rich.

“And upon you. Itfuddal, doctor, you honor our humble home,” said Ali. “Allow me to present my wife.”

Philippe Rochon was perhaps forty, pepper-black hair just showing the first sprinkling of salt. Not much taller than Ali, but one of those men who seem to gain stature through some special aura, some sheer power of their presence.

More than anything else, it was his eyes, Amira thought. Though he greeted her in good Arabic with conventionally elaborate courtesy—“Your Highness, you do your poor servant too great an honor”—his eyes, the changeable expressive blue of Normandy, spoke far more eloquently.