Chapter 3 Three

  Vizier Tariq’s proposal did not involve romance.

  He arrived not with a clatter of armor like Farook, but with a silent, creeping dread. A palanquin borne by four identical, silent slaves was set down in our courtyard without a sound. The curtains parted, and out he seeped, like a stain from old wood.

  He was ancient. His silks, once magnificent, were faded to the colors of dust and weak tea. They hung on his bony frame, smelling of mothballs and a sweet, decaying perfume meant to mask something worse. He moved slowly, each step a calculated event, as if his joints might powder. His face was a map of deep wrinkles, but his eyes were wrong. They were a pale, watery blue, too sharp, too observing. They didn't blink enough.

  My mother was trembling beside me at the doorway. "He is a scholar," she whispered, a desperate hope in her voice. "A man of culture. Be respectful."

  A scholar of what, I wondered. Dust? Dry rot?

  The receiving room felt different with him in it. Not charged with angry heat like with Farook, but chilled. Sapped of life. He didn't acknowledge my father's stammered greetings. His pale eyes pinned me to the spot from the moment he entered.

  "So," he said. His voice was a dry rustle, like pages turning in a tomb. "The al-Kasim daughter. The commodity."

  He didn't sit. He began to circle me, a slow, shuffling orbit. I stood perfectly still. My father started to speak, but Vizier Tariq made a small, dismissive flick of his fingers, and the words died.

  "Yes," he murmured, mostly to himself. "A pleasant ornament. The line of the neck. The youth in the skin. It does provide a certain vitality to a collection."

  A collection. My blood, which had been hot with Farook's brute force, now went cold and thick as sludge.

  He stopped in front of me. "You will do," he announced, as if selecting a vase. "Quiet, I assume. Biddable. Your function will be to sit, to pour tea, to provide a pleasing contrast to my antiquities. Your presence will suggest continuity. A living piece to complement the still ones." He finally blinked, a slow, reptilian descent of a thin lid. "For my twilight years, a touch of spring. That is all that is required."

  Then he reached out.

  His hand, speckled with age and trailing those musty silks, moved toward my face. I stopped breathing. His fingertips, dry and cool as parchment, brushed my cheekbone. It was not a caress. It was an appraisal. He tilted my chin a fraction toward the light from the window, studying the texture, the color.

  My mother made a small, choked sound. My father was a statue of shame, looking at the floor. Rage, white and silent, exploded inside my skull. I wanted to bite those fossil fingers. To shatter this dried up old relic against the wall.

  But I didn't. I became ice. I became stone. I let him turn my face. I let his dead eyes scan me. I felt like a bolt of fabric being assessed for its durability, a marble statue checked for flaws. My personhood evaporated under that touch. I was an asset. A pleasant ornament.

  He dropped his hand, apparently satisfied. "Acceptable," he pronounced. "The arrangements will be made. She may bring one servant. The rest of her associations will be concluded."

  He turned, ready to seep back out of our lives, having purchased his living doll.

  That was when I moved. I turned my head, not to him, but to my mother. My voice, when it came, was clear, calm, and carried perfectly in the dead air of the room.

  "Mother," I said. "A question, if you please."

  My mother jumped, horrified that I had spoken. Vizier Tariq paused, his back to us, as if surprised a statue had made a sound.

  "Yes, Leyla?" my mother whispered, her eyes wide with warning.

  I kept my gaze locked on her, my face a mask of polite curiosity. "Does the Vizier's palace employ a skilled embalmer? One should check these things in advance. We may have need of a very good one quite soon."

  The silence that followed was absolute. It was the silence of a vacuum, of deep space.

  My father actually gasped. My mother's hand flew to her mouth.

  Vizier Tariq went very, very still. Then, with immense slowness, he rotated back to face me. The pale blue eyes were no longer just observing. They were shocked, then incandescent with a cold, brittle fury. The insult was not a shouted curse. It was a surgical strike, lethal in its politeness. I had not just refused him. I had looked at his twilight years and declared them already dead. I had suggested his end was so imminent that the preservation of his new ornament was a pressing concern.

  For a long moment, he said nothing. The wrinkles on his face seemed to deepen, carving into stone. A tiny muscle in his jaw twitched, a frantic pulse beneath the paper thin skin.

  "You," he rasped, the dry voice now cracking with venom. "You are not just willful. You are corrupt. A rotten piece. Spoiled goods."

  He looked at my father with utter contempt. "You offer me this? This venomous, disrespectful creature? The debt stands. But my offer is rescinded. Let her be some other fool's burden."

  He gathered his silks around him as if shielding himself from a contagion. With a last, glacial look of disgust aimed at me, he shuffled toward the door. This time, his movement wasn't slow and calculated. It was hurried. He wanted out of the air I was breathing.

  My father, panicked, scurried after him, sputtering apologies, his voice a faint, pleading echo in the vizier's wake. "Vizier, please, she is young, she did not mean…"

  The courtyard gate shut with a quiet, final click.

  The moment it did, the dam broke in my mother. She whirled on me, her face, usually so composed, was a mask of pure, unraveling terror.

  "You are ruining us!" she hissed, the words sharp and desperate. "Do you understand? You are not playing a game, Leyla! That man had power! Real, quiet power! And you spoke to him of… of embalmers?!"

  Tears were streaming down her face now, but they were tears of fury, of a fear so deep it had turned to rage. "Farook was a brute, but this man, he could have buried us in paperwork! He could have had the tax collectors here for a decade! We are not just poor, we are dangling over a cliff, and you are cutting the rope!"

  She was right. I knew she was right. Farook’s threat was a sword, loud and obvious. Tariq’s was a quiet poison, a slow, legal suffocation. I had just made another powerful enemy.

  But as I watched my mother cry, as I listened to my father's helpless murmurs from the courtyard, the cold, sludgy feeling in my veins began to heat. It didn't boil into anger. It simmered into something else. Something clear and precise.

  These men. The brute. The preserved corpse. They were two sides of the same coin. They saw a woman as a thing. A trophy for a wall, a living doll for a shelf. They were the system Malek used, the only options on his disgusting menu.

  I couldn't just pick the least awful one. That was still losing.

  I walked past my weeping mother, out into the courtyard. The sun was bright. The air was fresh, scented with the dry earth. I looked at our crumbling walls, at my father's slumped back, at the empty space where the vile vizier's palanquin had been.

  A dangerous plan, half formed and terrifying, began to knit itself together in my mind. It wasn't enough to reject the wrong men. I had to find the right wrong man. A man who didn't want what they wanted. A man who might, just might, see a tool instead of a trophy. A man whose own situation was so unusual that mine might seem less like a problem and more like an opportunity.

  The name came to me like a whisper, a story told in the market about a man who played by different rules. Khalid al-Munsif. The Falcon. A man with six wives and a reputation for strategy, not conquest.

  The idea was a madness. But it was a specific, calculated madness. And as I stood there in the sun, the last echoes of my mother's sobs in my ears, I knew with a chilling certainty that it was the only move left on the board.

  I had humiliated the brute. I had mortally offended the corpse. Now, I needed to find the falconer. And offer myself not as a pet, but as a blade.