Chapter 4 Four

  The rumors of Khalid al-Munsif arrived not with a fanfare, but with a whisper. They came to me when I was almost too tired to listen.

  A week had passed since the vizier’s departure. The silence in our house was no longer just quiet. It was heavy, like a weight pressing down on all of us. The hope that had flickered in my parents’ eyes after I took control was gone, smothered by my two spectacular refusals. No new suitors’ carriages rattled our gates. Malek’s month was bleeding away, day by slow day, and I had chased off the only offers we had.

  I was sitting in the inner courtyard, in a patch of thin sun, pretending to mend a shawl. My hands moved automatically. My mind was a trapped bird, beating itself against a cage of my own making. Maybe my mother was right. Maybe I was ruining us. The brave stand, the sharp words, what were they worth if they only led us faster to the debtors’ prison?

  That was when I heard the giggling.

  It came from the kitchen window, propped open to let in the cool afternoon air. Two of our remaining maids, were inside, their voices a low, eager hum. They thought they were alone. They thought I wasn’t listening.

  "…and I heard from my cousin who serves in the cloth merchant’s house, and he heard from a guardsman that  the first wife, she can read a legal scroll from across a room and find the one clause that will ruin you. She’s not a wife, she’s a hawk in human form."

  I paused my stitching. My fingers grew still.

  The other girl sighed a dreamy sigh. "It’s the third wife, the artist, for me. Samira. They say she paints with colors made from crushed jewels and night blooming flowers. That the walls of her chamber are a living garden."

  "Bah, gardens are pretty but they don’t protect you," Yasmine shot back, her voice dropping to a theatrical whisper. "It’s the fifth one. Nadia.They say she’s a sword dancer from the eastern steppes. That she moves like wind and her smile is sharper than her blade. They say the Falcon himself won her loyalty in a duel, not by force, but by matching her step for step."

  My breath caught in my throat. I wasn’t hearing about a man’s wealth, or his lands, or his capacity for cruelty. I was hearing about his wives.

  Laila giggled again. "Six of them! Can you imagine? The gossip, the fighting, the sheer drama of it all."

  "Fighting?" Yasmine’s voice was knowing. "That’s just what stupid people say. My cousin’s guard says they’re a cabinet. A council. Each one rules a piece of his world. He doesn’t break women. He… he collects them. The smart ones. The dangerous ones. The ones no other man would know what to do with."

  He doesn’t break women. He collects them.

  The words did not feel like a whisper. They felt like a key sliding into a lock deep inside my chest, a lock I didn’t even know was there. The trapped bird in my mind stopped flailing. It went still, waiting.

  I leaned closer, the shawl forgotten in my lap.

  "He’s called the Falcon of the Northern Marches for a reason," the maid continued, her voice full of authority. "He doesn’t storm castles. He sees the whole field. He plans ten moves ahead. And his wives… they’re not his treasures. They’re his eyes, his ears, his claws in different parts of the kingdom. A poet once called his palace not a harem, but a war room draped in silk."

  A spark ignited in my chest. It was a small, frantic, brilliant little flame, so different from the cold anger I’d felt with Farook or the icy disgust with Tariq. This was heat. This was possibility.

  A man who saw dangerous women not as a threat, but as a resource. A man who valued strategy over domination. A man surrounded by a council of wives, each with her own power, her own territory.

  My mind, so good at seeing traps, began to race down a new, terrifying path. What if I wasn’t looking for a husband? What if I was looking for a commander? An employer. What if marriage wasn’t a cage, but a position?

  The idea was absurd. Scandalous. Potentially glorious.

  I stood up. The shawl fell to the tiles. I didn’t pick it up. I walked, my steps quickening with each beat of my heart, from the courtyard into the main house. I found my father in his study, not working as there was no work left. But, ust staring at a ledger filled with red ink.

  He looked up as I entered. His eyes were hollow, the skin around them bruised with exhaustion and fear. "Leyla," he said, his voice flat. "If you have come to ask about new offers, there are none. Malek’s man came this morning. He reminded us we have seventeen days. He was smiling."

  I didn’t let his despair touch me. The new flame inside me was burning it all away. I stopped in front of his desk, my hands planted firmly on the polished wood. I looked him directly in those defeated eyes.

  "Invite him," I said. My voice was clear. It held no request. It was a command.

  My father blinked. "Invite who? Leyla, there is no one to invite. We are pariahs. You made sure of that."

  "Not them," I said, a slow, deliberate smile beginning to form on my lips. It was the first real smile I had felt in weeks. It felt dangerous on my face. "A new prospect. Send a messenger. Tonight."

  "Who?" he asked, frustration and confusion warring in his tone.

  "Khalid al-Munsif," I said. The name felt solid on my tongue. "The Falcon of the Northern Marches. Extend an invitation. Tell him the daughter of House al-Kasim would see this collector for herself."

  The change in my father’s face was immediate and total. The confusion vanished, replaced by pure, unadulterated horror. His mouth fell open. The color drained from his face, leaving him a sickly gray.

  "Khalid… al-Munsif?" he stammered, the name itself seeming to poison the air. "Leyla, have your wits finally left you? That man… he is a scandal! He is a laughingstock in polite circles! He has… he has…"

  "Six wives," I finished for him, my smile widening. It was a real smile now, alive with terrifying purpose.

  "Yes! Six wives!" my father exploded, pushing himself up from his chair. "It is an obscenity! A chaos! He doesn’t want a wife, he wants a… a menagerie! People whisper that he is a man who cannot be satisfied, that he mocks the very institution of marriage! He is not a suitor. He is a spectacle!"

  He was pacing now, waving his hands. "Do you understand what you are asking? To invite him here, after refusing Emir Farook and Vizier Tariq? It would be the final joke! We would be the family so desperate they offered their daughter to a man who runs a boarding house for eccentric women!"

  I listened to his panic. I watched his fear. And the beautiful, perfect logic of it all settled into my bones. He saw chaos. I saw a blueprint.

  He stopped pacing, gripping the back of his chair, his knuckles white. "Why, Leyla? In the name of all that’s sane, why?"

  I straightened up. I met his horrified gaze with absolute calm. The spark in my chest was now a steady, guiding fire.

  "Exactly," I said.

  The word hung in the dusty study, simple and final.

  He didn’t understand. He couldn’t. He saw a man with six wives and thought scandal. I saw a man with six wives and thought * vacancies*. He saw a man who broke convention and thought weakness. I saw a man who broke convention and thought opportunity.

  My father searched my face, looking for madness, for hysteria. He found only a chilling, determined clarity. He saw that I was not asking. I was telling. And he was a man with seventeen days left and no other cards to play.

  He sank slowly back into his chair, the fight leaving him in a long, shuddering sigh. He was defeated. But for the first time, I was not.

  I turned and left the study. The hallway outside seemed brighter. The air felt different. I had direction. A target.

  The Falcon of the Northern Marches collected dangerous, intelligent women.

  Well, I thought, a fresh, defiant energy singing in my veins. He had never collected one like me.