“Turn out your pockets.”
“DO IT NOW—”
With a rising, whistling shriek that nearly took off his head, the voices were suddenly ripped out of his mind, leaving in their absence only a lingering scream that all but blew out his eardrums. Kamran was on both knees now, fighting back a cry of agony as his chest heaved, and his head ached, and his ears rung painfully as the sounds of the world slowly regenerated around him. He soon heard the trill of crickets, the call of a nightbird, the wind sweeping a scatter of dead leaves toward his feet. Still, he struggled to regain his strength. In the aftermath of this strange episode Kamran was left shaking, his limbs trembling. He felt an unexpected warmth of moisture at his ear and lifted an unsteady hand to inspect it, his fingers coming away smeared with blood.
Kamran’s heart was pounding.
He didn’t understand what’d just happened, but he was aware enough to fuse together what seemed the most likely theory: that this experience could only have been crafted through the use of magic, which meant the Diviners must’ve been trying to communicate with him.
Turn out your pockets.
These cryptic words made no sense. There was nothing in his pockets save a bit of gold, Alizeh’s book, and his chain mail mask, and last he’d checked, none of these things was a sledgehammer, which was the only item he truly cared to possess at the moment.
Nevertheless, he was too curious to ignore such a direct command, and he clumsily patted himself down, turning out his pockets even as his head swam, his frozen fingers fumbling. The usual suspects were all here, all accounted for, and there was nothing else to—
Kamran’s hands stilled, then, as he felt the shape of something unfamiliar in his interior cloak pocket.
Carefully, blinking to clear his blurry vision, Kamran withdrew a small, rectangular package from his pocket. It was a slim box wrapped in brown paper, tied with simple red twine. He recognized the gift at once, the significance hitting him with an astonishing blow. His understanding of the moment was indeed so powerful, so fiercely unsettling that he felt his eyes prick with emotion.
The late Diviners had given this to him days ago.
Before they’d been murdered, before his home had been invaded, before his grandfather had been killed, before he’dever known the satin of Alizeh’s skin. It was because of this package that he’d arrived at all in the Royal Square; the Diviners had summoned him for a visit that day despite the fact that he’d never announced his return to Setar. He’d awoken early to avoid the crowds that would inevitably swarm the streets, and was making his way to the Diviners Quarters when he was stopped in his tracks at the sight of what he thought was a grown man about to murder a servant girl.
This moment.
It had changed the course of his entire life.
Later, after the pandemonium had settled, and after the Diviners had taken in the street child to care for him, Kamran had finally gone to see the priests and priestesses to whom he still owed a visit. He’d checked in on the boy while he was there, but Kamran had been so distracted by the outcome of his infuriating meeting with Omid that he hadn’t paid much attention to the gift the Diviners had pressed into his hands on his way out the door. The prince, who’d been by then accustomed to receiving small gifts on occasion from both Diviners and commoners alike, merely tucked the parcel into his cloak pocket, meaning to open it at a later, less chaotic moment.
It had remained here ever since.
Now he stared at it with shaking hands, but he did not delay any further in unwrapping this package. He tore it open like a crazed man, tossing the scraps to the filthy ground, and carefully lifted the delicate lid of a simple wooden box. A wisp of paper fluttered out at once, and which he caught in a desperate motion with his unbloodied hand. Then, hisheart pounding in his chest, he looked inside the box, within which he discovered a single black feather, resting in a bed of linen.
At first, he did not understand.
He scrambled to unfurl the paper, which he quickly held up to the moonlight, and in the distant glow he was able to discern that the scrap was but a piece of a much larger document. It was a small slip of paper with torn edges, and its pale skin had been printed upon in the neat, careful script of his grandfather.
It read:
leave this feather to my grandson, to use only when all else seems lost, when his tragedies feel insurmountable, and hope feels impossible. He will need only to touch it to his own blood, and Simorgh will come for him, as she once did for me. I also leave him my
There, the message was cut off, and Kamran’s heart sped up to a truly frightening pace; suddenly he could hear nothing but his own breaths, the harsh sounds echoing between his ears, his mind spinning as the world around him seemed to fracture and reassemble, fall apart and resurrect.
Still, he did not hesitate.
Kamran pressed the feather into his bloodstained hand and, with a shaky, terrified breath, he closed his fist.
In the Beginning
ONE NIGHT WAS BORN
a royal child
Windows shattered
the rain was wild
The queen rejoiced
