“A little, perhaps, is not so offensive to the senses,” Huda rejoined, looking around the room with renewed revulsion. “But this, I fear, is egregious.”
“I like it,” said Alizeh, who was feeling oddly defensive. She shook her head. “Why are we arguing over the flowers?”
“I don’t know, dear,” she said, aggrieved. “I’m terribly nervous.”
“And how do you imagine I must feel?”
“Better, I hope?” Huda raised her eyebrows. “Better than you did with the arrow in your back, anyway. I can’t imagine that was very comfortable.”
She laughed; Alizeh did not.
“Yes, well,” Huda hurried on, “I don’t knowallthe details, of course, as I am generally precluded from joining important meetings – and do you know” – she lifted her chin – “everyone is odiously self-important around here,as if I can’t be trusted! As if I’d give away all the empire’s secrets!”
Alizeh shot her a look.
Huda crossed her arms. “And so what if I do occasionally divulge my findings? A tiny secret shared among friends is not so awful, is it? Though perhaps if they shared more with me I might not be so inclined to snoop!”
“Have you been snooping?”
She dropped her arms. “Only a very little, entirely innocent bit!”
“Huda –”
“Perhaps later we can talk about all the discreet letters Prince Kamran has been writing” – she raised her eyebrows – “and all the mysterious trips King Cyrus has been taking –”
“Youhavebeen snooping.” Alizeh’s eyes widened.
Huda gave a brilliant smile. “I’m not entirely useless, am I? I don’t care what Mother says about me. Anyway, to answer an important question: we are currently at the Diviners Quarters in Tulan. It turns out that the reason you were feeling so ill the morning of” – she made air quotes – “The Unpleasantness, was that you’d been poisoned by dark magic.” She bit at her fingernail. “Which, you know, is why it’s taken you so long to heal. Nearly four weeks you’ve been here at the temple –”
“Four weeks?” Alizeh cried. “I’ve been asleep for almost a month?”
“Oh, it’s been torturous for all of us, let me assure you!Certainly not more torturous than it was for you,” she hastened to add. “I don’t mean to imply that we suffered more than you did! I only mean to say that we did suffer, quite a bit, for even with the Diviners’ intercession it wasn’t a simple fix. No one was certain how long your healing might take, and it was the fact of not knowing that made it all the more brutal. They had to, erm” – she bit again at a cuticle – “bleedthe bad magic from your body –”
Alizeh drew a sharp breath.
“Yes, disgusting! Grotesque, even! Though I don’t know if theyactuallybled you, to be honest? But it sounds awful, just awful – and anyway the thing is, dear, no one can figure out why you’d have such a poison in your body to begin with, and, well” – she cringed – “naturally they’ve all been fighting over it.”
“I see.” Alizeh’s heart was thudding painfully.
Huda sighed, released her tortured fingers from her teeth, and stared at Alizeh. “The boys have been awful. I quite hate them now. Not Deen and Omid, of course – but the others are always fighting and brooding and muttering andridiculous. And to think, I nearly swooned the first time I saw Kamran!” She clasped her chest. “The way he’d parted the crowd the night of that horrific ball! I thought I’d die there in that fiery ring, and suddenly there he was – striding toward me like a hero, calling me a lady! Heaven help me, Alizeh, I thought I’d never seen anyone more magnificent in all my life.” Huda dropped her hand, then made a disgusted face. “Can you believe, growing up in the royal city, I always dreamed of meeting him?”
Alizeh raised her eyebrows. She was still trying to digest the fact that she’d been half-dead for a month when she said, faintly, “Yes, I believe it’s fairly common to be enamored of royalty.”
Huda laughed. “It’s generous of you to think of it that way. It makes my stomach turn to think back on the insipid dreams of my younger self, and yet – every time Mother was awful to me, or my sisters were cruel, or I discovered my pillows had been stuffed with rat entrails –”
“Rat entrails?”
“Yes, the rat entrails were particularly unimaginative,” she said, pursing her lips. “Anyway, every time something terrible happened, I’d lock myself in my room and then lock myself in my closet and then lock myself in my head, where the stupidest of all my dreams lived, and I’d imagine that one day I’d meet the dashing prince and he’d be everything good and glorious and” – she hesitated, looking suddenly haunted – “well, I suppose I thought he’d be different. Kinder than everyone else.” She was quiet a moment, fighting a flare of emotion before returning her gaze to Alizeh.
“Good thing that’s sorted, isn’t it?” she said with forced brightness. “Anyway, do you happen to have any recollection of being poisoned? It would solve a great deal of our problems, I think, if you could remember whether anyone had poisoned you.”
Alizeh blinked steadily at the young woman, then sank down onto the bed beside her. She felt dazed; her mind was churning –roiling.
Had she been poisoned? She didn’t know.
She couldn’t remember.
Had she really been asleep for four weeks? What had happened to the world in her absence? What of her people, to whom she’d made promises?
