She does. A dark sky unfurls above her, bedecked with the flickers of a thousand candles, a star for every wish tightly held in someone's heart.
“Now, if we're to play the part,” Khawla whispers, her voice suddenly near Shay's ear, “we have to summon our inner beasties.”
Shay smiles nervously. “Our inner what?”
The glow of the jinn stick sharpens the effect of the maid's face paint, her smile transformed into a fang-toothed snarl. “Ready to show me how loud you can be?”
“I—” Before Shay responds, Khawla tosses her head back, releasing a roar. Laughing in turn, Shay musters a growl of her own.
“You can do better than that!” Khawla urges. “Think about someone who hurt you. Someone who deserves to be devoured.”
Tarik rises in her mind. Shay again tilts her head toward the moon, silver and swollen and shimmering, thinking now of the hjabat's crystal face. How Hind lied to her. Ghita, too. A rage that feels both unfamiliar and strangely natural bubbles into her chest. She opens her mouth, and the sound that emerges is raw and howling. And full of power.
They plunge into the forest's depths, met with the cling of moist air. Each brisk step they take over the sodden earth releases the stench of rotten eggs. As they move from tree to tree, Shay spots more of the yaz symbols, and other symbols she can't identify. It hits her how little she knows about this Sisterhood she's agreed to confer with.
“Can you tell me more about this friend of yours we're meeting?” she asks. Khawla's arrival felt like nothing less than a life raft appearing at the critical moment when she needed one to stay afloat. Shay neglected to consider that the maid already had family and friends of her own, had a whole life before coming to live with the bone-eaters that Shay isn't privy to. “What's his profession? Well, besides being a rebel, I suppose.”
Khawla laughs, the sound cut short by a far-off cry, the not-distant growling that closely follows it. “He's a bit of a yahyah of all trades. And speaking ofprofessions, I'm curious, is it common practice for midwives to take on multiple apprentices at once?”
“They take one at a time usually.” Shay points out the scarlet leaves of a patch of venomous vine, and they both step carefully around it. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, you know me,” Khawla answers coyly. “Just being nosy as usual.”
Animals rustle, near enough to make their presence known without stepping into the girls’ path.
“How do you do it?” Shay asks. It's obvious Khawla knows where she's going, a confidence born of well-trodden familiarity. Everything about the forest gives Shay the uncomfortable feeling of having one foot in the real world and the other in the world beyond, of beingbetween. If it has any such effect on Khawla, she doesn't show it. “How do you spend so much time in the forest?”
“You get used to it.” The maid ducks beneath a low-hanging branch fringed green in glowing moss. “It wasn't always a scary place, you know.”
“It wasn't?” Shay asks as the girls join hands, crossing the slippery rocks of a stagnant creek. Fingers of blue mist clutch at their ankles.
“When magic thrived, so did the forest. This was a place of abundance. It provided plentiful shade and cover for prey animals. Grassy meadows for grazers. Everything had its balance. Mature trees and young saplings. Pristine lakes and flowing creeks.” Khawla leads Shay inside the dark belly of a cave where they can only see as far as the small bubble of light thrown by the jinn stick. “When magic died, the forest died, too. Men used to hunt here, you know, when the birds didn't possess more legs than a spider and the bears didn't have fur as coarse as jabberfish spikes or bellies filled with maggots the size of salmon. Now, men who dare pass through are more likely tobehunted. If not lost for eons. What with landmarks known to rearrange themselves on a whim maps aren't useful here anymore.”
Shay is quiet for a moment. She never thought about magic impacting the natural world the way it impacts human politics, but the last thing Khawla said seems significant. “Don't you ever get lost?”
“Me? Oh, I have a special affinity for directions and finding things. That's why the Sisterhood often sends me to relay messages or conduct reconnaissance missions,” Khawla says, that edge of pride flushing back into her voice.
The jinn stick flickers then, and blinks out, resigning them to darkness.
“Devil be damned,” she says, and though Shay can't see her shaking the stick to no avail, she guesses that's what's happening. “It must have been an old one.”
A special affinitysounds an awful lot like an echo, or maybe even the fledgling gift of a hizoura. Never having called someone a friend, Shay can't be sure how much sharing is considered appropriate, but she doesn't want to keep secrets from Khawla. And if Khawla really sees their emerging friendship as more than a job, she won't pressure Shay to join the Sisterhood if she doesn't want to.
Shay always thought she had to be one thing or another, that her existence required a purpose, a label.Apprentice. Daughter. Outcast.But what if she could justbe, and that was somehow enough? Maybe the answer she's been praying for has been right in front of her all along.
“I want to show you something,” she whispers, brushing Khawla's arm in the inky darkness.
Shay takes a deep breath and reaches out with the part of her mind where her Shawafa resides. She directs her flow of consciousness to the kindle worms hidden deep within the crooks and crevices of the limestone ceiling. Nothing happens for long enough to make her think she's only going to embarrass herself, but then glowing dots of blue emerge one by one. They illuminate en masse, transforming the cave ceiling into a theater of cosmic lights.
“Glory to heaven.” Khawla gasps in delight. “Wait—how did you do that?”
“I guess you could say I have an affinity with living creatures.”
“Hmm …” Khawla bumps her shoulder into Shay's. “I knew there was something special about you the moment I laid eyes on you.”
The caves make a kind of tunnel system that Khawla explains serves to shorten the distance to Nezjar. Shay continues to summon the kindle worms to light the caves they pass through, and in the alternating stretches of forest between them, she enlists the assistance of friendly fireflies.
They reach the parts of the forest recognizable to Shay from her foraging excursions more quickly than it seems possible. Soon, she's stepping from the trees into a clearing where the lights of Nezjar line the hilltops in greeting. Shay's first thought is it should feel like she's come home. But the notion is at odds with the hollow ache of her chest, as wistful as the notes of a half-forgotten song.
