Someday, she would have to face the reality that he could never be her future, but for now, she would keep dreaming that the circumstances of their lives were different.
“No apologies are necessary.” She held out a hand. “When I return, I’ll tell you about my adventure in full.” Because she had faith Ahmed bin Walid would be back. He was a hunter, and hunters were tenacious creatures.
She expected the wali to shake her hand. Instead, he grasped it and kissed her knuckles. “And we shall finally talk, lovely Loulie, of stars and stories.”
Loulie was too astonished to say anything.
It was not until she’d left his residence that she noted her clammy palms and racing heart. But then Qadir appeared at her side, and her anxiety vanished into thin air.
They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. Qadir was here because it was time to go.
She glanced back only once—and witnessed the disconcerting sight of the wali’s shoulders drooping as he walked away. He looked, in that moment, like a defeated general. She suffocated her foreboding and turned away.
36
LOULIE
Their return to the desert was a solemn affair. The prince no longer smirked when she looked at him, Aisha only ever spoke pointedly about the relic belonging to Omar, and Qadir was reticent and grim-faced. It was an abysmal atmosphere, one made drearier by the tension between them.
Their first night out, Loulie barely spoke to anyone, including Qadir. She trailed the jinn on a hunt, pointed out a warbler’s nest, and agreed to skin the birds with nothing but silent gestures. The words they did trade were perfunctory, limited to simple questions and one-word assurances as they set up camp and cooked their prey over a fire built by the thieves.
The second day, the tension intensified into a suffocating quiet, one so heavy it pressed on Loulie’s shoulders like a physical weight. “Unnatural,” Aisha bint Louas murmured, and Loulie realized she was right. Though the desert was normally quiet, this silence was so dense it was oppressive. But for all its strangeness, it was familiar.
“Ghouls,” Qadir said, speaking her mind.
The prince sat up straight in his saddle. “Where?”
“Not too far away,” Aisha grumbled. “You can tell by the stillness.”
Loulie shifted atop her horse to scan the horizon. As far as she could see, there were no undead creatures approaching. But then, ghouls were incredibly slow; she and Qadir had never had problems outrunning them in the open desert before.
“We should alter our course, just to be safe,” Qadir said.
Omar sighed. “Better that than waste our time on a needless fight.” Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but—Loulie could have sworn his brow furrowed briefly with consternation.
They changed direction, swerving away from the open plains to travel between the dunes. The silence eventually disappeared, only to be replaced by an irritating, howling wind. Not enough to build into a storm, but enough to be a hindrance. They rode faster and harder in the afternoon hours to find more-secure shelter, and by the time stars scattered the sky, they were camping in the shadow of a large boulder. Right before they retired for the night, Loulie overheard Omar say to Aisha, “Never a dull moment with ghouls around, is there?”
Aisha responded with a tired shrug. “Stupid creatures. But at least we can outrun these ones. The quiet in the dune was awful.”
Thankfully, they did not run into the ghouls again. Loulie was glad for it. By their third night out, her fortitude had been whittled down to a sliver. Her thighs were sore from hard riding, her shoulders were bunched with nerves she couldn’t roll out, and she had accumulated an uncomfortable layer of sand beneath her robes. So when they came upon one of the Bedouin camps on Omar’s map, she could not help her sigh of relief.
She leaned forward in her saddle to get a better look at the campsite. Even from this distance she could tell it was small, composed of only four interlocking circles of tents and two corrals—one for sheep and another for camels. The tribesmen were gathered in the center, probably for feasting or stories. It was not long before a messenger detached himself from the group and rode out to meet them. His brown skin bore constellations of freckles—a testament to the many years he’d spent beneath the sun.
Upon noticing the details of Omar’s garments, he greeted them with a graceful bow from his horse. “High Prince.” His eyes roved over the rest of their group: Loulie wrapped in her unimpressive brown shawl; Qadir, tall and imposing on his horse; and Aisha, her lips pressed into a tight grimace shadowed beneath her hood.