“That is, I mean— What did he do to help the boy?”
“Yes, quite right,” Deen said, his expression relaxing. “Well, he picked the boy up in his own arms, didn’t he? And called for help. The good people came running. If it weren’t for the prince, the boy would surely be dead.”
Alizeh felt suddenly ill.
She stared at a glass jar in the corner of the shop, at the large chrysanthemum trapped within. Her hearing seemed to fade in and out.
“—not entirely clear, but some people are saying he’d attacked a servant girl,” Deen was saying. “Put a knife to her neck and cut her throat, not unlike y—”
“Where is he now?” she asked.
“Now?” Deen startled. “I wouldn’t know, miss. I imagine he’s at the palace.”
She frowned. “They took the Fesht boy to the palace?”
“Oh, no, the boy is at the Diviners’ in the Royal Square. No doubt he’ll be there a while.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said quickly. “I’m very grateful for your help.” She drew herself up, forced her mind firmly back into her body, and attempted to be calm. “I’m afraid I must now be on my way.”
Deen said nothing. His eyes went to her throat, to the bandage he’d only just wrapped around her neck.
“Miss,” he said finally, “why is it you do not remove your snoda so late at night?”
Alizeh pretended to misunderstand. She forced out another goodbye and rushed for the exit so quickly she almost forgot her packages, and then ran out the door with such haste she hardly had time to register the change in weather.
She gasped.
She’d run straight into a winter storm, rain lashing the streets, her face, her uncovered head. It was but a moment before Alizeh was soaked through. She was trying, while balancing an armful of parcels, to pull the sopping wet snoda away from her eyes, when she suddenly collided with a stranger. She cried out, her heart racing wildly in her chest, and through miracle alone caught her packages before they hit the ground. Alizeh gave up on her snoda then, darting deeper into the night, moving almost as fast as her feet could carry her.
She was thinking of the devil.
There once was a man
who bore a snake on each shoulder.
If the snakes were well fed
their master ceased growing older.
What they ate no one knew,
even as the children were found
with brains shucked from their skulls,
bodies splayed on the ground.
The vision she’d seen, the nightmare delivered by Iblees in the night—
The signs seemed clear enough now: the hooded man in the square; the boy who’d never turned up at her kitchen door; the devil whispering riddles in her heart.
That face had belonged to the prince.
Who else could it be? It had to be the prince, the elusive prince—and he was murdering children. Or perhaps he was trying to murder children. Had he tried to murder the child and failed? When Alizeh had left the Fesht boy earlier today he’d not seemed in danger of killing himself.
What had the prince done to him?
Alizeh’s feet pounded the slick cobblestone as she ran, desperately, back to Baz House. Alizeh had hardly enough time to breathe lately; she’d even less time to solve a riddle sent down from the devil. Her head was spinning, her boots slipping. The rain was falling so hard she hardly saw where she was going, much less the hand that darted out of the darkness, clamping down on her wrist.
She screamed.
Twelve
KAMRAN DID NOT LOOK AT Hazan as the latter approached through what was fast becoming a violent storm, choosing to stare instead at a stripe of wet cobblestone shimmering under orange gaslight. The rain had grown only more brutal, thrashing all and sundry while a vengeful wind rattled around their bodies, unseating ribbons of frost from a stand of trees.
It was unlike Hazan to overlook Kamran’s cold reception, for though the minister knew his place—and knew that he was owed little of Kamran’s attentions—he relished any opportunity to provoke his old friend, as the prince was easily provoked.
Theirs was an unusual friendship, to be sure.
The solidarity between the two was real—if varnished over with a thin layer of acerbity—but the foundations of their comradeship were so steeped in the separation of their classes that it seldom occurred to Kamran to ask Hazan a single question about his life. The prince assumed, because they’d been acquainted since childhood, that he knew all there was to know about his minister, and it had never once occurred to him that he might be wrong, that a subordinate might possess in his mind as many dimensions as his superior.