“If they decide to investigate his death as a killing, the broken back means they will be searching for a man.”
Her lips parted. “Because of the force needed to cause such a break.”
“Yes.” It felt beyond strange to share this part of myself. The balance of our relationships had shifted, and I no longer knew where we stood.
If you were the girl I raised you to be, you would finish them here, Hanim said. I scraped a hand down my face. When would she go away?
Once Marek finished arranging the body, Sefa helped him out of the riverbank. I lingered out of reach. A touch right now would snap the last of my already fraying calm.
“We need to run. Fast as you can. We won’t be in Mahair in time for the shift change, but we need to be within the boundary of the raven-marked trees.” I picked at my wrist, gaze somewhere above their heads. “Thank you. This favor will not be forgotten.”
We ran against the dawn. Sefa stumbled more than once, but Marek remained near with a steadying hand. I focused on avoiding the puddles. There was no guessing how deep they went, and they had already caused plenty of trouble. A broken ankle was exactly what this catastrophe of a night needed.
I tried to put my suspicions about Sefa and Marek’s backgrounds out of my head. It was too big a thread to unspool in my current state of mind.
We crossed the raven-marked trees without incident. A collective exhalation passed between us. “We should walk the rest of the way,” Marek said. “We’re wearing the sweat of the guilty.”
“Neither of you are guilty,” I said sharply. “If it comes between protecting me or yourselves, make a smarter choice than the one you made tonight.”
“Is she trying to protect or insult us?” Sefa asked Marek. “I can never tell.”
“Both, I think.”
“We have all heard the rumors about the random disappearances happening across the kingdoms in the last year,” I said. “This was just another disappearance.”
“Those rumors aren’t true.” Sefa glanced around, more alert than she’d been a moment ago.
“Maybe not, but their existence might buy us some time.”
As we reached the end of the trail, a wagon rumbled past us, stacked with towers of crates bound together with water-stem rope. The smell of fresh aish baladi drifted from the main road as the kids threw loaves of the dense flatbread into baskets or onto the wooden lattices propped on their shoulders.
The warm scent of wheat tugged at my memory. How many mornings in Usr Jasad did I spend with crumbs on my clothes, burning my tongue on aish baladi hot from the palace ovens? The bread was more common in Jasad’s rural communities, but my mother had asked the bakers to prepare us two loaves each morning. So many of Jasad’s customs had been adopted by the other kingdoms. Jasad’s food, art, traditions—pretty spoils of war for the circling scavengers.
I turned away from the bakery. Jasad was gone. Mourning a kingdom I barely knew was a disservice to the life I had built.
“It’s my turn to pick up the fūl for breakfast,” Sefa said. “If I go home without it, Raya will mop the keep with my neck.”
“We don’t have the pot,” Marek said.
“Hamada is nice. He’ll let me borrow his extra pot.”
“Nice,” Marek repeated with derision. “Only oil, salt, and black pepper this time, all right? Nobody likes lemon on their fūl except you and Fairel.”
Sefa rolled her eyes. “I’ll ask for it plain so you can season it your way. Your wrong way, I might add.”
We stopped at the fūl cart. Hamada dismissed Marek and me with a glance, homing in on Sefa. While he poured the steaming beans out of a massive metal jug and into a lidded pot, I surveyed our surroundings. The shift change had happened twenty minutes ago. Even if they allowed the soldier a few minutes for tardiness, they would not have waited twenty minutes before calling in reinforcements. Dread swelled in my chest. Why did I come back? I should have left the soldier and kept running. I knew how to hide in the wilds of Essam. I had had a basket of food and a head start. I could have eventually found my way into the lower villages of Lukub or Orban and started over. What kind of simpleton was I to stumble back to the cage and hope they didn’t close the lock?
They would barricade any entry or exit within Mahair. Every home would be combed for Jasadis. Trade would halt. They might even cancel the waleema, one of the greatest sources of income for the village.
“Soldiers disappear frequently,” Marek murmured. I flinched, surprised to find him openly watching me. “They will not waste resources on a middling Omalian village until they are certain he was killed.”