She did not recall learning that they were dead. She knew it must have happened, that someone would have told them. She knew she had cried, because she had understood what was happening, and that Josit had cried because he did not. Bandits had overtaken her parents’ caravan near Jiqal, the desert that was all that remained of what had once been Aram. Their waggon had been seized, their throats slashed, their bodies thrown into the Road to be picked over by vultures. Though surely no one had told her that; still, she had overheard whispers: Such a terrible thing, people said. Such bad luck. And who would take the children?
Children were precious to the Ashkar. They represented the survival of a people who had no homeland, and thus had been in danger of extinction since the Sundering. It was assumed Lin and Josit’s one surviving relative, their maternal grandfather, would take them in. Lin had even heard envious muttering. Mayesh Bensimon, the Counselor to the King. Save the Maharam, he was the most influential man in the Sault. He owned a grand house near the Shulamat. A lucky life they would have with him, surely.
Only he had not wanted them.
She recalled sitting in her bedroom with Josit in her lap, listening to Davit Benezar, the Maharam, arguing with Mayesh in the corridor outside. I cannot do it, Mayesh had said. Despite the words he was saying, the sound of his voice was, briefly, comforting to Lin. She associated it with her parents, with feast nights when the whole family gathered and Mayesh read aloud, as the candles burned, from the Book of Makabi. He would ask Lin questions about Judah Makabi, the wandering of the Ashkar, and the Goddess, and when she got the answers right he would reward her with loukoum, a sweet candy of rosewater and almond.
But: “No, no, no,” he said to Benezar. “My duties will not allow for raising children. I do not have time, nor attention. I must be at the Palace every day, at any hour they call me.”
“Then step down,” snapped the Maharam. “Let someone else counsel the King of Castellane. These children are your blood and flesh.”
But Mayesh had been curt. The children would be better served in the community. Lin would go to the Etse Kebeth, and Josit to the Dāsu Kebeth, the House of Men. Mayesh would look in on them from time to time, as their grandfather. That was the end of it.
Lin still recalled the pain of being separated from Josit. They had pulled him wailing from her arms to take him to the Dāsu Kebeth, and though he was only a street away from her, she felt his absence like a wound. Like the Goddess, she thought, she had been wounded thrice, each name a scar of fire beneath her heart: mother, father, brother.
Chana, who headed the House of Women with her wife, Irit, tried to console Lin and make her comfortable, but Lin’s rage would not allow it. She was like a wild thing, clambering up into trees from which she could not be fetched down, screaming and smashing plates and glasses, tearing her own skin with her nails.
“Make him come,” Lin sobbed, when Chana, at her wit’s end, took her only pair of shoes to stop her running away. But the next day, when Mayesh did come to her in the physick garden, bringing an expensive gold necklace from the Palace as a gift, she only flung it at him and ran back inside the Women’s House.
That night, as Lin lay shaking on her bed, someone came into her room. A small girl with smooth dark braids wound around her head, pale skin, and short, spiky lashes. Lin knew who she was. Mariam Duhary, an orphan refugee from Favár, the capital of Malgasi. Like Lin and several others, she lived here in the House of Women. Unlike Lin, she didn’t seem to mind.
She climbed onto the bed beside Lin and sat quietly while Lin thrashed and hit her pillow and kicked at the walls. Eventually, kicking and thrashing in the face of so much quiet patience became unrewarding. Lin settled into silence, glaring up at Mariam through her tangled hair.
“I know what you’re feeling,” Mariam said. Lin got ready to snap; no one knew what she was feeling, even if they all claimed they did. “My parents are also dead. When Malgasi turned against the Ashkar, they sent the vamberj—the wolf-masked soldiers—to hunt us down. They would call out through the streets: Ettyaszti, moszegyellem nas. Come out, wherever you are. They caught my mother on her way to market. She was hung in the main square of Favár, for the crime of being Ashkar. My father and I fled, or the Malgasi would have killed us, too. We traveled the Gold Roads until he grew too sick. We came here, traveling through the night. My father had said things would be better for us in Castellane. But by the time we arrived in the morning, he was dead in the back of the waggon.” Her voice was matter-of-fact as she recounted these horrors, so much so that Lin fell silent. “Everyone wants to tell you that it isn’t so bad, but it is. You will be so sad that you will feel like you will die. But you won’t die. And with every day that passes, you will get back a little piece of yourself.”
Lin blinked. No one had spoken to her like this since her parents’ death. There was something extraordinary about it.
“Besides,” Mariam added, “you’re lucky.”
Lin sat up, angry, kicking at her covers. “What do you mean, I’m lucky?”
“You’ve got a brother, don’t you?” said Mariam. In the shadows, the gold circle that hung on a chain around her neck gleamed darkly. The words of the Lady’s Prayer looked like scratches. “I have no one but me. I am the only Duhary in Castellane. Maybe the only one in the world.”
Lin noticed that Mariam did not mention Mayesh. She was glad. She realized in that moment how foolish she had been, demanding that Mayesh visit her. Mayesh waited on the pleasure of the King, not the whim of his grandchildren. He did not belong to Lin. He belonged to the Palace.
Mariam had drawn the shawl from around her thin shoulders and handed it to Lin. It was a pretty thing, of fine cambric and lace. “Take this,” she said. “It makes a very satisfying sound when you rip it. Whenever you feel everything is unfair and awful, tear a piece off.”
And she tore the shawl in half. For the first time in weeks, Lin smiled.
After that, the girls were inseparable. Mariam was sister and best friend all in one. They took lessons together, played together, and helped each other with tasks like cleaning the kitchen and planting the physick garden, where all the Sault’s herbs and medicinal flowers were grown. Lin thought of Mariam, with some envy, as graceful and delicate in her sensibilities; she never seemed to want to dig in the dirt, wrestle with the other children, or clamber up into the chestnut trees with Lin and Josit. Lin envied her decorum but knew perfectly well she could not change her own nature. She herself was always dirty and knee-skinned from playing; she loved to climb the Sault walls and stand at their very edge as the Shomrim did, her toes jutting over the side, the harbor and the crowded streets of the city swaying below.
When Lin turned thirteen, she realized Mariam was not simply uninterested in roughhousing as Lin previously thought. She began to see, with a more adult eye, that Mariam was not delicate, but rather fragile. Fragile and ill. Her pale skin bruised easily; a short walk would leave her short of breath. She had fevers that came and went, and often she’d be up all night coughing, while Chana Dorin sat with her, giving her ginger tea.
“There’s something wrong with her,” she’d observed to Chana Dorin one day, when the older woman was plucking leaves from a feverfew plant in the physick garden. “Mariam. She’s sick.”