The Fire Wish (26 page)

“While you were in the memory, I told Shirin and Atish what it contained.” Faisal turned the crystal shard around in his hands, studying the blue swirls of smoke inside. “I went back for her, after they had buried her.”

“You dug her up?” Shirin asked, incredulous.

“No. I returned to make this.” He gestured at the crystal. He hung his head. My mind raced, remembering my parents’ deaths. No one should see that. I wrapped my arms around myself. I wanted to stop the image of my parents’ blood staining the rugs in the tent.

“Why didn’t they tell me I wasn’t their child?” I whispered. “My mother. She was my aunt. And my father.” Then it dawned on me. “He must have known I was half-jinni, and he sent me to Baghdad.” I stood up too fast and had to hold myself against the wall until my body stopped shaking. I was going to vomit. “I can’t stay here.”

Shirin jumped up. “But you have to help Najwa. She’s your—she’s your
sister.
Right, Atish?”

Atish had a strange look on his face, as if he’d tasted something he wasn’t sure about. “Yeah,” he said tonelessly.

“Faisal,” I said, “if Hashim hated my mother so much—”

“He didn’t hate her. He was in love with her. Everyone was.”

“But he—”

“He was angry she was a jinni, and even angrier when he found out who her father was.”

“Who was her father?” I asked.

“An official. It’s not … I will explain that later.”

“Fine. But if Hashim was so upset, why did he come back to Zab? Why did he choose me for the prince?”

Faisal froze. “
Hashim
chose you for Prince Kamal?”

“He wanted someone from our tribe. He came out himself, the first time since—” The words caught in my throat. “Since that night. He picked me.”

Faisal stood up quickly. “Atish, go get Captain Rashid.” Atish nodded, but moved slowly, like he was half-asleep. “Don’t just stand there. Hurry. Hashim has something planned. Something he needs jinni blood for.”

After Atish left, I stared at the frankincense curling in the air. Everything was different now. I wasn’t who I’d always thought I was. I was half-jinni. I had a twin sister. And I had sent her straight to the man who killed our parents.

Atish returned with another jinni, who wore a leather vest studded with obsidian points. His face was carved in a permanent scowl, and his belt held two daggers. He was broader than Atish and had a long scar that stretched over his left shoulder, over the lion mark of the Shaitan. He was holding a map clamped on a piece of slate, and I noticed that his knuckles were white with scars. From training or from fighting humans?

Faisal spoke first. “This is Rashid, Captain of the Shaitan. This is Mariam’s daughter Zayele.” Rashid was exactly what I’d always thought the Shaitan would look like. Fierce, determined, and bloodthirsty. He grunted a hello, then pointed at the map, showing it to Faisal and Atish.

“She’ll have to go in. They are there, there, and there.” Faisal nodded each time Rashid’s finger jabbed the map.

“Who will go in?” I asked. “Me?”

Atish nodded solemnly. “You’re the only one who can. You’re part human—”

“I’m more human than jinni,” I said bitterly.

Faisal placed a hand on my shoulder. “Zayele, the truth is, we need you. You can get past the jinni wards, just as Najwa did.” His voice had gone dry, and he swallowed.

“I know the wards keep jinn out of the palace. But what
are
they, exactly?”

Atish sounded very tired. “Hashim put them in place after he murdered Mariam. We don’t know what’s on them, but we’ve gotten intelligence that tells us where they are.”

“They’re just paper,” Rashid said, “but they’re powerful. They have a holy mark on them that blocks anything made by the devil.”

“So, jinn
were
made by the devil?” I had heard rumors about jinn, but I’d never paid attention to that part. I had only cared about the wishes.

Shirin took my hand. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. We aren’t demons, you know.”

“The first jinni was a human,” Atish said.

“Iblis?” I asked, throwing out the one name I knew.

Shirin nodded. “He found an angel lying broken on the ground. Fearing it was a test, he helped the angel, and then—”

“The angel offered to give Iblis a gift,” Faisal cut in. “But Iblis declared he did not need any gift from an angel. The
angel laughed and said he could not resist such a gift—and he gave Iblis what we now call ‘wishpower.’ ”

“And it changed everything,” Atish said.

“How?”

Faisal smiled grimly. “Human bodies can’t handle the power needed to grant wishes, so it changed his body. He twisted into a being of fire and sand. A jinni. Then the angel showed Iblis where he could take his tribe, to start a new race. They followed a tunnel that led here. It wasn’t until later that Iblis discovered he’d helped the first of the fallen angels, and by then it was too late.”

“Iblis built the Cavern out of wishes?” I asked.

Faisal and Rashid eyed each other. “We don’t have time for this,” Rashid said. “Jinn are as evil, and as good, as humans. That’s all you need to know. We need to take down the wards.” Faisal nodded. “Zayele, whatever the wards are, they stop us from going anywhere near them. I don’t know how Najwa got there the first time, but she did. And I believe you can too. It must be your human blood.”

“But I don’t know her. Not like my brother—” I stopped. Yashar wasn’t my little brother. Not anymore. Something cold went through me as I thought of how nothing had been real. “I just took a wish from her. That was it.” I looked again at the map that showed the palace. She was in there, somewhere.

“It was a Fire Wish,” Atish said. He sounded grave. “When a jinni demands a wish from another jinni, that’s what it’s called. It’s the worst thing you can do to a jinni.”

Shirin cut in. “But she didn’t know she was a jinni. She didn’t know about Fire Wishes.”

Atish looked at Rashid. “So what happens?”

“Zayele,” Rashid said, looking me squarely in the face, “when you made the wish, you took away Najwa’s choice, and most of her power.”

“She can make everything right again,” Faisal said, stepping between us. “She can go back, and she can expose Hashim. She can save her sister.”

“How?” I asked. “No one listens to me. I was nothing but a bride.”

“Let’s go outside,” Faisal said. He motioned for me to follow, and I did. We left the school building, and for the first time, I looked at the Cavern’s ceiling, at the jutting crystals and the ever-changing homes, and knew my mother, Mariam, had lived here. Part of me was from this place.

Faisal walked toward the wall that stretched along the lake. He held his arms behind his back while he strolled. He was at ease, the opposite of everything inside me. Finally, he stopped.

The lamplighter walked past, high on his stilts, and Faisal gestured toward him.

“Zayele, if that man can wish a light out of empty air, you can find a way to show the world the truth.”

I leaned forward and pressed my hands into the coarse stone of the wall. “I can’t.”

“But you must. You’re able to slip through the wards, so it
has
to be you. You’ve got to save her. You’re the only one who can undo what you did, as much as that is possible.” He frowned. “A Fire Wish is the most devastating thing one jinni
can do to another. A long time ago, when we first came to the Cavern and we were learning about our power, there were a few who commanded wishes from the others. They stole their free will, just as you took Najwa’s. Whenever she tries to defy your wish, and I’m sure she will, it will be excruciating.”

Again, I’d done too much. “I didn’t know.”

“We know you didn’t mean to harm Najwa, but what is disturbing is that you so freely took from someone else.”

There wasn’t anything to say to this. What could I do now?

Atish, Shirin, and Rashid came toward us. Rashid was holding his map rolled up like a scroll, and he held it toward me.

“We need to focus on what’s most important. We need to get in there and take down the wards. You’re the only one who can do that, other than Najwa,” Rashid said. “You are as much a jinni, and a human, as Najwa.” He had gotten even more intense, and I found myself backing away from him.

“We can help you,” Shirin said, placing her hands on my shoulders and gripping me firmly. “After you take down the wards, we’ll come.”

“And after that? Where do I go?” I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t face my father—my adoptive father. And the Cavern, even with its jewels dripping from the ceiling, was too alien. I didn’t belong anywhere.

“It’s up to you,” Faisal said. I watched the flames on the lake while I thought about it. They twirled around each other, no two alike.

“All right. Show me how,” I said.

I SLICED THE lemon in half and squeezed the juice over the back of my hand, right over where the henna hid my mark. It stung, and I gasped. I had been rubbing at the skin for several minutes, and it was already raw. The lemon juice was like a poison, seeping into the cracks of my skin, but it was nothing like the burning in my lungs when I tried to resist Zayele’s wish. That had been
real
pain.

“I told you it would hurt,” Rahela said. She was sitting across from me, rolling another lemon in circles on the tabletop, pressing it beneath her flattened hand to make it juicier. “Is it fading?”

It was, but only because I was scrubbing off a few layers of skin. “Yes,” I said, wincing. The Eyes of Iblis mark was almost whole, although it was a little redder than it should have been. “I don’t know if it will work, but what else can we do?”

We had decided not to hide it anymore as soon as we’d gotten back to the room. If the caliph was dying, we didn’t have much time before they’d decide to marry me to the
prince, and I needed someone to find Zayele before that happened.

The lemon’s acidity worked better than my scrubbing alone, but I couldn’t sit still. It stung, and I flapped my hand in the air, trying to get it to stop.

“Maybe you should do something else for a while. Like read that book you found,” Rahela suggested. “I’m afraid you’ll rub all the skin off.”

I picked up the book with my non-stinging hand. “Good idea,” I said. “I’ll try a distraction.” I tucked it under my arm and went out onto the patio. Kamal had said he’d meet me here tonight, but I wasn’t sure he would come now that his father’s condition had gotten worse.

The sky above was the bruised color of a dying day. On the other side of the palace, the sun was setting, but there was still enough light to read by. I sat on the bench, took a look at the cutout between my garden and Kamal’s, and opened the book I’d taken from the House of Wisdom.

It wasn’t long before I discovered it was a journal. The charts and lists of names had thrown me before, but now I realized it was organized by date, and each entry began with some activity that had happened that day. I flipped through the pages and came to an entry I had to read twice.

I’ve told Faisal, but he doesn’t believe me. He trusts Hashim too much, and I think it’s because he helped Melchior bring Hashim into the Cavern. He never wants to admit he could have been wrong. I have sent a letter to his supervisor, but have not yet heard back.

Faisal and Hashim were friends? He had
never
told me this. Everything he’d ever said about the man concerned his betrayal and his hand in the start of the war. He’d never said he knew him.

I flipped to the end, but it was blank. The last entry was halfway through the book, and hurried. It was darker now, and I could barely make out the words:

Someone attacked a human village, and they’re blaming Faisal. Hashim was there and is due back tonight with more details, but I cannot bring myself to believe a word he says. He wants more than the ambassadorship. He wants the caliphate, the Cavern, and a jinni to command.

Delia says I should return before Hashim arrives, but someone must stay and defend Faisal. Someone must keep the flame going. I will continue in my translation work until I hear from Faisal himself.

Faisal had told me once that his brother had been working in the House of Wisdom. He had been a translator, but had died during the first wave of attacks the humans made on the jinn. This had to be his journal.

I swiped my thumb over the last of his words. They’d been written just before the war began. If he had left the palace like Delia suggested, he wouldn’t have been killed.

Saddened, I laid the journal on my lap and glanced up at the moon. It seemed I could only get my hands on tragic stories, whether recorded with pen or with crystal.

“Hello,” someone said, and I jumped. The voice had come
from the wall, and I saw Kamal’s face peering through. “You looked very absorbed. I almost didn’t want to disturb you.”

“It’s very engrossing,” I said, sighing.

“What is it?”

Quickly, I snapped the book shut and held it behind me. “It’s just an old journal.”

He raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Interesting. May I see it?”

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t exactly run back into my room. That would raise too many suspicions. But what if he saw who had written this, and it made him even more curious? “I found it lying around,” I said, holding it up. His eyes darted to the leather.