The Fire Wish (9 page)

“Shatamana,”
I whispered.

Then it happened. Tiny grains of sand swirled around my skirt and scratched my cheeks, moving with the air that left my lungs. A wind of limestone bits and musk twisted around and around. The lake rushed past me, a marbled vision of fire and water.

Then I dissolved into smoke the color of my hair and flew up through the Cavern, a burst of flame pushing through the layers of rock and sand.

“PRINCESS,” THE GUARD said. He was knocking on the door. I sat up just as Rahela stood from her spot on the floor. The guard’s beard filled the whole window.

“You’ve come to let us out? That’s really too kind,” I said, while I checked to make sure I was properly covered.

“No, Princess. The vizier wanted us to tell you to prepare yourself. We will be arriving in Baghdad before the day is over.”

It was good I was still sitting down. Somehow, I managed to nod.

“Thank you,” Rahela told the guard. She spoke to him about breakfast and needing extra water for me to bathe in, but my focus faded.

Today was the hideous day I’d be let out of my little cabin and brought into the legendary Palace of Baghdad.

After the guard left, Rahela washed my hair and braided it in layers.

“Let’s leave my hair like this. It doesn’t matter what I look like,” I said.

She ignored my complaints and tugged out the knots. “It doesn’t matter to them, but it matters to me. I can’t walk in looking better than a princess,” she said. Then she grinned. “Unless you want
me
to marry the prince and have
you
be the constant companion.”

“Would you?” I asked, jerking my hair from her fingers.

She rapped my head lightly with the brush. “Of course not, silly. Besides, Hashim knows what you look like.”

“I think I’m going to throw up,” I said, resigning myself to her overly elaborate hair design.

At the end of an hour, I had the hair of a princess about to be wed. Then she took out her narrow henna box and painted the soles of my feet and then my palms. She drew diamonds and curlicued flowers across the lines, dipping her brush into the henna pot over and over. The brush tickled and tugged my skin, leaving behind a layer of black goo.

I groaned, pretending not to notice that what she’d done was beautiful. “So I have a few hours left. Then we’ll be out of this cage and in another.”

Rahela sighed. “The palace won’t be a cage. And at any rate, it won’t be as small as this place.” She stole a glance at the door. We’d leave this cabin and never see it again. “There.” She wiped the brush on a bit of cloth and closed the henna pot.

I flapped my hands in the air. As long as the henna was wet, I couldn’t touch anything. She reached for my feet and scraped away the dried henna there, revealing swirling flowers coiling around my toes, triangles and pearls on the bottoms of my feet, and bell-shaped flowers curling up my ankle. All of it was red.

It would fade, but by then I’d be a married woman with weeks of experience. I shivered. I didn’t want to think about it. I went to my usual spot by the window. Outside, the sun was straight above, so that the guard had no shadow and the water was blinding.

“I’m sure it’s dry now,” Rahela said behind me. I nodded and turned toward her, but just as I did, something happened. The hairs on my arms rose and a sudden rush of cold swept across me, followed by a wave of heat. I turned back to the window.

A girl was looking through it. I gasped, and in a blink, she was gone.

On instinct, I reached through the window and grabbed at the air. Something caught in my fingers.
Hair.
She hadn’t gone. I yanked at it and heard a muffled cry.

She was a jinni. A jinni was
right here.
In my hands. Everything I’d been told about jinn rushed through my mind—invisibility, bejeweled hair, wishes—and when she tried to pull away, I thrust my other hand through the window and touched what had to be her face.

“Got you!”

The jinni gasped, and I felt her shudder. She fell apart and came in through the window like a wave of sand. Then, as quickly as she’d turned to sand, she came together again and fell into me, knocking us both onto the floor. Then her hands pushed at me and she backed up. I reached forward before she could flee, and grabbed her wrist.

She wore a pale gown embroidered in silver stripes, and her hair shimmered with jewels. Her eyes were wide and dark as a
gazelle’s. And just as nervous. But the strangest thing—even stranger than finding a jinni at my window—was that her face was like my own.

“Zayele!” Rahela shrieked. She backed up in the corner of the cabin, and her nostrils flared.

“She’s a jinni,” I said.

The jinni froze. “Let me go,” she whispered.

“Why do you look like me?” I asked, squeezing her wrist. I was not going to let go.

“Please, let me go.”

There had to be a reason a jinni showed up here, right before I reached Baghdad. It couldn’t be coincidence. “Grant me a wish.”

She tried to pull away, shaking her head. “Please, don’t ask that—”

“But those are the rules, aren’t they? I know we’re at war, but before all that, jinn granted wishes. All we had to do was catch one.”

“Don’t, Zayele. Let her go.”

“I need this wish, Rahela,” I said. I gritted my teeth. I had almost given up on escape, but the perfect solution had appeared at my window: if a human caught a jinni, the jinni had to grant that human a wish. It was a rule of nature to keep the jinn from growing too powerful. “You,” I said to the jinni girl, “you owe me a wish. Then I won’t kill you or call the guards. Is that a deal?”

She balled up her fists. I could feel the tendons in her wrist moving, and was surprised at how human she felt. “Why can’t
I wish myself home?” she asked with a strain in her voice. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but it didn’t matter. I needed this wish.

She looked so much like me. With a change of clothes and a bit of henna, no one would notice. A tingling idea began to form, and I felt the corners of my mouth lifting. I knew what I would wish for. I smiled, and a powerful surge pulsed beneath my fingers.

“Is that normal?” I asked.

She glared at me. “I don’t know. I’ve never had a human hold me prisoner before.”

“I’ll just say my wish now, then.” I breathed. I had to get this right. In all the stories about jinn, the human never said the wish right. I remembered listening to the fables with my cousins and shouting out what the man should have wished for. But it never changed. The man would make his wish and everything would unravel. The rest of the story was always about how he slaved to get everything back to how it’d been before. I was not going to make a greedy mistake. My words were going to be just right.

I looked into her black eyes and felt a stutter in my veins. “I wish for you to take my place and send me home.” It was a two-part wish, but I hoped it would work. Rahela cried out behind me.

The jinni shook her head, then ripped her hand out of mine. She turned to the door and tried to beat it down, but she could not slip through it. Crying, she turned back to me, her cheeks flushed and blotchy.

Didn’t you have to have a soul to cry?

“What have you done?” Rahela asked. She looked more disappointed than I’d ever seen her look before.

“But—”

A white fire spread across the jinni’s skin and then swept over to me. It fell down my shoulders like a desert breeze. The wish was working.

The jinni doubled over and clutched at her stomach. “I shouldn’t have come,” she said, slumping to the floor and writhing in pain. I watched for a moment before I felt something like butterflies—burning, flurrying butterflies—multiply and spread out through my limbs.

My body fell apart, grain by grain, and turned into a raging fire. I screamed, but the scream didn’t come with me.

MY CHEEK WAS stinging. Someone had just slapped me. I sat up and looked at the woman who had been with the girl who made the wish.

“What happened to Zayele?” she exclaimed, keeping her voice just above a whisper.

My stomach lurched, and I thought I would vomit, but nothing happened. It only turned, along with my head.
What have I done? Faisal will
kill
me.
The girl was gone. Free.

The woman was panting in fear and had drawn back her hand. She held it close, as if afraid I’d hit her back. I couldn’t answer her. I had to go home.

“Mashila,”
I whispered. Instantly, a piercing pain shot through my lungs, and I curled up against the wall of the little room we were in, gasping for air. The woman was looking at me, more curious than concerned.

“
Mashila.
” Again, my lungs were on fire, and the burning spread to my heart, to my stomach, and up my neck. I kept gasping. Each breath caused pain, and I could not take any
deep breaths or speak. In desperation, I shook away the
mashila
wish and set Zayele’s foremost in my mind. Instantly, the pain and fire dissolved, like ashes in the wind. When I had finally calmed down, I looked over to the woman.

What had the wish done to me? I could barely breathe!

“Keep the noise down, or the guards will come. Now I’ll ask again,” the woman said. “What happened to Zayele?”

“I don’t know,” I said. My words were hollow and dry. I couldn’t wish myself home. I couldn’t stand the pain.

“She turned into a flame and slipped through the window,” she said, choking back tears.

Zayele had transferred like a jinni, but why had she turned into fire? I looked up at the woman. “I have to leave,” I said. I tried to go through the door, but it was firm as granite, and there was no way to open it from inside.

I couldn’t get out! I banged on the door, screaming for it to open.

“They won’t open it. Zayele tried that for days.” The woman slumped down onto a bed platform. “You look like her.”

“I can’t stay,” I said. I held up my hands and rubbed the owl-eye tattoo. It still glittered. But I didn’t press on it. If I managed to escape this strange wish, then any images I sent back would be glaring at me from the Eye. There’d be no way to deny I’d left the Cavern without permission.

How was I going to get out of this if I couldn’t open the door and I couldn’t wish myself home?

The woman pursed her lips and then said, “So her wish worked.” Her gruff voice broke again, and she pressed her hands against her mouth before holding up a clay pot.

“I …” I fought back my tears. “Why did she do this to me?”

“Sit.” It wasn’t a request, so I sat. “What’s your name? If jinn have names.”

“Najwa.” It came out a faded whisper.

“I’m Rahela. I’m Zayele’s cousin.” She was a few years older than me, with straight hair, narrow shoulders, and a piercing glare. “From now on, I have to refer to you as Zayele. Until she comes back or you find a way to fix all this.” Everything I’d been raised to do, all that Faisal had hoped for me, would never come to be unless I escaped. He was going to kill me.

If the humans didn’t do it first. Deflated, I let my head fall forward. Rahela picked up one of my hands and spread my palm flat.

“We have to get you ready, and we have very little time.”

I shook my head in protest, but Rahela picked up a long, narrow box and set it on her knees. She lifted the lid and pulled out a thin brush. Then she opened a clay pot of henna paste.

I had first seen henna a few months ago, in the artifact room. Shirin and I had drawn swirls and diamonds on our hands, trying to copy human designs. Faisal had been amused. My mother had nearly spat when she’d seen it, and clamored for a jar of the paste, but Faisal wouldn’t let it out of the artifact room. She’d simmered for days. None of her wishes matched the intense red the henna had stained into my skin. Now I watched as Rahela took my palm.

She inspected it, flipping it over. She examined my mark and shrugged. “You feel exactly the same, but we will have to cover that up.”

“I’m flesh and blood, just like you,” I said. A lock of hair
fell over her eyebrows, shading them. She nodded, and then expertly sketched out a filigree design on my hand with the brown paste. What if I did look like a human? What if I
could
blend in? My fears eased a little. I was being dressed up like a human princess. I was
in her place.