Chapter 10: The Court Test

Laleh woke up when I swore.

She lifted her head off the bench with orris on her nose and looked into my kit.

"Are those...?"

"Ash rose."

She was on her feet in one move. "Throw them in the fire."

"No."

"Nazira!"

"Somebody put them there for a reason," I said. "In a few hours the court ladies will want to see inside this kit."

"If the petals are gone, they'll find something else."

"So what do we do?"

I bent and breathed over the petals without touching them.

Dried in an oven, not the sun. Scorched at the edges.

Fresh from the jar. Handled.

Sweat and rose oil and something else, a cheap almond hand cream.

"We go to the Rose Court," I said, "and we take them with us."

The Rose Court was a garden inside the women's wing, all pink stone and fountains.

Twenty court ladies sat on cushions under the arches in their best silk.

They'd served the old Sultan's first wife, and then his second, and they knew exactly what a queen smelled like.

Ruya sat at the center on a raised cushion in rose-colored silk, with her maid kneeling behind her.

The maid was a thin girl with her hands folded in her lap.

I knelt on the stones in front of them with my kit and my veil.

Laleh stood behind me with her arms crossed.

"Well?" said Ruya. "Let's smell this queen."

I uncorked the crystal flask and passed it to the oldest lady first.

She held it under her nose.

Her face changed.

"Oh," she said softly.

She passed it on.

It went along the line from hand to hand. Every one of them did the same thing.

A breath. A stillness. Then that soft "oh."

"That's the old garden," one of them whispered. "The one the first queen kept. With the saffron in the beds."

"Twenty years," said another. "I haven't smelled that in twenty years."

Keep reading free with an account. Start Falling for the Sultan Who Ordered My Death from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.