Falling for the Sultan Who Ordered My Death novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Sand Gate

Walked barefoot out of the Sand Gate while the Sultan watches from the wall, Nazira finds a buried waterskin at the first cairn, and then sees riders with dogs coming from the city.

They put me back in the cell and nailed a board over the vent.

I sat against the wall and listened to the hammer.

Then I tore a strip off the inside of my hem and checked the little twist of musk I'd sewn there months ago.

A perfumer's habit. My father kept one in every coat he owned.

The guards had taken my knife and my shoes.

They hadn't thought to search a hem.

I didn't sleep.

At the first gray light they came with ropes.

They tied my hands in front of me and walked me through the lower city.

People had come out in their nightclothes to watch.

A baker I'd sold rose water to for six years spat on the stones beside my feet.

His wife pulled him back by the collar.

"She did his sleep oil," somebody said. "Every night. For a year."

"Every night," somebody else said, like that proved it.

The Sand Gate stood open at the end of the street.

Past it the Red Waste went on forever, the color of a fox, with the sun not up yet.

A crowd had packed the square inside the wall.

Then I heard her.

"Nazira! Nazira!"

Sahar was fighting her way through the front of the crowd with a bundle on her back.

She was supposed to be outside the west gate by now, with her things.

A guard caught her by the arm.

"Let me go with her! I'll carry the water!"

"There is no water," the guard said.

"Then I'll carry her!"

She bit him.

He yelled and dropped her, and two more grabbed her by the shoulders.

"Sahar," I said.

She stopped kicking.

Her face was swollen and red and wet.

"Go west," I said. "Find the dye sellers at the Copper Well. Tell them I sent you and they owe me for the indigo."

"I don't care about the indigo."

"They owe me eleven silver. Collect it."

She laughed, a horrible wet laugh, and then she cried harder.

The captain of the guard cut the rope on my wrists.

"No water, no shoes, no hat," he said to the crowd. "By the seal of the Sultan."

I looked up.

Tamir stood on the wall above the gate.

White robe, no crown, his hands flat on the stone.

He was looking down at me.

Beside him in deep blue, the Grand Vizier stood with his hands folded.

I looked at them both for as long as I wanted.

Then I looked at the lintel.

Someone had carved it a very long time ago, and the sand had worn the letters soft.

"Who walks back through this gate alive has paid."

Nobody had walked back in ninety years.

The children on our street used it for counting games.

I read it twice to make sure I had it right.

Then I walked out barefoot under it and didn't look back at the wall.

The road ran east for a hundred steps and then it simply stopped being a road.

The sand was still cool from the night.

It wouldn't stay cool.

My mother walked the salt road for twenty years.

She used to hold my face in her hands and turn it into the wind.

"What do you smell?"

"Nothing."

"Wrong. Again."

So I stood still and breathed.

Dust. Hot stone starting to warm.

My own fear, sour under my arms.

And far off, a green bitter thread, like crushed leaves in a hot hand.

Tamarisk.

Tamarisk grows where there's water under the sand.

I walked toward it.

The sun came up and hit the back of my neck.

By midmorning the sand burned through the soles of my feet.

I walked on the dark stones where I could and on the shadows of dunes where I couldn't.

The tamarisk smell got stronger.

So did something else.

Fresh-turned sand smells different from sand the wind has had.

Damper. Mineral.

The first cairn of the old salt road stood on a rise, a knee-high heap of flat red stones.

At its foot, someone had dug and filled in again.

I dropped to my knees and dug with my hands.

A waterskin.

Goat leather, new, full and heavy, still cool from being buried.

Somebody had tied the neck with a knot I'd never seen.

Three turns, a loop through itself, and a tail tucked under.

I sat there holding it against my chest.

Whoever had done this had come out through the Sand Gate in the dark.

Before my walk.

Knowing I'd come this way.

I couldn't make the knot come undone.

So I worked the whole cord up and off the neck in one piece, knot and all.

Under it sat a wooden stopper.

The first mouthful hit my throat so hard I coughed half of it back up.

I made myself stop after four swallows.

My mother's rule. Drink like you'll still be walking tomorrow.

I pushed the wooden stopper back in and tied the stranger's knot onto the strap.

Then I slung the strap across my body.

Then the wind turned.

It came from the west, from the city, and it brought me dog.

Wet fur and raw meat and horse sweat behind it.

I climbed the cairn's rise and shaded my eyes.

A line of dust stood up off the road behind me.

Riders.

Six of them, maybe eight, coming fast out of the Sand Gate.

Ahead of the horses ran the long low shapes of hunting dogs, noses down on my tracks.

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