Chapter 5: The Veil

"Good," I said. "Let him say it."

Sahar stared at me.

"I mean it," I said. "Let him lie there and say my name. He had his chance to say it in the Hall."

I went back behind the plank and kept packing bottles.

I put the tamarisk in the straw. Then the mint. Then the sage.

Then I stopped with the sage in my hand.

"How does he wake up?" I said.

"What?"

"You said gasping. Does he grab at things? His chest?"

"The kitchen girls say he claws at the bedclothes like he's drowning."

I put the bottle down very carefully.

A drop a night in lamp oil.

Breathed in sleep.

The sleeper wakes gasping and reaching.

My mother taught me the desert plants before she taught me my letters.

Ash rose was the first one she ever slapped out of my hand.

"It's not grief," I said. "It's not a weak heart. It's ash rose. Somebody's burning it in his room."

Sahar went white under her sunburn.

"The Vizier," she said. "You smelled it on him. That night. You told me through the cell door."

"And nobody else in that palace can smell it under lamp oil."

"So?"

"So in a month he's dead, and the Grand Vizier is standing next to the throne."

"So?" Sahar said again, and this time she was crying. "He killed you. Let him die."

I looked at her wrapped hands.

Then at my coin box, with forty-one silver in it and a knot at the bottom.

"The Vizier burned our house," I said. "With you in it."

Sahar wiped her face on her shoulder.

"I'm not going back for the Sultan," I said. "I'm going back for the man who did that to your hands."

"And I'm taking my house back."

The salt-mother had been listening from her fire the whole time.

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