Chapter 6: Every Night

Nobody in the hall breathed with him.

He opened his eyes and looked straight down the line of perfumers at me.

I looked at the floor and coughed into my veil.

"Majesty," said Sadeq. "The perfumer from Tel Zahra. She has put the chamberlain to sleep standing up."

Tamir looked at the chamberlain, snoring between two guards.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth.

"Then she's already done more for him than I have," he said. "Tonight."

He turned and walked out, one hand on the wall.

They gave me a room off the old palace workroom, with a cot and a window and a lock on the inside.

I sat on the cot and held my own hands until the sun went down.

At the second hour of the night a servant took me up the long stairs.

I knew every step.

The Sultan's bedchamber was the same.

The carved screen. The silk cushions. The balcony doors open on the dark smell of the oasis.

The brazier sat cold beside the screen.

On a low table by the bed, a clay lamp burned with a small steady flame.

Tamir sat on the edge of the cushions in his white robe.

He was thinner. The shadows under his eyes had gone the color of bruises.

"Perfumer," he said.

"Majesty."

My goat voice.

He didn't say anything else.

I went behind the screen and knelt by the brazier, the way I'd knelt three hundred and sixty times.

I lit the coal. I let the drops fall.

Date blossom. Sage. Tamarisk. The resin.

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