The road to the Castilian encampment was long, winding through olive groves, abandoned villas, and ash-colored hills. Dust curled in lazy spirals underneath the two strangers as a dry wind lifted the hem of Jahima's tattered robe while tugging at the man's hood. The sun had climbed enough to burn the morning chill away, turning the cracked earth to gold and easy the cold that had settled into their bodies.
Jahima sat stiffly atop the stranger's horse. Every muscle ached from travel and tension. They had ridden into the morning without stopping. Throughout the night her swollen fingers clenched the worn leather saddle as if to ground herself, but her eyes never stopped moving. She was watching, calculating. Measuring not just the terrain or the stranger behind her, but the weight of her choices. Her chances of survival. Her next move.
Every breath she took was a quiet wager, every glance a gathering of possibilities.
"You never gave me your name,"she said cautiously in an attempt to remain awake.
The man smiled beneath his hood, revealing a deep scar along his cheek.
"Names are for men who wish to be remembered."
Jahima kissed her teeth and rolled her eyes causing the spy to chuckle in amusement.
"Don't be so disappointed, all will be revealed soon."
"While that promise is intriguing, I am more stirred by my sudden need." she sighed utterly exhausted.
"Then we stop."
The stranger slowed the horse and dismounted, one hand still firmly holding the reins while the other outstretched to Jahima. Too tired to care, Jahima stepped down, the motion was casual but sure. The man offered her a waterskin without a question and she accepted it, the leather feeling cool against her palm. Their fingers brushed in the exchange, and she felt it was something like an apology, a recognition passed between them.
"Are you not worried I will run away?" Jahima asked as she walked toward the olive tree to relieve herself.
The man watched her in his pause, not with mistrust but with an odd kind of appraisal. One that acknowledged the woman before him as more than a prize or a mission.
"I think," he said, turning towards the horse to avert his eyes, "you'll do what you must, and you'll do it precisely."
"How kind of you to place your faith so pragmatically." Jahima uttered as she emerged from behind the olive tree smoothing her disheveled robe in an effort to maintain her decency.
The man watched the sway of her shoulders, the way she paused before she returned, and a softness in his posture emerged that the road had not earned. For the first time since she'd agreed to leave with this stranger, Jahima felt something loosen. An inch of space where she could breathe.
He helped her climb back onto the saddle and settled himself behind her, reins slack enough that the horse ambled, but not so slack they looked careless. They rode on in companionable silence, two silhouettes bound for the same uncertain horizon.
"If you tried to run," he whispered into her ear after a while, not as a threat but as an acknowledgment, "you would have likely died."
Jahima's spine straightened and she reminded herself that there was only one person she truly feared, and distance would do little to protect her from the shadow of the Malika.
◆◆◆◆
Morning spilled through the lattice windows like gold dust, painting shifting mosaics across the silk sheets. Aneesa stirred, her body heavy and thoughts hazy, as if she'd been dreaming with her eyes open.
Tariq lay beside her, still half-asleep, his breath steady against her skin. For a moment, she felt cocooned in warmth and silence. Then came the flickers of images she couldn't quite hold.
The throne room. Tariq calling her name. The Malika's eyes. The sound of something breaking…and then nothing.
Her body remembered the night, but her mind did not. It was as if the memory had been washed away, leaving only the echo of something she knew she didn't want to recall.
"It's strange," she murmured, turning to face Tariq. "It feels as though the night has vanished."
He smiled faintly, eyes still closed. "Then let it. Not every memory deserves to be kept."
Questions formed on her lips but before Aneesa could answer, a sharp knock shattered the calm.
Tariq groaned. "Ignore it," he said, refusing to open his eyes.
Another knock followed, firmer this time.
Aneesa's pulse quickened and she sat up covering herself with the sheet. "I do not believe that is a servant."
Tariq sighed, and slowly opened his eyes. "It's my mother."
When he opened the door, the Sultan stood there. His gaze was sharp and his tone measured.
Tariq blinked in disbelief. "Father, you came yourself?"
"Dress my son." The Sultan's eyes flicked briefly to Aneesa "Now is not the time to lose yourself in a woman's embrace."
Then he turned without waiting for a reply, and walked away, his robe humming across the marble floor.
Tariq lingered with the door ajar, confusion etched across his face before closing it. He turned to Aneesa, still in a fog. "If he's come in person, something's changed."
She said nothing but watched him fully dress in deep thought. Before he left he leaned down and kissed her deeply.
"I'll return soon," he whispered on her lips and then he was gone.
Aneesa sat in the silence that followed, the air still filled with the Sultan's presence. She had just begun to rise when a servant appeared at her door, bowing low before presenting a sealed note.
Bring the book.
◆◆◆◆
The Malika's chamber was bathed in morning light that cascaded in from the balcony she stood on. Silk curtains drifted lazily in the breeze, and the queen surveyed the distant mountains holding a small looking glass to the horizon. Her crimson gown burned like flame against the cool stone, and her dark unbound curls caught the light like waves in a dark sea.
"I see my son has finally let you wake," she said without turning.
Aneesa hesitated by the threshold. "He was called away, Your Majesty."
"Hmm. Then we have the morning to ourselves." The Malika folded her looking glass and faced Aneesa, her gaze unreadable but not unkind.
"You brought the book?"
"Yes." Aneesa stepped forward and presented an unremarkable book. Its leather cover was darkened with age, its edges wrapped in iron clasps etched with ancient script. It was her sole possession from her life with her father. A documented history of the empire that had been in her mother's family for centuries.
The Malika's eyes softened and she smiled out of character. "This book holds the lineage of every ruler who has walked these halls. Your mother's family has guarded it for generations."
"My father said it was a record," Aneesa murmured. "I didn't know it was ours to protect."
"It is more than a record," the Malika replied. "It is truth, disguised as history. And truth, my dear, is more dangerous than any sword."
Aneesa's fingers brushed the cover. "You knew my mother."
"I did," the Malika said with a tinge of pain in her voice. "She was my closest confidante. The first woman who dared to see me not as the Malika, but as a woman. She gifted me laughter when this palace only offered silence."
Emotion welled in Aneesa's throat. "She never spoke of you."
"She wished to protect you. And perhaps she feared what this place might make of you."
The Malika's gaze drifted to the small pendant at Aneesa's neck. It was a silver disk with a faint, incomplete symbol carved into its center.
"Tell me," she said, "did your mother ever explain that necklace?"
Aneesa looked down. "No. Only that it belonged to her mother before her."
The Malika extended a hand. "May I?"
Aneesa unfastened the pendant and placed it in her palm. The queen turned it over, her thumb tracing its grooves. "This is no ornament. It is a key, one only your mother could use."
"A key?" Aneesa whispered.
"To a palace without doors."
The words seemed to hum in the air. The Malika crossed to the nearest table and opened the book. The cover bore a small, almost invisible hollow beneath the filigree of the royal crest. She fitted the pendant into it with a soft click.
A pulse of light rippled across the surface. The ink on the first page began to shift, the letters rearranging themselves like water disturbed by wind. The words once chronicling bloodlines and titles melted into new symbols that glowed faintly, as if alive.
Aneesa stepped closer, breath shallow. "What is it saying?"
The Malika's voice dropped to a whisper. "The secrets of this palace. Passages that were never built. Bloodlines erased from memory. And the true power upon which our throne is sustained."
The light flickered, then dimmed with the last of the glowing script fading into the page.
The Malika turned to Aneesa, her expression unreadable.
"Your mother trusted you to guard this truth before you even understood it," she said softly. "And now it is yours to protect and understand."
Aneesa looked down at the pendant in her palm. The faintest trace of light still pulsed within its silver lines.
"Why me?" she asked.
The Malika smiled. "Because the palace without doors opens only for those born inside its walls."
The riddle answered nothing but Aneesa noted it in her mind as a piece of information she would need to remember.