The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

RAMPION Alexandra Duncan

When the sands whip my face or the rag boys kick my feet out from under me, I ask myself if it was worth going blind, having laid eyes on her. If only I had clapped my hands to my ears when I first heard her singing. Had I not tethered my horse and waded across the river to pluck oranges from the trees growing wild around her estate, I might be riding the country still, surveying my father’s holdings and reveling in the sweet, unformed yearning I felt that day before I crossed the river.

This morning, as all mornings, I grip my walking stick, secure my tattered, sweat-grimed taqiyah on the crown of my head, and pick my way over the swept cobblestones of the Plaza Asad. When I had my eyes, I only cared if the roads were kept well enough to allow my mother’s horse and escort smooth passage, but now each narrow street has its own topography. I navigate by the jutting stones, the smells of marzipan, meat—fresh lamb at the halal butchers, jamón serrano at the Christian shops—and the waft of dank water steaming from the sewers. The fishmongers, newly fetched up from the Guadalquivir, shout over each other. Their voices mix with the clang of steel, the rush and tang of the forge-fire consuming the air, and above all, the distant cry of the muezzin calling us to prayer.

A stone lion crouches by the western spoke of the fountain at the heart of the plaza. I rest one hand on its warm grained head and dip the other into the fountain pool to cup up a drink. Then quickly, I splash another handful over my face and head and hope that will suffice to please God in place of proper ablutions. I can do no better.

A crowd of men mill around me on their way to prayer. A year ago, a throng would have packed the plaza, men and their wives and children meandering down to the mosque together. But today it’s only men’s voices I hear. Most of the women and children hide away indoors; what few there are huddle in dense pockets of silence. A year ago, these men—scribes, poets, merchants—would have talked the price of geldings, the weight of a bolt of cloth. They would have complained about their slow progress translating Sophocles from the Greek, while their wives’ voices bubbled under the din. But today Berber mercenaries ring the plaza, looking out for Northern spies and keeping an eye on our impiety, all at the behest of our vizier, Sanchuelo ibn al-Mansur, who every year tugs another corner of power loose from the caliph. The men speak in low voices of the Christian chieftains’ incursions into Moorish territory, our vizier’s bloody reprisals, and the weakness of the throne.

“…said the Catalan forces took their orders from the Pope…”

“…cut off their hands and feet.”

“…mercenaries set fire to the library…”

And then, in the middle of it, a name drops into my ear like a stone.

“Adán Hadid.”

I lock to the voice that said it, a man’s lilting, nasal tone that catches behind the speaker’s teeth. My ear marks him a Castellano, ruby-blond and reedy, with pale skin, like all men from the North. Trolling the plaza for gossip and bargains, keeping friendly with the Jewish and Moorish merchants so his trade name stays good. Before I lost my sight, I had friends like him, advisors and artisans of his faith in my employ. My mother and I strolled with them by the tinkling garden pools at the palace of Madinat al-Zahra, played ajedrez with them, presented their wives with gilt and mother-of-pearl fans, took down the tapestry maps in our halls so they could examine them. I brought Northerners to tea shops in the city where the air hung full of smoke and spice and men’s voices, the floor was soft with raw-silk pillows, and the proprietors kept my comings and goings to themselves. And always, the captain of my guard, Adán Hadid, stood silent in the shadows of the room with his hand on the pommel of his sword.

“Hadid, I heard the caliph laid a death sentence on him,” the Castellano says. “If he’s ever found.”

“Are they saying the Umayyad prince is dead now? Are they sure?” asks another man, a native Córdoban by his accent.

A third man, older, makes a sputtering noise with his lips. “What do you think? They found his horse with its throat gored out.”

“And Hadid never seen since that day,” the Castellano adds. He clucks his teeth. “He’s a Jew. What else do you need to know?”

“I heard,” the older man says. He lets his voice sink even lower. “Hadid was acting on orders from the vizier.”

“No?” the Castellano says, urging him on.

“Yes,” he says. “Think on it. Without an heir, who does the caliph name as successor?”

“He’ll never agree to it,” the Córdoban puts in. “I heard the caliph’s turned stubborn since the prince disappeared. Told the vizier to send some of his Berbers back.”

I push myself to my feet, my blood hot and calling me to fight. I want to grab the Castellano by his shirtfront, shout out my name to the crowd. But in my blindness, I stumble. Misery and shame flare up in my old wounds, and I remember how I brought this fate on myself, on Adán, on her. Why I must forever bite my tongue. I grip my walking stick and hobble into the crowd, away from the gossip blackening Adán Hadid’s good name. My arms and back tremble with unspent rage, as if I am bearing a terrible weight. This talk of the prince dead, my—his horse dead, makes me feel naked to the world.

I am so tired. I speak to God, though I don’t know whether the words leave my mouth. I should be riding out to hunt, walking with my young wife through the topiary gardens, teaching our child the curve of his first letters. But none of those things have come to pass, and my youth crumbles.

The crowd pulls me to the courtyard of orange trees outside the Great Aljama Mosque. I let the flow of men carry me inside. There, I can crouch to pray in the soft dark without drawing the pity or stares that dog my footsteps in the daylight, only another man among thousands kneeling in the mosque’s candlelit womb.

Afterward, when I feel my way back into the sunlight, it is like being born. In my good eye, I see light, sometimes, and blurred colors, but mostly light, and it is never so bright as when I step out of the cool dark into the grit and glare of the everyday world. I siphon a bit of peace from the thought that no one has found Adán, not yet, and that means he is safe. And perhaps even she is safe, and maybe he is with her.

That night, I dream of killing my horse, my Anadil. My hands are steady as I draw the blade across her throat. She is hurt; it is a mercy killing. After it’s done, I cradle her head in my lap. But when her blood pools hot in my hands, I see she isn’t injured after all. She is whole, except for the gaping line of red at her throat. Anadil rolls her eyes up at me. I try to hold her flesh together, but it’s too late. Her black coat is thick with blood and my hands are slick with it. There is nothing to be done but to watch her bleed into the dirt.

I wake with my heart hammering. The open night hangs black around me, heavy and tight with a wet chill that signals the hour farthest from dawn. My bad leg pains me. I reach inside my shirt and clutch the thin braid of hair I wear tied around my neck, stroke it with my thumb. Even after all this time, it is still silk-whisper smooth, though I am beginning to forget its color. Is it tawny brown, the way I remember her hair spread over the bed cushions? Or bright as copper when the sun beams through it, as it was the day we met, when she leaned from her window and it fell loose around her shoulders? Or does it shine like burnished gold in the candlelight, elegantly twined, as on the night she first brought me to her bed? I am even beginning to forget her face. We have no images of each other, exchanged no portraits, and even if we had, I could not stoke my memory with her likeness. Is it possible, then, she remembers me at all?

Ojalá que me recuerde. God will it she remember.

From the mouth of the alley, the sound of a man pissing on the brickwork trickles its way to me. I press my body against the wall, trying to make myself small and unseen.

“… por la zorra que me mató la alma,” the man sings, hushed and then suddenly loud, the way drunks do. At first, I don’t recognize the voice.

“Eh, Gemel, Lope, hermanos, ¿adonde vaís?” he calls after someone on the street.

The Castellano.

I hear him tugging on the belt of his trousers, and then the stumble-step of his footfalls. I pull myself up by the wall and feel my way after him. I don’t know why I follow. Maybe it’s the hope of hearing more news of Adán, or maybe I want to bash his head against the paving stones for naming my friend a traitor. I don’t know, but I follow.

“Esperad, hijos de puta, esperad,” the Castellano mutters. His voice sticks, foggy and rough with drink.

“Lázaro!” one of his companions calls from far ahead. “¡Andate, cabrón!”

We’ve reached the mouth of the alley. I can tell by the way the air opens up around me and, through my better eye, the muddy red glow from the braziers that line the street.

“Vengo, vengo. Santa Madre,” Lázaro says under his breath. And then a heavy sound follows, like a water cask tumbling on its side or a whole bolt of damask dropped to the floor.

I stumble back into the wall behind me and feel my way to the corner of the building’s stone stairwell. I know a body hitting the ground when I hear it.

“Lázaro!” the Castellano’s companions call. One of them is laughing, but the other has a nervous waver in his voice as he jogs back along the street.

“¿Que te pasó?” the nervous one asks as his steps slow to a quick walk.

“Guuugghn,” Lázaro says. He pauses to draw breath. Something wet splashes on the paving stones and the smell of bile leaks into the air.

“Christ,” his other friend says, coming upon the scene. His coat sleeve muffles his voice. “Drunk again.”

“What do we do?” the nervous one asks.

“Leave him for the Berbers,” the other mutters darkly. The vizier’s mercenaries are so pious, they not only abstain from drink themselves, but flog anyone caught in public drunkenness.

“We can’t,” the nervous one says. “Who’ll do for the horses come morning?”

“Maldito sea.” The other man pauses, thinking. “All right. We’ll go for Delgado and the cart, and we’ll have Delgado help us take him to the rooming house.”

“I’ll go,” the nervous one says.

“The hell you will. You’re half as bad as him. You and Delgado will start drinking, and then you’ll forget and leave me cold on the street,” the other one says.

“I won’t.”

“You will. I haven’t forgotten that time before Semana Santa.”

They both fall silent. I hear nothing but the shuffle of their feet on the sandy stones and the deep, heavy breath rising out of Lázaro’s prone form.

“Look,” one of them mutters suddenly, and they go silent again. The hairs on my forearms and shoulders rise up, as if a magnet has swept over them. A terrible foreboding hits me: they’ve seen me hunched in the shadow of the stairs.

“Help me,” the least-drunk one says.

The other grunts and the sound of something heavy sliding over the stones shushes toward me. I feign sleep, thinking maybe they’ll leave me in peace if they see me unconscious. Lázaro’s hot, heavy form drops down next to me and slumps against my shoulder. His friends laugh like a clutch of newly betrothed girls.

“Watch him for us, good sir,” the drunk one quips.

“See he doesn’t fall into the wrong hands,” the other calls as they hurry away.

I had pictured Lázaro a reedy man, but he is not. The mass of dead weight leaning on my shoulder proves him thick in the middle and meaty everywhere else. I can see why his friends didn’t think they could lift him alone. When I’m sure they are gone, I shove him away.

Lázaro groans. “¿Gemel, que haces?”

My heart picks up speed. My blood still wants violence, but my years of learning, my training in logic, stay my hand. The Castellano can tell me nothing of Adán if he’s dead.

I wet my bottom lip and swallow, try to rouse some of my old self for what I must do. “Lázaro?” I lean close to his ear, speaking low.

He stirs. “Gemel?”

“No,” I say. “You address Ishaq ibn Hisham, of the Umayyad line.”

His throat makes a series of little sucking noises. I can picture him blinking his eyes, trying to make them focus well enough to see me. “You’re dead,” he says.

“Lázaro,” I say, “tell me what you know about Adán Hadid.”

“He is a murderer.” Lázaro sounds suddenly lucid, enunciating every word.

“Yes.” I grit my teeth. “And where is he?”

Lázaro’s voice drops and quavers. “I don’t know.” He sounds genuinely forlorn, but then his tone turns again, just as quickly. “But if I find him, the caliph will pay me in gold and horses and I will be a lord and everyone will say, ‘At your pleasure, Don Lázaro, estimado Don Lázaro.’”

Disappointment thickens my chest. I take a deep breath and push on. “And the Lady Sofia de Rampion? Have you heard anything of her?”

Lázaro pauses. I wish to God I could see his face so I could know if it showed bewilderment, or careful thought, or sudden, clear-eyed suspicion.

And then Lázaro laughs. He taps my shoulder with his index finger. “Oh, prince, I’ve heard about you. Sofia de Rampion is beautiful, the most beautiful, la flor más bella del mundo Cristiano. ¿Me entiendes? But you can’t have her, no, no. Her brothers have taken her north to the Pyrenees, to the care of her uncle, King Filipe of Roussillon de Catalunya, where the Moors can’t touch her.”

My heart is ablaze and then dust, all in a moment. Sofia is alive. But I would fear to travel to Roussillon with both my eyes and my horse alive again. The whole kingdom of Castilla separates us, and then a mountain range of petty warlords.

“But I, I will see her for myself.” Lázaro leans close to confide in me. His breath is swampy. “When I bring the horses.”

I start, my right hand tight on Lázaro’s loose sleeve. “When you bring the horses?”

“Yes, the horses for her brothers and her uncle’s men.” He lowers his voice to a whisper. “I would never tell you this, except you’re dead and you won’t speak of it to the vizier.”

My muscles tense at the mention of Sofia’s kinsmen. “Yes,” I agree.

“They are war horses.” Lázaro slaps my arm. “Can you believe it? My horses, bearing the soldiers of Christ on their backs as they retake al Andalus? Crushing the Moors’ skulls beneath their hooves.” He laughs.

My body sings for me to run, to fight, but I am trapped by the darkness around me. I make myself release Lázaro’s shirt sleeve.

Lázaro slumps against the wall with a muted thud. He sighs. “They say her voice is like birdsong painted in honey and her hair is so long you could scale the curtain wall of an alcazar with it. They say her maids must walk behind her to keep it from trailing in the dust.”

Her voice comes back to me all at once, like a basin of cold water emptied over my head. I hear it anew, mixed with the steady tambour of my horse’s hooves over the dusty road by the far side of a shaded tributary. That day, I left Adán and the rest of my men behind at the river mouth to pray and rest through the midday, while I rode out alone into the silent heat of the countryside. When the peaked towers of the Rampion manor came into view over the orange groves surrounding their land, I slowed my horse.

Common wisdom held one should ride slow and quiet when their gabled roof showed above the trees, for then a man was close enough to call the eye of Lamia de Rampion, the matriarch of the family. She was said to be a sahhaar, a bruja, a sorcière come down to us from the North. Since I was a small boy, I had listened in on the stories told at court by lamplight. No one had seen her ride in, but one day in winter, on the eve of a bitter, snapping frost, a drover sighted her in the courtyard before the abandoned Rampion house, straight-backed in her black dress, with two boys at her skirts and a white-swaddled babe in her arms. Ismail Almendrino, whose lands met hers to the south, went up to find what might be her claim on the land. She recited her lineage for him back to the rule of the Visigoth chieftains, saying she was the grandniece of old Osoro de Rampion, who had died childless and left the manor vacant some ten years before my birth. She had come south with her grandchildren, recently orphaned, to reclaim the lands for her grandsons. Almendrino said she spoke Castellano and some Arabic, but her accent was the French of the Pyrenees and her bearing that of one who cradles power in her hands and tongue.

When spring came, the orange groves of the Rampion manor that had stood so long untended bowed heavy with fruit. And it might have gone well for Lamia and her grandchildren, had a boy not been found dead under the orange trees, his tongue blue as from snakebite and a lobe of fruit in his mouth, but no mark upon him. Then the whispers started. Some of the older boys, who had become accustomed to eating from the Rampion trees when the estate stood empty, said Lamia de Rampion had screeched at them and called down devils when she found them filling their pockets with oranges. The drovers told how she walked out alone on nights of great wind and communed with the al-shayatin by the light of a bonfire. The women even took to saying her granddaughter was no blood of hers, but a babe snatched from her mother’s breast and spirited away to give the old woman company. In more savage times, they would have raged to her door with fire and brand, but Ismail Almendrino, who was learned and pious, stayed their hands. Still, the Christians crossed their breasts and spat when Lamia’s servants ventured out to market. And even Almendrino took to hanging blue and white nazar in the trees along the borderline of their lands.

I knew better. I had studied the biology of voles and frogs, mixed black Oriental powder at my tutor’s hands, and understood the forces behind the invisible tug of magnets. Lamia de Rampion was no more a witch than I was a prophet. She was only an old woman who craved solitude and was stingy with her harvest.

I led Anadil down a gentle slope in the riverbank, let out her rein so she could bend her head to drink from the shallows of the slow-moving river, and hitched her to an overhanging branch. I waded across with the thought of gathering fruit from the crude outlying trees to slake my thirst and share with my men. This was the custom in our land—to leave a share of fruit for widows and travelers—and as I say, I paid no heed to this peasant talk of brujería.

But as I pushed myself up onto the opposing bank and stood among the flowering boughs, I heard it. A woman’s voice, arching with the same pure cadence of a vielle, winged over the treetops and fell on my ear. I forgot Anadil and the oranges. It was as if someone had tied a kite string to my heart and now gently wound it in. The song pulled me through the line of trees, nearer the house. The branches parted on a packed dirt courtyard fronting a whitewashed stone manor with a sloped roof. Drought-sick rose bushes needled out from the base of the wall. I stopped below a second-story window, where a thick, ancient olive tree cleaved to the face of the house. A young woman in a fine-cut, blue workaday dress and indigo plackart stiff with silk-embroidered leafy whorls sat at the window with its leaded pane propped open. Lamia’s granddaughter, now grown, near my own age.

Leafy vines overflowed the railed balcony below her. She had put her veil aside and the sun streaked her hair all the subtle golden tones of a shaft of hay. She held a piece of embroidery and a bone needle in her hands, but she stared off over the orchard, toward Córdoba, with its towers and fine domes and minarets hazy in the distance. She sang to herself,

A peasant song, a simple little love song. But it cracked my heart like a quail’s egg. She frowned to herself, then lifted her embroidery to begin her work again.

I smoothed my silk taqiyah and stepped from the trees so she could see me. “Forgive me, Señorita de Rampion?” I called.

Her needle slipped and jabbed her thumb. “Christ’s blood!” she swore. Her embroidery fell from her hands and whisked itself out the window. She grabbed for it, but it fluttered past her reach and lazed to a stop at my feet.

I bent and picked it up. Stitched vines and blooms arabesqued along the borders of her handiwork. “My apologies, lady,” I said, trying to hide a smile at her curse. “I heard you singing. I was riding by and….”

She leaned out over the dark wood casement. Her uncovered hair fell forward into the sun. It reached at least twelve hands below the window ledge, thick, loose braids mixed with undressed locks, shining bright as brass against the deep green vines. My breath caught.

“You’d best keep riding, sir,” she said quietly. “My grandmère is taking her rest. If you wake her, she’ll be none too glad of your company. And my brothers don’t feel kindly to the caliph’s men these days.”

I looked around the peaceful garden. “You object to my visiting, lady?”

She checked behind her as if making sure the door to her closet were shut, and turned back, her brow knitted. “Who are you?”

“Ishaq ibn Hisham, of the Umayyads, son of the caliph of al Andalus.” I bowed. “Although I am called al-Hasan, the Handsome, by the women of the court.”

“In that case, I do not object, my lord,” she said. She allowed herself a small smile, but then a frown clouded her features again. “But, please, if you stay, my kinsmen will forget their courtesy.”

“Your company is worth the risk,” I said. “Your voice….” I fumbled for words, and touched the center of my chest instead.

She blushed and looked at me sideways from under her hair. “My grandmère warned me of men like you. You would win my ear with pretty words.”

“I would win your ear with whatever tender you value.”

She bit her bottom lip. “Do you have any news of the North, then, Ishaq ibn Hisham, son of the Umayyad caliph, sometimes called al-Hasan?”

“The North?” I repeated dumbly. My lessons at the time had been all Aristotle, algebra, and petty diplomacy. The vizier had charge of the larger matters of state, and he assured my father the Northern lords were rabble-rousers and brigands, soon to be crushed beneath the charge of a Moorish cavalry, with him, the son and heir of the great warrior al-Mansur, at its head.

“Yes, my lord,” she said. “They say the Christian lords from Castilla north to the Occitan territories are spoiling for war. I heard my brothers talking of raids on the outskirts of Tulaytulah and a muster north of Madrid. There is even talk of the Northern lords riding into Córdoba to reclaim the bells of Santiago de Compostela. And the vizier raising the call for more mercenaries in turn. Is it true?”

Something shifted in my chest, like to a bone popping into joint. I did not see it then, but a keener and more durable thing than the whim that drew me to her window had put down its roots in me.

I dropped my light manner. “It’s true. There was a raid on Tulaytulah and some of the smaller towns north and west. But trust me, lady, you need not fear. My father and I desire peace as much as any in the caliphate, and the vizier has all the mercenaries he needs.”

She studied me for a long pause. “If you say it,” she said finally.

I looked up at her, her hair hanging like ropes of gold braid beneath the window ledge. “May I know your name?” I asked.

“Oh, the price of that is more news.” She smiled, teasing again. “I’m locked up alone here with nothing but my handwork and a few servants most days. I cannot even ride out without my brothers’ escort. I am parched for news of the outside world.”

“What would you like to know?” I asked. “The fashions of the court at Granada? The latest arguments from Alexandria? Shall I recite an epic from the Greek or tell the tale of Scheherazade?

She laughed. “Only tell me what you’ve seen on your ride today and what brings you so far outside the city.”

“Well.” I pretended to count on my fingers. “I have seen the bridges of Córdoba by the earliest light, three farms, two other manors, a field of sunflowers tall as a man, a very fat merchant fall from his horse, and the most quick-minded woman I have ever met. My mother excepted, of course.”

“Of course.” The lady smiled.

“As to what brings me,” I said, “I can only say the vizier is happier when I keep myself amused away from court, and when he is happy, we all prosper.”

“Have you no duties there?” She raised her eyebrows. “Shouldn’t you be learning the arts of state at your father’s hand?”

“My father and the vizier agree, there’s no need for me to learn the messy particulars. Not with such an able administrator in our employ.”

“I see,” she said.

“And your name, lady?” I prompted. “Or have I not yet satisfied your thirst?”

“No, my lord, I am perfectly satisfied,” she said. “I am called Sofia de Rampion.”

“Thank you,” I said. “And you must call me Ishaq.”

“Yes, my Lord Ishaq.”

I held up her embroidery. “May I return this to you?”

Her face fell. The levity that had buoyed her so briefly fled. “You cannot enter the house. My grandmère would tell my brothers.”

“Should I leave it here for you?” I asked, looking around at the dusty courtyard below her window.

“Wait,” she said. “I have it.” She disappeared from the window and returned with a little porcelain water pitcher tied to a length of flax string. She pointed to the olive tree below her window. Its upper branches disappeared into the spill of vines. “Climb up.”

I hoisted myself up onto the sturdiest bough, reached out for the pitcher, dangling level with my head, and tucked the delicate piece of embroidery into its neck.

Sofia drew it up. “Thank you, my lord.”

I swung down from the tree. “May I come to you again? I could bring more news, better news next time.”

She traced an invisible design on the windowsill with her finger. “I think not, my lord.” She raised her eyes and I could read regret written all over her face. “I have loved our talk. Truly, it has brought me joy. But my family—”

“—will not object to what they don’t know.” I finished for her and smiled.

She ducked her head to hide a small, mischievous smile aimed back at me. “You live up to your reputation, Ishaq ibn Hisham. And for your part, won’t you boast of me as one of your conquests?”

“Believe me, lady, I am better at keeping confidences than you’ve heard,” I said. “Not even the captain of my guard knows where I’ve come today, and he is my dearest friend.”

She paused and stared at me, taking my measure.

“May I come again?” I asked.

Slowly, so slowly I would never have noticed had I not been watching every movement of her body, she nodded her consent.

“You will not regret it, lady,” I said, walking backward into the trees. “I will bring you news from all over al Andalus, from the halls of Cairo, from Baghdad, from every corner of the known world.” I nearly tripped over a fallen branch and righted myself. “Even from Damascus itself!”

She laughed, and the sound rang so lovely, so light, I thought nothing of the small sliver of darkness between the shutters of the window beneath her room, or how it disappeared as they pulled themselves shut.

Lázaro snorts in his sleep, jarring me out of my reverie. I push aside the thought of leaving his throat slit by his own knife and drag myself up out of the shadow of the stairs by my walking stick. It will take the rest of the night to reach the city’s outer gates at my limping pace, and the good part of early morning to beg a place in Lázaro’s caravan going north to Catalunya. For now that I know where Sofia is, it is as if God has touched His lips to my ear. It does not matter if she remembers me, or that I am blind and will likely die on my way to her. Some of my youth returns to my limbs. I grasp the braid around my neck and the kite string pulls tight once more.

I am coming to you, I swear. I am coming to you.

Adán found me in the library at Madinat al-Zahra late at night the Friday after I first met Sofia. Parchment bearing architectural designs for the Great Mosque lay thick over my lap and on the table before me. A smoking hashish pipe dangled absently from my hand. My father and I had returned from prayers at our private chamber within the mosque earlier in the day, when the sun stood at a right angle over the palace gardens. Kneeling there before God, I remembered Sofia’s fears. It had come to me how this private chamber, the palace, our reliance on the vizier only turned our heads from the trouble around us, though all the while it lapped at our necks. I had come straight to the library and instructed the scribes to bring me all the plans for the mosque from the time it was rebuilt from an old Visigoth church to the most recent additions under my father. I had also asked for the annals of the golden reign of my great-grandfather, Abd al-Rahman III.

By the time Adán came looking for me, daylight had fled the room. He carried an oil lamp. “Night’s full on, brother. Shouldn’t you be sleeping? Or at least visiting that pretty minister’s daughter, what’s her name? Iuliana?” He stopped beside me at the table and lifted the sheaf of papers. “What’s this?”

“Doesn’t your Shabbat keep you from laboring over these questions?” I said, rubbing my palms over my face.

“Don’t tell me you’re thinking of adding to the mosque again, Ishaq,” Adán said, letting the papers fall with a slap. “There are other ways to distinguish your reign when it comes, you know.”

“No,” I said. I was too tired even for our boyish needling. “I was thinking of knocking down walls, not building new ones.”

“What do you mean? Not destroying the mosque?” Adán pulled out a chair and sat beside me. His face pulled back in horror. “You would have a mob at your gates. Do you realize the city is already—”

“No, no.” I laid my hand over his arm to calm him. “Only the walls to the royal enclosure at the head of the mihrab. I dislike this praying separately from the people. I’ve been reading about my forefathers. They were great men, Adán. They never would have let a common warmonger like Sanchuelo….”

“Hssst,” Adán hissed. He jerked me up by my arm and dragged me after him through one of the library’s horseshoe-arched porticos, out into the night. Past the overlapping arcs of the fountain pool, past the torchlight’s radius, and into the thick of the shoulder-high hedge maze surrounding the gardens. I let him thread us deep into its bends before I pulled my arm from his grasp and stopped in my tracks.

“Are you mad?” Adán checked over his shoulders and leaned in close to my face. “Are you simple?”

“I’m the heir to the Umayyad caliphate, which you seem to have forgotten,” I said, straightening my sleeve.

“Oh, Ishaq.” Adán sounded weary. “You are truly God’s fool.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but Adán cut me off. “You think you will rule the caliphate when your father dies? Have you ever sat down with a minister of state? Helped plot any of the military campaigns? Drafted a mandate for the emirs?”

My face went hot, despite the cool air of the garden. “Of course I—”

“No,” Adán interrupted. “The vizier tolerates you because you fall prey so easily to women and fine horses and smoke. You are a pretty face for minor diplomats and their daughters. You’re no threat to him. But if you start speaking this way….” He let his words trail away.

I said nothing, my arms locked to my sides, my hands in fists.

“I tell you these things because I’m your friend, Ishaq,” Adán said. “You trust me, don’t you?”

I tried to swallow the ire crushing my windpipe. “Yes,” I said.

“If you want your throne back from Sanchuelo, I’m with you. But wait. Watch. Make allies. Sanchuelo is too strong now.”

I breathed the anger out of my lungs. I nodded.

“Good,” Adán said. “And in the meantime, go see that girl again, whichever one it is you’ve been mooning over all week.”

I stalked to the stables, forgetting my cloak and the book of poetry I had laid by my bedside to take with me when next I returned to Sofia. The wind ripped the taqiyah from my head and turned my hair wild as I rode. I only slowed when the orange groves appeared silhouetted against the bright moonlit sky. I dismounted and walked Anadil down to the river again. She snorted softly, the sound lost in the bubbling of the current. I stroked her muzzle and whispered to her, “Calm, Anadil, easy. I’ll be back.”

A pair of quail started from the brush as I climbed the riverbank. I walked softly along the hall of trees, pausing at every rustle and animal sound. The thought of Lamia de Rampion walking here with spirits swirled about her head seemed more real in the darkness, away from the light and hum of Córdoba. I came to the house, its pale walls reflecting the full moon’s light. Sofia’s window was shuttered, its vents open to draw in the cool night air.

“Sofia,” I called softly. “Sofia.”

I paused and listened. Nothing.

“Sofia.” I tried again. “Sof—”

The shutters creaked as Sofia eased them open. “Ishaq?” She wore a linen shawl over the white fabric of her shift and her hair fell in a long braid. Delicate curls haloed her neck and ears, where they had escaped the plait.

“It’s me,” I said.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered. She blinked and touched a hand to her eyes.

“I’ve come with news,” I whispered back, loud as I dared.

“Has something happened?”

“Yes,” I said.

She moved a hand from forehead to chest to shoulders in the sign of the cross. “Oh, Christ. Is it the Northern armies or the vizier? Which is it?”

“Neither,” I said.

“What, then?”

“I came to tell you I’m going to be caliph.”

She stared at me with a look that said she was considering hurling her chamberpot at my head. “Are you drunk?”

“No.” I hoisted myself up into the olive tree and scaled the branches until I was only an arm’s length from her window. I kept my face still and serious and looked up into her eyes, wide and dark in the night. “I’m not drunk. I’m going to take back the caliphate from Sanchuelo.”

Her lips parted and she moved her hand as if to reach for me, then drew back. “I’m going for a light.”

She returned a moment later with a lamp. She laid it on her sewing table beside the window and reached her hand down to me. “Climb up,” she said. “We’ll wake Grandmère if we keep talking this way.”

“I’ll hurt you.” I eyed the thin circumference of her wrist.

“You won’t,” she said. “Climb.”

I fixed my boot tip between the cracks in the wall, took firm hold of the ivy with one hand, gripped her hand with my other, and heaved myself up into the window.

“Ugh,” Sofia said. “You’re heavy.”

The white walls of her room stood close together, leaving barely enough space for the dark wood furniture that hugged them. I swung my legs over the casement and touched my feet to the floor.

“No, my lord.” Sofia shook her head and looked pointedly at my boots. She sat on her narrow bed. “You’ll stay in the window. And I won’t have you talking sweet, or the next thing I know, you’ll be trying to talk your way into my bed.”

“Only news then.” I leaned against the casement and doubled up my knees so I would fit within the frame.

“Only news,” she agreed.

We sat in silence, staring at each other over the soft, bobbing light of the lamp’s flame. I looked down at her sewing table. Dried wildflowers—foxglove, Jerusalem sage, asphodels, the rampion flower from which her family took its name—littered her desk, along with a book of parchment where someone had reproduced every panicled stem and anther in sepia ink. I touched a cluster of rampion petals lightly.

“I copy them for Grandmère. For her books,” Sofia said. She blushed and looked away. “And for my embroidery.”

“Your grandmother keeps books?” I knew it. This did not match the peasants’ stories of black cockerels slaughtered to tempt the al-shayatin and futures read in their entrails.

“Yes.” Sofia flipped closed the cover of the book. Pharmakopia, it read, gold-etched in the leather.

“I think I would like to meet her.” I traced the letters, bringing my fingertips close to Sofia’s own.

Sofia looked up. “No,” she said sharply. “You would not.”

The force of her words surprised me. I pulled back. “Of… of course. Forgive me.”

Silence swallowed us up again.

“You came here to tell me something?” Sofia turned the book facedown and pushed it to the far end of the table.

“Do you think….” I stopped and adjusted myself in the window frame. My legs dangled. “Can I ask, do you think God ordains what we do? What becomes of us?”

She sat on the bed. At first she didn’t answer, and I was afraid I had overwhelmed her with my abruptness, or worse, angered her. But then she spoke, slowly, as if choosing each word as it came into her mouth. “I think He can… I mean, maybe He does move His hand in our matters. But mostly I think He speaks His will to men’s hearts, and if they are righteous, they listen.” She blushed and looked up. “I don’t know, Ishaq. I’m from a family of country knights, not scholars.”

“No, no, speak,” I said, leaning forward.

“Why do you come to me in the night with these questions?” She tilted her head and brushed a stray curl from her face. Her braid lay heavy over her shoulder, sloping down over the curve of her breast and coiling in her lap. Smaller braids twined in the whole.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Ever since you spoke to me from your window. Our imams have always talked of how my family ruled the caliphate because God willed it. And I thought because God willed it, I would only have to wait, and everything I deserved would come to me, would simply appear like a bowl of pomegranates on my dressing table.”

Sofia nodded carefully.

I stood and paced the small distance between her wardrobe and her sewing bench. “But then I thought, Fruit doesn’t appear. Someone cultivates it. Someone harvests it. Someone carries it to my rooms and places it on my dressing table.”

I turned to her. My heart raced with the revelation unfolding in my chest. “The Prophet calls the common men of my faith to care for the widowed and the poor, but what God asks from a leader of such men is even greater.” I knelt in front of her so I could look into her face. “I have to earn the caliphate. And when I have it, I must do works worthy of it.”

Sofia dropped to her knees and kissed me. It was so sudden, so sweet, my body reacted before my mind did. I pulled her against me, her braid trapped between us, my hand at the small of her back, and leaned into her kiss with an open mouth. The smell of her, of warm flesh and salt and woman, nearly drowned me. Her hands were in my hair and mine in hers, her breasts lush and pressed close.

And then my mind caught up to our bodies. “I’m sorry.” I broke away and backed to the window. I looked down into the yard at the bare, thorned rosebushes. “I don’t want you to think you’re some conquest. I don’t want anyone to think that of you.”

Sofia followed me. She touched my arm and turned me from the window so I faced her, then worked her hands into my hair and pulled my lips down to her mouth again. She took up my hand and placed it on her breast. “My brothers want to marry me to someone in my uncle’s court in Catalunya.” Her lips brushed mine as she spoke.

My heart pulsed wildly and my head swung between the twin concepts of her small, round breast in my palm and the thought that she was being sent to the North. “When?” I asked.

“Summer’s end,” she said. “They want me to leave then so I’ll arrive before the first storms in the Pyrenees.”

I cast about for something to say, but the feel of her flesh beneath the thin shift tugged my mind away from anything else. “You’ll be far from the front if war breaks out,” I finally said.

She took my other hand and guided it to her waist. “I would rather stay. I’m not afraid.”

I forgot to breathe for a moment, and when I remembered again, my breath came harsh. “Sofia….”

She stepped closer so she pressed against the length of my body. “Ishaq,” she said. Her eyes flicked up to mine. “Come.”

I kissed her again and she led me to her bed. I laid her down among the bedclothes.

“Gently,” she said. She circled me with her arms, lifted her legs around me, pulled me tight against her skin. Her hair came undone in my hands. I rolled her over me and it fell around us in a curtain, brushing my skin like feathered silk. And when it became too much and I thought I might cry out, she brought her lips up to mine again and I moaned into her mouth.

When it was over, we lay together in her bed, slick with sweat. She nestled the bridge of her nose against my neck and kissed my chest.

“Sofia.” I traced my fingers over her jaw and repositioned my head on the pillows to look at her. “Why?”

She opened her eyes. “My brothers want to barter me away. But this isn’t theirs to barter.”

She rolled over so her back rested against my chest and curled into me. My nose was in her hair. The smell of bread, sweat, sweet oil, and something indefinable and warm rolled over me as I buried my face in her tresses and tumbled into sleep.

The first crack of blue daylight woke me. I sat up in bed, remembering Anadil still tethered by the riverside, and felt a small ache of guilt. The open window looked out over acres of orange groves and a shining slip of the tributary winding east. Sofia sighed in her sleep.

I rose and dressed. Her grandmother’s book, still facedown on Sofia’s sewing table, caught my eye as I stooped for my boots. I paused with my outer robe unlaced and the boots beneath my arm. Would she object? I glanced back at her. Her hair spilled over the pillow and down to the floor. The early light picked out the copper filaments in her waves and made them glitter like gold dust along the silted bottom of a creek bed. It was too tempting not to look, not to spy in on a small piece of Sofia’s world. I flipped the book open with a soft thud.

The drawings were Sofia’s, that much was clear. On the page I opened, she had rendered a poppy, all clean lines put down in deep brown ink. Her neat, looping script accompanied it:

I stole another look at Sofia. An uneducated man would call this proof of witchery. Was she merely taking down her grandmother’s words or had she written this of her own accord? Either way, this was a dangerous book to have.

I thumbed the page over. This time large, craggy letters in blue-black ink filled the page, alongside Sophia’s drawing of a starry-whorled oleander blossom. But the words were not in Sofia’s hand. Lamia’s, then? I wondered. My eyes came to rest on a snarl of words:

My heart juddered. I knew this plant. One of Adán’s men had a horse that died after nibbling its sweet blossoms. This was a recipe for poison. I flipped the page again. Nightshade. Monkshood. Bleeding heart. Laburnum. Jerusalem cherry. All fatal.

Sofia stirred. She blinked her eyes at the daylight and sat up. “You’re going?”

“Yes.” I regarded her warily, my hand still resting on the open pages of the book.

She frowned. “What’s wrong? What are you….” She followed the line of my arm down to the table and snapped awake. “You’ve been reading Grandmère’s book?”

“I have,” I said. She had looked so innocent and vulnerable by the morning light, half-naked with her hair mussed, but awake she was a keener thing. Did she know her grandmother was using her hand to lay out the properties of poisons? How could she not?

“Ishaq, it isn’t what you think—”

“I know well what it is,” I cut in.

She sat straight and stared into me. “Will you call us witches now, too, then?”

“Sofia—”

“There’s nothing unnatural in what we do,” she said, suddenly fierce. “What sin is there in recording the earth’s uses?”

“None, but—”

“How is it different from an apothecary’s art?”

“Sofia.” I knelt by the bed and took her hand. “Sofia, I don’t think you’re a witch.”

She blinked at me and softened. “No?”

“No, or your grandmother either.” I glanced over my shoulder at the volume. “But you must know what that book contains.”

“Medicines,” Sofia said. “Curatives.”

“Poisons,” I said.

“One and the same sometimes,” Sofia said quietly. She looked away, and then turned back with wide eyes. “But she would never turn them to their darker ends. Nor I. You must believe me.”

I combed my fingers through a section of her hair. “I trust your word,” I said.

“We have many books. This is but one.”

“I trust you,” I repeated. I kissed her brow and rested my head against hers. The rising sun stung bright in the corner of my eye, and my heart went heavy. “I must go, but will you let me come again?”

She let out a breath. “You want to?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“What you’ve seen here.” Sofia tilted her head back to the ceiling, not looking at me. “What I’ve heard of you.”

I rubbed my thumb over the smooth ovals of her fingernails, unsure how to answer. I looked up. “And what they say of me, that’s all there is?”

Sofia looked at me. Her lashes were wet. “No, I suppose not.” She brushed a hand beneath her eye and tried to smile. “I would you didn’t have to go.”

“Nor I.” I twined one of her smaller braids around my thumb. “May I….” I started to ask.

“Only if you let me… ,” she said, and reached down to the woven sewing basket at her bedside to retrieve a pair of silver shears. She cut the thin braid from her hair and wrapped it around my palm, then folded my fingers over it and reached up to cut a lock from my head as well.

She kissed the thick black curl. “Come soon,” she said.

I lowered my feet from the window, steadied myself on the vines, and found the highest tree limb. I looked back up at her. “I promise.”

“I trust your word.” Sofia echoed me.

I dropped to the ground and then I was off, walking quickly through the orchard, turning back every few feet to catch a last glimpse of her, until finally the branches closed off my view.

I find a place in Lázaro’s caravan with a Jewish mapmaker called Miguel ben Yaakov and his wife, Mencia, traveling north as far as a little town at the foot of the Pyrenees. They promise me a share of their bread and a seat on their wagon tail if I will water and brush down their horses at the end of each day. We ride in the middle of the line, behind the dull thunder of Lázaro’s horses and the armed men guarding them, behind the merchants, who have bought a place near the guards, but before an imam and a cluster of students on horseback.

Dark mutterings surround our campfires at night, talk of unrest in the city we’ve left behind, stories of women raped, a Berber soldier beaten and left for dead by a mob, and the hanging of a student. We douse our fires and huddle in the darkness when hoofbeats roar close along the road.

By day, Mencia dotes on her horses, who she calls Limón and Pulga, and it is not long until she is hovering over me with extra shares of cured beef and sour bread, shaking out an old horse blanket for me at night. When the men in Lázaro’s band help kill a young bull that’s slipped its pen and tried to gore one of the students, she makes sure I have a strip of the meat. Her husband keeps a wary distance. He doesn’t say a word to me, even as his wife turns in the wagon to chatter about everything she sees as we make our way north through the rolling emptiness of La Mancha.

“Look, the city!” she cries when they finally sight Tulaytulah, her warm, firm hand clutching my forearm. She laughs in delight. Mencia reminds me of my mother in the days of my childhood, before the fear and isolated luxury surrounding our family smothered her to nothing, an empty veil, a dried flower between the pages of a book. For Mencia’s sake, I try to remember the city as I saw it when I was a boy of fifteen, its gray battlements cresting a green hill, all the common houses scattered below like so many windfall apples.

I don’t know how I will make it north to Roussillon, once the mapmaker and his wife are gone, or what will become of me once I’m there, but I have miles and miles to mull it over as the cart lumbers north along the old Roman road. I hold Sofia’s braid to my lips and pray for God to pass my message along. I am coming to you, I am coming to you.

On the last day I saw her, I came alone in the gloaming. Adán had grown suspicious of my late-night rides, but I chose a Shabbat evening so he would be forced to stay behind at the palace, not follow me as he had tried the week before. On my way to the house, I snapped a cluster of almond blossoms from a tree for Sophia. The air was heady with oranges, and she sat in her window, singing to herself as she strummed a quitara. Her voice rose lovely over the instrument’s steady thrum, dipping and weaving like a bird in flight. Her brothers had gone to the city for the week and her grandmother was off on one of her rambles, so she let me sing with her as she played.

We made love in the soft, last light of day. After, curled together in her bed, her head resting against my shoulder, I asked what I had been mulling over since the day she pulled me through her bedroom window.

“Sofia?”

“Hmm?” she replied.

“Would you come to court at Madinat al-Zahra? With me, I mean?”

She sat up in bed. “Truly?”

I reached out and fixed a piece of wayward hair behind her ear. “I’ve been thinking, if I were to marry a Christian lady, it might appease the Northern lords and restrain the vizier. It could stop the skirmishes at the border. And it would keep you here.”

“Ishaq, are you asking for my hand in marriage?” She prodded me playfully in the chest.

I kept my face solemn. “I am.”

“You aren’t asking very properly.” She put on a mock-stern face.

I reached over and pulled her on top of me, my hands on her hips. “My Lady Sofia de Rampion, will you consent to be my wife?”

“I will,” she said. She ran her fingers through the hair of my chest absentmindedly. “But Grandmère…. And my brothers won’t be so easily swayed.”

“How could they object to their sister becoming a princess of al Andalus?” I asked, and pulled her close to kiss her. She leaned down to press her mouth to mine.

A scrape sounded outside the door. We froze, her bare thighs around me, my hand on her back. The latch clicked and the door slammed open with a sound like Oriental powder igniting. A dark-haired man in his late twenties, with the same dark eyes as Sofia, pushed his way into her room, followed by a younger, fair-haired man. My eyes flew wide. Leandro and Telo, Sofia’s brothers. I recognized them from the portraits hanging in the manor halls. Leandro, her eldest brother, pulled Sofia from me and pushed her against the wall. I scrambled up, but Telo was on me in the same moment. He hit me hard across the jaw, and I fell back against the bedpost.

“Déjenlo, por favor, déjenlo!” Sofia screamed.

But I was up again, my back to the wall, and Leandro had drawn his longknife.

“Brothers—” I started, my hands raised to show I was unarmed.

“Call us that again and we’ll cut out your tongue,” Leandro said.

“Please,” I said. “I mean no harm. I wish to marry your sister. I—”

“Oh, you mean to marry her?” Leandro advanced with the knife. He shoved me against the wall and held the tapered blade to my throat. “You mean you wish to marry her after you’ve violated her? After you’ve left her unfit for any other man’s bed? Well, by all means. Telo, have you any objections?”

“Don’t,” Sofia began. “Please—”

“Quiet,” Telo said.

“But I asked him—” Sofia said.

Telo slapped her hard across the face. She fell against the wardrobe. Its sharp wood edge sliced her brow and blood streamed from the cut.

I struggled to go to her, but Leandro pushed his forearm into my throat. Telo turned from his sister to me and stalked across the room to where I stood naked, trapped against the wall.

“You come to our land.” Telo leaned in close, his voice quiet and charged with menace. “Your force your Prophet on us. You raid our holy places. And now you have the gall to defile my sister in our own home.”

“Telo,” Leandro said warningly.

“No.” Telo turned to his brother. “These Moors need a lesson. Hold him.”

I tried to jerk away in panic, but Telo shoved me over the edge of Sofia’s bed, and Leandro pinned me belly-down, his knife nicking behind my left ear. The bedclothes still held Sofia’s warm smell, mixed with fresh blood and my own sharp fear. Telo’s belt clicked.

“Please….” I tried to turn, but Leandro’s knife pressed below my jaw.

Telo knocked my legs apart with his boots. I felt pressure, and then pain ripped up through my bowels.

“No!” I screamed and strained my arms against them, but Leandro held me still as Telo forced himself into me. Oh, God, this is happening, this is happening. God, stop it, God have mercy. This is happening.

“Stop, please, stop.” Sofia’s voice shook.

My feet scrabbled uselessly on the floor.

“You’ll pay a hundredfold for what you’ve done to our sister,” Telo grunted in my ear.

He finished and drew back. I slumped beside the bed, shaking with shame and shock. How could this have… oh, God, I am… why did you let this happen?

Without warning, Telo leveled a kick at my ribs. I heard the pop of bone before I felt the pain. I fell to my side. Another kick, to my head this time. It caught my left eye, and one side of my vision exploded in a white starburst. Leandro joined in. One of them brought his foot down on my femur. I heard it snap and the room swam close to blackness. I rolled onto my stomach, tried to drag myself away from the blows, but they came at me from all sides. Adán, I thought, but no, he was far away in Córdoba, safe, presiding over his mother’s table. I curled my arms around my head and tried to hold still in my own half-darkness, praying for it to end.

And then they were finished, the room silent except for Sofia’s ragged crying.

“What have you done?” I heard Sofia say, somewhere far away.

“You stupid bitch,” Telo said, out of breath. “Did you think your virtue was yours to give?”

“He is Ishaq ibn Hisham, the heir to the caliphate,” she said. Her voice canted higher. “What have you done?”

The room went quiet. I blinked the darkness away from my open right eye. My left eye was already beginning to swell shut, and strange patterns of light danced across my field of vision. A surge of anger rolled over me, followed by shame and blackening pain. Anger. Shame. Pain.

“No one would blame us.” Leandro’s words swam close. “It’s simple vengeance. Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”

“No,” Telo said. His footsteps sounded near my head. He snarled his hands in my hair and tugged me up sharply. “Help me, Leandro.”

“That’s enough,” Leandro said.

“Enough?” Telo laughed. “For ruining our sister?” He took hold of my wrists and began pulling me from the room.

Leandro hung back, uncertain.

“What are you doing?” Sofia’s voice shot high.

“Taking him to Grandmère,” Telo said. “Let her judge what’s to be done with him.”

Telo pulled me to the stairs. Leandro followed. Fire shot up my side as the muscles tugged on my fractured rib. Lamia. Hope and dread clouded together in my chest. A woman with books might be civilized, might put an end to this, but the recipes for poisons and the stories, the boys’ stories of her cursing them over mere oranges…. My broken leg fell limp against the landing. I cried out and all my thoughts dissolved in a burst of pain. A cold sweat broke over my body, mixing with the blood that slicked my neck where Leandro’s knife had bitten me.

“Please,” Sofia said, faint now.

My back hit the cool, smooth flagstones of the house’s ground floor. Blearily, through my open right eye, I saw we were coming into the central hall, where a steady fire burned in the hearth. A woman in a red-hemmed gray dress sat before it. The fire’s heat and the billowing darkness over my eye warped her face. The windows reflected the flames, backed by the dense blackness of the country night.

Telo dragged me up on my knees before her. I swayed. He grabbed the back of my neck and stood behind me, holding me upright.

Slowly, Lamia de Rampion turned her face from the fire. She was aged, but younger than I expected, regal in the way of women who have not forgotten what it was to be beautiful in their youth. Her hair waved black and silver in equal parts into a low, loose bun. My mind sparked and fever-wheeled with the notion that perhaps she was Sofia’s mother after all, not her grandmother.

“What have you found?” she asked, cool and calm, the tone a cat’s mistress would use when he made a present of his kill.

“A rat.” Telo tightened his grip on my neck. “Glutting himself on our stores.”

She lifted her chin to Leandro, standing at the bottom of the stair. “And where did you find him?”she asked, as though she already knew his reply.

“Upstairs,” Leandro answered. “As you said.”

“Please, doña.” My voice trembled and scraped as I spoke. “If you would let me make amends…”

Lamia’s eyes drifted down and hooked into my own. A chill washed over me. I could make out nothing of mercy in their depths.

“Amends?” She leaned forward, as if I had made an interesting point. “How do you propose to compensate me for what you have taken from us, hmm? Can you restore my granddaughter’s virginity? Or perhaps you mean to repay us in horses and lands. Is that it, Moor? Will you heap us with gold if my granddaughter’s legs prop open for you whenever you happen by?” Her voice stayed even, furiously calm.

“No, never—”

Lamia cut my words short with a curt lift of her hand. She stood, and I saw her then as she was, a woman with the full swell of her powers come to fruit. “Bind him, please, Telo,” she said, nodding to a straight-backed wooden chair facing the fire.

I tried again. “Doña, please.” I turned to Leandro. “Peace, brothers—”

“What did we say?” Telo asked. He heaved me into the chair and bent to bind my ankles to its legs with horse rope. “We’re not your brothers.”

“Grandmère,” Leandro said from the stair. “What are you doing?”

“Please,” I said. It hurt to breathe around my broken rib. “Let me go. I won’t say a word. We can forget all this.”

Telo twisted my arms and bound my wrists together behind the chair back in answer.

“You’re Christians,” I pleaded. I strained my arms against the ropes, but they held me fast. “Does your Christ not love mercy?”

Lamia walked behind me to the stairs. I craned my neck to see. “Lend me your knife, Leandro,” she said.

“Grandmère—” Leandro said.

“Your knife,” Lamia repeated.

Leandro handed it over slowly. Lamia rustled past me and knelt by the fireplace, shuffling her grandson’s blade in the coals. “Do you know what our Christ says, Moor?” She turned her head to regard me over her shoulder. “Do you?”

My throat would not part to let me speak. “No,” I whispered.

She spoke into the fire. “If thine eye do cause thee to offend, pluck it out and cast it from thee.” She turned the knife within the coals. “Lest thy whole body should be cast into hell.”

“I meant no offense to you or your granddaughter.” I fought for enough breath to speak as the blade turned from dull silver to red. “Please, I love Sofia.”

At that moment, Sofia’s footsteps sounded on the stair behind us, light and bare. Lamia turned. The tip of the knife blade shone white, like a pale thorn, as if a little piece of noonday sun rested on its tip.

“No!” Sofia shouted behind me.

“Keep her back,” Lamia said. Her voice crackled.

Sofia’s screams grew to a hysterical pitch. Her feet fell in muted thuds against the floor as she tried to kick out of Leandro’s grasp. My own heart beat like a piece of tin beneath a blacksmith’s hammer, and my breath came gasping and shaky.

“Please,” I tried one last time. “Te suplico.”

Lamia took my chin in her hand and shoved my head back so I was forced to look up into her eyes, black and dilated with carefully composed rage. “Here is my mercy, Moor. Remember my face when your world is dark.” Then she pointed the tip of the knife at my open right eye and thrust the white-hot blade into its center.

We are packing up the wagons after a week’s stay in Madrid to buy provisions and fit the horses with fresh tack when the cry goes up from the back of the line.

“God, no. It cannot be. Ojalá que no.” A woman’s voice wavers above the crowded plaza.

And soon other voices echo her prayer, spreading through the crowd all at once like water coming to a boil.

“Madinat al-Zahra,” someone says.

I drop the water bucket I am holding to Pulga’s mouth and fumble blindly for the nearest man’s arm. “What of the palace?” I ask.

“It’s fallen,” the man says. “It’s been razed, and the fires seen burning five whole days from the Córdoban gates.”

A cold chill slaps my body. I cannot stop myself from picturing all my familiar books blackened and shrunk by flames, the deep fountains boiled bare, the gilt ceiling raining molten drops of gold as the roof catches fire.

“Who was it?” I ask. “The Northern lords? Or the Abbasids? Have they sent ships from Baghdad?”

“Neither,” the man says. “Vizier Sanchuelo lost control of his Berbers, and they took it on themselves to destroy the palace city.”

My hands tremble in their grip on his coat. “And the caliph?” I ask.

“Abdicated,” the man answers, and pushes past me to repeat his story for other ears.

I grope my way to the wagon’s tail and sink down beneath it, by the tall wheels. The world spins too quickly around me, and behind my ruined eyes all I can see are tongues of fire spreading like oil over the glossy leaves of the towering hedges, the tapestries ash, carved ivory doors blackened and hanging ajar, boot prints in the soot. I clutch at the braid around my neck like a drowning man.

Is this Your punishment? I ask God. To know I could have stopped this, and yet stand fettered by blindness as my world burns?

“Ishaq?” a woman’s voice says.

For one reeling moment, I think it’s Sofia. But then the wheels of my mind start turning in tandem again, and I realize it’s Mencia. My given name is common enough I’ve told it to her.

“They’ve burned Madinat al-Zahra,” I say.

“Ishaq, get up.” Her strong hand grips me at the elbow. “We have to move. They’re barring the city gates.”

I cling to the back of the wagon as our caravan lurches forward. The watchmen at the gates shout after us that we’ll be safer inside the city walls with the other refugees fled from al Andalus, but I know Lázaro has his reasons for wanting to push on. The horses rise to a canter as we hurry north.

I broke into black consciousness with Adán crouched over me. Pain wormed in every inch of my body. An animal moan rose deep in my throat.

“Softly, brother,” Adán said. “I don’t know if they’re coming back.”

The overlapping criiii of cicadas pulsed in the air. I felt dirt and dry, sparse grass beneath my hands. “Where are we?” I asked.

“The eastern edge of the Rampion lands,” Adán whispered. “I dragged you from the house.”

“Your men… ?” My throat sounded stripped to my own ears.

“No,” Adán said. “I followed you alone.”

“Sofia?”

“I saw four horses galloping from the gate. Two men and two women.” Adán paused. Dirt scraped beneath his feet as he stood. “I’ll send word to the caliph. Our men will catch them before the night is out. They’ll be executed at dawn.”

“No.” I flailed my hand blindly and grasped the hem of his cloak.

Adán knelt beside me again. “No?”

“If they kill them, the Northern lords will take it as cause for open war.” My chest ached. I felt sick. “I have to protect—”

“Brother, they’ve taken your eyes. And your leg….” He stopped, unable to name the other thing they had done to me.

My left eye burned with tears behind its swollen lid. The right stayed dead. “No,” I repeated, trying to sound firm. “I’m to blame. Please, Adán….” My voice broke.

Adán smoothed his hands over my brow. “We’ll wait, then.” He kissed my forehead. “I’ll get my horse.”

“Anadil is by the river,” I said.

Adán paused a beat too long. “Don’t worry. I’ll come back for her.”

He returned a few minutes later, heralded by the faint clop of his stallion’s hooves. He wrapped me in his cloak and heaved me onto the horse’s back. Pain ripped through my leg and side, and nausea rolled over me as my innards shifted, but I clung to the horse’s mane. Adán led the horse quietly past the outer palisades of the Rampion estate, into the open country.

We made our way to a small village along the road to Córdoba, where Adán roused a doctor he knew.

“God have mercy,” the doctor breathed over me when Adán unwrapped the cloak from my shoulders.

Together, he and Adán brought me into his kitchen and laid me on the broad table. The doctor reset the bone in my leg and woke his wife so she could help him make a poultice for my eyes. Afterward, they washed me and prayed over me and wrapped me in a quilt, and for some time, I lost all knowledge of what happened to me.

I woke to the sound of running water, a courtyard fountain. For a moment, I thought I had been allowed passage into Paradise, despite what my life had been. But the high burn raking the marrow of my bones thrust that thought from my mind. I remembered the doctor and raised a hand carefully to my ribs. My whole chest had been wrapped in soft bands of cloth, my wrists in the same where they had rubbed raw against the horse rope. I felt something clutched in my left hand. Sofia’s braid. I tried to open my eyes, but couldn’t.

Someone shifted beside me. “Brother?” Adán said quietly.

“Adán?” I said.

“Yes.” His hand was cool on my forehead.

“Am I going to die?”

“No,” he said.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“You’re safe,” Adán said. “My friend Nasir has given us room in his house. He’ll keep us safe here, keep us hidden.”

“Sofia?”

Adán took my hand in his. “Her whole estate is empty, the doors left open to the dogs.”

I tried to raise myself on my elbows, but the pain flared through me again. I fell back to my pallet with a whimper.

“Rest,” Adán said. “I promise I’ll find her. Te lo juro. Only rest.”

I drifted beneath the surface of a fever. Nightmares plagued me, where Lamia cut open my chest and used my body as a cauldron for poisons, while Sofia lay beside me and held my hand. Adán came and went from the house, gathering news from Córdoba and coming back to whisper to me what he had overheard. My mother and father and sisters were safe at Madinat al-Zahra, so the attempt had been on my life alone, he said, still ignorant of my part in what had happened. My father had detached his own guard to search the countryside for me, in addition to the vizier’s foot soldiers, and they had offered to reward any man who could lead them to me.

“Sanchuelo tries to accuse the Jews of a plot to murder the caliph and his family,” Adán said, kneeling by my couch in the shaded eaves of Nasir’s courtyard. “He uses my name. Though they say your father won’t believe it.”

A rare breeze touched my neck. Earlier in the day, Nasir and his wife had propped me up on a bank of pillows in the corner of the courtyard, where they said the open air would help me recover. I hadn’t spoken since I first awoke in their house.

“Ishaq,” Adán said. “Why did they do this to you? Tell me.”

My lips had dried together. I pulled them apart to answer. “Sofia.”

“What about her?” Adán asked in frustration.

“I… I shouldn’t have… without her brothers’ consent….” My throat closed around the words. I pressed my nails into my palms.

“You took her for a lover?” I could hear the anger in Adán’s voice, but I didn’t know if it was meant for me or Sofia’s kin.

“Yes.” I leaned forward into the pain in my ribs. I deserve it, I deserve it. Oh, God.

Adán didn’t speak. His leather coverlet creaked as he rose. He scuffed around the perimeter of the courtyard’s smooth flagstones, and then came back and knelt beside me. “You loved her?”

“I would have married her,” I said.

He fell silent again.

“God has delivered His judgment,” I said, so quietly the steady rush of the fountain nearly hid my voice. “With their hands He marks me unfit to rule.”

Adán took my head in his hands and kissed my forehead again, as he had done the night he found me. “Brother, you know better than to ascribe the will of God to the works of men.”

A hard tear burned my left eye. I wished to God for Him to consume me in flame or let the earth open up for me—Oh, God, let me cease to be—but the quiet heat of the sun continued, and the water bubbling from the fountain, and the birdsong from the roof, and I did not cease to be. I reached out to Adán. “I cannot go back to my father’s house. He can’t know.”

Adán laid his hand over mine. “Anything you say.”

“Will you… will you find her?” I tightened my grip on his hand. We both knew I was too damaged to rise from my bed, much less seek her on my own. “See she’s kept safe and whole?”

“Yes,” Adán agreed.

“She has an uncle somewhere in Catalunya. They may have taken her there. See she has everything she needs. Shoes for her feet and cloaks for winter. And see no one speaks ill of her name.” My throat closed in on itself and the words halted in my mouth. I choked on all I wanted to give her. Pearls to seed her hair and a swift horse to ride out on whenever she chose, all the books of my library, a place at my side when I wrested control of the caliphate back from Sanchuelo. But without the sight of the courtyard to distract me, my mind unrolled the image of Telo striking her, her head hitting the wardrobe, the look on her face when she saw me stripped of my manhood, abased and unclean, helpless to save either of us.

“I will,” Adán said. “Anything you say, brother. But if I go, you must be ready when they start to speak of me as your murderer. I won’t be able to set foot in al Andalus so long as they remember your name. I won’t be able to come back for you.”

God forgive me, God forgive me.

“I know,” I said. “Go.”

He rode out on the north road in the cool predawn dark the next morning.

Some months later, when my bones had healed and my eyes crusted over in a thick stratum of scabs and scar tissue, I asked Nasir to bring me a walking stick. I pushed myself slowly to his front door.

“Stay,” Nasir pleaded. “There’s no need for you to leave. How will your friend Hadid find you if you go?”

“He won’t return,” I said. “God grant it, I may go to him some day, but he won’t return.”

Thus I left the quiet of Nasir’s house for Córdoba, to live in the shadow of what was once my home, to erase myself from all men’s memories, and to pray for word that would lead me back to my beloved and my friend.

We have reached the wooded no-man’s-land inside the Catalan border, by the chill banks of the river Segre. Our caravan has been shrinking, the imam and the students long since left behind in Madrid, and many of the merchants stopped in smaller cities and towns along the way. Lázaro and his men make up the bulk of the caravan, save Miguel’s wagon and a Christian merchant we picked up, also bound for Catalunya. We file close together over the narrow road. At night, we sleep in the woods. We light no fires. Icy rain patters down on us in the day, heralding autumn in the North country. Even Mencia has fallen under the pall of silence that hovers over us. Although we have traveled beyond the chaos rippling out from Córdoba, unallied highwaymen and Visigoth war bands roam the wilderness in these parts. A fight has broken out among Lázaro’s men about whether to abandon Miguel, Mencia, and me, since traveling with Jews and a Moor so near the Pyrenees places them in danger. But so far, we haven’t woken to find them gone.

I walk alongside the cart with my hand resting on its upper boards while the mapmaker’s horses strain up a steep grade. Wet rocks bite my feet and several times I slip, but catch myself on the cart’s edge in time to keep from sliding under the wheels. My leg aches at the old break. The crash of whitewater roars up from the river gorge below. Lázaro’s men have ridden ahead, but when we finally crest the hill, we find them stopped.

“What’s happening?” I ask.

“Shhh.” Miguel quiets me.

“State your allegiance,” a strange man’s voice, speaking Catalan, booms over the road.

No one answers.

“State your allegiance,” the stranger tries again, in Castellano this time. The words are heavy in his mouth. He swallows the ends of them, and it takes me a moment to remember where I’ve heard his accent before. I am ten years old, jacketed in gold brocade and standing in the shadow of my father’s throne. A Visigoth chieftain with a heavy black beard and pale skin stands at the base of the dais, a gilt and sapphire cross glinting in the fox fur at his neck, an emissary from our ancestors’ long-vanquished enemies….

“State yours,” Lázaro says. The sound of swords drawn from their scabbards rings throughout the group of men arrayed on the path before us.

“I am Athanric of the Wese. We swear allegiance to his Holiness Pope John XVIII.” The Visigoth shouts to be heard over the river. A fine sleet begins to fall.

“Then we have no quarrel with you,” Lázaro says. “We go to the court of King Filipe of Roussillon to aid his cause in retaking the southern lands from the Moorish kings.”

“And yet you travel with a Moor,” Athanric says. He pauses, as if working out a problem in his head. “And Jews?”

I cannot see, but I feel the gaze of two score pairs of eyes turned on our wagon in the silence that follows.

“They’re no part of our caravan,” Lázaro replies.

“Then you will not object if we dispatch them from your company,” the Visigoth says. “We would be remiss in our Christian duty if we did not baptize them here in the river.”

Lázaro pauses. The cold gush of the river rises in the silence. An uneasy murmur works its way through his men. “No,” Lázaro says. “They’re no concern of ours.”

Mencia clutches my arm.

“Good lords.” Miguel raises his voice for the first time, and I am surprised at how strong and clear it is after so much silence. “I am a tradesman. My wife and I travel to Orgañá, no further, and this man is our servant. We are no threat to you.”

“A Jewish tradesman,” Athanric says. He thumps the flat of his sword against his leg. “And wearing no marks on his clothes.”

“It is not our custom in the south,” Miguel says quietly.

“Ah, but it is custom here,” Athanric says. His voice and the rhythmic beat of his sword move closer. “As well as law. And lawbreakers must be punished.”

Mencia cries out. Her hand jerks from mine. Her husband shouts and there is an awful, thick sound of fists on flesh and scrabbling in the wet dirt. Tearing fabric rips the wet air.

“Perhaps we will dispense justice here and now,” the Visigoth says.

Save us, I pray, shaking with cold and furious impotence. Save them. Save her. Don’t let anyone else suffer because I am helpless to stop it.

Mencia screams, longer this time and more pained.

This cannot be Your will, I say to God. If it is, I will not bow to it.

And then there are hoofbeats on the slope behind us, dozens, loud as war drums, kicking up stones and spattering mud as they skid to a stop behind our party.

“Look what we have today,” a man says. “Athanric of the Wese.” His voice is full of humor and menace in equal parts, and my heart near stops, for I would know it anywhere. It belongs to Adán Hadid. The man who gave up his life in service of mine. Who defied God’s law and rode out to save me on a Shabbat eve.

“This is none of your concern, de Lanza,” Athanric says.

“Perhaps,” Adán says, easy with his false name. “But I see you have taken some of my countrymen, so perhaps I will find it is my concern after all.”

The Visigoth swears in his own tongue. He calls to his men, and their horses stamp as they mount and draw away.

“Some day I’ll find you outnumbered,” Athanric shouts over the sound of his men’s retreat.

“Be sure it’s four to one,” Adán calls after him.

The pounding of their hoofbeats fades into the distance. Mencia cries quietly as her husband murmurs and soothes her. I am frozen, locked still as stone. My heart is the only thing moving. Will Adán recognize me, changed as I must be? And will Lázaro know his quarry by sight, or by name only?

Adán’s horse clops toward Lázaro’s band, grouped on the side of the road. “Gentlemen, if you’re in need of an escort, my men and I will be happy to accompany you for a small fee. Where are you going?”

“Roussillon.” Lázaro coughs.

“What do you say, shall we go to Roussillon?” Adán calls to his men.

“To Roussillon!” they shout in response, and beat their swords on their shields.

“With your consent, of course,” Adán says to Lázaro.

“Por supuesto,” Lázaro says, the strain evident in his words. “We would be grateful, sir.”

Adán spends several moments making sure Miguel’s cart is undamaged, he and his wife secure within it, and calls for a beaver-skin blanket to shield Mencia from the icy rain. Then we are off again, moving through the trees at a steady clip with Adán’s men riding in a protective circle around us.

I walk on, steadying myself with one hand on the cart. My legs shake with every step.

A horse veers close to me and slows to my pace. “Do these men know who you are, brother?” Adán says quietly.

I turn my face up to him, even though all I can see is the hazy, muted green of the damp trees all around us. Joy hits me like a wall, and I stop. The cart rolls on without me. “No,” I say.

“We’ll move faster if we place this man on a horse,” Adán calls up to Lázaro. “And bring him some spare boots.”

Lázaro mutters to himself, but sends one of his men to the back of the line with an older mare and a pair of worn riding boots. Adán dismounts and helps me up onto her back, then ties my horse’s reins to his own. They trot side by side. It is all I can do not to reach out and take Adán’s hand.

“Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you?” Adán says.

“I didn’t know if you were alive,” I say. “My father laid a death sentence on you before the vizier seized control, and that man Lázaro is looking for you.”

“I have more men than he,” Adán says. “And better trained. Though I do ask myself what you’re doing following him into Catalunya.”

“Sofia,” I say. “He’s bringing these horses to her uncle in Roussillon. She’s there with them.”

We ride in silence for several minutes. The air is full of the steady grate of hooves on loose stone.

“So that’s where they’ve been keeping her,” Adán says.

“You couldn’t find her?” My last memory of her, bleeding and wild-eyed, unfurls before me again.

“I’m sorry.” Adán leans over in the saddle and grips my wrist. “I tracked them as far as the Pyrenees, but I didn’t know how deep they’d gone. It isn’t friendly territory for Jews, even those with their own war bands.”

Silence laps over us again. The sleet falls steadily, but my horse’s heat steams away some of the cold.

“What will you do when you find her?” Adán asks after a time. “I don’t suppose her grandmother and brothers will usher you into her arms.”

“No,” I say. “I had only figured out the part where I lived to come this far.”

“You were always terrible at strategy.” I can hear the boyish smirk in Adán’s words.

“I’m out of practice,” I say.

“When this is done, I’m tutoring you.”

A piece of my youth flexes in my chest. Maybe it is the feel of a horse beneath me again, the way my body remembers and responds to its sway, keeps me righted. Maybe it is that I am riding closer to Sofia, and the invisible cord between us is tightening, transmitting the vibration of our hearts. Or maybe it is that my friend is at my side again, speaking to me as a man, and he has always carried some piece of me wherever he goes.

After another run-in on the road, with common thieves this time, Lázaro decides to keep Adán and his men on. Lázaro suggests the party will travel faster if they leave Miguel, Mencia, and me to find our own way while they go on to Roussillon, but Adán won’t hear it. And so we deliver the mapmaker and his wife to Orgañá, where we buy furs for the journey higher into the Pyrenees.

As we prepare to go, Miguel hurries to push a folded square of vellum into Adán’s hand. “A map of Roussillon,” he says. “In case you find some difficulty leaving.”

While we ride, Lázaro’s men talk of the vats of mulled wine awaiting us at Filipe’s castle, venison on spits, the sweet crackle of pine logs on the hearths in the great hall. The mountain road slopes sharply. It whips around corners and narrows so we must ride single file. On the fourth day of our trek, we wake to a fine glaze of frost stiffening our blankets and the mat of fallen leaves where we made our bed the night before. The clouds hang low and chill in a fog across the road. And then, on the twelfth day, the men at the front of the line shout that they’ve sighted the timber barricades circling Filipe’s thatch-roof fortress.

“I can’t go in,” I say to Adán under my breath. My horse jerks her head, picking up on the fear seeping from my body. “Lamia, Sofia’s brothers—”

“Hang back.” Adán reins in my horse.

We slow until the last of Adán’s men pass us. “Ride on,” Adán tells them. “I’ll catch up.”

We veer into the trees, Adán leading my horse, and wend our way deeper until we come to a dense thicket. Adán wraps me in skins and furs, pushes a knife into my hand.

“Stay here,” he says. “I’ll see what I can find and bring you word.” He hurries to his horse. Its hoofbeats disappear into the silence.

I shiver under the skins and chafe my arms for warmth. Cold burns in the fissure where Sofia’s brothers broke my leg nearly two years past. I am afraid to warm myself by walking, in case I should become lost in the woods and Adán come back to find the thicket empty. I sit and rock instead.

After a time, the pale gray light I can detect through my left eye recedes into darkness, and the very air I breathe burns like swallowing live coals. Fat snowflakes filter through the canopy of trees. Wolves keen high in the woods above me, answered by their mates somewhere deeper in the vales below. A small creature cries out, an unearthly strangled noise, almost human. I pile leaves and pine needles in a nest and burrow beneath them like an animal, hoping they will hide my scent.

“I am come for her.” I speak aloud to God, as though He might be hovering in the frozen air, sitting impassive at the edge of the thicket. Here in the vast, rough expanse of mountain range that holds my beloved in its teeth, it is easy to imagine Him a different, more savage being than the God of my childhood.

The wolves’ voices melt together in one long howl. It sounds as though the earth itself is moaning, and I shiver again as the thought of Lamia passes before me. Lamia, roving the hills below, calling up all the wild and pale-toothed things of the earth against me. The wind her skirts, churning the dead leaves to fall anew.

“I am come for her,” I repeat, and it makes me feel more human to hear the words falling back to my ear, muted by the soft snow. I curl into the leaves and try to imagine they are Sofia’s body pressed close, the backs of her knees tucked against mine, her hair soft on my face, safe.

The squeak of boots on snow starts me awake. I freeze, rigid and alert beneath the layers of leaves and animal skins. I tighten my grip on the knife.

“Ishaq?” Adán calls quietly. “Where are you?”

I push myself up. “Here.”

“Ishaq.” Adán hurries to me and crouches at my side. “Are you well?”

“Cold,” I say. My teeth knock against each other.

“I’ll build a fire,” he says. He clears an empty space on the ground and digs a trench around it. I hear him snapping branches and the tap-click of his flints striking flame into the kindling.

Warm, red light flares in my good eye, and I think for a moment I can even make out the shadow of Adán’s body as he moves between me and the flames. Waves of heat push the cold from my face and hands. Adán sits beside me and wraps us together in the same bearskin so we can share warmth. We wait in silence for our bodies to stop shaking.

“I saw her,” he says.

My heart jolts. “Is she… ? Have they… ?”

“They’ve married her to Henri du Cerét, one of her uncle’s knights.”

I feel as though someone has sprinkled salt on my heart. The fire pops and sizzles as snowflakes turn to vapor in its flames.

“She served our meal, but she wouldn’t speak to any of us,” Adán says.

I swallow. “And Lamia?”

“She was there, at the seat nearest the fire,” Adán says. “She seemed… I don’t know, sick, diminished. Not at all as you described her. They had her wrapped in furs, and she was coughing so hard, she could barely hold the wine cup to her lips. They say some sickness has entered her lungs.”

The shock of his words saps all the feeling from my limbs. I had imagined Lamia ever as she was, clear-eyed and cruel in her command of man and earth. I know if I were righteous, I would ask God to show mercy, true mercy, even to this, my enemy. But in truth the only feeling I can muster is relief. So she is not afoot beneath the moon, in communion with the wolves and winds. She is flesh and blood after all, and I am glad of it.

Adán clears his throat. “There’s more.”

“What more?” I ask.

“They say Sofia has two children.”

“Children?” I hear myself say, although it sounds as if someone else is speaking those words from the far side of the thicket.

“Twins,” Adán says. “A boy and a girl, a little over a year old.”

The earth moves too fast, and my body is spinning opposite its turn. I see Sofia laid out on the bed, under some other man. I shove the knife Adán gave me down to its hilt in the mossy soil.

“Ishaq.” Adán repeats the words slowly. “Over a year old.”

I force myself calm enough to figure what he means. I count the months. Four for my journey from al Andalus to Roussillon. Close to a year on the streets of Córdoba. Six months lost to healing in the doctor’s home. A year and ten months in all since I last lay with Sofia. I grab Adán’s arm and stand. The bearskin falls to the dirt at our feet.

Adán tries to hide a laugh. “They say her children have dark hair, and they share their mother’s eyes, but not her complexion. There are whispers Henri du Cerét might have been cuckolded before he was even wed.”

“Take me to her,” I say. I can hear the twist of pleading in my voice. I feel for the furs Adán left me earlier in the day and begin hurriedly wrapping them around me. “I’ll go now. Show me the way.”

“Easy. Calm,” Adán says. “It isn’t that simple.”

I sit down again and let out a breath in frustration. “You’re right. I know.”

“We could steal her away,” Adán says. “You could send some sign with me, and with her help and my men, we could do it.”

I touch the braid of hair around my throat.

“But they would give chase, and if it’s known you’re the one who’s taken her, you risk bringing all the fury of the Christian armies down wherever you go. You could never return to al Andalus to retake the caliphate.”

I nod and swallow.

“So you decide. Will you take her from this place and go on being no one, or will you forget her and become Ishaq ibn Hisham of the Umayyad line again?” Adán says.

A log resettles itself in the fire. The flames flare, and then shrink.

Adán touches my arm. “You know if you ride south, I would go with you. I would raise an army for you.”

I rub my forehead. “Give me the night,” I say. “I need to think.”

“As you say.”

Adán piles more branches on the fire and rolls himself in the bearskin to sleep. I feel my way to the edge of the thicket and turn my face up to the sky. The snow has stopped falling, but the wind trails its cold fingers over my face.

God, are You there? I ask.

Until now, I never truly understood the story of the Hebrew king Suleiman asking God not for long life, or wealth, or the death of his enemies, but the boon of wisdom. Would that God would offer me such a bargain. Would that He would speak to me as He spoke to the prophets. Would that He would send me His messenger angel.

If You speak to my heart, I will listen. Will You speak to me? Are You there?

The wind makes a hollow sound in the treetops.

I kneel and touch my head to the wet leaves rotting on the ground, unsure if I am facing Mecca or if I am turned away.

I am lost, I pray. For the tug of vengeance and duty pulls me back to al Andalus, but my heart fills with panic and a terrible blackness when I think of coming so close to Sofia, only to slip away again, to leave her at the mercy of Lamia, to abandon my own children. Does God wish me to be a man or a king?

What is Your will? I ask. What I feel in my heart, is this Your will? Or are You testing me as You tested Ibrahim? Would You have me leave my people in anarchy? Would You have me leave my beloved and my children in the care of the men who tried to murder me? How can I know Your will if You will not speak to me?

The cold creeps into me, but still I kneel, my head to the earth, my hands tight around Sofia’s braid. Dim light seeps into the thicket. I raise my head. My limbs pop and my joints grind with stiffness as I right myself. I draw in the first cold breath of day. “You will not answer for me, will You?” I say aloud.

I stand and pick my way through the thicket to Adán’s side. “Brother,” I say. I shake him gently.

He sits up.

Let this be Your will. I take the braid from my neck and slowly pull it over my head. I feel for Adán’s hand and drop the slip of hair into his open palm.

“Tell her I’m come for her and the children.” My voice scrapes my throat, for in the shadow of my words I see tombstones stacked high as fortress walls, shining towers in flames, and blood in the marketplace.

Forgive me, I say. Forgive me.

Adán rises. He shakes the pine needles from the bearskin and stamps the fire to ashes. “Wait here,” he says. “Be ready.” And he kisses my head before he crashes away in the direction of the road.

I pace the thicket. I warm my hands over the hot ashes of our fire. The hollow of my chest feels stripped, between the ache of wanting for Sofia and my children and the knowledge that I’ve surrendered Córdoba to whoever steeps it in the most blood. The Berbers. The Abbasids. The Christians of the North. I lie down by the fire’s remnants, too tired even to sleep, and stare blindly up at the sky.

I must fall asleep at last, for when I wake, the sun has burned through the morning gloom. Its light is bright all around me. Somewhere down the steep vale below the thicket, a baby cries. Another child joins in, echoing its wailing. But their voices waver and quiet as a woman picks up a song. Her voice is husky with the cold.

And then her voice peaks higher, clear as church bells, clear as the muezzin’s call.

I stand. It is the voice that drew me from the riverbank to the orange grove, tied a string to my heart. For a moment, I think it might be my memory, grown stronger now that I am near my beloved again, for can Adán even have had time to deliver my message? But no, in my memory, there is no child’s cry, no small imperfection in her voice. My heart catches and lifts high. I start forward, pushing through the thick trees, and stumble out into an open vale. I trip down the hill, fall, and right myself again. I am running blind, stalks of dry winter grass slapping my legs, but her voice is closer now, more real than anything in my memory. I am running and falling, running again, her voice so near I know if she keeps singing I will be able to run straight to her.

The song halts.

I stop in my tracks. The wind rustles the grass.

“Ishaq?” The word comes from my right, only a few paces ahead.

I drop to my knees. Let it be her. I know I am not worthy, but let it be her.

“Ishaq?”

I stretch out my hands. “Sofia?”

She throws herself into me. Her arms lock around me, the thick wool of her dress warm on my skin, the smell of her different now, less salt and more smoke, but still her. Her throat makes a wrenching noise. She kisses my mouth, my eyelids, my forehead, my cheeks. I hold her and hold her and let my sorrow spill out of me. We rock together in the tall grass. One of her tears hits my face and courses down into my left eye. I blink. For a moment, I think I see a flash of red gold, her hair. I reach for her face and trace the line of her jaw, the delicate folds of her ears.

My knuckles brush her hair. It seems lighter, too light. I feel for her braid, but it isn’t there.

“Your hair… ,” I say, frowning.

She takes my hand and guides it from root to tip. It stops in a ragged line where her shoulders meet her neck. “Grandmère cut it as punishment,” she says.

“Oh.” I lean my head heavily on her collarbone and crush her against me. She is thinner, her body more worn. “Sofia, forgive me.” Forgive me, forgive me.

“It was nothing,” she says. She kisses my eyes. Her voice breaks. “It was nothing.”

“How are you here?” I cock my ears from side to side, but all I can hear is the gentle chafe of dry grass. “Where are your brothers? Are they far behind?”

Sofia takes my face in her hands. A small tremor runs through her fingers. “They’re not coming.”

“How—”

“I’ve been watching a long time, in case the chance should come,” she says. “Preparing. Last night, I heard Cordobán voices in the hall, and two soldiers from that man de Lanza’s band talking of a blind servant in the woods. And when de Lanza left to tend to him….”

I open my mouth to speak, but Sofia stops me with her rough fingers laid soft on my lips. She takes a trembling breath. “After they brought me here, I found Grandmère’s books, the ones on poisons and sleeping draughts—”

“Sofia.” I try to stop her. I do not want her to admit what she is about to say.

“And when Henri allowed me out for walks, I began looking for the plants they describe.”

“Sofia.” I try again.

“No, listen Ishaq,” she says firmly. “I couldn’t find any poppies or fellenwort to make them sleep….”

No.

“But I found a laburnum tree.”

Laburnum. I see the pages of her grandmother’s Pharmakopia open on the table before me again. “They’re dead?” I make myself ask.

“I don’t know.” She clears her throat and reins in the trembling in her voice.

I take her shaking hand in my own. I would forgive her anything.

“Grandmère’s book only said what would kill a man, not how much would force him down past waking. I tried to dilute it, but….” Her words soften, as though she’s turned away from me to cast one last look at the castle. “I don’t know what I’ve done, Ishaq.”

I kiss her fingertips again and again, because there isn’t anything in the world to say.

“Lady?” an older woman’s voice calls behind her. “Are you well?” One of the children makes a high, questioning noise, testing the sound of its voice.

“Is that my daughter?” I ask. “My son?”

“Yes,” Sofia says softly to me. She turns and calls over her shoulder. “Yes, I’m well.”

The wind stirs the grass around us, carrying the scent of rain and pine and far-off smoke.

“Come.” Sofia takes my hand and helps me to my feet. “Come and meet your children.”