But Ahmed knew a grab for power when he saw one. We didn’t know all that much about Malik Al-Kizzam, the man who’d taken over Saramotai, except that he’d been a servant to the emir and now the emir was dead and Malik lived in his grand estate.
So we sent a few folk to find out more. And do something about it if we didn’t like it.
They didn’t come back.
That was a problem. Another problem was getting in after them.
And so here I was, my hands tied so tight behind my back I was losing feeling in them and a fresh wound on my collarbone where a knife had just barely missed my neck. Funny how being successful felt exactly the same as getting captured.
Hossam shoved me ahead of him through the narrow gap in the gates. I stumbled and went sprawling in the sand face-first, my elbow bashing into the iron gate painfully as I went down.
Son of a bitch, that hurt more than I thought it would.
A hiss of pain escaped through my teeth as I rolled over. Sand stuck to my hands where sweat had pooled under the ropes, clinging to my skin. Then Hossam grabbed me, yanking me to my feet. He hustled me inside, the gate clanging quickly shut behind us. It was almost like they were afraid of something.
A small crowd had already gathered inside the gate to gawk. Half were clutching guns. More than a few of those were pointed at me.
So my reputation really did precede me.
‘Hossam.’ Someone pushed to the front. He was older than my captors, with serious eyes that took in my sorry state. He looked at me more levelly than the others. He wouldn’t be blinded by the same eagerness. ‘What happened?’
‘We caught her in the mountains,’ Hossam crowed. ‘She tried to ambush us when we were on our way back from trading for the guns.’ Two of the other men with us dropped bags that were heavy with weapons on the ground proudly, as if to show off that I hadn’t gotten in their way. The guns weren’t of Mirajin make. Amonpourian. Stupid-looking things. Ornate and carved, made by hand instead of machine, and charged at twice what they were worth because someone had gone to the trouble of making them pretty. It didn’t matter how pretty something was, it’d kill you just as dead. That, I’d learned from Shazad.
‘Just her?’ the man with the serious eyes asked. ‘On her own?’ His gaze flicked to me. Like he might be able to suss out the truth just from looking at me. Whether a girl of seventeen would really think she could take on a half dozen grown men with nothing but a handful of bullets and think she could win. Whether the famous Blue-Eyed Bandit could really be that stupid.
I preferred ‘reckless’.
But I kept my mouth shut. The more I talked, the more likely I was to say something that’d backfire on me. Stay silent, look sullen, try not to get yourself killed.
If all else fails, just stick with that last one.
‘Are you really the Blue-Eyed Bandit?’ Ikar blurted out, making everyone’s head turn. He’d scrambled down from his watchpost on the wall to come gawk at me with the rest. He leaned forward eagerly across the barrel of his gun. If it went off now it’d take both his hands and part of his face with it. ‘Is it true what they say about you?’
Stay silent. Look sullen. Try not to get yourself killed. ‘Depends what they’re saying, I suppose.’ Damn it. That didn’t last so long. ‘And you shouldn’t hold your gun like that.’
Ikar shifted his grip absently, never taking his eyes off me. ‘They say that you can shoot a man’s eye out fifty feet away in the pitch dark. That you walked through a hail of bullets in Iliaz, and walked out with the Sultan’s secret war plans.’ I remembered Iliaz going a little differently. It ended with a bullet in me, for one. ‘That you seduced one of the Emir of Jalaz’s wives while they were visiting Izman.’ Now, that was a new one. I’d heard the one about seducing the emir himself. But maybe the emir’s wife liked women, too. Or maybe the story had twisted in the telling, since half the tales of the Blue-Eyed Bandit seemed to make out I was a man these days. I’d stopped wearing wraps to pretend I was a boy, but apparently I’d need to fill out a little more to convince some people that the bandit was a girl.
‘You killed a hundred Gallan soldiers at Fahali,’ he pushed on, his words tripping over each other, undeterred by my silence. ‘And I heard you escaped from Malal on the back of a giant blue Roc, and flooded the prayer house behind you.’
‘You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,’ I interjected as Ikar finally paused for breath, his eyes the size of two louzi pieces with excitement.
He sagged, disappointed. He was just a kid, as eager to believe all the stories as I had been when I was his age. Though he looked younger than I ever remembered being. He shouldn’t be here holding a gun like this. But then, this was what the desert did to us. It made us dreamers with weapons. I ran my tongue along my teeth. ‘And the prayer house in Malal was an accident … mostly.’
A whisper went through the crowd. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t send a little thrill down my spine. And lying was a sin.
It’d been close to half a year since I’d stood in Fahali with Ahmed, Jin, Shazad, Hala, and the twins, Izz and Maz. Us against two armies and Noorsham, a Demdji turned into a weapon by the Sultan; a Demdji who also happened to be my brother.
Us against impossible odds and a devastatingly powerful Demdji. But we’d survived. And from there the story of the battle of Fahali had travelled across the desert faster even than the story of the Sultim trials had. I’d heard it told a dozen times by folk who didn’t know the Rebellion was listening. Our exploits got greater and less plausible with every telling but the tale always ended the same way, with a sense that, while the storyteller might be done, the story wasn’t. One way or another, the desert wasn’t going to be the same after the battle of Fahali.