“It had to be.” I stopped and leaned against the wall of a shop, because I could not face threading through the crowds while my thoughts were in such turmoil. “Duties in the desert, indeed. Tom, I believe the sheikh has gone to some effort to keep me from encountering Suhail, and vice versa. Now that has blown up under his feet.”
“You think Suhail was pretending, then?”
The question put a chill in my stomach. That I had read the sheikh’s intentions correctly, I was sure; it explained his animosity toward me, his refusal to acknowledge me except when necessity forced it upon him. But what if his fears were unfounded? What if his brother did not care that I had come to Akhia?
I could not believe that. Even if the warmth of our friendship had faded utterly from Suhail’s mind, he would not have been so cool toward me. Indeed, the very fact of his coolness told me he had not forgotten: he would only act so if he needed to persuade his brother that nothing untoward would occur.
“He did not even ask after Jake,” I said. My son had grown exceedingly fond of Suhail during our travels, the two of them bonding over a shared love of the ocean. “Yes, I am sure it was pretense.”
Tom did not argue. “What now, then?”
A very good question. I had put more time than I should admit into imagining what might happen when I encountered Suhail again… but none of it had accounted for the possibility that our meeting would not be as free and easy as our previous interactions.
There was only one answer I could give.
“I will do my work,” I said, and pushed off the wall. It would have been better had we been returning to the House of Dragons, rather than our lodgings in the Segulist Quarter. Then I might have distracted myself properly. “I will not give anyone cause to say it was a mistake to send me here.”
But even as I spoke those words, I knew them for a lie. I had in my desk at Shimon and Aviva’s house a folded piece of paper, and I would see it in Suhail’s hands if I had to climb the walls of the sheikh’s house to do it.
FIVE
Alas—or perhaps I should say “fortunately”—climbing the walls of the sheikh’s house would not have done me any good.
I had the sense to turn for aid to someone I trusted not to make the problem worse: my brother, Andrew. That he might laugh at me was entirely possible, but I could admit my conflicted position to him without fear of it rebounding upon my public reputation. (Tom I trusted even more, but any action he took would be read in light of the stories told about the two of us.)
When Andrew walked me home the next day, I invited him to the courtyard, where we might converse in relative privacy. “I was wondering if I might ask a favour of you,” I said.
“Of course,” Andrew said without hesitation. Then he grinned. “Am I going to regret saying that?”
“There is no reason why you should. It is not dangerous—oh, don’t look so disappointed,” I said, laughing. “It has to do with the sheikh’s family. As it happens, his younger brother Suhail was our traveling companion during my time aboard the Basilisk.”
“I see,” Andrew said, and then: “Oh. I see.”
As separate as we had been these past few years, he still knew the rumours. No doubt he had some of them from our mother. “The tales are stuff and nonsense,” I assured him. “Suhail is only a friend, and a respectable scholar. But it seems the sheikh disapproves of our association, and I do not wish to antagonize him by doing anything that might be seen as forward. I was wondering if you might carry a message for me—nothing inappropriate, you have my word. Merely that I have acquired a piece of research material, which I think would be of interest to Suhail.”
Andrew forbore to mention that I referred to Suhail by his given name alone. It was habit, left over from our time on the Basilisk, when I had not known any more of his name than that, nor any title to gild it. “You want me to take the research to him? Or should I just tell him you have it?”
“I should like to give it to him myself, if I can,” I admitted. “Though if that fails, then yes, I would like you to convey it on my behalf.”
My brother shrugged. “Very well. I’ll see what I can do.”
What he could do, unfortunately, was to inform me the next evening that Suhail was already gone from Qurrat. “Back to the desert,” Andrew said. “The sheikh doesn’t go out there very often himself, so he’s got his brother acting as his representative with the nomads.”
And when, I wondered, had that practice begun? After Suhail came home following the death of his father? Or when word came that Tom and I would be assuming Lord Tavenor’s duties?
Either way, it put Suhail quite neatly beyond my reach: a most frustrating situation. I could only hope that he came back to Qurrat soon, or Tom and I received permission to go out into the desert ourselves. As Andrew had said, he was the sheikh’s representative to the Aritat, and they were the ones providing us with our eggs and live drakes. He should not be terribly difficult to find.
Neither of those things happened right away, however, and in the meanwhile I had my work to keep me busy.
Dar al-Tannaneen had its own rhythm, established under Lord Tavenor’s oversight. The beasts must be fed, their enclosures cleaned, their health monitored. On Eromer the Scirling soldiers took up the burden of these tasks, so the Akhians could go to their prayer courts; on Cromer the Akhians returned the favour. (Our soldiers largely spent the resulting time idling about rather than reading Scripture. There were no Assembly-Houses in Qurrat, only Bayitist tabernacles; and Andrew told me the piety of his fellows varied in direct proportion to how much danger their lives were in.)
Tom and I spent those weeks familiarizing ourselves with things: the procedures of Dar al-Tannaneen, Lord Tavenor’s records of what he had done there, and of course the drakes themselves, with whom I became acquainted to a degree wholly unlike any I had experienced before.
Always we had been chasing them in the wild, watching them from cover, ordinarily getting close observation only once our subjects were dead. In Akhia, by contrast, I came to know the dragons as individuals. Quartus was lazy, seeming content to idle about in his enclosure, some days rousing no further than the minimum necessary to gulp down his meal. Quinta was fretful, and the reason the enclosures had been deepened partway through Lord Tavenor’s tenure, for she had almost escaped her pit on several occasions. The juvenile we called Sniffer had endless curiosity, and would play with objects we threw into his cage as toys.
None of that was immediately useful to our task, and I confined my notes on such matters to a private book, rather than the official records of Dar al-Tannaneen. This was the sort of thing Tom and I wanted to publish, separately from the business that had brought us here: it added to our store of knowledge about desert drakes, if not our ability to breed them. But we were not going to rush anything into print, regardless of military oversight. We needed to know more.
I knew perfectly well what was said about me around the compound. Tom had insisted I work at his side; this fed all the rumours that he and I had been lovers for years. I suspect, but do not know for certain, that Andrew got into fistfights in defense of my honour. Certainly Pensyth disciplined him for something, and more than once. I never asked why. Eventually the gossip among the Scirlings stopped. Whether it continued among the Akhians, I did not know, and did not want to.