“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.”