“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:
The seeds of the common poppy (Papaver somniferum) make a most marvelous defense against pain when crushed and burned, or when prepared in a tea. They render unto the drinker a state of profound sleep. Let the reader know, this same solution also may be used in the calling of Visions that, coupled by a Guide, can tell the truth of things.
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:
…a most potent draught, but pains must be taken to disguise the taste…
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.