“Kneel,” Nadine said from behind me.
I sank to my knees clumsily.
“Well, your work is quite cut out for you, isn’t it?” a second voice said. It was cultured and sharp, as though the speaker were used to cutting people down with it.
I could feel her eyes burning holes into the back of my skull, and then the sound of swaying skirts and jewelry chiming as she made her way in a large circle around me. The bottom of her skirt was a dark red, embroidered and shot through with black. Hanging from the gold belt around her waist were several long, thin chains that swayed and hit against one another as she came into view.
My eyes met hers, and I made a sound that was both a sob and a laugh. Looking at the girl in front of me was like looking into a mirror: it was my mouth on her face, the same dark eyes as mine, though they were lined in kohl. The same chin and cheeks—though hers were fuller, rounded with wealth.
No one on Cadiz had seen an image of the princess, not for a long time—her father had kept her hidden away on Luna-Vaxor, the Vathek homeworld, out of danger and out of view. But now I knew that standing in front of me was Maram vak Mathis, Her Royal Highness, High Princess of the Vath.
And she looked exactly like me.
5
The princess stepped closer to me, the move easy and graceful, pulled off my veil, then slipped a hand beneath my chin. She looked like the queen she would one day be, standing over me, one hand twisted lazily into the folds of her opulent gown. Sunlight glinted off her gold belt and the rings she wore. We were the same, I thought, and yet not. She wore more wealth than I’d thought to see in my entire life. And where I still retained the scent of a village girl, the princess smelled of sweet oils and incense. Her chambers were likely scented with bukhoor, her hair washed in sweet-smelling soaps, her qaftans folded away with satin-wrapped rose resin.
It was foolish of me to look her in the eye—she was a princess, after all. But each of us seemed to be riveted by the other, and the longer we stared the more painful her grip around my face became. I struggled not to twist out of her grasp.
The princess, I’d heard, had been raised on the Vathek homeworld after her mother’s death, among her father’s relatives. She was every inch the Vathek scion, or so the stories went, cruel to family and friend alike. She’d willingly impoverished cousins who’d displeased her. And when she returned to Andala, one of her Andalaan ladies-in-waiting emerged two weeks later with her face disfigured as punishment for speaking out of turn. Her hatred of her mother’s people and her legacy was legendary. She neither spoke nor read Kushaila, and she regularly derided its use whenever someone used it in her hearing.
Young as she was, and though half of her belonged to us, we expected her to continue her father’s reign in just his way when she came to power.
“Why do you suppose you are here and not at home?” the princess asked softly.
“I am here because I was brought here, taken from my home,” I said, letting some of my anger seep into my voice.
Her grip tightened painfully against my cheeks, and I sucked in a sharp breath.
“Don’t play,” she said. “I am not in the mood.”
“I don’t know why I am here,” I told her, though it wasn’t entirely true. I did know, or thought I did. My mind raced with thoughts of situations where they could use me—a disposable farmer’s daughter—in place of the princess. I thought once more of the droids storming our kasbah, scanning the faces of every girl in the village who was coming of age. It was no stroke of luck that they’d taken me. They’d been searching for me—for a mirror image of Maram—all along, probably all over Cadiz and every other moon in our system.
“I don’t know, Your Highness,” she corrected, and shook my chin angrily. “Say it.”
“I don’t know, Your Highness,” I repeated, trying to match her tone.
“What a darling mimic you are,” she said. “One could almost forgive you for looking so much like me.”
“I didn’t choose to look like you,” I said softly.
Her expression changed from banked anger to something uglier, crueler. The air stretched and thinned between us, until she released my chin. She moved quickly, like a viper, and backhanded me with her ringed hand. Pain was quick and hot; it radiated over my cheekbone and down my jaw, spreading like wildfire, amplified by the bitter taste of copper inside my mouth. I turned my head back slowly and gripped my skirts as tight as I could.
When our eyes met a ghost of a smile came and then left her face. She looked almost satisfied, and that more than her anger terrified me.
“Nor did I,” she said at last, her voice even. “And yet here we are—a baseborn girl and a future queen. Now, answer my question.”
“I don’t know, Your Highness,” I repeated.
She curled her lip.
“Her Highness,” Nadine said, “has been blessed with a spare.”
“I am not a spare,” I gritted out.
Her satisfaction grew and transformed into triumph. My stomach sank as I realized I’d stepped into the trap she’d laid for me.
“The Vathek have a story about a man named Alexius who angered their god,” Maram began, her mouth curving into a lazy smile. “He was strung up on a mountaintop and fed to birds of prey. Every day they pecked him until he died,” she continued, and began to circle me. “And every night god healed his body so that these same birds could feast again with the rising of the sun.”
I tried to keep my breathing even and my eyes fixed on a spot on the floor. Whatever she had planned, I would not cower. She couldn’t make me.
Maram whistled, a high-pitched, thin sound and lifted her right arm. For the first time I noticed the long leather glove she wore. The sound of wings beat against the air, drawing closer and closer.
To her credit, Maram did not flinch or waver when the roc alighted on her arm. The bird was half her height at least, and when it spread its wings for balance, they spanned as long as she was tall. Its talons and beak were bone white, a stark contrast to the near midnight black of its plumage. It regarded me with one eye, as dark as its feathers, unblinking and fixed on me as if I were prey.
I swallowed.
“Nadine used to tell me stories,” Maram said. She stroked a spot against its chest, and it warbled, an eerie sound from so frightening a creature. “The roc used to be large enough to carry grown men off to feed their nestlings.”
When I met her eyes her smile widened. Fear beat in me, louder than my heart, and drowned everything out. I did not jump when she lifted her arm up and the roc launched itself back into the air, but it didn’t matter. Keeping my composure would not stop what I knew was coming next.
“You will learn a great many things in the Ziyaana,” she said. Her smile was sweet now, nearly congenial. There was a dimple in her left cheek. “Here is your first lesson: do not presume to speak back to me.”
She whistled two short, sharp bursts. The roc cast its shadow from high above as it circled the ceiling, gave out an angry cry, and dove with its wings tucked against its sides.
I could not stop the scream of terror that tore itself out of my throat.
I had seen feral hawks and the like on Cadiz, watched them take down prey and feast with a detached fascination. I had never allied myself with the prey, had never imagined I’d be on the receiving end of claws and beak and terror. You could not be anything like prey and survive our village or our moon.