The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

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 Cordoba. 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 Grandmere 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 Grandmere. 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.”

“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.