The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

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 Adan’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 Grandmere’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.

“One and the same sometimes,” Sofia said quietly. She looked away, and then turned back with wide eyes. “But she would never turn them to their darker ends. Nor I. You must believe me.”

I combed my fingers through a section of her hair. “I trust your word,” I said.

“We have many books. This is but one.”

“I trust you,” I repeated. I kissed her brow and rested my head against hers. The rising sun stung bright in the corner of my eye, and my heart went heavy. “I must go, but will you let me come again?”

She let out a breath. “You want to?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“What you’ve seen here.” Sofia tilted her head back to the ceiling, not looking at me. “What I’ve heard of you.”

I rubbed my thumb over the smooth ovals of her fingernails, unsure how to answer. I looked up. “And what they say of me, that’s all there is?”

Sofia looked at me. Her lashes were wet. “No, I suppose not.” She brushed a hand beneath her eye and tried to smile. “I would you didn’t have to go.”

“Nor I.” I twined one of her smaller braids around my thumb. “May I….” I started to ask.

“Only if you let me… ,” she said, and reached down to the woven sewing basket at her bedside to retrieve a pair of silver shears. She cut the thin braid from her hair and wrapped it around my palm, then folded my fingers over it and reached up to cut a lock from my head as well.

She kissed the thick black curl. “Come soon,” she said.

I lowered my feet from the window, steadied myself on the vines, and found the highest tree limb. I looked back up at her. “I promise.”

“I trust your word.” Sofia echoed me.

I dropped to the ground and then I was off, walking quickly through the orchard, turning back every few feet to catch a last glimpse of her, until finally the branches closed off my view.

I find a place in Lazaro’s caravan with a Jewish mapmaker called Miguel ben Yaakov and his wife, Mencia, traveling north as far as a little town at the foot of the Pyrenees. They promise me a share of their bread and a seat on their wagon tail if I will water and brush down their horses at the end of each day. We ride in the middle of the line, behind the dull thunder of Lazaro’s horses and the armed men guarding them, behind the merchants, who have bought a place near the guards, but before an imam and a cluster of students on horseback.

Dark mutterings surround our campfires at night, talk of unrest in the city we’ve left behind, stories of women raped, a Berber soldier beaten and left for dead by a mob, and the hanging of a student. We douse our fires and huddle in the darkness when hoofbeats roar close along the road.

By day, Mencia dotes on her horses, who she calls Limon and Pulga, and it is not long until she is hovering over me with extra shares of cured beef and sour bread, shaking out an old horse blanket for me at night. When the