The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

men in Lazaro’s band help kill a young bull that’s slipped its pen and tried to gore one of the students, she makes sure I have a strip of the meat. Her husband keeps a wary distance. He doesn’t say a word to me, even as his wife turns in the wagon to chatter about everything she sees as we make our way north through the rolling emptiness of La Mancha.

“Look, the city!” she cries when they finally sight Tulaytulah, her warm, firm hand clutching my forearm. She laughs in delight. Mencia reminds me of my mother in the days of my childhood, before the fear and isolated luxury surrounding our family smothered her to nothing, an empty veil, a dried flower between the pages of a book. For Mencia’s sake, I try to remember the city as I saw it when I was a boy of fifteen, its gray battlements cresting a green hill, all the common houses scattered below like so many windfall apples.

I don’t know how I will make it north to Roussillon, once the mapmaker and his wife are gone, or what will become of me once I’m there, but I have miles and miles to mull it over as the cart lumbers north along the old Roman road. I hold Sofia’s braid to my lips and pray for God to pass my message along. I am coming to you, I am coming to you.

On the last day I saw her, I came alone in the gloaming. Adan had grown suspicious of my late-night rides, but I chose a Shabbat evening so he would be forced to stay behind at the palace, not follow me as he had tried the week before. On my way to the house, I snapped a cluster of almond blossoms from a tree for Sophia. The air was heady with oranges, and she sat in her window, singing to herself as she strummed a quitara. Her voice rose lovely over the instrument’s steady thrum, dipping and weaving like a bird in flight. Her brothers had gone to the city for the week and her grandmother was off on one of her rambles, so she let me sing with her as she played.

We made love in the soft, last light of day. After, curled together in her bed, her head resting against my shoulder, I asked what I had been mulling over since the day she pulled me through her bedroom window.

“Sofia?”

“Hmm?” she replied.

“Would you come to court at Madinat al-Zahra? With me, I mean?”

She sat up in bed. “Truly?”

I reached out and fixed a piece of wayward hair behind her ear. “I’ve been thinking, if I were to marry a Christian lady, it might appease the Northern lords and restrain the vizier. It could stop the skirmishes at the border. And it would keep you here.”

“Ishaq, are you asking for my hand in marriage?” She prodded me playfully in the chest.

I kept my face solemn. “I am.”

“You aren’t asking very properly.” She put on a mock-stern face.

I reached over and pulled her on top of me, my hands on her hips. “My Lady Sofia de Rampion, will you consent to be my wife?”

“I will,” she said. She ran her fingers through the hair of my chest absentmindedly. “But Grandmere…. And my brothers won’t be so easily swayed.”

“How could they object to their sister becoming a princess of al Andalus?” I asked, and pulled her close to kiss her. She leaned down to press her mouth to mine.

A scrape sounded outside the door. We froze, her bare thighs around me, my hand on her back. The latch clicked and the door slammed open with a sound like Oriental powder igniting. A dark-haired man in his late twenties, with the same dark eyes as Sofia, pushed his way into her room, followed by a younger, fair-haired man. My eyes flew wide. Leandro and Telo, Sofia’s brothers. I recognized them from the portraits hanging in the manor halls. Leandro, her eldest brother, pulled Sofia from me and pushed her against the wall. I scrambled up, but Telo was on me in the same moment. He hit me hard across the jaw, and I fell back against the bedpost.

“Dejenlo, por favor, dejenlo!” Sofia screamed.

But I was up again, my back to the wall, and Leandro had drawn his longknife.

“Brothers—” I started, my hands raised to show I was unarmed.

“Call us that again and we’ll cut out your tongue,” Leandro said.

“Please,” I said. “I mean no harm. I wish to marry your sister. I—”

“Oh, you mean to marry her?” Leandro advanced with the knife. He shoved me against the wall and held the tapered blade to my throat. “You mean you wish to marry her after you’ve violated her? After you’ve left her unfit for any other man’s bed? Well, by all means. Telo, have you any objections?”

“Don’t,” Sofia began. “Please—”

“Quiet,” Telo said.

“But I asked him—” Sofia said.

Telo slapped her hard across the face. She fell against the wardrobe. Its sharp wood edge sliced her brow and blood streamed from the cut.

I struggled to go to her, but Leandro pushed his forearm into my throat. Telo turned from his sister to me and stalked across the room to where I stood naked, trapped against the wall.

“You come to our land.” Telo leaned in close, his voice quiet and charged with menace. “Your force your Prophet on us. You raid our holy places. And now you have the gall to defile my sister in our own home.”

“Telo,” Leandro said warningly.

“No.” Telo turned to his brother. “These Moors need a lesson. Hold him.”

I tried to jerk away in panic, but Telo shoved me over the edge of Sofia’s bed, and Leandro pinned me belly- down, his knife nicking behind my left ear. The bedclothes still held Sofia’s warm smell, mixed with fresh blood and my own sharp fear. Telo’s belt clicked.

“Please….” I tried to turn, but Leandro’s knife pressed below my jaw.

Telo knocked my legs apart with his boots. I felt pressure, and then pain ripped up through my bowels.

“No!” I screamed and strained my arms against them, but Leandro held me still as Telo forced himself into me. Oh, God, this is happening, this is happening. God, stop it, God have mercy. This is happening.

“Stop, please, stop.” Sofia’s voice shook.

My feet scrabbled uselessly on the floor.

“You’ll pay a hundredfold for what you’ve done to our sister,” Telo grunted in my ear.

He finished and drew back. I slumped beside the bed, shaking with shame and shock. How could this have… oh, God, I am… why did you let this happen?

Without warning, Telo leveled a kick at my ribs. I heard the pop of bone before I felt the pain. I fell to my side. Another kick, to my head this time. It caught my left eye, and one side of my vision exploded in a white starburst. Leandro joined in. One of them brought his foot down on my femur. I heard it snap and the room swam close to blackness. I rolled onto my stomach, tried to drag myself away from the blows, but they came at me from all sides. Adan, I thought, but no, he was far away in Cordoba, safe, presiding over his mother’s table. I curled my arms around my head and tried to hold still in my own half-darkness, praying for it to end.

And then they were finished, the room silent except for Sofia’s ragged crying.

“What have you done?” I heard Sofia say, somewhere far away.

“You stupid bitch,” Telo said, out of breath. “Did you think your virtue was yours to give?”

“He is Ishaq ibn Hisham, the heir to the caliphate,” she said. Her voice canted higher. “What have you done?”

The room went quiet. I blinked the darkness away from my open right eye. My left eye was already beginning to swell shut, and strange patterns of light danced across my field of vision. A surge of anger rolled over me, followed by shame and blackening pain. Anger. Shame. Pain.

“No one would blame us.” Leandro’s words swam close. “It’s simple vengeance. Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”

“No,” Telo said. His footsteps sounded near my head. He snarled his hands in my hair and tugged me up sharply. “Help me, Leandro.”

“That’s enough,” Leandro said.

“Enough?” Telo laughed. “For ruining our sister?” He took hold of my wrists and began pulling me from the room.

Leandro hung back, uncertain.