The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

gates.”

I cling to the back of the wagon as our caravan lurches forward. The watchmen at the gates shout after us that we’ll be safer inside the city walls with the other refugees fled from al Andalus, but I know Lazaro has his reasons for wanting to push on. The horses rise to a canter as we hurry north.

I broke into black consciousness with Adan crouched over me. Pain wormed in every inch of my body. An animal moan rose deep in my throat.

“Softly, brother,” Adan said. “I don’t know if they’re coming back.”

The overlapping criiii of cicadas pulsed in the air. I felt dirt and dry, sparse grass beneath my hands. “Where are we?” I asked.

“The eastern edge of the Rampion lands,” Adan whispered. “I dragged you from the house.”

“Your men… ?” My throat sounded stripped to my own ears.

“No,” Adan said. “I followed you alone.”

“Sofia?”

“I saw four horses galloping from the gate. Two men and two women.” Adan paused. Dirt scraped beneath his feet as he stood. “I’ll send word to the caliph. Our men will catch them before the night is out. They’ll be executed at dawn.”

“No.” I flailed my hand blindly and grasped the hem of his cloak.

Adan knelt beside me again. “No?”

“If they kill them, the Northern lords will take it as cause for open war.” My chest ached. I felt sick. “I have to protect—”

“Brother, they’ve taken your eyes. And your leg….” He stopped, unable to name the other thing they had done to me.

My left eye burned with tears behind its swollen lid. The right stayed dead. “No,” I repeated, trying to sound firm. “I’m to blame. Please, Adan….” My voice broke.

Adan smoothed his hands over my brow. “We’ll wait, then.” He kissed my forehead. “I’ll get my horse.”

“Anadil is by the river,” I said.

Adan paused a beat too long. “Don’t worry. I’ll come back for her.”

He returned a few minutes later, heralded by the faint clop of his stallion’s hooves. He wrapped me in his cloak and heaved me onto the horse’s back. Pain ripped through my leg and side, and nausea rolled over me as my innards shifted, but I clung to the horse’s mane. Adan led the horse quietly past the outer palisades of the Rampion estate, into the open country.

We made our way to a small village along the road to Cordoba, where Adan roused a doctor he knew.

“God have mercy,” the doctor breathed over me when Adan unwrapped the cloak from my shoulders.

Together, he and Adan brought me into his kitchen and laid me on the broad table. The doctor reset the bone in my leg and woke his wife so she could help him make a poultice for my eyes. Afterward, they washed me and prayed over me and wrapped me in a quilt, and for some time, I lost all knowledge of what happened to me.

I woke to the sound of running water, a courtyard fountain. For a moment, I thought I had been allowed passage into Paradise, despite what my life had been. But the high burn raking the marrow of my bones thrust that thought from my mind. I remembered the doctor and raised a hand carefully to my ribs. My whole chest had been wrapped in soft bands of cloth, my wrists in the same where they had rubbed raw against the horse rope. I felt something clutched in my left hand. Sofia’s braid. I tried to open my eyes, but couldn’t.

Someone shifted beside me. “Brother?” Adan said quietly.

“Adan?” I said.

“Yes.” His hand was cool on my forehead.

“Am I going to die?”

“No,” he said.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“You’re safe,” Adan said. “My friend Nasir has given us room in his house. He’ll keep us safe here, keep us hidden.”

“Sofia?”

Adan took my hand in his. “Her whole estate is empty, the doors left open to the dogs.”

I tried to raise myself on my elbows, but the pain flared through me again. I fell back to my pallet with a whimper.

“Rest,” Adan said. “I promise I’ll find her. Te lo juro. Only rest.”

I drifted beneath the surface of a fever. Nightmares plagued me, where Lamia cut open my chest and used my body as a cauldron for poisons, while Sofia lay beside me and held my hand. Adan came and went from the house, gathering news from Cordoba and coming back to whisper to me what he had overheard. My mother and father and sisters were safe at Madinat al-Zahra, so the attempt had been on my life alone, he said, still ignorant of my part in what had happened. My father had detached his own guard to search the countryside for me, in addition to the vizier’s foot soldiers, and they had offered to reward any man who could lead them to me.

“Sanchuelo tries to accuse the Jews of a plot to murder the caliph and his family,” Adan said, kneeling by my couch in the shaded eaves of Nasir’s courtyard. “He uses my name. Though they say your father won’t believe it.”

A rare breeze touched my neck. Earlier in the day, Nasir and his wife had propped me up on a bank of pillows in the corner of the courtyard, where they said the open air would help me recover. I hadn’t spoken since I first awoke in their house.

“Ishaq,” Adan said. “Why did they do this to you? Tell me.”

My lips had dried together. I pulled them apart to answer. “Sofia.”

“What about her?” Adan asked in frustration.

“I… I shouldn’t have… without her brothers’ consent….” My throat closed around the words. I pressed my nails into my palms.

“You took her for a lover?” I could hear the anger in Adan’s voice, but I didn’t know if it was meant for me or Sofia’s kin.

“Yes.” I leaned forward into the pain in my ribs. I deserve it, I deserve it. Oh, God.

Adan didn’t speak. His leather coverlet creaked as he rose. He scuffed around the perimeter of the courtyard’s smooth flagstones, and then came back and knelt beside me. “You loved her?”

“I would have married her,” I said.

He fell silent again.

“God has delivered His judgment,” I said, so quietly the steady rush of the fountain nearly hid my voice. “With their hands He marks me unfit to rule.”

Adan took my head in his hands and kissed my forehead again, as he had done the night he found me. “Brother, you know better than to ascribe the will of God to the works of men.”

A hard tear burned my left eye. I wished to God for Him to consume me in flame or let the earth open up for me—Oh, God, let me cease to be—but the quiet heat of the sun continued, and the water bubbling from the fountain, and the birdsong from the roof, and I did not cease to be. I reached out to Adan. “I cannot go back to my father’s house. He can’t know.”

Adan laid his hand over mine. “Anything you say.”

“Will you… will you find her?” I tightened my grip on his hand. We both knew I was too damaged to rise from my bed, much less seek her on my own. “See she’s kept safe and whole?”

“Yes,” Adan agreed.

“She has an uncle somewhere in Catalunya. They may have taken her there. See she has everything she needs. Shoes for her feet and cloaks for winter. And see no one speaks ill of her name.” My throat closed in on itself and the words halted in my mouth. I choked on all I wanted to give her. Pearls to seed her hair and a swift horse to ride out on whenever she chose, all the books of my library, a place at my side when I wrested control of the caliphate back from Sanchuelo. But without the sight of the courtyard to distract me, my mind unrolled the image of Telo striking her, her head hitting the wardrobe, the look on her face when she saw me stripped of my manhood, abased and unclean, helpless to save either of us.

“I will,” Adan said. “Anything you say, brother. But if I go, you must be ready when they start to speak of me