Chapter 28 · Chapter 28

The silence Abu Mishaal left in his wake was neither clean nor settled. It hung over the perimeter of the room like cooling smoke from a dying charcoal brazier, thick with the unsaid grievances of men who had banked everything on an alliance that had just crumbled under their boots.

Yet the hall was not empty.

Near the lower bend of the perimeter diwan, seated deliberately away from the sadr where Nayef stood, my uncle remained. Ammi Tariq sat with his knuckles pressed into the wool of his brown mishlah, his jaw tightened into an arrogant angle that refused to accept how thoroughly the tide had turned against him.

He had brought those elders into this house. He had drafted the terms that would have stripped my father’s registry from my fingers and placed my signature beneath another man’s seal.

Now that his emissaries had retreated into the Riyadh night, he clung to the unspoken entitlement of blood, waiting for Nayef to offer him the customary appeasement granted to an elder kinsman.

Nayef did not sit.