Chapter 26 · Chapter 26

The wooden partition had kept my silhouette hidden, but every word from the corridor had cut through the carved lattice with the clarity of struck brass. I had stood in the dimness of the anteroom, the scent of aged cedar mingling with the faint trace of smoke from the morning’s mabkhara, watching through the fretwork as the envoy unrolled the bound calfskin before Turki.

They had tried to divide me into ledgers. In their ink, the woman of the first covenant was an heir whose rights could be settled in dates and quarterly dividends; the woman who had fled to the northern high-walled garden was a ward whose name required a guardian’s counter-signature; and the woman who had walked into Turki’s majlis unescorted was a phantom to be bought off and erased before the family council convened.

Turki had not even invited the man to sit on the low divans.