She smiled at him pleasantly. “You are exactly as I expected. One eye and all.”
Silence. Then, remarkably, the merchant started laughing. “That is where I get my title, yes. As you can imagine, it is also the reason I called you here tonight. I assume you have the magic I requested?” Loulie nodded. Rasul cleared his throat. “Well, let’s see it, then.”
She reached into her pocket and withdrew a coin. The merchant watched skeptically as she vanished it between her fingers. From his side of the table, he could not see the face on either side: a jinn warrior on one and a human sultan on the other. Every time the coin reappeared, it sported a different face.
Human, jinn, human, jinn.
“Must I remind you of our deal?” She held up the coin between pinched fingers.
Rasul frowned. “I already paid you in advance.”
“You paid in advance once. Now you must pay the other half.”
“I will not pay for a magic I have yet to see with my own eyes.”
Loulie did her best to ignore the stares of the armed men around her. Nothing can happen to me. Not while Qadir is here.
She shrugged, feigning nonchalance as she reached into her merchant’s bag. The bag of infinite space, Qadir called it, for it had a seemingly endless bottom. “If seeing is believing…” She withdrew a vial. It was a small thing, no bigger than one of her fingers. The minute the One-Eyed Merchant beheld the sparkling liquid inside, he tried to snatch it from her hand.
She tucked it away, into her sleeve. “I’ll take the other half of my payment now.”
“That could be water, for all I know!”
“And? If it is water, steal your gold back.” She gestured to the human weapons lining the room. “That is why they’re here, isn’t it? To make sure this exchange goes as planned?”
The merchant pressed his lips together and snapped his fingers. One of the men set a pouch in Rasul’s hands, which he offered to Loulie. She scanned the coins inside and, just to make sure she wasn’t being scammed, flipped the two-faced coin. It came down on the human side. Truth.
She offered him the vial. “Your requested magic: the Elixir of Revival.”
The merchant snatched it from her, and Loulie smiled beneath her scarf as he fumbled with the stopper. He was so excited, his hands were shaking.
If only he realized how easy this magic was to find.
Her eyes slid to Qadir. Though his expression was stony as always, she imagined a smug smile on his lips. She recalled the words he’d spoken the day she shared Rasul’s request with him: One jinn’s blood is a human man’s medicine.
There was a reason humans called it the Elixir of Revival.
That reason became apparent as the One-Eyed Merchant blinked the silvery contents of the vial into his eye. Loulie watched as sparkling tears streamed down his cheek, making his skin glow. But while this effect was temporary, something more permanent was happening to the merchant’s blind eye.
Darkness bloomed in the center of his iris like an inkblot spreading on a scroll. With every blink it spread, growing wider and wider until the blackness lightened to a dark brown.
Medicine indeed.
Soon it was not just the so-called elixir that fell from his eyes, but real tears. Even the mercenaries were unable to mask their shock as Rasul fixed both of his eyes on them.
“Praise be to the gods,” he whispered.
Loulie grinned. “Worth the price?”
“Such a miracle is priceless.” Rasul rubbed at his tearstained face, carefully avoiding the newly revived eye. “A thousand blessings upon you, Loulie al-Nazari.”
Loulie dipped her head. “And a thousand upon you. May I offer a piece of advice?” Rasul paused to look at her. “I suggest you come up with a new title. One-Eyed is a little melodramatic.”
The merchant burst out laughing. Loulie found, much to her surprise, that she was laughing with him. Once Rasul had finished heaping praises upon her and insisted on treating her to a stupendous feast later that evening, she left.
She and Qadir shared a look as they walked back down the corridor. The jinn lifted his hand to showcase the healing scab from a self-inflicted wound he’d made mere days ago.
She mouthed the words Shukran, oh holy, priceless miracle.
Qadir shrugged. He looked like he was trying not to smile.
Mama and Baba are dead. The words kept cycling through her mind. Every time Layla buried them, they resurfaced, a reality she could not escape.
Had the jinn not been dragging her through the desert, she would have succumbed to the weight of her sorrow days ago. But even when her body grew heavy with fatigue, he pressed forward. At first, she despised him for this—even feared him.
But the fear eventually faded. First into reluctance, then defeat. Why did it matter where the jinn was taking her? He’d told her that the compass her father had given her would lead them to a city, but she did not care about the city.
She did not care about anything.
Many sunrises later, she collapsed. She wanted to cry, but her chest was too heavy and her eyes too dry. The jinn waited patiently. When she did not rise, he picked her up and set her atop his shoulders. She was forced to hold on to him as he scaled a cliff.
That night, after the jinn had started a fire with nothing but a snap of his fingers, he took a coin from his pocket and set it on his palm.
“Watch.” He curled his fingers over the coin. When he next uncurled them, his palm was empty. Layla was intrigued despite herself. When she asked if it was magic, the jinn clenched and unclenched his fingers, and the coin was again on his palm.
“A trick,” he said.
Layla looked closely at the coin. It appeared to be a foreign currency, with the face of a human sultan on one side and a jinn wreathed in fire on the other. “There are two lands in this world,” Qadir said. “Human and jinn. And so there are two sides to this coin.”
He made the coin vanish and reappear between his fingers, moving so quickly she could not track the movement. “This may be a trick, but the coin itself is magic. It will tell you the real or moral truth of any situation.”
He set the coin down on Layla’s palm. “See for yourself. Flip it, and if it comes up on the human side, the answer is yes. If it comes up on the other, the answer is no.”
Layla would not have believed it was truly magic had the coin been given to her a few days ago. But things had changed. She was no longer so naive.
“My family is dead,” she whispered as she flipped the coin.
It came up on the human side.
She breathed out and tried again. “A jinn saved my life.”
Human.
Tears sprang to her eyes as the coin continued to come up on the human side, confirming her new reality. Truth. Truth. Truth.
“I am alone.” Her shoulders shook with sobs as she threw the coin into the air. It bounced off her knee and rolled away, back to the jinn. For a few moments, Qadir said nothing. Then he silently reached for her hand and set the coin on her palm.
Jinn.
He curled her fingers around it. “Not alone,” he said. “Not anymore.”
Loulie was lost in her memories and absently making the two-faced coin vanish between her fingers when she returned to the Aysham’s deck the next morning. The crowds from the previous night had dispersed, and the sailors paid her no mind as she wandered past them in her plain brown robes. She had traded the scarves obscuring her face for a light shawl, which she wrapped loosely around her head and shoulders to better feel the sun on her cheeks. It was a relief, as always, to doff her merchant apparel and bask in anonymity the day after a sale.
Also a relief: the familiar, hazy shape of Madinne in the distance. Loulie smiled at the sight of the city. “Qadir, do you see that?”