Nahri looked away. “God willing.”
The older woman swallowed, obviously picking up on Nahri’s discomfort. “And the djinn?”
She tried to think of something easy. “Have her drink tamarind juice every morning—it will please him. And take her to the river to bathe on the first jumu’ah, the first Friday, of every month.”
Baseema’s mother took a deep breath. “God knows best,” she said softly, seemingly more to herself than to Nahri. But there were no more tears. Instead, as Nahri watched, the older woman took her daughter’s hand, looking more at peace already. Baseema smiled.
Yaqub’s words stole into Nahri’s heart at the tender sight. You’ve no family, no husband to stand up for you, to protect you . . .
Nahri stood up. “You’ll excuse me.”
As kodia, she had no choice but to stay until the meal was served, nodding politely at the women’s gossip and trying to avoid an elderly cousin whom she sensed had a mass spreading in both breasts. Nahri had never tried to heal anything like that and didn’t think it was a good night to experiment—though that didn’t make the woman’s smiling face easier to stomach.
The ceremony finally drew to a close. Her basket was flush, filled with a random assortment of the various coins used in Cairo: battered copper fils, a scattering of silver paras, and a single ancient dinar from Baseema’s family. Other women had put in small pieces of cheap jewelry, all exchanged for the blessings she was supposed to bring them. Nahri gave Shams and Rana each two paras and let them take most of the jewelry.
She was securing her outer wrap and ducking the repeated kisses of Baseema’s family when she felt a slight prickling at the back of her neck. She’d spent too many years stalking marks and being followed herself not to recognize the feeling. She glanced up.
From the opposite side of the courtyard, Baseema stared back. She was completely still, her limbs in perfect control. Nahri met her gaze, surprised by the girl’s calm.
There was something curious and calculating in Baseema’s dark eyes. But then, just as Nahri really took notice, it was gone. The younger girl pressed her hands together and began to sway, dancing as Nahri had shown her.
2
Nahri
Something happened to that girl.
Nahri picked through the pastry crumbs of her long-devoured feteer. Her mind spinning after the zar, she’d stopped in a local coffeehouse rather than head home and, hours later, she was still there. She swirled her glass; the red dregs of her hibiscus tea raced across the bottom.
Nothing happened, you idiot. You didn’t hear any voices. She yawned, propping her elbows up on the table and closing her eyes. Between her predawn appointment with the basha and her long walk across the city, she was exhausted.
A small cough caught her attention. She opened her eyes to find a man with a limp beard and a hopeful expression idling by her table.
Nahri drew her dagger before he could speak and slammed the hilt against the wooden surface. The man vanished, and a hush fell across the coffeehouse. Someone’s dominos clattered to the floor.
The owner glared, and she sighed, knowing that she was about to be thrown out. He’d initially refused her service, claiming no honorable woman would dare venture out unaccompanied at night, let alone visit a coffeehouse full of strange men. After repeatedly demanding to know if her menfolk knew where she was, the sight of the coins from the zar had finally shut him up, but she suspected that brief welcome was about to end.
She stood up, dropped some money on the table, and left. The street was dark and unusually deserted; the French curfew had scared even the most nocturnal of Egyptians into staying inside.
Nahri kept her head down as she walked, but it wasn’t long before she realized she was lost. Though the moon was bright, this part of the city was unfamiliar to her, and she circled the same alley twice, looking for the main road without success.
Tired and annoyed, she stopped outside the entrance to a quiet mosque, contemplating the idea of sheltering there for the night. The sight of a distant mausoleum towering over the mosque’s dome caught her eye. She stilled. El Arafa: the City of the Dead.
A sprawling, beloved mass of burial fields and tombs, El Arafa reflected Cairo’s obsession with all things funerary. The cemetery ran along the city’s eastern edge, a spine of crumbling bones and rotting tissue where everyone from Cairo’s founders to its addicts were buried. And until plague had dealt with Cairo’s housing shortage a few years ago, it had even served as shelter for migrants with nowhere else to go.
It was an idea that made her shudder. Nahri didn’t share the comfort most Egyptians felt around the dead, let alone the desire to move in with a pile of decaying bones. She found corpses offensive; their smell, their silence, it was all wrong. From some of the more well-traveled traders, she heard stories of people who burned their dead, foreigners who thought they were being clever in hiding from God’s judgment—geniuses, Nahri thought. Going up in a crackling fire sounded delightful compared to being buried under the smothering sands of El Arafa.
But she also knew that the cemetery was her best hope of getting home. She could follow its border north until she reached more familiar neighborhoods, and it was a good place to hide if she came across any French soldiers looking to enforce the curfew; foreigners usually shared her apprehension toward the City of the Dead.
Once inside the cemetery, Nahri stuck to the outermost lane. It was even more deserted than the street; the only hints of life were the smell of a long-extinguished cooking fire and the shrieks of fighting cats. The spiky crenellations and smooth domes of the tombs cast wild shadows against the sandy ground. The ancient buildings looked neglected; Egypt’s Ottoman rulers had preferred to be buried in their Turkish homeland and therefore hadn’t seen the upkeep of the cemetery as important—one of many insults they’d visited upon her countrymen.
The temperature seemed to have dropped rather suddenly, and Nahri shivered. Her worn leather sandals, threadbare things long overdue for replacement, padded on the soft ground. There was no other sound save the jingling coins in her basket. Already unnerved, Nahri avoided looking at the tombs, instead contemplating the far more pleasant topic of breaking into the basha’s house while he was in Faiyum. Nahri would be damned if she was going to let some consumptive little brother keep her from a lucrative take.
She hadn’t been walking long when there was a hush of breath behind her, followed by a flit of movement she caught out of the corner of her eye.