Chapter 1

The Foreign Prince

Once, in the desert kingdom of Miraji, there was a young prince who wanted his father’s throne. He had no claim to it but the belief that his father was a weak ruler and that he would be stronger. And so he took the throne by force. In a single night of bloodshed the Sultan and the prince’s brothers fell to the young prince’s sword and the foreign army he led. When dawn came he was no longer a prince. He was the Sultan.

The young Sultan was known to take wives into his harem the same way he had his country: by force.

In the first year of his rule, two such wives gave birth to sons under the same stars. One wife was a girl born in the sands. Her son belonged to the desert. The other wife was a girl born across the water, in a kingdom called Xicha, and raised on the deck of a ship. Her son did not belong.

But the sons grew as brothers nonetheless, their mothers shielding them from the things the palace walls could not. And for a time, in the Sultan’s harem, things were well.

Until the first wife gave birth again, but this time to a child that was not her husband’s – a Djinni’s daughter, with unnatural hair and unnatural fire in her blood. For her crime in betraying him, the Sultan turned his anger on his wife. She died under the force of his blows.

Such was his rage, the Sultan never noticed the second wife, who fled with their two sons and the Djinni’s daughter, escaping back across the sea to the kingdom of Xicha, where she had been stolen from. There, her son, the Foreign Prince, could pretend that he belonged. The Desert Prince could not pretend; he was as foreign in this land as his brother had been in their father’s. But neither prince was destined to stay long. Soon, both left Xicha for the open seas instead.

And for a time, on ships going anywhere and coming from nowhere, things were well for the brothers. They drifted from one foreign shore to another, belonging in each place equally.

Until one day, across the bow of the ship, Miraji appeared again.

The Desert Prince saw his country and remembered where he really belonged. On that familiar shore he left the ship and his brother. Though the Desert Prince asked his brother to join him, the Foreign Prince would not. His father’s lands looked empty and barren to him and he could not understand what hold they had over his brother. And so they parted ways. The Foreign Prince stayed on the sea for a time, raging silently that his brother had chosen the desert over the sea.

Finally the day came when the Foreign Prince could no longer be separated from his brother. When he returned to the desert of Miraji, he found that his brother had set it on fire with rebellion. The Desert Prince talked of great things, of great ideas, of equality and of prosperity. He was surrounded by new brothers and sisters who loved the desert as he did. He was now known as the Rebel Prince. But still he welcomed the man who had been his brother his whole life with open arms.

And for a time things were well in the Rebellion.

Until there was a girl. A girl called the Blue-Eyed Bandit, who had been made in the sands and sharpened by the desert and who burned with all of its fire. And for the first time the Foreign Prince understood what it was that his brother loved in this desert.

The Foreign Prince and the Blue-Eyed Bandit crossed the sands together, all the way to a great battle in the city of Fahali, where the Sultan’s foreign allies had rooted themselves.

In that battle of Fahali the rebels won their first great victory. They defended the desert against the Sultan who would have burned it alive. They freed the Demdji, another Djinni’s child, whom the Sultan would have turned into a weapon against his will. They killed the young commander, their brother who would have shed blood until he could win praise from his father, the Sultan. They ruptured the Sultan’s alliance with the foreigners who had been punishing the desert for decades. And the rebels claimed part of the desert for themselves.

The story of the battle of Fahali spread quickly. And with it spread news that the desert might be a prize for the taking again. For the desert of Miraji was the only place where the old magic and the new machines were able to exist together. The only country that could spit out guns quickly enough to arm men to fight in the great war raging between the nations of the north.

New eyes from foreign shores turned to Miraji, hungry ones. More foreign armies descended on the desert, coming from all sides, each trying to claim a new alliance, or the country itself. And while enemies from outside gnawed at the Sultan’s borders and kept his army occupied, the rebels seized city after city from the inside, knocking them out of the Sultan’s hands and rallying the people to their side.

And for a time things were well for the Rebellion, for the Blue-Eyed Bandit, and for the Foreign Prince.

Until the balance started to shift against the Rebel Prince. Two dozen rebels were lost in a trap set for them in the sands, where they were surrounded and outgunned. A city rose up against the Sultan, crying out the Rebel Prince’s name in the night. But those who had saw the next dawn with the blank eyes of the dead. And the Blue-Eyed Bandit fell to a bullet in a battle in the mountains, gravely wounded and only just clinging to life. There, for the first time since the threads of their stories had become tangled, the Blue-Eyed Bandit’s and the Foreign Prince’s paths split.

While the Blue-Eyed Bandit clung to her life, the Foreign Prince was sent to the eastern border of the desert. There, an army from Xicha was camped. The Foreign Prince stole a uniform and walked into the Xichian camp as if he belonged. It was easy there, where he did not look foreign any more. He stood with them as they battled the Sultan’s forces, spying in secret for the Rebel Prince.