The leg of the duck finally came free in a snap of cartilage and sinews ripping free under the sawing of the Sultan’s knife. There was something about the noise of cracking bone echoing around the polished marble halls and glass dome that set my teeth on edge. The Sultan calmly spooned orange sauce across the flesh as he spoke.

‘And my father let it happen. He was foolish and cowardly. He thought we could fight the same way our country had in my grandfather’s day. He thought we could stand against two armies and somehow not get annihilated. Even General Hamad advised my father he couldn’t win a war on two fronts. Well, Captain Hamad then. I made him a general after his advice proved to be so sound.’

He was talking about Shazad’s father. General Hamad had no loyalty to this Sultan. Shazad had always known her father despised his ruler. But he had backed the Sultan’s ideas twenty years ago all the same. There was a time when even a man on our side had thought our enemy was in the right.

‘The only way to win was to form an alliance, grant them access to what they wanted from us on our terms. My father wouldn’t do it. Neither would my brother who had won the Sultim trials. Just because he was able to best eleven of our brothers in an arena somehow that made him fit to decide the fate of this country?’

Not any more fit than Kadir was. But I didn’t interrupt. Getting myself turned out of the Sultan’s presence didn’t seem so important now. I’d learned history in school. But it was different to hear it from the Sultan’s own tongue. It would be like hearing the tale of the First Mortal from Bahadur, who would have stood with the other Djinn at the birth of mortality and watched him face down death.

The Sultan seemed to sense my attention on him all at once. He looked up from where he was sawing at his meat. Glancing between my empty hands and my still-full plate.

‘I did what needed to be done, Amani,’ he said calmly.

He had chosen a side to keep us from being torn apart between two of them. In one bloody night Prince Oman, a nobody among the Sultan’s sons, too young even to be allowed to compete for Sultim, had led the Gallan armies into the palace, killed his own father, and slain the brothers he knew would stand between him and the throne: the Sultim and the others who had fought in the trials. By morning he sat in his father’s place and the Gallan were our allies. Or our occupiers.

‘What I did twenty years ago was the only way to keep this country from falling completely into their hands. The Gallan have annexed enough countries. I couldn’t allow us to be next.’ He sawed at his food carefully as he spoke. ‘The world is a lot more complicated than it seems when you are seventeen, Amani.’

‘And how old were you when you turned our country over to the Gallan?’ I knew he hadn’t been all that much older than I was now. The same age as Ahmed, give or take.

The Sultan smiled around the piece of duck he was chewing. ‘Young enough that I spent the next nineteen years trying to find a way to drive them out. And I was very close to succeeding, you know.’ Noorsham. He’d been trying to use my brother, a Demdji, as a weapon to kill the Gallan, and never mind his own people who wound up caught in the crossfire. ‘A little more time and I could’ve rid this country of them forever.’ He picked up his wine, drinking deep from the cup.

A little more time. If we hadn’t interfered. If we hadn’t saved Fahali. Saved our people. Saved my brother. And he reckoned he could’ve saved the whole country. They would have been a sacrifice for the greater good.

‘You’re not eating.’

I wasn’t hungry. But I speared a piece of cold meat all the same. The orange had congealed into a sticky paste around it. It was too sweet when it hit my tongue now. You’re wrong. The words, too, were sticky on my tongue. I couldn’t spit them out. I wished Shazad were here. She knew more than I did. She’d read up on history and philosophy and had better schooling with her father’s tutors than I’d had in a busted-down schoolhouse at the end of the desert. She was better at debating things than I was. But we’d both been in Saramotai. A power play disguised in a just cause. ‘Awfully convenient how saving this country meant you becoming Sultan without the Sultim trials.’

‘The Sultim trials are another antiquated tradition.’ The Sultan placed his wine back on the table, carefully steadying it by the stem. ‘Hand-to-hand combat between brothers and riddles to prove a man had half a brain might’ve been the best way to pick a leader when we were just a collection of tents in the desert fighting the Destroyer of Worlds’ monsters, but wars are different now. Wit and wisdom are not the same. Neither are skill and knowledge. And Sultans don’t go out on the battlefield with a sword any more. There are better ways to lead.’

‘You held a Sultim trial anyway.’ I reached for another orange off the duck, moving slowly so as not to rustle the stolen supply route map hidden in my waistband.

‘Yes, and look how well that served me. I acquired a rebel son out for my throne as a result of it.’ He laughed to himself, as he pushed the gold platter closer towards me. A low, self-deprecating chuckle that reminded me of Jin. ‘I had to hold the trials, to show the people that though I had taken my throne by … other means, I was still upholding the traditions of our country. As antiquated as it is, it can still serve a purpose.’ He settled back in his seat again, watching me eat. ‘In some countries, the people love their royals best when they are celebrating weddings or new royal children. If only that were the case with my people, I would never run out of their love. But the Mirajin people are not so easily bought. They never love my family more than when we are fighting to the death for the right to rule them. They never love me so much as they do on Auranzeb when I remind them that I killed twelve of my brothers with my own hands in one night.’ He said it so calmly that whatever warmth his laugh had brought into the room drained out of it instantly. ‘I try not to remind them that it was the same night I handed them over to the enemy they hate so much. But really, this is a violent country, Amani. You’re proof of that. Our dinner is proof of that.’ He tapped the arrow through the duck’s neck. ‘I put a knife in your hand and your first instinct was to stab me.’