The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen Read Free Page A

and then handed the mirror to me.
    “So you may see more clearly,” she said. And then she walked out, dropping the cloth behind her.
    The instant she was gone, my nurse and Shara turned toward me as one, their faces pale, nostrils flared with fear. I didn’t ask how the door to the outer chamber had come open. It didn’t matter.
    I was betrothed to Sadiq within a week.
    I threw myself at my father’s feet in the audience room of his private chamber—the place where he might be not a king but a man.
    “I beg you, do not give me to him,” I cried. I clasped the fine leather of his sandals, pushed up the hem of his robe to touch my forehead to the top of them.
    “Bilqis,” he said with a sigh. I raised my head even as he looked away. The lines around his eyes seemed more pronounced in the lowlamplight of the chamber, the characteristic kohl missing from the rim of his lower lashes. “Can you not do this thing? For Saba—for Almaqah, over all?”
    “What do I care for any god?” I said. “The gods do what they will!”
    “Are you a goddess, that you, too, should do what you will?” he said softly.
    “She did this because she heard me speak ill of Sadiq. I repent of it!” I dropped my head, clutched at his feet. “I will apologize. I will serve in her chamber. But please do not do this!”
    He reached for me, to draw me up. “Hagarlat would see our tribal bonds strengthened. And why not? Your brother will be king. Do you really think the queen so petty?”
    I jerked away from him. “Do you not see that she hates me?” I stumbled back, away from the low dais and into the pool of lantern light before the throne. I opened my mouth to renew my appeal but stopped when I saw how he stared at me.
    For a moment his mouth worked, though no words came out. There was a pallor to his skin that hadn’t been there before.
    “Ismeni . . . ?” he said faintly. His hand lifted, fingers trembling in the air.
    “Father?”
    I went to him again but when I tried to clasp his knees, he flinched away.
    “Father, it is I, Bilqis!”
    “It is late,” he said, eyes turned toward the latticed window. Torchlight glowed up from the royal gardens below.
    “Please, my king. I was your daughter once. If you have any love for me—”
    “It is settled.” His voice was strained. The lamp flickered and I saw it then on his face: the grimace of the years since my mother’s death. Love eclipsed by the dark moon of pain.
    Sadiq seemed to be everywhere after that. He stood in the porticoes when I went out to the gardens. He loitered near the fountains as I went about my lessons. And though he did not approach me beneath the gaze of the ubiquitous guards, his eyes were as ever-present as the scorching sun.
    I quit attending meals in the hall. I began to avoid my lessons. The sight of him, from the way he wore his ornamental dagger high up in his belt as though it were his very manhood to the number of rings on his fingers, repulsed me. I would feel different in time, my nurse assured me. But my only comfort was that I would never be alone with him until we married in three years.
    Sadiq, however, was not a man of honor.
    I was twelve the first time he laid hands on me.
    The soft scrape of the door woke me. I was alone and at first glance by light of the waning lamp, I thought it was Baram, the eunuch. He, too, was paunched around the middle and soft-chinned, and the only man allowed in the women’s quarter.
    And then I saw the gleam of the dagger’s hilt.
    He crossed the room in three strides and I bolted up, screaming for Baram. Sadiq struck me hard across the face.
    I fought him as his weight fell on me, the scabbard of his dagger digging into my ribs, but he was twice my size. “Baram and the women are attending my sister, who is even now miscarrying your new brother,” he said hotly against my ear. He was putrid with perfume and wine. “And none of them will stand against the new master of waters.”
    His hand closed around