The Silver Sparrow

A Dream of Red

Hasheem's nightmare came almost every night for the past three weeks he'd been accepted into the kha'gan. She could hear it from the proximity of their tents—the muffled groans and whimpers of someone running from or seeing something too terrifying to imagine. Most of those nights she had stayed awake, tossing and turning on her own bed as she listened. It would take someone without a heart to sleep through something like that, especially for someone like her who had been through the same ordeal at night, no matter how long ago it had been.

It had been awful, those dreams of her mother being tortured, hurt, left to die in the desert like a worthless carcass waiting to be picked by vultures and eaten by foxes. Her mother, the sweetest, kindest soul whose hand had been gentle when she'd braided her daughter's hair or dressed her husband for battle. Those careful, thoughtful words she'd used around people to move and bend them to her cause, to calm and comfort even her father during his most impossible fit of rage. A delicate being, a beautiful face, a bharavi, won and loved by Za'in izr Husari, by her children and people, dragged over behind a rock by Rashai soldiers, made to weep and scream.

Soldiers, the survivors had said. No one would tell her the details of what they'd done to the kha'ri of Visarya. She had been given no opportunity to see her mother's face before they buried her. But she had seen her father's when he brought his kha'ri home that day.

It had been enough.

So had what Za'in izr Husari decided to do afterward to villagers, to the men, women and children along the outskirts of Sabha been enough to tell Djari what the Rashais had done to his kha'ari.

Some approved of his choices, others didn't. Everyone had, however, learned that there were lines one couldn't cross with people and things one couldn't take away from a man—or a woman—without consequences, sometimes to those who deserved it, other times to those who didn't. Life wasn't fair. It didn't last long if one expected it to be. Some wounds didn't close until one sought some kind of retribution. The scars remained though, so did the nightmares. Djari had some for the death of her mother, and others for what her father had done to the Rashais.

The desert had been painted red. There was blood in the sand, on her father's swords, in the crease of his skin just below his eyes, running down towards the scar that had turned crimson on one side, and dripping off his chin on the other. The white of his zikh had disappeared, soaked almost completely by blood, its excess dripping endlessly onto the already drenched shoulders of his horse. At the horizon, the flame rose high above the wooden roofs, reaching up in unison with the cries of babies and the shrieks of mothers toward the clouds as the day bled into nightfall, staining the sky deep red the same way the dead had stained her father's zikh.

Red was what she saw in her dreams. She hated the sunset, hated it for the memories it threatened to bring and for the future it promised. Za'in izr Husari had brought both his son and daughter along to witness his retribution, to remember, to etch into their memories and carve on their hearts a scar that would dictate every action in their lives and every decision they made afterward. She remembered her father's face that day, how tight his jaw had seemed, how much sorrow had been painted so clearly on it. Za'in izr Husari had never been a monster, but that day he decided to become one. It was a seal made from the blood of innocents, a promise that from then on there would be no line between him and his retribution, even if it meant breaking the world and his children along with it.

It did break her, and probably Nazir. That nightmare repeated itself often, sometimes with her in her father's place, in his garment, covered in blood she'd drawn or ordered drawn. There was no guarantee that she won't make the same mistakes. She was her father's daughter, after all.

Tonight she might also be making one, Dajri realized as she stood by her sworn sword's bed looking down at him. She'd come into his tent on half a thought. She did that a lot—putting things into action before she finished thinking. A terrible habit that was going to get her killed one day—or her sworn sword, now that she had one.