Izzi tried to block out the music and loud voices. On the third attempt she could still not read the spell all the way to the end. It was about secrecy, about remaining invisible—not the simple shimmer they taught at the Magekadeh, but a deeper, harder-to-detect disappearance between the layers of place. 

The handwriting and sigil script was tight and difficult. In her last days Mother was frail, hands cramped into claws barely able to hold the quill. Izzi must also mentally unscramble the cryptic alterations that kept the knowledge secret. 

A deep resonant beat began, rushing the air in and out of her ears. The uneven laughter of a man already deeply drunk seemed to race up the stairs, chased by the higher peal of a woman’s laugh. It was a waste of time. She closed the journal, neatly re-shelved it, and spun the lamp wick down. Firelight from the courtyard below flickered in the intricate carvings on her ceiling. 

The foundations of the khan tensed, like a breath indrawn. Roots of ancient apricot trees clenched the stones like Mother’s old hands, gnarled and desperate, as if holding tight to something slipping away. Izzi always felt the magesty of the khan deeply, as if those roots twisted through her bones. 

She wrapped her hair back up, slipped into her sequinned slippers, and checked the ward of magic on her door. She sat on the veranda stairs for a while—chin on hands on knees. The general smokiness separated out into baked goat, spilled wine, and warm dust.

It was the usual celebration of a successful journey. Her half-brother, Simurgh, the caravan leader, laughed with a few of his men—his familiar voice echoed. Khan folk mingled with the caravaners in this rare moment of permitted downtime, now that the serving of the meal and formalities were over, and the growing beat signalled dancing. She slipped down a few more steps to the next level, observing like a ghost in her own khan, her own home—thinking about the spell of secrecy. 

Of course! She tilted her head back and smiled—the last part of the spell had just unravelled in her mind. 

The khan breathed out, leaving only the background pulse of magesty thrumming through Izzi like a second heartbeat. The wards her mother had laid over the khan were so sensitive, sometimes giving false tellings. Perhaps that’s all it was.

Izzi descended the remaining stairs, staying to shadows. Polished armour flickered. One of Hakim’s men nodded, then continued his patrol, tugged along by his huge mastiff dog.

The drum beat quickened, three burly musicians banging tombeks with a fury. Two older women strummed forty-eight stringed qanuns, sounding like a band of hundreds. Near the main fire seven men cheered, lifted their cups to smack them together, wine splashing, then passed them quickly to others before raising their fists in a collective grip. With a shout they threw their hands down to draw their swords, and with a gasp everyone close rushed back.

But it was the three musicians blowing their humble neys that was the signal that started the dancers, and their sinuous tune seemed to guide the foot stomping, swirling, treacherous dance of the scimitars. 

All onlookers clapped to the beat and cheered. Scimitars hissed through the air, narrowly missing each other and everything else. Sweat sprayed from flicking beards. The dancers dared death over and over, eyes flashing with concentration and zeal. The ultimate teamwork, the ultimate trust.

Izzi could not begin to understand what drove them to such foolishness, but she clapped with the others. Eventually the dance ended in a final flourish and shout. 

The music slowed, and many other young men joined the sword dancers in an informal time of dance training and laughter. 

She hung back behind a group of young people from both caravan and khan, who sat on benches away from the fire. She knew most of them casually. A girl a few years older than Izzi noticed her and beckoned. She had a round Kythian face like Izzi’s mother’s, eyes dark and slightly slanted above stern cheekbones. A name popped into Izzi’s head: Fariha. 

Izzi attempted a smile, and moved forward, but the music changed to a wavelike rhythm and Fariha’s attention turned away. Six women wove in to replace the men in the dance. The men taunted them with comments Izzi could not hear, causing reactions of feigned outrage and laughter.

Fariha winked at Izzi then jumped up and ran in to join the dancers. Izzi found herself closer to the group. Embarrassed, she backed away a little.

The ney players fell silent, allowing one qanun to dictate the movements of the dancers in a slow, rhythmic cadence. They turned and swirled, slippered feet seeming to spell out an elusive charm that Izzi tried to decipher like her mother’s tight script.

If there was a message there, it was in no language she could read—she could never move like that. The movements were fluid, hypnotic, the shimmer of their gold-threaded scarves catching the firelight as they twirled.

Izzi hovered at the edge of the group. One girl whispered too loudly to another, to be heard over the music.

“How can Fariha dance like that when her home village has been burned? Smoke rose over Xiktar only yesterday. The war swallowed it entire.”

Many heard, and heads shook.

Izzi watched Fariha more closely, saw a glitter in her eyes as she swayed, her arms moving like snakes. Beneath the movements there was tightness. Her hands trembled when outstretched, before she forced grace back into them with obvious effort. 

The music slowed to a quiet climb and fall of separate plucked notes. Izzi watched the concentration of the musicians, saw them looking into each other’s eyes, keeping a connection that became the music. Finally, only a faint beat on a tambour remained. 

The other dancers fanned out, leaving Fariha to dance out her sorrow. 

An older caravaner woman rose among the musicians and raised her hands, then opened them as if she read a book. She howled once like a jackal, and began a mournful croon, her voice deep and care-worn.

The names on the wind,

Mother, your name it sings.

Fariha swayed, her arms moving as if she was thrown about by the wind. The music climbed in complexity and tempo. The singer continued the lament.

The mountains my kingdom,

The wind my road,

The flames my feathers.

The qanun built to an impossible number of notes in an angry crescendo, swirling like a windstorm, while Fariha extended her arms to the stars, and begun to spin, till she flew like a child’s spinning top.

You who burn,

Sting of arrows,

Break our homes,

Shame on swords—

Our lives are sand. 

Her angry spinning slowed. The music seemed to falter, pick itself up, and falter again. Her feet took her back and forth as if to stop her from falling as she wobbled. The rich, reverberating voice sounded out a sour hope.

I spread my wings,

Write your name on the wind—

It will find you.

Birds take our names,

Ashes take our bones,

Wind, take our foes.

Fariha collapsed, a marionette with its strings cut. The other dancers swooped in and caught her at the last moment, their arms forming a cradle around her limp frame, and the singer breathed the final part, her voice catching in despair and loss:

Mother, feed me,

No ashes for dinner.

I swallow your name

On the wind.

A wound seemed to open in Izzi’s chest, a physical pain, and she pressed her hand into it. Myzina’s name was on the wind, carried by the vultures, dark giants of cleansing. She flew with them, wheeling and soaring. 

The tears dripping from her cheeks were soggy on her sleeve. 

This song was for Fariha, it was not about her. The mother in the song was not her mother, who had died of illness, not in a battle fought over her home. But Izzi’s emotions, haunted by wordless questions, would not be ordered around or thought away. That had not worked before, and would not this night.

She backed away further into the shadows, till her shoulders pressed against the rough sandstone of the building. She wanted to race back to the darkness of her room, to the smells of her mother’s incense, the safety of her memories. But the khan’s magesty held her, tightened at her ribs, rooted her to the earth. She forced her breathing to slow. There was no need to flee. There was nowhere to run.

Izzi wanted just to disappear. She curled her fingers into the shapes of the sigils, and whispered the spell from her mother’s journal. The air around her rippled. Her fingers frayed at the edges like ripped cloth, and dissolved like dust in lamplight. Even her own eyes slid off them. Other things were far more important to see.

The spell had worked!

No one would notice her now. 

No one ever really saw her anyway.