The music played on. Well-known songs had most joining in, many badly out of tune and time, but all full of enthusiasm and cheer. The songs were so familiar to Izzi they flew over her, high above, almost unheard, but she knew whether happy or sad they carried the people away from thoughts of the war and its costs. She remained in the background, a ghost, unfeeling, defending herself from memories.

Eventually it was time for the tellings. Simurgh emerged from behind the musicians and hurdled up onto a wine cask with the effortless grace of a man who could leap between speeding horses. Those who noticed him stopped their conversations, touched the shoulders of their colleagues. Izzi saw him scan the crowd, feeling for his moment. He nodded to the musicians, who brought the current tune to a tidy end. 

“Caravan!” he called. His voice didn’t seem loud, but it’s timbre carried and silenced the final mutterings, inviting all the caravan folk to gather. He dropped to sit with his dusty boots dangling, and motioned his people closer. His turban was slightly unravelling, and he pushed it back out of the way impatiently, readying himself to speak. At least a hundred crowded in—the cameleers, cooks, and cart-wrights; the traders, tailors, and tinkers; the singers, storytellers, and scouts who called the rolling desert home. The caravan guards flanked him, those same swift and deadly horsemen who had just danced the swords. None saw Izzi, even when she mingled forward, but she took care not to be close enough to bump into shoulders or hips. 

“A trip of great profit, my friends,” Simurgh said, his thick black beard parting in a grin, “as father will attest.” He pointed over their heads, indicating Penza, owner of the khan, caravan, and much else besides, who stood outside his darkened tally room on the colonnade, watching on, wearing his usual indigo kaftan and fine but austere turban. He dipped his head in acknowledgment. 

There were muted cheers in response. 

“And profit for the caravan is profit for us all.” Simurgh continued, deftly saving the moment.

The cheers were more enthusiastic.

“I know we passed on the last leg things you might like to un-see, or forget, or maybe cannot forget—perhaps you have vowed never to forget. Know that we do not just make a profit here, we carry vital goods and supplies for the people at both ends of our journey. We are a lifeline, a heartbeat for the people, mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, regardless of who they support or what they believe, from the richest noble to the most luckless refugee.”

The response was silence. All eyes were on the kohl-lined eyes of Simurgh, and he seemed to return a piercing regard directly to each in turn. He raised his hands, adjusting his turban once again, then lifting them to include all in an expansive gesture, fingers splayed. 

“Remember who you are. Perhaps you are a son of a son of a son of a cameleer who rode the dunes before the rock of these kingdoms was raised from the sand, and feel what I say deeply. Or perhaps you are a daughter who joined us only weeks ago, leaving behind what you knew, running from it, or running to us. No matter. 

“Who you are is a caravaner. Your loyalty is clear. We are Caravan!”

“Caravan!” one of the sword dancers shouted, raising a fist.

“Caravan! The crowd cried in unison. “Caravan!”

Izzi so wanted to belong to the caravan. She could leave with them the next day, run away to feel the sense of belonging her brother invoked. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. She did not belong to the caravan. Penza would never allow it, in any case. Zakra was all she had ever known, and she was as rooted here as the khan.

Simurgh continued. “If you have no duties among the stacks and coffers, no duties to the camels and horses, no fruitful trading to pursue, have a well earned day of rest tomorrow, for the next day the desert welcomes us back.”

“Who gets to rest, exactly?” cried a heckler.

“Those who are not carrying their weight, Malik,” Simurgh retorted, and threw his head back in a laugh which dislodged his turban entirely, spilling out the dark waves of his hair. The laughter caught on and rippled through the caravaners, and Izzi saw that even Malik, the young camel-hand, joined in. She smiled with pride for her brother.

Then the brightness of the fire and lanterns seemed to dim. A shift in the magesty of the khan tickled the invisible swirling wards, raising and rippling the fine hairs on Izzi’s arms. She spun around to scan for the source. There. 

Back between the columns, Father tugged at the long ripples of his beard, wearing an expression that might have been anger on another man, but Izzi knew was concern. Behind him, a second figure loomed in the darkness—darker than the shadows, a shape half-swallowed.

Seeing him shattered the spell that had hidden him—Mogh Kalu.

Kalu was her teacher at the Magekadeh, but more than that—he led the Magians of Zakra, and was the king’s Royal Magian. It was his veiled presence that must have disturbed the wards earlier.

She hadn’t seen Kalu at the Khan of Penza since the day he’d recruited her for mage training, plucking her from childhood to set her on the path to defend Zakra. Why was he with Penza now? 

Kalu moved from the tally room’s threshold, his dark cape rippling like a pool disturbed by a stone. Those ripples seemed to drink the light from the space around him, dragging an eerie stillness in his wake. Izzi saw his lips move—murmuring something just beneath hearing. A spell.

The courtyard dulled. Firelight flickered low. The murmur of the caravaners faded into nothing. A glamour—one beyond her skill, but she could feel its touch.

Then, finally, Kalu stepped fully into the light.

The lines of his face were carved in all the wrong directions, as if his skin had set in expressions no ordinary man could make—angles of thought too sharp, furrows of concern shaped by calculations rather than care. His fluffy white hair bobbed with his stride, and though she often found it comical, it wasn’t. Not now. Not in the silence he had drawn over them all.

“Friends,” he said—not a greeting, but a challenge, a word laid down like a marker, daring any to contest it. And yet, beneath the hush he had woven, the word rang hollow.

“Friends, as Simurgh rightly says, the caravan is a vital artery for Zakra. King Shahram knows your worth—spares you his scrutiny in light of your good work, your role in keeping the machinery of commerce and state turning as smoothly as the famed machines of perpetuity he commissioned for his grand hall.

“But like the magic of those machines, perpetuity has a price.

“Be you sons of sons of cameleers, or daughters of former enemies, we all dance the blades. And in this city, we show our loyalty to Zakra.

“The war rages now, closer to the gates than it has for many decades. No force of man can stop it—the fires of its hell burn deep in the veins of this land, flaring as they have for generations. It can no more be extinguished than an idea. But have no fear. This latest insurgence will be crushed. Zakra, as always, prevails.”

His voice was steady, measured, undeniable.

“I have come this night to inform you: the return leg of your journey to Kythia is delayed. Operational matters intervene, making your route too dangerous.”

The silence held. No one moved.

Simurgh was the only one who dared speak. Izzi saw him fighting against the inertia of Kalu’s spell, forcing breath into his lungs, shaping sound from lips that wanted to stay still. Kalu released him to talk.

“Friend,” Simurgh said. His voice was calm, composed—so well-crafted that none could guess the word a lie. “Foodstuffs will spoil. Livestock must be fed. The expense of this delay is great.”

Kalu shrugged, the gesture light, almost careless. He flicked up the fingers of one hand. “Business,” he said, turning those fingers as if the concept amused him, “is not without its risks. As Penza will attest. When a pause or gap in the battles allows, I will make it known.”

He started to turn to leave, but paused and twisted back to scan the onlookers. His eyes landed right on Izzi—impossible, considering her spell—or it should have been.

“Oh, and Izzi,” he said, maintaining the amused tone, “I hope you are studying for your assessment in only two days, and not just mucking around with your mother’s spell of deception.”

Casually, as if a continuation of his natural movement, he moved one hand behind his back so she could see no sigils, and held the other over his mouth to hide whatever spell he spoke from her. She felt a ripping at her skin as the spell of invisibility was wrenched away like the tearing of a bandage from a wound. 

“Ow!” She gave an involuntary cry of pain—only small, mostly suppressed. But in Kalu’s imposed silence everyone heard and turned toward the sound.

She felt every expression of disapproval land on her. How could anyone trust her now, knowing she could observe them unknowingly? They could not know this was the first and only time. Her face burned, hot with shame and embarrassment. 

Kalu’s smile now was for her alone. “Magic too,” he said, “is not without risk.” His expression was benevolent, as if he had gracefully delivered another lesson, and she should be grateful.

Izzi’s hands went cold. She clenched her fists to stop her fingers from shaking. Her nails bit into her palms. He will pay, she thought. He will see what I can do, how far ahead Mother’s teachings have taken me.  

But every eye was on her, exposed as a sneak, a lurker, an eavesdropper. Untrustworthy. 

If she could not be invisible, she wanted to shrink. She knew no spell for that, so she fled. The people parted, slightly more afraid of her now. It was not the kind of respect she wanted.

✨

Later, in the darkness of her room, in the silence after Kalu had departed and all had retired, Izzi woke. She lifted her face from her tear-soaked pillow, listening.

Pay attention, a voice said in her mind.

She sat up instantly. No questing presence should have been able to get through the wards of the khan, and definitely not into her mother’s apartments which she had laced this night with more than the usual spidery web of tells. So what was this?

She sat crossed legged on her bed and attuned herself to the magesty of the khan. The apricot trees hung in the still air, still exhausted from a day in the sun, and the nightjars in their branches rested and preened. The foundations of the khan groaned inaudibly, bearing the weight as ever, and in the stable the sleeping camels grunted and sighed, grinding their teeth in dreams of endless sand. A horse whinnied softly and another snored. The night guards whispered the watchword as they passed on their rounds. 

The voice was only in her head.

Satisfied, she lay back down, turned her pillow to the dry side, and counted sigils to keep away all thoughts until she could sleep again. But it did not work, the lines of sigils blurred and she could not keep them in their proper sequences, their pure progression as trained in the Magekadeh. 

Tomorrow she would have to face Kalu again. She didn’t want to do that from such a position of weakness. How had he seen through her spell so easily? Normally the magian spells followed a strict regimen of ritual and execution, built upon ancient scriptures. Her spell had a totally foreign base, a chaotic magic like nothing the mages were taught, but Kalu had undone it seemingly without effort.

She dared not underestimate him again.

Izzi clenched her fingers into the sheets. The sting of humiliation still burned, but beneath it, something else stirred—something sharper. He thought he had put her in her place. He had silenced her, stripped her of control. But he had also revealed something. He had shown that though her magic was still unformed, unpredictable, he had still been able to stifle and counter it. But the important realisation was that he had felt the need to, and that meant he feared her, a mere student. He feared her magic and what it could become.

Yet Izzi was not frightened of her mother’s magic, so meticulously shared from beyond the grave.

She exhaled slowly, pressing her hand against her chest, feeling its slow fall. She would not cower. She would learn. If her magic could be undone so easily, then she would find the gaps, cover them with complexities and counters. Next time, when she faced Kalu, she would be ready.

She turned onto her side, no longer counting sigils but letting her thoughts drift like wind teasing the ridges of dunes. She was not defeated. Not yet.

✨

The next morning started sour with odours of too much humanity. Now that the war’s approach kept the gates closed, the downwind dumping ground was inaccessible and waste piled. Yasmin laid out a bowl of porridge topped with camel-milk cream and chopped figs, which did little to ease her stomach. She forced a little down before submitting to Laleh’s help in dressing for the day.

The two servants, longtime favourites of her mother, still cared for Izzi, but she couldn’t shake the feeling they were spying for her father.

As Laleh brushed her hair, the brush caught slightly on one of the red woollen strands Izzi always braided in, just as her mother had done years ago. Izzi closed her eyes, murmured the correct incantations, and breathed the lingering scent of her mother’s favourite rose oil, savouring the memories. 

Yasmin and Laleh started to argue over which earrings would best match the blue dress. 

“Enough!” Izzi snapped. “I’ll choose my own earrings.” The servants stepped back, exchanging a knowing look they did not try to hide.

“Just leave me be,” she said, and waved them out. She gathered the last few things she would need for a day at the Magekadeh. In the brightness of the morning, and despite the smell, facing it did not seem so impossible.