But she was better.

Too fast for anyone to stop her, Karina leaped from the stage onto the table in front of her, earning startled yelps from its occupants, and slammed her sandaled foot on it in a steady rhythm that echoed throughout the restaurant. Though Karina wasn’t facing her maid, she knew Aminata was clapping along, scowl and all. In seconds, everyone in the room had joined her in the beat, banging whatever they had on hand against their tables.

Grinning a grin that would put a hyena’s to shame, she began to play.

It was still “The Ballad of Bahia Alahari,” but Karina bent the melody almost beyond recognition. Where the bard had focused on the stifling yet beautiful grief the song was known for, Karina pushed the beat to a frenzy, playing at a speed normally used for the fastest dance songs. She brought the song to a crescendo where she should have quieted and bit into the parts that were meant to be soft. Through it all, the song never lost the undercurrent of sorrow for which it was famous—but it was sorrow converted into manic energy, the only kind of sorrow she knew.

Karina sang the first verse in Zirani, turning in a circle as she played so every person could hear.

For the second verse, she switched to Kensiya. A delighted cry went up from the group of Arkwasians, engaged in the performance for the first time that night. Then she went to T’hoga, and back to Kensiya. With each verse, Karina made sure to hit a different major tongue of Sonande. The only language she did not sing at least a line in was Darajat. None of her tutors had considered the language of Eshra important enough to teach her, and she lacked the incentive to learn it on her own.

The cheers of the audience drowned out Karina’s last notes. She smiled sweetly at the bard, who looked ready to toss his instrument to the ground.

“I’ll be taking that.” Karina grabbed his purse and bounced it in her hand. There had to be at least a hundred daira in there.

“I want a rematch!” the bard demanded.

“Rematch with what? What else do you have to lose?”

His face twisted into a pained grimace as he pulled a heavy object from his bag. “I have this.”

In the bard’s hands was the oldest book Karina had ever seen. The green leather cover sported bite marks around the edges, and time had yellowed the pages with mold. Faded almost to invisibility, the title read in Zirani, The Tome of the Dearly Departed: A Comprehensive Study on the Curious Matter of Death within the Kennouan Empire.

“The man who sold this to me couldn’t even read the title,” said the bard. “He didn’t realize that he had pawned away a true remnant from the time of the pharaohs of old.”

A shiver ran down Karina’s spine as she eyed the Kennouan glyphs embossed on the book’s cover. Reading had never been her preferred pastime, and she neither needed nor desired a dusty old book about a culture long lost to history.

“If this book is so special, why are you gambling it away?”

“Anything worth obtaining is worth sacrificing for.”

Karina wasn’t one to turn down a challenge, no matter the prize. Baring a smile that showed all her teeth, she unstrapped her oud from her back.

“One more round.”

Twenty minutes later, Karina skipped from the Dancing Seal, her bag heavy with her new book and Aminata trailing behind her like a second shadow as last-minute preparations for Solstasia swirled around them. Workers suspended from scaffolding strung garlands of jasmine and lavender between tightly packed buildings while white-robed acolytes yelled for people to bring forth anything they did not wish to take with them into the new era so that it could be offered to the Great Mother during the Opening Ceremony. Throngs of all ages streamed toward Temple Way, engaging in spirited debate about who the seven Champions might be.

Karina’s new coins jingled in her pack, and she couldn’t help but grin as she imagined adding the winnings to the ever-growing pile of daira she’d hidden within a jewelry box in her vanity. Every coin brought her closer to the life she truly wanted, one far away from Ziran.

“Must you always be so dramatic?” sighed Aminata as they sidestepped a group constructing an altar to Patuo in the middle of the street.

“I have never said or done anything dramatic in my life, dear Mina.”

As Karina flipped idly through The Tome of the Dearly Departed, her eyes glazed over various chapter headings: “Differentiating Zawenji Magic from Ulraji Magic”; “Care and Feeding of an Infant Serpopard”; “The Rite of Resurrection Involving the Comet Meirat.”

Karina paused. The Comet Meirat was what the Kennouans had called Bahia’s Comet.

. . . the Rite of Resurrection is the most sacred and advanced technique, possible only during the week the Comet Meirat is visible in the sky . . .

She skipped to the images below the description. The first showed masked individuals around a corpse wrapped in bandages while the second showed the figures laying a human heart stuffed with a bright red substance on top of the corpse’s body. The third image depicted the corpse walking around, color returned to his form.

Karina clicked her tongue and stuffed the book back in her bag. If the Kennouans had really known the secret to resurrecting the dead, someone else would have discovered it by now. Perhaps she’d give the book to Farid when she returned home. He’d always been fond of boring, ancient things.

They reached a bend in the road. To go left would lead them to River Market and the Western Gate, while going right would take them through Jehiza Square and into the Old City. Though some time remained until sundown, the desert night’s chill had already taken hold, and Karina pulled the scarf round her head tighter as she contemplated which road to take.

In a way, Ziran was truly two cities in one. The first was the Old City, the original kasbah in which Bahia Alahari had built her fortress of Ksar Alahari and which housed the Zirani court. Unfurling westward from the Old City was the Lower City. This sprawling jumble made up nearly three-quarters of the city’s square area, and it was where all the people who made Ziran interesting lived.

Surrounding it all was the Outer Wall and, beyond that, the rest of Sonande. Karina had spent enough time studying the map of their continent to know what she’d find if she ever left Ziran. Going north would take her to the dense jungles of Arkwasi while heading west would lead to the Eshran Mountains, and those were only Ziran’s immediate neighbors, just a small part of a world waiting to be explored.

But knowing the world was out there and actually seeing it were two different things. Yet every time Karina approached the Outer Wall, a sharp pull in her gut tugged her back toward home. Despite her efforts to fight it, her sense of duty was annoyingly strong.

Karina turned left, ignoring Aminata’s grunt of protest. “Let’s head to Temple Way. Maybe we can get a spot at the Wind Temple Choosing Ceremony.”

Karina herself was Wind-Aligned, though she felt little attachment to her patron deity, Santrofie. She’d had only one prayer after Baba and Hanane had died, and her god had never answered it.

“By the way,” said Aminata as they flattened themselves against a wall to make way for a team of dancers leading an irate warthog. “I didn’t know you knew that song in all those languages.”

“I didn’t. Not before tonight, anyway.”

“You were translating as you played?”

“Years of language tutors have finally paid off,” said Karina, not hiding the smugness in her voice as Aminata rolled her eyes.

At first glance, the two were quite the mismatched pair, her maid plain and reserved in all the ways Karina was outgoing and careless, Water-Aligned to Karina’s Wind, thin and lean where Karina was thick and soft. Aminata’s tight coils were cut nearly an inch from her head, whereas Karina’s curls poofed out past her shoulders when she wore her hair down. But Aminata’s mother had been Karina’s favorite among her army of nursemaids, and the two girls had been inseparable since childhood. The only people Karina had spent more time with as a child had been her parents’ ward, Farid, and her older sister, Hanane.

“If you put even half as much effort into your actual lessons, you’d probably have the highest marks in the city.”

“And give the Kestrel even more expectations for me? I’ll eat camel dung first.”

“I’m sure your mother,” Aminata pressed, refusing to use the nickname the common folk had coined for the sultana, “would be delighted to know you’ve absorbed so much of your studies. Speaking of, we should head back before she notices you’re gone.”

“I could fall to the ground dead before her eyes, and my mother wouldn’t notice I was gone.”

“That’s not true.”

An unusually strong pang of guilt hit Karina’s chest. However, she had not come all this way to debate the Kestrel’s affection for her—or lack thereof.

“Mina, what day is it?” asked Karina before her maid could start lecturing anew.