The Ice Maiden's Sheikh

Latif’s dark gaze flicked her and she twitched in a kind of animal alarm. It was just the effect he had on her; there was no reason for it. But it annoyed her, every time.

“They just took an educated guess, probably. Your reaction gave you away.”

The truth of that was instantly obvious.

“Oh, damn it!” cried Jalia. “Why did I ever take off my veil?”

Three

Laughter burst from his throat, a roar of amusement that made the windows ring. But it wasn’t friendly amusement, she knew. He was laughing at her.

“Does it matter so much—a photo in a few papers?”

Jalia shrugged irritably. “You’re a Cup Companion—the press attention is part of your job. And anyway, you’re one of twelve. I’m a university lecturer in a small city in Scotland, where princesses are not numbered in the dozens. I don’t want anyone at home to know.”

He slowed at the approach to the paved road and turned the car towards the city. Two journalists’ cars were now following them.

“Aren’t you exaggerating? You aren’t a member of the British royal family, after all. Just a small Middle Eastern state.”

“I hope you’re right.” She chewed her lip. “But the media in Europe have had an ongoing obsession with the royal family of the Barakat Emirates for the past five years—and it jumped to Bagestan like wildfire over a ditch the moment Ghasib’s dictatorship fell and Ashraf al Jawadi was crowned. If I’m outed as a princess of Bagestan, my privacy is—” Blowing a small raspberry she made a sign of cutting her throat.

“Only if you continue to live abroad,” he pointed out. “Why not come home?”

Jalia stiffened. “Because Bagestan is not ‘home’ to me,” she said coldly. “I am English, as you well know.”

The black gaze flicked her again, unreadable. “That can be overcome,” he offered, as if her Englishness were some kind of disability, and Jalia clenched her teeth. “You would soon fit in. There are many posts available in the universities here. Ash is working hard to—”

“I teach classical Arabic to English speakers, Latif,” Jalia reminded him dryly. “I don’t even speak Bagestani Arabic.”

She felt a sudden longing for the cool of an English autumn, rain against the windows, the smell of books and cheap carpet and coffee in her tiny university office, the easy, unemotional chatter of her colleagues.

“I am sure you know that educated Bagestani Arabic is close to the classical Quranic language. You would soon pick it up.” He showed his white teeth in a smile, and her stomach tightened. “The bazaar might take you a little longer.”

The big souk in Medinat al Bostan was a clamour on a busy day, and the clash between country and city dialects had over the years spontaneously produced the bazaar’s very own dialect, called by everyone shaerashouk—“bazaar poetry.”

Jalia looked at him steadily, refusing to share the joke. She had heard the argument from her mother too often to laugh now. And his motives were certainly suspect.

“And I’d be even more in the public eye, wouldn’t I?” she observed with a wide-eyed, you-don’t-fool-me-for-a-minute look.

“Here you would be one of many, and your activities would rarely come under the spotlight unless you wished it. The palace machine would protect you.”

“It would also dictate to me,” she said coolly. “No, thank you! I prefer independence and anonymity.”

He didn’t answer, but she saw his jaw clench with suppressed annoyance. For a moment she was on the brink of asking him why it should mean anything to him, but Jalia, too, suppressed the instinct. With Latif Abd al Razzaq, it was better to avoid the personal.

Silence fell between them. Latif concentrated on his driving. One of the press cars passed, a camera trained on them, and then roared off in a cloud of exhaust.

She couldn’t stop irritably turning the conversation over in her head. Why was he pushing her? What business was it of Latif Abd al Razzaq’s where she lived?

“Why are you carrying my mother’s banner?” she demanded after a short struggle. “From her it’s just about understandable. What’s your angle? Why do you care what I do with my life?”

In the silence that fell, Jalia watched a muscle leap in his jaw. She had the impression that he was struggling for words.

“Do you not care about this country?” he demanded at last, his voice harsh and grating on her. “Bagestan has suffered serious loss to its professional and academic class over the past thirty years—too many educated people fled abroad. If its citizens who were born abroad do not return… You are an al Jawadi by birth, granddaughter of the deposed Sultan. Do you not feel that the al Jawadi should show the way?”

Jalia felt a curious, indefinable sense of letdown.

“You’ve already convinced my parents to return,” she said coolly, for Latif’s efforts on their behalf, tracking down titles to her family’s expropriated property and tracing lost art treasures grabbed by Ghasib’s favourites, had been largely successful, paving the way for them to make the shift.

“And my younger sister is considering it. Why can’t you be satisfied with that?”

“Your parents are retirement age. Your sister is a schoolgirl.”

Jalia was now feeling the pressure. “Nice to have a captive audience!” she snapped. “Is this why you decided I should come with you on this wild-goose chase? You wanted to deliver a lecture? Do you enjoy preaching duty to people? You should have been a mullah, Latif! Maybe it’s not too late even now!”

He flashed her a look. “My opinion would not anger you if you did not, in your heart, accept what I say. It is yourself you are angry with—the part that tells you you have a duty that is larger than your personal life.”

She was, oddly, lost for an answer to this ridiculous charge. It simply wasn’t true. Neither in her heart nor her head did she feel any obligation to return to Bagestan to nurture its recovery from thirty years of misrule. Until a few weeks ago she hadn’t spent one day in the country of her parents’ birth—why should she now be expected to treat it as her own homeland?

In spite of her parents’ best efforts to prevent it, England was home to her.

“Look—I’ve got a life to live, and I’ve paid a price for the choices I’ve made. Why should I now throw away the sense of belonging I’ve struggled for all my life, and reach for another to put in its place? I don’t belong here, however deeply my parents do. I never will.”

He didn’t answer, and another long silence fell, during which he watched the road and she gazed out at the vast stretch of desert, thinking.

Her parents had tried to keep her from feeling she belonged in England, the land of her birth, and she was resentfully aware that to some extent they had succeeded. Her sense of place was less rooted than her friends’—she had always known that.

Maybe that was why she clung so firmly to what she did feel. She knew how difficult it was to find a sense of belonging. Such things didn’t come at will.

At the time of the coup some three decades ago, her parents had been newly married. Her mother, one of the daughters of the Sultan’s French wife, Sonia, and her father, scion of a tribal chief allied by blood and marriage to the al Jawadi for generations past, had both been in grave danger from Ghasib’s squad of assassins. They had fled to Parvan and taken new identities, and the then King of Parvan, Kavad Panj, had put the couple on the staff of the Parvan Embassy in London.

Jalia had passed her childhood in a country that was not “her own,” raised on dreams of the land that was. As she grew older, she began to fear the power of those dreams that gripped her parents so inescapably, and to resent that distant homeland from which she was forever banished. From a child who had thrived on the tales of another landscape, another people, another way of being, she had grown into a sceptical, wary teenager determined to avoid the trap her parents had set for her.

When she turned sixteen they had told her the great secret of their lives—they were not ordinary Bagestani exiles, but members of the royal family. Sultan Hafzuddin, the deposed monarch who had figured so largely in her bedtime stories, was her own grandfather.

Jalia had been sworn to secrecy, but the torch had to be passed to her hands: one day the monarchy would be restored, and if her parents did not live to see that day, Jalia must go to the new Sultan….

Her parents had lived to see the day. And now Jalia’s life was threatened with total disruption. Her parents, thrilled to join the great Return, were urgent that their elder daughter should do the same. But Jalia knew that in Bagestan something mysterious and powerful threatened her, the thing that had obsessed her parents from her earliest memories.

And she did not want to foster the empty dream that she “belonged” in an alien land that she neither knew nor understood. That way lay lifelong unhappiness.

Attending the Coronation had been an inescapable necessity, but it had been a brief visit, no more—until her foolish cousin Noor had undertaken to fall madly in lust with Bari al Khalid, one of the Sultan’s new Cup Companions, and promised to marry him.

“Showing the way for us all!” Jalia’s mother declared, wiping from her eye a tear which in no way clouded its beady gaze on her elder daughter.

Her mother had been convinced then that Jalia had only to flutter her lashes to similarly knock Latif Abd al Razzaq to his knees, and was almost desperate for her daughter to make the attempt.

Princess Muna had wasted no time in checking out the handsome Cup Companion’s marital status and background: not merely the Sultan’s Cup Companion, but since the death of his father two years ago, the leader of his tribe.