me that my own name does not pass his lips. He turns to face me. “May I be so bold as to ask you to detach the veil from your hair?”
So it begins.
I raise my fingers to my head, but the poet stays my hand and instead plucks the pins from my hair himself. Gently, he unwinds the chiffon scarf from my hair, revealing my braid that I’ve plaited with a golden tassel. He wraps my pale blue scarf around his own neck. Then begins to unbraid my hair.
I step away, startled at the intimacy of the gesture. He smiles like a schoolboy. I nod at him; anything else is death. He begins again, slowly, slowly unweaving one section of hair from another. I softly shake my head, and my hair unravels down my back.
“You smell like roses,” he says and then walks around to face me. “But the rose envies the color of your lips and the night your raven hair.”
“Is it true what they say about you?” I ask. He raises an eyebrow. “You are mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
He throws his head back and laughs. “I see my reputation precedes me. My misfortune.”
I am emboldened, because for most of my life in the serai, my only choices were bravery or fear. “They say you have appetites.”
“Your beauty and your self-assurance demand my candor, and thus I willingly give it. Yes, I have certain passions, as a poet and as a man. My faults are many, but I am determined that if I am to be alive, then I must live and live fully. Taste all the fruit life offers, in all the ways it offers them. To some, I am stern and artful. To you, I hope I am more, as your charm and exquisite loveliness and, indeed, your courage compel it of me. I present myself to you, then, merely as a man humbly at your service.” With his words, the poet sweeps his hand to his heart and bows before me.
I take his offered hand in mine, and he brings it to his lips. He wraps his arm around my waist and bends to kiss my cheek, then hooks a finger under my chin, brushing his lips over mine. His is the first clean-shaven face I have felt against my own, and his skin is smooth, supple, like a woman’s. He tastes of tobacco and coffee.
I flinch. He pulls his head back. Pasha could lash me for this.
“My lord, forgive me. I . . . I . . . Pasha has bid me to avail myself to you. To make you comfortable and answer your needs . . . your desires—”
“But you cannot. Your heart belongs to him.”
“No, my lord. Not to him.”
“To another, then?” The poet’s eyes widen.
“To another,” I whisper.
“And this is why your Pasha offers you to me? Your punishment for a clandestine lover?”
I laugh. “If my deception were exposed, it would be death. To lie with Pasha means you can be with no other.”
The poet’s face turns paler than it already is. “And yet he gives you to me? What awaits you on the ’morrow, then?”
“I was the favorite, the haseki, but I have borne no children, and so . . .”
“You are to be employed in this manner as a price for being barren?”
“I am not barren. A jinn’s curse protects me from being with child. As I have asked. As I have prayed. I will not bring a child into a world such as this.” I instinctively bring my finger to my opal. Si’la slips out of one of the tree hollows. I raise my hand to stay her. I need no intervention.
The poet shivers and glances around but sees nothing.
I clutch his hand. “I must escape with you when you leave. There is nothing left for me here. My life is forfeit.”
“And your lover?”
“I will see to him.”
“And how do you propose I remove you from here without notice?”
“I will travel in disguise as part of