A melody drizzles the air like honey, warm and seductive. It reaches for him with claws, failing to grasp him, failing to fold him under her control. That’s when he sees that she’s not alone—no, there’s someone with her. A boy.
Ayub’s brother.
Innocent, kind, gentle Youness. Driss tries to see what she does. Tries to see a monster, someone who has wronged.
He fails, but with that failure comes another understanding: She’s not killing the ones who’ve wronged. She’s killing them all.
“Youness!” he yells. The boy doesn’t look up, too enamored by her voice, too far gone in her enigmatic melody. If he recognizes Driss, his gaze shows no sign of it.
Driss doesn’t think—he runs. He avoids the ups and the downs of the rocks, charging straight into the silt by the river. Something slithers against his leg, but he keeps going, yelling Youness’s name.Why couldn’t she have sung toAyub instead?Driss shakes the dark thought free.
The Qandisa sees him. Apprehension catches her eyes, like a cloud passing over the moon.
“Don’t,” Driss pleads. “Don’t do it.”
She doesn’t stop singing.
“I know why you’re killing those men,” he says softly, and her notes falter but still do not stop. “I know. But Youness is not like that. He’s a boy. He’s agoodboy.”
Her voice is a cocoon, wrapping him in silk, but his thoughts are miraculously his, clear of intrusion. She notices it when he meets her eyes. He knows it’s not normal by the way she trips on her song again, by the way she looks at him.
Her lure doesn’t work on him. But that’s not what matters now. The Qandisa sits and Youness lays his head in her lap.
“Please,” Driss says. “Please don’t do this.” He stops and tries again. “They were monsters—youare not.”
Nothing. Not even a hitch in her voice. Aziza’s warnings ring in his head, telling him to stay away from the river, to be careful, to promise.
What stopped him from listening to her?
He looks at the Qandisa as the sky turns the color of bubble gum. Sheisbeautiful, just as much as she’s sad. He remembers the girl he saw from the window of a bus. A girl, not a killer. A girl, not a monster.
“Aicha,” he says softly.
And all sounds cease.
Youness runs without a backward glance—the only other person to have escaped the Qandisa’s clutches. It’s why no one else has spoken her name: they never have the chance. Step near the river, and her song steals all thought and reason. No one else has lived beyond the lull of it to ever return.
“That’s your name, isn’t it?” Driss asks, taking a step toward her.
She watches him, and he wonders if it’s the angle of the light that makes her eyes look brighter at his nearness. His Batman shirt today is as faded as the one he tossed in the wash, nothing like her bright red gown that only an artist could have conceived. The folds of red are offset by burgundy, ending just above the delicate tufts of gray-white fur capping the hooves where her feet should be. He doesn’t think he’s seen anyone so beautiful. So lonely. As if she’s the landmark beyond the trees, a distant mirage appreciated but never once understood.
Like me.
“Say it again,” she says suddenly, sweeping closer. He’s taken aback by the light in her eyes, making her look almost normal. Human. Someone close to his age.
“Aicha,” he breathes, taking the smallest of steps closer. She notes it, but doesn’t flinch or fear. “Your name is Aicha.”
“It was,” she murmurs in that voice from another time. “Before this.”
He wonders if she feels the same ache that he does, nestled deep in the space between his ribs.
“It still is.” He doesn’t know where the sudden certaintycomes from, but he believes it. And then he corrects himself. “It can be.”
How?she asks with the low set of her brow. The tales say the Qandisa is cursed, but Driss thinks she was given a task. An undertaking. That doesn’t mean she has to give up her life for it.
He sits down on a flat rock beneath the shade of a warped tree. The sky is still bubblegum hues, painting an aura around her, and he has to pry his eyes away shyly when she catches him staring. He gestures to the empty spot beside him. “Go on. I don’t bite.”
She smiles, a quick one-sided flutter of joy, gone before he can fully appreciate it. She sits, one silken panel trailing over the knuckles of his left hand, and he swallows.It’s only a dress.He opens up his paper bag and looks down at the two sfenj Aziza had given him on his way out. One honey-soaked donut for him, the other for Karim, she’d said.
