The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (Amina al-Sirafi, #1)

by Shannon Chakraborty

I knew my stammered, evasive answers were never enough, and yet it only made me feel guiltier when she stopped asking them. She seemed too young to have surrendered to fate.

The swiftness of the change and the vivid, ever-present green—a divine hue unlike any other I’ve witnessed—seems very nearly magical, evidence of God’s splendor.

But such laments can join a long list of regrets.

How much easier her life would be if she were rich. For while the pious claim money doesn’t buy happiness, I can attest from personal experience that poverty buys nothing. It is a monster whose claws grow deeper and more difficult to escape with each passing season, with even the slightest misstep setting you back years, if not forever.

“‘He who dares does while he who fears fails,’” I said, repeating the mantra of the Banu Sasan.

I’ve never liked swift action. A proper job takes time to plan. The best take weeks of preparation for but a few hours of action.

The three of us had been on enough misadventures that no one needed to speak as our eyes met above the box of fiery death, but Dalila did so anyway because she believes in murdering hope whenever possible.

Men find it easier to believe they have been swindled by a witch than outwitted by a woman.

Salah has always had a different quality out here, a rawer one. There is a great vulnerability in being entirely at God’s mercy, a position akin to a worm upon a floating splinter that with the slightest ripple may be lost forever.

I did not get to run from situations I had brought others into.

For the greatest crime of the poor in the eyes of the wealthy has always been to strike back. To fail to suffer in silence and instead disrupt their lives and their fantasies of a compassionate society that coincidentally set them on top. To say no.

“You look angry and thoughtful. That is not typically a good combination.”

“I remain entranced by its utter inability to provide for itself,” Dalila marveled. “Tinbu must hand-feed it so that it does not starve. The only thing it does seek to consume on its own initiative is my black powder. It is such a failure of a cat that I cannot help but be impressed.”

In a hidden corner of my heart, I nursed embarrassing dreams. That I was not the child of my parents, but the daughter of a tribe of female warriors who flew upon winged horses. Or I was heir to a hidden sea kingdom below the waves, and the whispered sighs I heard from the water when we sailed and the strange lightning in the distance were not natural weather phenomena but magic, my true family calling to me.

Doing so felt like resurfacing from a dream, the kind that lingers, making one doubt what is real and what is not.

But I have not survived this long by confusing courage with foolishness.

“I neither seek harm nor take pleasure in it. But I am a creature of ambition, and it is rarely bloodless.”

Salima folded the paper into increasingly smaller halves, as though its implications might vanish entirely.

Indeed, I believe the phrase “I’m going to make it completely historically accurate except for the plot” came out of my mouth at least once.

For as I have been reminded again and again and AGAIN, history is a construct, ever-changing and always subjective. Not only does it reveal the biases of its teller, audience, and intention, but also there is often much we simply don’t know.

Is the Moon of Saba a real legend? Absolutely not: one does not spend one’s time reading stories of djinns and demons and then give directions to summoning such a creature in a commercial novel.