Written in the Ashes Read Online Free Page A

house. He looked up from the afternoon task of organizing the spices in his kitchen, an activity he greatly preferred to any interruption.
    Then it came again.
    It sounded as if a peacock had gotten into the house and started rearranging the furniture upstairs. He waited several minutes, and, hearing nothing more, took up a handful of fine cinnamon powder and set it on a sheet of parchment, which he then folded lengthwise and carefully tapped into a funnel set precariously on top of a jar. When the powder was half dispensed, a crash came through the wall with such sudden force that Jemir looked up with a start and knocked the funnel from the jar with his elbow, sending aloft a most expensive cloud of spice.
    With a sneeze and a torrent of obscenities, Jemir threw down the rag resting on his shoulder and went in search of the interruption.
    He was not the only one.
    Leitah, the young Byzantine maidservant, simultaneously dropped her soggy sponge in the bucket on the stairs and crept through the house with her ear bent to the walls.
    Both Jemir and Leitah followed the sound from opposite ends of the house, and came to stand in front of Tarek’s door. They shared a conspiratorial nod and Jemir set his hand on the iron latch, but as he lifted it, he found it was locked.
    Jemir knocked. “Tarek? What are you doing in there?”
    There was no reply. Then came the muffled, mysterious shrieking.
    Jemir knocked again, but as his knuckles struck the door for the third time, it opened in front of him and Tarek appeared, shutting the door behind him. “It is nothing,” he said, beads of sweat at his temples, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow. His bare chest bled where he had been scratched.
    Leitah touched the blood on Tarek’s skin and recoiled. She showed her burnished red fingertip to Jemir without a word.
    “You cannot bring a peacock in the house, Tarek.” Jemir pushed the boy aside. “They are stupid birds that will fight even their own reflections.”
    “No.” Tarek covered the door with his scrawny limbs and fixed his eyes on the squat Nubian cook with a look that was not to be challenged.
    With that, an argument ensued that involved much shoving and yelling of insults between Jemir and Tarek. Even a stranger could have inferred that each held unspoken past grievances against the other. Leitah slipped away unnoticed. When she returned, it was with two enormous red hounds and their master between them.
    “Silence!” One ominous word from Alizar ended the squabble between Jemir and Tarek instantly. “Explain yourselves.”
    Jemir and Tarek bowed their heads.
    Alizar set his penetrating gaze on Jemir. “Speak.”
    “He has a peacock in his room.”
    “No, there is nothing,” insisted Tarek.
    “A strange sound disturbed my work,” said Jemir. “I came up here to investigate. Leitah heard it as well.”
    The mute servant girl nodded.
    “Tarek, is there something in your room?” Alizar asked. Tarek cringed at the simple question, for he knew the wrath of Poseidon that would be unleashed if he lied. When punished as a child, Tarek would envision Alizar standing over him as if at the surf’s edge, wild white mane swirling in the storm above him, trident in hand, lightning flashing in the distance as his sonorous voice lashed out. Tarek wanted to lie, but he could not summon any story worthy enough. The truth would have to do.
    “Yes.”
    “Go on. What is it?”
    Tarek pushed open the door. “Is she .”
    And that was when he revealed to them his secret, the girl he had been hiding in his room for nearly a week. The girl he had purchased for one hundred gold solidi in the market who had neither died nor recovered.
    “Hermes, Zeus and Apollo.” Alizar swept a hand through his white mane and stopped in the center of the room, for there was Hannah, naked, curled against the wall at the corner of the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest. Her hair was matted and wild about her body, as though she had crawled beneath