The Desert King / An Affair with the Princess

Kamal was giving her the royal treatment all right. Imposing it on her more like. He’d sent her a clipped voice mail driving home that this was what she should expect from now on as his future queen. He’d elaborated on how she should receive her dues, mete out her responses with the poise, benevolence and grandeur befitting her impending majesty. Yes, he’d used those very words. And was evidently still conscious and in the best of health.

Finding no energy and no point in resisting his incursion she’d let herself be swept away to her so-called future kingdom and installed in so sumptuous and extravagant a guest wing that it could have housed forty princesses. Then the list of things to be done that he’d provided for her had started to roll on.

First thing this morning was to have leisurely communications with three of her parents, informing them of her acceptance of the marriage of state and assuring them she’d play her part. With utmost attention to decorum, of course. As if.

She’d never treated those three in any way that wasn’t grounded in love and respect, even when their actions had almost messed her up for good, but she was damned if she’d stand on ceremony with any of them. Kamal had to be satisfied with what she was letting him have—control over these countdown days.

She’d finished her conversations with her parents—who’d all been mighty relieved, she should add—and without missing a beat had headed to her dictated afternoon tea with her fourth parent.

Kamal had had Anna flown in from King Atef’s court, where she must have been cause for some serious domestic disturbance. The queen—the woman who’d turned out to be Aliyah’s stepmother—was a master of dissatisfaction, unreasonableness and conflict. Aliyah could only imagine her attitude now that she had real strife material on her hands.

And here they were. An hour into the long-awaited meeting. A twenty-seven-year-long wait on Anna’s side, a two-week one on Aliyah’s, which still felt like a lifetime. Aliyah thought she would have recognized Anna if she’d met her on the street. And it went beyond the resemblance. There was this unmistakable…connection.

She bet Anna had felt the same from the first moment, but they’d both reached an instant and unspoken agreement to test the waters first. She’d felt that Anna was agitated within an inch of her sanity at the enormity of the situation. She, on the other hand, was…comfortably numb. Too many enormous shocks could do that.

So they’d talked about Judar, Zohayd, compared royal palaces, weathers, customs, currencies, reminisced about L.A., which they’d both lived in and now seemed to have left behind permanently.

Then Anna had blurted out that fraught statement.

Seemed she was ready to wade in deeper.

Not that she was finding it easier. She let go of Aliyah’s gaze, hers brimming as she stared down into her cup, choked out, “This sounds like so much exaggeration, like lip service, but I—I…I don’t know what I can say that won’t sound like…like…”

Aliyah put down her cup, invited Anna to look back at her with a gentle touch on her knee. “How about you say exactly what you’re thinking? Feeling? It would save a lot of confusion. We’ve run out of small talk so I guess it’s time for something big.”

Anna nodded, her eyes reddening even more. Then she inhaled, whispered, “Do you resent me…too much?”

Aliyah plopped back on the couch and glided both palms over the cotton-silk pastels damask as she considered her answer.

Then she sighed. “Okay, I won’t say I didn’t resent this. I did. I do. But it’s not you I resent. I don’t presume to judge you. I can only imagine what drove you to the decisions you made, and that it couldn’t have been easy or made your life better. When all is said and done, I can only say thank you.”

Anna blinked. She couldn’t have looked more stupefied if Aliyah had just told her she could turn into a bat at will.

Anna finally breathed. “You’re thanking me? What for?”

Aliyah shrugged. “For not aborting me. It would have been the far easier, clean-cut route to go. And though my life hasn’t been a bed of roses and doesn’t promise to be, I’m still real fond of it. I wouldn’t exchange it for oblivion. So…thanks.”

Again, those blue-gem eyes surged with tears that tugged at the ones lying too close to Aliyah’s surface now.

“I never dreamed…oh, God, that you would feel that way….” Anna stopped, panting, then burst out, “Do you really feel that way?”

Aliyah gave her a tremulous smile. “One thing you will find out about me soon enough is that I go around saying exactly what I really think and feel. A very objectionable practice, I’m perpetually told, but at least you know exactly where you stand with me.”

Anna seemed to lose all tension, melted back in her armchair. “I can never tell you how…how it makes me feel, hearing you say that, that you really feel it. I’ve lived with the guilt, the pain for so long. Then I find out you’re alive, near your father, well and loved, and that I can see you. I would have settled for seeing you from afar, for being deservedly hated by you…but you…you…You’re wonderful, so full of light and life.”

“Full of light and life, huh? Now that’s a new spin on things. To everyone else, I’m full of erratic energy and instability.”

Anna looked genuinely taken aback. “How can anyone think that? I can’t think of anyone who’s less erratic and unstable.”

Aliyah threw her head back on a self-deprecating laugh. “Oh, postpone your verdict until you’ve known me longer than an hour.”

“I won’t change my mind a year or ten years from now. Things like that are the first thing one feels from others. You’re energetic, vivacious and from what I’ve heard, incredibly creative, truly independent and have the strength of your convictions. And yes, you’re unpredictable, but I don’t need more than the past minutes to realize it’s in the best of ways. You clearly do what’s right rather than what’s accepted.”

Aliyah lips twitched. “Wow, that’s quite a testimony. Can I call on you next time I have to fend off accusations of irrationality? Hmm…I do what’s right rather than what’s accepted. I think that will be my new slogan, Anna….” She stopped, bit her lip. “Uh…is it okay if I call you Anna? I’d feel weird if you wanted me to call you Mom or something.”

Anna surged forward, eagerness spilling from her tremulous smile. “As long as you call me at all, I’m happy for you to call me anything that feels comfortable to you.”

Aliyah’s smile grew. “Anna feels comfortable.”

In answer, Anna’s smile faltered. Aliyah felt she could see into the older woman’s mind, that she thought she wasn’t entitled to this level of ease with the daughter she’d given up.

“Listen, Anna, as you said, time isn’t an issue here. What happened is in the past, so let’s leave it there and move on. Now. I don’t want to observe a period of appropriate awkwardness. If you want to know me, if you want to be a part of my life, then let’s start now. What do you say?”

Anna looked like she’d burst into tears before she nodded vigorously. “I do—I want all that. Oh, God…how could anyone ever think you erratic and irrational?”

Aliyah stilled. The call of blood, Anna’s willingness to do anything to atone, to know her, be there for her now that she’d found her, surged inside her. For the first time in her life, she felt she wanted to, could share her secret.

She took the leap. “When I was six, my teachers couldn’t interest me in anything in school, couldn’t even get me to sit down. I was always listening to voices and seeing whole worlds inside my head and telling everyone who’d listen—and even anyone who wouldn’t—about them. I was almost diagnosed as autistic, but I was too curious and could talk anyone under the table. Therapists had to label my condition so they settled on ADHD.”

Distress crept into Anna’s face. “This is my fault…you inherited those tendencies from me. I was always too hyper, too awake, too quick, too something or other. It was what drew Atef to me, and I think what ultimately put him off—apart from the fact that he had to marry for his kingdom.”

Aliyah shook her head. “I bought into the psychobabble for a long time, but I no longer do. Who’s to say what’s ‘hyper’ and what’s not? What’s ‘too much’ of anything? We’re individuals who can’t be quantified. They wanted me to conform, and when I didn’t they decided there was something wrong with me, tried to fix me and almost ruined me for life. They misdiagnosed me, put me on prescription drugs, kept increasing the dose to get the effect they were seeking until, for the next ten years, I was a zombie.”

Anna gasped. “Oh, my God…oh, Aliyah, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, me, too. I feel like I missed my childhood, that it passed before me while I watched it from behind a distorted barrier.”

“Didn’t your—your parents realize that?”

“Yeah, but not for many years. At first they were so relieved when my teachers—the ones who’d started the whole thing—started saying I’d become an exemplary student, citing that as proof of their insight into my so-called condition. Later my parents kept attributing my subdued state to puberty. By the time I was fourteen, they could no longer fool themselves and tried to wean me off the drug. I went ballistic. I don’t remember what happened exactly, but I think I tried to commit suicide. They gave up, put me back on it. I didn’t know what was going on. I trusted them and took my medicine like a good girl. Then when I was almost seventeen I overheard a very enlightening conversation. They’d long realized I’d been misdiagnosed, or at least that I had a severe reaction to the drug—to both taking it and trying to get off it. And I decided to take matters into my own hands, kick the habit that I realized had been controlling me all my life.”

A tear raced down Anna’s cheek. “How did it go?”

“To hell. The mental and psychological version. I was an addict, and I went through every kind of withdrawal. I think I went totally insane for a while.”

Aliyah fell silent as her heart stampeded as if she were in the throes of one of those episodes again. Putting her ordeals into words was both cathartic and exhausting.

A long time later, Anna hiccuped, whispered, “But you’re okay now. You have been for many years.”

The urge to comfort her surged within Aliyah, came out on a fervent “I am.” Then she felt compelled to be as honest about the rest. “Though I can’t call getting shoved into a marriage of state to the last man on earth I ever wanted to see again ‘okay.’”

The tear trailing down Anna’s cheek became a stream that splashed on the hands upturned helplessly in her lap. “Oh, my God…it’s all my fault again. Everything I am, everything I did affected your life so profoundly. It’s still hurting you, changing the course of your life where you don’t want it to go. I kept thinking maybe I don’t need to feel so guilty, since everything was turning out great for you, especially since I saw your g-groom and thought him incredible…”

Aliyah huffed the breath she’d been holding. “You and every female on the planet, Anna. That doesn’t make him human.”

Anna looked as if she might have a heart attack. Aliyah wanted to reach out and comfort her. She curled her hands on the urge for a second then exhaled. What the hell. She was what she was. And one thing she’d never stop doing was comforting others in distress.

Anna jerked when Aliyah reached out and squeezed her shoulder, her eyes widening on such a mixture of surprise and hope that Aliyah groaned. “It’s not your fault, okay? I may have thought that when I was still in shock and having an internal tantrum, but that’s just too far-fetched. You didn’t make the Aal Shalaans into grabby bastards, and you didn’t make Kamal a ruthless one.”

“You’re making me feel even worse, being so kind.”

“I’m just honest.” Aliyah smiled, prodding her to smile back, to lighten the mood. She had enough heartache in her future, she couldn’t take any now. “One way to look at things is that it’s a good thing you had me, or two kingdoms would be on the brink of civil war right now. I’ll go down in history as the chess piece that defused the whole mess. Not many women can boast such a pivotal role, even if it is, alas, a passive one. Still, most women marry for far, far less and do nowhere as much good. We can even say that your relationship with—let’s call him King Atef, since I can’t get around to calling him Dad, either—has been preordained, so you’d have me and I’d be the peace chip.”

Anna’s smile trembled, as did her voice. “That’s certainly one way to look at things.”

“Makes everything sound so much better and worthwhile, doesn’t it? How about we sanction it as the official version?”

Anna nodded, her eyes filling with a jumble of pain, relief and anxiety. “I never dreamed I’d cause anything like this. I didn’t know who or where you were, then Atef found me and I let him think Farah was his daughter, when she’s my…my…”

“Your adopted daughter. Your real daughter, really. Being your biological child doesn’t make me that. I always believed a child is raised, not born.”

Anna’s gaze faltered. “And you don’t want us to have any more than a biological link?”

She surged forward, put her hand on Anna’s knee. “Oh, I do. Though I don’t know if I can come to think of you as my mother. I already have one, whom I love, even though she let so-called experts mess with my life. But I know she did it out of an almost pathological need to see me healthy and normal.”

Anna gave her a sad smile. “Then that is something besides you that I share with Bahiyah. I almost messed up Farah’s life with the same pathological need.”

Aliyah’s lips twisted whimsically. “Hmm, another thing I have in common with Farah. Wow. I can’t wait to meet her.”

“She can’t wait, either. But she doesn’t want to impose on you.”

Aliyah gave her a mock-wicked glance. “Oh, I’ll impose on her. I have three days to get ready for the wedding of the century, as the list my ‘groom’ gave me indicates. I need all the eager-to-please people I can lay my hands on.”

The sounds of powerful cars gliding to smooth stops tickled her ears as she spoke.

Kamal’s cavalcade. She knew it. The king had come home.

She quirked an eyebrow. “Say—how about we stretch our legs?”

Anna nodded, swayed to her feet, smoothed her sky-blue skirt suit and fell in step with Aliyah as they exited through huge French windows to the enormous veranda leading to a dozen thirty-foot-wide stone steps and the wing’s garden, an explosion of flowers and rare plants.

Anna, still bent on elaborating on the main issue eating at her, didn’t seem to notice the cavalcade drawing to a stop at the palace’s main entrance. “You’re so willing to deal with the most awkward things, with your pain, so openly, and I have the feeling you can take on the whole world and come out the winner. Yet, with all your pragmatic approach, you haven’t accepted this marriage as you claim, have you? You’re feeling…trapped.”

Pragmatic? This lady had way too much to learn about her still. But she’d gotten one thing right at least.

She was trapped. In a marriage without love or respect. But she should console herself it was also with a time limit. In nine months’ time, if she proved to be a fertile little chess piece, he’d do an encore of his favorite trick and cast her aside.

Not much of a consolation when she thought of her track record. The first time he’d done that, he’d almost destroyed her. Any bets he’d succeed this time?

Aliyah heaved a huge sigh, nodded and stood straighter as Kamal stepped out of the middle limo.

He saw her the split second he straightened, his eyes slamming into hers across the distance.

In the next second anger radiated off of him like a shock wave.

Didn’t like that she was letting him see her, did he? Going against the dictates of their culture and its unreasonable demands of decorum, its servitude to and belief in the caprices of luck and its evil influences. Supposedly if the groom saw the bride in the five days before the wedding, their marriage would be blighted with inexplicable incompatibility and strife.

She couldn’t see how theirs could be blighted with worse than what they already had—ill will, bad blood and subzero expectations.

She held his gaze, came forward so he could take a good look at her. Disappointing you yet, ya habibi?

His imperious face and body filled with the answer, with the unmistakable intent to stride up to her and let her hear it, along with a few more decrees no doubt, maybe even a restraining order. She only made a face at him, tossed her hair and turned to Anna.

Anna gaped at Kamal for a moment before turning stunned eyes on Aliyah. “My. Oh, my. That was…intense.”

“Yeah, that’s Kamal for you.”

Anna shook her head dazedly. “I meant both of you. The vibes you generated were enough to send Judarian homeland security reaching for a nationwide red alert.”

Aliyah let out a resigned laugh, glanced sideways at Kamal, found him still standing there, glaring at her, looking like the bronze colossus of a wrathful god.

If only he didn’t look so…everything. And have a character to match. Except when it came to her. A shudder rattled through her.

Anna caught her gaze, concern showing in her heavenly eyes. “This marriage isn’t just a hated duty to you, is it? You want it, yet you believe it won’t work and you’re…scared?”

While that was a simplistic way to sum up the mess, Anna had again cottoned on to her basic turmoil. She took a last look at Kamal, saw the promise of retribution for defying him, for flaunting his precious customs, written all over him.

Her smile was conceding and defiant at the same time as she sighed. “Witless.”

“I like her already.”

Kamal rounded on Shehab, glowering. Shehab only grinned at him, his enjoyment glaring, chafing.

“A woman who isn’t intimidated by you, who can pull that face—ya Ullah, that face—on you, is all right by me. More than all right. She’s a once-in-a-lifetime find. A treasure.”

Kamal wondered how the international community would react if, during the countdown to his joloos and wedding, he engaged his smug older brother in a knock-down, drag-out fight. Would it really matter if they both showed up at the ceremonies with broken noses, stitched lips and black eyes?

He exhaled the surplus of aggression. He wasn’t letting Shehab bait him. Aliyah had done too good a job of it.

She’d let him see her. And after he’d made it clear he expected not to see her until she came to him in her zaffah. He’d invoked customs when in reality he just couldn’t deal with the added turmoil of seeing her again one second before he had to.

And he’d been right to stipulate that ban. His current condition testified to the accuracy of his projection that seeing her would mess with his coherence and control. He couldn’t afford that now when he needed them most.

And Shehab, alf laa’nah alaih—a thousand damnations on him—was taking such joy in plucking at the last anchors holding his restraint in place, giving him a taunting, considering look. “But this isn’t her reaction to a fresh exposure to you, is it? It doesn’t feel like the outcome of one meeting. Her defiance of your incomparable powers of exasperation feels too…estab-lished. As for your reaction…b’Ellahi, it was priceless.”

Kamal bared his teeth at Shehab before casting his gaze again where she was no longer standing. He still saw her in his mind’s eye, as if her focus on him had left a brand that still sizzled.

He tore his gaze away, cast it to the stately spires of the innermost palace gates, which were flying the flag of Judar at halfmast in mourning for his late uncle, King Zaher.

The weight of responsibility pressed harder on his shoulders, the best cure for his personal upheaval. He exhaled, strode toward the expansive steps, taking in the palace in an inclusive glance. He felt he was seeing it for the first time.

The four-level soaring, sprawling stone edifice was a marriage of the cultures that formed Judar, its architecture a melting pot of their grandeur, each line, ornament and texture owing its design, method and philosophy to one culture or the other. Somehow Byzantine, Indian, Persian, Turkish and other influences conspired to form an Arabian whole, echoing a vast, rich and sometimes brutal history. The palace still owed enough to Western modernization to be a monument of today. And tomorrow.

It reminded him of Aliyah.

And it was his dominion now. The seat of his power. A power that combined his own global influence with that of the throne.

He scaled the steps faster, felt Shehab keeping up with him, his taunting gaze still burning the side of his face.

“What I regret is that I didn’t catch it all in digital memory for the viewing pleasure of the coming generations.”

Kamal shot him a sideways look. “You do remember your warning to me, when I was taking your beloved Farah’s name in vain? You, too, have a perfect set of teeth to cherish and protect, if only to flash them like a fool at your enchantress. So shut up, Shehab.”

“Is this a command, ya maolai?” Shehab all but wiggled his eyebrows as he called him “my liege.” Then seriousness crept into his hard, noble features. “Is Aliyah why you think love affairs are destined for heartache and humiliation? Why you’ve been like a tiger with a festering wound these past years?”

Leave it to Shehab to fathom it all simply from watching him seethe across the distance at Aliyah. He had been like an agonized tiger since he’d cast her out of his life, his disillusionment becoming total intolerance of any human frailty. But he’d always been fair in his ruthlessness.

He hadn’t been with her. Not two nights ago. He’d slashed at her with unforgivable things. The inferno she’d ignited inside him, physical and emotional, had obliterated control and judgment.

And he couldn’t let that happen. The throne of Judar depended on him. The peace of the region. He had to keep Aliyah at arm’s length emotionally, would join with her physically only to produce the vital heir. He couldn’t let her overwhelm him again. As she could, so easily, so totally, if he ever weakened.

Shehab was going on. “I won’t probe…”

“Oh, please do. Then I can have the pleasure of probing right back. Into your maddeningly, obliviously blissful face.”

Shehab sighed. “If I thought it would help, I’d let you. You probably think I owe it to you for passing the throne to you.”

“You talk as if you passed me a ball.”

“I did my share of the running but had to leave the touchdown to you.” Before Kamal turned on him, made him touch down face-first, Shehab raised placating hands. “But sports metaphors aside, whatever went wrong between you, Kamal, bury it. She’ll be your woman, your wife and your queen. And she looks and sounds like your match. You must have felt enough for her in the past if it hurt that bad and affected you that long when things went sour. Focus on the positive, dismiss the negative. Treat her well and it can only circulate in a flow of goodwill and intimacy.”

Kamal slowed as they passed through the soaring mahogany doors. “What’s this? Did our mother leave you instructions to read me before I married? Or did you find this in a wife user’s manual? Or an edition of Domestic Bliss for Dummies?”

Shehab threw his head back on a hearty laugh before his gaze turned penetrating. “I want you to be happy. You haven’t been for a long time, Kamal. I don’t have any information on the situation, but I do trust my instincts, my heart. Especially after they led me into what you so strongly object to, the deepest reaches of love with my incomparable Farah. I want the same for you.”

Holding back his response, which would have been riddled with obscenities, Kamal picked up speed as they crossed the vast columned hall that sprawled underneath a gigantic dome. The transition from the glare and dry heat to the interior’s soothing light and the coolness achieved by the palace’s structure and building materials silenced him. That, and feeling that he was seeing everything through new eyes now that he would call the palace home. His and Aliyah’s.