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“Ah! Nahri,” Muntadhir startled at her shadow appearing over his shoulder, spilling wine onto his white dishdasha and the throw pillow at his side. “Do you have to move so quietly?”
“Next time I’ll just topple over your table of fine pottery on my way in.” She took the seat next to him, stealing some fruit off his plate. She stared off the balcony into the distance as she popped a grape into her mouth.
“Now, that would just be a waste.”
“You said it,” she folded her hands over her stomach. “They would catch a pretty price in Cairo.”
Cairo again, her darling homeland. The glint in her eye was brighter than the gold-leaf patterning on his favourite wine glass, which she was appraising with a practised smile. She ran her fingers gingerly over the thin lip of a crystal decanter, and a memory shivered through Muntadhir at that same gesture flitting over his collarbone.
Their marriage could hardly have been called a loving one, but they had had their moments. Moments that started something like this one, when she wound her way to his chambers after a heavy meal and a little more wine than the Daeva holymen could excuse. Moments when looking at her hadn’t recalled his banished baby brother, or best-kept secret of Jamshid. Moments just between them and their bedsheets.
For five years the siblings (or cousins, if he wanted to be pedantic) had been his primary company, publicly and… personally. He tried not to think too hard about the nights when Jamshid would sneak out of his rooms in the same hour Nahri slipped between his sheets. No matter that Jamshid had kept a strict cease on their relationship during his marriage, Muntadhir still cringed at the memories.
How blind he had been then, not to see their resemblance. If not exactly in their physical appearance, then in habit. Nahri would gesture wildly with her hands when reminiscing about the complicated politics of Franks and Turks in Cairo. That same ferocity that Jamshid had when he explained the intricacies of whatever blade technique he hadn’t quite mastered yet. Though, if Muntadhir was being completely honest, he had rarely paid much attention to Nahri’s eccentricities of character. Unless it was a matter of keeping them alive, and out of his father’s wrath.
Perhaps if he had paid his wife a little more attention they might have had a marriage worth mourning, after a well deserved and much celebrated divorce. Perhaps he should have had a scribe find some Egyptian poetry for him to memorize, it couldn’t be all that different than the djinn lyrics he loved so well. He could have actually listened to Nahri’s rambling about a new surgery she was going to perform that week. They may not have been in love, but they could have loved one another. Maybe there was a quiet happiness Nahri could have found elsewhere, that Muntadhir had with Jamshid.
But, in the life they lived, there would have been no fixing what was wrong between Muntadir and Nahri. No matter how many Egyptian lullabies he plied her with, no matter if she had danced with him every night with the skills of the most talented courtesan. Their marriage was a seed cast over stone. It had bloomed from a rotten soil, with not enough sun and far too much rain. There was no saving the fruit of such a tree.
“Are you looking for your brother?” Muntadhir asked. “Because I think he’s with mine tonight.”
“Right, looking over plans for the new Citadel.”
Not that Nahri wasn’t welcome to his company, but they rarely chose to spend time alone together, even as husband and wife. Now as… friends? Allies? Almost-in-laws? He wasn’t sure what to make of the Banu Nahida in his chambers, at the tail end of dusk. And she didn’t seem eager to explain, busy enjoying his wine and an orange from her grove.
“How is your grandfather?” He tried, maybe she had come to deliver bad news. The old chef had taken ill last week.
“Very well now, he was coughing silver dust. Nothing that we couldn’t solve at the new hospital.”
Her darling hospital. Another thing he might have taken some interest in, when she and Ali had first been reunited. When he had been too proud to treat her with respect, choosing apathy and suspicion instead. Since they had defeated Manizeh and gotten Daevabad somewhat settled, it had been nearly two years of rebuilding all they had lost. Not only monuments, but trust, families, the very things that made Daevabad inhabitable in the years when it offered only its worst to so many of its citizens.
“So, your grandfather is well. Your brother and mine are accounted for, I assume there’s no pressing political emergency that requires my particular skillset. Unless you’ve run desperately out of wine, I’m at a loss.”
“Muntadhir, I’m shocked at you.” Nahri covered her heart and gasped in mock offence. “Can’t a woman just keep her ex-husband company, out of the goodness of her heart?” She tutted loudly as she poured herself a glass of wine.
“Your one night off from work, and you’re choosing to spend it with me?” He smiled, taking the decanter from her hand once she finished. “I’m charming, but not that charming.”
“Modesty isn’t a good look on you, comes across as disingenuous.”
“Can’t please everyone.”
“You’ve certainly tried.”
“Now you’re just being mean.”
Nahri smiled, and again he saw Jamshid in the dimple on her left cheek. In the way her left eye crinkled more than the right when he was trying to hide exactly how amused he was by Muntadhir’s silly teasing. Wrinkles and dimples he had kissed a hundred times, but never once noticed in Nahri.
He didn’t understand her, is what it came down to in the end. But he understood very well what Ali had found in her. His little brother spent nearly every spare hour at her house or in her office at the hospital, waiting for any fleeting moment she would have to spend with him. He brought her books from the depths of the library or bought off far-travelled merchants. Books on astronomy, history, medicine Biographies of great men and women, human fairytales of the djinn world. If not books, then oddities and trinkets to amuse them for hours, finding Djinn additions to human ingenuity. Nahri and Ali had the same streak of clever in their winking wit. One always winning over the other, but neither ceding to second.
Muntadhir stretched, his heels digging into the mosaics and his crystal wine glass precariously balanced over his head.
“Your brother has to propose.”
To his credit, Muntadhir caught his surprise before the whole of his wineglass spilled into his hair. As it stood, only a tasteful sprinkling made it into his curls, like a fermented winter shower.
“Is there… a timely urgency to this proposal?” He doubted it, though. His pious brother had a heart-attack-of-conscious after kissing Nahri once , he imagined anything else would be far out of his Ali’s depth.
“No! Nothing like that, but it’s been almost two years, Muntadhir. I…” Nahri closed her eyes, a frustrated shiver rattling her demeanor.
“You don’t have to say it.” Pride was perhaps the only thing he and Nahri had in common. He knew that when it wasn’t a matter of great importance, she hurried through economic meetings and city council sessions to the meals Ali brought to her home. He watched his brother sit half asleep at his desk in the morning, having spent dusk till dawn making plans and whispering whatever passed for sweet-nothings in the ears of over eager, book-nosed kids like Ali and Nahri. “You want me to talk to him?”
Did Ali know she loved him? He must, he wouldn’t have spent years at her side if he thought he wasn’t wanted.
“You know what I’m like, what we’re like.” Nahri set her gaze on the last lines of gold in the horizon. “I’m one to speak my mind. But, it would be… nice, if I didn’t have to ask this time.”
“Can I believe my pointed ears? Are you becoming a romantic?” At that, a light flush touched the tips of Nahri’s ears.
“I negotiated my own dowry as means of proposal! Forgive me for wanting something a little less transactional, this time.”
“Oh, what shall I plan for him? Rose petals and white doves on the operating table? An elephant parade through the marketplace? Candlelit dinner in the bathhouse?”
Nahri tossed a pillow at him, hitting Muntadhir with a thud in the stomach. He laughed it off, even as Nahri stalked off the balcony.
“Just talk to him.” She shouted over her shoulder. “No antics, no elephants, and certainly do not come anywhere near my operating tables.” She slammed his door behind her, loud enough that Muntadhir jumped in his seat.
Telling me what do like she’s my… Right. Maybe that was her joke all along. He never quite got a taste for her humour.
In the end there were no elephants and suggestive bathhouse perfumes. Ali came home early the next morning to find Muntadhir asleep at his desk. After a bit of eyebrow raising, brotherly ribbing, he got to the point. A days worth of planning, two brothers worth of goading and teasing, and enough hypothetical but what if she doesn’t-- to drive Muntadhir to madness. But in the end it would be worth it, the set up would be worth it.
There was no grand display of magic, no ostentatious jewelery, not even romantic verses from their mortal books. A meal, all the courses chosen by Ali, was set up on the roof of the hospital. Nahri had gardens there. It was for small things that she wanted on hand; medicines she didn’t want to send a page to the palace gardens and back for on a daily basis. And a few orange trees, the sweetest fruit. Just enough sun in the richest soil. Climbing vines that twirled lovingly about their trellises. Flowers that twinkled like starlight catching at Nahri’s dark eyes in the dusky evening light.
Dowries and marriage contracts could be figured out later. Ali’s shaking hands and nervous glisten of sweat wouldn’t allow for anything more than the moments his brother had talked him through.
Just sit with her, like any other night. Hold her hand, like you would--
I wouldn’t.
Zaydi, you’re a very lucky man.
Muntadhir said it in his joking tone, one that might have left Ali feeling horribly inadequate years ago. As Muntadhir shook his head at Ali’s inexperience, all Ali could feel was fondness for his brother’s help.
But Ali took his advice as he took Nahri’s hand. He met her eye and smiled as openly as he did when he thought she wasn’t looking. He loved to see her like this, surrounded by the fruits of her dearest labours. The vines seemed to bow and curl toward her, like heavens bending around the worthiest soul. Sitting atop a building that was hardly a wisp of a dream all those years ago, Ali voiced what Nahri had asked herself a dozen times in the graze of his arm against hers in the library, in the sound of his hoarse, late-night laughter over their fifth pot of rosewater tea. A question that had glimmered against her darkest hopes so long ago on the Nile.
In the end they stayed on the roof long after their plates were covered only in crumbs. Long past the dusk and well into the early hours of dawn. Hands entwined, kisses pressed onto foreheads, guileless giggling neither would admit to by the light of day. Looking out over the garden, a bright, cloudless dawn rising over the lake, Nahri and Ali would face whatever Daevabad brought them. There was a new life waiting for them in their city, but that night it was enough to see hold it at a distance. Enough to imagine the sweetness of being together, of what might grow between the cracks in the cobblestones, if they let it.