There's an older kid, bright hair, bright face, who loves them. He coddles Mariam. He likes to call himself the older brother, but Cassim doesn't see it; as the older brother, he should be a shield, like Cassim is for Mariam. Alibaba is stronger and quicker and more talented, but he is stupid and naive; he's too blind to protect them.
He tries to coddle Cassim, too.
Sometimes Cassim looks into his face until he thinks he will get spots in his eyes, as if he were looking at the sun, and he wants to tell him. Alibaba wants to take care of them, and Cassim wants to tell him what he hasn't taken care of. He wants to take away the film covering his eyes and show him the world as it really is. He wants to see Alibaba's face when he finds out.
He wastes his chance, and Alibaba's mother shows him instead. She is kinder by far than Cassim would be, letting him believe it has been overcome. (It hasn't.) Anise is not like Alibaba, he knows. Her face is bright as his but her eyes are brown and dark with sight; she sees what her son does not. He wonders why she doesn't show him, but maybe, like Cassim, she thinks of it and thinks of it but is stopped each time by an odd clench in her chest. He likes to think there could be any similarity between him and Anise. He can't quite fool himself into thinking there could be any between him and Alibaba.
"It's okay," Alibaba tells them when she dies, but he's crying harder than Mariam. "It's okay, I'll take care of you guys. We'll be fine!" Cassim wraps his arms around them and thinks he should have been older.
Soon enough, Alibaba gets whisked off to the palace, as if the world itself gets a clench in its chest when it thinks about opening his eyes. Cassim's father dies at his hands and Cassim's sister dies in his arms, and he wonders if he has any family left.
Alibaba comes back, and he wonders if he wants any.
(Alibaba comes back, and Cassim clouds his eyes with smoke and whispers.)