Chapter 37
Ruth
Trust was a strange thing. Each step and breath was lined with the knowledge that he was watching, waiting, expecting, from his vantage point at the door. The world shrank to the size of a room chambered as a heart, beating with words unsaid, waiting to bleed.
She approached the bed, and her first sight of the girl passed in unaffected silence. She lay quiet and still, eyes closed in exhausted rest. Her features were a union of beautiful plainness and weary youth, unmemorable, like a thousand other nameless women.
Jasmine waited for an epiphany, for some tragic truth or bitter rage to reveal itself. None came. The girl looked nothing like her.
A cough broke the silence as the fragile body on the bed jerked slightly, a delicate throat exposed by the fall of translucent sheets. Eyes fluttered open involuntarily, disturbed from sleep, and the next moments were a blur.
A choked gasp, widened eyes, a violent toss of the blanket, and the heavy thump of knees against the floor. "Your Highness--"
Shaking hands, palms down, inches from Jasmine's feet, long hair hanging limply from thin shoulders, forehead lowered painfully to the carpet. "Your servant begs--have mercy..." The girl's entire body was shuddering under the weight of some repeated nightmare. Jasmine drew back in growing horror.
"Mercy..."
Jasmine knelt slowly, hands helpless in her lap. The memory of cold metal in her palm was too fresh. Mercy. The dark laughter of a sorcerer, a disdainful offer for a cure at the price of a servant girl's life. Mercy. Long months gone by in coldness, an escalating fall into bitterness and loss and deadly rumors of madness and vengeance--
"What is your name?" she whispered.
"F--Fadwa, your Highness."
"Rise, Fadwa," she said, and took the girl's hands.
The curve of her belly was plainly visible through her nightgown, a burden infinitely precious. Jasmine's heart ached, but she did not know for whom she felt pain. The terror in the girl's eyes was a knife in her gut, and she closed her eyes briefly, poison swirling, leaking, escaping.
She helped Fadwa back into bed, aware once again of Aladdin's eyes on her, how he was only now releasing the breath he had been holding. Trust was a strange thing.
"Please..." Jasmine brushed a strand of hair back from the girl's forehead. "Please don't be afraid."