she had been his lover.
‘We both know why you need me out of here today, Emir. We both know you’d be in my bed tonight, and heaven forbid you might show emotion—might tell me what’s going on in the forbidden zone of your mind. You can stop worrying about that now—I’ll be gone within the hour,’ Amy said. ‘All temptation will be removed.’
‘You flatter yourself.’
‘Actually, I haven’t for a while. But I will from now on.’
Amy had once read that people who had been shot sometimes didn’t even know, that they could carry on, fuelled by adrenaline, without realising they had been wounded. She hadn’t believed it at the time, but she knew it to be true now.
She packed her belongings and rang down to arrange a car to take her to the airport. There wasn’t an awful lot to pack. She’d arrived with hardly anything and left with little more—save a heart so broken she didn’t dare feel it.
And because it was a royal nanny leaving, because in this land there were certain ways that had to be adhered to, Emir came out and held Clemira while Fatima held Nakia.
Amy did the hardest thing she had ever done, but it was necessary, she realised, the right thing to do. She kissed the little girls goodbye and managed to smile and not scare them. She should probably curtsy to him, but Amy chose not to. Instead she climbed into the car, and after a wave to the twins she deliberately didn’t look back.
Never again would she let him see her cry.
HE HEARD the twins wail and sob late into the night. He need not have—his suite was far from the nursery—but he walked down there several times and knew Fatima could not quieten them.
‘They will cry themselves out soon,’ Fatima said, putting down her sewing and standing as he approached once again. She had put a chair in the hallway while she waited for the twins to give in to sleep.
Still they refused to.
He could not comfort them. They did not seem to want his comfort, and he did not know what to do.
He walked from the nursery not towards his suite but to Amy’s quarters. It was a route he took in his head perhaps a thousand times each night. It was a door he fought not to open again and again. Now that he did, it was empty—the French doors had been left open to air it, so he didn’t even get the brief hit of her scent. The bed had been stripped and the wardrobes, when he looked, were bare, so too the drawers. The bathroom had been thoroughly cleaned. Like a mad man, he went through the bathroom cupboards, and then back out to the bedroom, but there was nothing of her left.
He walked back to the nursery where the babies were still screaming as Fatima sewed. When she rose as he approached he told her to sit and walked into the nursery. He turned on the lights and picked up his screaming girls.
He scanned the pinboard of photos and children’s paintings. There he was, and so too Hannah, and there were hundreds of pictures of the girls. But there was not a single one of Amy—not even a handprint bore her name. Emir realised fully then that she was gone from the palace and gone from these rooms—gone from his life and from his daughters’ lives too.
The twins’ screams grew louder, even though he held them in his arms, and Emir envied their lack of restraint and inhibition—they could sob and beat their fists on his chest, yell with indignant rage, that she was gone.
He looked out of the window to the sky that was carrying her home now. If he called for his jet possibly he could beat her, could meet her at the airport with the girls. But she was right, Emir thought with a rueful smile—she would make a terrible mistress.
She should be his wife.
‘Ummi?’ Clemira begged. Now she had two mothers to grieve for. He held his babies some more until finally they were spent. He put them down in one crib, but still they would not sleep, just stared at him with angry eyes, lay hiccoughing and gulping. He ran a finger down Clemira’s cheek and across her eyebrows as Amy had shown him a year ago, but Clemira did not close her eyes. She just stared coolly back, exhausted but still defiant. Yes, she was a born leader.
As was Emir.
Except the rules did not allow him to be.
‘I’m leaving for the desert,’ he told Fatima as he left the nursery. ‘The new nanny starts in two days.’
Fatima lowered her head as he walked off. She did not ask when he would return, did not insist that he tell her so she could tell the girls. That was how it was supposed to be, yet not as it should be, Emir realised.
He joined Amy in the sky—but in his helicopter.
Once in the desert, he had Raul ready his horse and then rode into the night. He was at the oasis for sunrise. The first year was over and now he must move on.
He prayed as he waited for counsel from the wizened old man—for he knew that he would come.
‘Hannah will not rest.’
The old man nodded.
‘Before she died she asked that I promise to do my best for the girls.’ He looked into the man’s blackcurrant eyes. ‘And to do the best for me.’
‘And have you?’
‘First I have to do the best by my country.’
‘Because you are King?’
Emir nodded. ‘I made that promise to my father when he died,’ he said. He remembered the loss and the pain he had suffered then. His vow had been absolute when he had sworn it. ‘The best for me is to marry Amy. It is the best for the girls too. But not the best for my country.’ Emir told the old man why. ‘She cannot have children.’ He waited for the old man to shake his head, to tell him how impossible it was, to tell him there was no dilemma, that it could not be; instead he sat silent, so Emir spelt it out for him. ‘She cannot give me a son.’
‘And the new wife you will take can?’ the old man checked.
Emir closed his eyes.
‘Perhaps your new wife will give you girls too?’ the old man said. ‘As Queen Hannah did.’
‘Without a son my lineage ends,’ Emir hissed in frustration. ‘Alzirz will swallow Alzan and the two lands will be become one.’
‘That is the prediction,’ the old man said. ‘You cannot fight that.’
Emir was sick of predictions, of absolutes, of a fate that was sealed in the sand and the stars. ‘It must not happen,’ Emir said. He thought of his people—the people who had rejected his daughters, was his first savage thought. Yet they were not bad—they were scared. Emir knew that. He loved his people and his country so much, and they needed him as their leader. ‘I cannot turn my back on them. There are rules for Alzan …’
‘And for Alzirz too,’ the old man said, and Emir grew silent. ‘You are King for
