did you do?”
He glanced towards her, then back to the past again. “I made approaches to these new princes, my uncles. I demanded to know what my grandfather’s plans for me had been.”
“And they didn’t tell you?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. They would not speak to their own nephew. I had been taken from my mother’s home, but those who had done this thing would not let me enter my father’s.”
He turned to gaze intently at her. “Was this not injustice? Was I not right to be angered?”
“Zara told me they never knew. Your uncles, Rafi and Omar and Karim—they didn’t know who you were. Isn’t that right?”
“It is true that they themselves had never been told. They said afterwards that my letters, even, did not make the point clear. They thought me only a bandit. But someone had known, from the beginning. My grandfather himself…but he had made no provision for me in his will. No mention.”
“Isn’t that kind of weird?” It struck her as the least credible part of the whole equation.
His eyes searched her face with uncomfortable intensity.
“You would say that my uncles knew the truth, and only pretended ignorance until they were forced to admit it? Do you know this? Has your sister said something?”
She shook her head, not trusting the feelings of empathy that his story was—probably deliberately—stirring in her.
“No, I don’t know any more than you’ve told me. It’s just very hard for me to accept that a woman wouldn’t insist on meeting her only grandchild, the son of her own dead son.”
His face grew shadowed. “Perhaps—perhaps my illegitimate birth was too great a stain.”
“And so they never even met you?” Clio tried to put herself in such a position, and failed. She herself would move heaven and earth to have her grandchild near her, part of the family, whatever sin of love his parents had committed.
“Nothing. Not even a letter to be given to me after their death.”
No wonder he felt at home nowhere.
He was silent as they skimmed across the endless stretch of water, that seemed as vast as any desert.
“What did you do when your uncles refused your requests?”
He had made his way back to his “home,” the desert of his childhood. But the bonds had been severed.
“The desert could never be home to me. The tribe—so ignorant, living in another century, afraid of everything new—could not be my family.” So his determination to force his real family to recognize him grew. He had collected followers to his standard—and eventually…he had taken a hostage.
“And the rest you know,” he said, in an ironic tone.
“The rest I know,” she agreed. “And now your life has changed all over again. Thanks to Zara, you’ve proven your bloodline, you have your father’s titles and property…and you’re so trusted by your uncles they’ve made you Grand Vizier and now you’re on a mission to—”
His head snapped around, and if his dark eyes had searched her before, they now raked her ruthlessly.
“Mission? Who has told you I had a mission?”
She returned his look with surprise. “I thought the reason you were coming here was to get a better command of English so you could study political science or whatever at Harvard in the autumn. I thought a summer with the rowdy Blake family was supposed to be the perfect way to do it.”
The guarded look slowly left his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “It is true.”
Clio turned back to the water ahead of her, her mind buzzing with speculation. What on earth was that about? Did it mean he wasn’t really here to learn English at all? That it was some kind of blind? But for what? What other reason could Prince Jalal possibly have for coming here to the middle of nowhere?
Three
Jalal stood and moved towards the stern, gazing around him as they passed into yet another lake. He lifted both arms, stretching out his hands in powerful adoration. “It is magnificent! So much water!” He breathed deeply. “Smell the freshness of the water! This water is not salt! Is it?”
A loud horn startled her, and Clio whirled to discover that she had turned onto a collision course with another boat. She waved an apology to the indignant pilot as she hastily and not very gracefully adjusted her course. Jalal half lost his balance and recovered.
“Dammit, don’t distract me when I’m driving!” she cried. She had been staring over her shoulder at him. He had a huge physical charisma, but she would get over that. “No, of course it’s not salt,” she said when the danger was past. “All Canada’s lakes are freshwater.”
“Barakallah! It is a miracle. And you drink this water!” He spoke it as a fact, but still he looked for confirmation from her.
“Yes, we drink it.” She smiled, and then, realizing how much she had already let her guard down with him, steeled her heart against the tug she felt. “For now. It may end up polluted in the future, like everything else.”
But his joy would admit no contaminants. “It must be protected from pollution,” he said, as though he himself might fix this by princely decree. “This must not be allowed, to destroy such rich bounty.”
“Yes, really,” Clio agreed dryly.
“Why do they pollute such beauty?”
“Because it is cheaper to dump than to treat waste.”
Prince Jalal nodded, taking it in. Was it his grandmother’s blood in him that so called to this place?
“My mother’s mother was raised in a country of lakes and forests.” He spoke almost absently, as if to himself, and he blinked when she responded.
“Really? How did she happen to marry a desert bandit, then?”
“On a journey across the desert, she was abducted by my grandfather, Selim. She spent the rest of her life in the desert, but she never forgot her beloved land of lakes.”
The result of that union had been only one daughter, his mother. Desert-born Nusaybah had heard many longing tales of her mother’s homeland as a child, and later she had passed them on to her son. She had also passed on the information that his grandmother was a princess in her own country.
That had seemed unlikely, until the DNA tests showed that he was more closely related to Prince Rafi than to Rafi’s two half brothers. Then a search of the family tree showed that Rafi’s mother, the Princess Nargis, was the daughter of a prince whose sister had been abducted and never spoken of again.
For centuries the family had spent every summer in the highlands, just as Jalal’s grandmother had always said. So it was deep in his blood, the longing for lake and forest, though he had not felt its force
