The Fire Wish by Amber Lough Page A

I was leaving the next day. Then, when I told Rahela she was coming with me, she turned pale as snow. But she didn’t cry or complain. In fact, she didn’t say anything for the rest of the night. She just packed her trunk and then helped put the younger children to sleep, as if nothing had changed. I, on the other hand, threw my dresses into my trunk and thought of a dozen reasons why I should run away.
    Now we sat, side by side, for what felt like another mile along the canal. “I could help you,” I said. I was trying to have a positive attitude. She was stuck, just as I was. We were in it together.
    She studied the loom for a moment, then humphed. “Maybe later. The sun is going down soon, and we don’t have a lamp.”
    I hadn’t thought of that. So we weren’t just locked into a tiny room, where we’d surely drown if the boat took on any measurable amount of water, but we would be in the dark. I stood up and took the one step to the window. The sky to our east was the hazy purple that took over at sunset. Ahead, Hashim was shaking out a prayer rug. Travel wasn’t stopped for prayers, even for the caliph’s vizier.
    When the prayer call came from the barge behind us, Rahela pulled me from the window and made me kneel beside her. I tried to pray, but all I could do was go through the motions and think about how we were like birds in a cage. I snuck a peek at the sky, wishing I could fly out into it.
    Later, a hanging lamp was lit on the bow of our boat. Hashim ate a meal served to him by one of the men, and the two laughed. Their voices carried across the water. If a laugh could make it, then surely he could hear me if I yelled.
    “Great Vizier,” I shouted, “could we have a lamp and oil? It’s very dark in here!”
    He looked up from his bowl, but it was too dark to see his face clearly. “An open flame would be too dangerous in such an enclosed place,” he called back.
    “Can we come out for meals?”
    “You will get out when we arrive at the palace’s dock.” He said this like he was stating a fact of nature, like how the sun rises at dawn. Then he got up and disappeared into his cabin, which was set into the center of his barge, like ours. But he didn’t share his with anyone, and he wouldn’t have been locked in.
    I was about to call out again, but a figure appeared on theother side of the door. “Dinner,” the man said. He unlocked the window, which was on a hinge that I hadn’t noticed, and passed us two bowls of lentil stew.
    I took the food, and we ate in the nearly full darkness.
    I looked up through the window into the indigo sky. I could almost feel the wind that blew past our locked door. I wanted to feel the wind. I wanted to be out there in the open, where anything could happen as long as I allowed it to.
    I almost wore down the floorboards. I couldn’t stop pacing. On the third day of this, we slid out of the canal and into the Tigris River. The water was a deeper green and bubbled with eddies. We moved faster, and the pilot had to work harder to keep us away from the banks. For Rahela and me, though, nothing changed.
    That afternoon, we rowed past Samarra, a city squished along the river like weeds against a fence. Once we cleared the city, the guard at the prow seemed more tense than usual. He stood straighter, if that was possible. A series of dark holes, some as wide as a horse, dotted the riverbank, and he kept turning his head to look at them.
    “Look at that,” I said to Rahela. She put down her loom and I gave her some room at the window. “What are those?”
    The holes grew larger. How was the bank not sliding down into the river?
    “I think those are tunnels, or caves,” she whispered. Rahela rarely whispered, and when she did, you paid attention.
    “Jinni tunnels?” I asked. She didn’t answer, so I cleared my throat and shouted, “Hey, guard! Are those jinni tunnels?”
    He glanced back at me and nodded. He didn’t have to tell us to be quiet. Rahela backed