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“I think I have realized why the two of you have been mooning over each other like a pair of lost puppies,” Zeinab quietly observed.

Ellie startled at the sound of her voice, having momentarily forgotten the other woman was there. “Lost puppies!” she protested.

“You are in love with him,” Zeinab continued relentlessly.

The pain in Ellie’s chest tightened, threaded through with worry, fear, and a wild, desperate longing. The bone-deep feeling snuck up on her like a bandit with a power that threatened to overwhelm her.

Zeinab’s gaze lingered on Adam as he swung his sword in the wrong direction, then corrected himself with a laugh, the men around him smiling. “But you will not marry him. Because marriage in your world is a monster.”

“How did you…” Ellie’s voice trailed off, and she drew in a careful, unsteady breath. “It’s… we’re…” She swallowed thickly. “It’scomplicated.”

“Complicated.”Zeinab echoed the word like a curse. Her tone shifted. “Of course, marriage is far from good in Egypt. Our mullahs say that it is the will of Allah that women be subservient to men. But that is not what I read in the Quran. My Quran declares that Allah made men and women to be equals.Waman ya?mal mina l-?âli?âti min dhakarin aw unthâ wahuwa mu'minun fa-ulâika yadkhulûna l-janata,”she recited.“‘For whoever does right, whether man or woman, and is a believer, will enter Heaven.’”

The song of the men drifted to them on a night breeze scented with acacia blossoms. Stars pricked to life against the deep velvet of the twilight sky overhead.

“Tell me, Miss Mallory,” Zeinab continued. “Which truth should I live? Their truth? Or the one that holds between me and my Lord?”

Her words were quiet. The Bedouin women scattered around them did not hear, comfortably wrapped up in their happy gossip as they watched the Ardah.

Zeinab waited for an answer. Ellie gave the only one she possibly could.

“Yours,” Ellie replied.

“Mine,” Zeinab confirmed, her green eyes flashing with determination. “I know the mullahs have law and custom on their side. I know that my truth does not save the women who are forced into marriages with men who misuse them. Some might even say that it changes nothing—but they would bewrong.”

Ellie’s heart skipped strangely in her chest. Zeinab’s tone soundeddangerousin a way that tugged at her like a golden thread.

“Your Bates is a good man. Anhonorableman,” Zeinab added meaningfully. “It is obvious to anyone with eyes to see that he is devoted to you exactly as you are, even when it is troublesome for him—and you have chosen a path with no shortage of trouble,” she noted dryly. “But the trouble that this world would thrust upon you—the trouble of the choice you think you must make between this man and what you believe in… That is notcomplicated. That istyranny.”

A sense of wild, strange potential whispered through Ellie, notching up the low drumbeat of her heart.

“What are you saying?” she asked, her voice careful.

“I am saying that if you wish to change the world, you must first know what you mean for it to become.” Zeinab’s words snapped with quiet ferocity. “When you find your own truth—yours and God’s—and live it in spite of those who would confine you…nowyou are dangerous. Because you know whatoughtto be. Because you seize it for yourself from the teeth of their injustice, even as the world howls that you must not.”

Ellie felt as though she were teetering at the edge of a precipice. Behind her lay the world she had known, while before her stretched… somethingelse. Something she was only beginning to imagine.

She realized that her hands were shaking. She tucked them carefully around her bruised ribs.

“What could that even look like?” she asked, her breath tight.

“Only the two of you can decide that,” Zeinab returned authoritatively.

“But… what if the rest of the world thinks it’s wrong?” Ellie pressed back urgently.

“Do I go about telling everyone I meet that I am a revolutionary?” Zeinab scoffed. “Running up to the doors of tyranny to bang on them with your sword is a man’s way of doing battle.” Her eyes glittered. “Women take the hinges off.”

Ellie snorted with laughter. The sound burst from her involuntarily and was loud enough that a few of the other women glanced over, their eyes warm with wry surprise over their veils.

Zeinab’s gaze shifted to the figure of her husband, where he gracefully swept out his borrowed sword. “Of course, you cannot keep it from the people who truly love you. And they may worry, because they care about your happiness. But once they understand that this is your truth, they will accept it.”

Ellie glanced over at Neil as he far less gracefully worked to keep up, his face brightened by a tired, involuntary grin. “Do you really believe that?”

“I do,” Zeinab solemnly replied. Her expression shifted, going over more dry. “Unless they are bigots, in which case they may change their hearts or go away.”

This time Ellie’s laugh simply spilled out, and something loosened inside of her—a tight, heavy knot that she had been carrying around without realizing it. As it unraveled, the night around her grew wider, sprawling out across a moon-silvered desert rife with possibilities.

Her gaze locked on Adam where he danced among the line of men, tracing the graceful sweep of his arm as his sword flashed in the torchlight. “What if we want different things?”