A/N: my attempt at an edit above, with the girl characters and their name meanings. Tell me if you guys like it and I'll make one for the guys!
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"YOU THINK ME A LIAR?" Sooraya asked in the wake of Azade's obvious shock. If you'd had asked her a few hours ago, Azade would've thought that Sooraya was simply lying and trying to play with her mind. But the serious tone in her words, the bitterness in that voice—she couldn't be lying.
"The witch is your Mother?"
Sooraya let out a humourless laugh, her knuckles pale on the reins of the horse. "Call her what you like. A witch, a bitch—a whore, but she is anything but a Mother." She said, while slowing the horse into a trot.
Azade tried to picture their faces side by side, both beautiful in an unnatural way. "But you both can do magic?" She remembered the way Sooraya's palm sealed over the stone just moments ago. The pale light that excreted from her hands; proving to Azade that witchcraft wasn't simply controlling dreams and making healing antidotes.
"It's not magic, magic is something you're born with." She said, her gaze straight forward as she pulled on the reins to stop the horse. "What my Mother has, what I have—it's an abomination." Wordlessly jumping off, she held out a hand to help Azade get down.
Brushing off her skirt; Azade could see they had stopped just below the city and in a forgotten field, filled with a mixture of dirt and sand. "Why haven't we gone into the city?" She doubted Rukun would go very far if he decided to leave the palace to search his own capital, but they could never be sure.
"If you want to be surrounded by drunken men, whores and thieves, go on ahead." Sooraya led the horse with one hand to a palm that laid conveniently where they stopped. "You've never been inside Al-Zanur, have you?"
Azade shook her head. Al-Zanur, the capital city of Kroos. Where poor men could come out with their pockets heavy with gold. As a slave, she'd only dreamed of witnessing anything other than her small world of whips and sand. The city seemed to call to her strangely, its lanterns like stars swaying in the sky. "It's beautiful."
"I've never enjoyed meaningless conversation." Sooraya cut briefly, laying against the tree. Her eyes flickered towards Azade for a second, but looked back thoughtfully at the city. "Al-Zanur's beauty is only on the surface, terrible things happen inside that city." Bitterness tinged on her voice.
"You'd know from experience." It wasn't a question.
Sooraya gave a small smirk, leaning into the tree. She paid no mind to Azade who still stood by the horse; her hands folded together. As if deciding if she should speak or not, her eyes seemed to burn into the city. Like silence before rain.
