Aliya

chapter seven

THAT NIGHT, WHEN THE SUN fell into the border between the sea and the sky, when Maria had finally fallen asleep at the foot of my bed — as insisted by the rules of Ismal — I'd snuck out of my bedroom and ran.

The castle was big and the hallways were dim, but more than the fear of what could be lurking in the shadows and the fear of the penumbras of the little nooks and crannies of each alcove was the fear that I could hear burning in my ears, the adrenaline going inside my head,  the fear that, more so than being killed, I was being trapped.

And by Maria's words, it sounded like they planned on keeping me here forever.

I couldn't do forever. Forever was too long of a time to be spent here, in this fishbowl sort of a lifestyle.

Remembering this, I quickened my pace.

The servants must've been ordered to clean the stairs and floors at least a thousand times, and to oil the doors at least twice that amount, because as I ran, I couldn't hear a single creaky hinge or rat scuttering across the floor.

And for once, I was grateful to that.

In hindsight, perhaps I should've asked Maria first the ways to get around the palace. Perhaps I should've first figured out my way around the place before I'd attempted my escape, but in my mind, I was running out of time to live, much less to plan.

I didn't know how long I spent running around hallways, consistently walking on my tiptoes in hopes that nobody else would hear, but with every maid's cough, with every butler's sleeping snore, I felt my heart skip two beats.

By the time I'd escaped into the gardens, I felt like I'd aged at least twenty years.

When we first arrived at the Palace of the Sun, I'd been too starstruck by the way the sunlight glinted off of the walls to pay attention to anything else. But now, in the darkness of the night and the palace behind me, even with the underlying paranoia that someone could find out that I was trying to escape at any moment now, I couldn't help but stop.

My religion teacher used to like to tell stories, stories of old myths and legends, of Kings and Gods, of places none of us had ever seen before.

I remember she used to mention a Hanging Garden, a beautiful, mythical, unproven mystery of a place. A King had loved his Queen so much that he had given her the world, and when she'd asked for the Garden of Eden, he'd given her a place with every plant imaginable and all of them hung down from the sky.

At the time, she'd mentioned that nobody really knew where it was, because nobody had seen it.

Clearly, 'nobody' had never been to the gardens of the Palace of Persia.

Tall, twisting oak trees braided into the shape of a heart intertwined under the sky, just visible under the moonlight. Everywhere I looked, there were little flowers, flowers in every color imaginable and flowers I wish I had the knowledge to name, but didn't, that grew on the barks of trees and around benches and crept up the walls of the palace, vines that slithered underneath my feet but shyed away from the pavement, crickets the I could not see that croaked in time with the wind, just barely loud enough to hear, as if they themselves were afraid of waking up the rulers of Persia.