Sweet Revenge

lacquered Chinese box. A puzzle box with a delightfully complex pattern of sliding doors and springs. In a matter of days, Adrianne would nest The Sun and the Moon in thesecret drawer and ship it, as she would ship the vases and platters, home.
    The brazen and potentially dangerous plan of smuggling the necklace out on her person could be rejected. Abdu, through his own pride, had given her the perfect route to revenge.
    She saw him only once more before her wedding day, and then it was she who was obliged to approach him. Written permission from a male relation was still necessary for a woman’s outing, princess or not.
    Adrianne stood, hands folded at the ends of her long sleeves. She wore only the diamond Philip had given her, and the earrings which had been a gift from Celeste. The amethyst was already put away. It would be liquidated for the plumbing in the clinic.
    “Thank you for seeing me.”
    Her father’s offices were a symphony of royal red and blue. A sword with a jeweled hilt hung on the wall at his back. He sat behind an ebony desk with his ringed fingers drumming impatiently on the surface.
    “I have only a short time to give you. You should be preparing for tomorrow.”
    The pride she’d inherited from him flared. The skill she’d inherited from her mother banked it so that her voice was quiet. “Everything’s ready.”
    “Then your time should be spent contemplating marriage and your duties.”
    Before she spoke, she forced her hands to relax. “I’ve thought of little else. I must thank you for arranging everything.” They both knew that the cost of a daughter’s wedding was another way a man was judged.
    “Is that all?”
    “I’ve also come to ask your permission to take Yasmin and my other sisters to the beach for a few hours today. I’ve had very little time to get to know them.”
    “The time was there; you chose to live it elsewhere.”
    “They are still my sisters.”
    “They are women of Jaquir, daughters of Allah; you are not and have never been.”
    Keeping her head lowered and her voice quiet was oneof the most difficult things she’d ever done. “Neither you nor I can deny blood, however much we might wish to.”
    “I can deny my daughters the corruption of your influence.” He spread his hands on the desk. “Tomorrow you will be married in a ceremony as is fitting your rank. Then you will leave Jaquir and I will no longer think of you.
Inshallah.
To me you have been dead since you left Jaquir. There is no need to deny what doesn’t exist.”
    She stepped forward not caring whether she was struck for it, or worse. “There will come a time,” she said softly, “when you will think of me. I swear it.”
    That night, alone in her room, she didn’t dream. But she wept.
    The prayer call woke her on her wedding day. Adrianne pushed the windows open, welcoming the heat and the light. This day would be the longest and perhaps the most difficult of her life. She had only a little time before women and servants would invade her privacy and begin the ordeal of dressing her.
    Letting her mind go blank, she filled the huge sunken tub with hot water and laced it with bath oil.
    If the wedding were real, real in her heart, would there be excitement, joy, anxiety? All she felt now was the dull throb of grief for what couldn’t be. The ceremony would be a lie, as the promises made in such ceremonies from one end of the world to another were so often lies.
    What was marriage but bondage for a woman? She took a man’s name and forfeited her own, and with it her rights to be other than a wife. His will, his desires, his honor, never hers.
    In Jaquir it was called
sharaf
, the personal honor of men. Laws were built around it, traditions grew from it. If it was lost, it could never be recovered. So women of the family were guarded fanatically—or their chastity was, for a man was responsible for his daughter’s behavior as long as she lived. In place of freedom they were given servants, an absence of physical labor, and empty lives. This gilt-edged slavery went on and on as women allowed themselves to be sold into marriage, just as she, for the price of revenge, was allowing herself to be.
    But what her father had said had been true. She wasn’t a woman of Jaquir, and Philip had no bedouin blood. It was all pretense, all masquerade. On this, the most important day of her life, the day she had waited for since childhood, she had to remember that. She might have had the blood