Authors: Jasinda Wilder
He kneels beside me, scoops me up and sits cross-legged with me in his arms. “You’re my breath,” he whispers.
I didn’t know he’d heard that. Maybe he didn’t, maybe he came to that understanding on his own. I don’t know. All I know is his arms are around me, and I feel the tender, impassioned touch of his lips on mine.
“I love you, Leila,” he says, and I know he heard me whisper those same words to him just before he died.
No one speaks, no one moves. I have no strength left. All I can do is lie limp in Carson’s arms as he clutches me desperately, kissing my face and my neck and my forehead and my temple.
A crackling, rasping voice breaks the silence. “There must be a Sealing.” It’s the officiant, insistent and hunched. “The magic demands a Sealing. The groom is absent, so the burden must be passed.” He looks to Carson, and my heart clenches as I realize what he’s saying.
There
has
to be a marriage. The nature of the Sealed marriage contract is such that the terms must be fulfilled today, or the penalty for breaching it will occur at midnight.
There has to be a marriage.
Everyone is looking to me, to Carson, expectant. Panic fills me. It’s too soon. I love him, and we’ve both saved each other, but…marriage? An ifrit marriage, especially a Sealed one like this, it’s not merely a legal agreement, it’s permanent, magically binding.
My eyes find Carson, and I expect to see equal panic in his eyes as he realizes what the officiant is saying.
Instead, I see…acceptance. Love. Knowledge. He knew this would happen. I look at Father, who is nodding, smiling, and at Mother, who seems confused but somehow relieved.
My strength is returning, and I sit up. “You…knew?” I search his eyes; feel his hands tangle in my hair and in my fingers. “This was the plan all along? Banish Hassan and marry me?”
Carson nods. “The contract must be fulfilled. There has to be a Sealing.” He smiles, kisses me. “But if we’re going to do this, we should do it right, shouldn’t we?” His eyes twinkle and shine as he stands up with me still in his arms, lifting me effortlessly. He kisses me again and then sets me on my feet. Carson looks at me, then at the crowd gathered around us, mainly my clan now that Aida has vanished with hers.
He lowers himself to a knee, takes my hands in his. My heart throbs in my chest as I realize what he’s doing.
“Leila Najafi…I don’t have a ring, and I’m not an ifrit, but…” He hesitates, licks his lips, takes a deep breath and continues. “Will you marry me?”
I thought I’d wept all my tears, but I was wrong. I laugh and sob and hiccup, nodding, lift him up to his feet and throw my arms around him.
“Are you sure?” I ask him, whispering in his ear. I pull back and look at him, search his eyes for doubt or hesitation. I see none. “This isn’t…”
“I know,” he interrupts me. “Your dad explained it. I know what it means. I love you, and I know it’s crazy, but…this is right. Everything between us, it all happened so quickly, but it’s just….perfect and natural and right. I can’t remember what my life was like before you, and I can’t picture my life without you.”
Carson takes my face in his hands, kisses me with all the passion he has, and I feel my soul rise up to meet his, feel the essence of all I am, natural, mortal, magical, elemental, all tangling about him. When I healed him, when I forced his lungs to breathe, I left a portion of myself in him. When we made love back in Detroit—what feels like weeks ago but was only days—I know part of my essence was imbued in him then. I can feel him inside me, in my heart and my mind, and I can feel a new kind of power surging through him.
I look closely at him, and I see his eyes glowing slightly. It is the same white that mine become, the same as Father’s and Mother’s. He’s absorbed some of my nature, and now he is changed. He knows it, too, but he’s smiling and laughing as he feels the wind skirling around us and blowing through us, teasing and tangling and twining with us both.
I don’t know how we got here, but we’re standing in front of the officiant, the arch rising above us, the flowers somehow changed from lilies to irises, a few violets here and there now, and I know that’s my mother’s touch, lending color, lending hints of herself to it all. I look around us, and see the same touch everywhere now, hints of purple touching everything. Mother herself stands a few feet away, smiling for once, a genuine, loving smile, and Father too, his arm wrapped around her waist in a rare gesture of affection.
I can see the strangeness of it all in their faces, but they’re happy enough that we’ve all escaped the specter of forced alliance to the al-Jabiri clan. I push those thoughts away, as well as the knowledge that we’ve started a war on several fronts, most likely.
I turn back to Carson, who hasn’t taken his eyes off me. My dress is smudged and filthy from kneeling in the ash next to Carson, who is clad in only a pair of Levi’s and boots. All of the al-Jabiri clan left hurriedly at some point and now there is just my family, my clan, left. They resume their seats for the ceremony. The bride’s side is full of happy friends and relatives; the groom’s side is empty. That’s apropos, I realize. Carson has no one. Nadira is now awake again and smiling but still in elemental form, a woman-shaped figure carved from living liquid.
She recognizes the situation and takes an empty seat on the groom’s side. “I’ll fill in for your family,” she says. Carson nods, and I can tell the knowledge that he has no family to attend his wedding, abrupt or not, is still painful.
The officiant looks around at everyone, sees that we all seem to be ready.
“Who offers the bride in marriage?” he asks, voice reedy and weak and heavily accented.
“We do,” Father and Mother say together.
“Who stands in witness for the husband?”
Nadira rises and comes up to the dais. “I do,” she says.
“Very well,” the officiant intones. “Let the bride be offered and the husband witnessed.”
Mother and Father speak in unison: “We offer this bride, pure and willing, into the Seal of Wedlock.”
Carson’s brow furrows in confusion; he’d expected the typical American church ceremony, and this is definitely not that. I squeeze his hands and smile at him.
Nadira recites her part flawlessly: “I stand in witness for this husband, bearing testimony to the purity of his troth.”
The officiant nods, waves a purple-veined hand and swirls golden particles—the essence of magic—that eddy around me and Carson and my parents and Nadira, sinking into all of us, igniting the magic of the Sealing. Mother, Father, and Nadira take their seats, and now it’s only Carson and me standing face to face. I can feel the magic of the Sealing swirling and coiling around us, pushing through us, preparing to bind us.
“The husband will now repeat my words,” the officiant commands. He speaks the words of Sealing, echoed by Carson. “‘In the sight of these witnesses I pledge my troth of my own free will. I offer my life from this day until the ending of time, and I offer it freely in the spirit of love and loyalty. I seal myself, heart and mind and body and soul to my bride for all of time. May the thread of my life be cut if my pledge be broken in word or deed or thought.’”
Carson’s voice is strong and confident as he repeats the words. I can hear the promise in his voice as he understands what it is he’s agreeing to, and I know he’s offering himself to me wholeheartedly. When the last word is spoken, the letters rise up from the pages of the officiant’s book, glowing cursive script floating with semi-sentient purpose to surround Carson in a skein of words, in a train of binding, burrowing into his skin, into his temples and his chest, inked tangibly upon his skin as the magic enters Carson and tangles with the essence of his being, residing there and waiting for the Seal to be completed.
The officiant reads the words again, and I repeat them, but my voice is not nearly so strong. It cracks and I find myself fighting back tears yet again, and I swear to myself in the back of my mind that I won’t cry again for at least a year. This time, however, I don’t mind. The words of Sealing are woven of magic in their very essence: when you speak them, their meaning is driven into you word by word, phrase by phrase. You speak them and you understand the permanence of marriage. In our culture, among ifrits and djinn, marriage is forever; the words of Sealing make sure of that. What isn’t guaranteed to last forever is the happiness and love of the marriage.
When I speak the final word, the same sweet strain of magic wreathes around me, spreading through me and into me, and then there is a soft susurrus echoing within me and within Carson; I know he hears it, I know he feels it, for his eyes widen and his hands tighten on mine. The sound is the breath of magic becoming real, becoming a physical tangible psychic connection between us. The wind blows, and we are caught up, we fade and twist and twine and tangle into a torrent of joined currents of earth-breath, two souls reaching together into the farthest spaces of the sky; there is naught but we two, there is only our merged sense of
I
, only one self coruscating and scintillating in the bright hot sun far above the commonality of human and ifrit and djinni. This is beyond wedlock, beyond union, beyond marriage, this a new and rare kind of Sealing, a perfect and inimitable morphing of souls caused by magic and by a prior meshing of essences in the vulnerability of a love-made sexual union and in the presence of my unique magic now residing in the structure of his very cells.
He is breath, and I am wind; he is motion and I am air.
I know not for how long we glint and glide in the wide sky, but at long last, after a mere moment or an echoing eternity, a day or an hour, we return to the earth and split and regain corporeality. The wedding has moved inside, where the clan smiles and drinks and celebrates. They are all happy, relieved, if a bit puzzled as to what just happened and what it means for the future of the clan. A human, a police officer, no less, the heir to the patriarchy? Unheard of. Impossible. Yet, there it is, an unavoidable fact.
Before we go in to join them, we stand with arms wrapped around each other, lips touching, our breathing synched.
I’ve heard of what is possible in the purest of Sealed Unions:
I love you, Carson Hale.
The words are thought, not spoken.
He starts and gasps, curses in surprise. I see the dawning of understanding filter through him, and he smiles slowly.
I love you back, Leila Hale
, he replies in the same manner.
I hadn’t even thought of taking his name, but hearing it from him, it sounds perfect, it sounds right. He said it himself, and I know he’s right: I cannot imagine a moment in my life that hasn’t contained him. All the years before the moment he sat down on the stool in my bar seem as distant and half-remembered as a dream, and as easily forgotten.
Now, he is my reality.
THE END
Continue Reading for a sneak peek of
Djinn & Juice
By
Jasinda Wilder
Nadira
Alexandria, Egypt; June 1882
Seagulls caw and wheel in ever-widening circles above the sapphirine surface of the Mediterranean. Cargo ships creak and bump at anchor, the salt spray drifting in tangy mists in the constant breeze, the smell of fish and unwashed bodies sits heavy in the air. People of all nations bustle in a constant crush as far as the eye can see, hawking wares, conducting business, eating in the myriad cafes, puffing on hookahs in jabbering groups, cursing and jostling and shouting in a dozen languages. There are kaffiyehs and hijabs, long white robes and black ones, western-style fedoras and bowlers, English soldiers in brilliant red and white uniforms, business suits, and khaki clothes favored by the influx of explorers in the city. There are men with red hair and blond and black, men with long thick beards and those who are clean-shaven, men with swarthy skin and fair. Arabic and Urdu and English and Dutch and French and Bedouin and German and Spanish rise to mix in a cacophonous babble.
I take it all in as I walk by my father’s side. I tug at the veil across my nose and mouth, wishing I could simply take it off. I don’t often leave Father’s house, so I seldom wear the full head covering and veil. Today, however, Father has finally acceded to my constant badgering and has allowed me to go with him to his business meeting. Sometimes I just want to get out of the house, away from the stifling silence and endless hours with my tutors.
We push through the crowd to a small café tucked away from the crush of people, the entrance hidden in a narrow alley. The interior is dimly lit, with low ceilings, and the hookah smoke hangs in thick, fragrant clouds. My father and I are met by the proprietor, a short, older man with a long beard hanging over a round belly.
“Come, come,” the owner says in florid, formal Arabic. “I have your table ready, your Excellency. All is waiting for you. Your guests are here, and I have taken the liberty of serving them. I hope all is to your satisfaction, Excellency. Is there anything you wish, any further instructions? I can have anything you wish brought to you, immediately, at no extra charge of course—”
“Enough,” Father murmurs. “Leave us.”
The proprietor bows as he backs away. “Yes, Excellency, as you wish. If you desire anything, you have only to raise your hand. I am at your service, ready and waiting to attend to your pleasures.”
Father waits until the effusive proprietor vanishes before addressing his guests. Both are Englishmen, one older with graying brown hair and a neatly trimmed full beard; the other is younger, perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three, clean-shaven with platinum blond hair.
I sit beside Father, trying to keep my eyes demurely cast down as is expected of me, but I don’t quite succeed. I have met a few of Father’s European business associates before, but none of them have ever been so young and handsome as this one with the hair so blond as to be almost white. I stare at the rough wood grain of the tabletop, but my gaze keeps wandering back up to the young man’s finely-chiseled features, intelligent blue eyes, and broad shoulders.