‘The Hidden City isn’t truly invisible, Gabriel. Most people are blind to what threatens their world. Life is easier thus.’
—The Sprite Queen, Desert Boy Book One
Qetara, Egypt—1814
‘For heaven’s sake, Lady Samantha, come down before you fall down.’
‘Oh, go away, Sir Stay-Away-from-the-Edge.’
‘Stop calling me that.’
‘Well, Mama says I mustn’t call you Edge any longer because now that I am eighteen it is no longer proper. But I refuse to call you Lord Edward Edgerton; that is even stuffier than you are.’
He burst into laughter. He didn’t often laugh freely, but it always surprised her how it transformed his face, softening the sharp-cut lines on either side of his mouth and between his overly straight brows. With his serious grey-green eyes and hair as dark as any of her Venetian cousins he’d always appeared so adult. Or perhaps it was his insistence on dressing so properly even in the heat of the Egyptian desert.
Next to him her brothers looked like heathens or corporeal manifestations of the gods etched on the temple walls where her mother’s cousin Huxley spent all his waking hours working with Edge’s uncle Poppy. Once those two were caught in the web of their historical weaving, everyone else faded into nothingness—more ghosts in a landscape of ghosts and far less interesting.
He stopped laughing and frowned even more awfully, as if he needed to compensate for his moment of levity.
‘Proper. You have no idea what that means.’
‘Yes, I do. It means doing nothing enjoyable at all.’
‘No, it means showing respect. And it means not climbing on the antiquities.’
‘If this sphinx survived two thousand years, it will survive me.’
‘It is not a sphinx but a ram and Poppy says it is likely at least three thousand years old based on references in...never mind. In any case it should not have to suffer the indignity of being climbed upon. And barefoot, too. One day you will step on a scorpion and that will be the end of it.’
‘You have my permission to dance a jig on my grave if it is, Lord Hedgehog.’
He ignored her latest variation on his name.
‘Don’t be a fool, Sam. Besides, I hate dancing. Why the...why are you up there anyway?’
‘Come see.’
She turned away and waited. He might be as dry as a mummy, but he had his uncle’s curiosity. She wondered if he realised he’d reverted to calling her Sam as he once had. Probably not.
It took five minutes. She heard the scrape of his boots and a muffled curse. Probably something like ‘drat’ or ‘bother’; despite being such good friends with Lucas and Chase, he never participated in their cursing contests. Since his uncle and aunt had brought him to Egypt when he was only six years old he spoke Arabic better than all of them, but he rarely indulged in the very colourful epithets Lucas and Chase mined from the locals, at least not in her hearing. In fact, she sometimes wondered why he and her brothers were so close.
She waited for him to say something unpleasant about her occupation, but though he cast a shadow over her sketchpad he said nothing. She twisted to look at him, but all she could see was a dark shape haloed by the sun.
‘Not bad. You’re improving.’
The temptation to give his legs a shove and send him tumbling off the sphinx...off the ram...was powerful, but she resisted. He had a point—she was now eighteen and perhaps it was time to resist such puerile urges. Still, she smiled at the image, taking some pleasure in cutting him down to size in her mind. When she answered, her voice was dignified.
‘Cousin Huxley believes I am very gifted. He says some of the Sinclairs possess artistic skills. Like my Aunt Celia.’
She spoke her aunt’s name defiantly, waiting for him to attack that as well. But no doubt the scandal of Lady Stanton’s elopement with a spy and their subsequent demise was too much for him to even consider because he merely sat beside her.
‘May I?’
‘Sit? You may. This is not my ram, after all.’
‘No, may I see your sketches?’
He took her sketchpad with all the care he gave to the shards and remains his uncle excavated. She tried not to squirm as he lingered over a sketch of a wall painting from the temple below the cliffs and one of a funerary urn bearing the head of Bastet, the feline god.
‘You’ve a good eye for detail. There is not one mistake here. Very strange.’
She gritted her teeth, but as he turned she saw the wavering at the corner of his mouth and relaxed a little. She could never tell when his peculiar sense of humour would surface. She’d forgotten that about him—under his granite shell there was another Edge, the one who was endlessly considerate of Poppy and Janet and her mother, and who she often suspected was laughing even when he was doing his very best to scold her.
‘Most amusing. You would not be smiling if you know how close you came to being shoved off on to your posterior.’
He frowned.
‘That is most definitely not a proper word in mixed company.’
‘Posterior? It is a perfectly innocuous word.’
‘The word might be innocuous, but its...what it alludes to...’
‘Your behind?’
‘Sam! Will you ever grow up?’
‘I am grown up. In a couple of months I shall make my debut in Venetian society, be crammed into a frilly dress and have no choice but to behave like a simpering simpleton. But I am not there yet and I see nothing wrong with speaking of something completely natural. You and Lucas and Chase did it often enough when in your cups—I distinctly remember you once discussing the attributes of a certain ghawazi dancer in rather off-putting detail.’
He groaned.
‘You are impossible.’
‘And you’re stiff-necked, stuffy and stodgy bundled together and tied with a neat little bow and dipped in vinegar.’
‘Not little. I take offence at that.’
She couldn’t stop her smile. Somehow he always managed to pull the rug of her annoyance out from under her.
‘No, not little. Is being a great big bore preferable to being a little one?’
‘As long as I am great at something.’