The words caught at her and she raised despairing eyes to the stranger.
‘How could I have forgotten my own mother’s name? How could I not have remembered? Yet when you said it I saw her in my mind’s eye.’
She closed her eyes, more to catch wayward tears than to keep the image there.
Then cool fingers touched hers, easing them just slightly from the locket. She felt it lifted from where it lay against her skin, heard his small gasp of surprise.
‘You were burned?’
‘The car caught fire.’
‘And the locket burnt your skin—some protection!’
‘No, I survived!’ Lila reminded him, angered by his closeness—his intrusion into her life. ‘It did protect me.’
But now he’d grasped her fingers, turning them to see the faint scars at the tips there as well.
‘You kept hold of it?’
The words were barely spoken, more a murmur to himself, then he squeezed her fingers and released them, stepped back, apologising again for the inconvenience, adding, ‘I had rooms arranged for you at the hospital, a small serviced apartment close to a restaurant on the ground floor, but I think for now you should stay at the palace. You will be safe there, and maybe you can help us solve an old mystery.’
‘Palace?’ Lila whispered. ‘No, I’ll be very happy in an apartment at the hospital. The sooner I get settled the sooner I can make it a home. I’m sorry, I have no idea what’s going on but whatever it is I don’t like it, not one little bit.’
He smiled at her then, the exhausted stranger with the even stranger ways.
‘Perhaps you are home, Nalini’s daughter, perhaps you are home.’
* * *
Tariq knew he was staring. Not openly, he hoped, but darting glances at the young woman who was so like the one he’d loved as a child.
He’d been eight, and Nalini had been beautiful, brought into the household because she was Second Mother’s sister, to be company for her, someone familiar.
But very quickly she’d become everyone’s favourite. Back then she’d been like the Pied Piper from the old European fairy tale and all the children in the palace had followed where she led, laughing with her, playing silly games, being children, really, in a place that had, until then, been rather staid and stolid.
Tariq was pouring coffee as the memories flashed past, handing a cup to their guest, explaining they would be leaving as soon as her luggage had been collected.
She took the cup he offered her and looked up into his face, her almond-shaped brown eyes meeting his, anger flickering in them now.
‘And if I don’t want to live in the palace?’ she asked, steel in her voice as if the tiredness of the long journey and the stresses of her arrival had been put aside and she was ready to fight.
‘It need only be temporary but if you are Nalini’s daughter then you are family and as family you must stay in our home.’
How could he tell her that things had not gone well for the family since Nalini’s—and the locket’s—departure and things were getting worse. He was a modern man, yet it seemed imperative that the locket return to the palace where its power might reignite hope and harmony.
Not that she could read his thoughts, for she was still fighting him about his decision.
‘Because I’m family? Or because you think my mother stole the locket?’ she challenged, setting the tiny cup back on the table. ‘What makes you think it was her? For all you know she could have seen it somewhere and bought it! Maybe she was from Karuba—was the same Nalini you knew—and it reminded her of her home. But stealing from a palace—how could anyone do that?’
Al’ama, she was beautiful, sitting there with anger sparking in her eyes! The simple cream tunic and flowing trousers—loose clothing the hospital advised visiting staff to wear—emphasised rather than hid a shapely body, the colour enhancing the classic purity of her features and lending warmth to the honey-coloured skin.
Not that he could afford to be distracted...
‘Nalini lived at the palace because she was family, as you will, if you are family,’ he said firmly, as the door opened and a nod from the man beyond it told him they were ready to leave. ‘Come, there are more comfortable places where we can discuss this, and probably a better time. You must be weary after your journey, and should rest. Later, we will talk.’
He put out his hand to help her up from the low seat, but she refused it, standing up herself, very straight—defiant...
Tariq cursed himself. He’d handled this badly from the beginning. A long night searching bone-marrow donor registers had led to nothing, then the call from the airport, when what he’d really needed was a few hours’ sleep.
So, tired as he was, seeing the woman—a woman called Halliday who looked so like Nalini—had thrown him completely. He’d been thrust into the past and a time of tension, bitterness and even hatred in the palace.
Added to which, she was wearing the Ta’wiz, the most sacred of the objects that had gone missing at the time of Nalini’s disappearance. Customs and immigration officials had been on the lookout for all the jewellery for decades but the Ta’-wiz was the one they all knew best, for the hollowed-out crystal with the elaborate gold-and-silver casing around it was believed to carry the spirit of the people’s ancestor.
The immigration officer would not have needed to look closely at it, for he would have felt its power, as Tariq had the moment he’d entered the room, for this simple piece of jewellery was believed to have spiritual qualities—and the strongest of these was protection.
He waved her towards the door, and followed her, looming over her slight form like an evil jinn.
Lila, her name was Lila, he remembered, and right now he wanted to go back in time, to have been at the airport when the plane landed, not finishing a despairing computer search for the magic formula that might save his brother.
He could have greeted her properly, taken her to the hospital, maybe not even noticed the locket around her neck.
The scars on her fingertips told him she’d clung to it as her mother—as both her parents—had died in a flaming inferno. Apart from it being a last gift from her mother, it had protected her, of course she didn’t want to take it off.
Neither could he take it from her...
But perhaps with it safely back in the palace—even in the country—some of the uncertainties and ill-fortune of the last decades would diminish and peace could be restored.
He shook away such thoughts. His country had grown from a collection of nomadic villages to a world presence in a matter of decades and his concern was that it had happened too quickly for many people to adjust and the happiness everyone had expected to come with wealth had somehow eluded them.
* * *
Swept along in this surreal dream, Lila followed the man who had first taken her to the small room down more corridors and finally out onto a covered parking area.
A driver in striped trousers and a long striped tunic leapt from the only car parked there, a huge black vehicle, to open the back door, the tail of his turban dropping forward over his shoulder as he bowed towards her.
Uncertainty made Lila look back, but the large man—her new boss—was right behind her, sober-faced but nodding as if her getting into the car was the right thing to do.
Not that she had a choice unless she decided to run straight out into the blinding sunlight and just keep running.
To where?
Home and family, and the only safety she knew, were all a long way off. Besides, she’d come here to find out