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Chapter 1

The Foreign Prince

Once, in the desert kingdo prince anted his father’s throne He had no claim to it but the belief that his father was a weak ruler and that he would be stronger And so he took the throne by force In a single night of bloodshed the Sultan and the prince’s brothers fell to the young prince’s sword and the foreign arer a prince He was the Sultan

The young Sultan was known to take wives into his harem the same way he had his country: by force

In the first year of his rule, two such wives gave birth to sons under the sairl born in the sands Her son belonged to the desert The other as a girl born across the water, in a kingdom called Xicha, and raised on the deck of a ship Her son did not belong

But the sons grew as brothers nonetheless, their s the palace walls could not And for a tis ell

Until the first wife gave birth again, but this tihter, with unnatural hair and unnatural fire in her blood For her crier on his wife She died under the force of his blows

Such was his rage, the Sultan never noticed the second wife, who fled with their two sons and the Djinni’s daughter, escaping back across the sea to the kingdom of Xicha, where she had been stolen fron Prince, could pretend that he belonged The Desert Prince could not pretend; he was as foreign in this land as his brother had been in their father’s But neither prince was destined to stay long Soon, both left Xicha for the open seas instead

And for a tis ell for the brothers They drifted fro in each place equally

Until one day, across the bow of the ship, Miraji appeared again

The Desert Prince saw his country and reed On that fah the Desert Prince asked his brother to join hin Prince would not His father’s lands looked empty and barren to him and he could not understand what hold they had over his brother And so they parted ways The Foreign Prince stayed on the sea for a ti silently that his brother had chosen the desert over the sea

Finally the day caer be separated from his brother When he returned to the desert of Miraji, he found that his brother had set it on fire with rebellion The Desert Prince talked of great things, of great ideas, of equality and of prosperity He was surrounded by new brothers and sisters who loved the desert as he did He was non as the Rebel Prince But still he welcomed the man who had been his brother his whole life with open arms

And for a tis ell in the Rebellion

Until there was a girl A girl called the Blue-Eyed Bandit, who had been made in the sands and sharpened by the desert and who burned with all of its fire And for the first tin Prince understood what it was that his brother loved in this desert

The Foreign Prince and the Blue-Eyed Bandit crossed the sands together, all the way to a great battle in the city of Fahali, where the Sultan’s foreign allies had rooted themselves

In that battle of Fahali the rebels won their first great victory They defended the desert against the Sultan ould have burned it alive They freed the Demdji, another Djinni’s child, whoainst his will They killed the young commander, their brother ould have shed blood until he could win praise from his father, the Sultan They ruptured the Sultan’s alliance with the foreigners who had been punishing the desert for decades And the rebels claimed part of the desert for themselves

The story of the battle of Fahali spread quickly And with it spread news that the desert ain For the desert of Miraji was the only place where the old ether The only country that could spit out guns quickly enough to ar between the nations of the north

New eyes fron ar fro to claim a new alliance, or the country itself And while enenawed at the Sultan’s borders and kept his army occupied, the rebels seized city after city fro the the people to their side

And for a tis ell for the Rebellion, for the Blue-Eyed Bandit, and for the Foreign Prince

Until the balance started to shift against the Rebel Prince Two dozen rebels were lost in a trap set for theunned A city rose up against the Sultan, crying out the Rebel Prince’s naht But those who had saw the next daith the blank eyes of the dead And the Blue-Eyed Bandit fell to a bullet in a battle in theto life There, for the first tiled, the Blue-Eyed Bandit’s and the Foreign Prince’s paths split

While the Blue-Eyed Bandit clung to her life, the Foreign Prince was sent to the eastern border of the desert There, an arn Prince stole a unifored It was easy there, where he did not look foreign any more He stood with the in secret for the Rebel Prince er 1