Free The Fire Wish by Amber Lough

but it matters to me. I can’t walk in looking better than a princess,” she said. Then she grinned. “Unless you want me to marry the prince and have you be the constant companion.”
    “Would you?” I asked, jerking my hair from her fingers.
    She rapped my head lightly with the brush. “Of course not, silly. Besides, Hashim knows what you look like.”
    “I think I’m going to throw up,” I said, resigning myself to her overly elaborate hair design.
    At the end of an hour, I had the hair of a princess about to be wed. Then she took out her narrow henna box and painted the soles of my feet and then my palms. She drew diamonds and curlicued flowers across the lines, dipping her brush into the henna pot over and over. The brush tickled and tugged my skin, leaving behind a layer of black goo.
    I groaned, pretending not to notice that what she’d done was beautiful. “So I have a few hours left. Then we’ll be out of this cage and in another.”
    Rahela sighed. “The palace won’t be a cage. And at any rate, it won’t be as small as this place.” She stole a glance at the door. We’d leave this cabin and never see it again. “There.” She wiped the brush on a bit of cloth and closed the henna pot.
    I flapped my hands in the air. As long as the henna was wet, I couldn’t touch anything. She reached for my feet and scraped away the dried henna there, revealing swirling flowers coiling around my toes, triangles and pearls on the bottoms of my feet, and bell-shaped flowers curling up my ankle. All of it was red.
    It would fade, but by then I’d be a married woman with weeks of experience. I shivered. I didn’t want to think about it. I went to my usual spot by the window. Outside, the sun was straight above, so that the guard had no shadow and the water was blinding.
    “I’m sure it’s dry now,” Rahela said behind me. I nodded and turned toward her, but just as I did, something happened. The hairs on my arms rose and a sudden rush of cold swept across me, followed by a wave of heat. I turned back to the window.
    A girl was looking through it. I gasped, and in a blink, she was gone.
    On instinct, I reached through the window and grabbed at the air. Something caught in my fingers. Hair. She hadn’t gone. I yanked at it and heard a muffled cry.
    She was a jinni. A jinni was right here. In my hands. Everything I’d been told about jinn rushed through my mind—invisibility, bejeweled hair, wishes—and when she tried to pull away, I thrust my other hand through the window and touched what had to be her face.
    “Got you!”
    The jinni gasped, and I felt her shudder. She fell apart and came in through the window like a wave of sand. Then, as quickly as she’d turned to sand, she came together again and fell into me, knocking us both onto the floor. Then her hands pushed at me and she backed up. I reached forward before she could flee, and grabbed her wrist.
    She wore a pale gown embroidered in silver stripes, and her hair shimmered with jewels. Her eyes were wide and dark as agazelle’s. And just as nervous. But the strangest thing—even stranger than finding a jinni at my window—was that her face was like my own.
    “Zayele!” Rahela shrieked. She backed up in the corner of the cabin, and her nostrils flared.
    “She’s a jinni,” I said.
    The jinni froze. “Let me go,” she whispered.
    “Why do you look like me?” I asked, squeezing her wrist. I was not going to let go.
    “Please, let me go.”
    There had to be a reason a jinni showed up here, right before I reached Baghdad. It couldn’t be coincidence. “Grant me a wish.”
    She tried to pull away, shaking her head. “Please, don’t ask that—”
    “But those are the rules, aren’t they? I know we’re at war, but before all that, jinn granted wishes. All we had to do was catch one.”
    “Don’t, Zayele. Let her go.”
    “I need this wish, Rahela,” I said. I gritted my teeth. I had almost given up on escape, but the perfect solution