Chapter One

      1981, Baghdad, Iraq

      “Once upon a time, a long time ago, not very far away from here, there lived three witches,” my gidaty said, as she had so many times before. The story she told was an old and familiar one.

      The first time my grandmother told me the tale of the three harem slaves of Babylon, I’d replied, “I know this story already.”

      Her old eyes—not as old as they were now, of course, for I’d been only five years old then, and I was thirteen now—had widened at my innocent words. “You know the story, Amarrah? How, my little one?”

      “I was there.”

      Gidaty had been stunned, I could tell. “You were, were you?”

      I’d nodded. I remember how clearly I’d been able to see it all in my mind. The glittering city of Babylon and the luxurious harem quarters where I’d been a servant. Slave girl to the slave girls. “I was a palace slave before,” I’d told my increasingly astounded grandmother. “I worked in the kitchens. But the other servants were mean to me. I had to do all the nastiest jobs. But then one day Lilia, the king’s favorite harem slave, asked him to send me to serve her and the others in their quarters. And from then on, I was so much happier.”

      Gidaty had cupped my face and stared into my eyes. “I’ve not told you this story before, have I, child?”

      “No, Grandma. I knew them. Lilia and Magdalena and Indira. I told you, I was there.”

      She blinked and nodded. “Perhaps you were at that.”

      Later, as I grew older, I came to believe it had been my imagination, that I was just very good at storytelling even then. That belief had led me to want to be a writer when I grew up. Over time, I’d forgotten which parts of the story my gidaty had told me and which parts I had told her. They had all blended together into a single compelling tapestry. But to me, it was all fiction.

      But beloved fiction.

      I knew the tales of the three harem slave witches so well I could have told them to my grandmother, instead of the other way around. And on days when her illness was very bad, she asked me to. I never refused. But that night when I was thirteen, when her voice weakened and I held the water glass to her lips, she didn’t ask me to take over. She sipped and swallowed, then fell back against her pillows, closing her eyes so I wouldn’t see her pain.

      But I didn’t have to see it. I felt it.

      I took the glass away when she’d finished. “They were the most beautiful women in all of Babylon, and beloved by the king, but they were keeping dangerous secrets,” I said, picking up where she’d stopped, even though she hadn’t asked me to. “The practice of magic was the right of the high priest alone. For anyone else to cast and conjure was considered witchcraft, and it was forbidden. And so were their loves.

      “Indira had fallen secretly in love with a young priest of Marduk, the sun god. Very bad mojo, that. Magdalena loved the prince—the son of the very king she was bound to serve. That might have worked out all right, if things had been different. The king would have given her to his son had the prince but asked. But time ran out for them because of Lilia, who loved a soldier—the king’s most trusted, his First.”

      Gidaty held up a hand to stop me. “We have to skip to the end this time, Amarrah. I don’t have much time.”

      Frowning, I looked at the clock beside the bed, as if it would tell me something. It sat ticking softly beside the heavy black telephone. But in a heartbeat I understood. I was thirteen, after all. It wasn’t the ticking of the clock that had my grandmother rushing but the slowing, stuttering beats of her own heart.

      “Should I call for help?”

      “There’s