The Theft of Sunlight, Intisar Khanani [best book club books for discussion txt] 📗

honey cakes, blissfully unaware of our worry. But Ani’s already been asking about her all over town; someone would have said if they’d seen her.

“Hurry,” I say, walking as fast as my uneven gait can take me. Niya keeps pace easily. We call out to the people we see, all of them familiar, and by the time we’ve arrived at the blacksmith’s home, right beside the smithy, there are a dozen more people out looking for Seri. All the children have been sent home, though.

“Rae?” Ani’s mother, Shimai, calls out to us as we hurry to her. She stands with two other women just outside her house, one of them holding a bread basket. It’s a normal scene. Too normal. It hadn’t occurred to me until this moment that Ani’s mother wouldn’t know about Seri’s disappearance. But then she says, sharply, “Seri’s not at my mother’s, is she?”

I shake my head. “She never went there. Do you know where she could be? Ani and my family are searching the market, and we’ve asked all along the way here. No one’s seen her in the last hour or so.”

Beneath the brown of her skin, Shimai’s face pales, her lips bloodless. “She has to be here.”

“We should mount a proper search,” one of her friends says. “Before it gets any later. There’s no time to lose.”

“I’ll check her friends’ houses,” the other says. “Shimai, where should I—?”

Shimai gives herself a shake and starts forward with a jerk, her expression shifting from panic to determination. She rattles off a short list of friends’ names for her friend to check, directs the other to inform her husband, who is absent from the smithy today of all days, and sets off down the street toward the market to rally a proper search. As she hurries past, she says, “Rae, you get your sister somewhere safe. Both of your sisters, just in case. They can stay in my house, if needed.”

“Yes, auntie,” I say, thankful for the excuse to send Niya into the house.

I stand in the doorway, watching Shimai as she races down the street, her legs flashing beneath her skirts. Behind me, Niya runs upstairs. This is why Mama sent us here: if we can recover a hair or two, or possibly even a ribbon or scrap of cloth that Seri has worn, then Niya might be able to use it to track her.

“Got it,” Niya calls from upstairs, and I sag against the doorframe with relief. “Took a hair from her comb.”

“Good. What else do you need?”

“Water. I’ve got everything else.”

There’s the kitchen, which has the decided advantage of keeping us hidden from sight. “Will a bowl do?”

Niya nods. “Just fine.”

“This way.” I lead the way through a house I know as well as my own. The adobe walls are smooth and cool, the kitchen shutters pushed open to light the room with its fire grate to one side and its low worktable to the other. I fill a bowl with water from a pitcher while Niya hurries outside, returning a moment later with a leaf in her hand. She pulls the door shut behind her.

I set the bowl before her as she drops onto a cushion before the table. “Do you know how to do it?”

She shrugs, delving into her bag. “I’ve never tried tracking before, but I know how to make a compass. If I can get the compass to point toward her, rather than north, then we’ll have a direction.”

“Brilliant.” I sometimes wonder if Niya wishes our parents hadn’t hidden her. Wishes she could have learned these things properly instead of fighting her way to each new success, all in secret.

“Not my idea,” she mutters. “Heard about it once. It has to do with flow.”

I nod and close the connecting door to the kitchen, as well as the shutters. I light a lamp to take the place of the sunlight. When I turn back, Niya has set a leaf on the water, and on top of that, her prized silver needle. She snips a small length of the hair she took from Ani and Seri’s room and sets it beside the needle.

There are two ways mages have for working with the latent magic around us—what is often referred to as the current. One can work with the flow of magic, directing it into new uses and directions, or one can work with the patterns that exist already, replicating those with slight shifts to achieve one’s aim. Flow tends to be the preferred method taught in Menaiya, because, quite simply, it is easier to master. Niya discovered a long time ago that a fever might be understood as a flow of heat and healing through the body, which her magic could mimic and more efficiently complete without harming the body.

Now she holds one hand over the leaf with its double burden, her head bent so low I can barely see past it. If she starts with the attraction of a magnetized needle toward the North Pole and redirects its flow—from the pole to Seri—we’ll have a way to focus our search.

I wait, listening for the sound of someone entering the house. Anything to indicate I need to hide what Niya’s doing. I can hear a woman calling to her children somewhere in the distance, and the general sounds of the town: a wagon creaking its way down the road, chickens clucking in someone’s backyard, and, faintly, people calling Seri’s name.

I swallow and glance back at Niya.

She looks up. “It’s not working. I don’t know if it’s me or . . .”

“Here,” I say, catching the end of one of my braids. “Try my hair. See if that works.”

Niya takes the bit of hair I snap off and bends over her bowl again. I grip my skirt with my fists and hope, hope that it’s Niya’s magic that isn’t working, and not . . . not that Seri is truly beyond our reach.

“It’s working,” Niya says, her voice flat. I look down to see the leaf has turned,