Enemies and Lovers

The Handler

She didn’t know if she could’ve gone back to the Handler’s place. They had wanted her dead, and even if she had succeeded in the assignment, she knew it wouldn’t be long before they killed her themselves.

At the Academy, she wasn’t the best fighter by any standard. She had been enrolled there, simply because her mother was a great lover of weapons art, and her best friend Sam was going. What the Academy couldn’t teach her, life did.

When she made her first kill, she didn’t know what she had done. Her teacher might have been disappointed by the bad technique of her punch, of the terrible way in which she had stabbed the man multiple times. Layla had found her with a knife in her hand, crouching, weeping on the floor. Layla had softly asked her if she would be willing to kill again. She had simply nodded.

She knew she had no prospects, no family here, her world had changed, and she would have to too.

The realization made her feel as through her heart had hardened up inside her.

Most of the women who worked for the Handler had poison as their weapon. A beautiful woman who knew how to fight was a gold mine, the Handler had said. The fact that she was an amateur was irrelevant. She extracted information for him, and when he wanted, she murdered for him. He wanted the deaths to be theatric. Layla said that Sarah was his new toy. He would ask Layla to dress her up. Dresses of fine silks, perfumes, her long wavy hair, pinned by a brooch, her lips smeared in dark red. After she came back from the assignment, he would ask her to give her all the details, how she had seduced the target, and exactly how the life had gone out of him as he received a stab in place of a kiss.

Layla often said that if she had known how things would’ve turned out, she would’ve never gifted Sarah to the Handler.

Sarah preferred killing in a quiet way, often disguised as a man, silently finishing the task. Each kill made her feel even more terrible. She had become the person people back home watched crime documentaries about.

She climbed through the roof and dropped into Layla’s room. Silently she walked to Layla’s bed and shook her awake, pressing down a hand on her mouth.

“It’s me,” she whispered.

“Sarah, Gods, what is the matter, what happened with the prince”

Layla had hated the mission the moment she heard it, even going so far as to tell the Handler that she refused to dress Sarah.

Sarah lifted her fingers to her wound.

Layla yelped and leaped into action. Muttering curses as she washed and dressed the wound, applying herbs Sarah had no knowledge of. She remembered the first aid kit her mother always kept in the car, and how Sarah would fuss over a simple paper cut and apply a band aid to it. Now she barely felt the wish to bandage up her bleeding stomach.

“He’s dead” Sarah said, lying on Layla’s bed. Her hands still trembled at the thought of the way she had pushed the prince away before running. She was a monster.

“What a shame, the king is a good man, who knows who we’ll get next”

“What do you mean?”

“The king has no other sons, the throne is vulnerable, the news will spread, especially after the prince fails to show up at the festival tomorrow.”

The Blood Moon festival was the most sacred festival of the land. The kingdom celebrated the defeat of the demon king, the defeat of magic. People celebrated the freedom that the land got after they were no longer controlled by the wielders of magic.

Sarah had wondered why people would celebrate the end of magic, and what kind of freedom they meant. But she guessed that if you were low enough in the chain of society, true freedom would always elude you.

“You must miss your family,” Layla said, softly. She was the only person Sarah had tried to explain her situation to.

Sarah nodded. Tears stinging her eyes. Would they recognize her now, the seductress, the assassin?

Layla had found Sarah starving, wearing clothes that did not belong, and talking of places Layla had never heard of, a bloodied knife clutched in her hand. Sarah had tried to explain, in her half-delirious state, of how she had stumbled into a world she did not understand. How she thought the trader was a nice man. How she was at one minute on a school trip to an ancient fort, and the next she was standing in front of a huge gate of a walled-up medieval town. She had been picked up by a trader, who had said he would offer her a job at his house. She had claimed she was a foreigner after they refused to answer her questions about the directions to her class tour group. She didn’t know what she was doing, only the fact that she had found herself transported through time and space was clear. She wondered if she were smarter, she might have turned out to be something other than an assassin.

Layla didn’t ask Sarah any questions after that, and Sarah had been too afraid to speak of anything. Sarah had spent the first few months confused, wrapped up in guilt over the increasing body count. She hoped the whole thing was a dream, because it felt like one. Some days she would wake up and she would think she was lying in her bed back home, with her mother making breakfast downstairs and the school bus due soon.

But Sarah and Layla grew close over their shared disgust of the Handler. They spent hours talking, with Layla telling Sarah about the kingdom - little pieces of history and folklore and town gossip; and Sarah would tell Layla of life back home. Of her mother and father and sister and friends. Of the leaders that were elected by everyone and the situation that still remained bad. Layla had been unimpressed by the television, but she had relished over the idea of a phone. Sarah spoke of the after school Academy where she learnt boxing and weaponry, and how she was terrible at throwing punches and how her teacher had said she would never make a good fighter.

They would sometimes compare little details, like the fruits and the gas stoves, and argue. Sometimes Sarah felt as though she would forget the little details of her home and every time she struggled to describe her school or her room to Layla, she would burst out crying. None of them tried to analyze the way in which Sarah had simply appeared. And the means of escape, of going back home, were simply things Sara thought of before she went to sleep.

She had tried going back to the gate and had even spent a whole night there, but nothing happened. She felt trapped. She knew she was trapped. With every fading memory, with every new kill, she no longer recognized herself.

Layla placed her hand on Sarah’s forehead, humming a lullaby, and Sarah fell asleep, hoping to dream of her family.

**

The stickiness of the shadows always managed to escape into the bright mornings. The scent of the cinnamon tea, mixed with the smoky scent of the shadows that never wanted to leave.

Sarah watched people mill about their business from the window, her fingers curled around the cup of tea. People were putting up the decorations for the Blood Moon. Hanging floral wreaths out the houses, painting murals on the walls, hanging lanterns. She pushed back the image of her father and sister blowing up balloons for the birthday parties.

She couldn’t avoid the Handler forever. He knew there was no place for her to go. He seemed to know too much about her. She didn’t want his disgusting presence at Layla’s house. The place had become sacred to her.

She walked through the cobbled streets, wondering if the news of the prince’s death had reached the town. The imposing minarets of the palace were visible from the lower end of the town, and the flag still flew high, no visible signs of royal mourning. Her wound hurt with every step she took, and like a madman she relished the pain, letting it clear her head for the meeting with the Handler.

She walked past the guards outside the Handler’s place. It was a disgusting tavern. Filthy enough to make her feel sorry for the jasmines she planted in the pot on her balcony. The Handler lodged his assets there, conducted all his business from the place, and made sure the royal guards knew the residents of the place were not to be bothered with. As much as the place disgusted her, she was glad to have a roof over her head. She had lived a few hours without one, and it hadn’t turned out well.

Sarah made her way through the tables and chairs in the hall. Dirty mugs and plates from the night before were still on the table. Disgusted, she walked up to the small counter where Ava sat.

“Is the Handler in” she asked.

Ava nodded, her eyes too wide, her smile a little too bright.

Sarah sighed and began climbing up the stairs. She knew Ava was afraid of her, and she had tried to allay Ava’s fear, but she couldn’t help but laugh at the fact that in a tavern full of criminals, Ava found her to be the scariest. Sarah knew of the rumor that was spread around the tavern. According to the rumor, Sarah was a witch who got her power and beauty from eating the hearts of young women.

Sarah knocked at the Handler’s door,

“Come in, come in, little princess, do you know you’re the only one in this god-dammed kingdom to knock on doors. If they’re open, we enter, and if they aren’t, we holler for them to open,”

The Handler leaned back on his chair, laughing.

Sarah stared at him. She never bothered to laugh at his sad attempts at humor.

His table was empty, save for a few loose parchments of paper, a cup of tea and a plate full of the candied almonds. In his clean loose white tunic, he looked out of place in the office, with its cobwebs and dirty chairs. He looked every bit like a respectable man, with his charming smile and boyish good looks, but Sarah had spent too many horrible days in the place to know the act was a false one. His mind was a rotten thing, degraded enough to be out of place even at a cemetery.

“You know I don’t like you in those boy’s clothes.” He rose up from his chair and walked towards Sarah. “You didn’t go dressed that way to the palace did you?” He stood in front of Sarah. She felt repulsed by his smile.

She shook her head.

“Layla dressed me in the dress you sent, I got the prince alone, and as he let his guard down and placed his hands on my cheeks, I stabbed him in the neck, he is dead now.”

She felt no hesitation in lying to the Handler. She wouldn’t tell him of what really happened, of how her plan had failed and how the prince was the one who was leading her. She would tell the Handler what he wanted to hear.

“Ah, my little princess, you see the news of your work reached me, but it isn’t quite the story that you tell.”

Sarah felt panic rise in her throat, her had reached up to the hilt of her knife.

“I stabbed him, and I saw him go down.”

“Now now, you don’t have to lie, no one expected you to really do it. I am impressed that you tried, and escaped with your life. Many haven’t even gone that far.”

“wha- I’m not lying.”

“I saw the prince this morning, alive, healthy, no holes in his throat, don’t look so devastated, I appreciate your effort at trying to cheer me with the story.”

The Handler was smiling at her, like she was a naughty child caught with a hand in the cookie jar. She wanted to punch him, and tell him she had done the job, but a tiny voice in her brain told her the prince might be alive. It seemed impossible, and yet she felt the Universe had once again pulled the rug from under her.

“Here have some almonds, brought them off a caravan from Persia.” The Handler was back in his seat, sipping is tea. “I never thought sending you in was a good idea, killing the prince would’ve led to some very angry clients but I had to give the boys something, they wanted blood.”

“What if had actually killed the prince?”

“Then I would have to kill you, aren’t we all glad of how this has turned out, my little princess securing her throne by my side, now, I have another assignment for you tonight.”

Sarah felt nauseous. She wanted to lock herself in the hole she called her room and scream. The picture of the prince’s shocked expression as she stabbed him refused to leave her head.

“-are you listening?”

“What?”

“Find Zakir and kill him, he’s starting to question things, he’ll be at the town festivities tonight, and you can wear your boy clothes if you want to, I don’t want a*********s on this one.” He smiled, satisfied at his generosity.

Sarah left the office and walked to her room, on the top most floor. She liked Zakir. She had seen him trying to stop men from mocking her, and she had liked to see Zakir and Ava together, their little romance making her think the place wasn’t all that doomed. Ava would surely have enough reason to hate Sarah after the night’s festivities.

She didn’t let herself consider refusing the Handler’s orders. She had mistaken his smile and polite manners in her first year. The first time she refused to kill, he had the men bring the target to her room at night and kill him in front of her. The first time she had said she felt more comfortable in the tunic and trousers, he had the flowers she had planted by her window burnt. The first time she refused to tell him the story of her kill, he had snapped the neck of the stray cat she would sometimes feed.

She lifted her tunic and saw the wound. She pressed it until blood gushed out and tried not to think about the prince’s magical healing, and the dark eyes that kept popping up in her head.

**