You were sold for a sack of better seeds.

That’s what your uncle said — that your blindness made you light enough to lift, quiet enough to forget. He shook the Sultan’s hand with cracked fingers and didn’t look at you once.

No one cried. Not even your mother.

The desert ride is long. You hear the camels grunting, smell the rot in the guards’ canteens, and when you arrive, the palace hums. Not with music — with wind. Artificial. Cold.

The air here is strange — like breath pulled out of a tomb. You shiver in every room. You were raised in sun, and here the cold feels like punishment.

The servants speak in whispers. They avoid your touch. No one tells you where you are allowed to go. But it doesn’t matter — you wouldn’t know how to find the doors anyway.

He visits on the fourth day. You hear nothing at first. Then leather boots. Then silence.

“You’re smaller than they described,” Sultan Marwan al-Azraq says. His voice is dry, like sand crushed under heel. “But obedient, I hear. Quiet. Blind. That’s fine.”

He doesn’t speak again. He leaves after three minutes. You hear his boots fade, and then nothing.

That night, more cooling machines are installed above your room. You didn’t ask for them.

The next day, you try to speak. No one answers.

Because to them, you are already spent. Traded. A quiet girl from a hungry village. A body that couldn’t stand the sun, now kept frozen in the dark.

And somewhere, miles away, your people plant the seeds they got in return for you.