Sidra al-Najjar is a girl of thirteen, an Arab tiefling, who must make her way amidst the tangles of an identity drawn from a mixed parentage — a human father, a tiefling mother. Sidra goes veiled, the better to hide her horns and her strange skin, a caution bred into her by an upbringing in a household heavy with religious repression. Her gifts as a sorcerer, taken by many for the touch of a djinn (a spirit of the old tales), are at once her blessing and her burden, and she wrestles inwardly with the stigma that the world lays upon her magic.
For all that, her curiosity is not to be quenched, and it fixes above all upon the Sufi whirling dervishes, whom she has heard slighted as "gin possessed". One evening, at a dinner at Thymbra Farm, she was presented by Osman Hamdi Bey, who praised her labours at a nearby dig; and, set at the children's table beside Ahmet Yusuf, she played at aping the grown folk, her youthful eagerness plain as she fell into talk with Rufus Dimitrious and his grand tales, which she and Ahmet heard with open doubt. As she listened, her thoughts strayed to the Sufi turning, and she watched Gizem Faruki with a mingling of wonder and unease, turning over in her mind her own strange powers.
In a spirit of adventure Sidra roamed the grounds of the farmhouse, her curiosity making light of the privacy of the place — a girl caught fairly between the world of magic and the world's expectations of her. As a young mage with a djinn for a guest, she commands sundry arts, the spell of Detect Magic amongst them, by which she caught a faint residue of magic in one of the bedchambers; and her perception of such matters is keen, as when she knew a door dressed with snake-handled imagery for a reference to the tale of Heracles.
At the dig she found further traces of magic and lent her hand to the searching of a cave, where she studied pre-Greek frescoes at Jean-Zera Mongé's side, her djinn sharpening her senses to the site's antiquity. She bore a pivotal part in the facing of a wicked shade that rose from a cabin aboard the ship, calling upon her djinn to loose a radiant magic that unmade the thing; she and Ahmet came upon a teleportation circle in the cargo hold and saw the aftermath of a spell's rebound that imperilled the vessel; and it was she who warned the captain of the flooding, showing her courage and her wit in a tight place.
Sidra has a deep feeling for things of the spirit, and holds converse with an inner presence she calls her djinn. Drawn to books of magic, she seeks to learn of its many forms and of her own gifts, poring over cosmological treatises and works upon monsters and souls. She begged leave of Osman Hamdi Bey to send a letter to her mother in Constantinople, which he granted for the morrow's post; she explored a library stocked with magical tomes, marking the themes of the collection and choosing Aramaic and Latin texts to copy; and, looking into a fevered man, she judged his affliction spiritual rather than magical, finding a tether that bound him to some outward entity and satisfying herself that no djinn was the cause — a nice proof of her method in the weighing of the fevered hunter's state and of what the tether might portend.
Oftentimes at a loss in strange surroundings, Sidra drifts through the streets and takes counsel of her djinn, the more so when danger presses. She is plainly shaken by fear in such straits, as when she saw an albasti — a winged thing in the shape of a woman — stoop to prey upon a sleeping man; yet for all her fear she took cover and gave battle, working the spell of Sacred Flame and a curse laid with a Nazar Bead (the blue eye-charm against ill fortune) against the creature. Struggling at first with her dread, she yet brought off the Sacred Flame and scorched the thing, watching her companions and lending her support from a distance. When it was done she talked the matter over with them, and had a notable exchange with Gizem upon their shared dreams and what such dreams might mean.
Her course is shaped, too, by the ties of family: her mother pressed upon her a toll-token for passage to the Undercity, a mark of a protective love and of a knowledge of the perils the girl might meet. In her wanderings Sidra shows a shyness, particularly when she falls in with the local children of the Undercity; yet she is willing enough to venture upon new faces and new places, caution and curiosity mingled in her, taking in the manners of the place whilst keeping a wary eye upon its risks.
Of late Sidra has been seen with a Silver Yatagan, a curved Ottoman sword, and with a set of thirty Silver-Tipped Throwing Knives, both come to her as rewards. Searching a Cemetery with Ahmet Yusuf, the two went in by stealth but were soon marked; they met a creature no bigger than a monkey drawing upon a hookah, and sought to parley with the Scavengers round about, whom Sidra won over with baklava and sweets that a small one took up eagerly. Learning that a witch had driven the Scavengers from their home, she and Ahmet set out to confront an Invisible Attacker and to restore the Scavengers' tree.
Drawing near the Invisible Attacker's tree, Sidra was struck by a stone flung from above and fell senseless; Ahmet brought her round, and together they loosed a Fire Bolt at the tree, whose light betrayed the Invisible Attacker to their eyes. By well-ordered strokes they brought it down; and when the fire was quenched, they reassured the Scavengers of their safety and carried the creature's body back to Hano 'the Widow', so settling the disturbances of the Cemetery. For their pains they were rewarded, and agreed to share the spoils, Sidra keeping the Silver Yatagan and half the throwing knives.
In her continuing adventures in the Undercity, Sidra has faced sundry foes, a dwarf chieftain called Usta Kerim amongst them. Her spellcraft runs to a searing magical rebuke, and to attempts at the spell of Sleep — which failed her through a magical backlash and left her with a lingering chill. She has used Mage Hand to trail shadows unseen during a performance, and searched a private library for alchemical receipts. When muggers set upon the company she took the hurt of a dagger flung by Usta Kerim, but paid him back with a magic that scorched him. Her taste for alchemy has grown, learned by watching Papa Mert; and she keeps a talking cat named Greek Captain, who has told her something of the Council of the Ninth Life.
During the Festival of Candles, Sidra sought an audience with the Ghost of March, but he put her off, saying, "Now is not the time, little one, but soon." Amidst the disorder of the festival — the death of Nazif the perfumist not the least of it — she and her companions drew together at a café to take stock. Later the company slipped into Nazif's perfumery to look into his death, and there met Sharif the Strong Fur, a talking cat who had taken up Nazif's office; Sharif asked Sidra's help with certain gravely sick cats, and she agreed, vouching for her fellows. In a brush with animated cadavers beneath Saint Benoit Church she essayed to speak with the undead in Romanian, though to what understanding is unclear; her spells had their part in the undoing of the dead, and she bore an active hand in the fight.
In a recent affray Sidra roused her inborn sorcery and cast Sacred Flame against an undead priest, lighting the room and alarming the armed men in it. Faced by Hyria, a leader of tomb-raiders, she held that her party was there to stay the harm of the undead and had taken nothing from the place; and when Hyria pressed her demands, she answered with a Fire Bolt at a gunman, kindling him through a radiant mist her ally's Moonbeam had raised. As the quarrel grew, a surge of terror rose in her and a cold mist gathered, herald of a vampire's coming; through the ensuing chaos she cast on — Hellish Rebuke amongst her spells — against the undead guardians and the vampire alike, and owned her relief when the vampire at last was thrown down.
Sidra has of late been seen with a magical short sword, one of two uncursed Magical Short Swords (+1) taken from a hoard. She has set herself to mapping the zones of the Undercity — marking its residential quarters, an entertainment district about the Leaky Pit, and the routes the better sort of visitor keeps to — and has logged its amenities besides: the Styx Bathhouse, the Thieves Bazaar, the Shapeshifter tailor's shop, the Ermeydani fight-ground, and Misty Pond, a tranquil subterranean park, from which she gathered hazardous samples of moss and fungus for study. At Papa Mert's, an apothecary of the Undercity, she learned somewhat of medicinal and toxic properties and of safer ways to gather them. In the course of a mission she cast Guidance upon Jean-Zera and opened a Message between them to coordinate with her allies; she charmed a lead agent, casting their peril in a gentler light, and set Dissonant Whispers upon a trailing agent, so that he fled.
Sidra al-Najjar carries within her a djinn that colours her every experience and dealing, and her magical presence is strong — witness her power to call down radiant magic. She has a gift with animals, and in particular with a tortoise named Ashraf, to whom she offers flowers by way of distraction; she is alive to the dangers of magic, and felt a stern warning when a man in a dream sought to cheat her. She led Ashraf away from a search that her party might look into a library; and she took her part in a brush with shadowy figures, using her magic to hamper an enemy's stroke, her deeds adding to the company's labour against the shadows.
Beneath the Basilica Cistern and the Maiden Tower, Sidra al-Najjar came into a power of a wholly new kind. When she attuned to the Crown of Sargon in the thick of a dragon-fight, a magical rebound first robbed her of thirteen hours' memory and then tore her djinn bodily out of her, granting it a form and a name of its own — Faravi — and remaking her from a djinn-possessed sorcerer into a djinn-master warlock; her body was freed of the "mortal shell" decay that had long plagued it, and she might now yield herself for a moment to Faravi's power, or turn aside enchantment and divination worked against her. Crowned and attuned, she bade the black dragon flee and claimed the Crown of Sargon, and later turned its power to the reading of ambushers' minds upon the road, and to the knowing of Aziz Sefa Bey for the man come to kill Mira.