The rat bolted with a squeak, and Altair stood as footsteps approached. The misshapen clay abode stank heavily of age, the corners of the room thick with cobwebs. It was battered and bruised and glaringly unsecure, yet the zumra still hadn’t found him.
If they’re looking for me, that is.
The Lion swept through the open doorway, followed by an ifrit with two bowls of shorba and warm flatbread. The food of peasants, not a shred of mutton in sight.
“Taken to talking to yourself?” the Lion asked as he sat on the cold, hard ground. The ifrit set down the food and left.
“Keeps the vocal cords young,” said Altair with a smile. He remained standing a beat longer before he lowered himself back to the floor. “I can take to singing, if you prefer.”
These were the moments that scared him. The ones in which his father sought his company for no reason other than companionship.
Moments that scared him because he enjoyed them. They carved new lenses through which the monster, cruel in his ambitions, became a man, curious and collected.
The Lion rarely touched the food he brought with him. It had given Altair pause at first, but if he kept fearing poison, he’d starve. A body like his didn’t maintain itself.
“You have my father’s eyes,” the Lion said.
Altair stopped with a piece of flatbread halfway to his mouth.
The Lion frowned as if he’d surprised himself, too. “I sometimes forget his face. Events, too. With the odd recollection that they were … pivotal somehow. Time has stifled the memories.”
Whatever the Lion believed had stifled his memories was not time, and Altair could see it bothered him, enough to bring a haze of madness to his gaze. The same glint from when he’d spoken of vengeance, as if he wanted it with an all-encompassing need but couldn’t fathom why.
“You loved your father,” Altair observed, and lifted his arms, flashing his shackled wrists. “Mine keeps me in chains.”
The Lion smiled. “I can remove them. Take you from captive to son. Ally. We will carve our names upon history, and we, too, shall live forever.”
Heavy words to be spoken in the height of the day’s heat. How easy it would be, Altair thought, to shift the work of decades over to the side of his father. He would accomplish the same: a new Arawiya untainted by the Arz, unfettered by the curses that magic’s absence had left behind.
He finished his bowl and slid his father’s, still untouched, toward himself.
“I won’t let you go, Altair, and they will not come,” the Lion said with certainty. “If they triumph because of the road you set them upon, what makes you believe you will garner credit? I’m no seer, but even I know what will come of it.”
“Oh?” Altair said when he shouldn’t have. The walls rumbled with the thunder of passing horses somewhere out on the streets.
The Lion looked at him, strangely intent, as if his son were a puzzle he was close to solving. As if he had solved him during the handful of meals they’d shared.
“You will be forgotten.”
There were words that warped shields and slowed quick tongues. Knotted strings around fingers and made them tremble, one, two, three, ten. Twisted inhales so their exhales shook.
Words like these.
Altair set down his bowl with too sharp a thud, avoiding his father’s gaze. He smoothed his hands down his arms, bare and suddenly cold.
A question tumbled out of him: “Have you found the zumra?”
The Lion tilted his head, as he did whenever curiosity struck. “I’ve sent for a scroll in the palace. It details a spell that will emulate the Huntress’s affinity. Why?”
We, too, shall live forever.
Altair dropped his fists on the table between them. Dust sprang from the little crevices. He latched his eyes onto the Lion’s amber ones, curious and staid.
No, Baba. He would not be forgotten. Not so long as his lungs moiled away. He had spent far too much of his life working for exactly the opposite.
“Unshackle me,” he said with careful reflection, “and I’ll tell you where they are.”
CHAPTER 17
When Zafira was young, her fingers just long enough to wrap fully around the hilt of Baba’s jambiya, she had scrunched her nose and asked him why it was so plain and so old. She had walked with him and Umm to the sooq, where the men wore their jambiyas with pride. Hilts of polished stone or wood, studded with jewels, carved with care, each curved dagger fancier than the last.
“A blade is born to murder and to maim,” he had told her. “It reminds me of all I’ve done. Each deer I have gutted, each rabbit I have ended. Lives are not meant for thieving, my abal.”
“Will you give me my own blade?”
Umm had smiled. “Girls are not meant to wield the toys of men.”
Baba had disagreed. “My girl will wield weapons, and she will wield them well, for it takes a special kind of courage to hold power and know when not to use it.”
He had given her his dagger then, the leather hilt tattered from use. The blade, however, was still sharp. Enough to prick her finger when she drew it from its sheath.
To this day, she remembered Baba’s laugh. As if he were surprised to have made such a sound, as if all were right in the world.
“It likes you,” he had said afterward, and she remembered that, too. For she liked it back. Enough that she carried it with her everywhere. When she showered. When she helped Umm knead bread in the kitchen. When she began to hunt and feed her people.
When Baba had returned from the Arz.
She carried the Jawarat now as she used to carry that dagger, as she still carried that dagger, only it didn’t make her feel good, or brave, or right. It was a part of her. Being away from it troubled her as much as removing her cloak once did.
“Pure hearts aren’t meant to go on killing sprees,” Zafira said to it, and the reminder of Nasir refusing to give her the hearts stung afresh.
You reject us, bint Iskandar.
“No,” she said, pointedly. The Jawarat might have gleaned a near century of malevolence on Sharr, but those years had to be insignificant compared to the Sisters’ memories. “I will never hurt my people. I’m rejecting this chaos you crave. We’re bound to each other—what about what I want?”
Dusk was bleeding into the sky, the sun exhaling its final rays of warmth. Lana had returned, and despite the relief that heaved a trembling exhale out of her, Zafira refused to see her, petulance and anger demanding that her sister come to her first. The Jawarat only hummed that damning hum as it did whenever her emotions ran rampant and tempestuous.
She flipped Baba’s jambiya over in her hands. Could she really go so far as to forget her own people? To harm them? She thought of the gassing. Perhaps it was a small mercy, her village being gone, her people dead so they wouldn’t have to fear being split in half by the girl who once provided for them.
The Jawarat didn’t care about her. It wanted someone to enact its will, to unleash a chaos she couldn’t stand behind.
So we have learned.
She shivered at its ominous tone.
“If we are to continue this ridiculous bond, you will neither influence me any longer nor share with me your hideous anger.”
Skies, she sounded insane, commanding a book. A sentient book, but still.
Our bond is irreversible. There is no “if.”
“No,” Zafira agreed, “but I can dig a hole and bury you in it, and you will never again witness the light of day.”
Neither will you, the Jawarat gloated.
She growled, “You know exactly what I meant.”
The Jawarat fell silent as it considered this, and Zafira dropped back onto the bed with a bout of pride, rising when a knock sounded at her door again. She ignored a twinge of disappointment because it wasn’t the soft knock she had come to anticipate. If it was Lana, that girl—
Oh.
She couldn’t stop her smile. “I didn’t recognize the knock.”
“Can’t b
e predictable now, can I?” Nasir asked, his gaze hurrying across her room before locking on her, a little too eager. “Can I come in?”
Zafira tilted her head, but after a beat of hesitation, she stepped aside and closed the door behind him. “That has to be the boldest question you’ve ever asked.”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “I can be bolder.”
Zafira laughed, and his eyes darkened in response. And then he was reaching for her, pressing himself against her, and swallowing her gasp of surprise with a kiss, leading her back, back, back to her bed.
He was cold. So cold, she felt the chill through her skin. She wound her fingers around his shoulders and pushed him away, her mouth ablaze with sensation, her pulse racing like a steed. She stared at him.
Say something.
“I didn’t think you would return,” she managed. She had been so certain his words were a dismissal earlier, worried he was afraid of her.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he replied, as if her question were ridiculous, and it stopped her from asking after Lana and Aya.
He caught her hesitance and quickly tipped a smile. “You’re like a room full of books. Every time I see you, I discover something new.”
His eyes were bright. There was something brazen about the quirk of his lips. Something too sure to his touch. He seemed to read her face as he had begun to do more often these days, and took a measured step back.
“Should I leave?”
No. But the word was too bold for this moment, so she knelt on her bed and gestured for him to join her.
“Sit,” she said, aware that Lana could walk in at any moment, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. She, the Lion, the Jawarat, the hearts—everything could wait. “Ask me more questions.”
CHAPTER 18
Every color that makes you. Rimaal, he might as well quit now and become a bard.
It was true, though. Color had held no value until her. She was everything Nasir was not. She saw her father die, stabbed in the heart by her own mother—a horror he never could have guessed because she took her pains and sorrows and funneled them into anger and rage and action.
Whereas Nasir was always tired and sad and … there.
He was drawn to her like a moth to a flame, and the closer he went, the more he burned—but what happened when a moth’s wings caught fire?
He trudged up the stairs, knowing they had to move soon if they wanted to track down that elusive vial of blood and find Altair. Nasir had never been to Alderamin, and he wasn’t enthused at the prospect. Nor did he think it was right to use Zafira for her affinity as if she were a tool at their disposal.
You’re one to talk.
He paused before his door and stepped, instead, closer to hers, pressing his brow against the ebony. He always knocked softly, so that if she was engrossed in something, he wouldn’t be disturbing her.
So far, she had responded to every knock.
And instead of setting him at ease and flaring satisfaction, seeing her filled him with a fear he craved and did not understand. A sort of dependency in danger of growing into an addiction.
Before he could skim the wood now, however, he heard it: the low murmur of a male voice on the other side, followed by the heady sound of her laugh.
His mind blanked. He took a quick step back, tripping on the rug.
Safin weren’t known for their chastity. Their debauchery and revelry matched none—any one of them could have charmed her. Khara, even a sand qit on the street was more charming than him.
She laughed again, so softly that it felt a sin to hear it.
Nasir stumbled into his room. Shadows unfurled from his palms before he could stop them, and he laughed bitterly from the edge of his bed, at the control he believed he’d achieved.
He exhaled slowly, flicking his gauntlet blade free before retracting it and repeating the movement again, and again. A killer, that was what he was. A blade made for ending lives. A monster on a leash. How was this moment any different from the last time he had been in Sultan’s Keep?
Anyone who could make her laugh so freely, so beautifully, was better than he could ever be.
But oh, how he wished he could act as selfishly as he felt.
CHAPTER 19
It was a bad idea to invite him to sit on her bed, Zafira knew. The gleam in his eyes made it hard to think and speak and daama breathe. He paused at the apparent change in her thoughts.
“You don’t even have to speak. Your face does it for you.”
He leaned close, brushing his fingers down the side of her face, and she sank into the familiarity of his touch, knowing every moment was stolen. He was the prince. Once this was over, he would remember that there were far more women in existence.
“Should I stop?”
Yes, she thought, but some part of her delighted at the way his voice broke.
“No,” she said, and brazenly turned her lips to his palm. She slid her fingers up the scruff of his jaw before gently threading them in his hair. His lips touched hers, warm and soft, foreign and familiar at once, and nothing existed save for him and her and this.
He eased her back into the pillows, and she fell drunk on the faint sweetness of pomegranates and the weight of him. A sound escaped her when he pulled back with a torn exhale and skimmed his hand down the length of her, lingering at her thigh.
“Wait,” she gasped. She was going to explode. Irritation flitted across his gray eyes, and she felt the sting of it as acutely as a knife.
“What is it?”
“If we do everything now, then—”
She had never seen anyone so still, as if even his heart stopped at his command.
“Then what?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said quickly. Her pulse pounded at her neck. She didn’t feel empowered as she usually did with him. She didn’t feel longing. She felt … debased. Everything felt wrong and she wanted to disappear.
“Interesting,” he murmured. He swept off the bed, and she saw a line of deep mauve on his robes that hadn’t been there before. “I thought you would never make the mistake of falling in love.”
Zafira went cold at the sudden change in his voice. The way it deepened into velvet. Confident in a way only immortality can provide. There was only one to whom she had spoken those words aloud: the Arz. There was only one who had listened from its depths. Who had befriended her as she had him.
His eyes, no longer gray, glinted amber in the lantern light.
A scream clambered to her throat, and she tried, tried, tried to shout, but her voice was swallowed by horror and the dizzying sensation of his mouth. A thousand and one emotions slowed her down: fear, disgust, anger, and—worse—desire.
Before a warning repressed it all: the Jawarat was in plain sight.
“You are every bit as decadent as I imagined, Huntress.” The Lion’s voice was a caress as the room festered with shadows, dark as a hollow grave.
Her pulse pounded in time to her single thought: The Lion. The Lion. The Lion.
“I missed you, azizi,” he said softly, eyes darkening as they roamed her supine form.
My darling.
She had a terrible, sickening realization: Some twisted part of her had missed him, too. She had never really lived without him. He had always been within reach, his presence exuding from the strange trees and impenetrable darkness, the shadows curling around her limbs, calming her.
A wicked grin contorted his mouth. “Did you not miss me? We are one, you and I.”
“You’re not the first to say that,” she bit out as she dug her fists into the sheets and forced herself upright and out of bed.
He canted his head, unveiling a lock of white in his dark hair as he neared. Slowly, his features shifted into his own, and the Lion stood before her, golden tattoo glinting in the lantern light. ‘Ilm, it said. Knowledge. For which his hunger could never be sated.
“But it was I who made you what you are, my bladed compass, and because of it, you cleverly bound yourself to t
he Jawarat, successfully gleaning the knowledge of the Sisters of Old.”
His brows rose at her hesitation.
“You fear it,” he realized with a soft tsk, backing her to the wall.
She allowed it, for it was drawing him away from the Jawarat.
“You fear the doors that knowledge throws open. Embrace it, azizi. There is no greater gift.”
“I will never—”
“Shh,” the Lion murmured, stopping her with a thumb to her mouth, calluses rough across her lips. “Brash promises so quickly take us in directions we don’t like.”
She shivered.
“Now,” he said, no louder than a whisper.
She felt the word, tasted pomegranates when she drew air.
“Give me the Jawarat.”
He hadn’t looked for the hearts, or the safin he hated, or even the Silver Witch, more powerful than he could ever be. He wanted the Jawarat and its wealth of knowledge.
“And?” Her voice was all breath.
“When the Gilded Throne is mine, I will make you my queen as I forge a home for my kin. The world will be ours to shape as we will.”
The throne. For knowledge was power, and power was epitomized by the throne.
“All these years,” she said, and smoothly snatched her jambiya. She would protect that book if it was the last thing she did. “And you failed to notice I was never interested in crowns.”
She pressed the blade to his neck, devouring his flash of surprise. There and gone, trembling her resolve.
“Does the thought of my blood bring you joy?” He tipped his head back and her jambiya caught in the meager light, brilliant against his flesh.
Not joy—power. A remnant of the Jawarat’s vision, the one part of it she craved in some dark corner of her soul.
His voice was a lull in her ear. “Tear me open, azizi. Slit my throat and see if the blood I bleed is black or red.”
What mattered more was the blood he had spilled: that of Baba, Deen, Benyamin, the Sisters of Old, a thousand and one others.
“I will end you,” she whispered.
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