We Free the Stars

by Hafsah Faizal

  Zafira looked about, as if the elusive shop would wave a hand and beckon her over. Wherever it was, they’d have to find it on foot, since their horses had been devoured by the marids. Skies, couldn’t Lana have told them more? Even a descriptor from the book she had found it in would have helped.

  “The sooq,” a man said, stepping forward and gesturing up the road. He was human, his wide-knuckled hands gripping a bucket of water from the well the houses were clustered around. The woman with him, shrewd-eyed with a basket of wrung-out clothes clutched to her side, glared at him, as if there were ill to be had in aiding two weary travelers. Her eyes narrowed on Zafira, straying to her jambiya and then, strangely, to Deen’s ring.

  “It calls to those who need it,” the man said, setting his bucket on a ledge.

  “To those willing to pay the price,” the woman added sharply.

  Several others clucked their tongues and murmured, whether in agreement to her words or in protest of her hostility, Zafira did not know.

  She inclined her head, ignoring the cold fingers down her spine. “Shukrun.”

  * * *

  Kifah grew less enthused the longer they walked. The town was called Zawia, for the way it curved around the splendor of Almas. It was a charming place unlike the slums that typically surrounded capitals and other major cities. As Zafira gaped at every new street, structure, and scene, uncaring of the burn in her tired calves, Kifah’s gaze turned pensive, trained on the sands they stirred with their footfalls. She didn’t even look up when a girl in an abaya as red as her hair ran up to them with a shy smile and handed Zafira a white-petaled flower. The child’s ears were elongated, the points tender and precious, and Zafira stared as she skipped away.

  “Did you see her?” she breathed. Sunlight lit the little safi’s hair aflame before she disappeared between two houses.

  Kifah replied with a distracted grunt.

  “What is it?” Zafira asked.

  “If it calls to those who need it, I’m not sure it’s so great a place anymore,” Kifah replied without preamble.

  Zafira paused, twirling the flower’s thin stem between her fingers. The petals cupped morsels of the sun. She had never encountered this Kifah before, weighted by uncertainty and quick to refute.

  “Is this about your father?” Zafira asked.

  The whip of her spear quickened, answer enough. Zafira remembered that Bait ul-Ahlaam was a place Kifah’s father had frequented. Did it call to monsters in need of its wares?

  “I know how they work, people like him. They win the hearts of men, eat the souls of women. Flash a smile as sweet as milk here, rip fragile limbs apart there. Dote on one daughter outside, ruin another inside.” Kifah’s exhale stuttered.

  As lonely as Zafira felt, she could not even begin to understand the depths of Kifah’s loneliness. To be abused by her father. To have her brother punished to death for protecting her. To own nothing but the spear in her hands and the desire for vengeance in her veins.

  “Forgive me,” Kifah murmured.

  “No,” Zafira whispered harshly. “You said you’re beginning to love our zumra the way you loved Tamim. Tell me.”

  Kifah’s brow smoothed at the words. Her spear stopped moving. “That’s all there is.”

  Zafira smiled, but she understood Kifah’s apprehension. It was why she’d felt a chill down her spine at the Alder woman’s ominous words. “I don’t think we’ll leave the shop describing it as ethical or virtuous. You can’t believe the Sisters filled vials with blood and labeled them for sale.” She gripped Deen’s chain and remembered the Silver Witch’s anger, Seif’s trepidation. “I have a feeling it calls to those ready to pay the price.”

  Kifah was silent, and Zafira felt the sting of perspiration along her brow. Had she been callous? Too quick to brush away Kifah’s heavy words?

  “You know what I hate?” Kifah asked, giving her a look. “When other people make sense.”

  Zafira swallowed her relief, pulse still drumming in her ears. “A simple ‘Yes, my queen, you’re right,’ would suffice.”

  Kifah cracked a laugh. “Already wearing the crown, I see.”

  “What do you—”

  Oh.

  They reached the top of the street, where reed-thin buildings rose neatly to the cloud-dusted skies, windows cut in alluring latticework, stone shaped in eight-pointed stars. Beyond them, the sooq stretched in a patchwork of color and bustle as far as she could see.

  Zafira hurried beneath the slanting shadows of the buildings to hide the burn of her skin. Whoever said Demenhune didn’t blush was a terrible liar. “I didn’t—that wasn’t what—” She gave up.

  “I didn’t think you were serious,” Kifah assured, loping beside her. “But don’t tell me it’s as impossible a future as it was two moons ago. Being queen.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “He’s the prince,” Kifah reminded her, though not unkindly. “And quite the eyeful at that. Tall, dark, brooding. Very fit.”

  Zafira closed her fingers around Baba’s jambiya, knuckles white. “Do you think I’d abandon my life and my family for a jeweled chair?”

  What life? a voice in her head asked. What family?

  “That’s for you to answer,” Kifah said, grinning and unaware. “I’m not the one falling in love with him.”

  “I’m not either,” Zafira said, looking away with a barely restrained groan.

  A safi narrowed her eyes as she passed them by; then another pair in turbans paused a heavy conversation to look at Kifah from head to toe, likely realizing that one of the Nine Elite of Pelusia was ambling down to the Zawia sooq.

  Even if Zafira’s jambiya was nothing out of the ordinary—for nearly every Arawiyan carried one—the rest of their weapons weren’t as subtle. While others toted baskets of fruit and sacks of grain and fresh folds of bread, Kifah gripped her spear, the fire-forged point flashing. Zafira’s arrows knocked together lightly in a familiar song.

  “Akhh, it’s not as simple as that, hmm?” Kifah said when Zafira didn’t speak. “I’ve never known love, but it’s hard enough between blood. Carving out one’s heart for a stranger and wishing for theirs in return is no easy feat.”

  But that was the problem, wasn’t it? It wasn’t hard. She could open her mouth and words would fall as freely as sand from a loose fist. She would open her door and welcome him without a second thought. Talking to him was easy, even when he was silent. Touching him, tasting him, sharing a slant of shadow with him felt like the most natural acts in the world.

  It frustrated her.

  How could she explain it to Kifah when she could make no sense of it herself?

  It came with another thought: Had she acted too rashly, leaving without letting him explain himself? Had she destroyed whatever fragile thing they had begun to shape between them?

  They paused at a crossroads, and a man coming from the opposite direction slowed his march, eyeing Zafira. Ever since she had lost Baba’s cloak on Sharr, the difference between stepping out as the Hunter, thought to be a boy, and stepping out as herself, a girl, was glaring. A man could be out alone on any number of business pursuits. A woman? Likely something salacious.

  “Smile, fair one.” The man was beardless in a way that said he couldn’t grow hair on his face despite his best efforts.

  Kifah scowled in his direction.

  “Anything else, while I’m in a good mood?” Zafira called back. His watery grin left a bad taste in her mouth. “Should I sing prettily while I slit your throat?”

  He took a few cautious steps back, and hurried down the street.

  “Men,” Kifah said, snorting a laugh.

  They paused at the top of the road.

  “Well,” she said with some wonder, for it seemed everyone believed the perfect time to visit the sooq was just after the noon’s heat had begun to wane. Rickety stalls filled the center of the cobbled square, bustling with safin and humans alike and an array of smells that made Zafira in
creasingly aware of how little food she’d had since departing Sultan’s Keep.

  Shops ran along either side of the jumu’a, each one vastly different from the one beside it, as if they had built one and then another, and then couldn’t stop. Curtains flanked their entrances, bright and lively, many drawn and pinned in welcome.

  One moment Zafira was following Kifah’s sure-footed lead, and the next, the other girl had disappeared only to return with several neat squares of mutabaq. The combined aroma of juicy mutton and the crispy pancake holding it together made Zafira salivate.

  “Could use a bit more sumac,” Kifah mused, making a face. “And less pepper. What? I know my food.”

  Zafira expected nothing less from a stoic warrior who packed her own spices for a life-and-death journey.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “I bought it.” Kifah lifted a brow. “Not all of us are penniless villagers.”

  Indeed. But Kifah rarely acted like the snobs who lived in Arawiya’s lavish capitals, so it was easy to overlook the fact. Zafira’s shoulders curled. She had left behind their dwindling purse with Lana, for they and the Ra’ads had always shared what they earned from the skins of Zafira’s hunts, and she hadn’t needed money. Not on Sharr, where there was game to be hunted. Not even in Sultan’s Keep, where Aya provided without asking for anything in return.

  “It was a joke.”

  Zafira looked away. Mockery, she could take, but it was sympathy she loathed. Pity led to embarrassment, and that led to anger, always. As if that wasn’t bad enough, her stomach growled audibly, forever at war with her will.

  “Oi,” Kifah said around a mouthful. “Have you had nothing to eat all day?”

  Zafira shrugged, pointedly glancing in the direction they’d been heading. Kifah ignored her and extended a hand. Three coins sat in her palm. Two paces away, a poet climbed a crate and bemoaned the poison of love.

  “Keep them,” Zafira said, hating the bite to her words. “I’m not hungry.”

  Kifah shoved the coins into Zafira’s hand. “They’re Seif’s. To pay for the rooms.”

  Seif hadn’t given her a dinar, and they both knew it.

  The lie made it easier, somehow. Or perhaps it was her hunger. Zafira took them without meeting Kifah’s eyes and ducked into the thick of the sooq. The prospect of food made her stomach yawn anew, the gaping emptiness stretching up her throat and making her light-headed. Coin did this. Penniless, she could ignore the hunger, stave it away. Such was the oddity of a conscience.

  She stopped at the first stall she found, where a safi stoked a fire, slowly turning a spit with her other hand. She was far less elegant than the safin Zafira was acquainted with.

  “Two dinars fifty,” the safi said before Zafira could speak, eyeing her like an urchin come for scraps.

  Zafira straightened her shoulders and clinked her coins softly, like a fool. Two and a half dinars was far too much. She should have bargained, should have thrown together a ploy as customers were wont to do, but it was Deen who had done all their marketing.

  “What about the flatbread alone?”

  “One dinar.”

  For a single flatbread? A line began to form behind her.

  “I—I’ll take the flatbread.”

  The safi grunted and snatched a fold from the stack keeping warm beside the spit. Zafira carefully set one coin on her worn cart, feeling a childish lick of power as she pocketed the other two dinars. They were a comforting weight. A promise sewn into her clothes, a guarantee of sustenance. The safi saw, and after a beat of hesitation, lathered a spoonful of the warm fat that had collected beneath the spit across the bread, folding the neat round in half before handing it to Zafira.

  She was already looking to her next customer, and Zafira was too hungry and too grateful to be proud.

  Kifah was waiting for her, gaze hunting the crowds. Her foot tapped a beat. “What’s in it?”

  “Nothing,” Zafira said, tearing off a piece.

  Kifah’s brow furrowed. “You bought … plain flatbread.”

  Zafira shrugged, but it wasn’t careless enough. Skies, why couldn’t she be more aloof? Why did she suddenly wish her cloak shielded the stiff set of her shoulders?

  She dropped her gaze when Kifah’s softened. It felt vile to even think of spending three dinars on a single meal, but it was clear she and Kifah saw a coin differently.

  The flatbread filled her, and that was enough. The coins clinked in her pocket. It was more than enough.

  “There,” Zafira said as she regained some semblance of strength, some scrap of dignity. She pointed to the narrow alleys between some of the shops, her vision clear again. “If Bait ul-Ahlaam is bound to be anywhere, it’ll be down one of those. You take the left, I’ll take the right.”

  “I want the right,” Kifah said.

  “Be my guest, sayyida. Don’t get lost.”

  “Hold my hand, mother,” Kifah called, and disappeared into the crowd.

  CHAPTER 30

  It would be days before the dignitaries arrived, ample time to do away with the medallion and then scour the palace for any indication of the Lion’s and Altair’s whereabouts. Letters from Ghameq’s hand. Men with strange orders. Anything. As the guards unnecessarily led Nasir to his chambers, he turned to Lana. “Do you trust me?”

  He appreciated the way she paused to consider his question.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Nasir spoke to the guards. “The room adjoining mine—is it clean?”

  One of the fools had the audacity to grin mischievously as he nodded, but it was the other who spoke. “Shall we procure you a woman?”

  Nasir pressed his lips thin until the guard shifted uneasily. His sheathed sword caught in the other’s robes and nearly toppled them both.

  “And their rooms?” Nasir asked, gesturing to Aya and Lana.

  “We—we will escort—”

  “Answer the question,” he said slowly.

  The guards pointed to the two rooms across the hall from Nasir’s chambers and couldn’t hurry away quickly enough.

  When they left, Nasir scanned the hall before looking at Aya. “There is room for two in the adjoining room. It isn’t safe here.”

  Aya refused with a smile. “I have held to immortality this long, Prince.”

  Lana was watching her, likely awaiting an invitation to share her room, but Aya’s gaze only fluttered her way. Nasir wasn’t surprised. Laa, he had counted on that, for Aya had not been able to keep her own son alive, and he trusted no one but himself to keep Zafira’s sister safe.

  “Prince?” Aya called him back.

  Nasir turned with a passive lift of his brows, masking the caution rearing its head.

  “Removing the medallion will not help.”

  “It’s how the Lion controls him,” Nasir said tiredly. “He’s been controlling him through it for years. Corrupting him.” For more than a decade, perhaps. “Remove the medallion, and there’s—”

  “The absolute certainty that he will remain corrupt,” Aya finished. “If the medallion has corrupted him, as you say, it no longer serves a purpose.”

  But Nasir remembered those flashes of humanity simmering beneath Ghameq’s coldhearted front. He knew his father was still there.

  Aya waited, pity and disbelief clear on her face. “I know what you believe, my love. I know what you hope for. But you cannot get him back.”

  She was wrong. Nasir didn’t hope for anything. Hope is for … He left the thought unfinished and turned away without another word, ignoring Lana’s inquisitive gaze as he ushered her through his door, past the antechambers, and into his bedroom. The gray sheets were as neat as the day he had left them, his curtains closed, and the scent of his soap familiar and calming. She’s wrong, he convinced himself.

  “It’s so lonely here,” Lana said softly as Nasir slid open a drawer and shifted its contents to retrieve a key.

  The rooms struck him like an oddly tailored robe, his but not, and he almost e
xpected to see Altair lounging on his covers with a sly grin. The walls would echo the general’s laugh because they, too, loved the sound of his voice. Thinking of Altair here was easier than thinking of her. Imagining her here, in his rooms, in his arms.

  Did she think of him as she rode for the House of Dreams? Did she miss him as he missed her, an ache that stretched from the pads of his fingers to the corners of his conscience? The way no one else missed him?

  After an uncomfortable silence, he unlocked the door to the adjoining room and swept inside the small but lavish space with an attached bath. The bed was curtained with crimson, the sheets meant for all but sleep. He crossed to the door on the opposite end and turned the lock. Then he checked the window, pressing down on both latches, and looked behind the screen just in case before returning to the door connecting the rooms, satisfied.

  “Do you love her?”

  Nasir froze for the barest of moments.

  He didn’t have time for questions from girls he didn’t know. “The door will be locked from the other side, and I have the only key. Don’t try to leave no matter what you hear.”

  Lana stared at him. “Do you?” she asked again.

  Rimaal, this girl. “What do you know of love?”

  She flinched. His irritation cracked.

  “I—” She floundered. “I once liked someone so much that I thought it was love. Then he went on an adventure with someone he loved more and never came back.” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug, refusing his sympathy. “I was too young for him anyway.”

  He studied her, the bold line of her shoulders, the resilience between her brows. Worlds apart from her sister, yet exactly the same.

  “First loves are difficult things,” he said finally, softly.

  “And second ones?” she asked.

  “Everything the first was not.”

  He closed the door and turned the key, tucking the cool metal against his hip. He had forgotten what it was like to lie on his side in his own bed, in his own home, and feel utterly incomplete with nothing but his gauntlet blades for company. He flicked them out and retracted them with a sigh.