We Free the Stars

by Hafsah Faizal

  They needed to get the doors opened, or the Lion wouldn’t only be king, he would rule supreme.

  She fired her way to the doors, unflinching as blood drenched her clothes and her quiver ran low. Her gossamer sleeves like butterfly wings hung tattered. She spotted Ghada and several of the Nine Elite, Lana between them. Near the throne, the rest of the Nine and the Sultan’s Guard kept the Lion’s attention away from the vulnerable crowd. He was still dazed, she noticed, still lost in the memory of his father’s death.

  She drew back at a sudden hiss before a stave came hurtling for her neck. Like a fool, she lifted her hand to defend herself, dropping the Jawarat in the process, but the blow never came. The ifrit fell, and a hand extended toward her, a moonstone pommel catching in the light.

  “Haytham,” she sputtered before remembering her manners when she saw the wazir. She snatched up the book. “Sayyidi.”

  A gash across his brow oozed blood. His sword was coated in black, the hilt out of place amid the dead and dying. She swallowed a crazed laugh.

  How much worse could this night become?

  You just had to ask, said Yasmine in her head as death gripped the chamber.

  CHAPTER 56

  For you, Baba. So much of what Nasir had done was for him. One smile, one nod of approval. Now he was nothing but a grain of sand in the expanse of the desert. There in Nasir’s palm for a fleeting moment and lost to the wind the next.

  For Nasir, death was a subtle thing. He killed in the middle of a crowd, in a house full of the living. Blood was a whiff to catch before he was leaping out a window and into the open air. Anything flashy and loud and boisterous was Altair’s specialty, even now, with Nasir’s errant power and its wild eruptions.

  So when the ebony doors exploded, wood hurtling through the hall, Nasir knew it wasn’t the work of his angry, writhing shadows. No, this was the opposite.

  It was the light to his dark, the day to his night; and he would recognize that powerful build anywhere. That figure, posed with dramatic flair in a flood of light, bringing the battle to a wrenching, startling halt.

  Altair, who had turned his back on Nasir as Nasir had done to him on Sharr.

  A tumult of emotions warred within him. Zafira stepped to his side, her hand brushing his in reassurance. Kifah paused at his left, and the three of them regarded Altair through a wary lens. Yet Nasir’s heart betrayed him, and for the first time since this nightmare began, he found he could breathe.

  “Akhh, did I miss the party?”

  Nasir closed his eyes at the sound of Altair’s voice, his real voice, so unlike the peculiar tone he’d adapted in the Lion’s hideout. The light waned, and as the ifrit chittered among themselves, Nasir finally saw him.

  Only a day had passed, but it might as well have been years. Altair’s clothes were tattered and dirty, his wrists red and raw. A chain was wrapped around one fist, the end dangling.

  Yet he stood as if he owned the land beneath his feet. As if there were a crown on his head and a procession in front of him.

  Nasir pushed past a guard and froze.

  “Sweet snow,” Zafira whispered.

  A dirty cloth swathed Altair’s left eye. Streaks of red painted his face, as if he had wept blood. And Nasir saw in his one open eye what had not been there yesterday: Something in him had broken.

  Altair, who loved the world and loved himself without humility.

  “I told you,” said Kifah, a sob in her throat. “I told you he wouldn’t leave without just cause.”

  Nasir ignored the pulse of his gauntlet blades, for a hashashin did not react to emotion. The Prince of Death did not react to emotion.

  From across the room, the Lion threw away the two red-clad Nine Elite and settled once more on the Gilded Throne. There was something new in his aristocratic features, an agony Nasir hadn’t seen before. A torment.

  The look of a man after a memory relived.

  “Altair,” he said in greeting, as if surprised to see him. “How nice of you to attend my coronation.”

  The rest of Altair’s brilliant light faded to nothing, and the ifrit abandoned their panic, fiery staves slowly crackling to life. The zumra needed to tread carefully, Nasir knew.

  He knew it, and yet.

  Something propelled him forward. Zafira hissed. Kifah stepped into the cover of the crowd as ifrit surrounded him, weapons raised. All Nasir saw was Altair and those bloody streaks. This time, the Lion was pleased.

  “Weeks ago, you were ready to plunge your blade through his throat,” he mocked, though he lacked his usual certitude. “I merely moved mine a little farther north. Do you pity him?”

  Pity was an insult to what Nasir felt. Rage. Pain. Bone-splintering grief and guilt for even allowing himself to believe that Altair had betrayed them.

  Unless this, too, is a ruse.

  No. If it was, he would rip Altair to shreds himself. Nasir was more than capable.

  “Pity? The wound only adds to his daring character.”

  The words were out of Nasir’s mouth before he could stop them. How Altair managed to goad and poke fun when in danger had once been beyond him. But now he saw how it worked. Altair’s face broke into the grin Nasir had been waiting for, relief easing his features. As if Nasir, with a scar down his eye and dozens on his back, would judge him.

  “I’ve taught you well, princeling,” Altair called with a fake sniffle. Silence held, tension rising as the room readied for the next beat of chaos.

  Among the shifting, flickering forms of the ifrit, Nasir met Zafira’s gaze. Her fingers slowly curled around her bowstring, the Jawarat tucked under her arm, before she dipped a barely noticeable nod.

  Altair, too, was as perceptive as ever. He looked at the dignitaries—wazirs, caliphs, officials, and their families—wide-eyed and bleeding, and slowly rewound his chain. “I know I’m quite the vision, but I didn’t dash to your aid to be stared at. Yalla, Arawiya! Yalla!”

  And despite the hesitation and suspicion breathing down Nasir’s neck, it felt right. Like old times.

  He threw up his sword. Zafira unleashed three arrows in succession, felling ifrit as Altair swung his chain around another’s neck with an unseemly cackle that gave Nasir pause. A thud echoed behind him, succeeded by a gust of air from a twirling spear. Kifah.

  Chaos had returned, a storm without reason. People screamed, charging toward the doors with ifrit at their heels, attacking without mercy. Men were fleeing, safin grasping vanity and failing in the face of death.

  “Nasir.” Zafira was hurrying to him, the green of the Jawarat serene in the chaos. She shoved it into his hands. “Keep this safe.”

  “Me?” he asked warily.

  She lifted her hands, already nocking another arrow. “I’m wearing a dress.”

  He stared down at the book, wondering if he imagined it judging him, and shoved it securely into his robes. The Lion shouted orders. Nasir sank his gauntlet blade into one of the silver-cloaked idiots who had joined the wrong side and melted into the surge of people escaping the palace.

  Until he was yanked by the collar to a small column of space between the doorway and the corridor.

  “All that time away, and you’re still shorter than me,” Altair remarked from the shadows. “How was the performance? Do you think my baba was pleased?”

  The blood on his face was even more gruesome up close. Forget blood. The realization sank in: He had lost an entire eye.

  Movement drew Nasir’s attention to a figure now clinging to Altair’s neck—a child, dark-haired and starved. The Demenhune wazir’s son. Rimaal, Nasir had completely forgotten about the boy they’d kept in the palace dungeons. Altair, on the other hand, had always been partial to children and their innocence.

  “Was turning your back on us a performance, too?”

  Or was it real? He couldn’t bring himself to ask, not when he knew in his bones that it was not. It could never be. Altair did nothing without a reason.

  “I could have killed you,”
Nasir growled when he didn’t answer. Haytham’s son ducked his face into the general’s neck.

  “What’s one more attempt?” Altair said.

  There was an edge to his voice, a bitterness similar to the one Nasir had encountered in the Lion’s hideout. Chaos continued to unfold, screams continued to flay his sanity, and yet Nasir didn’t move.

  He owed Altair an explanation.

  “We didn’t want to leave you. On Sharr. By the time we realized you weren’t on board, we had already weighed anchor,” he said. “And we couldn’t risk losing the other hearts.”

  He withheld the full truth. He couldn’t let their mother take the blame.

  Altair considered him. If he read between the lines, he said nothing of it. “Just know that had I been in your shoes, I would have found a way to save both.”

  Nasir didn’t doubt it. “That’s why I deal in death.”

  “Only one of us could have the brains.” Altair’s eye closed and opened in what Nasir realized too late was a wink. He cursed himself when Altair looked away.

  “Wink at me one more time, and you’ll wish you never came back,” Nasir said quickly, relieved when his brother sighed in his familiar mocking, exaggerated manner.

  Nasir started for the crowd. Screams continued to split the air, shouts thickening.

  “Wait.”

  He turned back. There was a dagger in Altair’s hands, black from blade to hilt.

  “Is that—” Nasir started.

  “Black ore,” Altair finished. “Why I turned back when you told me what had happened to our mother. It’s the only way to stop the Lion, and…”

  “And?” Nasir prompted.

  Altair gave him a thin smile, a beat of reluctance in his stance. “End him, of course.”

  Nasir didn’t think. Only reached for the hilt, looking up when Altair pulled it away.

  “Always so eager,” he taunted. “We would be fools to face him now. Our efforts are better placed protecting the others.”

  “He’s used far too much magic for a dose of dum sihr,” Nasir said with a frown. By all counts, the Lion would be winding down from a peak, needing to slit his palm and draw blood again.

  “If only, brother. He’s armed with the si’lah heart. It’s inside him, as one with his body as it once was within the Sisters of Old.”

  Inside him. As a heart was inside his mother, pumping magic into her blood. As half of his heart, and half of Altair’s. It was exactly as he’d feared but hadn’t had the words to express.

  “I tried,” Altair said softly. The ground trembled and an earsplitting shriek made them both flinch. “We have to go. Let’s join the masses, shall we?”

  He sheathed the dagger and gripped the boy’s arms, entering the fray with a quick “Yalla, habibi,” over his shoulder.

  No, Nasir would never admit to missing the oaf. And yet he still wasn’t free of that moment yesterday when Altair had turned his back on him, because Nasir had lived a life wrought with deception. False smiles. Forged truths. Feigned love.

  He stared as his half brother disappeared into the fleeing crowd, ignoring a swell of emotion when Altair turned back, noting Nasir’s absence with a furrowed brow followed by a jerk of his head. Yalla.

  Nasir set his jaw. He had nothing left to lose.

  He waited while the last of the people staggered out of the hall, one of them falling with a stave to his back, twitching and gasping until Nasir slit his throat to end his suffering. He stepped to the broken doorway of the banquet hall as the cold hand of death combed the growing silence.

  Several high-ranking officials were soaked in crimson. The Zaramese wazir lay on her back, a stave through her heart. The Alder calipha’s pretentious abaya was now her death mantle. Loss stirred in his veins. Benyamin’s mother, the safi he had once believed to be his aunt. Gone. Immortality was a sham in the face of deliberate death.

  Power once rested in their hands, wealth adorned every angle of their sight. None of them remembered the shroud has no pockets.

  Nasir stopped just before turning away, stomach dropping at the sight of russet threads catching the light. Muzaffar. The merchant who would have turned Sarasin’s future.

  His eyes were unseeing, his short beard doused in blood.

  It was Nasir’s fault for mentioning the man to his father, for thinking it was truly Ghameq taking heed of his words and not the Lion, waiting to destroy his every hope.

  Across the newly minted graveyard, Nasir’s eyes connected with the false king of Arawiya.

  His father’s murderer. His mother’s ruination. The Lion had done it all with cunning and manipulation alone. What chance did they have now that magic was his, limitless and unchecked?

  If the Lion was ruffled by Altair’s entrance, he hid it well—something else haunted his gaze. Yet he smiled as a horde of ifrit gathered to him. “See to our guests, my kin.”

  One by one, they leaped to the open window and spilled into the night.

  CHAPTER 57

  Being rich and distinguished made no difference when people screamed. The endless corridors shrank, stifling and suffocating. The lit archways leading to the blue-black night were pinpricks in the distance, too far to offer any comfort as the stench of blood lifted bile to Zafira’s throat, sweat a sheen on her skin. She found Lana and tore her away from the Pelusians, her hand clammy in hers.

  “Okhti?” Lana spoke loudly.

  Skies, she was growing faint. Too many people. Too many smells.

  “Breathe. We’re almost out.”

  She nearly tripped on the sandals of the man in front of her and gave up, but at last they stumbled outside and Zafira doubled over, gulping down fresh air.

  “Khara!” Lana yelped.

  Zafira barely had the mind to reprimand her when she saw the dead body at her feet lit by the sconces along the wall enclosing the entirety of the courtyard. She snatched the man’s quiver and drew Lana to her side.

  “I’m afraid the worst isn’t over yet,” Kifah said, joining them. Zafira followed her gaze to the hall window, where the chandelier swayed as ghosts of the dead snuffed out wick after oil wick. The gilded window frame outlined the dark forms of ifrit awaiting a command.

  “Whoever broke that window needs to die,” Zafira groaned. She nocked an arrow into her bow. The arrows of the rich were less amenable than those of the poor, but how could she complain?

  “That would be me,” said Kifah sheepishly. “Bleeding Guljul.”

  Ifrit spilled into the courtyard. Zafira and Kifah put Lana behind them.

  “What were you thinking?” Zafira shouted as shrieks filled the air.

  “I thought we could climb our way out, but no one wanted to hitch their robes. Not even the daama men,” Kifah replied.

  On the sandy stone of the courtyard, the ifrit billowed and wavered, too strange to look at too closely. Zafira remembered when, on Sharr, they had taken Yasmine’s form, then Baba’s, then Umm’s. She couldn’t decide which was worse, but she knew with utmost certainty that she was tired and weary and ready to lie down and take a nap. She wasn’t battle-hardened like the others. She was a hunter who gutted an animal and called it a day.

  But what did the world care if one was ready for it or not? She took her place beside Kifah. Slowly, the rest of the Nine Elite did the same, hashashin and silver-liveried guards joining them. Even Lana picked up a sword.

  As the first ifrit began racing toward them, she comforted herself with the thought that though she might not be ready for the world, though she might die this night, at least she wasn’t alone.

  In moments, the courtyard fell to turmoil. The gates had yet to be unlocked, and panic built a suffocating dome around them. She paused with every shot, ensuring the arrow she fired was spiraling not toward a human, but an ifrit. A tedious task, for some of the wily soldiers shifted into men only to come up behind the susceptible and slit their throats.

  Kifah cursed, and Zafira whirled to her. “Ghada. I have to—”

  �
��Go,” Zafira said after a beat, and though she herself had said the word, it felt like a betrayal when Kifah rushed to her calipha and the Nine Elite. Zafira watched her leave, surprised to see Ghada herself battling ifrit with not one but two spears in her hands.

  Then the ifrit disappeared.

  All around her, people straightened in disbelief. A little ways away, Nasir rose from a crouch and Altair went perfectly still, a young boy at his side. A tremor shook the ground, loose stones rattling. Another tremor followed, and a third, almost like—

  Footsteps.

  “Okhti…,” Lana dragged out, fear high in her voice.

  An unseen hand doused the sconces, leaving only the light of the shrouded moon. But it was enough to allow them to make out the towering form of a creature, winged and beastly. Made of the same shadows as the ifrit.

  “What—” Zafira’s croak died in her throat.

  “Elder ifrit,” someone nearby said. She caught a flash of a tattoo. A High Circle safi. “Far more difficult to command, likely why the Lion never summoned any before.”

  The elder shrieked, loud enough to awaken every soul in Arawiya, and took to the air. It landed in the center of the battle, crushing a hashashin beneath its claws. A horrific stench tainted the air, dank and acrid, like burnt flesh.

  It lashed out, toppling people who were too slow to leap out of the way. Moonlight flashed on the black steel of its claws, and Zafira shoved Lana away. She looked back at her sister but shouldn’t have.

  She should have trusted Lana to stay safe.

  An ifrit flung Zafira to the ground, stave poised to impale. Lana screamed, and terror gripped Zafira in a fist. She threw off the ifrit with a kick of her legs and rolled away from the lash of a stave.

  She was on her knees when a shadow slanted over her, stretched by the moonlight. It was followed by a second, a third, and a fourth. Ifrit surrounded her. She turned and rose with careful stillness. Through her peripheral vision, she saw Lana too far away. She saw Kifah racing toward her, and dared to hope before a scream made the warrior look back to the Nine Elite.