We Free the Stars

by Hafsah Faizal

  He had watched the life fade from a thousand men, but never had he lost so many friends in a single mission. Benyamin, Zafira. Aya.

  Nasir studied him in a way he had never seen. It was how Benyamin once looked at him. It was how one looked at another that they knew as well as themselves.

  “You loved her.” His voice was quiet.

  Altair’s eye fell closed.

  “I saw the way you spoke of her. Of us. Of loss,” Nasir clarified.

  “I loved him more.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Altair’s grip tightened around the reins as Haytham’s son woke from his slumber. “It means that no matter what needs to be done to make the children of this forsaken kingdom smile again, I will do it.”

  Dawn gave way to morning, clinging to the edges of the earth as they pressed deeper into Sarasin, the towns silent and empty. As if fear ruled these streets, dread clogging the air.

  “We’ll cross the Dancali Mountains by nightfall,” Altair said.

  “And then home?” Haytham’s son asked.

  At least someone wanted to speak to him.

  After a hearty silence filled with nothing but the clatter of hooves, Nasir looked to the distance. “The sooner we pass Sarasin, the better.”

  Though Sarasin was considerably brighter than it was when he and the Lion first arrived, it was still darker than the rest of the kingdom. They stuck to the main roads, avoiding the shadows where ifrit might be, sometimes splitting up, sometimes pausing to visit the house of a spider, always vigilant. It meant they were seen by more people than Altair liked, including a little girl with ice chips for eyes that reminded him of Zafira.

  He had failed her. He had failed Nasir, who was burrowing into himself and shutting out the world once more, his already broken spirit slowly degenerating. He was only a boy the world had thieved endlessly, giving nothing back. Altair hadn’t seen a single wisp of his shadows since their escape.

  He was stifling his emotions again, caging his heart once more. Altair had spent years loathing the prince, but Sharr had changed more than the course of the future. Nasir stared at the remnants of the compass their mother had given him before this journey began, brushing his thumb across the fractured glass with the sorrow of a thousand lost souls. If someone had told him his brother was capable of such compassion, such tenderness, Altair would have laughed in their face.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me how I escaped?” The words were light, but he still felt the weight of the black shackles that had restricted him.

  Nasir reluctantly eyed Altair’s red wrists. “How did you escape?”

  “Let it be known that I am not one to shy from the use of tongue,” Altair said.

  Nasir released a long breath, but at least the prince was focusing on something other than misery. They didn’t have the might of Pelusia to quicken their pace; this would be a long journey.

  “Do you have something to say, brother dearest?” Altair watched him struggle between the desire to ignore him and the need to retort.

  The latter won. “No one wants to hear of the filthy things you do to get around.”

  “You, princeling, need to extract your dark little head from the trenches. I was referring to words. My impeccable sense of charm that transcends the likes of race.”

  Nasir ignored him, just like old times, but when did that ever stop Altair?

  After Aya’s death, the ifrit had come, spurred by the Lion’s command. There were far too many for Altair to overpower in the state that he was in, and he knew it. He was too weak, too drained. Emotionally and physically.

  So he’d held up his hands. The ifrit weren’t mindless beasts, he knew. He avoided looking at Aya, an unceremonious heap on the floor like a discarded doll, and gestured to their fallen brethren, prone and unconscious. At least, he had hoped they were only knocked out and not dead.

  “You see what happened to your friends?” Altair asked. They only blinked, but Altair didn’t mind. He was adept at one-sided conversation. Anyone who tolerated Nasir had to be. Conversing with ifrit was as easy as kanafah.

  “Don’t think I won’t do the same to you.”

  The ifrit paused to speak among themselves. If Altair made it out of this ordeal alive, he was going to learn their tongue. He blinked his working eye, vowing it now.

  “Look at you, chittering and scrambling around to do his bidding without a second thought,” Altair continued.

  They considered him and his words, and four of them looked to the fifth, clearly the leader of the bunch.

  Altair used that split-heartbeat of a distraction to lunge. He kicked down two ifrit and flung his arms, knocking two more to the floor with the weight of his shackles, buying him time when the fifth came for him with a stave lit aflame.

  He tsked. “Baba never gave you permission to hurt me, did he?”

  The ifrit arced the stave, uncaring or likely not understanding. Altair leaped out of the way, throwing up his arm when another stave came for his heart. It clanged against his right shackle before he wrapped his fingers around the ifrit’s neck.

  Footsteps echoed outside the door.

  Altair punched down the last of them and snatched the discarded scalpel and whatever other tools might prove useful as weaponry, pausing only to close Aya’s eyes before he crept into the hall.

  And came face to face with Seif.

  Altair wrenched the door closed on Aya’s dead body.

  “Bin Laa Shayy?” Seif asked, pale eyes flitting to his missing eye and away just as quickly. “What happened to you?”

  Son of none. Altair almost laughed. Akhh, do I have news for you, habibi.

  “Seif!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

  “Of all the places I thought I’d see you, the dungeons beneath the palace were not among them.” Seif was curt. “I came looking for—”

  “I know. So nice of you to rush to my aid.”

  Seif regarded him stonily. “You didn’t seem to be in need of rescuing when the Lion took Aya.”

  Altair stopped prying at the seams of the cursed shackles. “Did you believe it? Did you truly think I would turn my back on my kingdom after all I’ve done?”

  Seif’s scorn bled into his words. “What have you achieved? He stole Aya because—”

  “Aya is dead,” Altair snapped. “And everyone else will follow soon enough if we don’t make haste. Now, stop scowling and help me get these off.”

  “She’s dead?” Seif repeated numbly.

  Altair ran his fingers along the black ore, trying to read the Safaitic engraved there. Trying to keep moving, because grief had a way of latching to the idle.

  Seif only took one look at the shackles before he made quick work of them with his scythe and a few words. Altair stumbled when the ore fell away, revealing thick bands of red around his wrists.

  “That’s going to leave a mark,” he mumbled before fire surged in his veins, threatening to erupt. He gripped the nearest surface and clenched his jaw to near cracking. His skin glowed, white light burning beneath like a torch. He would bring this place to the ground if he wasn’t careful.

  Wahid, ithnayn, thalatha, he counted beneath his breath.

  “Shall we?” Seif asked, but Altair had turned back to the Lion’s room, where he’d found what he needed, black and sharp, but hadn’t had a chance to steal.

  “I have to get something first.”

  * * *

  After nearly a week on the road, the Tenama Pass finally widened to Demenhur, with its sloping hills and ablaq masonry, the technique of alternating rows of light and dark stone never a style he had liked. Snow still doused the land in white and cold, but the air felt different. Less biting than what Altair remembered. It tasted like change. Hope.

  Hope, he had learned, arrived swiftly, seeking to bloom in the darkest of places and in the most harrowing of times. That was what he felt in Demenhur.

  “We’re here,” Haytham’s son said softly, and fell against his chest wit
h a small tremor, the effect of a soldier come home. A gust of wind came at Altair’s back, and he was reminded once more of his twin scimitars, their phantom weights heavier than the blades themselves had ever been.

  May you find hands as caring as mine, Farhan and Fath. He had overseen their forging, slipped the smith extra dinars so the man would carve bin Laa Shayy right above the hilts. He wasn’t just the son of none, he was a proud one.

  Farhan and Fath had been with him through the thickest of battles. Farhan had won him a much-needed victory against the Demenhune army. Fath fitted well in a sharp-tongued huntress’s hands when she—

  Sultan’s teeth.

  As he ducked beneath the thick clustered branches of a lifeless tree, Altair threw open his satchel’s flap with a curse. He pulled out the Jawarat, bound in green leather and embossed with the head of a lion. In its center was a hole, the result of a dire injury to the one it was bound to, and if Altair were mad and a fool for hope, he would say the tome was gasping for air.

  Fighting for breath as it knitted itself together, right before his eyes—eye. Altair sighed.

  That would take some getting used to.

  CHAPTER 63

  Death wasn’t supposed to be so painful. Laa, it was supposed to be an end.

  At least, that was how corpses made it seem. Yet Zafira wavered in pain even while she lay on her back, something sharp stinging her nose despite the warmth in the air. It reminded her of Demenhur, and how the cold never really left no matter how loud the fire crackled.

  The only things missing were Baba and Umm and—

  A string of curses echoed in her dead ears. Then: “If she doesn’t wake up in the next two beats, I’m going to slap her.”

  Yasmine?

  “I’m beginning to see why she keeps your company.”

  She recognized that dry tone, the lightning-quick string of words: Kifah. Skies, the dead did dream. How else were her two friends conversing with each other?

  “Aside from my looks?”

  Dream Kifah barked a laugh, and a door thudded closed. Zafira couldn’t remember the last time a door had closed in one of her dreams. Perhaps the dead dreamed more vividly.

  “I can see your eyeballs rolling around in there.”

  Zafira opened one wary eye and then the other, blinking back against the onslaught of light. Only in Demenhur was light so white, so blinding. Everywhere else it streamed gold, glittering with enchantment.

  “I—I’m not dead?” Her voice was hoarse.

  A face framed by hair like burnished bronze pressed close, half hooded by a blue shawl. Warm eyes lit with emotion and rimmed in kohl, rounded features cast in worry, beauty etched into every facet of her creamy skin. Zafira ducked her head, suddenly shy. Laa, fear prickled through her chest.

  Because being daama dead was easier than facing Yasmine.

  A sound between a sob and a laugh broke out of her friend. “You’ve always been a corpse walking. No one else could be so boring.”

  Zafira looked down at herself, stretched on a mat, and remembered the shaft of the arrow protruding from her chest. The surprise she felt, even as her body succumbed to pain. How was she alive? How was she in Demenhur? Every thought tangled with the last.

  “What am I wearing?” she asked.

  Strips of gauze had been wrapped from the right of her chest to the opposite crook of her neck. The muscles in her back were strangely knotted, making it hard to ease herself up, but her dress was a bright hue of yellow, taut across her shoulders and a good length too short. It was no wonder she felt cold.

  “You were ready to die, so I thought you might as well go looking nice. It’s mine. Khara, you’re as ungrateful as ever. I cleaned you up and washed your stinking hair. Cleaned your filthy nails. I should have left you out to freeze. That would have served you right.”

  Zafira stared at her for a few breathless moments until she couldn’t hold back her grin any longer, yearning and jubilation and happiness because her friend was right there.

  And then Yasmine began to cry.

  Zafira choked on her pain when Yasmine wrapped her into her arms. Orange blossom and spice flooded her numb senses.

  Yasmine’s sky-blue gown hugged her generous curves, accentuated her ample bosom. She looked regal. She had always been regal in a way that everyone in their village understood. She was the sun in the gloomiest of days. The joy in the despondence of death. Life as a royal suited her, even if she was only a guest in the palace and leagues away from the suffering of the western villages.

  “Lana sent me a letter,” Yasmine whispered, “and I came as fast as I could. You were—you were bloody and still, Zafira. So still. My heart stopped.” Her voice was small and shaky. “I stayed with you. Even when they said it was hopeless, I stayed with you.”

  What was it Lana had learned from Aya? Only half of a sick man’s life was owed to a healer, the other to hope.

  Zafira didn’t know when Aya had lost the ability to hope.

  “If the archer had been even half as skilled as you are, you wouldn’t have stood a chance. You’re lucky you had Lana on the journey with you to stanch the bleeding and keep you alive until they got you here to the supplies she needed. She knitted you back together, commanding everyone like a little general. Poor thing collapsed from fatigue a little while ago.”

  Of course it was Lana. Zafira felt a swell of pride, until Yasmine pulled away and she caught sight of the familiar walls. The basin in the corner with its chipped edge. The mirror with its fissure that always stretched her eyes too far apart.

  This wasn’t the palace in Thalj. It was no palace at all—laa, it was a poor man’s house.

  It was her room. She was home.

  “Why are we here?” she breathed.

  “Apparently there was only one way to save you, and it was in your umm’s cabinet.”

  Or in Alderamin, Zafira didn’t say. Aya was bound to have tenfold of their mother’s collection. Ya, Ummi. Before, Zafira had lived with the guilt of not seeing her. Now every glimpse filled her with an aching, numbing emptiness.

  The reminder that she was an orphan was a wound opened afresh.

  “It’s strange being back, isn’t it?” Yasmine asked, misinterpreting her silence. “Like wearing an old dress washed one too many times.”

  It was true. Now that Zafira had seen the palace’s smooth walls and the sheen on its floors, she was painfully aware of her home’s every blemish. The dark veins of rot creeping from the broken windowpane she never had enough coins to repair. The armoire with its doors that didn’t sit right, cutting a shadowy gap that Lana refused to look at for fear of nightmares. The doorway that Baba would lean against as he wished his daughters good night.

  Zafira cleared her closed throat. “Was it Kifah who brought me in?”

  “If she’s one of the Nine Elite, then yes. They brought you here in one of those fancy Pelusian carriages that travel unnaturally fast. She’s the only one who stuck around, though.”

  “And the others,” Zafira ventured. “Are they … are they here?”

  “Others? It’s just us. I left Thalj to come here as soon as Lana’s missive arrived, and that was before Caliph Ayman returned from Sultan’s Keep. So I don’t know if he’s alive.”

  No, not the old fool.

  Altair, who had materialized in a halo of light to help them at the doomed feast after turning his back on them.

  Seif, who wielded scythes like the silks of a dancer.

  Nasir.

  Nasir. Nasir.

  Yasmine canted her head, her shawl sliding from her shoulder. “And here I thought I’d never see color on your cheeks. Are you all right?”

  Zafira nodded meekly, unable to meet her eyes for more reasons than one.

  “The snow’s still here, if you’re wondering.” Yasmine looked at her hands.

  No, Zafira hadn’t been wondering. She was thinking of Deen now, which meant Yasmine was, too.

  “It’s falling less. The elders hope the
change will be gradual, or the caliphate could flood.”

  Deen’s name rolled to the edge of Zafira’s tongue.

  She lifted her eyes and met Yasmine’s gaze that was every bit Deen’s. Sorrow stirred her stomach.

  “I know.” Yasmine’s voice was flat, the stiff line of her shoulders cutting. “I’ve known.”

  Zafira held still, trapped in a case made of glass. How dare you feel sorry, guilt demanded. How dare she, when it was her fault?

  “I came back here,” Yasmine began haltingly, “after you left. And I was … I was lost. I don’t know what got into me, but I went to the Arz, because I missed you so daama much, and I saw it. It—flashed behind my eyes. As if I were suddenly elsewhere. I saw Deen jumping in front of an arrow, and the golden-haired demon who fired it.”

  Zafira’s brows knitted. The Arz didn’t present its visitors with visions—it fueled their affinities, which meant Yasmine was a seer. If magic was restored, Yasmine would be able to see snippets of the future.

  The revelation made Zafira inhale deep, and she flinched at the sharp sting in her breast. At the change in the room. The charge that hadn’t been there before. She had expected it, but she had not anticipated the amount of pain that would thrive upon it.

  “I’m sorry,” Zafira whispered, and the chain around her neck heavied into a noose. “I’m sorry I didn’t love him enough. I’m sorry he died so I could live.”

  I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Sorry. Who could have created a word so callous, so insignificant?

  “I would never have let him marry you. You know that, right? If your hearts don’t beat the same, what does it matter?” Yasmine’s mouth was askance and razor-sharp, her tone dripping poison.

  Zafira held her breath, waiting for the lash.

  “That didn’t mean you had to kill him.”

  Zafira stared at her. Her friend, the sister of her heart. It took every last drop of her will to hold her features still and stoic, to keep from falling to pieces. Wars could wage and swords could cut and arrows could pierce. None of them compared to the pain of a well-poised word.