We Free the Stars

by Hafsah Faizal

  “A murderer,” Zafira said, void of emotion, surprised to learn her heart could indeed suffer more. “You’re calling me a murderer. This is a new low, Yasmine, even for you.”

  Yasmine crumpled in pain, and that was somehow worse. Because it meant she knew it wasn’t true, but she was hurting and wanted Zafira to feel the same.

  Couldn’t she see that Zafira did? She relived his death when the light bled gold across the desert, when a stranger on the street smiled without malice, when she passed stalls of colorful fruit.

  “I didn’t take him,” Zafira said, her voice careful and slow and—sweet snow, she sounded like Nasir. It was easier than screaming, pretending she felt nothing. It was easier to ignore the burn of tears, the guilt she felt guilty to feel. “I didn’t even ask him. He stood on his own two legs and decided according to his own daama conscience, and if you expected me to be his caretaker, you should have given me a wage.”

  Yasmine was aghast. “And now you have the gall to mock him. To mock me and my pain.”

  “Your pain,” Zafira repeated. “Your pain. He was your brother by blood, but he was mine by choice. Did you think I was happy when he died? Do you think I’m happy now? My best friend is dead. My parents are dead. My life as I knew it is gone.”

  “Are you listening to yourself?” Yasmine asked, voice rising. She threw the pillow aside and stood. “All I hear is me, me, me.”

  “As if you didn’t marry and leave us both,” Zafira scoffed, heat rising to her face. Anger clouded her head and made her speak so uselessly.

  “He didn’t die for me,” Yasmine enunciated. “He died for you.”

  “And I wish he hadn’t, Yasmine! I lived five years of my life with the guilt of Baba’s death. Don’t think I’m a stranger to any of this. Altair—”

  “Don’t,” Yasmine bit out. “Do not speak that name in my presence. I know it’s his. Misk told me enough to let me connect the daama dots.”

  Zafira had hated him, once, because of the notion that he had killed Deen. But when she learned that it was true, she’d felt sad instead. When he’d turned away from them at the Lion’s hideout, she’d believed it with a sinking, drowning certainty, but when he’d come to their aid later, his face streaked red, wrists raw and chafed, she’d felt remorse and contrition.

  She loved him in the way she loved Kifah, and she could not fault herself for it.

  “He is my friend,” Zafira whispered. Not the way Yasmine was, not the way Deen had been, but enough that her heart could not summon hate, not anymore. “And I will say Altair’s name as I see fit.”

  Yasmine whirled, but Zafira beat her to it, clenching her jaw against the sting of her wound as she rose to her feet and threw open the door, slamming it in Yasmine’s face.

  Kifah lifted her brows from the hall, where she would have heard every last word. “Already bustling about, I see. It’s good to have you back.”

  She tipped her head toward the other room, Umm’s room, and Zafira found Lana asleep inside, beneath a mound of blankets, the soft pink one Yasmine had gifted Umm tucked beneath her chin.

  “Zafira?”

  She paused. Kifah never called her by her name.

  “I am bound by duty to the Nine Elite, but I am bound to you by honor. Did you think I’d forget you saved my life?”

  The events of Sharr seemed far and foreign, a story rooted in the past, an adventure that seemed less wrought in danger than the reality they faced now. Zafira had forgotten it. Or she would have thought twice before firing her last arrow.

  “My blade is yours. Until every last star is freed, we are bound.”

  Zafira warmed at the ferocity in Kifah’s dark eyes, her promise a harsh line across her brow. “Does that make us friends?”

  Kifah laughed. “A thousand times over.”

  And though Zafira would never forsake her friendship with Yasmine for anything in the world, even now, when she had flung as much pain as Yasmine had flung back, it was a relief to befriend someone as carefree as Kifah, as if her vengeance had encompassed her so deeply that nothing else was ever allowed to fester.

  “What about the others?”

  “You mean your prince,” Kifah said smugly.

  “I meant your general.”

  “Oi, I told you,” Kifah protested, and Lana stirred at the bark of her laugh.

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t love him.”

  “Laa, and that doesn’t mean you don’t love his grumpy brother.”

  It felt dangerous to let the words simmer without denying them. A refutation clambered up her throat, but she swallowed it back down. She hadn’t almost died to live a life bereft of danger.

  Kifah sombered quickly. “I see those bloody streaks on his face every time I blink. You know what’s worse? My first thought at the sight of them was What if it’s a lie?” She looked down. “I’ve never felt such shame.”

  Zafira pursed her lips. The two halves of herself were at war with each other. Half of her knew that Altair had dedicated decades to this cause. To Arawiya’s restoration. He couldn’t have climbed up the ranks to the sultan’s right hand without an atrocity or ten. His every act was deliberate, done for the good of the kingdom. She knew this, and yet the other half of her was trapped trying to decipher why he had turned away when he’d had every opportunity to aid them.

  “No word from anyone,” Kifah continued. “Nor did I see either of them when we were escaping, only Seif, who told us to head for the palace in Thalj to recoup, though he didn’t know you were alive. We had to detour here, and we’re lucky we had Ghada’s carriage to quicken our pace, but we’ll circle back when you’ve recovered, and hope they’re waiting for us.”

  The moments leading to Zafira’s near death still echoed like a terrible dream, but standing in her old home with the ghosts of her life was somehow worse. The emptiness yawned, hungry and cold.

  Kifah followed her to the foyer. “The Lion hasn’t wasted any time. He dropped the taxes, and so the riots have stopped. There’s even talk of a new caliph being appointed in Sarasin soon. It’s only been four daama days.”

  Her words made it harder for Zafira to breathe, but they made sense, didn’t they? The Lion had created those riots. He had raised taxes. He’d refused Sarasin a new caliph. All so he could take on the guise of being lenient when he became king.

  She loosed a breath. Lana’s stack of books sat on the majlis, the latest pamphlet of al-Habib at the very top. Baba’s coat hung near the door, the hook beside it empty, and she felt her cloak’s absence acutely. Four days. Zafira snatched a shawl and her boots.

  “Where are you going?” Kifah asked.

  “Outside,” Zafira replied, not knowing it was worse.

  CHAPTER 64

  Saraab, they had called the western villages of Demenhur once. Before magic left and the snow infiltrated their lives. The old name translated to “mirage,” for that was what the sparse villages were, a haven for stray bedouins or sailors on their way to the Baransea shore.

  Zafira always found it strange that there were two meanings to the old name, the second being “phantom.” As if whoever named the villages had known that it would one day become this.

  A village of ghosts.

  “Easy,” Kifah called when Zafira stumbled down the steps leading from her house. Her voice echoed eerily in the emptiness.

  A breeze wound through the dry limbs of the trees, welcoming Zafira—accusing her. For in all seventeen years that she had lived here, not once had ill befell them.

  Until she left.

  The cold was instant, a familiar sting in Zafira’s nose and a crackling across her cheeks, a whisper of memories from the last time she had stood amid snow. Umm was alive. Yasmine was smiling. Deen was by her side. A hood had shrouded her head and a cloak had hidden her figure. There was an almost dizzying sensation inside her now. As if she were transitioning between two moments, past and present.

  She had been two people then, but if she was being honest with herself,
she was more Demenhune Hunter than anything else. A mystery to the people, an empty shell until she donned her cloak. Everything had been stripped away on Sharr, leaving nothing but that empty shell behind.

  She was just Zafira.

  “Oi, it’s freezing. Do you want me to stay?” Kifah asked.

  Zafira shook her head. “I just need to breathe.”

  “Right. But have a care, eh?” she said with a pointed glance at her chest.

  Zafira waved her off.

  Who was she now? What purpose did she serve in the world?

  Change hung in the air, making the sun’s rays a little bit different, and her steps faltered when she saw it.

  The nothing in the distance.

  No enticing shadows, no breathing black. A simple plain of snow cut into blue seas, a horizon bereft of the Arz. That darkness that had defined her. That had made her who she was.

  Now she was an archer without a target. A girl without a home. A soul without a purpose.

  Zafira turned and hurried away. The street leading to the sooq was white and empty, and her shawl did nothing to ward her shiver as the ghosts of her village spooled to her side, following her past one house, then a second. The third. Ghosts don’t exist, Deen said in her head.

  Ice scraped the bottoms of her boots, cold and relentless. Not even the downiness of snow had survived the massacre.

  The buildings surrounding the sooq held a dark and maddening silence. This was the jumu’a where Yasmine’s wedding had taken place, a moment that felt rooted in some long-ago past. How many times had Zafira stridden past the windows of Araby’s sweet shop, annoyed at her people for smiling and laughing as the cold clouded their every exhale?

  Now she missed it with a bone-deep sorrow. She could hear phantom laughter, the joyous shouts of children, the hustle and bustle of her people. If she walked three steps to her right, she would be able to make out the lavender door to Bakdash. A few steps to her left, and the thin baker’s windows would stretch wide.

  The wind moaned again, lamenting, lamenting.

  “It’s all my fault,” she whispered, sinking to her knees on the gray jumu’a, snow drenching her clothes.

  Footsteps crunched along the ice-speckled stone, and a weight lifted because she knew that gait, those whispering footfalls. She turned to meet Nasir’s gaze, to find understanding, reason, something.

  No one was there.

  Shivers racked her body. She was cold, so, so cold.

  Her life had fallen apart without even her to witness. These were the people her father had taught her to feed, to care for. They had died because they had breathed.

  I’m sorry, Baba.

  Resilience flowed through a woman’s veins as fervently as her blood, Umm had always said. It was what held together the frayed edges of Zafira’s sanity, but endurance, like all else, had its limits.

  It was suddenly too much.

  She curled into herself, clamping her mouth closed to stave her scream.

  Pain flared from her wound. A cry tore from her lips, unleashing the dam that she’d kept patching and patching over the years, failing to notice as it overflowed. One tear became ten, and then she couldn’t stop.

  A small shadow fell over her.

  “Okhti?”

  “I did everything. Everything I could possibly do,” Zafira gasped out. “Why? Why wasn’t it enough?”

  Lana pulled her to her chest, and somehow, the tears fell faster, harder. She was supposed to be the stronger one. The one to hold them together.

  “The world has no right sitting on your shoulders, yet you’ve given it more than you will ever owe,” Lana whispered. “You’ve done for it what a sultan would require a throne, a crown, and a thousand men to accomplish.”

  You are very much its concerned queen.

  It felt decades ago that the Silver Witch had proclaimed those words. Zafira was queen of nothing now, an orphan in every manner.

  “You can cry,” Lana said gently. “It helps.”

  Zafira sputtered a laugh, and then Lana’s face broke. She threw her arms around Zafira, forgetting all about the wound she had carefully bandaged.

  “Yaa, Okhti. You were just … there. You wouldn’t move, you barely breathed.”

  “And yet you were as brave as I knew you’d be,” Zafira said softly, shivering at her haunted tone. “If not for you, I would have been lost.”

  “But you’re here now. You’re here. And Ammah Aya was useful for something, at least. Have you eaten? We have no thyme,” Lana blabbered as tears streamed down her cheeks and her breath clouded the air. “But Umm had dried pomegranate on hand. Can you believe it? Demenhur hasn’t grown pomegranates in decades. They were so red. As red as your blood. And I—I—”

  Lana’s sobs were soft. She had always cried in silence. It was sadder somehow, as if her tears did not want to fall. To leave her. “I thought I’d lost you both. Don’t do that again,” she whispered. “I like the sound of your heart.”

  Zafira liked it, too, she realized, as the cold seeped through the knees of her pants. There was nothing like death to make one value life. “Never. You will always, always have me.”

  Her sister was still here and very much alive. Zafira herself still had breath in her lungs, and so long as the Lion sat on the throne, she would have purpose. So long as the Demenhune caliph railed against women, she would have purpose.

  “Get dressed,” Zafira said suddenly.

  “Why?” Lana pulled back to look at her. “Oh no. I know that look. We’re not going anywhere until you’ve recovered. Ah, you’re bleeding again.”

  “I’ll rest on the way.” They needed to regroup with the others. “We need to get to the palace.”

  CHAPTER 65

  Though much of the road between the western villages and Thalj was rough, the journey to the capital took less than three days thanks to Calipha Ghada’s carriage, with its sleek wheels and pulleys and other moving parts that quickened their pace in a way horses never could. But Zafira missed much of the scenery because her wound reopened, and Lana’s drowsing tinctures had her weaving in and out of lucidity. It meant she missed much of Yasmine’s scowling, too, but she wasn’t quite as sorry about that.

  The next thing she knew, she was propped against the carriage’s cushioned wall as Lana fussed over her bandages, something fine and sharp impaling her skin. Her body was scalding, but the cold wasn’t helping matters.

  “I didn’t get to see anything,” Zafira groused groggily, awake enough to see that her words provoked a smile out of Yasmine, which she quickly masked away.

  “I expected you to cry out,” Lana said tiredly, setting a bloody needle aside.

  Zafira’s vision swam again. From a needle? “Do I look like a man?”

  “You’re bleeding. Khara, this is why I wanted you to stay back and rest.”

  “No cursing,” Zafira scolded, and then she blacked out.

  * * *

  A fire crackled in the hearth of the large room, white walls carved with lacework flourishes and adorned with silver, gray threading the deep blue furnishings. Arches shaped the windows, unlit sconces between them. It was nowhere near as grand as the Sultan’s Palace, but its beauty was less sinister, less cruel.

  “You had a fever.”

  Zafira looked at Yasmine, and Yasmine looked back.

  “Even murderers get sick.”

  “Serves them right,” Yasmine replied, but the words were weighted with disquiet, strangled and wrong. “Kifah. Is she … your friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  “But not the sister of my heart,” Zafira said after a beat.

  A startled, relieved laugh broke out of Yasmine, faltering between them as quickly as it had come, replaced by Deen with a bleeding chest. With a ring in his trembling hand. Acting out of love until his body released his soul.

  Zafira held herself stiff, waiting for Yasmine to speak of Altair again. Or of Zafira being a murderer, Zafira not caring, Zafira dragging
Deen to Sharr and burying him in its depths. She inhaled slowly, smoothing the ruptures inside her.

  “I’m trying, Zafira,” Yasmine whispered.

  She was, too. But it was as Nasir said: Not every grief needed conquering. Acceptance was a feat in itself.

  “I’m trying to look at you and not see him. I can’t. It hurts, and I can’t.”

  A knock sounded at the door, and a girl swept in with a tray. She set it on the low table and poured qahwa from a steaming dallah. Zafira refused the proffered cup with a slight shiver. She had avoided the bitter coffee and those handleless cups ever since Sharr.

  “Bring her tea,” Yasmine said. “With mint, if you can.”

  “Sayyida,” the servant replied with a slight dip of her head.

  The girl left, and Yasmine stared down at the steam wafting from her cup. Zafira stared at her. The silence was a twisted thing between them with thorns and teeth, strange and foreign, and she wondered if they could ever return to what they once had.

  She would try, though. It was what Deen would want, she told herself. It was what she wanted. She couldn’t lose them both. “How is Misk?”

  The change was instant. Yasmine stiffened, a loose ribbon gone taut. Her fingers fluttered to her throat as she swallowed her qahwa.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?” Zafira said slowly, less question than command.

  Yasmine’s fingers curled around one another, nails digging into her unblemished skin.

  “Yasmine,” she repeated, voice hard. “Where’s Misk?”

  “We fought. He left.” She paused with a slant of her mouth. A snarl tangled in Zafira’s throat. He had left her—

  “Or rather, I sent him away.”

  Oh.

  The servant returned, and Zafira gratefully gripped the warm cup of tea. Anger etched scores between Yasmine’s brows, sorrow shaped the bow of her lips. Still, Zafira waited. This was new, between them. The guard in Yasmine’s eyes. This uncertainty, this fear that a misstep would cause the silence to remain forever.