We Free the Stars

by Hafsah Faizal

  Zafira brushed her knuckles over the ache in her chest. If only wishes were things she could make real. If only pain were like lint on a shoulder, easily brushed away.

  “Misk is a bookkeeper, I said. His pockets are lined with silver because the flour merchant’s men pay well.” Yasmine was trying to force anger into the words, but it had already worn away, agony in its place. “You know what I’ve always wanted.”

  Zafira had known forever: a normal life. Her parents had been apothecaries in the army, her brother a soldier. The sister of her heart disappeared into the Arz every day. The same sister’s mother had murdered her own husband.

  Misk promised what she had always dreamed of: simplicity.

  Yasmine laughed without mirth. “It was all a lie. He came to Demenhur for you. To spy on me. To befriend me and learn about you, the Demenhune Hunter. I was supposed to be flattered that he fell in love with me along the way.”

  Zafira froze, remembering what Benyamin had said on Sharr. Misk was one of his spiders—one of Altair’s spiders. Still, she held her tongue; the last thing Yasmine needed was to think Zafira had known about Misk before then.

  “He could have been a murderer, a cutthroat, the worst of the worst, and I wouldn’t have cared, if only he’d give me his truths,” Yasmine murmured.

  Because lies were what had thrived in the relationship between Yasmine’s parents. Zafira had seen proof of it, when Yasmine’s mother would come to their house, tears charting paths down her cheeks.

  “Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe it was a secret he had to keep,” Zafira ventured. Guilt churned through her afresh. Was this, too, her fault in a way?

  Yasmine stiffened, and Zafira knew it was the wrong thing to say.

  “Am I incapable of keeping a secret?” Yasmine asked. “Did I not hold yours for years? Had it been mine, I would have told him long before our wedding vows.”

  Zafira kept every movement of hers slow and careful, even her nod.

  Yasmine drew her lower lip into her mouth, and Zafira wished she could hold her. She wished her friend didn’t feel the need to steel her spine before her.

  “I don’t doubt that he loves me,” Yasmine continued. “He’s kind, and he’s good, and I might be overreacting—this might be the only secret he will ever have, but I’ve lost enough to lose my heart twice. What if it does happen again? What if there are more secrets and a child between us?” Her voice went quiet. “I was too young. I am too young. So eager to call myself a woman, when I’m only a child myself.”

  A month. That was how long it had taken for a secret to tear the newlywed couple apart. Yasmine was too young. Zafira remembered the wedding, an ethereal moment suspended in time. The intensity in Misk’s eyes, and the words he spoke to her. Most of all, she remembered envying the man taking her friend away from her.

  “Wretched” was too small a word to describe how Zafira felt.

  “That’s not you talking,” she said. “You’re Yasmine Ra’ad. The girl without rue.”

  The last Ra’ad left. Zafira’s fingers closed around the ring at her neck. Yasmine’s eyes, wet and still cautious, followed.

  “People change when they pick themselves up and piece themselves together again. Look at you—you’ve shattered so many times, I barely recognize you anymore.”

  Yasmine downed the rest of her qahwa, the thud of her cup a decree in the silence. She was still angry. Angry and in pain.

  “We both agreed we need some time apart. I don’t want to say goodbye. Does that make me a bad person? For not leaving him?”

  Zafira hid her relief with a shake of her head. “It means you love him enough that you’re willing to make it work.”

  Yasmine held still, her gaze off to the side. What do you know of love? Zafira imagined her asking in the silence. You couldn’t even love the man who loved you. Zafira wavered. And then Yasmine crumpled, shoving a hand to her mouth.

  “I miss him,” she breathed. “I’m so angry, Zafira, but I miss him. I miss you. I miss what we had, and what we could have.”

  Outside, Arawiya was falling to a ruin even darker than the Arz. Zafira did not know if Nasir and Altair lived. She did not know if magic would ever return.

  Still, she found the words slipping out of her mouth, chasing what they once had, trying to remind Yasmine that though she had lost her brother and maybe even her husband, she still had Zafira. She would always have her. “If we were in a story, what would happen?”

  A tiny smile broke Yasmine’s resolve, breaking a wider one out of Zafira. Yasmine, who was never sad, who was always full of emotion and bursting with passion.

  They had played this game time and time again. She could almost mouth the words as Yasmine spoke of the half Sarasin, half Demenhune man she had desired for months in a way Zafira had never understood.

  “A bookkeeper would sweep me away with his good hair and good taste. He’d be tall, of course,” she recited, and Zafira, as always, refrained from commenting on Yasmine’s height, or the lack of it. “Skilled in matters of importance that you pretend to know nothing about.”

  Zafira couldn’t tell whom the game was meant to benefit. “And? Is he?”

  “In every way but the truth. I hate lies.” Yasmine picked up her cup and swished the qahwa rinds. She didn’t look up. “Your turn.”

  “Mine?” Zafira asked, shrinking back. “I don’t have anyone.”

  She cringed when the words left her, half expecting Yasmine to say Oh, but you could have.

  “It’s theoretical. A game,” Yasmine said instead, gaze rising to the bandages wrapped around Zafira’s chest, flicking to her face, and she dared to hope: They could get through this, the two of them. They were making progress, if Yasmine could look at her now. “An escape from all this.”

  Zafira was quiet for a while. Her neck burned even as her thoughts raced. “He’d know his way around a bow and a blade.”

  Yasmine’s brows lifted.

  “He’d be my opposite, in every way. So contrasting that if you’d look at us a certain way, you’d notice that we’re exactly alike.”

  She didn’t dream. She didn’t believe in wishes. She was no romantic like Yasmine, but somewhere along the way, she’d grown partial to another soul.

  They were twin flames, twined by fate.

  “Heavy words,” Yasmine said softly, “from a girl with no interest in love.”

  The door swung open without a knock, and a liveried guard stepped back, formal and stiff as he announced, “Crown Prince Nasir bin Ghameq.”

  Her heart stopped.

  Yasmine dropped to her knees with a surprised yelp, lowering her gaze as a figure haltingly entered the room.

  Zafira heard the weight of his surprised inhale. The breathless murmur of her name that sent shivers down her spine.

  She saw the struggle in his limbs, the way half of him pitched forward, the other half holding him back. He still wore the fitted thobe from the feast, matted with dark blood and dusted in sand.

  “Shall I get down on my knees before you, my prince?”

  Her beautiful, bloody prince.

  His answer was a whispered invocation. “Never.”

  Yasmine made a sound, but he barely registered her presence until she rose to her full height. He blinked down at her, and it was impossible to believe he was unaffected by her beauty.

  “Forgive me,” he said hoarsely, and stiffly flourished two fingers from his brow. “I will, uh”—he cleared his throat—“I will return at another time.”

  He closed the door. Yasmine whirled to her, gaping.

  “That was … that was the crown prince. He looked at you—khara.” Yasmine stopped, and the room was suddenly very warm. “A moment longer and he would have torn every last bit of that yellow—khara. Theoretical, I said. Sweet skies, Zafira. Deen for the Prince of Death—”

  “Don’t.”

  The word cut harsh, and the room echoed with her command.

  “Don’t?” Yasmine repeated. “He’s—a monster, Z
afira. My brother for a monster.”

  Zafira would have flinched or fought. She would have been offended on his behalf. But Zafira had lived with Yasmine, and she herself had shared in that thinking, that the Crown Prince of Arawiya was not a boy, but a beast.

  Until he wasn’t.

  Yasmine left, and the door stayed closed. Zafira leaned back. What a fool she’d been to think a friendship such as theirs could be mended in an afternoon.

  CHAPTER 66

  In the hall, Nasir clenched his fist against the wall and dropped his head to the crook of his arm.

  The rise and fall of her chest made him want to weep. The sight of that smile he’d thought he’d never see again—rimaal. Crazed joy echoed in his limbs, crowded in his throat, worked his lungs for breath. Like a drunkard finally sobering, Nasir knew what had happened to him, and what her near death made him realize.

  He didn’t dare think the words.

  “Shukrun for letting me know before you shoved me down that hall,” Nasir said, trying to keep his voice steady.

  “I thought you’d enjoy the surprise,” Altair said, his face finally free of those terrible streaks of blood. “That was a short visit, by the way. Don’t you know what you’re supposed to do with the door closed?”

  Nasir pretended he didn’t understand. “She wasn’t alone.”

  “Ah, so you do know—”

  “Not. Another. Word,” Nasir bit out. Haytham’s son clung even closer to Altair’s leg. Nasir sequestered his wayward thoughts and burned them.

  The general shrugged, patting the boy with inattentive reassurance. “You know as crown prince, you can ask anyone to vacate the room, yes?”

  “As well as you know I’m not one for ordering people around.”

  “Could’ve fooled me—”

  “And here I thought we’d finally gotten rid of you.” Kifah stepped past the navy curtain, dark eyes bright.

  Altair made a sound between a chuckle and a strangled sob, and wrapped her in a hug, lifting her off the ground.

  She froze at the embrace.

  “I missed you, too, One of Nine,” he said.

  She pulled back and pointed at her eye, raising her brows without comment.

  “What can I say?” Altair asked in a nonchalant manner that suggested the opposite. “My father was jealous.”

  “Or exasperated,” Nasir said.

  Kifah snorted. “That is far more believable. Though that act of yours, when you’d turned your back on us? I was ready to fling my spear through your skull.”

  “I know,” Altair said, earnest. “I thought I’d convinced him that if no one else was on his side, his son was. Do you still think I look dashing?”

  Nasir tamped down a smile when Kifah gave Altair a look. “I never thought you looked dashing.”

  “Idris?” a new voice asked.

  The four of them turned to the doorway, which framed a man Nasir had witnessed through a fire sparked by dum sihr one too many times: Haytham. Ragged and weary, but alive.

  “Baba!”

  The boy stumbled and ran, and the wazir dropped to his knees, weeping as he drew the boy into his arms. The old Nasir would have scorned him for how easily his loyalties had turned. All it had taken was the trapping of his son, and the Lion had full sway over the second-most-powerful man in Demenhur. This new Nasir felt remorse for them both. Altair had the decency to allow them privacy, pulling Kifah aside with him.

  Nasir had no such qualm.

  Haytham looked up.

  “Sultani,” he said, rising hesitantly. He gripped his son’s arm.

  “We meet at last,” Nasir said. Haytham’s mouth twitched with a failed smile. “The Huntress looked at you with respect when you saved her in the palace. Why?”

  Had it been anyone else, Nasir wouldn’t have cared, he wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Haytham’s gaze flickered in surprise, but he should have known Nasir would notice. If an assassin was not attentive, he was dead.

  “Our interactions were scarce, but I’ve known for years that the Hunter is no man,” Haytham said, choosing his words.

  Nasir’s eyes narrowed to slits. “How?”

  “Ayman’s daughter. He cast her away, but I ensured her education and upbringing regardless, by dressing her as a boy. I recognized the signs.”

  Nasir hadn’t known the Demenhune caliph had a daughter, let alone a child. Was the caliphate’s bias so twisted that children were all but disappearing? But the regard in Zafira’s gaze made sense now. Haytham was a man of prominence, a path to ensuring that the women of the caliphate did not fear for themselves.

  “And yet you’re a traitor,” Nasir said. “The reason her village is gone. Her mother is dead.”

  Haytham was as much to blame as Nasir was. For it was he who had guaranteed the caliph’s whereabouts. He who had fled when the people suffered. The wazir pulled Idris tight against him—the reason a man as loyal as Haytham had loosed his tongue and betrayed the people he was sworn to protect.

  “If the people know, you will be stoned,” Nasir continued. If Zafira knew, she would break. Nasir knew well enough how painful it was for a gaze once wrought with esteem to lose it. He couldn’t allow that to happen.

  Haytham did not dare breathe.

  “Then we’ll speak nothing of it,” Altair broke in.

  The two of them glanced at the general in surprise. Kifah was nowhere to be seen as Altair’s blue gaze flicked between them.

  “It won’t discount what you’ve done, but we can all agree your death will do more harm than good, laa?”

  Nasir nodded. It wouldn’t be a difficult secret to keep. Only the three of them, the Lion, and Ghameq knew. And one of them was already dead. Forever. The word was a pebble smooth and laden.

  Outside, the sun was dipping behind the spindly trees, the cold deepening. Haytham used the end of his keffiyah to regain some composure and dropped to his knees. His son understood enough and did the same.

  Altair lifted an eyebrow. “You’re welcome.”

  Nasir said nothing, but when the boy snuck a glance up at him, he couldn’t help it: He smiled.

  CHAPTER 67

  Zafira woke to someone rearranging the cushions that had slipped during her slumber. She knew by the soundless movements that it was Nasir, and she opened her eyes the barest fraction as he lit the sconces and drew the curtains before rekindling the fire. Caring for her.

  Her monster.

  The last time she had spied on him this way, they were on Sharr and she had wondered when he would kill her. She had spent every moment awaiting the cool touch of his blade. Now she expected something else.

  “I know you’re awake,” he said in that voice that looped with the darkness, and she felt the familiar simmering low in her belly.

  She stretched, flinching when her wound throbbed dully. “You seem to enjoy playing nurse. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “I’m the prince,” he said simply, a note of teasing in his tone. A rogue lock of damp hair curled at his temple, hashashin attire neat and trim. She liked him like this, without a turban and the sheath of his sword, a single button of his qamis undone. It made her feel special somehow, that he allowed her to see this side of him. Unpresentable to the world but perfectly all right for her. “I don’t play the part of my inferiors.”

  You’re the king, she wanted to correct. The Sultan of Arawiya with a traitor on your throne. But she wasn’t ready for the light in his eyes to vanish. He sat down and crossed his legs. The brush of his knee against hers was a force made even more startling when he didn’t pull away.

  My brother for a monster. Yasmine’s words, rife with anger and disbelief, tied a knot in her stomach. That wasn’t what he was. Not anymore. Not to her.

  His fingers twitched, as if he wanted to reach for her hand. There was a nervous sort of energy to him—anxiety.

  “It feels as if I haven’t breathed since you fell,” he said finally.

  His gaze dropped and his mouth drew shu
t. This boy who had so much to say but didn’t know how. Whose lack of verbosity was something she once criticized.

  “It’ll take a lot more than an arrow to end me,” she said lightly.

  The corner of his mouth lifted, breaking the tension as neatly as he would a circle of harsha. It made her slide her hand closer to his the tiniest fraction. He noticed.

  Zafira wasn’t one to dream, to do much else beside the practical. But reposed here in this homely room, bereft of their weapons and stripped of the hood of the Hunter and the mask of the Prince of Death, she couldn’t help it.

  “They say the soul cannot rest until it finds its match. Then it ignites,” he said.

  Her breath caught when her eyes met the cool gray of his.

  “Do you believe it?”

  Do you feel it? was what he asked. Is it true for us? was what he wanted to know. When did he learn eloquence? Where did he find words that cut her as finely as a knife?

  Her voice was soft. “I want to believe it.”

  Once, all she had wanted was to see her village cared for, her sister happy, and the Arz vanquished. To snare a rabbit or a deer, sating her for the day. To know her people would live for yet another sunset. Now she wanted too much. One kiss had made her crave the next. Yearn for the brush of his touch, anywhere. Everywhere.

  She didn’t know what he thought of her answer, because the lines of his face were smooth even as tendrils of darkness wove through his fingers, whispering against hers as softly as a touch.

  “Zafira, I—”

  “Shh,” she said softly. He stopped, less from her command and more because of her fingers against his mouth. She didn’t want to hear what he would say this time. She didn’t want to hear those words again: my bride, my queen, my fair gazelle.

  Because they made her hope. They made her forget who she was in the vastness of this kingdom. Holding his gaze, she crooked one finger and swept it across his lower lip. His breath hitched.

  The door swung open.

  She shoved her tingling hand beneath her thigh. Nasir pressed a hand to his lips and stared at his fingers.