We Free the Stars

by Hafsah Faizal

  She went stiff as the words struck. “Ifrit?”

  “The one that killed the caliph,” Yasmine explained sadly.

  Zafira was just about to open her mouth when something moved by the wall.

  Nasir sat up and held her gaze. Play along, he insisted with a nearly imperceptible shake of his head.

  How? she wanted to ask him, knowing what had happened to Yasmine and Misk because of a truth withheld. But the alternative was worse, wasn’t it? Calling herself a murderer, the very thing Yasmine had accused her of being.

  Her guilt was a cruel thing, laughing at her as she upheld the lie.

  “It was brutal,” she whispered against Yasmine’s hair, and screwed her eyes closed. That, at least, was no lie. It was brutal. She was brutal.

  Her skull pounded from the tension grinding her teeth. The blood had been cleaned from her palm. The vial, drained of the si’lah blood she’d traded Baba’s dagger to attain, was nowhere to be seen.

  Neither was the Jawarat. The thought was enough: Hunger opened its jaws, eliciting a shivering need in her limbs. Breathe. Her vision swam red and white, blurring as she tried to focus on Yasmine. The orange blossom of her hair, her gentle but fierce hold.

  Zafira had steeled herself against the Jawarat’s chaos and its need to control her. She had been prepared. But it hadn’t been doing either of those when it had spurred her to the caliph’s door—not directly. It had been trying to atone. To make up for leaving her.

  Sweet snow, what is this madness?

  Yasmine pulled away, her gaze cast downward. “For once, I was relieved Misk isn’t here. In danger.”

  Typical Yasmine, never thinking of herself.

  But he wouldn’t have been in danger, would he? Zafira would never have hurt him. Would I?

  Her friend recovered with a dramatic roll of her eyes in Nasir’s direction. “Your prince is here.”

  Zafira searched her face, gratified by the acceptance she found. The apology. The indecent twinkle that said she liked what she saw very daama much, making Zafira look away shyly.

  She had always marveled at the endless ways in which people met one another halfway. The offering of peace was as near as they’d go to an apology, she knew, for when people were close they rarely needed to use words.

  She smiled, a tentative lift of her lips with a thousand apologies in between. For Deen. For what I’ve done.

  Yasmine smiled back, wistful. I know, her look said, though she could never know the extent of Zafira’s deeds. “He sat in that corner for half the night and wouldn’t leave, even when I promised to keep you safe.”

  A maddening laugh bubbled up Zafira’s throat. Safe. The world needed to be kept safe from her, not her from it.

  “I can hear you,” Nasir drawled.

  “Hashashins,” Yasmine muttered. “Perhaps you shouldn’t try so hard to listen all the time.” Then she straightened, remembering who he was. “Kha—uh, apologies, Sultani.”

  Nasir said something, and Yasmine replied. Words passed between them, but Zafira heard the sickening hollow of the caliph’s bones being split in two. She heard the guards who had come to save his life screaming as they were rent in half.

  “—wake Lana?” Yasmine poked her. “Zafira?”

  Zafira found herself shaking her head. Yasmine pressed the back of her hand to Zafira’s brow and pursed her lips.

  “I’ll return later. Rest, hmm?”

  She gathered the folds of her blue abaya and left, while Lana snored softly and Nasir watched her.

  “That’s Yasmine,” she said, because she needed to fill the silence.

  “I know. She doesn’t like me very much.”

  “She’s Deen’s sister.”

  “I know that, too,” he said.

  “She’s a seer, and she knows Altair killed him. We can’t—we can’t let them meet. Not now.”

  This, he didn’t know, and so he was silent. Zafira dropped her gaze to her hands. Every sound was amplified and thunderous. His sigh. The whisper of his limbs as he moved closer.

  “Why didn’t you do it?” she asked finally. The fire in the hearth did nothing to warm the cold, cold hole in her heart.

  His fingers flexed in his lap. “Do what?”

  “Use your scimitar.”

  She had mutilated three men and still had the impudence to be hurt by the sight of him armed against her.

  “You were supposed to be with Lana. I didn’t expect it to be you.”

  There was a pause before it, as if that small thoughtless space encapsulated what she had done.

  She laughed. “You didn’t expect me to be a monster.”

  Laa, that was too tame a word for what she was. Butcher. Monsters could be misunderstood. Butchers did one thing alone. Nasir said nothing.

  “We can’t lie to people,” Zafira said, grappling for what little virtue she had left. “I have to answer for what I’ve done.”

  “You will be stoned,” he said without preamble. “You will die.”

  Outside, the sky was the darkest hue of periwinkle as the sun roused, pressing through the glass of her window. A limb for a limb, an eye for an eye.

  “Tell me how it happened,” he said.

  She lifted her head, surprised to see him so close, so intent. She’d told no one of the Jawarat’s vision. Of the fact that it had collected more than the Sisters’ memories on Sharr. What was one more secret in a sea of them? But this was Nasir, and she could not refuse him. Laa, she found it easy to remain true, to bare even the darkest parts of herself. He never judged her, he never pitied her. He understood.

  He mistook her silence, or thought to console her as he breathed a whisper of a laugh. “There’s nothing wrong with a little bloodlust.”

  She shook her head. If only.

  “Your mother called me pure of heart,” she said softly. “The Sisters, when I stepped into the glade where I found the Jawarat, called me pure of heart, too.”

  And more—their voices rose to her ears even now. Pure of heart. Dark of intent.

  Had they known, in their infinite wisdom, that she would come to this?

  “But when I fed my people, not once wishing for repayment, I was angry. I would look at someone and hate them for being happy. I would think of the caliph, and wish him dead so that women and girls wouldn’t have to suffer his bias. I would hunt in the Arz and crave its darkness, desire it because I thought it understood me. After it fell, despite knowing it would have killed us by the year’s end, I missed it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” Hysteria crept into her voice. Skies, look at you. Sitting and discussing her internal state with Arawiya’s sultan as if he had nothing better to do.

  “Why do you miss it?” he asked. “Because it shaped you in ways you never imagined? That does not make you a monster.”

  “You don’t—”

  “I know what it’s like to be a monster, fair gazelle,” he said tiredly. “And you are not one.”

  “Is that what the others said when they saw me?” she asked, a wild strain to her voice.

  “No, the others didn’t say that.”

  No, but they would have thought it. She would have thought it, if she’d seen someone splitting a man in two in his own bedroom.

  “The others are concerned,” he said, emphasizing the word to include himself. “That was not you, Zafira. This has nothing to do with wishing a man dead, because plenty of people do as much.”

  His eyes fell to the little bedside table, and her own gaze followed, pulse quickening. On it, beside a tin of wrapped malban, was the Jawarat. The sight of it brought on a wave of guilt, strangely detached and not entirely hers—as if it belonged to the Jawarat. What reason would the book have to feel guilty? She had done what it wanted. It had fulfilled its chaotic desires.

  If anything, it should be gleeful.

  “It’s been speaking to me since I bound myself to it,” she said finally.

  He was silent until she dared to look at him. “I
assumed as much.”

  “I thought—I thought I’d gained control of it. I thought we’d reached an understanding.”

  An understanding. As if it were a person. Not a master playing her like a puppet.

  “But I clearly hadn’t,” she finished lamely.

  He nodded slowly. “Altair has finalized a plan, and we’ll be leaving soon. One of us can keep it with us.”

  Yes. Keep it. She needed the freedom to regain her sanity, to remember who she was.

  “You mean to take it away from me,” she whispered instead. Pressure was building in her chest, fear and loss overpowering. What is happening to me?

  He paused at the stillness of her tone, gaze flicking to Lana and back to hers. “No one is going to take it—”

  She cut him off with a vehement no.

  It was hers. She wouldn’t give her clothes to someone else to wear. She couldn’t have had Lana wear her cloak while she went out on her hunts. She wouldn’t let Yasmine wear the ring Deen had given her. There was a difference. He didn’t understand. None of them did.

  “No. And neither do you.”

  Ever so slowly, Nasir leaned back, rose to his feet, and left—and it was only then that she realized she had said all of it aloud. Every last senseless ramble.

  In the silence, Zafira dropped her face to her hands and muffled a scream.

  “You’re awake,” Lana said sleepily as she sat up, clutching the blanket.

  Zafira clenched her teeth. She wasn’t ready for yet another confrontation.

  “They wouldn’t let me study the caliph,” her sister complained. “Isn’t it fascinating how bodies are filled to the brim with blood, yet our bones are pure and white?”

  Oh.

  “It wasn’t fair,” Lana continued as she slid off the bed and came to kneel by Zafira’s side. “After what he did to us—”

  Laa, laa, laa. Lana wasn’t supposed to be fine with this.

  “What, Lana?” Zafira demanded. “What did he do to deserve being murdered?”

  “You’re the one who cut him in half,” Lana reminded her with a scrunch of her nose. “I’m helping you justify it. But look at it this way: He was going to die anyway. Now … he’ll be written into history with quite the creative death.”

  Zafira lifted an eyebrow and regarded her tiny, murderous sister.

  The gleam in Lana’s eyes faded to a look of contemplation. “He stunted the lives and futures of thousands of women, Okhti. You and Qismah found ways to endure, but the others? Anytime I was with Ammah Aya before—before everything happened, when she commanded men in the infirmaries and waited for no one, it was a reminder of how differently we’re raised here in Demenhur. And that’s the caliph’s fault.”

  That didn’t make what Zafira had done any more right.

  Lana helped her stand. “Yalla.”

  “Lana,” Zafira whined as her sister dragged her to the antechamber.

  “He’s dead. You’re still you. The rest is up to you to fix.”

  “What rest?”

  “The imbalance. Inside you.” Lana smirked. “Then you can revel freely.”

  A bewildered laugh bubbled out of Zafira. “When did you become this wild creature?”

  “I was always here,” she said with a nonchalant shrug, but she didn’t meet her eyes. “You just never noticed me.”

  A spirited chuckle echoed from beyond the door—Altair. As if on cue, Kifah’s equally loud, dry response followed, along with several pairs of footsteps. They came close to her room.

  And didn’t stop.

  Zafira listened through the pounding in her ears, but no one turned back. No one knocked.

  We’ll be leaving soon. Sweet snow, they had finalized a plan and she wasn’t even a part of it. These were her friends, her zumra. Her family bound by resilience and hope.

  And they had left her.

  Laa, she had broken their trust.

  Zafira sank to the floor, wrapping her arms around herself as her wound screamed and her heart screamed louder. She was empty of feeling, a hole chipping wider and wider. A void of a disease by the name of loneliness.

  Bint Iskandar.

  She tightened her jaw. The Jawarat was the last voice she wanted in her head. She shot to her feet.

  “Where are you going?” Lana asked. “Wait!”

  Zafira marched back to the room and grabbed the Jawarat with an angry snarl. She dug her nails into the leather, and a dull pain like the blunt edges of ten knives cut across her back.

  The book was silent. It was the rued kind of silence that came when someone felt they deserved to be chastised.

  We only thought to please you.

  Its despondence was as peculiar as when it had led her to the caliph and asked to be forgiven. As if it had ceased its desire to control her when the Lion had stolen it away.

  “How?” she whispered. The caliph flashed in her thoughts, split in half like an apple in her palm. How could that please me?

  “Okhti?” Lana crouched beside her, draping a blanket over her shivering shoulders. “Don’t do it. Don’t talk to it.”

  Zafira shrugged away. “I need to fix this. I’ve—I’ve lost them, Lana.”

  “Lost whom?”

  “Them. My friends. Kifah, Altair. Nasir,” she finished in a whisper. You, for though Lana was here and concerned, she was concerned, and Zafira didn’t want her to be. “They don’t trust me anymore.”

  “Then win them back. You can’t undo what’s done, but you can decide the future.”

  The Jawarat stirred from its somber moping. The zumra has but only one wish.

  The Lion’s annihilation.

  We can end—

  No. She knew what the Jawarat would suggest. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it my way.

  Zafira straightened and looked at her sister, tiny and quick. “Can I trust you?”

  Lana studied her, as if trying to decipher if it was Zafira or the Jawarat that spoke.

  “Always,” she said, appeased by what she saw.

  “Do you know where everyone’s been staying? Which rooms they’re in?” Zafira flexed her shoulder with a grimace. She needed to rest and heal, but she could do neither, not with the caliph’s death on her shoulders. Not while the Lion lounged on his ill-claimed throne.

  Lana’s eyes brightened. “You mean the prince’s?”

  “I mean Altair’s. I need you to steal something for me.”

  CHAPTER 74

  It didn’t take Altair long to find Nasir. He dropped the roof’s trapdoor shut with a thud, tugging the collar of his robes against the cold.

  “You only drill when you think too much.”

  Surprise flitted across the prince’s gray eyes. Did he really think Altair didn’t pay attention? Nasir gathered his belongings and leaped across the rooftop to join him, setting his neatly wrapped bundle beneath the shelter of a latticed archway. He stared into the distance, the perfect depiction of brooding. Altair couldn’t understand why women found that attractive.

  “It’s Zafira,” Nasir started, slowly piecing his words together. “I don’t know if it’s right, allowing her to keep the Jawarat.”

  Ah. It was natural, Altair knew, to second-guess actions when one had lived a life dictated by orders.

  “Every deed has its outcome,” Altair said. “Doubt is inherent. The best of us merely manage to overcome the voice—”

  “If I wanted philosophy, I would have sought out the library.”

  Altair regarded him. “It’s time now for you to follow your heart. To listen to it.”

  Nasir slowly spun the scimitar before sheathing it with a huff that painted the air white. The boy’s nose was an almost adorable hue of pink.

  “Teach me,” Altair said suddenly.

  Nasir’s eyebrows rose. “What?”

  “Remind me what it’s like to use a single sword, because I will never use two again.”

  Nasir frowned. “Why not?”

  “Oh, because my father stabbed me in the
eye.”

  “I’m aware,” Nasir deadpanned. “But even a blind man can use a sword.”

  “Perhaps a blind man who doesn’t have a dark army waiting for him. There isn’t time. I don’t have the balance for two.” He didn’t have his scimitars anymore, either, and if he was being honest, he didn’t feel particularly inclined to find a new pair.

  Nasir nodded and stepped to the bundle he’d left beneath the archway. He carefully folded back the fabric and drew two scimitars. Altair’s heart stopped. The hilts were burnished gold, the perfect curve of the blades adorned with filigree and branded with names.

  “Sultan’s teeth,” Altair murmured, taking Fath from him. “Where? How?”

  “Seif, likely. I found it in the Pelusian carriage.”

  “Akhh, I could kiss him,” Altair announced, turning the scimitar over in his hand. He kissed the blade instead, and sank into a stance. “Parry me.”

  Nasir regarded him. “What makes you think I won’t kill you?”

  “You love me too much.”

  He caught the flash of Nasir’s laugh before he swung. Altair dodged it with shameful clumsiness. Both of his arms moved in tandem. They had mirrored each other for so long that it was habit.

  “Change is coming, brother. Are you ready?” Altair was aware he spoke to distract others as much as himself sometimes.

  “Death will come first,” Nasir said, lunging.

  Altair heard the approach of the sword, for turning his head to see out of his right eye took far too long, and ducked. “And then—”

  Nasir swung before he could finish, the hiss of his blade as cutting as the Demenhune air. This time, Altair parried it more swiftly. Nasir acknowledged him with a nod and swung the same way from his other side—Altair’s blind side. He parried a little too late.

  Nasir lowered his sword. “And then I’ll be king. Or sultan. I know.”

  “I always knew you were smart,” Altair teased, hefting the scimitar against his shoulder. In all twenty years of Nasir’s life, not once had they carried a conversation this long.

  This was an improvement, and Altair was proud.

  As with most of his rare displays of emotion, Nasir’s snort was a sound barely there.

  “Oi, it’s the truth,” Altair said. “You excelled in your every class, with every weapon they threw in your hands. You were eloquent. You were brilliant. And even if you weren’t, even if you were the dumbest child ever to curse the earth, none of it would have mattered, because you made our mother proud.”