We Free the Stars

by Hafsah Faizal

  His gaze flicked to her and back to the road. “The later it gets, the less likely we are to find rooms.”

  “I can sleep outside.”

  “I thought you wanted to kill the Lion, not deliver him your corpse,” said Nasir, as apathetic as he had been on Sharr. “We need to change your bandages and find you a bed.”

  She shrank back. “I can change them myself.”

  “I’ve no doubt,” he murmured absently, slowing near a dilapidated inn. “I’ll see if they have any vacancies.” He dropped Afya’s reins and started down the path. There was a matching building to its left, brighter and more alluring, filling her with unease.

  Here we leave him. Make for the stables.

  The Jawarat’s urging shot her with fear. She called him back. “You can’t go in there looking like that.”

  He looked down at his clothes with a frown. How was it they had been on a soggy trail all day and he still looked perfect?

  “Like … what?”

  “Yourself,” she explained, holding back a laugh at his perplexed state. “We—Demenhune don’t like Sarasins.”

  His brows lifted at that. “So I should—”

  “Help me down. I’ll ask.”

  He took a fortifying breath before marching back toward her, but the sudden scuffle of boots across ice made him freeze. He snatched a bundle of rope from the stable ledge and she turned in Afya’s saddle, breath clouding the air, to find a group of men meandering down the road.

  They spotted Nasir immediately.

  “Marhaba!” they called with typical Demenhune hospitality.

  Nasir’s response was hesitant. “Peace unto you.”

  His accent betrayed him.

  “Come for a room, Sarasin?” one of them asked, lantern swaying.

  Nasir responded too softly to hear. That, or her pulse was suddenly too loud to hear anything else as they crowded around him, scrutinizing him. A few of them even turned back to observe her.

  “I know you! You’re the Prince of Death!”

  She held still.

  “And look,” another crowed. “The prince’s whore.”

  She did not think a handful of words could strip her bare as easily as a knife. Reduce her. Defile her.

  They are nothing, the Jawarat told her, but its voice was quiet, hesitant.

  “There is a price on your head, Sultani,” one of them said.

  Her blood burned, but she heard the unsheathing of a rough-edged blade.

  “Dead or alive.”

  Nasir’s voice was level. “A price set by whom?”

  “The king.”

  Zafira flinched. Word was traveling quickly—too quickly. This was a lowly village just beyond the mountains. It couldn’t have been possible.

  “Oi, you three get his girl. The rest of you”—the leader of the group swung his dagger—“kill the Sarasin dog.”

  If she hadn’t been watching Nasir, she wouldn’t have seen it: the shatter of his gaze, lit by the moonlight. The break in his composure.

  The men were quick to brandish their weapons. Swords. Rods. Mostly daggers. Zafira gripped Afya’s reins with white-knuckled fingers, useless. The Jawarat whispered in her skull, too frantic to decipher.

  “You know who I am. You should know you can’t kill me,” Nasir said, but there was something reluctant in his voice. The abundance of Demenhune made his silvery lilt more pronounced, more deadly, yet the men laughed. It was a drawstring being pulled tight.

  The cinching of a noose.

  Nasir deliberately wound the rope around his fist, giving way to an awkward silence until he looked up at them with a lift of his eyebrows as if to say This is your last chance.

  Three of them turned to her, leering, their gazes as debasing as what they had called her. She counted each heartbeat as it pounded in her ears, her jambiya pulsing against her leg, Altair’s black dagger in her boot.

  Zafira heard the snitch of Nasir’s gauntlets and his blades cut across the night, toppling two of the men and startling the third. Nasir’s rope-bound fist shot out next, knocking one of them out with a blow to his jaw before he whipped the tail end of the rope, tripping the other three. The last of them threw his crudely made spear, wincing when it clattered to the stone walkway.

  “Hmm,” Nasir said, assessing.

  He circled back, stopping only to pluck his gauntlet blades from the men’s thighs, giving the last a look that sent him scampering, his features illuminated by the moonlight. He wasn’t much older than Zafira. They were all young, but that didn’t surprise her as much as something else.

  The Prince of Death hadn’t killed a single one of them.

  He hadn’t even drawn his scimitar. He’d come far from that moment on Sharr, when he’d looked at her without a shred of life in his eyes and told her it was kill or be killed.

  Guilt made her wrap her arms around herself. She felt apart from the world, apart from him. Empty in a way that came with an act as irreversible as butchery.

  Do not be empty. We will fix this.

  She ignored the Jawarat as the men groaned on the cold ground and Nasir remounted Afya, turning them back to the main road without a word.

  * * *

  Nasir should have listened to the warnings in his limbs when he’d first turned down the road to this village. Once a threat, the Prince of Death now held out to common people the promise of treasure. A price on his head. A target on his back.

  Worse, there was an hourglass already running its course, for Altair would have left Thalj, his plans now set in motion.

  Nasir wasn’t meant to leave Demenhur and cross into Sarasin until dawn, when at least a sliver of light would grant them an equal sliver of safety, but now they’d have to plow through the Tenama Pass and spend their first night there. He couldn’t risk staying here another moment. Not with her.

  The snow was bathed in weeping moonlight, houses and buildings passing in a blur of intermittent lantern light. He saw those seven men—boys with mouths too big for their years—lying on the ground. The prince’s whore.

  Even when he was trying to do good, even when he wasn’t the one drawing a blade and stealing a soul, he was hurting people. Hurting her. Darkness slipped from him, streamed behind them.

  “Speak to me,” he rasped into her hair.

  Her hand fell to his wrist. “The moon likes you. See how she shines for you.”

  Something lodged in his throat, drawn by the sorrow in her lilting voice.

  “You’re not that,” she said after a moment, so softly he almost missed it beneath Afya’s hooves.

  “Not what?”

  “What they called you.”

  He stiffened. “I know,” he said finally.

  She only hmmed, acknowledging his lie.

  Afya never complained, though it wasn’t long before Nasir felt the strain in her muscles. By then, they were deep into the Tenama Pass. The night had thickened, howls from hungry beasts winding from the rugged peaks of the Dancali Mountains.

  The pass was a narrow length of darkness, a harrowing tunnel lit only by a shrouded moon. Uninhabited, apart from the sporadic tent erected in the shadows, fires lit and sheltered from the mischievous breeze.

  Nasir didn’t stop at any of them, even the one where a woman waved and offered food for the remainder of their journey.

  And then he came to a wrenching halt at the mouth of the pass. Afya was breathing hard, her sides heaving beneath them.

  Nasir dismounted and stared.

  “Sarasin,” Zafira whispered with a shiver.

  The darkness was absolute. The moon had tucked herself away, ashamed of those below. Pockets of light flickered here and there, too faint to be seen as anything but eyes glowing in a graveyard, and with the dark came the cold, a chill beyond even that of Demenhur.

  “There are ifrit here,” Zafira said, and Nasir remembered how well she saw in the dark. How well he could see now because of the newfound power in his blood, after years of enduring the fear that lived with
in him.

  He began leading Afya on foot, a hand on his scimitar, his eyes on their surroundings.

  They stopped in a village just small enough that they were unlikely to be recognized. The caravanserai was a low construction that sprawled beneath the moonless sky, horses idling in the courtyard along with a single caravan, the camels slumbering. It was solemn and silent, as forlorn as the rest of the terrain they’d passed, but it was open, and that was what mattered.

  “Wait here,” Nasir said, knocking back his hood.

  “Marhaba,” a short, plump woman in a roughspun abaya said when he stepped through the door and its curtains to a warm room full of patrons. “I am Rameela.”

  “Business seems good,” he observed.

  The seated crowd was subdued but boisterous enough, the food abundant. Another woman sat on a stool, the gold-dusted length of her brown legs on display. She played a ney, fingers sliding down the flute sensuously.

  The caravanserai owner eyed him, her face kind as she regarded his attire. “The sun never shows, but it’s nothing new, eh? People still need a warm bed.”

  “Are there ifrit?”

  “None around here. How may I help you, sayyidi?”

  “Have you any rooms?”

  “Aywa,” Rameela affirmed, smiling. “The moon ensured your luck—I’ve one left.”

  “Just one?”

  She nodded. “Have you a party?”

  “I’ll take the room. I’ll also need a woman—”

  Her smile flattened with disappointment. “We do not cater to such needs, sayyidi.” She gestured behind him. “Rana sometimes does, if you’re to her liking.”

  Nasir turned to the woman playing the ney, realization striking him far too slowly when she smiled coyly at him.

  “I—that’s—I’m not—” He cleared his throat. “I mean, I need a healer.”

  Rameela leaned back and laughed. “Don’t look so frightened, sayyidi. You should have said so! I will see to your injury.” She looked him over. “My husband is more skilled. Shall I fetch him?”

  “No, you’ll do. Only to change bandages.” Exhaustion tugged at his eyelids like they were stubborn curtains.

  The vacant room was down a dimly lit hall. It was a small space with a narrow bed and an even narrower adjoined bath. Cramped, but warm and free from mold and filth, and nearest the back exit.

  “Passable, sayyidi?” Rameela ventured.

  “It’ll do,” Nasir said, because he apparently didn’t know any other words. Rimaal, why was it so hard to carry on a conversation with anyone amiable?

  Outside, a few spindly trees scratched against the caravanserai’s roof like knives across bone. He led Afya to a low ledge so that Zafira could dismount more easily.

  “No killers in this one?” she teased lightly.

  “I’m still here,” Nasir replied wryly as he handed the reins to the stable boy, whom he assumed was the owner’s son.

  Zafira laughed, but stopped just as quickly with a wince and a low moan. Her hand closed around Deen’s ring at her chest, and Nasir found himself relieved at the sight. It meant she was thinking of something other than the book, other than death. Other than those boys.

  “You truly loved him,” Nasir said like a fool.

  She paused to look at him. “I will always love him, though never in the way he wished.”

  He didn’t know what to say next, so he said nothing.

  Inside, they found the caravanserai owner lighting a few suspended lanterns in the room.

  She smiled when she saw Zafira. “Yaa, so this is why you asked for a woman. Come, child. Rest, so I can see to your wound.”

  “Do you need help?” Nasir asked like an idiot from the corridor.

  Rameela tsked. “If you could help her yourself, you wouldn’t have asked me, eh? There is food in the front. Yalla. Go eat, boy.”

  After avoiding the patrons and the woman playing the ney as he downed a bowl of shakriyeh—the yogurt warm but the lamb sparse—Nasir returned to the corridor as Rameela was leaving.

  She regarded him differently, wiping her hands on her abaya. “It is a horrible wound.”

  “An arrow.” He saw no reason to shirk the truth.

  “It was mended well,” Rameela said, “but it has torn again.” She eyed him as if that were somehow his fault, and looked back to the closed door. “She speaks strangely at times, to herself, laa? Fatigue won her over, Sultani.”

  Nasir held still.

  “You hold yourself too proud,” Rameela said, as if that explained it. “But it was the scar that gave you away.”

  He stared her down in the cramped hall, aware that any of the surrounding rooms could hold a mercenary out for silver. Aware that Zafira could be lying in a pool of her own blood because he was a fool to have left her.

  Rameela wagged her finger at him. “Any boy beneath this roof is to be treated as my son, prince or not,” she said with mock sternness.

  Nasir exhaled in relief. Had she heard his father was dead? That he was no longer a prince, but a displaced sultan himself?

  “The bed’s a narrow fit, but there’s space in the room for a bedroll, should you like one.”

  He thought of what the men in the small Demenhune town had called Zafira, and declined.

  “The hall is fine,” he said, not bothering to elaborate in Rameela’s expectant silence.

  “Right, then,” she said. “There is one detail I wish to know, if you are to stay the night. You are the prince, but who is she?”

  Zafira had shared nothing at all, it seemed.

  “Demenhur’s legendary Hunter.”

  She laughed softly. “I should not be surprised the Hunter was a girl all along.”

  CHAPTER 80

  In the end, Rameela pitied Nasir and, after assuring him that she would keep watch over Zafira through the night, showed him to a small room used to store spare covers and other odds and ends. It was cramped, but the door had a lock and her son left him a bedroll before the tiny fireplace, so it served its purpose.

  He was dreading the moment when he’d tell Zafira that he had orders to stop in Leil. That he didn’t, in fact, leave Thalj solely for her and would not be taking her to Sultan’s Keep. Khara, he should have been a little more up front about that bit. He had finally convinced himself to close his eyes—the word “dog” pounding in his skull in time with his breathing, Zafira straight-backed and unflinching atop Afya as the men sneered at her—when a flash of silver knifed the dark room.

  And materialized into a woman.

  Nasir sat up. “Doors were made for knocking.”

  The Silver Witch’s lips twitched into a faint smile. “And yet a locked door never stopped you.”

  The edges of his mouth ticked upward, briefly, as the fire rioted in the quiet. He looked to her hands, but they were empty, no papyrus in sight. Why was she here, if not for Altair’s missive?

  “Did you find the people you needed on the Hessa Isles?” Nasir asked. How else could she have materialized in this room, idiot? But he’d spoken the words as an apology, the closest he would go to atone for his coldness on board Jinan’s ship, and he wondered if she would understand. If she would accept it.

  She bobbed a nod, for that was how mothers were. “My immortality is no longer at risk. I have regained my powers.” She paused. “I heard the Lion has taken the throne. So I came to … to…”

  Nasir saw the mother he knew in the uncertainty crowding her mouth and the concern mellowing her harsh gaze. He heard the question she asked in the silence. The reason she had come to him, and not Altair, as planned.

  “He died,” he said.

  With his eyes closed, her broken exhale was infinitely worse. With his eyes closed, he could dare to imagine both his parents were here in this room in this moment.

  “He said—” Nasir stopped. What were these feelings so taut in his throat? When had he begun to suffer so much? “He thinks of you when the moon fills the sky.”

  Nasir slipped the pie
ces of the broken medallion from his pocket and placed them in her hand. The remnants of the Lion’s control. The gift to her beloved that had proved deadly.

  She whispered a word and fled to the hearth, her cloak catching wisps of firelight. As if she could mend herself with every last spark. As if she could turn the tides of the world. He had believed that, once. When he was young and lost and believed in the safety of his mother’s skirts.

  She, unlike Nasir, had been born to lead. She had been born with a place in the world. And she had given that to him, too, until the Lion came and took it all away. Now he was poised to take away more. Far more.

  “Si’lah are solitary creatures, drawn to assisting the weak. I was young, naive. I did not understand that ‘solitary’ does not mean bereft of companionship. I wanted more than to reign as a warden with an iron fist over the ones who had wronged Arawiya. I reversed the sentences of those imprisoned on Sharr even as the walls of my fortress barred magic. I gave them jobs, homes, allowed them to live as those on the mainland did. And yet I was alone.”

  He’d seen proof of it, in the ruins of the island. The edifices too elaborate, too luxurious for the incarcerated. In the hollowness of her words, Nasir found the answer to a question he had long asked himself: Was it possible to be surrounded by life yet feel nothing but the emptiness of death?

  “I wanted and I was weak. I desired to be loved and understood. He preyed on me. Stripped me of my defenses, exploited my weaknesses. He used me in every possible way even as I deluded myself into thinking I was in love.

  “I had never known loss as deep as what I felt on the day of my Sisters’ deaths. The day I fled Sharr and stopped at each of their palaces: Demenhur, Zaram, Pelusia, Alderamin, to tear their thrones apart. Of the five Gilded Thrones, only one remains. The one he sits upon now was never mine, for I’d never had one. It was Afya’s.”

  Her favorite of the Sisters of Old.

  “I dragged that throne to the old city of Sultan’s Keep and cemented my reign, appointing my Sisters’ most trusted as caliphs. This is what you hear of my reign. The change I wrought, the ropes I held to keep our fragile kingdom from falling apart. But there is only so much one can salvage of a ruin, isn’t there, my son?