We Free the Stars

by Hafsah Faizal

The crowd ruptured in surprise. Again, he looked to her, his fair gazelle. She was holding her sister against her, whispering something even as she held his gaze.

  “I am her son, but not her firstborn. I was raised a prince, but I wasn’t given the heart and soul of a king.”

  The buzzing crowd fell silent at this admission. The zumra’s gazes burned into him, questions rising in the quiet, none of them louder than his mother’s.

  “Her first son, however, was given both of those things. He has fought and bled for this kingdom, to keep the darkness at bay and our people alive even when all hope seemed lost. As I carried out the worst of commands, killing without mercy.” Now Nasir’s voice rose. It was a truth he would brand across history if he must. “If there is anyone deserving of the Gilded Throne and this crown, it is him. My brother.”

  Nasir inhaled a deep breath, gripping the rail beneath the full weight of what he was about to do.

  “Altair al-Badawi.”

  The effect of the name was instant.

  Joy swept down the ranks of the people gathered below, triumph in their shouts. He knew not everyone would trust that Altair was his brother. He knew there would be those who would search Altair’s lineage for the name of his father. Those who would challenge him.

  But for now, their love for him, and all he had done for them, would be enough.

  Nasir stepped inside, expecting bitterness in his veins, but he only felt pride. Pure and whole.

  He turned the golden crown over in his hands. “I don’t know if this will fit, but—”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Altair growled.

  Kifah was grinning ear to ear.

  “You are quite something when flustered,” Nasir said in full seriousness.

  Altair shoved a hand through his hair, mussing it even further and dropping his turban. He turned to the wall and gulped down several deep breaths.

  “If I take the crown—” he started, turning back.

  “There’s no ‘if.’ I’m not going to step back outside to say I spoke in jest,” Nasir replied.

  “What will you do?”

  For once, Nasir had an answer waiting. “Sarasin’s throne sits empty.”

  “Sarasin?” Altair asked, surprise arching his brow.

  Nasir’s answer was wry. “I am my father’s son, after all.”

  It was more than that. He vowed to begin righting his wrongs, and it was Sarasin that he had wronged the most. Sarasin that had suffered beneath his blade. Sarasin, where he had learned he could not live without her, as they had traveled and fought and triumphed as one, prudent and tactful.

  When he found the strength to seek out his mother, he found shock and understanding. Uncertainty, but also surety. There were tears in her dark eyes, not ones welled from sorrow, but those of pride.

  She said nothing, knowing she did not have to.

  Altair regarded him as cheers continued to ripple outside. “You’re more than that. We both are.”

  Nasir swallowed the sudden barge in his throat and struggled against the tantalizing fear in his veins that signified change. “If I didn’t know you any better, I’d think you were going to kiss me,” he said, pulling a page from the general’s book.

  Altair scoffed. “If you weren’t my brother, perhaps. That’s a little too much, Nasir. Even for me.” He looked at his trembling hands with a shaky laugh and wrapped his turban with haste. “Wish me luck, One of Nine?”

  Kifah couldn’t stop grinning. “You gave up your eye for Arawiya. Make your own luck, Sultani.”

  Nasir watched as Altair flicked his gaze, uneasy and fleeting, to their mother. The nod that was exchanged seemed indifferent, though it was anything but. And then the announcer was clearing his throat, prompting him to follow with a fortifying breath.

  Altair hurried back inside.

  “Wait—is my turban crooked?”

  Nasir smiled. “Just the way you like it.”

  CHAPTER 106

  He had been born for this. He had been bred for this. Zafira had—skies, what had he done?

  “Why do you look surprised?” Lana asked.

  “Did you not hear what he said?” Zafira shot back. “He just gave up the daama crown like it’s kanafah. He’s lived his whole life for this moment, for the crown, and he just gave it up.” Her voice was louder than it should have been. People were turning to stare.

  Lana tilted her head, a laugh in her eyes. “Because of you, Okhti. Didn’t you see?”

  Zafira closed her eyes, exhaling a slow, slow breath as Yasmine watched. Her stomach dropped, not because of Lana’s words, but because she knew she was one of the reasons why he had done this. Some part of her had seen it flicker in his gray eyes before he even opened his mouth.

  Altair ducked beneath the curtains and closed his hands around the burnished rail, his bare arms glistening in the full sun. People murmured of his eyepatch, threaded in gold. They murmured of their love for him.

  “Arawiya mocks me even now,” Yasmine murmured with some of her usual bite.

  Zafira threaded her fingers through Lana’s. Her sister, who had grown so much. Who would soon know how to heal with a touch. “What do you mean?”

  “He’s far too pretty to be a murderer,” Yasmine said with a sigh.

  Zafira grinned. Altair was light incarnate. Nasir was right about one thing: He deserved this. And a very different kind of pride swelled in her heart when the crown was placed on his head.

  “Remember when I stole from the sultan?” Lana asked with a smirk.

  Zafira let out a long-suffering sigh.

  CHAPTER 107

  The crown was placed on Altair’s head, and the written scrolls immortalized his coronation. He was sultan, he was king. He was a grand liar who had somehow earned himself a throne.

  He had lived in his baby brother’s shadow long enough that he was accustomed to being second, and so none of this felt real. It felt undeserved, despite what everyone said. It made him guilty to feel elated with the weight of the metal atop his turban.

  Altair had always intended for Nasir to sit on the Gilded Throne. It had been a part of the plan: Return magic, vanquish Ghameq, and nurture the young prince into the ruler Arawiya needed. But a crown on Altair’s head didn’t mean Nasir would be treated as any less than a sultan himself.

  Altair would ensure it.

  The procession made its way to the coronation feast in the banquet hall, ululations and drums ringing between the umber walls.

  “Where are you going?” Nasir asked, ever observant. “Your belly dancers are getting cold.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Altair said, plastering on a grin. “They won’t even know I’ve gone.”

  There was something he needed to do without a witness in case he faced the rejection he feared. He pushed his way to the empty hall, taking the steps by two, and stopped in the throne room.

  The Gilded Throne was still shrouded in shadow, the steps steeped in black.

  Altair straightened the collar of his thobe that he had tailored for his brother’s coronation and strode to the dais, his footfalls hollow, his pulse quickening when the steps remained as dark as the night.

  Sultan’s teeth. He laughed to himself. Those were his teeth now.

  He held his breath and eased himself down. A whisper unfurled across the room, a sigh almost. One of us, the throne echoed. No, not the throne, the Sisters. Relief wound through him as resplendent gold spread over the darkness.

  “Did you really believe the throne would not accept you?”

  The Silver Witch stepped from the shadows.

  “Did you doubt your blood?”

  Altair’s grip tightened around the arms of the throne, his knuckles white. “My own mother didn’t accept me.”

  “A sin I will forever regret.”

  He didn’t know why her remorse contented him.

  “Why? I was an amalgamation of your mistakes,” he replied mildly, but the words held less bite and more a bone-deep weariness. As if
the part of him bereft of her love wanted to believe her, and years of experience told him otherwise.

  “And it was worse to blame my wrongs on a newborn child,” she said softly. “If there was ever proof that good triumphs over the darkest of times, it is you. I will not ask for the forgiveness I do not deserve, but know that I will live the rest of my days with regret.”

  Altair considered the white mane of her hair, the loss she endured that no one would ever know the extent of. The power she had relinquished by giving up her heart. “Will you stay here? In the palace?”

  “I thought I’d had my fill of these walls,” she said carefully. “But if you’ll have me…”

  A flutter, in his chest.

  “Now that you mention it,” he said after a beat of thought in which he didn’t think at all, extending an offer of peace, “I am in need of an advisor.”

  His mother’s lips twitched in the faintest of smiles as the throne room doors swept open, bringing with it a gust of the revel and three others. His family. His zumra. His lifeline.

  Nasir looked surprised to see their mother, and Altair gave him a sardonic smile.

  Zafira bowed first. “My king.”

  Nasir followed, then Kifah, and Altair leaped off the throne and rushed toward them.

  “No!” he commanded. “You will never bow to anyone, least of all me.”

  Kifah smirked. “I only did it so Zafira wouldn’t feel awkward.”

  Zafira rolled her eyes, and Altair was struck by how much he would miss them. Ruling a kingdom was lonely like that. He couldn’t expect Nasir to govern Sarasin from Sultan’s Keep. He couldn’t keep Zafira from her home, or Kifah from her calipha.

  The others sobered, realizing the same.

  “Strange, isn’t it,” said Nasir, who was never one for contemplation. “How the darkness brought us together, and the light will let us fall apart?”

  Zafira shook her head, looking among them. “We’re not falling apart. We hunted the flame on Sharr, set free the stars across the skies, but it was only ever the dawn of our zumra. Now we make sure that light doesn’t go out. Forever. Together.”

  CHAPTER 108

  The safin of Benyamin’s High Circle would lift the blockades on magic at sunrise, and ease the people into the use of their affinities. A little bit more every day, Seif had said, and for the ones who wished to master the ability they’d been born with, the safin would aid them in cities across Arawiya.

  There was a time when Zafira had approached the safin with disenchantment, but now she was glad of them. Glad they were here, with their experience of living in a world of magic, so that they could do for Arawiya what the Sisters could not.

  Zafira left Lana in the palace banquet hall, where the girl was keen on trying every dish she possibly could, and closed the door to their rooms. Anticipation buzzed beneath her skin. Even the Jawarat hummed in excitement, ready for the inevitable chaos.

  We cannot help it, it said at Zafira’s reproach.

  She threw open the window as the knot in her throat became too thick to breathe around, as if she would be able to see magic flowing across the skies, reaching for her.

  They had done it. She had done it. How small she had felt leaving her village behind for a mirage that she feared might never be. And now it was here. It was daama here.

  Rest, bint Iskandar. We must be ready for dawn.

  Just a few moments, she promised herself, tucking the Jawarat to her side. She didn’t think she’d doze off, but the next thing she knew, the bed was shifting and a figure curled against her side. Heftier and taller than Lana.

  “Yasmine?” Zafira asked, cracking open an eye.

  Yasmine turned onto her back, lifting her chin to stop her tears. They trailed down the side of her face, falling to the shell of her ear.

  “I’ve never felt so empty,” she whispered. Her face was swollen, stained in streaks of sorrow.

  Zafira turned and tucked her arms around her and held her close, as if that could bring Misk back, as if that could fill her with whatever his death and Deen’s had taken.

  “If I hadn’t wished for time apart—”

  “No.” Zafira stopped her. “He would have done it regardless. He was tied to Arawiya and its future. That’s why he worked for Altair. He was a hero, Yasmine.”

  Yasmine sobbed. What had Zafira expected? For the Lion to die and all to be righted? It wasn’t only war that had an aftermath, but life, too.

  “You can add that to your list now,” Zafira teased with a nudge.

  Yasmine tried to laugh, but wept instead. And as the sister of her heart mourned the man she loved, Zafira was reminded of Umm and Baba. She was reminded of Nasir, and a truth: She could think of no future without him, and the revelation scared her roaring thoughts into silence.

  Love was a terrible thing, she decided. It tore hearts apart with talons and gnashing teeth and left nothing behind.

  CHAPTER 109

  Altair’s first order as Arawiya’s ruler was upheaving the depressing decor of the Sultan’s Palace. He didn’t understand such dark and drab decor. Royalty wasn’t dead. A day after magic’s return, the black carpeting was rolled up and a new one unfurled in blue and red and edged in gold.

  But if he was being honest, all this was merely delaying a more important task: being sultan. The loneliness of it. Magic and the chaos it entailed. Already there was word from one village of a fireheart having accidentally set a tree ablaze and the flames spreading to the sooq, upon which an aquifer thought to be heroic and flooded the market stalls.

  Some good the safin were doing, easing magic into Arawiya.

  “And here we have our lonely sultan,” Kifah said by way of greeting as she strolled into the room.

  He was lonely. Nasir had already left for Sarasin to prepare for his own coronation. Zafira and her sister were bound for Demenhur. He bit the inside of his cheek. Sultans didn’t cry.

  One side of Kifah’s mouth curled into a smile as she strode to one of the large windows. “Seif and I toured the city. They’re calling you Zhahabi Maliki.”

  The Golden King.

  “Has a nice ring to it,” Altair said, swallowing a rasp. He liked the word “king” more than the word “sultan.” What was it that his father had said?

  It was time for a new era.

  He’d written to the ifrit known as Muzaffar, the soon to be ruler of his own caliphate. Ifrit were different from men and safin—they’d require laws specific to them, benefits created for them, and Altair would figure it out. He was part ifrit, after all. Surely that would earn him a few favors.

  He’d sent invitations to the caliphates, too, including one to Qismah, the daughter of Ayman al-Ziya, the dead Demenhune caliph. It was early, and it risked him appearing malleable, but he’d already met with the rulers as a general, and he’d hoped the gathering would usher in a new unity in less time than Anadil expected.

  There were ways to rule, she had said. Altair agreed and disagreed, for there were ways to appeal to hearts, too.

  “And you, One of Nine? What does Ghada say, aside from wanting her daughter in my lap?”

  Kifah laughed. “I don’t think I’ll get a second invitation, if that’s what you mean.” She paused. “But … I don’t think I want one. I joined the Nine Elite to prove something to my father, but it was Benyamin who gave me what I’d wanted.”

  The chance for vengeance. Altair regarded her. “Will you return home to gloat? Am I to say farewell to you, too, then?”

  “Have you need of me?” Kifah probed.

  “I have a proposal for you, actually,” he said carefully. Her eyebrows rose. “For a place by my side.”

  “With a crown on my head?” Kifah sputtered. “Are you asking me to marry you?”

  Altair grinned. “I’m not blind, Kifah. I know romance isn’t something you desire if even my perfection can’t tempt you.”

  She snorted, but her dark eyes glistened.

  “I was thinking something more lethal, li
ke Sword of the Sultan. Captain of my guard.”

  She didn’t answer. Of course she’d want to return home. The bastard had taken away more than her brother.

  “Think about it. Discuss it with Ghada if you must. Find your father and gloat a little. You’ve seen the reports. These first few months won’t be easy as people come into magic, even with the help of the High Circle and the gossamer web. Then I’ll have to start worrying about every other kingdom wanting a piece of us now that the Arz is gone and—”

  “Altair. For once, please stop talking.”

  He stopped, and Kifah met his eyes.

  “Yes, I accept. Why be one of nine when I can be the one?”

  CHAPTER 110

  It had been three days since Nasir had taken the Sarasin throne. The people were not enthused about giving the crown to the assassin who had killed their previous caliph, but when had Nasir’s life been particularly loving?

  He found Zafira on a rooftop overlooking Sarasin’s capital of Leil, near the quarters of Dar al-Fawda, home of the prestigious camel races. She sat on a red rug with her back to him, loose strands from her crowned braid fluttering in the bare breeze. Nasir paused, chronicling every piece of the scene before making his presence known.

  She smiled when he sat down beside her, but there was a tightness to the gesture, a guard behind her eyes.

  “I’m leaving for Demenhur today.”

  Why? he wanted to ask, but he was certain she had a thousand and one reasons to head back to her home. “When will you return?”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized they had never spoken of this. The fragility of a future, and what she wanted. She had arrived for his coronation on time—without Lana or Yasmine, who had stayed in Thalj—and had been staying in the palace since then, but between the ceremony and the turmoil of magic’s return and the knowledge that his people were not pleased, Nasir hadn’t had the chance to see her. To speak to her.

  He saw the undulation of her throat before she looked at him. “I won’t.”

  The words were scythes carving out his heart, and it took him a moment to make sense of them. They could reject him across cities, across caliphates, all of Arawiya could scorn him, and none of it would hurt as deeply as this.