Possibly the last of her tomorrows.
If she hadn’t boarded the ship, she would have continued to hunt in the Arz, continued to help her people, ignoring that beckoning darkness as she always had. Ignoring the creeping forest until it devoured them, bones and all.
But oh, how everything had changed in the span of a few days.
She straightened when the stairs creaked with the heavy tread of boots.
“You’re blaming yourself,” Deen said by way of greeting, concern etched on his features.
“I’m supposed to, aren’t I?” She struggled to meet his eyes. “If I hadn’t stepped on this ship, you wouldn’t have.”
“If anyone’s to blame, it’s the witch.” He sat beside her.
“I’m afraid of proving him right.”
He knew she spoke of the caliph. “You’re not expecting to die, are you? The only way you can prove him right is by dying. And you have a penchant for punching death in the face.”
She cracked a small smile. “You don’t have to tend to me.”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said.
That drew a laugh from some part of her. “You are so very banal, Deen.”
He shrugged. “The way I see it, phrases become banal because they’re overused by everyone else. So I’ll say them again and again until you tire of them.”
The smile that curved his lips sorrowed his eyes.
She fiddled with the clasp of her cloak, the one little buckle that had separated Zafira from the Hunter for years.
She looked at Deen, at his sloppily wrapped turban, and felt the ridiculous urge to straighten it. He stilled, noticing the change in her thoughts. How was it that he noticed so much about her?
His eyes held hers as he reached for the cloak clenched in her white-knuckled fingers. “I’ll rid you of it.”
She shook her head, feeling stupidly, ridiculously weak. “I’m going to wear it.”
Whatever she had felt upon removing it had disappeared. She was still Zafira. Still just a girl with a bow and a hoard of venison to her name.
He was silent a moment, until he stood. “Very well.”
She started plaiting her hair and stopped when warm hands closed over hers.
“Let me?” he asked softly. “I’ll even crown it for you.”
She nodded. Deen’s fingers were deft, for this wasn’t the first time he had plaited her hair, but it felt different now, entwined with some form of melancholy. She tipped between lucidity and sleep the longer he wove.
Until she felt it.
Soft, barely there. The brush of lips against the back of her neck.
Zafira stiffened and felt him stiffen, too. She turned and met his eyes.
“No matter how many times, it’s always the same,” he murmured. “Akin to striking flint beneath the cold skies, striking and striking, until that gratifying spark comes to life. If only you knew.”
She didn’t know what he spoke of, yet she couldn’t find the words to ask him, not when he was looking at her with so much.
“If only you knew what it was like to feel the weight of your gaze,” he said, half to himself.
Oh. She pursed her mouth. Her neck burned from the touch of his lips, and she was abuzz with warmth like the first sun above the cold horizon.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I’m sorry, too, he said in the silence, but Deen Ra’ad never had anything to apologize for. He was too pure. Too perfect. Too good for this world basking in darkness.
“I sometimes forget you’re no longer that girl I helped from the trees all those years ago. That girl who dirtied herself in the mud and made sure I was just as filthy,” Deen said softly.
She sputtered a laugh, and he wove her braid into a crown.
“You’re a woman now. The Huntress who will change Arawiya.”
Silence lifted his words, echoed them within the dark confines of the ship’s belly. How could she summon words knowing she couldn’t spin them in half the beauty he could? But he saw her thoughts. He would always see every notion as it clicked into place and he exhaled the smallest of smiles.
The ship lurched to a halt.
We’re here. Here. Here. Here.
She pulled her gaze away from his beautiful face and drew on her cloak. Her fingers trembled when she reached for the waning lantern and stood, Huntress once more.
CHAPTER 22
Nasir had never seen the dandan, only heard of its tales. Before, when he used to listen raptly to the lies that were stories.
The creature before them was most certainly a dandan. It was serpentine, something out of myth, trembling as it rose from the sea. Because of the Arz, it was likely that the creature had rested for decades. In unsatiated hunger.
It was twice as wide as Nasir’s height, the bulk of its body obscured beneath the waves rocking the ship. Thick scales overlapped, glistening a deep iridescent blue-green beneath the glow of the sun.
Altair whistled. “Shame such a beauty is tied with such a ridiculous name.”
The creature’s head swayed, two depthless black eyes shifting to and fro. A strange hissing escaped its mouth, gills contracting on either side of its narrowed face.
“I don’t think it can see,” Nasir murmured. At his voice, the creature’s head tipped to the side in an almost innocent gesture.
Altair backed away, footsteps slow and measured, before he drew his bow and leveled for the creature’s eyes, or gills, Nasir couldn’t tell.
He threw a glance at the oblivious crew still going about their work. They blinked and flashed with the light, solid yet ethereal. The dandan didn’t notice them any more than they noticed it.
Nasir drew a steady breath and nocked an arrow of his own. “We should—”
The creature released a high-pitched screech, loud enough to ripple sand at the depths of the sea. As soon as the screech ended, with deafening silence and a gust of salted wind, it began again.
The dandan reared back and shot toward them, jaws parted to reveal razor-sharp teeth and a gaping black hole of a mouth. A green tongue lashed within.
Nasir and Altair let loose their arrows.
Both of them were deflected.
Nasir cursed and ducked against the side of the ship.
The dandan’s head pierced the mainsail, tearing down the mast as it crashed onto the deck. Altair shouted out. Water slickened the wood and soaked Nasir’s clothes as the ship tipped to the side with a terrifying creak.
The dandan whipped its head, hissing and screaming, even bigger than it looked from afar. It passed through the phantom crew as it slid toward Nasir. Kharra. He leaped to his feet and darted aside, but the dandan was faster.
Much faster.
He was thrown against the wall of the ship. His bow fell from his hands and skidded across the deck. He struggled for breath, pinned between the creature and the rails, scales like bones digging into his stomach.
A gill parted near him, and the dandan’s steaming breath nearly suffocated him. He jerked away when another slit parted and a depthless black hole stared back. If an eye and gill are this close, then its mouth—
The creature screamed again. Sound exploded and Nasir shouted in surprise, clamping his hands on his ears while gritting his teeth. Red and black streaked across his vision. The sudden silence that followed the dandan’s cry was just as deafening.
The monster lifted its head, swaying the entire time, and twisted to look at him.
It can’t see, Nasir reminded himself as his ears continued to ring. He swayed and held steady. But when the creature revealed its teeth, Nasir wasn’t so sure of the stories he had heard.
Until someone shouted.
“Oi! Dandan! What was your mother thinking, giving you such a silly name?”
Altair, the fool.
The dandan stilled. It contracted its gills and narrowed its black eyes.
“Dandan, oi! Dandaaan,” Altair sang. “Look at you, so green and blue. What a name! What a shame!
I pity your mother, and your brother. Oi, dandaaan!”
The creature tossed its head, body undulating, and Altair carried on with more ridiculous singing.
Nasir opened his mouth to stop Altair from shaming his family to oblivion, but the dandan’s eyes rolled to the back of its head. It convulsed, green scales falling like loose shingles on a rich man’s roof. It croaked a halfhearted cry and slumped, slipping back into the sea with a heavy splash that sent the ship rocking.
Altair grinned at him from the other end of the chaos.
“That, princeling, is how you defeat a dandan.”
Nasir looked over the edge, expecting the creature to return with more of its kind.
“It’s dead?” he asked, incredulous.
Altair joined him. “Afraid not. I had forgotten, though. The stories, I mean, because we call it a dendan. They’re maimed by the sound of singing—they could die from it.”
Nasir wondered whom the “we” entailed. He didn’t dare ask. “Because ‘dendan’ and ‘dandan’ are so different, you couldn’t remember,” he mocked instead.
Altair ignored him. “They would swallow whole ships in the dead of night, when no one could see them or know they were near. Until captains learned to hire maidens who sang through the entire voyage, poor souls. But it’s been so long since anyone sailed the Baransea that the creature probably abandoned all notion of day and night and attacked the moment it sensed us.”
The glaring sun had already dried Nasir’s clothes, and now sweat trickled down his spine. The ship rocked.
Their battered, broken ship.
Nasir turned to survey the mess, ears still ringing, but the broken mast had been fixed and the torn sail rippled unharmed in the breeze. Everything gleamed. He strode to the steps leading belowdecks and picked up his bow, hooking it behind him as he studied the undisturbed crew. His skin crawled with the essence of magic, just as it did whenever he neared his father and that wretched medallion.
“Oi! Princeling.”
“Call me that one more time, and—” Nasir stopped when he saw what Altair had seen: a jagged swarm of darkness quivering beneath the sun.
Sharr.
ACT II
A LONG WAY FROM HOME
CHAPTER 23
The ship had stopped, yet when Deen said, “We’re dismounting,” as if the ship were a steed, Zafira puzzled over the stretch of water between them and the mass of land obscured by the blistering sun.
But Deen’s lips at her neck. Those words in her ears.
“We’ll have to get there by rowboat,” he answered before she could ask, perfectly at ease, as if he hadn’t just cracked open his soul and told her things she had never heard before.
She climbed into the little boat, which looked in danger of sinking, and anger soured her thoughts. Anger at him, for saying what he had and remaining wholly unperplexed. She pressed her eyes closed and inhaled before opening them again. This was Deen. Her Deen. She didn’t have to feel demure.
The rowboat touched the water and he clutched the oars. After a few odd shuffles that nearly sent them both into the water, he finally deciphered the rhythm and began rowing them forward.
“I thought you’d take us all the way back to Demenhur,” she taunted, feeling instantly at ease again.
“Ha, ha,” he deadpanned, a laugh teasing his mouth.
Both of them gasped when the sun dipped from view, clearing its harsh glow from their sight.
Sharr.
A towering edifice, jagged like a monster’s teeth, reached for the sparse clouds. A wall, she realized, made of hewn stones held together with mortar. It may have once been the tan of limestone, but it was gray now, with veins of black creeping along the pebbled surface. The gaping darkness behind the aging cracks flashed and winked.
She looked away. What was it with the darkness, always coaxing?
Deen continued to row them ashore, the ship shrinking behind them. He was as inexperienced as she when it came to the sea, and water lapped into the little boat. Even the sea begged for her. Only a touch, it seemed to call. She leaned closer, and the boat tipped with her.
“Zafira!”
She sat upright at Deen’s shout, ducking her head in panic, and she had to remind herself there was no man here to shun her. No za’eem to marry her off.
“I wanted to see what it felt like,” she said, grasping her cloak.
“Please don’t test your mad notions here.”
Her hood obscured most of the withering look she gave him. “Row.”
He laughed. “But of course, sayyida.”
She realized then what the wall was for: to keep something in. A remnant of the prison fortress that once stood glorious and imposing. A world within itself.
A world Zafira was not sure she would outlive.
* * *
By the time they reached the shore, Zafira was soaked in her own sweat. She swayed when she set foot upon the sand. The grains shifted and sank, a living thing beneath her, swallowing all pockets of space.
There’s sand beneath my boots, Baba. Something stung in her eyes.
She stumbled forward, slowly understanding how to dance to the tune of the sand. The shift and the sink. Once that hurdle was over, the grains scorched her feet through her soles and her gloves suffocated. She shoved them into her satchel.
“You should remove your cloak, too,” Deen said, a hand to his brow as he surveyed the wall. He squinted at her. “This is just the beginning. If my understanding is correct, there’s a desert beyond the stone.” He handed her a vial with a questionable green tint, and she recognized the bottle from his parents’ apothecary trunk. “We’re not weathered enough for this sun.”
She rubbed the salve on her skin, thinking of Yasmine. Of Lana’s parting sob. Of the odd bout of nervousness that came over Haytham yesterday as he stared into the horizon in anxious anticipation. As if he were waiting for something worse than the Arz.
“Zafira.” Deen’s voice was soft. “Don’t start down that path. Not now.”
Not now. Not now. Not now.
“I’m trying,” she whispered.
The wall imposed in a cold, lifeless way, except for the brushwood sprawling at its base and the few wending palm trees fanning dark leaves against the stone.
“How are we supposed to get past it? We can’t scale it like daama hashashins,” Deen said. Zafira had half a mind to cross her arms and summon the Silver Witch. If she could be summoned.
Zafira didn’t trust her. Sometimes the most truthful words were merely elaborate lies. And if one was banned from lying, that was all the more reason to learn a new way of stringing words together.
A shadowed alcove cut diagonally against the structure. “There,” she said, pointing. “I think those are stairs.”
“What if we go up those stairs and find no entrance, Huntress?” Deen asked, looking skeptical. “Akhh, I wish we had a map.”
Zafira was the Hunter. She could find deer in absolute darkness and return home despite the odds. She had never needed a compass to find her way, and she certainly wouldn’t need a map now. She stomped past him to the foot of the stairs.
Something hummed beneath her skin, rushing alongside the blood of her veins. A boost of energy she couldn’t understand. She tamped it down and started up the umber steps, sand crunching beneath her footfalls.
And Deen, loyal as he was, followed.
CHAPTER 24
Nasir had no way of communicating with the phantom men as they anchored the ship at least a league from the island, but four of them stood beside a small boat waiting to be lowered to the sea, so he supposed that was where they were to go.
“I hope you can row, princeling,” Altair said, climbing in after him.
Nasir settled on the side farthest from the oars, making it clear he would do no such thing.
Altair sat on the other end and matched Nasir’s glare. The crew lowered them to the sea, and water lapped inside as the rowboat tipped with the weight of two.
Nasir was crown prince of Arawiya. He would do no rowing.
The closer they crept, the more desolate Sharr looked. The walls of the fortress were crumbling, and all they seemed to keep out were the sea and its breeze.
“I hope you can climb,” Nasir said.
“Do I look like a monkey?” Altair asked.
“That would be a disgrace to the monkey,” Nasir answered, and stepped out of the rowboat, ignoring Altair’s mock dismay.
When Altair finally followed, he carried one of the oars with him. Water trickled down the pale wood and sizzled on the sand. “You think we should keep this? Could be useful for thwacking our enemies.”
Nasir gave him a look. “We will not be thwacking our enemies. What are you, a child?”
“Fine. Don’t blame me if someone else comes equipped with one,” Altair called after him.
Nasir heard the sound of the oar clattering back into the boat. He certainly hoped no one else came. The Hunter would be enough.
“So what’s the plan, if it doesn’t include thwacking?” Altair asked.
Nasir stalked up the sloping plain of sand, studying the stone structure as he charted his northward path.
“We could just see if there’s an entrance,” Altair suggested.
“Might as well find us an inn while you’re at it, and roasted venison,” Nasir said. He wound his turban around his head before his hair could burn off. “We need to get beyond the wall, then head south.”
We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya) Page 15