Today marked forty-nine.
And then he could take it no more—he wept.
He clenched his teeth and bit his tongue until copper crimson spilled from his mouth, twining with the salt dripping from his chin and welling in his eyes. Melding into the darkness spilling from him.
As he remembered and remembered and remembered. Forty-eight times.
“Stop!” she cried out. Kulsum. His mother. The Huntress. Zafira.
Her chains rattled as she begged. But it was done, wasn’t it? The poker was discarded, glowing in the firelight. Just as it had been discarded forty-eight times before.
Smoke rose from his skin, the stench of burnt flesh besieged him, reminding him. Fitting, since he had run out of room on his back.
Nasir slumped in his chains. Skeins of black bled from his form, as if he were fading into shadow himself.
The Lion only laughed. The Lion of the Night, who still lived.
Nasir fought to remain lucid. Pain is nothing. Pain is a reaction. He thought of the medallion around the sultan’s neck. The Lion, staring back at him every time his father ridiculed him. Hurt him.
That poker had touched his back again and again and again. He had screamed, at first. He had bit his tongue until it bled, next. He would have taken each press until his body was covered in black, but his mother had interfered.
Only once, a black teardrop on the skin of her arm that Nasir would never forgive himself for.
His mother. Whose grief had overtaken her. Whose love had turned around and plunged a dagger through her beating heart.
And then Nasir had killed. Bloodied horizons across innocent throats. Final exhales that sighed across his knuckles as he tore his blade from left to right. Endless feathers tipped in red. A woman when she was nursing her child. A man as he was saddling his camel. Owais when he was scribing on papyrus. The Caliph of Sarasin when he was dining with his wazir.
Death upon death upon death.
The smile he had carefully folded into his memories rose behind his closed eyes. His father, before the Lion laid claim to his mind, body, and soul, making him a monster.
Making Nasir a monster.
The Lion tsked, studying him. “No one to protect you now, is there? Worry not, it’s almost time for our family reunion.”
Nasir’s every heavy inhale shook, every exhale trembled. He could not turn his face to look at her. Zafira. To see her pity. You are weak.
His vision wavered as he stared back at the Lion with as much indifference as he could muster. He had the Lion to thank for the mask he donned. “My father has suffered enough in your hands.”
“Ghameq?” the Lion mused. “Laa, laa. I was referring to your brother.”
Nasir only gritted his teeth, tasting copper on his tongue. “I have no brother.”
“I seem to recall you do.”
He was tired of being toyed with. Tired of being the mouse between the lion’s jaws.
“Eat your lies, Lion. Ghameq had only one son.” Nasir knew this for a fact, as certain as the wisps of darkness that spun from his fingers. As certain as the burn beneath his collarbone.
He was darkness. He was adrift in the desert, lost to himself.
“Perhaps.” The Lion tilted his head, enjoying this. “But your mother had two.”
Three forms stepped from the corridor. Two ifrit, one man. Blood oozed from the man’s lip. His muscled arms glistened with sweat, and his golden hair stood out like a blaze. Hair Nasir had never seen without a turban.
A turban that had obscured the elongated points of his ears.
He lifted a feeble smile, and Nasir’s heart faltered once more.
“Peace unto you, little brother,” said Altair.
CHAPTER 73
Zafira knew the prince was a killer. A murderer. Arawiya’s greatest hashashin.
She did not know he could cry.
She wanted to tear the Lion apart with her bare hands, but all she could do was beg. Promise him the Jawarat. Curse the shackles holding her in place.
And then it was done. The lapels of Nasir’s robes hung open, revealing his copper skin and a new scar across the expanse of his soul. Zafira stared at the wound, the blistering flesh. Her eyes burned with the wrath of a thousand storms.
Nasir lifted his head and spoke as he always did. But she saw the difference. In the crack of his voice, the tremble of his mouth, and the shatter of his gray gaze.
Altair looked from the Lion to the poker to Nasir’s open collar. Cold rage crossed his features, and she saw Arawiya’s prized general for the first time. Nasir’s brother. She had never thought they could share blood.
The Lion regarded Altair with an expression she couldn’t read. “Kill him.”
Nasir’s reaction was a wheeze. Zafira choked.
“Come now, Lion. We’ve only just met. Aren’t you going to offer me some torture, too?” Altair drawled, and Zafira wondered if this was how he dealt with emotion. The ifrit near him actually paused, bewildered, and the Lion gave a weary sigh.
Altair smiled. “I’m here for my damsel in distress. I’m not dying yet.”
“I am not your damsel and I am not in distress,” Zafira hissed.
She was surprised to feel a pang of emotion when he looked at her. She had missed him.
“Who said you’re my damsel?” he asked, tossing a wink at Nasir. Anger still crooked his mouth.
The prince didn’t react, but his eyes brightened and the corners of his lips twitched.
“Even more of a clown in person,” the Lion mused. “Yalla. Kill him.”
If the Lion really wanted Altair dead, he needed only to flick his wrist. Wrap him in shadows and suffocate him. Confusion riddled Zafira’s aching arms.
The two ifrit gripping Altair released him to draw swords. Altair threw his arms behind him, and as he unsheathed his scimitars, the sound of steel against steel was a song to her ears. The ifrit lunged.
Altair never faltered as he fought both ifrit at once, and Zafira wondered who was the better fighter: Nasir or Altair. She wondered who had killed Deen: Nasir or Altair. The general roared and an ifrit howled.
The Lion’s fingers shifted at odd angles.
“Altair!” Nasir shouted hoarsely, coming alert when the Lion launched a volley of darkness. No, darts of darkness, spiraled and sharp, smoke trailing in their wake.
Altair ducked, and three of the shadow darts pinned an ifrit to the wall, the others embedding around the dead creature with whizzes and thuds. Altair fought the remaining ifrit, and even through her pain, Zafira could tell he was purposely delaying the creature’s death. The Lion made no move to attack again, still observing with a far-off look.
“He’s stalling,” Nasir murmured.
Two more figures darted through the dark corridor: Kifah and Benyamin, grim-faced and armed. Zafira sputtered a mix of a laugh and a cry.
Benyamin’s immaculate keffiyah was wrapped as a turban on his head. He tossed a vial into the center of the room and the glass shattered, releasing a haze of green mist that triggered rounds of coughing. She heard the safi’s voice, low and urgent, followed by the Lion’s soft laugh. Zafira’s vision blurred and her mind slowed.
The shackles holding her in place loosened. The prince’s bare fingers brushed hers as he undid the chains at her wrists.
“How—”
“Hashashin. One chain or ten, we train for this specifically,” he said quietly.
She felt his hands slide to her waist and she swallowed. The clash of Altair’s scimitars, the whistle of Kifah’s spear, the Lion’s shouts—everything drowned away at his touch. His fingers trembled as he lifted her down. She felt the warmth of his skin, the pads of his thumbs below her stomach. The thump, thump, thump of her own chest. The drop of his eyes to the birthmark on her skin, and his anguish as he struggled against a wave of pain.
He crouched to remove the circlets from her ankles.
Everything rushed back.
“Yalla, Huntress!” Kifah shouted.
; Zafira dragged her right leg toward her left, limbs stiff from the angle she had been stretched. A wave of dizziness rolled over her, and she gritted her teeth.
An ifrit approached from her left, and Nasir slashed his arm across the creature’s neck, a line of black painting its throat before it fell. He slid the blade back into his gauntlet.
“Can you walk?” he asked her, not unkindly. He sounded distant.
She started to nod, started to follow, but stumbled instead. Nasir swerved to catch her, hands sliding up her arms, ragged breath at the curve of her ear. His face was close and her brain was a blur. She didn’t know if it was the pain that caused her vision to darken.
Laa. The room was darkening, and Nasir glanced at his hands in alarm.
The Lion’s eyes fell upon her, and she thought of the poker as a very different sort of darkness folded her into its embrace.
* * *
Nasir had no black resin to heal him. He had no mother to tend to him. He was alone, but he finally understood why this curse of darkness was only now displaying itself. It had tried to, during the rare times when his control slipped, but it had never gone this far.
He had trekked across Sharr for days, and not once had his affinity slipped past his iron defenses.
Until her. This pale demon. She had done this to him.
She had cursed his life with her presence. She had whittled at his caged heart and made him remember what it was like to feel. It was how the ifrit knew to show him Kulsum. How these dark wisps knew to unveil themselves.
The darkness showed itself when he felt, perceived, listened to sentiment. Like now. Shouts clamored as everyone turned blind in the sudden black that he caused.
The familiar suffocating fear returned, pelting him as his vision and perception disappeared, because he could no longer see. Fitting that his power—kharra, his power—was associated with the thing he feared most.
She fell and Nasir caught her. Held her. Feared her. Wished like a fool.
And then—
In the absolute darkness, a veil lifted and Nasir, despite his pain, could finally see.
CHAPTER 74
When Zafira came to, her heart seized at once—the Lion, his dark corridor, the chains. The poker touching the prince’s skin. Panic clawed its way up her chest until the familiar basalt scent of Sharr’s sands calmed her.
She was free from the jaws of the Lion’s den.
An outcrop of stone towered before her. A stream trickled to her left, small plants dipping into its waters, and Sharr’s dry breeze was a welcome touch on her skin.
Her throat was parched, and when she sat up, every part of her ached. A strap rested on her lap; only one of her satchels had made it out of the Lion’s lair.
The prince lounged in front of her, his back to the stone. His robes hung open, tan skin shadowed by the dark layers, still held partially in place by the wrap around his waist.
He was watching her, something distant in his gaze. Something broken.
“The Lion. The ifrit. Where are the others?” she asked carefully.
“Far enough that I don’t have to carry you anymore.” There was a crack in his voice. He didn’t meet her eyes, and she had the acute sense that he was nervous. She studied the shell of his ear, the smooth curve of it marking him as human, despite his half-safin blood. “You’re heavy.”
Of all the things he could say. “Are you expecting an apology?” she asked.
His handed her his goatskin. Darkness swallowed the gray of his irises. “No.”
She drank, swiped her sleeve across her mouth, and refilled the skin. When she turned back, he was staring at the flowing water. “I buried my mother by a stream. Or her coffin, at least. I never saw her dead body.”
The sultana. He was the prince—he lived and breathed in a different world than she did. Extravagance at his every glance, people at his beck and call. Zafira had never wished for more than she had, but she wondered, now, how life was for someone like him.
He clenched his jaw and pulled back his shoulder, a tiny reaction to something that had to be very painful. How much pain did one have to endure before a burn became as bearable as a nicked thumb?
She could help him, she realized. She dug through her satchel, finding the tin of resin, running her finger over the lid as she watched him. She was nowhere near as skilled as Lana when it came to healing, but Umm had taught her enough.
He stared back without a word, the gray of his eyes fractured. If she could catch a wish-granting jinn, all three of her wishes would be spent in mending his heart, for not even Umm would know how to treat such sorrow.
“It needs to be treated,” she said before she could stop herself, and pulled the tin out of her bag. He dropped his gaze to the silver can but didn’t object.
She pulled out more from her kit—a clean cloth, liniments, a salve made of honey, a small canister of copper salts, and a vial of tannic acid. Then she washed her hands and wiped them down before crawling toward him.
A vein flickered in his jaw as he watched, and her pulse raced.
“Does it hurt?” she asked softly.
“Not right now,” he said truthfully.
He stilled when she neared. His exhale trembled when she lifted her leg to his other side, pinning him between her thighs. His hands twitched, as if he were holding himself back. Skies. She hadn’t thought this through, or she would have waited for the others to come. And now her legs were threatening to give way beneath her and his mouth was so close, all she needed was to tip his head up and—
“Do I disgust you?”
The words were so soft, she wouldn’t have heard them if she wasn’t this close. She wouldn’t have heard the strangled chaos beneath the simple question.
She pursed her lips and thought of her cloak. “I would be the last person to judge based on appearance.”
His response was half of a broken laugh. “And character?”
It took her a moment to realize the Prince of Death had cracked some semblance of a joke, but there was too much in his steel eyes for it to be funny. Too many questions and too little distance between them.
She could feel the heat of his skin this close, and she blamed the quiver in her fingers upon the fatigue in her bones as she reached for the folds of his robes. She pulled the cloth aside, casting the wound in Sharr’s wan light. Her knuckles swept his collarbone and she heard the hitch in his breath, felt the quicken of her own.
What was she doing so close? Sweet snow below, she should have asked him to lie down. Then she wouldn’t have had to climb all over him. Yasmine waggled her eyebrows in her head.
“I wasn’t going to come after you,” he said as she soaked the cloth in cool water. “The last person I tried to save lasted two days before I buried her with my own hands. Before I learned killing was easier.”
“But you did come,” she said, wanting to ask who. She pressed the cloth to his skin. He flinched, and she gripped his shoulder to hold him in place.
Something had changed when he was shackled beside her. Something had broken after the poker touched his flesh and the shadows erupted from his fingertips. He wielded the darkness as if it were his.
“I didn’t want to lose my compass.”
There was something about his voice that stopped her from snarling. He stared at her, his eyes tracing her face with a look she couldn’t decipher. She didn’t realize she was starting to fold into herself until he spoke.
“I couldn’t find your cloak,” he said softly.
Her gaze crashed into his, expecting to find something mocking in the gray, for no one mourned the loss of fabric. But he was solemn.
“I don’t need it anymore, I suppose,” she conceded. It had been her companion as much as the darkness had. But she had wandered Sharr without her cloak, slowly becoming one from it. She picked up the honey salve.
“No, I suppose you don’t,” he agreed with something akin to a smile. She wanted to pause this moment and capture his smile, however faint.
She kept one hand on his shoulder and brought the other to his skin.
“Don’t move,” she whispered. He froze at her words, at her touch. He didn’t even breathe, though she could feel his thunderous pulse beneath her fingers as she rubbed the ointment across the ruined flesh. The distance made her drunk and she swayed closer, pulling back with a clench of her jaw. Distract yourself. “My mother was a healer.”
“Was?” he breathed. She tasted sukkary dates in his exhale.
“She’s sick now,” she said shortly with a sad laugh. “The irony is not lost on me. She and Deen’s mother were two of the best healers in western Demenhur. Now one is dead; the other is very near it herself.”
She swallowed the sudden swell in her throat. Blinked away the burn in her eyes.
“Who killed Deen?” she asked softly, and leaned back to look at him. She needed to know. To expose that wound to the air before it festered even further.
He drew a sharp breath, and a window closed behind his eyes. “Why do you keep asking that? It doesn’t matter which of us killed him; the other had every intention to.”
“If he were here now, would you kill him?”
A piece of her fractured when he lowered his head, a fraction that would have been insignificant on anyone else but was an earth-shattering display of defeat for him. For unlike that moment with the poker, he was now in full control of his emotions.
“A monster will always be enslaved to a master. Even if that master has a master of its own,” he said.
“But a monster has power,” she insisted. Anguish drew lines on his face. “The power to break free of his bonds. You are not your father, nor are you the Lion that took his soul. You are not the sum of his disparagement.”
He stilled at her words, and all she wanted was for this broken boy to understand.
His slow, weighted words were a harsh whisper. “Then who am I?”
Zafira knew of his scars. His fear. He was just like anyone else: flesh that could be flayed. A human who could be punished and beaten. Used and discarded.
“Nasir bin Ghameq bin Talib min Sarasin,” she said instead. “Crown prince to a kingdom begging for someone to stand up to a tyrannical ruler.”
We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya) Page 33