Altair. They were nearer now.
“Stay calm,” soothed Benyamin’s voice.
A sudden hiss silenced her emotions. Another hiss—her blood dripped to the cursed leaves. A tendril of white steam lifted, eerie in the darkness. It curled in the shape of a rose. White and wild.
Peace unto you, bint Iskandar. Pure of heart. Dark of intent.
Bint Iskandar. Daughter of Iskandar.
The guarding trees parted, unlocked by her blood. Dull light illuminated a circular jumu’a of black stone. The trees crackled and shifted, curving upward to form a dome of twisting branches, vines, and jewel-like foliage. It wasn’t a row of trees—there were five of them, their wide trunks lined with age, branches entwining to form an enclosure.
Protecting something.
Cradling her wounded hand against her chest, Zafira walked across a bed of leaves and stepped upon the stone. She felt a steady pulse beneath her boots. A breeze skittered across her skin, almost as if it were … sealing the jumu’a around her.
There it was. The lost Jawarat.
CHAPTER 85
Nasir sensed the ifrit too late.
Had he not been busy berating himself for the thousandth time, he would have sensed them long ago, but he hadn’t until one’s stave came swinging straight for his head. He ducked, scanning the stone pillars as he drew his scimitar.
Nasir should not have let her go. You only ever regret, mutt.
“We’re being attacked,” Benyamin announced.
“Barely a handful. We can take care of them,” Kifah said, spear twirling.
“Akhh, what else is new?” Altair asked flatly. The hiss of his twin scimitars punctuated his words.
“That, perhaps?” Benyamin asked, pointing in the distance.
“Bleeding Guljul,” said Kifah.
Not ten paces away, Zafira stood on a jumu’a of peculiar dark stone, a writhing black mass before her. Massive trees suddenly surrounded them, ancient limbs curling beyond a ceiling they could no longer see. It defied logic, existing within this endless hall of marble.
“Nasir? Tell me I’m dreaming,” Altair called.
“You don’t have the brains to dream, Altair,” Nasir replied, dodging a stave of fire as he swung his scimitar at the oncoming ifrit.
“Charming as always, brother dearest.”
Benyamin and Altair stood back to back, felling ifrit with the slash of sword and the shatter of glass. Kifah pivoted her spear beside Nasir. He felt a lick of heat by his ear, followed by a shriek when she pinned an ifrit to his right, while he cut another down to her left. They exchanged a nod amid the chaos, Kifah responding with a two-fingered salute across her brow.
“Oi, the kaftar,” Altair reminded them.
Nasir was about to say they could handle the few ifrit themselves when the ground trembled.
A horde of shadow crested the horizon, where the glistening marble met the dark night, slowly giving shape to countless ifrit. Benyamin wasted no time whistling, and Nasir hoped the kaftar wouldn’t be one more foe for them to fight.
His heart seized. One more foe, indeed.
At the front of the horde was the Lion of the Night, astride a stallion of shadows, silver armor glinting against the shrouded moon.
* * *
Chaos surrounded Zafira, the kind the darkness thrived upon. Elation built in her chest and spilt from her in the curve of a smile.
Stone hands atop a pedestal reached upward as if in everlasting prayer. The palms of mottled gray clasped a journal with pages of yellowed papyrus, bound in green calfskin and wrapped in a cord of braided black silk.
The lost Jawarat.
All of this for a book withering in the shadows. She reached for it with careful fingers.
“Huntress.”
Benyamin stood at the edge of the stone, weariness weighing down his features. Benyamin, who kept secrets from her. Benyamin, who cried over the small coffin of his son. Ifrit spilled into their surroundings, shrieking and writhing with the shadows. Shouts rang out. The kaftar arrived, summoned by someone’s whistle.
“The Lion is near,” he implored, “and that stone is your only protection.”
She felt detached from herself. Distant to everything but focused on this. This book. The darkness continued to ravage her mind as the whispers swarmed around the tome.
Benyamin’s next words were cut off by a shout. He fell to his knees, and Zafira blinked as the always poised safi fought for his life.
“Fate brings us together once more, Haadi,” said a voice of velvet. The Lion. He sighed boredly. “There is nothing I loathe more than safin. If it were up to them, you would be their slaves. I disrupted their balance, showed them their place. And Arawiya repaid me by trapping me on this island.”
Benyamin choked against the vise of shadow coiling around his neck. “Whatever … you do … Huntress … do not … step … from that stone.”
The Lion turned to her with a mocking laugh. His trim robes were deep mauve. Silver armor adorned his shoulders, filigreed at his cuffs. “A heart so pure, zill and zalaam never before had a vessel so eager to plenish. Impart it to me, azizi.”
Look to us, bint Iskandar, came another voice.
The Jawarat.
Zafira stepped closer to the book, last touched by the Sisters of Old. There was a silhouette of a lion imprinted upon the pebbled leather, its mane a blaze of fire.
She felt no fear as she closed her hands around the tome.
And the world came undone.
Arawiya unfolded in her mind. As it once was, a beacon of light flourishing beneath a golden reign. She saw six women, rare si’lah who loved one another fiercely, appointing their strongest, Anadil, as the warden of the most impenetrable metropolis of a prison. Zafira saw wars that were waged. Darkness rushing toward gilded palaces and screaming Arawiyans. Caused by a man with amber eyes and ebony hair, vengeance in his blood.
The Sisters locked him within the hold of Sharr’s prison after his dark attempts failed. The warden was a miragi, like Kifah, except the limits of her illusions, her power, did not exist. She reigned with an iron fist, swayed by nothing, until he seduced her with fabricated love, slowly but surely loosening her hold on good.
As the Lion had said: A heart so pure of intent, zill and zalaam never before had a vessel so eager to plenish.
She was Zafira, once.
Anadil, lost to herself, summoned her Sisters to Sharr and drained them of their magic upon the Lion’s urging. By the time she realized the truth of what she had done, it was too late: the Sisters had fallen upon marble and stone. With the last of their power and the dregs of their lives, they trapped the Lion on the island with them and created the Jawarat, sealing the truth of that fateful day within its pages.
It was not magic incarnate. It was a book of memories. Their memories. And as the Jawarat lay lost upon Sharr, it became a being of its own, gleaning more memories, knowledge, and words: the Lion’s.
It was the last remnant of the Sisters, but it had become something darker during its time on Sharr. Every fragment of knowledge the Lion held, every piece of history the Sisters knew—it was the Jawarat’s. It was hers.
The Silver Witch and the Lion were wrong. They had never needed a da’ira to find the book. Zafira had merely needed to pass its tests, to defeat the ifrit, to escape the Lion in mind and body. And then it showed itself to her. Pure of heart. Dark of intent.
A searing exploded in her chest, her lungs, her heart. Distantly, she heard the shatter of glass, Benyamin going free. The howl of the wind. The roar of a creature that had lived far too long. A reign of darkness.
The Jawarat fell from her hands with a muted thud and a plume of dust. She collapsed to her knees, the stone cruel beneath her bones. She could only stare at the smear of red across the green leather with the knowledge that she had done something very, very wrong.
She had forgotten about the gash in her palm.
The Lion growled. “What have you done?”
/> Benyamin rose on shaky legs. “Her blood. The book bound itself to her.”
I am you, and you are me. The words were a whisper in her heart.
A handful of ifrit surrounded the jumu’a. A stave twirled in her peripheral vision, reminding her that the ifrit didn’t need to step upon the stone to kill her. But they wouldn’t. Not now.
The book’s words spilled from her lips. “Harm me, and the Jawarat will die. What you need will perish.”
The Lion paused. Sharr held its breath.
“Stand back,” he commanded, and the staves vanished.
Triumph sizzled in her veins.
But the Lion was not finished. “Did you expect to retrieve the Jawarat and leave, azizi? You came here upon the witch’s ships, and they are now gone; you will not take your leave that way. Give me the book.”
Illusioned ships. She was trapped.
The Jawarat pulsed beneath her fingers. Fear not, bint Iskandar. We are unstoppable. She remembered then: Benyamin’s ship, the one the Silver Witch ensured he would bring.
As if summoned by Zafira’s thoughts, a woman stepped from the shadows. A cloak of silver sat upon her shoulders, crimson lips curved in a smile. Memories collected in Zafira’s mind as the Jawarat showed her the past once more.
The Silver Witch had come.
“You should not have come, Anadil,” the Lion said.
Which side did the witch belong to now? For whom did she fight?
The Silver Witch dipped her chin and strode toward the Lion. As she moved, her billowing cloak shortened. A crimson sash knotted at her hip. Armor glinted at her shoulders. She flicked her arms to either side of her, twin blades extending in her hands. “Only the lonesome fear the lion.”
The lonesome. She was here for them. With them. The Lion realized it then, too, and he quickly halted her in her tracks. Not with a blade to her heart or a vise around her neck.
He merely looked to Nasir and curled two fingers.
Altair shouted as Nasir flew into the air with a wrangled breath, choking as he clawed at invisible hands around his throat. Panic flared in his eyes.
The Lion’s words still soothed, his whisper still raised the hairs on Zafira’s neck when he directed his command at her. “Give it here, azizi. You know how little his life means to me.”
“D-don’t,” Nasir gritted out.
He wasn’t losing breath if he could speak. He couldn’t die from that height if he fell. A terrible suspicion weighted her shoulders.
The Silver Witch threw out her hand, but the Lion shoved her to the ground with a flick of his other wrist. She fell to her knees, a black dagger impaling the hollow beneath her shoulder. She yanked it free with a hiss, but she was slow, and Zafira realized her magic was already depleting into Sharr. For a witch who had calculated so much for so many years, her decision to show her hand so quickly made no sense.
The Lion laughed. “I never did like your second son.”
Zafira gasped. The sultana. The Silver Witch was the Sultana of Arawiya.
No wonder she was acting recklessly. No wonder she had interfered with the sultan’s orders and aided them. Nasir and Altair were her sons.
A stave of black materialized in the Lion’s hand, sharp points extending on either side. Metal, shadow, darkness—he threw it.
Straight
for
Nasir’s heart.
“Nasir!” Altair roared.
The Silver Witch watched, powerless. Kifah struggled against a horde of ifrit.
Zafira lost all reason. She ran from the stone, tucking her nose beneath the scarf around her neck, but even in her crazed state she knew she wouldn’t reach him in time. As always, she was too late. Too late to save her parents. Too late to save the one who had loved her.
This means nothing.
Still, she ran.
But she should not have stepped from the stone.
A blur of black billowed toward her, veins of black bleeding in its wake. The Lion. She cried out from the impact and fell to the burning sand.
And the lost Jawarat, now found, tumbled from her grip.
CHAPTER 86
Nasir had pictured his death a thousand and one times.
Never had he pictured it upon Sharr, a stave of shadow hurtling toward his heart while he hung suspended with no control of his limbs. Distantly, he heard the Lion’s drawl directed at Zafira.
“You and that pathetic prince will never understand the consequence of loving the useless.”
He was done being called pathetic. He was a hashashin. He was the Prince of Death. He was crown prince to a kingdom waiting for someone to make a stand. And the people this creature threatened were …
Rimaal. They were his companions. Friends. Somewhere along the way, he had grown the attachments he had feared and, for once, he didn’t feel the heat of shame. Love gives purpose.
He clawed at his neck. He thought of Zafira, with the Jawarat. He thought of his father, who once loved him. His mother, whose love had destroyed her.
He thought of his dark heart, finally coming to a halt.
A volley of darkness unfurled from his fingers.
The world exploded in shadows that rivaled the Lion’s. Ifrit shrieked in confusion. Altair barreled toward Nasir, double scimitars poised to deflect the Lion’s stave, still hurtling for Nasir’s heart.
The Silver Witch rose to her feet with the last of her strength. Someone else shoved her to the sands—Benyamin. He was running with the speed of the safin. Leaping. Putting himself between Nasir and the Lion of the Night.
Between Nasir and that dark stave.
Nasir heard a grim shatter of bone before it pierced Benyamin’s heart. But the safi made no sound.
The invisible claws loosened from his neck and Nasir fell on his knees. No, no, no. He gasped for air as he clambered toward Benyamin, sand burning beneath his hands as the chaos continued around them.
Benyamin remained still for one long, silent moment before he fell on his back, graceful even in agony.
Nasir was numb. Lost. His gaze met the Lion’s across the fray, and he felt a surge of anger when remorse fleeted across those amber eyes. His tattoo gleamed in the gloom, nearly identical to the safi’s.
Benyamin’s friend, once. Who repaid kindness with death.
Nasir heard nothing but the soft whirr of Benyamin’s breathing.
People had dreams, thoughts, ideas. Nasir had facts. When he had stepped upon this path the sultan had lain for him, he had always known there was no one left to love him. No one to liberate him.
Some fates were made easier with acceptance.
Yet here lay Benyamin. An immortal safi, vain by nature, embittered by knowledge. Nasir’s hands shook as he regarded the wound. There was so much blood he didn’t know where it began and where it ended. Altair dropped beside him. Kifah shouted out as she fought back to back with the kaftar, but she was too far, too overwhelmed by ifrit, to be of assistance.
Nasir found the point of impact. He sat back on his heels, hope leaching.
“It is fatal,” he said, hands drenched in red.
Dark steam wafted from the stave.
Benyamin spoke lightly. “Now I know what it is like to live as a mortal. Death”—he pressed his lips together against the pain, his brown eyes soft—“is a welcome truth.”
His white keffiyah was smeared with blood. It slipped from his head and Nasir righted it, perfected it as the safi would. Altair clasped Benyamin’s hand, drawing him close. “Oh, akhi, akhi, akhi.”
My brother, my brother, my brother. By a bond stronger than blood.
Nasir had never seen Altair cry. His raw sobs racked his whole body, desolate in the din. Nasir had never thought someone else’s tears could hurt him so much.
“Why? Why did you do this?” Nasir whispered. Something fisted in his throat, hindering his speech.
Altair kept murmuring the word “akhi” over and over, anger and pain shattering his voice.
“Sacrifice,” Ben
yamin bit out.
Nasir knew sacrifice, but for him, the Prince of Death?
“For you. For her. For the ones who deserve to see another day. Your story remains unfinished, Prince.”
Something cleaved in Nasir. The children in the camel races. The rebels in Sarasin. Zafira. Kifah. They deserved to see another day. They deserved sacrifice. Not Nasir, whose hands had felt the last breath of countless souls. Not the Silver Witch, who had made her mistakes.
“Remember me, eh? Say hello to my beloved, but not my sister,” Benyamin whispered.
Altair sobbed a laugh.
Benyamin struggled to smile. He cupped Altair’s face. “I seized it, brother. Strength was mine. But it turns out”—he coughed and more blood spurted from his wound—“the price of dum sihr is always great.”
A tremor shook his body. Benyamin did not shed a tear. He did not cry out in pain. He entwined his fingers upon his stomach, posture at ease.
Nasir watched the light fade from his eyes, a death that wasn’t his doing, a final breath he hadn’t captured. A sacrifice. He couldn’t move, even as the sounds of battle wound around him.
Slowly, he closed Benyamin’s eyes. Skeins of black leached from his fingers, bidding farewell. He pulled a feather from his robes and touched it to Benyamin’s blood before tucking it between the folds of the safi’s thobe. The black vane glittered red. One last gift from the Prince of Death.
“Be at peace, Benyamin Haadi min Alderamin.”
Altair clasped Nasir’s hand and helped him to his feet. Never had Nasir seen the general so weary, so shattered, streaks of grief staining his golden skin.
Together, they faced the Lion of the Night.
“You have dealt your hand upon one of ours. There will be retribution.” Nasir’s voice was cold. Low. The Prince of Death drew his scimitar, a hiss through the sands, echoed by Altair’s own swords.
Again, Nasir saw that flicker of remorse. A sorrow the Lion did not deserve.
“You’ve come a long way, Prince. But you will always serve the dark,” said the Lion.
The ifrit swarmed, fortified by the shadows Nasir had unleashed.
We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya) Page 37