Kifah pursed her lips at this, seeing the sense in the witch’s words.
But Nasir was not yet ready to acquiesce. “Maybe so,” he said, jaw clenched, “but there is no guarantee that Altair will be left whole.”
“That is a risk we have to take,” the witch said, looking to the sea. “I’m not losing both of you in one day.”
“I am not yours to lose,” he said coldly, but Zafira heard the hurt in his voice.
There was a touch of remorse on the Silver Witch’s face before she said, “And you are not yours to lose, either. Like it or not, you belong to the Arawiyan throne.”
Nasir held her gaze, a vein feathering in his jaw before he whirled around and half-limped to the prow of the ship, skeins of black trailing in his wake. He was like the Lion, Zafira realized. A study of darkness, a profile of shadows.
The last time Zafira had stood so close to him, she had pressed a dagger to his neck. Before that, her hands had fisted in his hair, her mouth on his.
She followed him after a moment, and he turned at her approach. His eyes were gray like the world fresh awakened from darkness, but they were shuttered and dim, just like when the Lion had pressed the poker to his skin. When she had tended to his wound and he had bared his soul.
This means nothing.
“Are you all right?” she asked, extending an alliance.
“Define ‘all right,’” he said quietly.
She reached for his arm, expecting him to pull away. He stilled when she tugged up his sleeve, where rivulets of shadow crept up his golden skin, swallowing the words inked upon his arm. His hand was warm in hers. “‘All right’ is when you’re bleeding black but it’s not as bad as bleeding red. When the world crashes but you’re not alone when it does. When the darkness is absolute but you hunt down the smallest flame and coax it brighter. When you carve the good out of every bad and claim it a victory.” She released his arm, but he didn’t move. “If Sharr has taught me anything, it’s that every breath is a victory.”
One side of his lips curled into a smile before he stopped himself. “I suppose I am then. All right.”
Waves crashed upon the side of the ship as the crew readied to set sail. The Silver Witch idled in silence, eyes trained in the distance. Zafira couldn’t imagine how she felt, losing a son she had never claimed, reuniting with a son she had shown a different face. Being used and used and used by the man she loved.
After a moment, Nasir sighed. “I can’t leave him.”
“We’re not leaving him. We’re recouping,” Zafira said, knowing of whom he spoke. “Altair knows we’ll come back for him.”
“You don’t understand,” he said, and he sounded tired. “If our situations were reversed, he would have fought tooth and nail for me. But he knows I was sent to Sharr to kill him. He knows I don’t disobey orders.”
Zafira thought of Altair, in some dank place, imprisoned by the Lion, hopeless. Helpless. He would endure it, he had to. So she said what he would: “We’ll just have to surprise him, then.”
“Optimism suits you.” Nasir smiled then, a true smile.
It looked foreign as they stood before the sea, tumultuous and wild. But like everything that had come to pass on this journey, it was laced in sorrow.
They had lifted the decades-old curse and freed magic from Sharr, even if they had freed the Lion in the process. They had salvaged four hearts, even if they were leaving one behind. They had triumphed over the Lion’s hordes, even if they had lost Benyamin for good and Altair for now. The safi would never be buried with his son, but he would forever rest with the Sisters. Zafira had succeeded in her quest to find the Jawarat, even if she had lost Deen.
They had magic now, even if she no longer felt the rush of it through her veins. And until they returned the hearts to the royal minarets again, she never would. The hearts were merely hearts.
A gain for every loss.
CHAPTER 91
The captain shouted over the din, barking orders from the helm. They were all young, Nasir realized. Arawiya was being brought from the brink of ruin by a handful of youth. Jinan saluted two fingers off her brow when she saw him looking. “Sultan’s Keep awaits, Your Highness.”
Sultan’s Keep. Home. He wasn’t certain if the Lion’s hold upon the sultan remained, now that his tether to Sharr’s obsolete magic was destroyed. He supposed he would find out soon enough.
His dark thoughts scattered when Zafira laughed.
It freed him. Reached into that crevice between his rib cage and gave him life. A vial of light undeterred by the dark, a sound he would burn down cities to hear again, wild and free. She stood differently now. Shoulders pushed back, dark hair adrift in the wind. Taller. Stronger. A woman, through and through.
The woman he had believed to be a man, the Hunter he was sent here to kill. She caught him watching. “I will make sure no woman fears herself. Like in Zaram, and Pelusia, and Sarasin.”
“I have no doubt, fair gazelle.”
She met his eyes, and Nasir felt a jolt in his chest when diffidence darkened her cheeks. She stepped closer, and Nasir remembered the marble columns, those moments before she held the Jawarat, when he held her.
This means nothing. He wished he could take back his harsh words. It hadn’t meant nothing, no. Nor had that moment before, when she had cared for him with a gentle hand, without a hint of repulsion on her open face. It had been the culmination of his life, to be looked at the way Zafira Iskandar had looked at him. If only she knew.
But those three words lingered between them, lifting a guard behind her eyes as she regarded him now.
“And you? What will you do, Prince of Death?”
He didn’t say what he wanted to say. “If I live past this journey, I’ll see then.”
“You’ll live, Prince,” Kifah said, joining them. “The Huntress will make sure you do.”
The Huntress in question scoffed softly. “The Arz has fallen. I’m not a huntress anymore.”
Kifah shot her a look. “There’s still a Lion to hunt down and a general with a penchant for conundrums. Don’t tell me you’re hanging your hat up so soon.”
She smiled. “I suppose not, then,” she replied, relief toning her voice.
They did not look behind, to where Sharr wavered, a scourge on Arawiya’s map, a place of shadow and death. They had lived in the past for far too long. Yet Nasir would always carry a souvenir of the island in his soul, another scar to mark his suffering.
“We will raise dunes from the earth, and rain death from the sky,” Zafira said.
“And then some,” Nasir promised.
Kifah gave a sharp nod.
It was time for change to sweep across Arawiya, this zumra at its helm. He had a brother to save and a father to liberate, through death or otherwise. There would be more walls to hurdle, battles to triumph, and victories to glean. But walls were nothing for a hashashin.
And the Prince of Death never left a job unfinished.
EPILOGUE
There were only so many tears a soul could shed before weariness and fatigue dragged her to an endless pit of grief. Yasmine had seen too much.
She no longer felt the joy of her marriage. Dread and defeat bittered her tongue. A place ravaged by war was no place for happiness.
“This isn’t war,” Misk had said, lashing out in a voice that promised retribution. “This is butchery. Cold-blooded and heartless. It will not stop with us. Zaram will be next, then Pelusia, and then his crimes will come full circle, Arawiya under his black crown.”
They were already under his black crown. She didn’t understand what more the sultan wanted.
The men had been there, wearing the black and silver of Sarasin, waiting in the shadows between houses and trees. When the ship carrying Zafira and Deen had vanished from view, they came. Misk had friends, she learned, and so she and her husband had been lucky enough to slip aboard the caliph’s caravan, fleeing with little Lana.
She went back, days later. To the villa
ge where she and Deen had distributed meat. Where they and Zafira had grown up. Where the men had scorched the homes of the western villages and unleashed a vapor upon the vulnerable.
Children Yasmine had tutored, whose smiles she had coaxed and celebrated, now lay in small coffins, the ground too cold and hard to allow them proper burials.
Their deaths were bloodless, but the pallor of their skin spoke of hours of suffering. The few who survived told of the colorless poison.
There was no escaping something that killed through the cardinal act of inhaling.
Now Yasmine stared from the window of the caliph’s palace in Thalj, far, far away from the forsaken village she once called home. She had no home. And if the Sarasins continued under the sultan’s orders, no one in Demenhur would, no one in Arawiya would. What was the purpose of such slaughter?
“She will come,” Misk said. He rubbed warmth into Yasmine’s arms and pressed a kiss to her head.
Zafira. The sister of her heart. There was no way to send news to Sharr, and no way of retrieving news, either. She did not know if Zafira still lived, but she did know that her brother did not.
She would have learned more, if Misk had let her wander farther into the Arz when she had been in that senseless, helpless state. She would have died, too, but she had remained there long enough for the dark forest to show her something too vivid to be false.
The vision had gripped her: Deen dying by the hand of a golden-haired man who had attempted to kill Zafira.
Yasmine vowed to kill him. To bring to him the same level of suffering he had brought to her.
She didn’t know how she would, for between her and Sharr was her husband, the Arz, the Baransea, and possibly a thousand and one other things she didn’t know of. She was no Huntress, but she was Yasmine Ra’ad, and she would find a way. She didn’t even know if the golden-haired man still lived, nor did she know his name. One donkey at a time.
Misk was still rubbing her shoulders, silently awaiting her response.
“For what?” Yasmine asked him.
What Zafira faced on Sharr was surely better than this. Yasmine didn’t want her to return. First they had suffered from the cold, then the loss of their parents. Then Deen. Now this.
“Suffering is our fate.”
Misk made a sound in his throat. “Have faith, Yasmine.”
“It’s hard.”
“That’s why I said have faith, not have a sweet.”
Yasmine gave him a look.
He laughed. “What? All of your terrible jokes are catching up with me.” He wrapped his arms around her, his chin on her shoulder, his voice warm in her ear. “Zafira will return with others in tow. Including a man I trust with my life and that of my mother’s. Deen knew of him, too.”
“And he will end our troubles with his oh-so-great powers?”
Misk let her mocking slide. “Not alone. But he will be part of it.”
The maids had brought her kanafah and mint tea, but the tray sat untouched, the tea long since cooled. Yasmine couldn’t stomach the sight of food or comfort. Everywhere she looked, she saw the bruised skin and still chests of the children. Small coffins and screaming mothers.
She was tired. So very tired, but she gifted her husband a small smile. “Does your mysterious savior have a name?”
Misk kissed her cheek. “Altair al-Badawi.”
* * *
He never did like the darkness. It was too heavy on the eyes, left too much to the imagination. It was where he had been shoved, confined, while his mother doted on his brother. While Arawiya celebrated the birth of a prince.
He preferred light. The dizzying kind that hung above the feasts he had once frequented with Benyamin.
Another sob slipped from his parched tongue.
Benyamin, who had risked his life for decades by acting as the one heading Altair’s treasonous gossamer web. His brother by choice, his friend by fate. Who lived with the guilt of his people’s negligence, with the guilt of his own kindness, embarking on this journey and not once expecting to die.
He was dead now. A lonely, honorable death, where he would rest with the Sisters of Old for eternity.
Altair watched the zumra leave. He saw the fall of Zafira’s shoulders, knowing what this battle had cost her. He saw Nasir, felling ifrit after ifrit, leading the others to the Alder ship. He saw his mother, weakened by Sharr.
None of them looked for him. Not while they boarded the ship. Not when they loosened their sails. Not when they left him. Even the lonely kaftar had pitied him before dispersing into the ruins.
Leaving him shackled by the Lion’s shadows, unable to escape. He had helped the zumra, released that dizzying distraction of light. And they had left him.
Then he was thrown on his hands and knees, forced to work alongside the chittering, shrieking ifrit as they salvaged a ship from Sharr’s ruins. Now, days—weeks?—later, his chains rattled as the ship heaved across the Baransea.
He knew why the dark creature hated him and the prince: Because we have what you do not. We tumbled from the womb with all that you strive for.
They were descendants of one of the Sisters of Old, with magic in their veins. They were vessels of power, even if they weren’t as powerful as the full-blooded Sisters. They didn’t need a magical heart or the light of a royal minaret. The land needn’t host magic for them to wield it.
The shadows stirred, alerting him to a visitor. Waves crashed against the ship, roiling the insides of his stomach. While his brother trailed shadows on another ship, he tossed an orb of light to the cabin’s ceiling.
His visitor’s amber eyes glowed, tattoo gleaming bronze, elongated ears tucked beneath his ebony turban. Ears much like Altair’s own.
“Hello, Father,” said Altair. His voice was rough. “Come to gloat?”
The Lion of the Night smiled.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There’s magic in words, I know, but there’s a particularly different kind of magic in the bond between blood. And this story could never have happened without my family. My greatest thanks goes, first and foremost, to my mother and father, for giving me courage and strength, and most importantly, for putting faith at my core. There is no greater gift.
To my sisters, Asma and Azraa, I owe you both the bulk of my smiles, my love, and my sanity (and insanity, if we’re being truly honest). Thank you for lending your brains so that We Hunt the Flame could be the greatest it could be. For being my biggest fans and my favorite critics. I love you both more than any alphabet can allow me to express. And yes, Nasir and Altair are yours before anyone else’s. To my brother, Abdullah, for sometimes being the worst, for being my earliest friend, and for reintroducing me to the world of books.
To my agent, John Cusick, for being kind and supportive and for always, always being there with the right words precisely when I need them. You found my book the perfect home.
My endless appreciation to my editors: Janine O’Malley, for seeing something special in my words and for being my greatest champion from the very first day; to Melissa Warten, who answers my hundreds of emails with enthusiasm and love. Thank you both for asking “why” countless times, and for making the rough stones of my work shine.
To everyone at Macmillan: Thank you for being the publishing home of my dreams and working tirelessly to make this book all it can be. To my brilliant publicists Brittany Pearlman (fellow displaced-Californian) and Shivani Annirood: Thanks for putting up with my mumbling and endless questions. To Molly Ellis: Your lengthy emails will always be a bright spot of this journey. To Melissa Zar and Jordin Streeter in marketing: It’s because of you two that I had to sign my name so many times, and I’ll forever be grateful for that and all else. To Hayley Jozwiak, for reading over my words a hundred thousand times. A much-needed thank-you to Elizabeth Clark, for putting up with the designer in me—and I don’t say that lightly.
Special thanks to Joy Peskin, Jen Besser, Jon Yaged, Allison Verost, Katie Halata, Mary Van Akin, Kathryn Little, T
om Mis, and Gaby Salpeter. To Melissa Sarver White at Folio Lit, for taking We Hunt the Flame abroad. To Virginia Allyn, for the gorgeous map, and Erin Fitzsimmons, for the typography. To Simón Prades, for the amazing cover. To Jenny Bent for your never-ending support and love, and agent extraordinaires Molly O’Neill and Suzie Townsend. To Sharon Biggs Waller and Leigh Bardugo, for empowering me from the very beginning, and V. E. Schwab for answering my many questions about how to get published. To Stephanie Garber, Lee Kelly, and Rachel Bellavia, for steering me in the right direction during my querying days, and Jessica Khoury, Ron Smith, Margaret Rogerson, Beth Revis, Evelyn Skye, Sabaa Tahir, Robin LaFevers, and Roshani Chokshi, for the love and support.
To Kerri Maniscalco, for teaching me how to appreciate every moment in the crazy world of publishing. To Katie Bucklein, soul twin and fierce fighter. Thank you for always having my back. To Joanna Hathaway, dearest friend and loving soul who keeps me going. Britta Gigliotti, principessa and the other half of this old couple. To Marieke Nijkamp, generous heart and mentor, thank you for being one of my earliest readers. To Joan He, partner in crime, agent sister, and debut friend. I heart you, goat friend. To Jessica Brooks, who kept a list and believed in me. To Beth Phelan and the #DVpit squad, you guys rock. To Brittany Holloway, my favorite mega fan. To the amazing fans with dedicated accounts supporting the world of Arawiya. To Lisa Austin, Kalyn Josephson, Jenna DeTrapani, Ksenia Winnicki, Heather Kassner, Mary Hinson, Sara Gundell, Korrina Ede, Noverantale, Ashelynn Hetland, Amanda Foody, and Michael Waters: Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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