Freedom's Slave

by Heather Demetrios

I shall do my best not to disappoint you, Kes thought in return.

  Thatur gently placed one of his claws on Kes’s shoulder. The gods keep you.

  Taz held Yasri tight against him, his cheek resting on top of her head. With one flap of his wings, the gryphon rose into the sky, blending into the dark clouds. Kes knew it would be this image that would give him the courage to do what he had to do tonight: his daughter and the jinni he loved, flying to safety.

  Kes watched them until they were little more than a speck, and then he watched a great deal longer.

  Hours later, Kesmir lay awake beside Calar, afraid to breathe lest she awaken from her restless sleep. Several times his hand had reached for the dagger beneath his pillow, but he was certain, time and again, that she was still half awake. He didn’t want her to know he’d been the one to kill her. She deserved that mercy.

  It was well past midnight and Kes knew the bottles were being transported as he lay there waiting to kill the jinni who’d once been his best friend, who he’d thought was his rohifsa. The tavrai and the Dhoma would be fighting on Earth now, cutting down the slave traders. Kes hadn’t been awakened by the guards, so he had to assume his plan had worked, and the jinn who were going through the portal to fight on the other side had made it through without detection. Taz, he knew, was waiting for Kes’s signal—sparks of white chiaan above the palace. This would be the Brass Army’s signal to charge the prison and take it over, freeing the remaining jinn.

  He whispered her name—if she didn’t respond, he would do it. He would kill her.

  “Calar.”

  He could hear the terror in his voice, might as well have announced his intentions. She mumbled something incoherent and turned over.

  Do it now, he said to himself.

  He closed his eyes, saw Taz’s golden ones. Saw him holding Yasri. Failure wasn’t an option.

  Kes sat up and slipped the dagger out from under his pillow. The metal glinted in the light from the flame that burned continually in the corner. He could see his reflection in it, misery and terror written all over his face.

  He eased onto his knees, looking down at her. Calar’s hair was splayed across the pillow, her face relaxed, innocent. Cold and beautiful, skin and lips and eyes he’d once covered with gentle kisses. The face that had saved him.

  “Hello,” the little girl says, her gloved hand outstretched. Her ruby eyes seem to take the full measure of him in one glance.

  Behind her, his village burns, the dead slaughtered outside their homes, left there to rot. The wind still carries the cries of his family. He doesn’t take her hand, just stares at her. The wound the Aisouri have given him pulses with pain—it is the only thing he feels.

  “Come,” she says, beckoning. “I want to show you something.”

  He takes her hand and she leads him down to the fire lake. Its surface is still, the lava shimmering in the late-afternoon sun.

  “Look,” she whispers.

  There, in the center of the lake, blooms a lotus, its delicate petals open to the sky. Impossible that it should live or grow here, but there it is.

  Something passes over the boy’s face, a fleeting joy, but then it’s gone.

  “I have a special power,” the girl says. Her voice is soft and gentle. Later, he will realize she is only soft and gentle with him. “I can see inside minds. I know you can’t talk right now, but my father is the shirva and he needs to know what happened. He will avenge your family. Your friends.”

  The boy simply looks at her. She is beautiful, shining against this stark background of death and destruction.

  The girl slips off her gloves. Later, she will tell him how her hands ached to touch him then. She couldn’t say why, except that he was beautiful and his sadness tore at her heart, a heart she didn’t even know existed until right then.

  “May I?” she asks.

  He nods slightly, curious.

  The girl reaches up and gently places her fingertips on his temples. He gasps as their chiaan merges.

  “This doesn’t hurt, does it?” she asks, anxious. “I’m still learning.”

  His eyes meet hers and he shakes his head. He wants her to touch him forever. For a moment, he can’t look away. Her eyes are like dark rubies, with flecks of amber. He allows her chiaan to seep into him. He can feel the twisted bits inside her, the secret shames. She is the mind reader, but for a moment it feels like he has the power. The boy reaches up his hands and places his palms over hers. Now it is her turn to gasp as he floods into her. His energy is dark, like hers, but laced with a gentle calm. To her, she later tells him, he will always be the lotus in the fire lake: fragile and yet strong enough to survive.

  This is what the girl sees when she enters his mind: Blood. Everywhere. Screams, the kind only animals make. Purple chiaan and the calm cold of the Aisouri on their gryphons as they cut down everything in their path. A baby sliced down the middle with a scimitar. Fire and mud and the stench of death.

  The girl shudders and the boy grips her hands.

  He feels her go deeper. He is a pool and she pushes down, down.

  The scimitar, slicing into his face.

  The girl goes deeper.

  The boy, younger now, running with a friend. “Kesmir, come back!” Alesh yells.

  Kesmir stops and turns, grinning.

  Behind him is the village, whole and unburned. Lava spurts into the sky from the nearby volcano, but it’s an unusually sunny day in Ithkar and the landscape’s fierce beauty is softened by the appearance of the sun.

  The boy grips the girl’s hands harder, the memory suffocating. His body begins to shake and he feels her pull away, closer to the surface of his mind. There: a body on the hard-packed dirt as the fires rage. Alesh.

  The girl opens her eyes. Tears roll down the boy’s face and she brings her lips closer, kissing each tear as it slips out of his eyes. His hands slide up her arms, into her hair, and he buries his face in her neck. She wraps her arms around him and holds him close to her and he somehow knows she is home now and she will never leave him. How can this—this—come from something so horrible?

  Kes gripped the dagger harder. The blade was now inches from her heart. His eyes filled and he let the tears slide down his face without shame, just like on the banks of his village’s fire lake so long ago. They fell on Calar’s face like rain. Her eyes snapped open and Kes froze, the blade suspended above her heart, his mind going blank with fear. She took in the dagger, his face, uncomprehending. He saw the moment when Calar understood what was about to happen: it swept across her face like a storm, a desperate unfathomable sadness giving way to instinct.

  Now.

  Kes drove the dagger into the space between them, but she was faster, rolling out from under him as the blade plunged into the mattress.

  He leaped up, grabbing her arm roughly as she tried to run from him. She had the power, he had the strength. He pressed her back against his chest and brought the blade toward her throat.

  Don’t think about it, don’t think about it—

  “Yasri,” she gasped, her voice filled with pain.

  That was all the time she needed. In the split second that Kes faltered at the sound of his daughter’s name, Calar let out a tortured scream, as though her soul were being ripped apart. She didn’t bother to run from him or wrest the dagger out of his hand. She didn’t need to.

  He resisted her with everything he had, pushing his psychic energy against hers. He could feel her frustration, her anger at not being able to hurt him. It was the first time his mind had been locked to her. He strained against the onslaught of her power, every second of his training being brought to bear on this moment. She pushed against his consciousness like a battering ram. He held out for nearly five minutes—an infinite amount of time—and then she broke through. His head exploded with pain immediately—his skull bashing against rocks, his brain ground underfoot, knives carving him open. No amount of training could have prepared him for this. Kes’s eyes rolled into the back of
his head and his body seized up and dropped heavily to the floor as thick, dark blood poured from his nose, eyes, ears, and mouth. He forgot about the dagger, about the war, about everything, because all that existed now was agony.

  He could feel himself letting go, his mind desperate to separate itself from the awareness of pain in his body. Dimly, he heard Calar sobbing one word over and over: why, why, WHY? His eyes were little more than two slits, enough to see her on her knees, her face ravaged by rage and grief. She reached out and pulled something off his chest—the yaghin meant to protect him from her shadows—and threw it across the room. Then she held up the yaghin at her neck and brought the stone to her lips, hands shaking, tears streaming down her face.

  You and Ri are the one good thing.

  Just as Kes began to go, to fade into that shadowy land that was pulling him into its embrace, he heard the most terrifying sound in the world:

  “Sahai.”

  His fingers twitched against the marble floor. Once, twice, and then they were still. A last, agonized gasp escaped his lips and crimson chiaan slipped out of his skin, hovering over Kes as the first of Calar’s shadows descended on him.

  27

  ZANARI CROUCHED BEHIND A LOW SAND DUNE, HER EYES glued to the portal. It was nearly impossible for her to remain silent, to sit still. She felt as though she’d been swimming in a sea of emotion for the past ten hours. Joy and adrenaline and guilt and fear and fury roiled within her. She’d lost her brother but gained Phara. She was leaving Arjinna behind—maybe forever—and now all of Earth was hers to explore.

  But first, she had to kill a few slave traders.

  She leaned forward as several figures emerged from the shimmering cut between the realms that bled chiaan like a wound. Zanari turned to the rows of Brass soldiers who stood in a shallow valley of sand behind her, waiting for her signal to ambush the traders. A shadow crossed over the moonlit sand and she looked up: Noqril, returning from his reconnaissance. He landed before evanescing behind a large dune, so that the smoke wouldn’t be visible; then he made his way to her, crouched low.

  “How many?” Zanari whispered as he came to join her.

  “Ten traders, but they’re being guarded by a battalion of Ifrit,” Noqril said, breathing heavily. He’d been in the air for hours, going between Earth and Arjinna to keep track of the traders.

  “Godsdammit,” she muttered. “What do you think?”

  “We’ll likely suffer casualties, but we’ll get the bottles in the end,” he said. “It’s your call.”

  How many times had Zanari seen her brother in this exact situation? Weighing the balance of lives lost to lives saved. It had never been easy for him—it kept him up nights—but she’d had no idea how heavy that burden felt. It was a physical weight on her heart. She glanced at the jinn behind her. How many would lose their lives tonight?

  “All right,” she said. “We have to do it.”

  Noqril nodded. “I agree.”

  Zanari stood, her chiaan pulsing inside her, and sent sparks from her fingertips—the signal to charge. A cloud of jade evanescence swirled beneath her feet. Behind her, she could see the evanescence of her fellow soldiers, every caste represented. This—right here—this was why she’d finally had to leave Arjinna. The tavrai saw the Ifrit and Shaitan in their midst as necessary evils, but to Zanari and the Dhoma, they were equal and their sacrifices honorable.

  The evanescence took her, and seconds later, Zanari was at the portal and launching herself at the nearest slave trader, an Ifrit in expensive leathers and with teeth made of gold. He cried out, dropping his sack of bottles in the sand as he scrambled away from her.

  “Not so fast, brother,” she called.

  Zanari threw laser-sharp daggers of chiaan at his back and he fell to the sand, the wind knocked out of him. She slit his throat and had already turned to the next trader before his body went still.

  Zanari became a maelstrom, a frenzy of blood and sand and cries of rage. You are a sword, nothing more, she chanted to herself, again and again. The thought of dying so close to Phara, without the healer even knowing she was there, was too horrible to contemplate. She had to make it through this.

  Blood coated her hands and her clothes. This gore—the stink of death all around her—was what Raif had been trying to save her from all those times he’d forbidden her to join in his skirmishes with the Ifrit.

  A ball of fiery chiaan hit her in the back and Zanari fell to the sand face-first, excruciating pain racing down her spine. She gasped and it was as if she’d drawn half the desert into her mouth with that one breath. Zanari gagged, rolling onto her back just as a scimitar came down onto the sand, barely missing her body. The trader stood above her, eyes full of fury.

  Screw honor, she thought. She rolled once more and her body flew down the nearest dune. Running away—rolling away—wasn’t what Raif would have done, but Zanari wasn’t her brother. She wanted to stay alive more than she wanted to win the love of the jinn she commanded. There was a shout and Zanari looked up from where she lay at the bottom of the dune. Noqril had returned to his fawzel form and had pecked out the eyes of the trader, and a Brass soldier finished him off, blasting the Ifrit with his chiaan. Noqril flew down to where Zanari lay. He evanesced in midair, landing nimbly on his feet, a regular jinni once more.

  “You gonna bite my head off if I pick you up?” he asked.

  Ever since they’d met on the Sun Chaser, the sand ship that had brought Zanari and Raif to the Dhoma camp over a summer ago, he’d been trying to bed Zanari. She’d rebuffed his advances with narrowed eyes, scoffing, and cutting remarks.

  She smiled now, grateful for this oaf of a jinni who had saved her life. “Just don’t grab my ass,” she said.

  Noqril laughed as he leaned down and gently picked her up. Pain shot through her as grains of sand settled into her wound.

  “Looks like we need to get you to a healer,” he said, once more flashing his wicked, lascivious grin.

  She smiled back at him. “Looks like it.”

  It wasn’t how she’d planned to surprise Phara, but Zanari would take what she could get.

  By the time Noqril made his way back up the dune, the roar of battle had died down and there was no one left to kill. The sand was littered with the dead of both sides, large sacks of bottles sitting between them like treasure. The few Ifrit left had retreated back through the portal, where they would be cut down by Kes’s jinn who waited there for them. It was over. Zanari had won the first battle she’d ever commanded, lacerated back and all.

  The sky had lightened to the soft gray of the rabbits that raced through the Forest of Sighs, velvet wisps of dawn. The remains of her little army were already gathering the sacks of bottles.

  “Who has first watch?” Noqril asked.

  Zanari had promised Raif that there would always be a small company of soldiers near the portal to help refugees as they made the crossing, as well as to intercept any slave traders.

  “We’ll keep a squad of Brass soldiers here for now,” Zanari said.

  Noqril nodded. “When we get to the camp, I’ll organize shifts for the fawzel before we head back to Arjinna.” They would need their bird’s-eye view for security now more than ever.

  Zanari’s stomach turned as she thought of her brother, waiting to fight his own battle. She wasn’t much for praying, but she’d gotten down on her knees to Tirgan for hours, begging him to protect Raif. She wouldn’t be able to rest until the battle for the prison was over and she knew he’d made it out.

  Noqril looked down at her, his eyes soft. “Ready to go home?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I am,” Zanari said.

  She glanced through the portal as Noqril’s evanescence pooled beneath his feet. Through the thin membrane between the worlds she caught a glimpse of moonlight, though she couldn’t see the Widows themselves. Somewhere over that range, Raif would soon be fighting for the Dhoma, fighting for the land he belonged to. Zanari didn’t stop looking until Noqril’s ev
anescence took her away.

  In the year since they’d left the Dhoma lands to travel across the Eye and fight a losing battle in Arjinna, Phara had been busy.

  Zanari, still propped up in Noqril’s arms, stared at the camp. There was no sign of the Ifrit destruction from a year earlier, when the homes of the Dhoma had been reduced to nothing more than scattered articles on the desert floor.

  Towering sand dunes that formed a natural valley bordered the camp and a large lake sat on its eastern boundary. Improbably high tents of several stories squatted in the sand, with Moroccan lamps of colored glass and lacy metalwork shining from poles planted in the sand before each family’s doorway. The light spilled across the sand, the colors reminding her of the aurora. A large bonfire burned continuously in the center. Zanari had fond memories of sitting among the Dhoma and listening to their stories and songs. The last bonfire, though, had been fraught with conflict and fear. Nalia, insisting they could make it through the Eye; Yezhud, Samar’s wife, blaming the Aisouri for the loss of so many Dhoma during the search for the sigil.

  The anticipation of finally seeing Phara again was dimmed by the loss of Samar and the grief his wife would carry on her heart.

  “How do we want to tell Yezhud about Samar?” she asked Noqril.

  He sighed. “I’ll do it. But first, let’s get you to the healer’s tent.”

  Zanari nodded, guilty for feeling so relieved. Her back felt as though it were on fire, and it was only the desire to reach the Dhoma camp that had kept her going. Sweat had broken out on her forehead and Noqril looked down in concern as she began to shiver.

  “Better hurry, brother,” she gasped.

  He started down the dune they’d been standing on, heading toward the center of camp, followed by the Brass soldiers who’d begun evanescing all around them, many carrying large sacks filled with bottles. It was slow going as Noqril made his way down the dune. Every step seemed to vibrate through her, and Zanari bit her lip to keep the screams inside. She whimpered, pressing her forehead against his chest.

  “Almost there, sister.”