“The lost Jawarat,” she said.
He nodded.
At her disparaging look, Altair’s mouth crooked with the telltale sign of him fighting a grin.
“You come here, try to kill me, murder my friend instead, and now you want to be my … ally? You Sarasins are more barbaric than they make you out to be.”
“Perhaps.” Altair tipped his head and his playful demeanor vanished. “The way I see it, we could kill you and be on our way. But the three of us together might stand a better chance.” He nodded at the fallen ifrit, now obscured by the shifting sands. “We did save your life.”
The girl had the most open features—Nasir could see her thinking the proposal through.
She lifted her eyes to him, those shards of ice discerning the real threat. Nasir’s nocked arrow had led her to assume he had killed the Demenhune.
“And when we find the Jawarat?” she asked.
Not if, when. There was nothing more respectable and dangerous than a woman of confidence.
This time, it was Nasir who spoke. “We decide then.”
CHAPTER 33
Fury burned in Zafira’s veins, harsher than the blazing sands. The Silver Witch had sent Deen and daama Sarasins.
Why the allyship? If they could hunt her down in this abyss of stone and sand, they could find the Jawarat themselves. They had no reason for her. Being the Demenhune Hunter held no merit in Sharr. She was no more than a girl from a caliphate where everyone had snow in their brains and smiles on their faces. The taller one didn’t even give her a true surname; al-Badawi meant “nomad.” A common name men used when they wanted to obscure their origins.
She was bait, or a shield.
But it was die now or die later, as with her decision to accept the wretched invitation. If the Sarasins hadn’t saved her from the ifrit wearing Deen’s face, she would already be dead.
Prolonging her death gave her time to think of a way out of this mess. Better yet: a way to avenge Deen.
So she nodded, and the dark-haired one nodded back. It was by no means an oath. Just a fragile deal held together by the inclines of their heads. She chortled, ignoring the funny looks they gave her.
“Now that we’re all allied and well, how about you tell us your name?” Altair began, as if he hadn’t just threatened to kill her. “I never thought the infamous Hunter would be so pretty.”
Zafira rolled her eyes. “Do you always talk so much?”
He scowled, a perfect half circle of downturned lips. “I would think you’d prefer my small talk to the deathly silence of this one.”
The dark-haired one studied her, the gray of his eyes now an unflinching steel. That ghastly scar on his face gleamed. He might not speak, but his head was full of words. People like him, Zafira knew, were dangerous.
Altair began leading them, wielding a curved scimitar like an extension of his hand. He held one in the other, too, but the bandage wrapped near his shoulder made clear why he wasn’t using it. The muscles in his large arms flexed against the cords strapped around them, and Zafira averted her eyes. How much did he have to eat to hone muscles like that?
“I see you watching me, Huntress. Worry not,” Altair said, glancing at his wound. “I’ll be good as new in no time.” He eyed his companion. “Do you ever wonder why women focus so much on me?”
“Maybe because you resemble a lost, rabid dog,” the dark-haired one suggested in perfect seriousness.
Zafira bit down a laugh, and Altair swiveled to her with a comical pout. She was unsure of the relationship between the two Sarasins. They didn’t look like brothers, nor did they seem friends, yet they had a mutual respect she doubted either acknowledged. One of them held power over the other, yet she couldn’t discern which one.
Murderers, she reminded herself. That was all that mattered. And if the arrows with the silver fletching and fine wood were any indication, they had more means than Zafira could ever dream of.
After a beat of silence, she spoke. “Zafira.”
“Who’s that?”
“You asked for my name,” she said. Sand danced in the distance, sparkling beneath the sun’s rays. The world was still a shade darker than when she and Deen had first arrived. She touched the coolness of the ring he had given her and nearly swayed at the reminder of his still chest. Of the tears huddling in her throat.
Altair nodded, oblivious. “Seems your mother was following in the sultana’s footsteps when she named you.”
She blinked. “Oh?”
“Zafira means ‘victorious.’” Altair used the end of his turban to wipe the sweat beading at his brow. The cloth was dark and rimmed in red. It reminded her of a snake, the ones with vibrant colors, poisonous and alluring at once. “So does Nasir, the name of our beloved crown prince. You see, Huntress, I know a thing or two about names.”
“He knows a thing or two about too many things,” the other one growled.
“Oh, come now, hashashin. Is that jealousy I hear in your voice?”
An assassin. That explained his garb and calculated movements. It would have been easy to assume he had killed Deen, had Altair not threatened to kill her.
“I know what the prince’s name is,” she said.
Altair gave her a funny look, and the hashashin merely looked the other way.
They turned east, through an arching pathway littered with shattered stone and tiny dunes of sand. Altair hacked away dead vines as he went, and as happy as Zafira would have been to leave him to clean the ruins, she had a Jawarat to find.
And an escape to plan.
“We’re supposed to head this way,” she said, turning north and out of the shadows.
The Sarasins shared a look.
“I have a feeling the Jawarat will be closer to the center,” she added.
The hashashin eyed Altair’s path. “That’s where we’re going.”
His low, dead voice made her shiver before she replied, “No, that path will take us along the outskirts of the island.”
“Is that what your compass says?” Altair asked. “Did you … receive one?”
“Receive one?” she repeated, then recalled Deen’s compass and her heart cleaved in two as she remembered everything afresh. She shook her head before Altair could see her distress, before the hashashin, with his cold and calculating gaze, could read her.
He approached with a compass of crimson and silver in his gloved palm. It reminded her of the Silver Witch.
Altair looked over his shoulder. “Where does it point?”
“It’s broken,” he said, and snapped the lid closed.
Liar. She saw the point shifting.
“We don’t need a compass,” she said. “I know where I’m going. I’ve always known where I was going.”
She just didn’t know how. She once attributed it to experience. The way a baker would never measure out his semolina before making his daily batch of harsha. She had never needed a tool to show her where to go. But if a baker was faced with a wild, uncharted maze of a quantity, wouldn’t he at least hesitate? Wouldn’t he need a tool then?
Zafira hadn’t thought twice about which path to take in Sharr’s ruins. But that odd frenzy in her blood only settled when she turned in the direction she wanted to go.
“Ah, yes. Come, let’s follow the girl who decides her path based on how she feels,” Altair said, pulling her from her thoughts.
She rolled her eyes and left them behind. But hadn’t Deen said something like that, too?
Her path had gotten him killed.
Just as she paused, she heard the sheathing of scimitars, followed by the drag of boots across the sand-skittered stone. Leading the giant and his growling companion to their deaths wouldn’t be so bad.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Altair said, ever suave.
“No, you don’t,” the other said.
Zafira wouldn’t bother asking for his name.
“Why do you always think I’m talking to you?”
“Does it look lik
e she’s listening to you?”
“Why do men think women can’t hear them unless we’re looking at them?” Zafira snapped.
Moments later, she heard nothing at all and swiveled to see them right at her heels, deathly silent. So the earlier shuffling was a ruse. The mystery of why they needed her set her on edge.
Zafira touched Baba’s jambiya at her thigh. “Well? Out with it.”
“With what? Would you like me to sing to pass the time?” Altair asked.
“The results of your apparent mind-reading,” she deadpanned.
“Ah, it’s just that I can see you plotting our murders leagues away,” Altair said. There was an edge to his voice when he added, “A little thing to remember, Huntress: your face thinks before you do.”
“My brain, unlike yours, works before the rest of me does,” Zafira retorted. She knew her face spoke before she did. Everyone knew. But Deen knew it best of all.
Altair laughed. “It would be uncharacteristic of me to disagree.”
As they continued away from the cover of the stone structures, she was fully aware of every weighted glance the two young men shared when they thought she wouldn’t notice. She was even more aware of the way the dark-haired one watched her.
The longer Zafira alternated between sand and relentless stone, the harder it became to breathe. Her hood became a cage, and her eyes burned as sweat seeped between her eyelids. The world tipped more than once; the horizon rippled.
She ran her tongue along her chapped lips.
Water. Everywhere she looked, there was water.
A mirage, Zafira. It’s a mirage.
“Huntress?” Altair paused by her side when she grasped a trellis to hold herself upright. She gave him an impatient wave, and he carried on with a shrug, shuffling sand in his wake.
Breathe. Remove your wretched cloak. What was the point of it anymore? They knew she was a girl. She lifted her fingers to the cool clasp of her cloak and … no. She wouldn’t be bested by a cloak. She could endure a little heat.
A shadow fell to her side, and Zafira glanced sharply at the dark-haired hashashin. Something shifted in his features, just barely, when she met his eyes. A mix of surprise, and a stir of anger. There was a vulnerability in the way his dark lashes brushed his skin when he blinked.
“Take off your cloak,” he said.
Her throat closed and her head spun. Spurts of sand struck her skin.
“What do you want with me?” she whispered as her breathing grew shallow.
He murmured a reply, but all she heard was that silvery lilt before the sun winked away and she tipped into darkness.
* * *
Zafira finally understood why Arawiyans celebrated the moon. Why the sight made people weep.
It was the desert. The sweltering heat that drained them to their core until the sun sank into the horizon and the moon swept across the dark expanse of sky, gifting them her cold touch. It was a beauty they didn’t appreciate in Demenhur, because of the shy sun.
She had never been happier to see that majestic sphere of white.
Moss was cool beneath her back. A figure was bent over her, silhouetted against the moon. He brushed a damp cloth across her forehead and pursed his lips when he saw that she was awake. The dark-haired hashashin. Altair was nowhere to be seen.
Skies. She had blacked out. She had blacked out in the middle of an uncharted island with two Sarasin men. Panic tightened her chest and she scrambled back, boot heels digging into the dirt, moss sticking to her palms.
A pool of water glittered darkly beneath the moon, surrounded by lush plants. Beyond the small oasis, sand dunes stretched for as far as she could see. Her cloak was folded to the side. Her satchels were there, too, untouched.
The moon cast the hashashin in shadow, sharpening the hollows of his face. “You passed out because of the heat, and you would have cracked your skull if I hadn’t caught you. Altair carried you here. I removed your cloak.” He turned his head and lifted a hand to his neck. “Nothing else.”
His voice looped with the darkness, near silent. As if the very idea of speaking disgraced him.
“Who are you?” she asked him. She folded her arms across herself, ignoring the cloth in his extended hand.
He dropped it to his side. “Depends on the slant of light.”
Desolation laced his words.
“What do you want with me?” she asked again in a whisper. Why did you try to kill me? Why did you care for me?
His lips parted.
“Ah, the sayyida blesses us with her presence, as pale as the moon herself!” Altair called as he emerged from the shadows, bathed in blue light. Zafira nearly sputtered at the sight of his bare chest. Golden, sculpted—skies. He grinned, the shameless man. “About time, too. We need to get moving.”
“We’re staying here for the night. She needs rest,” the hashashin said.
Now Zafira glanced at him in surprise. Judging by the sound Altair made, it was clear the hashashin rarely paid heed to anyone’s needs but his own.
“I’ll keep watch,” he continued.
Altair toweled his body. “But of course, sul—”
The hashashin cut him off with a growl, and Zafira lifted her eyebrows. Altair let out an exaggerated sigh and responded with a two-fingered salute.
For Sarasins, at times they seemed oddly … normal. As Zafira struggled to avert her gaze, Altair wrapped a fresh bandage around his wound. He threw on his clothes before unfurling his bedroll, an intricately woven carpet of blue and green fringed in beige. Then he lay back, crossing his arms behind his head with a wince. Kharra. Zafira hadn’t brought a bedroll of her own.
Altair grinned wickedly, noticing the same. “We can share.”
“Ah, no, shukrun,” she said quickly, tempering the flare within her as she slipped back into her cloak. Deen would have offered his bedroll and slept on the sand if he had to. She grabbed Deen’s satchel and set it against an eroding stone. Deen. Deen. Deen. All that was left of him were the things he had touched. A tin of cocoa and a vial of honey, both as empty as the world without him. She closed her eyes.
No. She wouldn’t close her eyes amid the enemy again. She had a mission. She needed to stay alive.
A chill wove across the night, and she wrapped her arms around her knees. Funny how the same desert that had given her a heatstroke such a short time ago now made her shiver.
Altair turned to her, something like earnestness on his face. “I’m sorry.” He glanced at Deen’s satchel. “About your friend.”
Ahead, the hashashin cleared a short boulder and sat with his back to her. She drew her hood over her head, letting it fall over her eyes. That was how much Sarasins valued life. Kill and apologize. Make up for a felled soul with a word.
Whatever fatigue she felt was soon overtaken by numbing grief. She slipped her finger inside the ring, rubbing her skin against the inscription. “For you, a thousand times.” She felt Altair’s gaze on her, yet she doubted he had ever known loss. She stared at the back of the hashashin’s head and guessed he hadn’t experienced it, either.
Sarasins truly were heartless.
Eventually, Altair’s breathing slowed, and she fought a losing battle to stay alert. She fought harder, unsure if she was even awake when the rustle of clothes knifed the night. She watched with hooded eyes as the hashashin turned away from the oasis.
By the glint in his eyes, Zafira could tell he was focused on Altair. A long moment later, his gaze drifted to her and she stiffened, but he didn’t seem to notice.
After what felt like years, he sighed, heavy and resigned, and faced the night again.
Zafira pondered that oddly human sound before sleep dragged her away.
CHAPTER 34
The girl spoke in her sleep.
Rimaal, a girl. The Huntress. She murmured strings of words dotted with curses that would make Altair hoot with laughter; the words “not now”; and a name, over and over and over. If Nasir were to guess, Deen was the Demenhune
Altair had killed, and he doubted this Deen had been merely a friend.
She murmured for a sibling, too. Two of them. Sisters whose names made a whisper of a smile twitch at the corners of her mouth. What was it like to have a brother or a sister born from the same mother? Every relationship Nasir had experienced was either fabricated or lived a short life.
He stood over Altair, whose features were blunted by sleep, and stared at the smooth column of his neck, where the qutn fabric of his turban had shifted. It would be easy. A clean cut, painless.
It would make his father proud.
That last thought was what made Nasir nudge Altair’s bare bicep with the toe of his boot. Altair’s right eye popped open instantly and Nasir clenched his jaw—he should have known.
“For a moment, I thought you might do it,” Altair said.
“Do what?” the girl asked. She yawned as she brushed her teeth with a siwak.
Altair’s mouth curled into a grin. “Kiss me.”
Nasir kicked him, and Altair’s laughter only increased.
“We’re leaving now,” Nasir said.
She met his eyes again, and his step faltered. Aside from his father and his dead mother, there were only two people who ever looked him directly in the eye: Altair and Kulsum, but she, too, only briefly.
As if holding his gaze was as painful as spying on a monster like him.
He shut down that line of thought and holstered his bow. The sun was still making its way past the horizon, so the air was cool. He untied the keffiyah from his neck and wove it into a turban around his head.
Altair extended a share of his pita and a trio of sukkary dates to the girl, who eyed them with suspicion.
“It’s perfectly safe,” he said.
“As is my own food,” she replied, digging through her satchel for darker safawi dates.
“You know it won’t last forever, yes?” Altair said, extending the food to Nasir, who ignored it. Altair shrugged and stuffed some pita into his mouth, dusting crumbs from his close-trimmed beard.
“Until I’m dying of hunger, I’ll pretend it will.” She bit her lip, as if speaking those words inflicted pain. Her eyes fell closed, nostrils flaring.
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