At the center of course, was Ghassan al Qahtani. Nahri’s skin prickled as she looked at the djinn king. It always did—there was far too much history between them. The man who held her life in his hands, who controlled her as thoroughly as if he’d locked her away, her chains the lives of the Daevas and friends he would destroy if she so much as thought about stepping out of line.
He looked calm and as inscrutable as ever, dressed in royal robes and his striking silk turban—a turban Nahri couldn’t look at without recalling the cold way he’d revealed the truth about Dara and Qui-zi to her on that rain-soaked pavilion five years ago. Early in her marriage, Nahri had quietly asked Muntadhir to take his off before they were alone—a request he had granted without comment and one he’d religiously followed.
Her gaze went to him now. She hadn’t spoken to her husband since their fight in the infirmary, and seeing him there, dressed in the same official robes and turban as his father, deepened her unease. Jamshid was at his side, of course, their knees brushing, but there were others as well, most of whom Nahri recognized. Wealthy, well-connected men all of them . . . but they were also Muntadhir’s friends, true ones. One appeared to be telling Muntadhir a story, while another passed him a water pipe.
It looked as though they were trying to keep his spirits up—or perhaps distract him from the other side of the platform, where Ali had taken a seat. Though he lacked his older brother’s dazzling array of jewelry, the starkness of his attire seemed to elevate him. At Ali’s left were several officers from the Royal Guard, along with a thickly bearded man with an infectious grin and a severe-eyed woman in male dress. On his right, the Qaid appeared to be telling a story at which Ghassan gave a hearty laugh. Ali remained silent, his gaze flitting between his companions and a large glass pitcher of water on the rug before him.
And though it was a beautiful night in an enchanted garden, filled with guests who looked like they might have stepped from the pages of a book of legends, Nahri had a sense of foreboding. The things Muntadhir had whispered to Jamshid, whatever Hatset was up to . . . Nahri could see it playing out in the scene before her. Daevabad’s sophisticated elites—the literati noblemen and wealthy traders—had flocked to Muntadhir. The rougher men who wielded blades, and the ones who could stand before the Friday crowds and fill their hearts with holy purpose . . . they were with Ali.
And if those brothers remained divided, if those groups turned on each other . . . Nahri didn’t see it ending well for her people—for any of them.
Her stomach rumbled. Impending civil war or not, there was little Nahri could do to save her tribe on an empty stomach. Not particularly caring about etiquette, she pulled over a tiled glass dish of knafeh and a reed platter of fruit, fully determined to gorge herself on cheese pastry and melon.
The nape of her neck prickled. Nahri glanced back up.
Through the narrow opening, Ali was watching her.
She met his troubled gray eyes. Nahri typically tried to close herself off from her abilities in crowds like this, the competing heartbeats and gurgling humors an irritating distraction. But for a moment she let them expand.
Ali stood out like a spot on the eye, a deep silence in the ocean of sounds.
You’re my friend, she remembered him declaring the first time she’d saved his life, with the utter confidence the haze of opium had instilled. A light, he’d added when he begged her not to follow Dara.
Annoyed by the unwanted, unsettling feeling the memory caused, she snatched up one of the serving knives. Still holding his gaze, she plunged it deep into a piece of melon, then began carving it with surgical precision. Ali drew up, looking both startled and somehow still snobbish. Nahri glared, and he finally looked away.
Ahead, Ghassan clapped his hands. Nahri watched as he gazed warmly at the crowd.
“My friends, I thank you for honoring my family with your presence here tonight.” He beamed at Ali. “And I thank God for allowing me the joy of seeing my youngest again. It is a blessing whose value I didn’t quite realize until he came striding into my palace dressed like some northern raider.”
That brought a chuckle to the mostly Geziri crowd, and Ghassan continued. “Prince Alizayd, of course, wanted none of this. If he had his way, we’d share a single platter of dates and perhaps a pot of the coffee I hear he now brews himself.” Ghassan’s voice turned teasing. “Then he would likely give us a lecture on the benefit of estate taxes.”
Ali’s companions burst into laughter at that. Muntadhir was clenching his wine cup, and Nahri didn’t miss the quiet way Jamshid lowered her husband’s hand.
“I will, however, save you from such a thing,” Ghassan said. “Indeed, I’ve something else planned. My chefs have been furiously attempting to outdo each other in advance of Navasatem, so I issued them a challenge this evening. Prepare their finest dish, and my son will choose the best cook to design the menu for the generation celebrations.”
Nahri grew a bit intrigued at that. Five years in Daevabad had yet to completely inure her to its marvels, and she was sure whatever the royal chefs conjured would be magnificent indeed. She watched as more servants wound their way through the royal platform, some pouring rosewater over the hands of the men while others refilled cups. Turning away a wine bearer, Ali beckoned politely to a young man holding a glass pitcher icy with condensation.
Before the servant could reach the prince, Jamshid stopped him, holding out his arm in a slightly rude—or perhaps inebriated—manner. He took the pitcher and poured his own glass of what Nahri recognized as tamarind juice, before pushing it back at the other man. He took a sip and then set his cup down, reaching out to quickly squeeze Muntadhir’s knee.
Ghassan clapped his hands again and then Nahri wasn’t looking at Jamshid.
Because a damned boat had joined them.
Carved from teak and large enough to fit the royal family, the boat swept in on a wave of conjured smoke, a miniature version of the great sewn ships said to sail the Indian Ocean. On its silk sail, the emblem of the Sahrayn tribe had been painted, and indeed the man accompanying it was Sahrayn, his striped hood thrown back to reveal red-streaked black hair.
He bowed low. “Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, peace be upon you all.”
“And upon you peace,” Ghassan replied, looking bemused. “An impressive presentation. What do you have for us, then?”
“The finest of delicacies from Qart Sahar: cave eels. They are found only in the deepest, most forbidden cisterns of the Sahara. We capture them alive, bringing them back in great vats of saltwater, and then prepare them in a scented broth of the most delicate perfumes and preserved vinegars.” He beamed, gesturing to the boat . . . no, to the vat, Nahri realized, catching sight of several sinuous shapes churning in the dark liquid filling the bottom. “They have been swimming in there a whole fortnight.”
The look on Ali’s face was almost enough to make the whole evening worth it. He choked on his tamarind juice. “Swimming . . . they’re still alive?”
“But of course.” The Sahrayn chef gave him a puzzled look. “The thrashing makes the meat sweeter.”
Muntadhir finally smiled. “Sahrayn eels. Now that is an honor, brother.” He took a sip of his wine. “I believe the first bite belongs to you.”
The chef beamed again, looking ready to burst with pride. “Shall I, my prince?”
Ali looked ill but motioned for him to continue.
The chef plunged a glittering brass trident into the vat, provoking a metallic shriek that drew startled yelps from the audience. The eel was still squirming as he quickly spun it into a nest and then placed it gingerly on a brightly patterned tile. He presented it to Ali with a flourish.
Muntadhir was watching with open delight on his face, and Nahri had to admit that in this, she and her husband were united.
Ali took the tile and choked down a bite of eel, swallowing hard before he spoke. “It’s . . . it’s very good,” he said weakly. “It certainly tastes like it did a lot of thrashing.
”
There were tears in the chef’s eyes. “I will carry your compliments to my grave,” he wept.
The next two competitors did not offer quite the same level of presentation, though the diners looked considerably more pleased by the skewers of minced rukh kebab—Nahri could only imagine how someone had caught one of those—grilled with golden Tukharistani apples, studded with whole spices, and served while still aflame.
They were removing the largest platter of kabsa Nahri had ever seen, a shrewd move made by the Geziri chef who probably suspected a prince living in the countryside might long for comfort food after some of the competition’s more “creative” dishes, when Ghassan frowned.
“Strange,” he said. “I did not see the competitor from Agni—”
A simurgh soared into the garden with a shriek.
The glittering firebird—twice the size of a camel—swept over the crowd, its smoking wings setting an apricot tree aflame. By the time it fluttered to the ground, half the men had reached for their weapons.
“Hah! It worked!” A grinning Agnivanshi man with a singed mustache joined them. “Peace be upon you, my king and princes! How do you like my creation?”
Nahri watched hands slowly move away from dagger hilts. And then she clapped in delight when she realized what the man meant. The simurgh wasn’t a simurgh, not really. It was a composite, constructed from what appeared to be a dizzying array of sweets in every color of creation.
The chef looked inordinately proud of himself. “A little different, I know . . . but what is the purpose of Navasatem if not to celebrate the sweetness of relief from Suleiman’s servitude?”
Even the king looked dazzled. “I’ll grant you points for creativity,” Ghassan offered. He glanced at Ali. “What say you?”
Ali had risen to his feet to better examine the simurgh. “A stunning enchantment,” he confessed. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“You’ve never tasted anything like this either,” the chef said smoothly. He tapped the simurgh’s glass eye and it fell neatly into his hands, a waiting platter. He made a swift selection and then bowed as it was passed toward the prince.
Ali smiled, biting into crumbly pastry covered in silver foil. Appreciation lit his face. “That is delicious,” he admitted.
The Agnivanshi chef shot a triumphant look at his competitors as Ali took a sip from his goblet and then tried another sweet. But this time, he frowned, reaching for his throat. He hooked his fingers around the collar of his dishdasha, tugging at the stiff fabric.
“You’ll excuse me,” he said. “I think I just . . .” He reached for his cup and then stumbled, knocking it over.
Ghassan straightened up, a look Nahri had never seen in his eyes. “Alizayd?”
Coughing, Ali didn’t answer. His other hand went to his throat, and as the confusion in his expression turned to panic, his eyes met Nahri’s again through the tent panel.
There was no anger there, no accusation. Just pained regret that sent a wave of cold dread through her before Ali even fell to his knees.
He gasped, and with the sound, Nahri was back on the boat, back in that horrible night five years ago. Dara had gasped like that, a hushed sound of true fear—an emotion she hadn’t thought her Afshin could feel—as he fell to his knees. His beautiful eyes had met hers and then he’d gasped, his body crumbling into dust as she screamed.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Hatset fly to her feet. “Alizayd!”
And then it was chaos.
Ali collapsed, choking and clawing at his throat. Hatset burst through the tent, propriety abandoned as she raced to her son’s side. Zaynab screamed, but before she could lunge forward, a pair of female guards descended, nearly knocking Nahri aside in their effort to pull the princess to safety. The Royal Guard was doing the same on the men’s side, soldiers hustling a stunned Muntadhir back. The Qaid drew his zulfiqar and then actually grabbed Ghassan, locking him in a tight, protective grip.
No one stopped Hatset. Well, one of the guards tried, and she smashed the heavy goblet she was holding into his face, then dropped at Ali’s side, shouting his name.
Nahri didn’t move. She could see Dara’s tear-streaked face before hers. “Come with me. We’ll leave, travel the world.”
His ashes on her hands. His ashes on the wet robe of his killer.
Everything seemed to go very still; the screams of the crowd faded, the thud of running feet fell away. A man was dying before her. It was a scene she knew well from the infirmary, one of desperate family members and scrambling aides. Nahri had learned not to hesitate, learned to shut her emotions off. She was a healer, a Nahid. The doctor she always wanted to be.
And in her dreams—her foolish dreams of being an apprentice to the great physicians in Istanbul, of taking her place in one of Cairo’s famed hospitals—in those dreams, she was not the kind of doctor to sit and watch a man die.
She jumped to her feet.
She was halfway to Ali, close enough to see the shimmering silver vapors escaping the gashes he’d clawed in his skin, when Suleiman’s seal crashed down upon her.
Nahri swooned, fighting for air herself, weak and bewildered by the sudden clash of incomprehensible languages. She spotted the seal glowing on Ghassan’s face and then Hatset whirled on her, brandishing the goblet. Nahri froze.
Ali started screaming.
Blood blossomed from his mouth, from his throat and neck, silver shards emerging from his skin in bloody bursts. The silver vapors, Nahri realized. They’d turned to solid metal the instant Ghassan called upon the seal; their misty form must have been magical.
Ghassan had just killed his son trying to save him.
Nahri ran. “Lift the seal!” she shouted. “You’re killing him!” Ali was seizing as he clutched his shredded throat. She dropped beside Hatset, snatching up one of the silver shards and holding it before the terrified queen. “Look for yourself! Did you not just see this change?”
Hatset glanced wildly between the shard and her dying son. She turned on Ghassan. “Lift it!”
The seal was gone in an instant, Nahri’s powers surging back through her. “Help me turn him over!” she shouted as Ali’s companions rushed to join them. She thrust a finger down his throat until he gagged and then pounded his back, black blood mingling with the silver gushing from his mouth. “Get me a board! I need to get him to the infirmary immediate—”
A blade whipped past her face.
Nahri jerked back, but it hadn’t been meant for her. There was a heavy thump and then a muffled scream as the servant who’d served Ali’s juice fell dead at the garden’s entrance, the khanjar belonging to Ali’s female companion buried in his back.
She didn’t have long to dwell on it. Ali’s eyes snapped open as they laid him on a stretched portion of cloth.
They were as black as oil. As black as they’d been when the marid took him.
Hatset clamped a hand over them, a little too fast. “The infirmary,” she agreed in a shaky voice.
13
Nahri
It took the rest of the night to save him. Though he’d vomited up most of the poison, what remained was pernicious, racing through his blood to whirl into solid form as it burst through his skin seeking air. Nahri would no sooner lance, clean, and heal a silver boil than another would bloom. By the time she was finished, Ali was a bloody wreck, and silver-soaked rags lay everywhere.
Fighting a wave of exhaustion, Nahri pressed a hand upon his damp brow. She closed her eyes, and that strange sensation rushed back: a deep, impenetrably dark curtain through which she could barely detect the thud of his heart. The scent of salt, of a cold and utterly alien presence.
But no hint of the destructive poison. She sat back, wiping her own brow and taking a deep breath. A violent tremor went through her body. It was a sensation that often overtook her after a particularly terrifying bit of Nahid healing, her nerves catching up only after she was done.
“He is all right?” Ali’s fr
iend—Lubayd, as he’d introduced himself—spoke up. He was the only one in the room with her, her own bedroom. Ghassan had commandeered it, insisting on privacy for his son, and in response, Nahri had kicked both him and Hatset out, declaring that she couldn’t work with Ali’s worried parents hovering over her.
“I think so.” She hoped so anyway. She had dealt with poisonings—both intentional and not—plenty of times since arriving in Daevabad, but nothing that worked with such speed and deadliness. Though it was obvious the silver vapors would have eventually choked him, the way they’d turned to metal shards when Ghassan had used Suleiman’s seal . . . that was a diabolical bit of cruelty, and Nahri had no idea who might have devised something so vicious.
Looking relieved, Lubayd nodded and retreated to a corner of the room while Nahri returned to her work, leaning closer to Ali to examine one of the wounds on his chest. The poison had burst perilously close to his heart there.
She frowned, catching sight of a bumpy ridge of skin above the wound. A scar. A meandering, savage line as if some sort of spiked vine had crawled across his chest before being ripped away.
Her stomach knotted. Before she could think twice, Nahri yanked close a basin Nisreen had filled with water, dampened a cloth, and wiped away the blood that covered his limbs.
The scars were everywhere.
A ragged line of puncture marks on his shoulder where teeth the size of her thumb had pierced him. The imprint of a fishing hook in his left palm and whirls of ruined flesh that called to mind waterweeds and tentacles. Pocked divots over his stomach, like fish had attempted to feast on him.
She covered her mouth, horrified. The memory of him climbing back onto the boat came to her: his body covered in lake detritus, a crocodile snout clamped on his shoulder, fishing hooks snarled in his skin. Nahri had thought him already dead, and she’d been so panicked that she and Dara were about to follow that she’d given little thought to what had happened to him. The stories about “Alizayd the Afshin-slayer” gallivanting across Am Gezira certainly made it sound like he was fine. And Nahri hadn’t seen him again after the boat.
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