At first light, Nasir was in the throne room, where the Sultan of Arawiya was seated and already dismissing emir after emir, austere and stony as if nothing had changed. Nasir would have convinced himself that the events of last night had been a dream, if the space where the medallion once hung wasn’t glaringly empty and if this morning he hadn’t seized open his bedside drawer, seen the antique circle—broken, unassuming, and real—and slipped it into his pocket.
Nasir had arrived with a single purpose: start afresh. He opened his mouth, determined to be the first for once, to ask after his father and how he felt, but when they were alone, all that came out was this: “Sultani.”
Not “Father.” Not “Baba.”
Something flickered in Ghameq’s gaze. “Ibni.”
Nasir expected to be happier, freer. Instead, he felt like a cornered animal, uncertainty caging him, for his father looked exactly as he had yesterday, exactly as he had weeks ago, months ago. And that meant looking into his face and reliving years of pain.
Perhaps worse than abuse was waking up to the fact. The realization, striking and unmooring, that the norm one had lived was not at all normal.
Ghameq’s face fell at what he saw. “You are early. Have you eaten?”
Eaten. A laugh broke out of him. His surprise must have been evident on his face, because the sultan’s face softened.
“Yes.” Nasir swallowed, shaped his next question as if it were a matter of life and death. “Have you?”
His father nodded. “We will dine together from here on out.”
I would like that, Nasir thought but couldn’t say as the braziers crackled beside the dais. He closed his mouth.
Ghameq smacked his lips, then reached for one of the missives by his side, waving it in the air. “The unrest continues. Tell me. What would you have me do?”
Again, shock gripped his tongue, for it wasn’t like Ghameq to humor him in conversation. To ask his son’s opinion. To need it—or Nasir himself.
“The taxes you have levied are far too high, and protestors grow bolder,” he ventured. And what’s your solution, fool? He scoured his mind. “Sarasin. They need a caliph. We can easily appease them by appointing someone like Muzaffar.”
“Who?”
Nasir blinked at his complete ignorance. “The merchant rising up in Sarasin since I left for Sharr. People like him. He’s well connected, and was village head a decade or so ago. Appoint him, and he may turn the caliphate around on his own, with minimal work from the crown.”
“Mmm,” Ghameq said, dismissing him with a smile, and Nasir found it difficult to feign one of his own. “I was freed by your hand only a short while ago. There is much to undo of the Lion’s. Time will allow us the victory we require, Ibni. Sarasin is a pit as it is, and the Lion himself is of greater concern than any tax.”
“Sultani,” Nasir said in appeasement, lowering his head. It seemed his insight hadn’t been required at all. True to form.
“It is why I am your father, isn’t it? To guide your hand.
Have you any plans on how to find him?”
A bell sounded in Nasir’s skull. “We will find him,” he said carefully. “By whatever means necessary.”
The sultan studied him.
“I should not have to tell you to avoid the use of dum sihr.
It has cost our family too much.”
Nasir shook his head quickly. Too quickly. This was his father. Trust was meant to be second nature.
“The Sisters forbade such acts. If we do this, what difference is there between us and the creature we seek to defeat?” Ghameq asked.
Blood magic was forbidden. The use of it did distort the line between them and the Lion. But there were plenty of differences between them and their foe, and the use of dum sihr didn’t negate that.
Still, morality was decidedly not a topic Nasir wanted to discuss with his father.
“Even if we planned to, dum sihr requires si’lah blood.
Which we do not have,” Nasir said.
Ghameq grunted his agreement. The sound echoed relentlessly in the silence.
“Perhaps,” Nasir dared again, changing the subject, “we can call off the feast. For now. Until magic is restored and the Lion is no longer a threat. Do you … remember sending out the invitations?”
Where did that line end and begin? There were questions about events where his father would blink emptily and others from long before that he could recount word for word almost immediately. It left Nasir unable to decipher just how much Ghameq remembered from when he was under the Lion’s control over the years, for his memories were clearly unaffected by time.
“Two nights prior,” Ghameq said after a thought. “It is too late to stop them, unfortunately. Besides, we have more reason to celebrate now, do we not, Ibni?”
“Yes,” he ceded softly, fighting dismay. At least the dignitaries would no longer be walking into a trap.
“What of the Huntress?” Ghameq asked, looking down at the sheaves in his hand. “She has not come.”
He knows. A curl of darkness slipped from Nasir’s fingers. For whatever reason, trust was impossible to summon. But nor could he lie.
“I’ve angered her,” he admitted.
A half-truth was enough. Three words that held a multitude would suffice. For truth held emotion, and lies held deception. It was how one knew which to believe.
I miss her, was what he wanted to say. He was alone without her, a soul-deep desolation. Drifting in a world where no one really saw him.
Ghameq laughed, proof that not even the man who fathered him could see him, understand him, know with merely a glance. Perhaps Nasir had been too young the last time he’d heard that laugh, too smitten, too innocent and unburdened by death, but it sounded different now. Harsher. Sharper. Less happy and more calculating.
But people changed, didn’t they?
 |
“You seem troubled, Prince.”
Aya dropped the hatch and joined him on the rooftop. She had come from the infirmary, and blood stained her roughspun abaya, the pale brown ashen compared to her normal attire. He watched a falcon sweep behind a date palm and saw the gathering in the distance, where a man clad in black cried of the Arz’s disappearance with foreboding.
The hours were waning. He hadn’t realized bringing his father up to speed would require so much time, though it was likely because words were slow to find. There was much the
sultan already knew, for he had been alert throughout the Lion’s control, and so Nasir filled him in on the events of Sharr and everything since, skirting the whereabouts of Zafira and Kifah, and the High Circle traversing Arawiya to restore the hearts.
“Where’s Lana?” Nasir asked.
“Still helping at the infirmary. I left to come see you, but she is safer there than here.”
Nasir snorted a breath, wondering how dangerous Aya thought the palace was if she left a young girl amid angry strangers who rioted on the streets.
When the riots broke out again today, a score of the Sultan’s Guard had run from the palace, and Nasir had frozen, half expecting an order from his father. Go. End this.
They had merely exchanged a glance.
If only the people knew rioting did nothing to the sultan. He had barely blinked. He had barely considered Nasir’s proposal to appoint that merchant in Sarasin, Muzaffar.
He pressed his eyes closed for a beat. Aya’s dubiety was bleeding into him, making him suspect his father’s every gesture. Making him wonder if the Lion was still there, mocking Nasir at a level more cruel than ever.
Because that was what the Lion had always done—mocked him out of hatred. Ridiculed him out of loathing. When he branded Nasir with the poker. When he carved out Kulsum’s tongue.
When he stole into Zafira’s rooms.
Aya drew closer. “Tell me what troubles you.”
He let the silence stretch until he couldn’t hold it anymore. “I was the one she saw.” He paused. He didn’t say her
name. Slants of light and shadow bled through the latticed screens, eight-pointed stars painting his skin. When he
blinked, he saw her at the door to his room, mouth swollen, hair coming undone. He wondered if she had enjoyed it. Whatever it was. “When the Lion came for the Jawarat.”
“She told you this?”
He pursed his lips. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? She could barely look at me.”
And she had always looked at him. Even when she had called him a murderer. Even when he had pressed her against the column on Sharr and captured her mouth in his.
“From what I understand, that should be somewhat flattering, laa?”
Nasir scowled, ready to fling himself off the rooftop. “What are you getting at?”
“Why does it upset you?”
Aya touched a hand to his shoulder, and Nasir stiffened, feeling the thrum of his blade against the inside of his wrist.
“Because,” he said after a steadying breath. “She already sees me as a monster.”
Now she would see the Lion.
Aya considered him. “She does not see you as such. Nor does she see a boy to love her. You are her prince. It will not be long before your father’s reign falls, and you must pick up the shards of Arawiya as sultan.”
Her words settled on his shoulders. “I can make her my sultana.”
Aya’s laugh was like chimes in the gentlest wind. “Quite a heavy sacrifice to ask.”
That isn’t a sacrifice, he was about to say, but wasn’t he the one who had likened the palace to a cage? Laa, a tomb. It would be different with her in it.
“She can command,” he countered. She commanded him well enough. “She would live a life of luxury. Want for nothing.”
The words rang hollow, even to him.
“Spoken like a true royal,” Aya said with a detached smile. Then something caught her eye and she dashed to the left ledge, shawl fluttering. “Aha! They return! Oh, I must change.”
Nasir swallowed as she disappeared down the hatch. Three travelers waded through the crowds on the Sultan’s Road. Seif held the note Aya had left for them back at her house. Kifah sported the crooked half smile she usually did when she was thinking anything mildly humorous.
And there she was, the light in the darkness. Something bubbled up his chest and throat, squeezing the crevice that held his heart, thrumming faster. Her gaze drifted to the palace, and rose up, and up, and up. Crashed into his.
Empty. Her eyes were windows, and in them he saw loss.
