The room erupted in chaos as ifrit pulled away from the shadows and every last person realized why the Lion had invited them, the governing heads of Arawiya. Zafira was a reed in a flood, helpless, hopeless, before she found her roots and stood her ground.
“The doors,” she shouted over the din, and if her voice cracked, no one heard it. “We need to get them open.”
Or not a single ruler would be left.
Kifah’s features were frozen in shock. “Laa, laa. It shouldn’t have—the throne—it—”
“Kifah,” Zafira snapped, and the warrior recovered with a lamenting breath. She flicked open her spear, and with a few rapid nods, disappeared into the fray.
Ifrit clashed staves with guards, hashashins, and armed dignitary alike—all while the Lion reveled in the ruin of his own making.
“You need your bow,” Lana said eagerly.
“I need you to stay safe.” Zafira gripped her shoulders, digging her fingers in to stop their trembling. “Look at me. Stay with the crowd. Don’t help anyone.”
Disappointment flashed across her sister’s face. “Is that what you’re going to do?”
“Don’t,” Zafira warned, wavering. The blank horror on Kifah’s face had shaken her will. “I’m not going to dig you a grave, Lana. Do you understand? Do this for me.”
Lana finally appeased her with a nod.
A few cowardly guards braved the steps to swear loyalty, and Zafira seized the distraction. She leaped over the table and dropped to her knees in front of Nasir on the first step of the dais.
“We need to go,” she said. “He will kill you.”
“Let him.” Desolation swallowed his already quiet voice.
She gritted her teeth. “Your father is dead. The Lion sits on your throne. Are you really going to abandon your people?” What was it he had said to her on Sharr? “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
His laugh cracked. “How our fates have reversed, fair gazelle. I started to feel, and now I cannot stop.”
With a gentleness she never thought him capable of, he lowered the sultan’s head to the dais. He brushed his father’s eyelids closed and tucked a feather into the folds of his robe, and she couldn’t understand how something so gentle could hurt so terribly.
And then with a sudden wheeze he froze, his back arched. “Why waste time mourning the dead when you can join
them?” The Lion lounged in his black throne and twirled his finger, wrenching Nasir to face him, shadows crushing tight.
Zafira’s hand twitched for an arrow, for her bow, but she had neither as Nasir was lifted off his feet.
“I could never understand why you hated me.” Zafira barely heard Nasir’s voice over the din.
“So much that my father’s every breath was spent ridiculing me.”
The Lion tightened his bindings with a clench of his fist, Nasir’s words striking true.
“Because I’m exactly like you: a monster breathing shadows.” Nasir’s voice dropped, the epithet near silent. “Yet she loved me.”
The Silver Witch.
He threw down his hands and the chain splintered. The Lion rose and splayed his fingers. Zafira couldn’t tell which wisp of black belonged to whom as Nasir lifted himself to his feet and threw his head back with a soundless roar.
The room fell to darkness.
Shadows rippled from his hands, flinging the Lion back. Control Zafira hadn’t thought Nasir to have. The Lion slumped on the ill-claimed throne, and the ruckus doubled, panic striking anew. She didn’t waste a heartbeat, remembering every sightless moment in the Arz as her eyes adjusted to the dark. She hurried up the stairs, one hand sliding to Nasir’s jambiya at her leg.
“Zafira—” Nasir’s voice was lost in someone’s scream. “The doors. I don’t—”
She didn’t hear the rest, but she saw him turn, trusting her to follow.
The dagger fitted to her palm, the blade faint in the gloom. The anger and chaos she associated with the Jawarat’s vision, a different version of herself, drove her. She would make up for that moment when she had fallen for the Lion’s lies and lost what was hers.
A hand gripped her wrist and she cried out as the jambiya fell with a clatter. Cool amber eyes caught hers through the billowing shadows.
“I was hoping to see you, azizi.”
She fought against him, shuddering when he wrenched her palm to his chest. The ice of his skin chilled her from beneath his embroidered thobe.
And something else. Horror and understanding locked her in place.
“It is something extraordinary, the pulse of life.”
The si’lah heart. Like a Sister of Old.
The heart that belonged to creatures beyond safin, ifrit, and men. Creatures of good. This was why he was pale—from the loss of blood when his chest had been cut open. This was the cause of his newfound power in a land still without magic, from the shadows barring the door to the ones that had cinched Ghameq’s heart. Why the Gilded Throne had accepted him, some twisted mutation cloaking it in black.
Aya had done this. Zafira knew it with the same striking certainty that she knew Aya was dead.
A deafening crash jolted them both, and she pried her wrist from his grip as one of the large windows ruptured with the sound of a thousand chimes. In that beat of distraction, she lunged, shoving her hands inside his robes and finding the Jawarat beneath the folds.
He lashed out. She fell back against the arm of the Gilded Throne with a cry, the Jawarat in her arms. Light flashed across the Lion of the Night’s tattoo before the shadows rose, and Zafira was back on Sharr again, chains shackling her wrists. Only this time, Nasir wasn’t here. Kifah, Benyamin. Lana.
Help—she needed help. She searched the floor for the jambiya, despite knowing Nasir’s gift to her was but a child’s thing in the face of the Lion’s power. Through the riot of fear in her heart, she heard a voice.
We ached for you, bint Iskandar.
The Lion gripped her arm, wrenching her forward and grabbing the Jawarat.
We are here for you.
And then the world came undone with a roar of anguish that brought them both gasping to their knees.
Always.
