Though much of the road between the western villages and Thalj was rough, the journey to the capital took less than three days thanks to Calipha Ghada’s carriage, with its sleek wheels and pulleys and other moving parts that quickened their pace in a way horses never could. But Zafira missed much of the scenery because her wound reopened, and Lana’s drowsing tinctures had her weaving in and out of lucidity. It meant she missed much of Yasmine’s scowling, too, but she wasn’t quite as sorry about that.
The next thing she knew, she was propped against the carriage’s cushioned wall as Lana fussed over her bandages, something fine and sharp impaling her skin. Her body was scalding, but the cold wasn’t helping matters.
“I didn’t get to see anything,” Zafira groused groggily, awake enough to see that her words provoked a smile out of Yasmine, which she quickly masked away.
“I expected you to cry out,” Lana said tiredly, setting a bloody needle aside.
Zafira’s vision swam again. From a needle? “Do I look like a man?”
“You’re bleeding. Khara, this is why I wanted you to stay back and rest.”
“No cursing,” Zafira scolded, and then she blacked out.
 |
A fire crackled in the hearth of the large room, white walls carved with lacework flourishes and adorned with silver, gray threading the deep blue furnishings. Arches shaped the windows, unlit sconces between them. It was nowhere near as
grand as the Sultan’s Palace, but its beauty was less sinister, less cruel.
“You had a fever.”
Zafira looked at Yasmine, and Yasmine looked back. “Even murderers get sick.”
“Serves them right,” Yasmine replied, but the words were weighted with disquiet, strangled and wrong. “Kifah. Is she … your friend?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
“But not the sister of my heart,” Zafira said after a beat.
A startled, relieved laugh broke out of Yasmine, faltering between them as quickly as it had come, replaced by Deen with a bleeding chest. With a ring in his trembling hand. Acting out of love until his body released his soul.
Zafira held herself stiff, waiting for Yasmine to speak of Altair again. Or of Zafira being a murderer, Zafira not caring, Zafira dragging Deen to Sharr and burying him in its depths. She inhaled slowly, smoothing the ruptures inside her.
“I’m trying, Zafira,” Yasmine whispered.
She was, too. But it was as Nasir said: Not every grief needed conquering. Acceptance was a feat in itself.
“I’m trying to look at you and not see him. I can’t. It hurts, and I can’t.”
A knock sounded at the door, and a girl swept in with a tray. She set it on the low table and poured qahwa from a steaming dallah. Zafira refused the proffered cup with a slight shiver. She had avoided the bitter coffee and those handleless cups ever since Sharr.
“Bring her tea,” Yasmine said. “With mint, if you can.”
“Sayyida,” the servant replied with a slight dip of her head.
The girl left, and Yasmine stared down at the steam wafting from her cup. Zafira stared at her. The silence was a twisted thing between them with thorns and teeth, strange and foreign, and she wondered if they could ever return to what they once had.
She would try, though. It was what Deen would want, she told herself. It was what she wanted. She couldn’t lose them both. “How is Misk?”
The change was instant. Yasmine stiffened, a loose ribbon gone taut. Her fingers fluttered to her throat as she swallowed her qahwa.
“What’s wrong? What happened?” Zafira said slowly, less question than command.
Yasmine’s fingers curled around one another, nails digging into her unblemished skin.
“Yasmine,” she repeated, voice hard. “Where’s Misk?”
“We fought. He left.” She paused with a slant of her mouth. A snarl tangled in Zafira’s throat. He had left her—
“Or rather, I sent him away.”
Oh.
The servant returned, and Zafira gratefully gripped the warm cup of tea. Anger etched scores between Yasmine’s brows, sorrow shaped the bow of her lips. Still, Zafira waited. This was new, between them. The guard in Yasmine’s eyes. This uncertainty, this fear that a misstep would cause the silence to remain forever.
Zafira brushed her knuckles over the ache in her chest. If only wishes were things she could make real. If only pain were like lint on a shoulder, easily brushed away.
“Misk is a bookkeeper, I said. His pockets are lined with silver because the flour merchant’s men pay well.” Yasmine was trying to force anger into the words, but it had already
worn away, agony in its place. “You know what I’ve always wanted.”
Zafira had known forever: a normal life. Her parents had been apothecaries in the army, her brother a soldier. The sister of her heart disappeared into the Arz every day. The same sister’s mother had murdered her own husband.
Misk promised what she had always dreamed of: simplicity.
Yasmine laughed without mirth. “It was all a lie. He came to Demenhur for you. To spy on me. To befriend me and learn about you, the Demenhune Hunter. I was supposed to be flattered that he fell in love with me along the way.”
Zafira froze, remembering what Benyamin had said on Sharr. Misk was one of his spiders—one of Altair’s spiders. Still, she held her tongue; the last thing Yasmine needed was to think Zafira had known about Misk before then.
“He could have been a murderer, a cutthroat, the worst of the worst, and I wouldn’t have cared, if only he’d give me his truths,” Yasmine murmured.
Because lies were what had thrived in the relationship between Yasmine’s parents. Zafira had seen proof of it, when Yasmine’s mother would come to their house, tears charting paths down her cheeks.
“Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe it was a secret he had to keep,” Zafira ventured. Guilt churned through her afresh. Was this, too, her fault in a way?
Yasmine stiffened, and Zafira knew it was the wrong thing to say.
“Am I incapable of keeping a secret?” Yasmine asked. “Did I not hold yours for years? Had it been mine, I would have told him long before our wedding vows.”
Zafira kept every movement of hers slow and careful, even her nod.
Yasmine drew her lower lip into her mouth, and Zafira wished she could hold her. She wished her friend didn’t feel the need to steel her spine before her.
“I don’t doubt that he loves me,” Yasmine continued. “He’s kind, and he’s good, and I might be overreacting—this might be the only secret he will ever have, but I’ve lost enough to lose my heart twice. What if it does happen again? What if there are more secrets and a child between us?” Her voice went quiet. “I was too young. I am too young. So eager to call myself a woman, when I’m only a child myself.”
A month. That was how long it had taken for a secret to tear the newlywed couple apart. Yasmine was too young. Zafira remembered the wedding, an ethereal moment suspended in time. The intensity in Misk’s eyes, and the words he spoke to her. Most of all, she remembered envying the man taking her friend away from her.
“Wretched” was too small a word to describe how Zafira felt.
“That’s not you talking,” she said. “You’re Yasmine Ra’ad.
The girl without rue.”
The last Ra’ad left. Zafira’s fingers closed around the ring at her neck. Yasmine’s eyes, wet and still cautious, followed.
“People change when they pick themselves up and piece themselves together again. Look at you—you’ve shattered so many times, I barely recognize you anymore.”
Yasmine downed the rest of her qahwa, the thud of her cup a decree in the silence. She was still angry. Angry and in pain.
“We both agreed we need some time apart. I don’t want to say goodbye. Does that make me a bad person? For not leaving him?”
Zafira hid her relief with a shake of her head. “It means you love him enough that you’re willing to make it work.”
Yasmine held still, her gaze off to the side. What do you know of love? Zafira imagined her asking in the silence. You couldn’t even love the man who loved you. Zafira wavered. And then Yasmine crumpled, shoving a hand to her mouth.
“I miss him,” she breathed. “I’m so angry, Zafira, but I miss him. I miss you. I miss what we had, and what we could have.”
Outside, Arawiya was falling to a ruin even darker than the Arz. Zafira did not know if Nasir and Altair lived. She did not know if magic would ever return.
Still, she found the words slipping out of her mouth, chasing what they once had, trying to remind Yasmine that though she had lost her brother and maybe even her husband, she still had Zafira. She would always have her. “If we were in a story, what would happen?”
A tiny smile broke Yasmine’s resolve, breaking a wider one out of Zafira. Yasmine, who was never sad, who was always full of emotion and bursting with passion.
They had played this game time and time again. She could almost mouth the words as Yasmine spoke of the half Sarasin, half Demenhune man she had desired for months in a way Zafira had never understood.
“A bookkeeper would sweep me away with his good hair and good taste. He’d be tall, of course,” she recited, and Zafira, as always, refrained from commenting on Yasmine’s height, or the lack of it. “Skilled in matters of importance that you pretend to know nothing about.”
Zafira couldn’t tell whom the game was meant to benefit. “And? Is he?”
“In every way but the truth. I hate lies.” Yasmine picked up her cup and swished the qahwa rinds. She didn’t look up. “Your turn.”
“Mine?” Zafira asked, shrinking back. “I don’t have anyone.”
She cringed when the words left her, half expecting Yasmine to say Oh, but you could have.
“It’s theoretical. A game,” Yasmine said instead, gaze rising to the bandages wrapped around Zafira’s chest, flicking to her face, and she dared to hope: They could get through this, the two of them. They were making progress, if Yasmine could look at her now. “An escape from all this.”
Zafira was quiet for a while. Her neck burned even as her thoughts raced. “He’d know his way around a bow and a blade.”
Yasmine’s brows lifted.
“He’d be my opposite, in every way. So contrasting that if you’d look at us a certain way, you’d notice that we’re exactly alike.”
She didn’t dream. She didn’t believe in wishes. She was no romantic like Yasmine, but somewhere along the way, she’d grown partial to another soul.
They were twin flames, twined by fate.
“Heavy words,” Yasmine said softly, “from a girl with no interest in love.”
The door swung open without a knock, and a liveried guard stepped back, formal and stiff as he announced, “Crown Prince Nasir bin Ghameq.”
Her heart stopped.
Yasmine dropped to her knees with a surprised yelp, lowering her gaze as a figure haltingly entered the room.
Zafira heard the weight of his surprised inhale. The breathless murmur of her name that sent shivers down her spine.
She saw the struggle in his limbs, the way half of him pitched forward, the other half holding him back. He still wore the fitted thobe from the feast, matted with dark blood and dusted in sand.
“Shall I get down on my knees before you, my prince?” Her beautiful, bloody prince.
His answer was a whispered invocation. “Never.”
Yasmine made a sound, but he barely registered her presence until she rose to her full height. He blinked down at her, and it was impossible to believe he was unaffected by her beauty.
“Forgive me,” he said hoarsely, and stiffly flourished two fingers from his brow. “I will, uh”—he cleared his throat—“I will return at another time.”
He closed the door. Yasmine whirled to her, gaping.
“That was … that was the crown prince. He looked at you
—khara.” Yasmine stopped, and the room was suddenly very warm. “A moment longer and he would have torn every last bit of that yellow—khara. Theoretical, I said. Sweet skies, Zafira. Deen for the Prince of Death—”
“Don’t.”
The word cut harsh, and the room echoed with her command.
“Don’t?” Yasmine repeated. “He’s—a monster, Zafira. My brother for a monster.”
Zafira would have flinched or fought. She would have been offended on his behalf. But Zafira had lived with Yasmine, and she herself had shared in that thinking, that the Crown Prince of Arawiya was not a boy, but a beast.
Until he wasn’t.
Yasmine left, and the door stayed closed. Zafira leaned back. What a fool she’d been to think a friendship such as
theirs could be mended in an afternoon.
