Zafira woke to someone rearranging the cushions that had slipped during her slumber. She knew by the soundless movements that it was Nasir, and she opened her eyes the barest fraction as he lit the sconces and drew the curtains before rekindling the fire. Caring for her.
Her monster.
The last time she had spied on him this way, they were on Sharr and she had wondered when he would kill her. She had spent every moment awaiting the cool touch of his blade. Now she expected something else.
“I know you’re awake,” he said in that voice that looped with the darkness, and she felt the familiar simmering low in her belly.
She stretched, flinching when her wound throbbed dully. “You seem to enjoy playing nurse. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“I’m the prince,” he said simply, a note of teasing in his tone. A rogue lock of damp hair curled at his temple, hashashin attire neat and trim. She liked him like this, without a turban and the sheath of his sword, a single button of his qamis undone. It made her feel special somehow, that he allowed her to see this side of him. Unpresentable to the world but perfectly all right for her. “I don’t play the part of my inferiors.”
You’re the king, she wanted to correct. The Sultan of Arawiya with a traitor on your throne. But she wasn’t ready for the light in his eyes to vanish. He sat down and crossed his legs. The brush of his knee against hers was a force made even more startling when he didn’t pull away.
My brother for a monster. Yasmine’s words, rife with anger and disbelief, tied a knot in her stomach. That wasn’t what he was. Not anymore. Not to her.
His fingers twitched, as if he wanted to reach for her hand.
There was a nervous sort of energy to him—anxiety.
“It feels as if I haven’t breathed since you fell,” he said finally.
His gaze dropped and his mouth drew shut. This boy who had so much to say but didn’t know how. Whose lack of verbosity was something she once criticized.
“It’ll take a lot more than an arrow to end me,” she said lightly.
The corner of his mouth lifted, breaking the tension as neatly as he would a circle of harsha. It made her slide her hand closer to his the tiniest fraction. He noticed.
Zafira wasn’t one to dream, to do much else beside the practical. But reposed here in this homely room, bereft of their weapons and stripped of the hood of the Hunter and the mask of the Prince of Death, she couldn’t help it.
“They say the soul cannot rest until it finds its match. Then it ignites,” he said.
Her breath caught when her eyes met the cool gray of his. “Do you believe it?”
Do you feel it? was what he asked. Is it true for us? was what he wanted to know. When did he learn eloquence? Where did he find words that cut her as finely as a knife?
Her voice was soft. “I want to believe it.”
Once, all she had wanted was to see her village cared for, her sister happy, and the Arz vanquished. To snare a rabbit or a deer, sating her for the day. To know her people would live for yet another sunset. Now she wanted too much. One kiss had
made her crave the next. Yearn for the brush of his touch, anywhere. Everywhere.
She didn’t know what he thought of her answer, because the lines of his face were smooth even as tendrils of darkness wove through his fingers, whispering against hers as softly as a touch.
“Zafira, I—”
“Shh,” she said softly. He stopped, less from her command and more because of her fingers against his mouth. She didn’t want to hear what he would say this time. She didn’t want to hear those words again: my bride, my queen, my fair gazelle.
Because they made her hope. They made her forget who she was in the vastness of this kingdom. Holding his gaze, she crooked one finger and swept it across his lower lip. His breath hitched.
The door swung open.
She shoved her tingling hand beneath her thigh. Nasir pressed a hand to his lips and stared at his fingers.
“Why am I never invited to such things?” a boisterous voice asked, and Zafira’s disappointment at the interruption was replaced with a different kind of elation.
Altair swept inside, carrying a bundle wrapped in an ivory cloth. He was clean now, scrubbed free of the terrible bloody tears that had streaked his face. A neat patch of deep crimson threaded with gold covered his eye, matching the turban carefully styled around his head. Only he could procure something so extravagant so quickly.
She thought of him turning away, standing at the Lion’s side. How well he’d looked then, only a day before he had lost his eye. What had changed within so short a time?
“Why is it you can never knock?” Nasir asked, clearing a rasp from his throat.
Altair peered at him. “Why? Were you busy? You don’t look like you were busy.”
The insinuation rang clear in his voice, and the feathering in Nasir’s turned neck made her pulse quicken. Touch me, that vein whispered.
She swallowed thickly as Altair crouched and frowned at her empty cup. “Nice of you to join us in the world of the living, Huntress.”
“I could say the same of you,” she replied. Questions rose to her tongue. Why did you leave us? What happened?
His eye was bright as it swept her face, his smile warm, and Zafira wondered if he had gotten that dimple from his mother or father. “I knew you’d miss me.”
And she had, so very much. She’d thought it odd, at first, that she could miss them when she had finally reunited with Yasmine, but it seemed that delicate, mortal hearts were strange and vast.
Riddled with guilt, too. Within the very walls of this palace, Yasmine nurtured hatred for her brother’s killer, yet here Zafira was, filled to the brim with relief that he was safe.
Skies, Yasmine. Altair.
How was it that they had lived leagues apart for decades and now, when anger and pain and vengeance burned in the sister of her heart’s veins, the object of that vehemence was only a hall away? As if she didn’t have enough to do, now Zafira needed to ensure the two of them did not meet. That their paths remained uncrossed.
She could imagine Yasmine in all her tiny glory scrambling atop him with murder and rage while Altair went slack-jawed at her beauty. He would apologize, she knew, but it wouldn’t be enough. No amount of apologizing could bring back Deen and mend the hole in Yasmine’s heart.
Only time could do that.
“I’m sorry about Aya,” Zafira said softly. Altair’s face fell, his eye ghosted by weariness. He and Benyamin had been close; it only made sense that Aya had been his friend, too.
If Zafira had been willing to live the rest of her life with Aya’s blood on her hands, would any of this have happened?
Kifah stepped inside and slammed the door closed, looking among them. “Oi, is there a reason we’re all loitering in something we probably don’t need to be loitering in?”
All three of them looked up. Kifah repeated her question with a silent lift of her brows. Her head was freshly shaved, scalp bright.
“We’re a zumra. We hunted the flame together, found the light in the darkness, but we were far from done, laa? Now we unleash it. We free the stars, shatter the darkness holding us captive, and return the world to the splendor it once was.”
Zafira breathed deep, as if she could somehow ingest the hope of her words. Had Kifah decided not to leave with her calipha?
“With a side of revenge, of course.”
Altair dipped his head. “Spoken like a true qa’id.”
Kifah cast him a sidelong glance. “Did you just put me in a position above yours? You do know a qa’id commands a general, yes?”
Altair grinned, and Kifah groaned before he even opened his mouth.
“I have no qualms about putting women above me.”
Him and his strange double-edged sayings that she wished she could ask Yasmine about.
He turned to Zafira with a stern look and held out the bundle in his hands. “I thought you might want this back.”
He peeled off the ivory cloth, unveiling a tome bound in green leather. The Jawarat.
Her breath hitched. A wave of emotion rolled over her when she curled her fingers around it, remembering what it had last wanted of her. To kill the Lion. To rend him in two. She closed her eyes against the senseless savagery it had roused. Kifah looked displeased but said nothing. Nasir watched her.
They knew that the book had used her to speak, but how differently would they react if they knew the extent of its influence? Only Altair was blissfully unaware.
She set it in her lap as if she weren’t itching to hold it in her hands.
“I felt his pulse,” Zafira said in an effort to shift their attention. “The Lion’s.”
She thought of telling them about his memory, the stones striking his father to death, but couldn’t summon the words. It didn’t feel right. Laa, like her strange connection with the Jawarat, it made her fear how they would view her. More fearfully. As if she couldn’t be trusted.
And sweet snow, there was enough of that with Yasmine.
A thousand questions rose with Altair’s eyebrow in the silence. “You, dear Huntress, have come a long way from the innocent lamb I met on Sharr.”
The Jawarat hummed with the same thought. Skies, how empty she had been without it. She had missed it deeply, and she knew without a doubt that the Lion, with his newfound throne and newfound power, missed it, too.
For he would forever be a slave to that which he didn’t know.
We missed you, too.
“Even with everything he has now, he’ll still want it,” she said, running her fingers over the fiery mane. “The Jawarat’s knowledge is endless, and the Lion couldn’t possibly have gleaned even a fraction of it.”
We do not want him.
If a book could pout, the Jawarat did just that.
You were quite eager to leave, she thought in her head, not at all unsmugly.
For which we are sorry. We were wrong to have left you. To have forced you to an unwanted fate.
Zafira paused at its apology. It was bowing its head,
yielding to her. And she, jaded as she was, was instantly wary.
The Jawarat sighed.
“He may seek it out at some point, but he’ll make use of the Great Library in the meantime,” Altair said.
Zafira had seen much of Arawiya due to this mission, but not the inside of the library her father once lauded. Alabaster floors, gleaming shelves stocked with scrolls upon scrolls arranged in a code only few knew. Librarians, those few were called. The scrolls had interested Baba less than the books, rare and treasured, for the process of binding them was no simple task.
He would have loved the Jawarat.
“Knowledge is his neighbor now that he’s king, but we might have something bigger to worry about. Baba dearest believes that magic must remain in the hands of the powerful. And by that, he means himself. He will destroy the hearts.”
The Lion was many things, but never wasteful. He would go for them nonetheless.
“He won’t prioritize them. They’re useless to us, and safe in the minarets,” Zafira contended. “There’s no reason to choose them over establishing the throne as word of his coronation spreads. He’ll want to be loved.” As his father once loved him. “And there’s no better time than now. Demenhur’s snows are melting, Pelusia’s soil is returning. The kingdom is returning to what it was, because of us, and he’s going to use
that to his advantage. And then, with the people appeased and tolerant, he’ll make room for ifrit.”
The zumra stared at her. She was unable to remember a time when Demenhur had been so warm.
Altair smacked his lips. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say my father wants love.”
“She’s right,” Nasir said, and she held still against the weight of his scrutiny.
He knew the Lion had come to her room back at Aya’s house—she’d told him as much. He had witnessed her relationship with him before then, too. On Sharr.
“We can’t go around re-collecting the hearts,” he continued. “The minarets are safest, specifically with the High Circle protecting them.”
Speaking of the High Circle … “Where’s Seif?” Zafira asked.
“In Alderamin,” Altair replied. “We lost the Alder calipha, Benyamin’s mother, and without Aya as his charge, Seif’s place is there. He’ll protect the Alder heart and aid Benyamin’s sister, Leila, in claiming her throne.” He heaved a sigh at that. “What’s worse in all this is that no dignitary will divulge the massacre. For good reason, of course, but it means no one outside of the feast will question or fear the Lion.”
Zafira was only now beginning to understand the repercussions of the feast. The sultan was dead, a self- proclaimed king in his place, but the caliphates had always been, to an extent, independent. The bloodbath had toppled that system, bringing with it a swell of fear and uncertainty that no leader would rightly impart to their people.
“No point lamenting,” Kifah said with force, crossing her arms as Nasir tossed wood into the hearth, discreetly glancing at Zafira’s wound. “We need that heart. And if the Lion was in a big enough hurry to leave you unsecured”—she gave Altair a
pointed glance, to which he feigned hurt—“there’s bound to be something else he’s missed.”
Altair’s mouth widened into a grin. “There is this.”
Bint Iskandar.
Not now, she snapped in her head. Altair closed his fingers around the black hilt of a dagger sheathed around his leg and pulled it free. It was black down to the tip of its blade.
Zafira had seen that wicked knife before. In the hands of the Lion. In midair. Striking the Silver Witch.
“The Lion’s black dagger,” she marveled.
“The one and only,” Altair said, flipping it over in his hands with a faraway look.
She studied him. “And the reason you went back.”
Altair smiled, and she didn’t miss the flicker of relief in his eye. “Ever perceptive, Huntress. It was indeed why I went back, when Nasir told me our mother was unable to heal herself. It just so happens that black ore strips one of magic. You saw how little your arrow affected him. There are spells that protect those who speak them, making the enchanted impossible to overpower. So long as the heart provides him with magic, wounding him will be impossible. Yet, until we wound him, we won’t be able to retrieve the heart. Akhh, I love conundrums.”
“And with the black dagger, we have a chance of stripping him of his power,” Kifah reasoned, foot tapping a beat. “Should have asked me.” She flourished a hand across the lightning blades sheathed along her arm. “I’ve got black ore to spare.”
Altair peered at them. “Pure black ore, One of Nine. See that silver sheen? They’ve been mixed with steel.”
Kifah didn’t look surprised. “I should have known anything of my father’s would be rubbish. Now, don’t lose that
thing.”
“I don’t make a habit of handing important artifacts over to the Lion,” Altair said lightly. “I’ll keep it safe. In my own rooms.”
Zafira ducked her head.
“Using the dagger requires getting close,” said Nasir, ignoring the gibe.
“Oi, Zafira went and felt his pulse,” Kifah said, waving away his concern, and Zafira stared at her empty teacup.
“No one said it would be easy,” Altair said, sheathing the dagger. “But we have a chance now where we didn’t before, and it’s time we take back what’s ours. And yours, Nasir. Worry not—I’ll even polish your throne for you.”
Nasir gave him a look.
Heed us, bint Iskandar. The heart fights him, yet it will soon be tainted by him.
The Jawarat waited for its words to register. Zafira’s hands fell to the cover, confusion giving way to horrible understanding.
Once it is tainted, it cannot sit within a minaret.
The others stopped talking. Kifah and Nasir frowned at the book. Altair stared.
“What can’t sit within a minaret?” Nasir asked, jaw set.
“The heart,” Zafira whispered, too hollow, too anguished to care that the book had used her again. “We’re running out of time.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” Kifah asked with the same dread suddenly cloaking the room. She had gone still as a bird trapped beneath snow.
“It’s a si’lah heart. Meant to live within the si’lah themselves or the minarets of their making. It was never
intended for the body of someone half ifrit, half safin.”
Her first thought was not to trust the Jawarat, not after she’d seen how capable it was of manipulating, stealing memories and exploiting others. But it made sense, didn’t it? It was the same as placing a fish in an empty bowl and expecting it to survive.
“That means—skies, we need to get it back now,” she said, “or all that we’ve done will have been for nothing. The Baransea, Sharr. Finding the Jawarat.”
Deen. Benyamin.
“And Aya would have done worse than give him magic,” Nasir said slowly.
Altair sat down. “She’ll have destroyed magic for good.”
