There were men who deserved forgiveness and a second chance, and others who deserved only to suffer for what they’d done. Caliph Ayman of Demenhur, the Jawarat said, was one of the latter.
Zafira fought against this claim, for she was a huntress and a girl, an orphan and a sister. Not a judge.
Wrongs must be righted, the Jawarat crooned. We will help you.
It was a losing battle against a bottomless, gaping hunger, a craving that could never be sated. This was how the Lion felt, she realized, when he desired knowledge. When he wanted vengeance for what his father had endured.
He dared to sequester a child in such a way?
Zafira didn’t know if the thought was hers alone or the Jawarat’s. Or if it had simply found the vial inside her that held everything enraging, and drunk it. The caliph had been wrong for years. His lies had spread across the caliphate, had permeated the very fabric of their lives. What made this moment any different? What made murder burn in their veins?
Their?
We are one and the same.
The double doors were locked, white wood as pure as her heart. She laughed at the analogy. Open them. Open them? It would be a waste of dum sihr to unlock doors. In her thoughts flashed Qismah’s shorn head. Her downcast eyes. Zafira’s own hunched shoulders.
A line of red ripped down her palm, and the locks came undone.
No longer will we wait for change. We will bring it.
Resolve hardened her. The doors flew open. Caution whispered from the back of her skull, that viper striking fear slithering close, and she—
“Qif!” Two guards leaped to attention, shouting in tandem, but what sort of fool would stop?
Sharp pain burst across her palm and she threw out her arms. The guards crumpled to the ground, dead. Dead? She froze in her tracks, blearily studying her surroundings as if suddenly awakening from a slumber. Her bandaged chest ached. Where was she? Where were Qismah and Lana?
The sentinels merely rest. Look at them, bint Iskandar.
Her lucidity vanished, and she felt as if she were watching herself from afar. The guards were lounging on the floor, chests rising and falling ever so slowly, asleep as the Jawarat assured her they were.
She was led by an invisible hand down one room and into the next, large archways like keyholes that would never find their match. Moonlight flooded the space, solitary lanterns lighting her path to a chamber.
And there, standing before a platform bed resplendent in furs, was the Caliph of Demenhur.
This is atonement for our abandon. Be pleased with this justice.
“You,” the caliph said in surprise. “The Hunter.”
Oh, how she’d missed the scorn the men of her caliphate directed at women.
The last time he had seen Zafira—as she stood on the ship departing for Sharr and revealed her identity to all—rage had burned in his gaze. Now, the wrinkles on his face were more pronounced and the light in his brown eyes had dulled. The
regard he had once shown when he’d thought her a boy was gone.
She didn’t care. Laa, she pitied him and his too-small mind.
“I retrieved the Jawarat, and this is how you look at me?” she demanded. “Did you not hear of the Arz falling? Of the sands of Sarasin turning gold again? Of the snow in Demenhur fading?”
“And?” he asked.
That tiny word drowned in a lifetime of prejudice.
“And what? Did you stop believing in Arawiya’s restoration the moment you learned I was a woman?”
The caliph didn’t move. “Destruction befell the western villages not long after your departure, Hunter. Not long after you dropped your hood.”
Why was she trying to speak to him? Why did she think she could make him understand?
Because that is who you are.
Zafira froze, sharp pain splitting her skull. That voice wasn’t the Jawarat’s. It was Yasmine’s and Lana’s. It was Umm’s.
No, bint Iskandar. There are those for whom reason does not exist. Do you weep the loss of virtue when we have given you power?
The Jawarat was right.
“Speak my name,” she said quietly, in a voice not entirely hers.
He took a careful step back. “How did you get past the guards—”
Zafira laughed. “Look at you. Pathetic. Afraid of a woman.”
His fear was so tangible that she wanted to gather it in a bottle and relish later—laa. She was no monster. She didn’t toy with her prey the way a lion did with a mouse.
“You took the future of a girl and did with it as you willed,” she said. Or perhaps it was the Jawarat that spoke. Her vision blurred.
“Whom do you speak of?”
“Your daughter. All of Demenhur’s daughters.” The caliph swallowed audibly. “Guards!”
Zafira started to laugh before a pair of guards rushed inside.
“Sayyidi?” they asked.
Both of them stopped short when they saw her. Their swords flashed in the moonlight, uncertainty at the sight of an unarmed girl halting their blows. Perhaps she would have left. Perhaps she would have been sated by the scare she had made, if not for the satisfaction on the caliph’s face.
The complacency of knowing she, a young woman, had lost.
You wish to give a girl her throne, the Jawarat told her.
Circumstance favors us.
Pain seared her palm. Something bold and angry crowded her gaze, as if leniency were a concept she knew nothing about. She lifted her hand.
With nothing but the moon as her witness, Zafira brought down her fist. Agony split the room, the throes a song in her skull. The night bled crimson, echoing with screams.
This is man, bare to the world. Halved of his whole.
She was the bladed compass, honed by the Lion and wielded by the Jawarat.
She was ruin, she was havoc, and she reveled in it.
