Power bled from her bones. It leached from her soul, dregs draining into some unseen abyss. Emptying her. Zafira Iskandar had ventured into the cursed forest known as the Arz for as long as she could remember, magic gradually sinking beneath her skin, always there, within reach.
And now it was gone.
Stuffed into a crate, shoved beneath a rotting nook beside a too-sure Zaramese. The Jawarat echoed her angry thoughts.
“I planned to destroy that book after magic was retrieved.” Anadil, the Silver Witch, Sultana of Arawiya, and Sister of Old pursed her lips at the green tome in Zafira’s lap. The lantern cast the angles of her face in shadow, white hair shimmering gold. Zafira’s cabin paled in her splendor.
She does not like us, the Jawarat reminded.
Zafira no longer flinched at its voice. It was nothing like that soothing whisper that once caressed her from the shadows near the Arz. The one she had thought belonged to a friend, before she learned it belonged to the Lion of the Night.
No, this voice was assertive and demanding, yet it was filling the void that magic had left behind, and she couldn’t complain.
No, she does not.
Instead, she had begun speaking back to it.
After all the trouble Zafira had gone through to retrieve the forsaken thing, she wasn’t going to let a scornful witch destroy it. Skies, was this why the woman had come to her cabin? “You’re afraid of it.”
“The Jawarat is my Sisters’ memories incarnate,” the Silver Witch said with a withering stare from the cot. Now that Zafira knew the woman was Nasir’s mother, she could see the resemblance in that look. “What have I to fear?”
She does not know. She is oblivious to what we gleaned upon Sharr.
The reverberation in her lungs was an order of silence as much as a reminder: Zafira didn’t even know the extent of what she had gleaned on Sharr, in accidentally slitting her palm and binding herself to this book. For the Jawarat was more than the Sisters’ memories.
It had steeped on Sharr for ninety years with the Lion of the Night. It held some of his memories, too, and the Silver Witch hadn’t the faintest clue. No one did.
Tell them. Her conscience was barely a whisper beneath the Jawarat’s weighted presence, but that was not the reason why she didn’t heed it. She simply couldn’t. She could not tell them of the Jawarat any more than she could tell them of the darkness that once spoke to her. Fear mangled whatever words she summoned. She was afraid of them. Afraid of how the others would see her.
She had been judged long enough simply for being born a woman.
“But we need it,” Zafira said at last, smoothing her features. The trunk beneath her had been bolted to the ship, but her stomach lurched with the waves. “To restore magic.”
“I’m a Sister of Old, girl. I know how magic must be restored. It is the book I know little about, for it was created in their final moments, in their last attempt to triumph over the Lion.”
And they had. They hadn’t been strong enough to destroy him, but they had trapped him upon Sharr and created the Jawarat. The way Zafira saw it, the book had been created for a single reason: to house their memories so that one day their
story would be known. To say why magic had been severed from Arawiya that fateful day, why they had died, and most important, where the hearts were located.
“The removal of the hearts from the minarets left Arawiya without magic, but the spell entrapping the Lion drew upon so much that it cursed the kingdom, leaching energy from every caliphate and causing havoc. Snow in Demenhur. Darkness in Sarasin. Sharr became frozen in time,” the Silver Witch said, catching Zafira’s surprise. “Indeed, life spans stretched beyond reason. Death became an impossible wish. By freeing the Jawarat and the hearts, you freed Arawiya, including those trapped upon the island. They were at last given the peace they sought.”
“Then the kaftar…” Zafira trailed off, tugging at the fringe of the scarf around her neck. She hadn’t been fond of the way the men who could shift into hyenas had leered at her, but they’d come to the zumra’s aid. They had helped fight off the Lion’s horde of ifrit.
“Dead.”
Zafira released a breath. How long did one have to live before death became a wish?
Jinan’s shouts echoed in the silence, the crashing waves muffling the rushing of feet on deck. Her contract with Benyamin would only take them to Sultan’s Keep, but they were heading for the mainland, close enough to Demenhur to rile a restlessness in Zafira’s blood.
“If you know how to restore magic, then you won’t need me,” she said. Or the book. “I can return home.”
She had left everything she’d ever known for magic. Journeyed across the Baransea. Trekked through the villainous island of Sharr. But that was before time and distance had created an insatiable yearning that came laced with fear.
Because she would need to face Yasmine.
“To what?” the Silver Witch asked without a drop of sympathy. “The Arz is gone. Your people have no need for a hunter.”
Her words were pragmatic, rational. Cruel. They stripped Zafira bare, reducing her to an insignificant grain in the vastness of the desert. Bereft, she reached for the ring at her chest—
And dropped her hand back to the Jawarat, running her fingers down the ridges of its spine. Almost instantly, she was filled with a sense of peace. Something that lulled the disquiet.
“When I bathe, will the pages melt?” Tendrils of sorrow lingered at the edges of her mind, too distant to grasp. She couldn’t remember being sad now. Nor even the reason for it. The Jawarat purred.
The Silver Witch paused. “I sometimes forget you’re only a child.”
“The world thieves childhoods,” Zafira said, thinking of Baba’s bow in her still-soft hands. Of Lana, brushing a warm cloth across Umm’s forehead. Of Deen, a ghost after his parents became bodies in a shroud.
“That it does. The Jawarat is a magical creation, immune to the elements, or it would have crumbled to dust within its first decade upon Sharr. Its life force, however, is now tied to yours because you so foolishly bound yourself to it. Tear out a few pages, and you may well lose a limb.”
Zafira hadn’t asked to be tied to the book. The Silver Witch was the one who had asked a child to go on this journey. It was her fault that Zafira was now bound to this ancient tome, and she hadn’t even needed Zafira for this quest. Only someone strong enough to resist the Lion’s hold. Unlike the Silver Witch herself, who had fallen deeper than any of them even realized.
Zafira had been certain Sharr had given them enough revelations to last a lifetime, but that was before Kifah’s
pointed question. Before they’d learned Altair was the Lion’s son as much as he was the Silver Witch’s. Strangely enough, learning his lineage had only made her more partial to the general.
She bit her tongue. “And there’s no way to undo the bond?”
“Death,” the Silver Witch said, as if Zafira should have known. “Drive a dagger through the tome’s center, and you’ll be free of it.”
“How kind,” Zafira ground out. “I’ll be ‘free’ of everything else, too.”
She brushed her fingers across the green leather, thumb dipping into the fiery mane of the lion embossed in its center. The Silver Witch only hummed, studying the girl who knew the Lion almost as well as she did.
She envies us.
Zafira began to agree, before she clenched her jaw against the Jawarat’s whispers. They could be far-fetched, she realized. Why ever would a Sister of Old envy a mortal girl?
We will align with time.
Whatever that meant.
She jumped when the two lanterns struck with a sudden clang. Her quiver tipped, arrows spilling and dust swirling like the sands of Sharr. The Silver Witch didn’t flinch, though Zafira noted the tight bind of her shoulders, so unlike the languid immortal, before the door swung open, revealing a silhouette in the passageway.
Zafira recognized the mussed hair, the absolute stillness she had only ever seen in deer before she loosed a fatal arrow.
A cloak of darkness followed Arawiya’s crown prince inside. He was effortless, as always. Almost careless, if one wasn’t paying close enough attention to his deliberate
movements. His gray gaze swept the small space and she couldn’t stop the flitter in her chest when it locked on hers.
And strayed to her mouth for the barest of moments.
“Are you hurt?” Nasir asked, in that voice that looped with the shadows, soft and demanding. But there was a strain to it, a discomfiture that made her all too aware of the Silver Witch watching every heartbeat of this exchange.
Zafira had known the context behind that question, once. When she was an asset that needed protecting. A compass guiding his destructive path. What was the reason for his concern now that they had retrieved what they once sought, rendering her purpose—on Sharr, in Demenhur, skies, in this world—obsolete?
Before she could find her voice, he was looking at the Silver Witch and gesturing to a dark trail on the floorboards that hadn’t been there before. Red stained his fingers.
“So this is why the ship isn’t going any faster.” Waves crashed in the silence.
“I can perform the mundane tasks any miragi can,” his mother said finally, “but time is an illusion that requires concentration and strength, neither of which I currently have.”
“And why is that?” His tone was impatient, his words terse.
The Silver Witch stood, and despite Nasir’s height, everything shrank before her. She parted her cloak to reveal the crimson gown beneath, torn and stiff with blood.
Zafira shot to her feet. “The Lion’s black dagger. Back on Sharr.”
Beneath the witch’s right shoulder gaped a wound, one she had endured to protect Nasir. It was a festering whorl of black, almost like a jagged hole.
“The very same,” the Silver Witch said as another drop of blood welled from her drenched dress. “There is no known cure to a wound inflicted by cursed ore. The old healers lived secluded on the Hessa Isles, and if any of them still remain, my only hope is there.”
“What of Bait ul-Ahlaam?” Nasir demanded.
Zafira translated the old Safaitic. The House of Dreams.
She’d never heard of it before.
“You can easily cross the strait from Sultan’s Keep and find what you need there.”
“At what cost? I will not set foot within those walls,” she replied, but Zafira heard the unspoken words: Not again. She had been there before, and it was clear the cost had little to do with dinars.
The Silver Witch was not easily fazed, so the flare of anger in her gaze and the frown tugging the corners of her mouth was strange. Notably so.
“Then you’ll leave us,” Nasir said, and Zafira flinched at his harsh indifference.
“I will be a walking vessel of magic. Of no use to you, but of every use to the Lion when he inevitably gets his hands on me,” the Silver Witch replied. “With my blood and his knowledge of dum sihr, no place in Arawiya will be safe. There is only so much he can do with my half-si’lah sons.”
Nasir looked down at his hands, where wisps of black swirled in and out of his skin. Almost as if they were breathing. His shadows hadn’t retreated like Zafira’s sense of direction had. He didn’t need the magic of the hearts when he could supply his own. He didn’t have to suffer the emptiness she did.
Something ugly reared in her, choking her lungs, and Zafira nearly dropped the Jawarat in her panic. Just as suddenly, the rage cleared and her heartbeat settled.
What— Her breath shook.
“This mess began because of you.” Nasir’s words were too cold, and she had to remind herself that he was speaking to his mother, not her. “We left Altair in the Lion’s hands because of you.”
The Silver Witch met his eyes. “There was a time when the steel of your gaze was directed elsewhere. When you looked to me with love, tenderness, and care.”
Nasir gave no response, but if the tendrils of darkness that bled from his clenched fists were any indication, the words had found their mark. He loved her, Zafira knew; it was why his words manifested so hatefully.
“I’ve taught you all that you know,” his mother said gently. “There is still time—I will teach you to control the dark. To bend the shadows to your will.”
“Just as you taught him?”
The silence echoed like a roar. Nasir didn’t wait to hear the rest. He turned and limped away, shadows trailing. Zafira made to follow, careful to keep her gaze from sweeping after him, for she was well aware that nothing passed the Silver Witch’s scrutiny.
“Heed me, Huntress,” the Silver Witch said. “Always carry a blade and a benignity. You may never know which you will need.”
Zafira felt the stirrings of something at her tone. “And you cannot return home.”
Purpose. That was what she felt. Something dragging her from this sinking, burrowing sense of being nothing.
“If you do, your entire journey to Sharr—including your friend’s death, Benyamin’s slaughter, and Altair’s capture— will have been in vain.”
Perhaps the witch had always known someone with the rare affinity of finding whatever they set their heart to—a da’ira—wasn’t needed for the job. Perhaps she saw in Zafira what Zafira could not see in her, but knew from the memories of the Jawarat to be true. Someone like herself, guided by a good heart and pure intentions, before she fell prey to a silver tongue.
“The hearts are dying. They are organs removed from their houses, deteriorating as we speak. Restore them to their minarets, or magic will be gone forever.”
