If Zafira was tired, her body betrayed no signs of it. Anger steeled her every vessel and vein, and she finally understood the restless energy Kifah lived and breathed.
Dawn had wrapped the night by the time the sea breeze signaled the approaching border of Sultan’s Keep. The lights of the city began to dwindle, the barrenness stretching like a shock. Which it was, Zafira supposed, for no one had expected the Arz to ever disappear.
Seif kept pace ahead of them, as if she’d begged him to come and he was displaying his ire for all to see. When in truth, he had asked her if she was ready when she had charged into the foyer with her satchel.
It was Kifah who had looked behind her to the stairs, expectant. “Where’s Nasir?”
“Preoccupied,” Zafira had replied, and her ridiculous mind sought out every one of Yasmine’s stories, making her wonder if he was truly busy.
Kifah had studied her with an ease that prickled her skin, and decided silence was the best answer.
A bird screamed in the distance now, breaking her out of her thoughts. She stared at it angrily as it swooped into the distance. Her horse whinnied, and she was angry at it, too. It was a shade darker than Sukkar but reminded her of him anyway. How attuned they had been to each other, how smooth his movements were. She bit her tongue. Better physical pain than the incurable one of the heart.
She missed the weight of the Jawarat by her side. Its cynicism and commentary. Its constant search for chaos and
control—even if she did not approve, it would have been a welcome distraction.
“It’s going to take some getting used to, standing around without four extra heartbeats,” Kifah mused.
“One less task for when we retrieve the final heart,” Seif reminded them curtly.
If, Zafira nearly corrected. She’d been astounded by the Lion’s audacity as much as by his presence in her room, and that didn’t bode well for her own confidence. At least she had the peace of mind knowing the girl in the yellow shawl had left the house shortly before she and Kifah did. Otherwise, her presence would have plagued every footfall of the journey.
But why? she asked herself. Why were her emotions, thoughts, and actions so visceral when it came to Nasir?
“Oi. Don’t look so glum,” Kifah said, bringing her horse near Zafira’s as they passed rows and rows of swaying barley, the crops contained by short fences on either side of the road. “If the Lion had walked through my door looking like my brother Tamim, I would have handed him the Jawarat without a second thought. And my brother’s dead.”
But the person in Zafira’s room hadn’t been her sister or dead mother or father, had it? It had been a boy she’d known for mere weeks, and yet felt a lifetime’s connection to.
“Do you still think of Tamim?” she asked. There were days when she forgot to think of Baba, when she barely thought of Deen, whose breath had clouded the cold Demenhune air less than a month past.
“Always,” Kifah said. Her chestnut mare snorted as they trotted along the cobbled road. “Though there are times when Altair takes precedence. More and more, as of late.”
“You like him,” Zafira said.
Kifah snorted. “Don’t tell me you don’t. You’re going to
Alderamin for him.”
She was going for more than Altair; for her own guilt, for the Jawarat, for the heart the Lion had stolen. Still, Zafira couldn’t argue with that. “But do you … love him?”
“Trying to pair us up, eh? I’m afraid my affections don’t run that way. I love him, yes. Fiercely.” She canted her head. “I’m beginning to love our zumra—even Nasir—as much as I loved Tamim, but I’d never be with Altair in the way you think. Affection isn’t measured and defined by tangible contact for me.”
Zafira considered that.
“I see those gears turning, Huntress. I wasn’t always so certain. I used to think I hadn’t found the right person yet. To be with another is supposedly an inherent desire of us all, is it not? Something we’re meant to do. I … I have never felt that pull. That need. Laa, I thought I was daama broken. Heartless.”
Zafira studied her. “But not anymore.”
Kifah squared her shoulders and spurred her horse onward with a smile. “No, not anymore.”
Zafira squeezed her thighs and her lazy horse whinnied again before following Kifah’s lead. It was a special kind of strength, knowing one’s heart as well as Kifah knew hers.
What do you want? She had demanded an answer from Nasir, and yet she could barely piece together one of her own.
Seif was waiting for them up ahead where the sand rose and fell in neat dunes. Pockets of shadow clutched the last of the night, sinking lower and lower as Zafira and Kifah neared, until the golden expanse deepened to azure, brightening and reflecting the sky, whispering a song quite different from that of the shifting sands.
The Strait of Hakim.
Yet another place Zafira had never thought she would see in person. Another place Deen, whose dream was to explore,
would never see.
She pressed her knuckles against the ache in her chest, fingers brushing his ring. There it is. The loss she thought she’d forgotten. The pain she thought she’d overcome. Yasmine’s face flashed in her mind, honey eyes dripping in sorrow.
Kifah whistled. “If that doesn’t beg for a swim, I don’t know what does.”
Zafira didn’t know how to swim. She didn’t know much of life’s delicacies or its simplicities. The waters were clear as glass, dragging the light of the waking sun to its depths and churning it into an alluring shade of blue-green.
Seif surveyed the shores, the barrenness. “Trade flourished here, at a time. Rarities from the Hessa Isles. Goods moved from Sultan’s Keep to Alderamin and back. Marketplaces sprawled along both coasts.”
Resentment seared his words, and Zafira wondered whom he blamed for Arawiya’s fall. If he blamed himself in any way, for it was, as every Arawiyan knew, the safin’s cruelty that created the Lion.
“We’ll cross there.” He pointed farther up the coast, where a bridge stretched like a too-thin smile across the horizon. It was white wood, the kind they could harvest in Demenhur, or maybe even Alderamin, a terrain she did not know. Iron rivets sparkled intermittently along its length, vying with the water for attention. They were a tiny comfort, she supposed, for the bridge had to be at least a century old.
“I’d much rather swim,” Kifah said slowly, running a hand along her bare scalp.
Zafira would much rather take a boat. Seif didn’t care.
“You might not care for your well-being,” Zafira began, realizing what a lie the words were when Kifah burst out laughing. It was a marvel how she could be both deeply
concerned and full of delight in a single moment. “But we’re not crossing that bridge with the heart.”
Seif didn’t even glance back. “Aya and I crossed it when we returned home to retrieve the remainder of the High Circle after the Arz’s fall, and she is worth more to me than all the magic Arawiya can possess.”
The two of them exchanged a look at his solemn tone, and Kifah’s laughter disappeared as quickly as it had come. He must have sensed their silent contemplation, their piqued curiosity, for he turned back with his signature irritation in his pale eyes, tattoo shimmering against his dark skin.
“Yalla, mortals.”
The bridge looked even worse up close, but neither Zafira nor Kifah commented as they dismounted and led their horses across the damp sand. The white wood was speckled with rot, a neat rectangular view of the strait cutting through every so often where slats were missing.
Well then.
Seif prepared to go first, the silk-wrapped heart clutched to his side, and Zafira wondered if he’d ever held a child. It was less likely than if he’d been mortal, she realized. Safin paid for their immortality with lower chances of procreation. Very few safin ever gave birth—a blessing, they learned in school, for Arawiya would be overrun with the vain creatures otherwise. Having never met a safi, she’d had no reason not to agree with the biased texts she’d read.
Now, having realized just how precious Aya and Benyamin’s child had been, the knowledge made her chest ache. It conjured a feline smile and umber eyes. Angry words from a mortal girl before his death. Did the dead know sorrow?
“Were you there for them?” she asked Seif. He cut her a look.
“When their son died?”
His features turned stony. “I was there for her when her husband was not.”
“I can’t see Benyamin abandoning his wife,” Kifah said, voice hard.
“The death broke them both,” Seif divulged, fixing his gaze in the distance. “Benyamin had the privilege of losing himself in his work, but Aya was still floundering from the loss of magic. It was her livelihood, for she was both a healer and a teacher of magic. Losing her son was hard enough, but losing Benyamin devastated her. He was there, of course. He loved her. But Aya needed more, and it was never the same.”
So there was another reason why Seif was angry at him. It didn’t sound like Benyamin, to abandon his wife in favor of his work, but she had seen firsthand what death could do to a family. How it could drive knives between bonds, sharpen grief into weapons.
Her thoughts flashed back to just before they left Sultan’s Keep, the girl in the yellow shawl vivid in Zafira’s mind as she laced her boots. Lana had followed her because Aya was at last out of earshot.
“She needs me,” Lana had said.
“She needs you?” Zafira hadn’t been able to tame her emotions. “Decades of life, and now she suddenly needs you?”
Lana hadn’t flinched. “I remind her of her child. She’s broken, Okhti. And we know what it’s like, don’t we? We know what it’s like to be broken. We’re the same, she and us.”
Zafira and Lana were sisters. The world had battered and bruised and torn them apart, and yet they had lifted themselves to their feet and persevered. They had powered onward. If Aya needed Lana because of the dead son she reminded her of, then laa, the safi was not the same as them. But Zafira had
been too angry to make Lana understand, too raw from the sight of the girl in Nasir’s room.
“Oi, Huntress!” Kifah called.
Zafira blinked free of her thoughts. Up ahead, Seif cast her the same look of annoyance as when she’d given the Lion the Jawarat. Incapable, it said.
She didn’t think twice before stepping onto the bridge and joining Kifah.
It swayed beneath them, a low hiss rising from the wood.
She paused. Hissing?
Shrieking?
Kifah released her horse’s reins and grabbed her spear. Seif drew two curved scythes, and Zafira surveyed their surroundings as she nocked an arrow onto her bow. Dimly, she realized she was waiting for something else. Not a foe, but the sound of a scimitar being drawn, a deathly silent assassin growing even more so in the face of danger.
“Marids,” Seif murmured.
And something flashed in the water.
