Altair bit his tongue until it was bleeding as profusely as his eye. He refused to make a sound, refused to cry out, even as every vessel in his body begged to. In pain. In loss. Ninety years he had retained himself, only for this.

This.

Aya stood in the doorway, dirt smeared across her pink abaya. She was bloody from head to toe—no, that was his vision. Blood dripped from his chin, spattered onto the floor as if he were a basin with an irreparable leak.

She ran to him and he shrank away. He hated her in that moment. Her pity, her pain. She had no right to any of it.

“What happened?” she cried.

“Why do you care?” Altair felt as hollow as his voice.

He tasted his blood on his tongue. Two paces away, the si’lah heart was witness to it all, thrumming faintly.

“Fix him, my sweet,” the Lion commanded quietly. “He must see that he chose wrongly.”

She reached into the tray and slit her palm after a moment’s hesitance, and through his pinprick of perception, he wondered if he was supposed to be grateful to her for abandoning her fear of dum sihr when she cupped her hand beneath his chin and stirred his blood with her own. When she pressed her fingers to his eye socket. When he saw, with a dry heave, what was left of his eye being torn away from his numbed skin.

“Give me water,” she said to an ifrit afterward. “To clean him.”

“Don’t,” Altair snarled. “Step away from me.”

She lowered her hand reluctantly, hurt flashing across her features, and Altair laughed. A sad croak of a sound he didn’t recognize as his own. The Lion murmured something he missed, and she went back to him, washing her hands in the basin in the corner.

The room smelled of blood and the must of oil. It smelled of apprehension and change. Of loss. With one eye, Altair watched the Lion recline across his bedroll as Aya sat beside him, crossing her legs. Her gaze flitted to Altair with the barest unease. With sorrow, always sorrow. Ever since her son’s death.

He seized it as whatever held him stiff against the wall subsided and the ifrit grabbed him once more.

“Aya, look at me,” he implored, despite the hatred in his veins. “Look at what he’s done. What would Benyamin say?”

She smiled at him. “The dead cannot speak, sadiqi.”

The Lion looked pleased. Aya picked up the first of her tools and pulled back the folds of the Lion’s robes.

Altair’s blood ran cold. He thrashed against the ifrit, but he felt as if he were suddenly made of wheat, frail and insignificant. He gave up, all but hanging in their clutches.

Two more came for him, because Aya might be Arawiya’s best healer, but no one could insert a heart into a heartless monster by skill alone. Without Altair’s blood to fuel her, none of this was possible. He twisted away in futile protest and dull pain throbbed up his arm at the slash of the blade. He stilled at the warm rush of blood, heard the soft pings as it hit the metal cup.

Pride bit his tongue, held his silence. His eye socket wrinkled oddly, bile rising to his throat.

Aya blended their blood with a soft murmur. She smoothed her fingers down the Lion’s chest.

“Do you feel it?” she asked momentarily.

The Lion shook his head.

Altair knew she was good, but skilled enough to numb so much of a man in heartbeats? She placed the tip of the lancet on the Lion’s skin and paused. “There is always the chance that it may not work.”

“Fair Aya, always so concerned for my welfare. We’ve discussed this, haven’t we? It is a risk I must take.” The Lion touched her cheek, like a proud parent commending his child.

“For Arawiya,” she said.

The Lion smiled. “For Arawiya, my sweet.”

She truly was gone. Altair watched helplessly as the knife tore through the Lion’s golden skin, black blood welling along the path of the incision.

The promise of a greater darkness to come.