Civilization faded to the swell of sand dunes lit blue, ghosts of the lost rising with the dust Altair’s and Nasir’s horses stirred in their wake. It was only after they crossed the border of Sultan’s Keep and passed into Sarasin that Altair allowed himself to breathe freely for the first time since they’d fled the palace.
He had watched the life fade from a thousand men, but never had he lost so many friends in a single mission. Benyamin, Zafira. Aya.
Nasir studied him in a way he had never seen. It was how Benyamin once looked at him. It was how one looked at another that they knew as well as themselves.
“You loved her.” His voice was quiet. Altair’s eye fell closed.
“I saw the way you spoke of her. Of us. Of loss,” Nasir clarified.
“I loved him more.” “What does that mean?”
Altair’s grip tightened around the reins as Haytham’s son woke from his slumber. “It means that no matter what needs to be done to make the children of this forsaken kingdom smile again, I will do it.”
Dawn gave way to morning, clinging to the edges of the earth as they pressed deeper into Sarasin, the towns silent and empty. As if fear ruled these streets, dread clogging the air.
“We’ll cross the Dancali Mountains by nightfall,” Altair said.
“And then home?” Haytham’s son asked. At least someone wanted to speak to him.
After a hearty silence filled with nothing but the clatter of hooves, Nasir looked to the distance. “The sooner we pass Sarasin, the better.”
Though Sarasin was considerably brighter than it was when he and the Lion first arrived, it was still darker than the rest of the kingdom. They stuck to the main roads, avoiding the shadows where ifrit might be, sometimes splitting up, sometimes pausing to visit the house of a spider, always vigilant. It meant they were seen by more people than Altair liked, including a little girl with ice chips for eyes that reminded him of Zafira.
He had failed her. He had failed Nasir, who was burrowing into himself and shutting out the world once more, his already broken spirit slowly degenerating. He was only a boy the world had thieved endlessly, giving nothing back. Altair hadn’t seen a single wisp of his shadows since their escape.
He was stifling his emotions again, caging his heart once more. Altair had spent years loathing the prince, but Sharr had changed more than the course of the future. Nasir stared at the remnants of the compass their mother had given him before this journey began, brushing his thumb across the fractured glass with the sorrow of a thousand lost souls. If someone had told him his brother was capable of such compassion, such tenderness, Altair would have laughed in their face.
“Aren’t you going to ask me how I escaped?” The words were light, but he still felt the weight of the black shackles that had restricted him.
Nasir reluctantly eyed Altair’s red wrists. “How did you escape?”
“Let it be known that I am not one to shy from the use of tongue,” Altair said.
Nasir released a long breath, but at least the prince was focusing on something other than misery. They didn’t have the might of Pelusia to quicken their pace; this would be a long journey.
“Do you have something to say, brother dearest?” Altair watched him struggle between the desire to ignore him and the need to retort.
The latter won. “No one wants to hear of the filthy things you do to get around.”
“You, princeling, need to extract your dark little head from the trenches. I was referring to words. My impeccable sense of charm that transcends the likes of race.”
Nasir ignored him, just like old times, but when did that ever stop Altair?
After Aya’s death, the ifrit had come, spurred by the Lion’s command. There were far too many for Altair to overpower in the state that he was in, and he knew it. He was too weak, too drained. Emotionally and physically.
So he’d held up his hands. The ifrit weren’t mindless beasts, he knew. He avoided looking at Aya, an unceremonious heap on the floor like a discarded doll, and gestured to their fallen brethren, prone and unconscious. At least, he had hoped they were only knocked out and not dead.
“You see what happened to your friends?” Altair asked. They only blinked, but Altair didn’t mind. He was adept at one-sided conversation. Anyone who tolerated Nasir had to be. Conversing with ifrit was as easy as kanafah.
“Don’t think I won’t do the same to you.”
The ifrit paused to speak among themselves. If Altair made it out of this ordeal alive, he was going to learn their tongue. He blinked his working eye, vowing it now.
“Look at you, chittering and scrambling around to do his bidding without a second thought,” Altair continued.
They considered him and his words, and four of them looked to the fifth, clearly the leader of the bunch.
Altair used that split-heartbeat of a distraction to lunge. He kicked down two ifrit and flung his arms, knocking two more to the floor with the weight of his shackles, buying him time when the fifth came for him with a stave lit aflame.
He tsked. “Baba never gave you permission to hurt me, did he?”
The ifrit arced the stave, uncaring or likely not understanding. Altair leaped out of the way, throwing up his arm when another stave came for his heart. It clanged against his right shackle before he wrapped his fingers around the ifrit’s neck.
Footsteps echoed outside the door.
Altair punched down the last of them and snatched the discarded scalpel and whatever other tools might prove useful as weaponry, pausing only to close Aya’s eyes before he crept into the hall.
And came face to face with Seif.
Altair wrenched the door closed on Aya’s dead body.
“Bin Laa Shayy?” Seif asked, pale eyes flitting to his missing eye and away just as quickly. “What happened to you?”
Son of none. Altair almost laughed. Akhh, do I have news for you, habibi.
“Seif!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
“Of all the places I thought I’d see you, the dungeons beneath the palace were not among them.” Seif was curt. “I came looking for—”
“I know. So nice of you to rush to my aid.”
Seif regarded him stonily. “You didn’t seem to be in need of rescuing when the Lion took Aya.”
Altair stopped prying at the seams of the cursed shackles. “Did you believe it? Did you truly think I would turn my back on my kingdom after all I’ve done?”
Seif’s scorn bled into his words. “What have you achieved? He stole Aya because—”
“Aya is dead,” Altair snapped. “And everyone else will follow soon enough if we don’t make haste. Now, stop scowling and help me get these off.”
“She’s dead?” Seif repeated numbly.
Altair ran his fingers along the black ore, trying to read the Safaitic engraved there. Trying to keep moving, because grief had a way of latching to the idle.
Seif only took one look at the shackles before he made quick work of them with his scythe and a few words. Altair stumbled when the ore fell away, revealing thick bands of red around his wrists.
“That’s going to leave a mark,” he mumbled before fire surged in his veins, threatening to erupt. He gripped the nearest surface and clenched his jaw to near cracking. His skin glowed, white light burning beneath like a torch. He would bring this place to the ground if he wasn’t careful.
Wahid, ithnayn, thalatha, he counted beneath his breath. “Shall we?” Seif asked, but Altair had turned back to the
Lion’s room, where he’d found what he needed, black and sharp, but hadn’t had a chance to steal.
“I have to get something first.”
 |
After nearly a week on the road, the Tenama Pass finally widened to Demenhur, with its sloping hills and ablaq masonry, the technique of alternating rows of light and dark stone never a style he had liked. Snow still doused the land in
white and cold, but the air felt different. Less biting than what Altair remembered. It tasted like change. Hope.
Hope, he had learned, arrived swiftly, seeking to bloom in the darkest of places and in the most harrowing of times. That was what he felt in Demenhur.
“We’re here,” Haytham’s son said softly, and fell against his chest with a small tremor, the effect of a soldier come home. A gust of wind came at Altair’s back, and he was reminded once more of his twin scimitars, their phantom weights heavier than the blades themselves had ever been.
May you find hands as caring as mine, Farhan and Fath. He had overseen their forging, slipped the smith extra dinars so the man would carve bin Laa Shayy right above the hilts. He wasn’t just the son of none, he was a proud one.
Farhan and Fath had been with him through the thickest of battles. Farhan had won him a much-needed victory against the Demenhune army. Fath fitted well in a sharp-tongued huntress’s hands when she—
Sultan’s teeth.
As he ducked beneath the thick clustered branches of a lifeless tree, Altair threw open his satchel’s flap with a curse. He pulled out the Jawarat, bound in green leather and embossed with the head of a lion. In its center was a hole, the result of a dire injury to the one it was bound to, and if Altair were mad and a fool for hope, he would say the tome was gasping for air.
Fighting for breath as it knitted itself together, right before his eyes—eye. Altair sighed.
That would take some getting used to.
