Saraab, they had called the western villages of Demenhur once. Before magic left and the snow infiltrated their lives. The old name translated to “mirage,” for that was what the sparse villages were, a haven for stray bedouins or sailors on their way to the Baransea shore.
Zafira always found it strange that there were two meanings to the old name, the second being “phantom.” As if whoever named the villages had known that it would one day become this.
A village of ghosts.
“Easy,” Kifah called when Zafira stumbled down the steps leading from her house. Her voice echoed eerily in the emptiness.
A breeze wound through the dry limbs of the trees, welcoming Zafira—accusing her. For in all seventeen years that she had lived here, not once had ill befell them.
Until she left.
The cold was instant, a familiar sting in Zafira’s nose and a crackling across her cheeks, a whisper of memories from the last time she had stood amid snow. Umm was alive. Yasmine was smiling. Deen was by her side. A hood had shrouded her head and a cloak had hidden her figure. There was an almost dizzying sensation inside her now. As if she were transitioning between two moments, past and present.
She had been two people then, but if she was being honest with herself, she was more Demenhune Hunter than anything else. A mystery to the people, an empty shell until she donned her cloak. Everything had been stripped away on Sharr, leaving nothing but that empty shell behind.
She was just Zafira.
“Oi, it’s freezing. Do you want me to stay?” Kifah asked. Zafira shook her head. “I just need to breathe.”
“Right. But have a care, eh?” she said with a pointed glance at her chest.
Zafira waved her off.
Who was she now? What purpose did she serve in the world?
Change hung in the air, making the sun’s rays a little bit different, and her steps faltered when she saw it.
The nothing in the distance.
No enticing shadows, no breathing black. A simple plain of snow cut into blue seas, a horizon bereft of the Arz. That darkness that had defined her. That had made her who she was.
Now she was an archer without a target. A girl without a home. A soul without a purpose.
Zafira turned and hurried away. The street leading to the sooq was white and empty, and her shawl did nothing to ward her shiver as the ghosts of her village spooled to her side, following her past one house, then a second. The third. Ghosts don’t exist, Deen said in her head.
Ice scraped the bottoms of her boots, cold and relentless.
Not even the downiness of snow had survived the massacre.
The buildings surrounding the sooq held a dark and maddening silence. This was the jumu’a where Yasmine’s wedding had taken place, a moment that felt rooted in some long-ago past. How many times had Zafira stridden past the windows of Araby’s sweet shop, annoyed at her people for smiling and laughing as the cold clouded their every exhale?
Now she missed it with a bone-deep sorrow. She could hear phantom laughter, the joyous shouts of children, the hustle and bustle of her people. If she walked three steps to her
right, she would be able to make out the lavender door to Bakdash. A few steps to her left, and the thin baker’s windows would stretch wide.
The wind moaned again, lamenting, lamenting.
“It’s all my fault,” she whispered, sinking to her knees on the gray jumu’a, snow drenching her clothes.
Footsteps crunched along the ice-speckled stone, and a weight lifted because she knew that gait, those whispering footfalls. She turned to meet Nasir’s gaze, to find understanding, reason, something.
No one was there.
Shivers racked her body. She was cold, so, so cold.
Her life had fallen apart without even her to witness. These were the people her father had taught her to feed, to care for. They had died because they had breathed.
I’m sorry, Baba.
Resilience flowed through a woman’s veins as fervently as her blood, Umm had always said. It was what held together the frayed edges of Zafira’s sanity, but endurance, like all else, had its limits.
It was suddenly too much.
She curled into herself, clamping her mouth closed to stave her scream.
Pain flared from her wound. A cry tore from her lips, unleashing the dam that she’d kept patching and patching over the years, failing to notice as it overflowed. One tear became ten, and then she couldn’t stop.
A small shadow fell over her. “Okhti?”
“I did everything. Everything I could possibly do,” Zafira gasped out. “Why? Why wasn’t it enough?”
Lana pulled her to her chest, and somehow, the tears fell faster, harder. She was supposed to be the stronger one. The one to hold them together.
“The world has no right sitting on your shoulders, yet you’ve given it more than you will ever owe,” Lana whispered. “You’ve done for it what a sultan would require a throne, a crown, and a thousand men to accomplish.”
You are very much its concerned queen.
It felt decades ago that the Silver Witch had proclaimed those words. Zafira was queen of nothing now, an orphan in every manner.
“You can cry,” Lana said gently. “It helps.”
Zafira sputtered a laugh, and then Lana’s face broke. She threw her arms around Zafira, forgetting all about the wound she had carefully bandaged.
“Yaa, Okhti. You were just … there. You wouldn’t move, you barely breathed.”
“And yet you were as brave as I knew you’d be,” Zafira said softly, shivering at her haunted tone. “If not for you, I would have been lost.”
“But you’re here now. You’re here. And Ammah Aya was useful for something, at least. Have you eaten? We have no thyme,” Lana blabbered as tears streamed down her cheeks and her breath clouded the air. “But Umm had dried pomegranate on hand. Can you believe it? Demenhur hasn’t grown pomegranates in decades. They were so red. As red as your blood. And I—I—”
Lana’s sobs were soft. She had always cried in silence. It was sadder somehow, as if her tears did not want to fall. To leave her. “I thought I’d lost you both. Don’t do that again,” she whispered. “I like the sound of your heart.”
Zafira liked it, too, she realized, as the cold seeped through the knees of her pants. There was nothing like death to make
one value life. “Never. You will always, always have me.”
Her sister was still here and very much alive. Zafira herself still had breath in her lungs, and so long as the Lion sat on the throne, she would have purpose. So long as the Demenhune caliph railed against women, she would have purpose.
“Get dressed,” Zafira said suddenly.
“Why?” Lana pulled back to look at her. “Oh no. I know that look. We’re not going anywhere until you’ve recovered. Ah, you’re bleeding again.”
“I’ll rest on the way.” They needed to regroup with the others. “We need to get to the palace.”
