It was fitting, Zafira supposed. That one safi had dedicated his life to reversing the fall of Arawiya, only for his other half to do the opposite.
She should have unleashed her arrow when Aya had taken the Lion’s hand. She should have leaped to the ground and torn Aya apart with her bare hands. Blood filled her vision: Aya gasping, her throat ripped to shreds. Zafira’s fingers steeped in crimson.
Part of her was repulsed by her thoughts.
It is as you wanted.
The Jawarat lulled her with its truth. When it had shown her the terrible destruction of her village by her own hand, she had wanted it to heed her wishes. That was exactly what it had woven in her thoughts just now. The room spun, angry slashes of red making it hard to see. A soft purring came from the book in her lap and something—
Something fell to pieces.
Altair jerked from the little table with a yelp. “I’m all right!
I’m all right!”
Zafira’s empty cup was now matching halves of ceramic.
Rent in two the way the men in her vision had been.
“How did that happen?” Kifah asked with a frown.
“It must have already been broken,” Zafira said quickly. She struggled to quiet her racing pulse, as if the others could somehow hear it and know she had broken the cup.
“And just needed a bit of time to fall apart,” Nasir said, watching her, not at all referring to the cup. She carefully set the Jawarat down, out of reach, but the haze didn’t disappear.
Laa, it was worsening, embers of anger merging into a flame, thieving her thoughts.
You did this, she hissed in her head.
Laa, bint Iskandar. It was you. It is the violence you wished upon the safi.
“I—I need to go,” Zafira said quickly. She started to get up but swayed with light-headedness, and Kifah had to grab her arm.
“Maybe you should sit back down,” Altair suggested gently. “We need to put together our plan.”
Zafira shook her head. She needed space to think. To sort through the crowding in her skull. If she remained, her only input would be blood and murder and other atrocities she wanted no part of. What was happening to her? She was the girl who’d mourned the rabbits she snared, who sought forgiveness as she slit their throats.
“I’ll take you to your sister,” Kifah said, oblivious. Yes, Lana would help.
“Akhh, there’s two of you?” Altair remarked.
Zafira rolled her eyes as the door thudded closed. Kifah led her down one hall and then another, wide and serene, arches beckoning with parted curtains every so often.
“You met Yasmine,” Zafira started. Her friend was down one of these halls, hating Zafira for her treacherous heart, knowing Zafira was the reason the last of her family was gone.
Kifah nodded, a sly smile playing on the edge of her mouth.
Zafira ignored it. “So you know what she looks like. And … well, I need your help making sure she and Altair don’t meet.”
Kifah only nodded, her smile widening. At Zafira’s glare, she shrugged. “I might have overheard a word or two of your,
er, reunion.”
Zafira’s brows flattened.
“Can you imagine it?” Kifah continued, wistful. “I didn’t spend long with her, but bleeding Guljul, the two of them would be perfect.”
Zafira’s slow blink turned to a scowl when she realized what Kifah was implying.
“She’s married,” she deadpanned. “And Altair killed her brother.”
Kifah only shrugged again as they turned down the hall. “Stranger things have happened.”
“Zafira?” Yasmine stepped from one of the rooms as if summoned by their conversation, a shawl clutched in her hand. Her hair fell in freshly washed curls, kissing her cheeks.
Kifah lifted her brows.
“You’re supposed to be resting,” Yasmine said. She looked between them, gaze narrowing to slits.
“I was,” Zafira replied, wanting to step close. Fear held her in place. “I’m going to see Lana.”
A door slammed down the adjacent hall, and a laugh echoed, boisterous and free. The dread coiling in Zafira’s stomach was instant and girdling.
“You should have seen your face, habibi.”
It’s fine, she told herself. Yasmine didn’t know Altair by the tone of his voice. Only by name.
“Always happy to be the source of your amusement, Altair,” came Nasir’s exasperated reply.
Zafira looked at Kifah, and Kifah looked at Yasmine.
Perhaps, if they hadn’t been here, Yasmine would have thought nothing of it. But their pause gave Yasmine pause. She
stiffened, and Zafira saw the moment recognition dawned, her features morphing into anger and rage, eyes bright and livid.
Khara.
“You know,” Kifah said lightly, “maybe Yasmine can take you to Lana, eh? I—I have to go.”
“Go where?” Yasmine snapped, but Kifah was already jogging backward with a two-fingered salute. Yasmine hoisted her abaya and ran after her.
Now both of them were leaving her.
“Wait!” Zafira called. “What about me?”
Kifah turned down the hall, disappearing from view.
Yasmine didn’t look back.
Do something, you fool. Zafira winced and shoved her fingers against her wound, crying out at the sudden pain. Yasmine slowed but didn’t stop.
“Akhh, One of Nine, why the rush?” Altair exclaimed, moving closer.
Zafira hissed again, just for good measure.
Yasmine looked back at her. “Now what is it?”
“Lana,” Zafira gasped, clutching her chest as blood blossomed across her wrappings. Perhaps this was a little too good an act. “I think my wound broke again.”
Yasmine wavered, torn between going after Altair or helping her bleeding friend. Zafira nearly scowled, doubling over and throwing a hand against the wall instead.
“Yasmine!”
“All right,” she snarled. “I’m coming.”
Zafira heaved a relieved sigh. Altair deserved the brunt of Yasmine’s anger, but not now. Later, when everything was through, she would make the introductions herself.
Yasmine grumbled all the way to Lana’s door and abandoned her immediately, but Zafira didn’t mind. She’d done her job. She stepped into a room with shelves upon shelves of little bottles—a regular arsenal of healing supplies
—and Lana, almost invisible in the shapely rays of evening light.
It was much like the rest of the palace: carved white shadowed by gray, accented in silver that complemented the deep blue furnishings, but this space smelled of so many herbs that Zafira’s nose couldn’t decipher a single one aside from rosemary, which she had never liked but Lana had always loved.
It was like Lana to claim a room that wasn’t hers. Even at home, she could never sleep in their room, preferring to curl on the majlis in their foyer, and for a moment, Zafira could only stand in the doorway, taking in the gleam of her sister’s hair, the soft curve of her cheek, lit with a line of fire from the crackling hearth.
It reminded her of home, before she undertook the journey to Sharr, when Lana had begged her to stay, saying magic meant nothing without Zafira.
Now it could be gone. Never, ever to return.
“You’re here!” Lana said, leaping to her feet. Her hands were stained with ink. Only then did Zafira realize she had brought the Jawarat with her. Her fear was a viper, sinking fangs and numbing her. “I was just writing down notes. Since you survived.”
“I’m delighted your experiment was successful,” Zafira said dryly.
We like her, bint Iskandar.
Zafira ignored it, or tried to—there was a sense inside her, a foreboding similar to when a storm churned in the distance.
Lana grinned cheekily before concern marred her brow. “Are you all right?”
Zafira nodded quickly, angling her bandages from view. “It’s the book, isn’t it?” Lana was staring at the Jawarat
with fascination and fear. “You act strange when you have it.” “I—”
She stopped when a knock sounded and the door opened before either of them could answer. Lana looked past her shoulder and quickly smoothed back her hair with an eager hand, leaving a streak of ink on her temple. Zafira’s eyebrows flicked upward. Sweet snow.
“Are we meeting someone special?” she whispered. Lana glared at her. “It’s the boy Ammah Aya saved.”
Zafira turned to the door, wincing when her wound stretched. The newcomer was slight, with a cloak shielding hunched shoulders and a hesitant step. Zafira was suddenly back at home, staring in her speckled mirror before her hunts. She recognized it all, down to the bare tilt of the newcomer’s hooded head.
“That’s no boy,” Zafira murmured. This was the palace, where the caliph lived. Where Haytham lived. She pieced together the clues. “You’re her. You’re the caliph’s daughter.”
The girl startled like a deer, her carefully draped hood falling back just enough to reveal shapely eyes wide in fear. She lifted her chin in a wobbly display of defiance, full lips pressed tight. With a start, Zafira realized the girl was not much younger than her, possibly even the same age as Zafira.
Lana scrambled to her feet, firelight highlighting her distress. “Khara, you’re a girl?”
Zafira turned to her sharply. “Mind your mouth.”
Lana directed her glower at Zafira. “How did you know?” “I should think the answer to that question is obvious.”
“What’s your name?” Lana asked, turning to the disguised girl. Disbelief toned her voice, the edges roughened by hurt.
“Qismah,” the girl said in a voice as gentle as first snow. She darted a glance at Lana, but her gaze seemed most comfortable on the ground. “I—I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. Only Ammu Haytham knows I’m a girl.”
Zafira wondered what sort of life Qismah was leading. Haytham looked out for her, but what did it mean for Qismah to keep her true self a secret? Did she believe herself a harbinger of ill, as many in Demenhur believed women to be?
“And—and Baba.”
Perhaps it was the way she referred to her father, with shame and hesitance, that caused Zafira’s anger to rear. It was a chorus in her skull, wild and grating. The Jawarat fueled it with murmurs, reminders of the way men of her caliphate looked at her. At women. She cinched her jaw tight, willing it away, telling herself to stay calm as the book sat innocently in her lap, as if it weren’t guiding her thoughts.
She smiled at the girl, seeing the resemblance between her and the elderly caliph. “Haytham says you are an apt pupil. You are very brave, doing what you do.”
Qismah’s half smile was fleeting.
It was unfair that girls so young were weathered enough to understand society so keenly. Once, Zafira would have smiled that same fleeting smile. She would have told herself that this, and this, and this was enough.
Enough. The word was a box she had placed herself within, and she would be a fool to let another young girl do the same.
“Your throne will be yours,” Zafira promised. Once the Lion was vanquished, and Arawiya stopped teetering at the edge of this dangerous precipice, she would help her. Enough people knew who Zafira was, and Haytham was a man in
position who would do what was right. He would help them. The people should know by now how twisted the caliph’s words were. If they didn’t, they would learn—or she would shove the truth down their throats.
“I…,” Qismah began, and tapered off with a nod. “Shukrun.”
The caliph’s daughter braved a glance at Lana, and in a clear attempt to do something, she tossed wood into the fire, pulling back when it hissed, her hood falling farther from her head.
That was when Zafira saw Qismah’s hair—shorn like a man’s, dark curls glinting bronze. Kifah was bald, of course, but that was a commonality in Pelusia. In Demenhur, the longer a woman’s hair, the more beautiful she was deemed. No one would dare lift a blade to a woman’s mane. Trimming it was as unseemly as pretending to be a man.
Trimming it was an act of disgrace.
Liquid fury replaced the blood in her veins, burning hotter than the bluest flame. She barely felt the throb of her arrow wound.
Let us redeem ourselves for leaving you. We will please you.
He will die for what he has done.
She did not know whose thought that was, whose vow that burned bright. She was on her feet. The Jawarat was in her hand, and turmoil ached in her bones, fighting against its pull and failing, failing. This wasn’t the chaos she had come to recognize and steel herself against. This was the fervent need to recompense. To atone. And it caught her off guard.
She couldn’t tell where her thoughts began and the Jawarat’s ended. Lana’s mouth shaped her name, but Zafira heard nothing. Qismah hurried away, terror morphing her pretty features. The hall hurried past in a blur.
It wasn’t until Zafira stood before two large double doors, the Jawarat clutched tight, that she knew where she was going, danger carving her path.
