In the end, Rameela pitied Nasir and, after assuring him that she would keep watch over Zafira through the night, showed him to a small room used to store spare covers and other odds and ends. It was cramped, but the door had a lock and her son left him a bedroll before the tiny fireplace, so it served its purpose.
He was dreading the moment when he’d tell Zafira that he had orders to stop in Leil. That he didn’t, in fact, leave Thalj solely for her and would not be taking her to Sultan’s Keep. Khara, he should have been a little more up front about that bit. He had finally convinced himself to close his eyes—the word “dog” pounding in his skull in time with his breathing, Zafira straight-backed and unflinching atop Afya as the men sneered at her—when a flash of silver knifed the dark room.
And materialized into a woman.
Nasir sat up. “Doors were made for knocking.”
The Silver Witch’s lips twitched into a faint smile. “And yet a locked door never stopped you.”
The edges of his mouth ticked upward, briefly, as the fire rioted in the quiet. He looked to her hands, but they were empty, no papyrus in sight. Why was she here, if not for Altair’s missive?
“Did you find the people you needed on the Hessa Isles?” Nasir asked. How else could she have materialized in this room, idiot? But he’d spoken the words as an apology, the closest he would go to atone for his coldness on board Jinan’s ship, and he wondered if she would understand. If she would accept it.
She bobbed a nod, for that was how mothers were. “My immortality is no longer at risk. I have regained my powers.” She paused. “I heard the Lion has taken the throne. So I came to … to…”
Nasir saw the mother he knew in the uncertainty crowding her mouth and the concern mellowing her harsh gaze. He heard the question she asked in the silence. The reason she had come to him, and not Altair, as planned.
“He died,” he said.
With his eyes closed, her broken exhale was infinitely worse. With his eyes closed, he could dare to imagine both his parents were here in this room in this moment.
“He said—” Nasir stopped. What were these feelings so taut in his throat? When had he begun to suffer so much? “He thinks of you when the moon fills the sky.”
Nasir slipped the pieces of the broken medallion from his pocket and placed them in her hand. The remnants of the Lion’s control. The gift to her beloved that had proved deadly.
She whispered a word and fled to the hearth, her cloak catching wisps of firelight. As if she could mend herself with every last spark. As if she could turn the tides of the world. He had believed that, once. When he was young and lost and believed in the safety of his mother’s skirts.
She, unlike Nasir, had been born to lead. She had been born with a place in the world. And she had given that to him, too, until the Lion came and took it all away. Now he was poised to take away more. Far more.
“Si’lah are solitary creatures, drawn to assisting the weak. I was young, naive. I did not understand that ‘solitary’ does not mean bereft of companionship. I wanted more than to reign as a warden with an iron fist over the ones who had wronged Arawiya. I reversed the sentences of those imprisoned on Sharr even as the walls of my fortress barred magic. I gave
them jobs, homes, allowed them to live as those on the mainland did. And yet I was alone.”
He’d seen proof of it, in the ruins of the island. The edifices too elaborate, too luxurious for the incarcerated. In the hollowness of her words, Nasir found the answer to a question he had long asked himself: Was it possible to be surrounded by life yet feel nothing but the emptiness of death?
“I wanted and I was weak. I desired to be loved and understood. He preyed on me. Stripped me of my defenses, exploited my weaknesses. He used me in every possible way even as I deluded myself into thinking I was in love.
“I had never known loss as deep as what I felt on the day of my Sisters’ deaths. The day I fled Sharr and stopped at each of their palaces: Demenhur, Zaram, Pelusia, Alderamin, to tear their thrones apart. Of the five Gilded Thrones, only one remains. The one he sits upon now was never mine, for I’d never had one. It was Afya’s.”
Her favorite of the Sisters of Old.
“I dragged that throne to the old city of Sultan’s Keep and cemented my reign, appointing my Sisters’ most trusted as caliphs. This is what you hear of my reign. The change I wrought, the ropes I held to keep our fragile kingdom from falling apart. But there is only so much one can salvage of a ruin, isn’t there, my son?
“He thieved and pillaged. Deceived without abandon. He took from me my Sisters, my kingdom, my husband, and my sons.”
She turned to him, and in her face, Nasir saw his own. He saw Zafira, and Altair. Kifah, and Benyamin. He saw those whose lives were forced onto paths they should not have had to tread.
“He took from me my life, and now I will take from him tenfold.”
He felt the chill of her words in his bones.
How did you find me? he wanted to ask, but pride refused to let him. It was magic, he knew. Zafira had slit her palm to find Altair, but his mother’s magic wasn’t restrained to the volume of blood in a vial when it was her own that fueled it.
“Did you receive Altair’s note?” he asked. She frowned. “Note?”
