Zafira loosed a relieved breath when the illusion disappeared. The Lion’s horror gave way to laughter, and she didn’t like how part of her reacted to the sound. In heartbeats, that relief would turn to anger when he realized he had been made a mockery of. He whirled, darkness in his palms.
Nasir was ready.
Both shadows clashed like thunder in a rare storm, rage igniting the courtyard. Zafira took a careful step away, shifting her bow to and fro as she tried to sight the ifrit, her wound whispering a warning everytime she moved. The shadows wouldn’t still, stirring debris and sand, whipping her hair about her face.
“You think to end me.” The Lion’s voice carried over the chaos. “To take the throne you imagine rightfully yours.”
Zafira looked to Nasir in alarm, but the words fell harmlessly.
“Pathetic.”
Nasir gritted his teeth, and the Lion, despite the distance between them, noticed.
“You will never be enough. The people will never love you,” the Lion spurred in a tight drawl as he drove his shadows with all his strength.
A rasp escaped Nasir, and she knew he saw his father. Heard him. Felt the weight of his dead body. Skies. She needed to do something, stop that monster’s mouth.
“A killer,” the Lion goaded, and she flinched. “A scarred boy king with barely enough words at his disposal.”
Nasir’s shadows began to waver, and she knew. The words themselves hurt less than the reminder that they were once spoken by his father.
“How do you think to rule, mutt?” Nasir’s shadows disappeared.
He dropped his hands, and the Lion’s shadows struck him, threw him. Zafira shouted as he was flung back against the metal gates. He fell without a sound.
And didn’t move.
She swallowed her cry, and fired. Her arrow whistled across the courtyard until the Lion snatched it in its deadly path.
Her heart lodged in her throat, at the reminder of what she needed to do.
“I’ve lost count of the sunsets I’ve witnessed, the men I’ve slain, and the books I’ve devoured—that is how long I’ve sustained upon this earth, azizi. Did you really think to kill me with a twig?” He snapped the arrow in half and caged her with a gust of darkness.
Bint Iskandar.
The Jawarat’s fear gripped her as the shadows did. They writhed around her, winding relentlessly, pressing the air from her lungs.
She refused to cower. “Did you really think we’d burn down Arawiya’s history?”
It was ironic, she thought, that the very thing he valued most would now be his downfall. If I live.
He ignored her. “What is it about the weak that draws you to them, azizi?”
“I don’t—” She started to protest, before she realized she didn’t owe him an answer. She owed him nothing. “Release me.”
“So bold,” the Lion tsked. “What if I killed you instead?”
Between one careful breath and the next, the Lion moved from the shambles of the fountain to the shadows trapping her in the center of the courtyard. His long fingers skimmed her neck and gripped her chin. Blood trickled down her throat, warm and thick. She shivered.
Claws. Sweet snow below.
“Why?” he asked suddenly. The question wasn’t tempered or conniving. It was merely him trying to understand. “Why are you trying so hard to stop me?”
Skies, he was truly mad.
“Look around you,” Zafira said, trying to keep the hysteria from her voice. “Where is the sun? Where are the people? You might have controlled Ghameq, but he had his limits, and even if we feared him, the known devil is better than an unknown saint.”
“Is it the devil you seek, azizi?” He was mocking her. Then he read her face and canted his head. “Do my people not deserve the freedom of yours? Do you know how it feels to stand beside others forged of the same flesh and bone and still be treated as inferior? As someone undeserving?”
Of course she did. Every girl was born to that unfortunate truth.
If her head weren’t tipped back, she would have spat at his feet. “This is not how one seeks freedom. Your cause might have been noble once, but you lost your way long ago.”
He clucked his tongue, but she wasn’t surprised. He wouldn’t acquiesce to the truth. “Never, azizi. Though I wondered as much, when I could no longer remember why my soul craved vengeance. Why I desired knowledge, enough that I inked the word upon my face. I thought Sharr had driven me mad, but it was only that wretched book. Thieving me of my past.”
The Jawarat did not recoil from his wrath. Laa, it matched his with its own. It wanted the black dagger in Zafira’s hand. It wanted the blade buried in his chest. But the shadows held her in place.
This close, she could hear his heartbeat.
“I had always been one for the written word, even then. You witnessed my memory. You saw them refuse me tutelage by stoning my father to death. When one is denied a thing, is it not normal to crave it? When that denial comes through violence, that need will do the same.”
So he had gleaned it all. He started with Benyamin’s library, learning Safaitic from the safi himself before using that knowledge to enact his reign of darkness. It wasn’t enough. He was banished to Sharr along with his people, and so he used Ghameq to devour what he could from the Great Library, mastering incantations and Arawiya’s long-lost secrets as he awaited his freedom.
He wanted and he received, and an endless wanting created greed. From knowledge, he desired power, and power made his gaze stray to the Gilded Throne.
He watched her connect one dot to the other. “Sarasin is where my people will live. Not the graveyard of the safin, a land defiled by their filth.”
What of the heart? she almost asked, but it was clear, wasn’t it? He could not create a home for his kind and destroy another without magic, nor could he do what he wished with the limited morsels the Sisters’ amplifiers provided. And why share and invite trouble when he could keep magic to himself, rendering him as powerful as the Sisters of Old themselves?
“And so, in your desire for freedom, you’ve become as cruel and terrible as the ones who wronged you,” Zafira said. “That doesn’t make you deserving of anything but a place in the dungeons.”
He released her in disgust. The Sisters had been wrong to imprison the ifrit on Sharr. They had been wrong to corral them like cattle and abandon them on an island. But one wrong didn’t justify another.
Zafira carefully measured her breaths, aware the Lion was plotting and scheming with every passing heartbeat. He spun his finger, and shadows coiled tighter, making her light- headed.
Bint Iskandar.
She struggled to draw breath. With a sigh that was almost resigned, the Lion reached for the satchel strapped to her side, only to straighten with a croak.
A gold tip protruded from his chest, sticky with black blood.
The darkness vanished like smoke and the palace came into view, as did Altair and Nasir. The courtyard was littered with ifrit corpses.
Zafira stumbled backward and Kifah withdrew her spear, readying to pierce him again. But the Lion—though slumping and out of breath—clenched his fist, and Kifah dropped to her knees with a vise around her neck. He flicked his other wrist, and Altair, rushing to help her, went flying.
Heartbeats later, the hole in the Lion’s chest stitched itself together again, not even a drop of blood left as proof.
When he blinked his amber eyes at her, he didn’t look like a man who had been run through with a spear. He looked almost bored.
So long as the heart provides him with magic, wounding him will be impossible. Until we wound him, we won’t be able to retrieve the heart.
The black dagger pulsed in her boot, cool and ready. But she didn’t dare reach for it, not when he could easily overpower her. Laa, she needed to catch him unaware.
The heart weakens him.
For a stricken moment, Zafira thought the Jawarat spoke of Nasir or Altair, but when the Lion dropped his hands, she caught the sheen of sweat on his brow. The fatigue.
Steal it.
But—the heart was inside his daama body.
The Jawarat laughed. When have we steered you wrong?
Zafira froze at its tone, the terrible beauty of that laugh. The reminder of what she had done with its voice in her mind, splitting a man in two as no mortal should be capable of doing.
The Lion watched her.
“Touching of your friends to run to your aid.” His gaze was intent. “Join me, azizi.”
Zafira scoffed. “Because you can’t kill me?”
“I won’t merely kill them,” he said, and from the corner of her eye, she saw Nasir using a whip of shadow to release the vise that had been crushing Kifah’s neck. “I will cut them open and string their innards together, as I did to the safin less than a fortnight ago. I will sever their heads to adorn the palace gates.”
“And then the people will love you?” Zafira asked, bile rising to her throat.
“Create enough fear, and the people will have no choice.”
His hand cut the air, and strands of shadow rippled toward her. Zafira threw up her arms, intent on protecting the Jawarat, but the shadows stopped before they reached her.
Caught in a shield of black that dissipated as quickly as it had come.
Nasir.
He extended his gauntlet blades as Altair and Kifah came up from behind. The Lion looked among the four of them and
laughed, as if their weapons were playthings, as if they were as insignificant as the ground beneath his feet.
From the corners of the palace, ifrit stalked forward. More marched from beyond the palace gates, caging them in. The crackle of their staves echoed in the air. The dagger, the dagger, the dagger—she couldn’t wrest it free now. He would rip her arm from her body the moment she did. Their weapons were playthings.
The Lion half turned to watch his encroaching horde and froze with a sharp breath.
“Baba?”
Zafira stilled. That one word teemed with an eternity of pain, and for a long, confused stretch of time, no one moved. He made a sound between a whimper and a sob.
Now, bint Iskandar.
The Lion stumbled forward. A breathless sort of pity rooted her in place. Nasir looked to Altair. Kifah narrowed her eyes. Who was it he saw? Surely an ifrit would not toy with the leader who fought for their right to live.
The heart, the Jawarat insisted, and she ducked past Nasir and Altair until she saw what the Lion was seeing.
A safi with blue eyes as bright as Altair’s stepped close. It was the man Zafira had seen in the Jawarat’s vision, only not bloody, his body unbruised. His father. He was alive.
Impossible.
And if Zafira was seeing the same face he was, this was no ifrit. It was an illusion—laa, an apparition.
A cruel twist of fate.
There was only one person the Lion had wronged so deeply, so terribly that she could fathom doing the same to him. Only one person with the power to create an illusion so real, no one could tell the difference. The Silver Witch.
The safi continued walking slowly toward him, and Zafira understood that it was more than an apparition; it was a distraction, and she was standing around like a fool.
Zafira ran, tucking the Jawarat against her chest and using both hands to shove the Lion to the dusty hard stone. He fell with an oof beneath her.
He was cold. Startled. Afraid. His eyes were crazed, barely seeing.
Pity broke Zafira’s inhale.
No. Focus.
Her hands shook as she grabbed the lapels of his robes and wrenched them apart, exposing his chest. Now the Lion struggled. He fought against her, shadows pooling in his palms and fading into nothing when she brought the black dagger to his skin.
Panic paralyzed him. Paralyzed her.
Tell me what to do, she begged the Jawarat. Altair shouted, “Do it!”
The Lion’s gaze cleared.
She trembled in alarm, but the Jawarat steadied her hand. And plunged the stolen black dagger through his chest.
The Lion sputtered. Zafira cried out.
Trust us, was all the book said, and the Lion froze, as if he heard the Jawarat’s command as loudly as she did. Down her palm was a line of blood, in her skull was a song. Her fingers tightened around the hilt.
And the dagger ripped downward, carving across him.
“This doesn’t belong to you,” she said, and took the beating heart out of his chest.
