I’ve a reputation to uphold. Rimaal, they needed to find the oaf quickly, or Nasir would go insane, speaking to him when he wasn’t there.
Laa, it was the emptiness that was doing this. He had been given a taste of the opposite, of contentment and satisfaction and fulfillment, and he had started to forget the feel of nothing. The way it made him exist outside of himself. The way it made him cease to exist at all.
Life was a dance to a tune he could not hear. Around him, the world rushed like a stream while he remained unmoving, a core that was not needed in the grand scale of anything. These were not new feelings, but subsided ones. Harsh truths that had quieted when there was someone who sought him out.
It was a feeling unmatched, to be sought by another.
The guard stepped aside. “The sultan awaits the amir’s presence.”
Nasir lifted his brows at the semblance of respect. “The sultan, or the Lion?”
Aya stiffened. The guard only blinked. “The sultan, sayyidi. We were told the amir’s party would be larger.”
“Is that why he sent armed men to greet us?” Nasir asked, and the man grew flustered.
Aya took pity on him. “The rest of our party did not wish to come.”
Five pairs of eyes assessed her and her tattoo. Very few knew of the High Circle, and Nasir wondered if they could tell she was not human despite the ivory shawl shrouding her ears. Their scrutiny dropped to the staff in her hand.
“For my balance,” she said.
The guard nodded, appeased by her dreamy smile, and led them across the foyer, up the twenty-three steps of the winding staircase, and across six paces to the wide double doors carved from alabaster and framed in polished limestone. Nasir knew the layout of the palace as well as the back of his hand—better, perhaps. He never inspected the hands he used for killing.
They paused before the doors and Nasir glanced back at Lana. “All right?”
She nodded, fear flaring her eyes, and Nasir regretted his decision to bring her. He should have left her down in the kitchens, where mopping the floors would be the worst of it.
Too soon, the guards heaved open the groaning doors.
Nasir blinked back against the unexpected spill of brightness. Nearly every dark curtain in the throne room was open, light carving ominous shadows into the ornate walls. The windows were designed to illuminate the Gilded Throne, and illuminate they did, framing the Sultan of Arawiya in an ironic halo.
Five hooded men stood to the right of the dais, another five to the left. They were fitted with gauntlets and contoured robes, as unmoving as statues. Hashashins.
Nasir entered. His steps were whisper-soft along the black carpet that cut a swath of darkness across the alabaster, and he was painfully aware of Ghameq watching his every breath. Aya and Lana flanked him, the rhythmic tap of the safi’s staff a pounding in his skull.
At the foot of the white dais, he stopped. A faint whiff of bakhour rose to his senses, the musk and jasmine familiar. Three steps up, and he would stand at throne level.
Sultan Ghameq stared at him down the bridge of his nose. The gray eyes Nasir had inherited were full of scorn, distaste furrowing his mouth.
It’s not him, Nasir reminded himself.
Two men shared the throne: one mortal, one ancient. One who had fathered him, and one who had stolen Altair. Laa, the Lion had stolen far more than that.
“I did not think you would come,” Ghameq said.
No greetings. No smirk. Nothing at all. The medallion hung between the folds of his gold-edged cloak, the leash by which the Lion held him. Nasir knew how to fix this. How to ensure the dignitaries’ safety.
He lifted his gaze back to his father’s.
Sultans don’t wear turbans, his mother had once teased.
I am Sarasin first, sultan second, his father had replied. A keffiyah and a circlet might make for a royal display, but never a pragmatic one. The exchange was forever ago, when those gray eyes hadn’t hidden amber ones. When his father still carried the pride of his heritage like a bannerman in war.
“I suppose I should be flattered you invited me,” Nasir replied.
The derision that rolled from his father’s throat was so familiar that he could have mimicked it. But for once, he didn’t feel the overwhelming desire to rein in his words. He would not cower before the Lion.
“Sharr gave you a tongue.” Ghameq stood. “Or was it the girl?”
Nasir stilled.
He heard the hitch of Aya’s breath. Felt the distress rolling off Lana in waves.
“You forget, boy. I am your father.”
Even Ghameq’s laugh was poised to belittle, and a roaring started in Nasir’s head.
“There are few men as witless as you. I saw the Demenhune Hunter with my own eyes. Did you think to protect her by not bringing her here?”
Nasir went very, very cold when Ghameq’s gaze fell on Lana. His father would not know the girl, but the Lion would—in the same way he had known Zafira before Sharr. Danger sparked the air. The roaring grew louder.
“Your orders were to kill her. Your orders were to kill them all, yet you disobeyed. You uncovered someone’s misplaced mettle and dared to show your face here.”
As if Nasir had no right to stand in this throne room. As if he had no right to sit upon the Gilded Throne forged by the Sisters of Old, whose blood burned in his own veins. As if he had not been asked to come here.
Breathe, Nasir told himself. He was not petty. Insults were letters festooned into words that could not inflict pain. A lie and a losing battle.
“You brought me here to mock me,” Nasir seethed, barely restraining the emotion that threatened to bleed into his words.
The sultan scoffed. “Did you expect gratification, mutt?”
Something
inside him
snapped.
Darkness erupted from his fingers like ravens taking flight. Distantly, he heard Lana’s surprised cry. The hashashins came alert, and Nasir fought to control the mass. Pressure built in his chest as Aya attempted to placate him. He could fight ten hashashins—he couldn’t keep Lana safe, too.
It’s not him. It’s not your father.
The voice lilted through his ears, wrapped around his limbs. Calming him. Reasoning with him, even when she was somewhere far, far from here. His heart wept. The shadows froze like a fog.
You are not the sum of his disparagement.
It was the Lion, Zafira’s words reminded him. The Lion was baiting him, as he had done and continued to do—every bit the animal of his namesake toying with his prey.
Nasir calmed the chorus in his blood and found it: the vessel that bled black. He cinched it closed, and the shadows disappeared, and satisfaction gave way to pride. Pride lifted his gaze to his father’s in time to see a flicker of surprise cross his face.
“Get out, mu—”
“Yes, Father,” Nasir replied.
It was a powerful feeling, cutting his father off, but he knew better than most that it was easier not to feel than to rely on the highs of emotion. Behind him, the throne room doors groaned open in wordless dismissal. In moments, the hashashins were back in their neat rows. The medallion swayed, enticing. The lingering shadows had vanished, burned by the light. It looked as if nothing had changed. As if they hadn’t been on the brink of an irreversible chaos.
Ghameq smiled, and in it, Nasir saw the Lion.
Nasir smiled back, imagining the medallion in his hands.
CHAPTER 28
A wave struck Alderamin’s shore as the bridge fell, the Strait of Hakim engulfing marid and rotting white wood alike.
Zafira clutched her bow in one shivering hand, arrows in the other. The blue-green water churned crimson, her horse’s body gone. She had barely kept herself alive and intact.
Kifah heaved beside her, drenched to the bone, and—
Zafira sat up. “Where’s Seif?”
“Where’s the heart?” Kifah echoed the word pounding in Zafira’s skull.
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The water receded, whispering its apology.
“‘Where’s the heart?’ she inquires. Not a word for the safi who saved her despite her impending mortality.”
Kifah looked at Zafira and Zafira looked at Kifah, as if the slow drawl had crawled out of the other’s mouth. Slowly, the two of them turned to find Seif in the sand, shirtless—fully shirtless this time—and panting, the satchel bearing the heart held gingerly in his dark hands. Even his daama horse had made it through.
Zafira gave him a look. “It was a collective effort.”
“Why should I have been worried? I saw you making the leap when I did,” Kifah said with a roll of her eyes.
Zafira hadn’t, and she was certain Kifah hadn’t either. There was a lot of slipping and jumping and falling in those final moments before the bridge’s collapse.
“It’s dying,” Seif said softly.
Zafira approached him stiltedly, for he was shameless and unclothed, his robes stretched to dry a little farther inland, where the sand was dry. The heart had darkened even more since they had begun their journey. It throbbed achingly slow, a deafening stretch of nothingness between each dying beat.
“It can’t die,” she said. Something pricked in her eyes, and Seif looked at her as if she’d lost her mind, but she shook her head. “It can’t die. Not after everything we went through to find it and the other hearts. Not when it will leave us without magic forever.”
Kifah shoved her spear into the wet sand. “Until the heart dies, it’s still alive. Now yalla, immortal. You’ve a minaret to find, and we, Huntress”—Kifah jabbed her spear in Zafira’s direction—“have some blood to hunt.”
* * *
Zafira welcomed the heat of the sun on her soaked clothes. The way it ran its fingers up her back, making her arch into its warmth. It reminded her of another touch, of another delicious heat she craved.
Was it wrong to coerce herself into believing it was him in her room? His words bold. His lips on her neck. His hand at her thigh. His, not the Lion’s. Was it wrong to remove herself from everything afterward, from the girl in the yellow shawl, from his failure to deny what looked so painfully obvious?
That moment looped back through her mind again, when the door slid open. When he was staring passively at the girl, not at all the way he looked at Zafira. With enough heat in his gray gaze to rival the sun itself.
She growled, wanting to scream. Wanting to shove him to the ground and tear him apart with her hands and her nails and her mouth and her tongue.
The ground or your bed? Yasmine taunted in her head.
“Whoa there,” Kifah clucked, casting Zafira a look.
She smoothed a hand down the horse’s neck in apology. It was her turn on Seif’s steed, and she was surprised by how composed the beast had been despite nearly being hacked to death by angry sea monsters. Seif might have had a strong dislike for mortals, but he clearly had a way with animals.
The sand had given way to stone, clattering beneath the horse’s hooves. And then, soon enough, she caught sight of the wall. It was a towering structure of white, at least four times her height. Every so often, a massive archway was cut into the wall, sharp and shapely, an entrance to the caliphate many only dreamed of seeing.
“Only the Alder,” Kifah said with a snort.
Anger shot through Zafira, hot and fierce. She’d known of the wall, expressed irritation with it once, but then she was secluded in her own little village. It was different now that she’d seen more of Arawiya, knowing the mighty Alder safin cowed behind stone while neglecting all else.
“If you, too, had lived an eternity before iridescent shores, you would have erected such a wall,” Seif said, morose. “Anything to shroud those cursed trees.”
“So you wouldn’t have to see the Arz, or our suffering?” Zafira snapped.
Seif ignored her, as he tended to do. For she was a mortal with a fleeting life, and he was an immortal, a king in his own eyes. She felt a wave of pride, sitting on the horse and forcing him to look up at her with his still-damp robes and the heart in his hands.
The barren sand gave way to dry shrubs, and then a slow trickle of greenery, trees rising with thick, healthy trunks, stretching shadows cool and large enough for children to play. Jasmine bloomed like snow. Birds called from the trees, and a camel ambled with his brothers beyond the road. And she hadn’t even broached the walls of Alderamin yet.
“The safin are blessed,” Seif said. Something in his tone kept her lips from curling in disgust at his vanity as she swapped places with Kifah, handing her the reins when she dismounted the horse. “Vigor unmatched by any other. Agility, hearing. Age. When Arawiya was cursed, each caliphate’s suffering pertained to themselves. The snow lauded once a year in Demenhur became a perpetual curse. Pelusia, whose fields could nurture any seed, suffered a loss to her fertility.”
He stared ahead, to the wall. She could see details now, glittering sand stirring against it. Life shifting beyond the wide arches.
“There is nothing unique to Alderamin save us, the eternal ones as old as the land itself. Safin, by nature, are less fertile than man.” He paused, ruminating his next words. “We began to die out. Sickness spread across the caliphate. Death, unheard of except in war and battle, became common. We chose sequestration out of necessity. We faced more than the loss of magic forever: It was the annihilation of our race.”
Zafira was stunned into silence. Kifah exhaled in disbelief, proof that the lies Zafira had been taught were not limited to her village, her city, or even her caliphate.
All of Arawiya believed that the safin had quarantined themselves within their walls out of vanity and selfish self-preservation. It was self-preservation, but not of the careless kind. Not because they were hoarding their resources.
It was because they had no choice.
They suffered alone. Quiet and brave. It was easy to believe that anyone who did not speak of suffering did not suffer.
Like Lana. Like her prince with ashes in his eyes.
“Why did you let the kingdom believe otherwise?” Kifah asked.
“And admit defeat?” Seif asked as if she had suggested murder.
Kifah, who had been concerned and awaiting a dire response, rolled her eyes. Zafira laughed, and she was surprised by the hint of a smile lifting a corner of Seif’s mouth.
CHAPTER 29
It was both a gift and a curse, to feel as deeply as she did. To see Alderamin in the lucidity of a dreamwalk was entirely different from seeing it in person. To believe that the realness would not affect her was a mistake on her part.
A sore, sore mistake.
The outskirts of the caliphate were as grand as the capital itself. It was the beauty of Sultan’s Keep tenfold. Like in the dreamwalk, she couldn’t shake off the feeling of it being more alive than anywhere else. The pulse of life was everywhere, from the spiny-tailed lizards darting up the date palms to the children shouting and laughing as they chased one another beneath an arch, circling back from the ledge of a low roof to leap into a blue-green pool of water. From the colors of the clothes on the backs of men to the medley of shawls suspended across zigzagging ropes swaying in the gentle breeze.
As much as she had scowled and groused over the safin tucked away within their walls, she had to admit the miscellany of people was greater than elsewhere. In Demenhur, the sight of anyone a shade darker than the snow-cursed made everyone stop and stare. In Sarasin, safin were rare, if not impossible, to encounter. In Alderamin, Pelusian and safin walked side by side. A Demenhune stepped through her bright green door with her Zaramese husband.
It wasn’t that safin weren’t welcome elsewhere. They simply had no reason to live anywhere but their perfect haven of Alderamin. Unlike everyone else, who believed Alderamin was where they’d find the life Arawiya had once provided freely and equitably. They believed it enough to traverse the uncultivated Wastes for a chance to live here. Deen had seen proof, when he’d visited years ago.
Here
was a sea of people with different shades of skin, different lilts to their tongue, different cadences that built the wholeness that was Arawiya.
And yet, despite the way the very ground seemed to live and breathe, Zafira felt strangely lonely. For a part of her had grown accustomed, she realized with some diffidence, to observing the world in awe and being observed in turn.
As if he could glean the same wonder just by looking at her.
Her fingers fluttered at her side. Skies, she missed him.
“This is where we part ways,” Seif said, holding the heart with care. “See that caravanserai with the stained-glass window? We’ll meet there at sundown.”
The window was impossible to miss: it was massive, more akin to an entrance for a giant, florals made of stone holding the arching glass within interlacing clutches. Kifah brought the horse to a stop. “Is that all the time it’ll take for you to restore the heart in Almas and return?”
“Safin,” was all Seif said as he mounted the horse and turned in the direction of Alderamin’s capital. He had recovered every last drop of his vanity now that his robes were dried, and he eyed the road ahead with such indifference, it felt offensive. Safin were quick, but that quick?
“And Bait ul-Ahlaam?” Zafira asked as the locals began to take interest. The people here might hail from around the kingdom, but they lived here. She knew the ferocity with which a village looked after their own. She respected it.
Seif pursed his lips. “It must find you.”
And then the bastard left them.
“Oi! What does that mean? Come back!” Kifah snarled. More people had wandered out of their houses to watch them, curiosity torching the air. They had lived near the border, near the encroaching Arz. Visitors were rare, if any. Kifah noticed them and turned a slow circle, baring her teeth. “What?”
Mothers tucked children into their skirts. Fathers eyed the spear in Kifah’s hand and the arrows slung on Zafira’s back, Baba’s jambiya with its worn hilt at her waist.
“Maybe we should start moving,” Zafira said gently.
Kifah glared at her. “Oh? Where?”
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