We Free the Stars

by Hafsah Faizal

On this very bed, in a bout of sorrow, his mother had mended the burns on his back. On this very bed, in a bout of hunger, Kulsum had slid the linen from his shoulders and he from hers. On this very bed, in a bout of companionship, Altair had propped up his sandals and teased him without mercy.

  Were all monsters lonely, he wondered, pretending to be aloof and unafraid? Was it that falsity that nurtured them, cultivating them with careful precision, unique and unmatched?

  He missed him. In the way it felt to lose feeling when a limb went numb.

  He missed her. In the way it felt to stop breathing. Like he was losing himself.

  And it was because of this loneliness that he knew with sudden awareness that he was not alone.

  CHAPTER 31

  The rope came for his neck. It was rough and frayed, meant for a bucket in a well, not the refined throat of a prince.

  Seven. In the stillness before he moved, he counted them. Seven daama men to murder someone in his own bed.

  He yanked the rope, bracing for his attacker’s forward stumble. The man’s face crashed against the back of his skull, nose crunching. Nasir flipped him over his shoulder, and he truly did want to stop and politely ask who had sent him and what for, but the fool was fumbling for his jammed gauntlet blade, so Nasir speared him through the throat. Fitted robes and an angular hood. Hashashin.

  And he was bleeding on Nasir’s bed.

  “There’s a reason I limit the company in my bedroom,” he said quietly. “And now all of you are going to die for ruining my perfectly good sheets.”

  Two lanterns flickered to life, illuminating a man on the majlis at the far end of the room. It took everything in Nasir’s power to keep the surprise from his face. His father. The medallion hung from his neck, glinting like vicious teeth.

  “Must have been difficult,” Nasir said, a bit of Altair slipping into his tone as he rose, “having to refrain from killing me in the throne room.”

  The sultan leaned back without a word, the shift barely visible in the soft light, but Nasir saw it clearly enough. He swerved as a hooked blade came for his neck, catching his arm instead. The trap was being sprung. He shoved his attacker away and wrenched the blade free with a hiss, plucking two throwing knives from his belt slung on the wall.

  There were hashashins, and then there was Nasir: trained by the best masters the art could offer, honed into a weapon by a Sister of Old.

  Nasir unleashed the blades, starting a tally in his head when a choked wheeze announced one true strike. It was the song of death. The hiss of a blade and the final, sputtering beseeching of a breath that could not be followed. A song Nasir knew as well as his own name.

  His arm bled and his neck throbbed, yet his limbs were filled with a type of zeal he had been missing in the past few days.

  A weight slammed into his back, and he fell with a wheeze, toppling the other man by digging his fingers into the back of his leg. Still on his knees, Nasir snapped the hashashin’s arm before impaling him with his gauntlet blade, barely rolling out of the way as another sword sailed for his neck.

  Aiming to kill.

  He doesn’t need me anymore.

  Pain knifed through his side. Focus. But Nasir was numbed by a sudden realization: His mother may have made him into the weapon that he was, but it was the Lion who had used him to do his bidding—kill people, venture to Sharr. And now that the Lion was free of the island’s shackles, magic nearly in his grasp, he didn’t need Nasir anymore.

  He swung his legs around another hashashin’s shoulders, dragging the man down with a twist of his knees and kicking the dead body in the path of another.

  Then he turned to his father.

  The sultan began to rise, but Nasir was quicker. It was knowing the Lion controlled him that made it easy. That made him bold. Still, his hands shook. His mind was strangely focused and untethered at once, for all his life he had wondered what it would be like to go against the one who had used and abused him relentlessly.

  He faltered at the whisper of a blade. He could repeat the words over and over, and yet such an act—his father drawing a weapon against his own son—still had the power to penetrate. To paralyze.

  The same part of him roared its doubt. Years of corruption could not be undone with a single act, within a fraction of a night. But he would be damned if he didn’t try.

  Nasir ducked beneath the arc of his father’s dagger. He seized Ghameq’s arm with one hand, reaching for his chest with the other. For the medallion glinting, taunting, controlling. His fingers hooked around the thin chain, and Ghameq’s breath hitched. Stars flashed in his vision, the force of his father’s fist tearing the air from his lungs. He blinked back into focus, gripping the chain and digging his elbow into the crook of his father’s arm. But Ghameq had always been the bigger man, the stronger of them, and three of the hashashin were still alive.

  They converged at once, and Nasir paused. One. Two. He dropped his hold and ducked. Ghameq’s dagger drove into a hashashin’s heart. Nasir shoved his gauntlet blade into the other hashashin’s knee, wasting no time to kill him and rise behind Ghameq and drag the chain over his head.

  The whispers were instant, throwing Nasir off balance. They slithered, dark and rough and snakelike. Begging and moaning and full of want. Want. Want.

  Drop it, she said in his head, lilting and fierce.

  He could not. A shroud of shadow thickened his thoughts, stealing something from him. Replacing him. Overpowering the emptiness.

  Blinding pain cut into his back. He was shoved to the floor. The tiles were cold. The medallion fell with an irreversible clink and crack, but nothing happened. Aya was right, and now he would pay with his life. A hand gripped his collar and wrenched his head back.

  And everything came to a halt at the sound of a whisper.

  Nasir stilled. He had imagined it. They had all imagined it. There was no possible reason the sultan would say—

  “Ibni,” Ghameq repeated.

  Mutt. Scum. Nothing. Everything disappeared at that one whispered invocation: My son.

  Ibni. He was a child with a splintered shin. Ibni. Reverently receiving his first sword. Ibni. Visiting Sarasin, as people pondered why the sands had begun to darken.

  Then this. On his knees in his room, the stench of blood heavy in his lungs.

  “I knew it would be you. The world would bow at my feet, but only you would save me.”

  Ghameq’s voice tremored with the weight of years lost. The room resembled a graveyard, the tiles stained red, corpses staring wide-eyed at the lights suspended from the ornate ceiling.

  “Release him.”

  It was not the same voice that spoke these words. This was curt, harsh as ever. Even the last of the hashashins flinched.

  Nasir rose, swaying from the loss of blood, from light-headedness. The hashashin handed him a cloth, which he held against his bleeding arm.

  The medallion lay broken between them, cast in the gold of the firelight and the glow of the moon. The medallion that had claimed his father for years and given a tyrant a throne.

  Now he was free. Free.

  Nasir stepped forward. Near enough to feel the heat radiating from the sultan. He looked exactly as he had a moment ago, gray eyes rimmed dark with exhaustion, displeasure denting twin scores between his brows.

  “Ibni,” Ghameq murmured again, and Nasir was powerless as his father drew him close.

  Baba, he wanted to say, but the word knotted in his throat. He listened, instead, to the beat of his father’s heart. The reminder that worse could have been lost.

  CHAPTER 32

  Night laved the last of the light from the sky, relieving the sooq of the relentless heat. Zafira had always thought people annoyed her. The way the Demenhune laughed and smiled despite the ill that surrounded them had always grated on her nerves.

  That had nothing to do with the people, she knew now, but herself. Her own inner turmoil.

  As she meandered the sooq, listening for whatever voice Bait ul-A
hlaam would use to call her, she studied the people as much as the stalls.

  A young safi spread fresh yogurt across a round of flatbread for his smitten human customer, and it was clear the way they felt about each other was mutual. Zafira watched as two safin sisters nicked an extra from an olive cart when the merchant turned to grab change. It was behavior she’d never expected from safin, and it made her smile.

  She passed a shop that offered narjeelah alongside tobacco marinated in molasses and sold by the weight. There was another with abayas adorned in embroidery that would have taken weeks, low-cut necklines making her skin burn. A moon ago, she would have barely given the colorful gowns a second glance. Now she wondered how she would look wearing one of them. Any of them.

  You’re still poor.

  That was not why she looked at them, and she knew it. She hurried along, pushing past safin and human alike, nearly tripping on the tiny sand qit roaming for scraps near the stalls that smelled of tangy sumac and sizzling onions, manakish and roasting mutton.

  At the head of another dark alley, she paused. A song whispered from a dimly lit entrance deep within, and her spirits rose.

  “Found you,” she whispered back.

  The night drew shadows that reminded her too much of the Lion and the heart he had stolen. Of Nasir and his wayward dark. As she neared the doorway, the tune grew louder, a flute both gentle and seductive. Zafira stepped inside, breath held, fingers pressed against her thighs.

  She frowned. The place was large, possibly two or three stories high, but bare in a way that shops were not. There were no tables heavy with trinkets, nothing fastened to the walls.

  Sweet snow, the walls. Zafira averted her gaze from the depictions painted across the golden surfaces: men and women unclothed and deeply entwined in various positions.

  A lazy titter drifted from upstairs, along with a deeper, rhythmic handful of sounds she hadn’t heard at first but couldn’t ignore now. Her splendidly slow conclusion cemented as footsteps whispered along the stone floor. A man dropped a beaded curtain and sauntered toward her with an indecent smile that would have made Altair blush. Possibly. Unlikely.

  “Did I interrupt anything?”

  Zafira whirled at Kifah’s slow drawl. The warrior leaned against the entrance, arms crossed, a single eyebrow raised as she looked between Zafira and the man.

  “I can imagine it’s tempting, Alderamin being the caliphate of dreams and all, but—bleeding Guljul—try to stay focused.”

  Someone might as well have flayed Zafira’s skin for the way it burned. She turned and halted the man’s languid, wandering gaze with a glare. “Stop looking at me.”

  He froze. The lewd walls echoed with Kifah’s laughter, and Zafira eyed her with irritation.

  “I heard a flute,” she snapped, as if that explained everything.

  * * *

  Zafira followed Kifah across the open market and down another alley, where a weathered old man watched. She shivered as they passed him, feeling his gaze on their backs until the walls pressed closer, swallowing the last of the light.

  Kifah’s spear tapped a beat against her leg, quickening as they ventured deeper and stopped before a curtain, crimson and heavy. Zafira touched a hand to her dagger and followed her inside.

  Bait ul-Ahlaam was smaller than Zafira expected. Darker, too. In fact, stepping past the curtain gave her a sense of unease vastly unlike her discomfort in the pleasure house. There, she had felt in control. Here, she was already losing something without knowing the price.

  “Magic,” Kifah said as the hum of it stoked something inside Zafira, a fire that had begun to die. Dum sihr, for how else could magic exist in a place so dark?

  Lanterns dripped from the ceiling, the four walls flickering with their light, wearied beneath the weight of all they contained. There were shelves laden with trinkets and contraptions. Tables tiered upon tables. Straw dolls with round shells for eyes, watching them more intently than eyeballs ever could. Sand that breathed in time to her heartbeat, ebbing and flowing yet contained by an invisible box. Vials that sputtered and grinned, the glass like teeth and the stoppers like mouths. Boxes and furs, fruits and books, lamps and jewels and a number of mechanisms Zafira had no knowledge of.

  “Touch nothing. Question the authenticity of nothing, either,” Kifah murmured just as a voice came from everywhere.

  “Marhaba.”

  Zafira’s hand dropped to her jambiya. Kifah pursed her lips and gave a small shake of her head as a man stepped soundlessly from behind a table, his finely spun robes glittering dark green in the mellow shafts of light. His face was smooth and unbearded, ears round just beneath his jeweled turban. Strange. How could a human come into possession of what would have taken years to procure?

  His dark eyes fell to where her hand rested, and sparked with interest. “May you find what you seek.”

  Zafira opened her mouth to lie and say they weren’t looking for anything in particular, but the shop catered to those who searched for it, not to the random wanderer. Which led to another thought: If the shop and its keeper knew they were here for something, then there was no harm in asking after the vial, was there?

  Kifah dug her elbow into Zafira’s side, telling her just what she thought.

  The shopkeeper vanished behind another mound of oddities, and the lanterns flickered, darkening without their host to illuminate. The shadows whispered, crowding around them.

  This was a place the Lion would adore.

  Kifah left her side and began looking around, ghostlike in her calm. Zafira ignored the dark hum and did the same, wandering past a display of stained teeth. A shelf full of lamps. For wish-granting jinn. There was a shawl that seemed to change position every time she blinked, and a pair of cuffs that winked sinfully at her.

  It settled a question in her stomach, leaden and dreary: What were they expected to offer in exchange for what they sought?

  All the trinkets had one commonality: They were almost colorless, strangely bland, for they were not what she sought. No, what she needed was red, sparkling, housed in a silver vial that coaxed her as a bedouin to an oasis. And Zafira had found it.

  Laa, it had found her. It was daama floating before her. The fine etchings on the casing caught in the light, geometric points housing a supple crescent moon in its center. She had seen that symbol before—on the silver letter she had found in her satchel so many days ago.

  It wasn’t the blood of any Sister of Old. It was Anadil’s.

  Next you’ll be calling me safin because I’m pretty, Yasmine drawled in her thoughts.

  Was it too improbable a conclusion to assume the blood was the Silver Witch’s? She had been distraught at Nasir’s suggestion to come here for aid. Angry. She had spoken of the cost as if she had suffered the price.

  Zafira startled when the shopkeeper snatched the vial from the air with a smile. His teeth lengthened and sharpened, his nose rounded into a snout.

  She blinked and he was human once more. A farce—this was no mortal man, but one who could shift between man and hyena at will. Suddenly, she understood the savage glow in his gaze, and the ancientness of Bait ul-Ahlaam.

  He was a kaftar.

  “Si’lah blood. Quite the treasure,” he observed. “The way of the forbidden often comes at too steep a price.”

  Kifah rounded a display. Gone were her calm and caution. Anger and aggression rolled off her in waves. “I saw your collection, creature. You glean memories. You thieve people of their pasts in order to sell your wares.”

  He trailed his gaze up Kifah’s bare arm and the tattoos that branded it. “I thieve no one. You wish to make a purchase, you must pay what is due.”

  Memory gleaning was thievery. It meant taking a fragment of someone’s past and bottling it for an eager patron to experience. An intriguing trade, if it didn’t require the former to lose the memory, too.

  “You can’t sell memories without magic,” Zafira said, confused. Only glean them. And if the bottles along th
e far wall were for memories, what purpose did the rest of his goods serve?

  “As such, magic is on the mend,” he said lightly, lifting the tiny bottle with its silver markings.

  Zafira stared at it. There was no part of her past that she wished to undo. Nothing she wanted to forget. Every moment of elation had made her who she was, and every moment that broke her down had only paved her path.

  The shopkeeper sensed their reluctance, and he closed his hand around the vial. For once, Kifah had nothing to say.

  “There won’t be a mend if we don’t have that vial,” Zafira said suddenly.

  The kaftar stilled, canting his head like the animal he was. Kifah bored holes into Zafira’s skull.

  “We met your kind on Sharr,” Zafira said. “They were cursed until we helped them. They fought for us. Knowing their death was guaranteed by sunrise, they fought for the Arawiya that was.”

  Hope fluttered against her chest as the shopkeeper considered her.

  “You are the Demenhune Hunter. A girl,” he said with some surprise.

  A girl. Her heart sank.

  “The rumors do you justice.”

  Her eyes snapped to his, and falling like a fool for the appraisal in his tone, she asked, “Will you sell us the vial for anything other than a memory?”

  She realized her mistake when his smile was all teeth.

  “Give me the dagger, and the vial is yours. For Arawiya.”

  No.

  Laa.

  Her heart and limbs and lungs caught in an iron fist, thought after thought racing through her. One: It’s only a dagger. Two: It’s not. Three: Baba.

  Baba. Baba. Baba.

  That was where she faltered and held.

  One who sold memories and bargained blood from a Sister of Old would have no qualms stealing emotions. That was what her dagger was, wasn’t it? A blade forged of cheap steal, worthless except for what it held: love. Years of it. Barrels of it.

  That was what the oddities in the shop were. If they weren’t coveted for what they were—the teeth of a dandan, ore from the depths of Alderamin’s volcanoes, enchanted artifacts—they were valued for what they contained. Love, anger, hate, confidence.