We Free the Stars

by Hafsah Faizal

  Nasir had made his way to the rooftop of the house and watched her now. Waited for her. She ignored the flip of her stomach at his unreadable gaze. How was it that he was there, right there, and they felt leagues apart?

  Kifah tucked into the shadows between two narrow houses to Zafira’s right. To her left, Aya pressed deeper into her cover, the breeze toying with the soft pink layers of her abaya, Seif at her side. If not for the staff in her hand, Aya would have looked as if she were out for a stroll down the street with a friend. Her words still nagged at Zafira’s conscience, troubling her.

  Zafira’s blood raced beneath her skin like a rushing stream as she darted across the street, toward the ledge surrounding the house. Grab, push, jump. Then she would be over, one step closer to the house, one step closer to the Lion, only a window separating her from a forage for the fifth heart. She wasn’t afraid of him, she reminded herself. Not when she knew he wouldn’t harm her and risk losing the Jawarat.

  She ducked her head, bow and arrows slung behind her, palms slick with anticipation.

  Grab, push, jump. That was the plan.

  Until a latch lifted.

  “Zafira,” Kifah hissed. “Hide.”

  She froze. Her heart was encased in a tomb of ice, but she didn’t move.

  “No. He already knows I’m here.” Zafira lifted her chin as the door swung open. The fringe of her shawl fluttered in the breeze, helplessly tugging her to safety. It took everything in her power not to flick her gaze to Nasir on the rooftop. She had lost Baba’s dagger for this mission, for Altair and the heart.

  They wouldn’t fail.

  The Lion stepped through the archway. He was fitted in mauve and midnight, the bronze of his tattoo catching a ray of the early sun.

  “I wondered when you would come to see me.”

  Even now, knowing who he was and what he had done, the velvety darkness of his voice struck her, removing her worries and setting her at ease.

  “I’ve come for what’s mine,” she replied.

  The Lion lifted his brows, knowing she spoke of the Jawarat. “And why do you believe it is yours? Because it speaks to you, understands you in a way your friends cannot?” His lips curled wickedly as he regarded her, the end of his turban rippling. “Do I not understand you as well? Am I yours, azizi?”

  Yes, she thought. He was hers. Her companion, her succor, her prey.

  He was hers to end. Hers to kill.

  She knew by the flash of his gaze, amber and beautiful, that he saw the murder in hers. The temperature careened and sudden clouds raced to hide the sun. She steeled her spine against a quiver of fear. Did the Jawarat revel in his theatrics? Was this what it had wanted from her?

  A dark head poked over the ledge of a nearby window. Another door opened a smidge. Curtains parted. Nosy people drawn like bees to honey as a swarm of black crowded around the Lion, filling the expanse of sand with ifrit and shadows.

  “Tell your friends there’s no need to hide,” he called. “We are all well acquainted, are we not?”

  With a lash of his hand, the wind rose, baying like dogs, bringing a chaos of sand and debris and the sounds of the city. Silver threads glinted from the Lion’s thobe as he addressed the empty road.

  “Don’t be shy. Come, fight my kin. Further your deception of triumph.”

  Zafira drew her bow and nocked an arrow as darkness flooded like fabric unspooled and swallowed her whole.

  CHAPTER 39

  The darkness stirred the shadows in his blood. The Lion’s voice echoed through it, low and seductive, and Nasir could only think of Zafira’s laugh that night. Focus. He had two beats to decide: Go to her aid or adhere to the plan?

  Disgrace her was the first option, really.

  He secured his gauntlet blades and crept to the side of the rooftop. Sand slid beneath his hands as he flipped over the side and gripped the edge on his way down to the second story. He paused at the sound of Zafira’s voice, sharp and unrelenting.

  Laa. No distractions. He dropped onto the balcony and stepped to the door. Locked from the inside. He looked to the inconveniently small windows on either side of the balcony with a sigh. Balancing himself atop the iron railing, he stretched to work the latch on one of the windows until it fell open with a satisfying clink.

  He threw a glance to the nearest rooftop, where a hashashin waited just out of sight, tensed and ready. A flash of orange reflected off her dark robes, followed by the crackle of flames.

  Ifrit had come, staves ready for battle. No sooner had he made the realization than the whiz of an arrow ripped through the din. The snap of a spear. Every vessel in his body begged to go to the zumra, aid them. Oh, how he had changed.

  With a slow breath, Nasir leaped into the house.

  The curtains rippled at the sight of him, stilling when he slipped the window closed. He was in an antechamber, neat and unlit. Dresses were piled atop a low table to the side, where they would remain untouched by the safi who had overseen their production. She was dead, Nasir knew.

  He peered past the arched doorway and into a larger room, lit with faceted light from the narrow stretches of cutwork framing the large window against the back wall. And it was daama open. That would have been an easier entrance. A staircase wound down from the far end, but just before he could make his way toward it, movement halted him in his tracks.

  A platformed majlis stretched against the wall beside the window, obscured at first by the curtains fluttering from a sudden gust of wind. It was occupied by a man, reclined and at ease, unchained and free to move about. His dark hair gleamed gold without his turban, his pointed ears proud. He looked different this way. Younger. Vulnerable. And not a single part of him appeared to belong to one who was imprisoned.

  Laa, he was reading a daama book.

  Nasir took a hesitant step toward him. “Altair?”

  His half brother looked up. Surprise flickered across his face. Then his eyes narrowed with frantic urgency, there and gone before Nasir could comprehend it.

  “Nasir,” he said. “Took you long enough.” He dropped his blue eyes to the sword in Nasir’s hand with a feeble smile. “Always so eager to kill me.”

  “Now is not the time,” Nasir said around the rock swelling in his throat. Some weak part of him wanted to embrace the oaf.

  “Oh, I see. I missed you, too,” Altair said, an ireful hollow in his voice as he rose. “You know, after you left me on Sharr, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

  Nasir refused to wallow in guilt, not when the Lion or his ifrit could return at any moment. He glanced to the stairs. “I’m here now. Yalla. We need to leave.”

  Altair didn’t move. “Do you remember when you walked into my rooms and I wasn’t alone?”

  Nasir’s ears heated.

  “They weren’t just any women. One was the daughter of a Zaramese merchant. The other a Pelusian wazir.”

  “Good to know you’ve acquired a specific taste,” Nasir said as a sound cracked across the lower floor. He gripped the winding rail of the stairwell and gestured for Altair to follow, but the fool moved slower than a dying man crawling.

  “When you have a reputation,” Altair said calmly, as if they were drinking qahwa on a majlis, “it’s easy to go unquestioned. Every Arawiyan I took to my room was an envoy.”

  Nasir remembered the letters he had found sewn into the rug. How much Altair had done for the kingdom that had done nothing for him. “So you didn’t—”

  “I’m many things, princeling, but a bore like you?”

  Nasir heard the grin in his half brother’s voice, and, rimaal, he had missed it. “Right. Is there a reason this can’t wait until we’re back at the palace?”

  Altair continued as if Nasir hadn’t spoken. “The Arz was destined to fall at some point, and I wasn’t going to stand by as it happened. I secured trade routes, forged alliances. As our mother struggled to hold the reins of our crumbling kingdom, I did my part in secret. She saw me as a failure—the culmination of he
r failures. I wasn’t going to be one, too.”

  There it was again, the strange hollow that didn’t belong to Altair. He was trailing behind Nasir leisurely, despite the battle raging outside, and suspicion threaded Nasir’s veins. He had expected chains. Captivity and suffering. Ifrit keeping watch. Not Altair idling unattended with a book. Almost content. Almost annoyed to have been disturbed.

  “To what end, Nasir? What was the point of all I’d done. Hmm?”

  The anger in his tone gave Nasir pause, but he said nothing.

  He left the stairs and crept to the door he had seen directly beneath the upper-story balcony. It had been almost too easy, this rescue, this escape. Though there were sounds of life inside the house, he hadn’t come across a single person, or otherwise, besides Altair. He eased the door open and stepped outside to a flood of shadow and turmoil, stopping in his tracks when he remembered something.

  The heart.

  Zafira couldn’t slip into the house to search for it now, not with the Lion’s attention undoubtedly attuned to her, and as much as he wanted to hurry to her aid, he couldn’t waste this chance.

  “Where are you going?” Altair asked when Nasir turned back.

  “To look for the heart, and—”

  “The Jawarat?” Altair scoffed.

  Nasir pressed his lips thin, holding still when the general leaned close.

  “Only a fool would leave it lying about. Only a fool would know its worth and value and let another steal it away.”

  The words were a double-edged sword, a shame Nasir was no stranger to. He could only imagine Altair’s reaction had he known how they’d lost the Jawarat.

  “Both of them are with him,” Altair said, annoyed.

  So why, then, had he been left to his own devices?

  “How is our mother, by the way? Dead?”

  Nasir’s wrists pulsed against his gauntlet blades, sand sinking beneath his footfalls along the side of the house. This wasn’t the Altair he knew. This wasn’t the Altair he had come to save. Nasir himself had been angry at their mother, disgusted even, but not this. Never so callous.

  “Dying,” Nasir bit out. “Is that what you wanted to hear? The Lion attacked her with his black dagger, robbing her of magic so that she has no chance of healing herself. And there’s little chance of anyone else healing her, either.”

  Something sparked in Altair’s gaze. Not remorse, but revelation.

  As if that had given him a daama idea.

  Nasir turned away with a growl. Altair had always been apt at needling Nasir, but, rimaal, this was an extent he never thought possible. Swords clashed, arrows flew.

  Perhaps, if he had been his old self, if he had not allowed emotion to fester in his soul, Nasir would have been more focused as he and Altair made their way to the front of the house. He would have been quicker.

  He wouldn’t have let an arrow strike his heart.

  CHAPTER 40

  Zafira’s heart stopped when Nasir doubled over. She turned in the direction of the ifrit that had fired at him, but Kifah got there first, spear dripping black. Get up, she pleaded to Nasir’s fallen form. Skies, she was angry at him—she didn’t want him daama dead.

  Across the gauzy black, he straightened and wrenched the arrow free, and with relief, she recalled the layer of mail attached to the underside of his robes.

  Then he turned to something behind him. Someone.

  There, like the golden figurehead of a dark ship, was Altair. The sight of him threw her back to Sharr, Benyamin by her side and Altair’s raillery keeping them afloat. Her heart lurched to her throat. At some point, she had come to care profoundly for the general who had killed Deen by accident.

  “Bleeding Guljul,” Kifah rasped.

  Nasir looked at Altair with barely contained irritation. Just like old times. “Find a weapon and help us.”

  Zafira paused. Perhaps a little more aggressive than old times.

  “Focus,” Seif spat, ripping his scythe across an ifrit that had come dangerously close.

  Zafira nocked another arrow and backed away, scanning her surroundings. The din was reminiscent of a stage—scores of discreet witnesses to the Lion centered upon an expanse, ifrit stationed around him. She had almost forgotten what it was like to be locked in battle with the beings of smokeless fire.

  There was little chance of slipping into the house for the heart and the Jawarat now, but she was the compass in the storm—she felt her quarry draw near when the Lion did. The frenzied pull of dum sihr subsided in her veins, and she knew: neither the heart nor the book would be inside the house.

  Laa, they were with the Lion himself.

  When the ifrit converged, Zafira took down one after another, making her way toward him. The heat of their staves stung her nostrils, shadows winding around her arms and the bare skin of her neck. She caught sight of Aya’s pink abaya as she and Seif cornered the Lion, her pale staff coming up between a stave and catching the Lion off guard. Yes. Now all Zafira needed was to get in a single shot. Throw the Lion off-kilter to allow Aya time to thieve the heart and Jawarat from him.

  “Fair Aya,” she heard the Lion say. “I had hoped to see you.”

  Zafira stiffened but could barely see, despite her height. A ladder was propped against a narrow building rising like the chimneys in Demenhur. She threw off an ifrit and hurried up the rungs. What was Aya that the rest of them weren’t? Safin? Whatever she said made the Lion produce a laugh, demeaning and bereft of mirth.

  “You’ve come to kill me.”

  The fighting came to a jarring halt. The ifrit seemed to coalesce. Zafira held her aim, breathing down her arrow’s shaft as silence spread.

  A healer. She remembered Lana’s eerie recollection of the boy who lay supine after the attacks in Demenhur, a boy she had brought back to life—Aya was one of the best, even without magic.

  “I merely wish to understand,” Aya said.

  Zafira froze. There was nothing to understand. The Lion had strayed beyond reason. He had murdered and maimed and destroyed in pursuit of his madness.

  “Do you think your husband thought of you when he leaped to save his zumra? Mortals whose lives will end just like that?” He snapped his fingers, and another ring of his dark soldiers formed, shadowy and volatile. This was a game to him. They were daama mice.

  For all her dreaminess, Aya was strong. Resilient. She had lost her son and found a way to persevere. She had lost her husband and remained a member of this mission.

  Lies. She was floundering, and Zafira knew it. She was troubled, and they should not have allowed her to come.

  “How much longer will the old ways sustain us?” The Lion raised his voice, knowing full well he had an audience as malleable as they were curious. “How quickly the Sisters of Old abandoned their people, leaving behind despair and desolation.” He looked at Aya again, his voice almost tender as he said, “We are the broken ones. Victims of a world that continues to take, and take, and take. To what end, I ask you?”

  Skies, the Lion was mad. He had been a part of the problem. It was because of him that Baba was dead. That Benyamin was gone. He had wronged others just as he had been wronged. The cruel cycle had no end.

  And yet Aya brought her staff down against the ground. Zafira felt its thud in her soul.

  “The time has come to shape the world into one of our own making,” the Lion said softly.

  Zafira recognized Aya’s expression. It was the look of a person who finally woke up.

  The Lion smiled at Aya as defeat crushed her shoulders. There was no cunning in it this time, only kindness. Not a single ifrit attacked her, and when the Lion extended his hand, Zafira saw her go still. Contemplative.

  Barely three steps away.

  “Aya, no!” Seif shouted.

  Nasir was locked in battle. Altair was nowhere to be seen. Zafira sighted her aim. They were here for the heart and the Jawarat. Not—not this.

  Two steps.

  Zafira’s blood ran cold. The Lion’
s mouth shaped more lies that Aya devoured like the starved.

  One.

  Aya smiled that dreamy smile and took the Lion’s hand in hers.

  CHAPTER 41

  Chaos spilled like a shattered water pot when Aya took the Lion’s hand in hers. Betraying them. Dreamy, beautiful Aya. Nasir saw it all, even from the distance the battle had carried him to. Disbelief and turmoil made it hard to breathe.

  He threw up his scimitar, clashing with a fiery stave as it came arcing for his neck. He needed to get to Aya. Stop her. Immobilize the Lion and take back the heart. The hashashins unleashed arrows from their elevated positions, and bloodcurdling shrieks filled the vicinity. He combed the scene for Zafira, only to find her breathing down the shaft of an arrow of her own, leveled at the Lion.

  Shoot, he thought.

  She fired. The arrow soared, hope surging in him when it struck the Lion square in the chest. At last. A stroke of luck. He wasted no time. With a racing in his pulse that he was still growing accustomed to, Nasir fought his way forward. He heard Seif shouting, reasoning with her, but he was too far to signal. Nasir felled another ifrit and stumbled to his feet, wiping a smear of blood from his mouth as he ran.

  The air stilled, alerting him to a presence, and he whirled to face Altair, whose mouth was set in contemplation as if he had a decision to make. Perhaps he did, for there was a stave gripped tight in his fingers.

  And aimed

  at Nasir.

  The breath escaped his lungs, and the sword fell from his hand. His mind blanked. He couldn’t move as Altair let the stave fly.

  It zipped past Nasir’s shoulder, lodging in the throat of the ifrit behind him.

  Nasir’s breath rasped out of him, relief too far gone to summon. Shadows spilled from his palms, surrounding them. Not now. Altair looked at him strangely, eyeing Nasir’s fallen sword before he disappeared into the dark without a word.

  “Wait—” Nasir began, but stopped short when a fine white arrow cut into an ifrit creeping close. Zafira. He couldn’t see past the thick veil of shadows. He couldn’t hear beyond the clashing swords.