We Free the Stars

by Hafsah Faizal

  The room was charged with that very thought.

  The thud of his footsteps echoed when he turned, and Zafira thought she caught a hint of fervent green from the folds of his robes, her stomach lurching for the barest of instances before her heart did the same as the Lion lowered himself onto the Gilded Throne.

  Nothing happened—at first. The throne didn’t repel him. It didn’t thunder and throw him off.

  Laa.

  It changed. The gold became black, color draining from left to right, smoke curling like ashes on the wind. Kifah loosed a strangled breath.

  The resulting silence was deafening, the death of an era, and the Lion’s soft, triumphant sigh was a roar immortalized in history.

  A silver-liveried guard stirred from the foot of the dais, the thick suspense in the hall slowing time as the fool dropped to his knees, awe hollowing his voice when he said, “Sultani.”

  The Lion frowned. “I never did like the word. The sultan is dead. This night, we abandon the old ways and bring forth the new: I am king. King of Arawiya.”

  And then he flourished a hand, his command like a knife.

  “Kill them.”

  ACT II

  VICTORIOUS UNTIL THE END

  CHAPTER 53

  The room erupted in chaos as ifrit pulled away from the shadows and every last person realized why the Lion had invited them, the governing heads of Arawiya. Zafira was a reed in a flood, helpless, hopeless, before she found her roots and stood her ground.

  “The doors,” she shouted over the din, and if her voice cracked, no one heard it. “We need to get them open.”

  Or not a single ruler would be left.

  Kifah’s features were frozen in shock. “Laa, laa. It shouldn’t have—the throne—it—”

  “Kifah,” Zafira snapped, and the warrior recovered with a lamenting breath. She flicked open her spear, and with a few rapid nods, disappeared into the fray.

  Ifrit clashed staves with guards, hashashins, and armed dignitary alike—all while the Lion reveled in the ruin of his own making.

  “You need your bow,” Lana said eagerly.

  “I need you to stay safe.” Zafira gripped her shoulders, digging her fingers in to stop their trembling. “Look at me. Stay with the crowd. Don’t help anyone.”

  Disappointment flashed across her sister’s face. “Is that what you’re going to do?”

  “Don’t,” Zafira warned, wavering. The blank horror on Kifah’s face had shaken her will. “I’m not going to dig you a grave, Lana. Do you understand? Do this for me.”

  Lana finally appeased her with a nod.

  A few cowardly guards braved the steps to swear loyalty, and Zafira seized the distraction. She leaped over the table and dropped to her knees in front of Nasir on the first step of the dais.

  “We need to go,” she said. “He will kill you.”

  “Let him.” Desolation swallowed his already quiet voice.

  She gritted her teeth. “Your father is dead. The Lion sits on your throne. Are you really going to abandon your people?” What was it he had said to her on Sharr? “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  His laugh cracked. “How our fates have reversed, fair gazelle. I started to feel, and now I cannot stop.”

  With a gentleness she never thought him capable of, he lowered the sultan’s head to the dais. He brushed his father’s eyelids closed and tucked a feather into the folds of his robe, and she couldn’t understand how something so gentle could hurt so terribly.

  And then with a sudden wheeze he froze, his back arched.

  “Why waste time mourning the dead when you can join them?” The Lion lounged in his black throne and twirled his finger, wrenching Nasir to face him, shadows crushing tight.

  Zafira’s hand twitched for an arrow, for her bow, but she had neither as Nasir was lifted off his feet.

  “I could never understand why you hated me.”

  Zafira barely heard Nasir’s voice over the din.

  “So much that my father’s every breath was spent ridiculing me.”

  The Lion tightened his bindings with a clench of his fist, Nasir’s words striking true.

  “Because I’m exactly like you: a monster breathing shadows.” Nasir’s voice dropped, the epithet near silent. “Yet she loved me.”

  The Silver Witch.

  He threw down his hands and the chain splintered. The Lion rose and splayed his fingers. Zafira couldn’t tell which wisp of black belonged to whom as Nasir lifted himself to his feet and threw his head back with a soundless roar.

  The room fell to darkness.

  Shadows rippled from his hands, flinging the Lion back. Control Zafira hadn’t thought Nasir to have. The Lion slumped on the ill-claimed throne, and the ruckus doubled, panic striking anew. She didn’t waste a heartbeat, remembering every sightless moment in the Arz as her eyes adjusted to the dark. She hurried up the stairs, one hand sliding to Nasir’s jambiya at her leg.

  “Zafira—” Nasir’s voice was lost in someone’s scream. “The doors. I don’t—”

  She didn’t hear the rest, but she saw him turn, trusting her to follow.

  The dagger fitted to her palm, the blade faint in the gloom. The anger and chaos she associated with the Jawarat’s vision, a different version of herself, drove her. She would make up for that moment when she had fallen for the Lion’s lies and lost what was hers.

  A hand gripped her wrist and she cried out as the jambiya fell with a clatter. Cool amber eyes caught hers through the billowing shadows.

  “I was hoping to see you, azizi.”

  She fought against him, shuddering when he wrenched her palm to his chest. The ice of his skin chilled her from beneath his embroidered thobe.

  And something else. Horror and understanding locked her in place.

  “It is something extraordinary, the pulse of life.”

  The si’lah heart. Like a Sister of Old.

  The heart that belonged to creatures beyond safin, ifrit, and men. Creatures of good. This was why he was pale—from the loss of blood when his chest had been cut open. This was the cause of his newfound power in a land still without magic, from the shadows barring the door to the ones that had cinched Ghameq’s heart. Why the Gilded Throne had accepted him, some twisted mutation cloaking it in black.

  Aya had done this. Zafira knew it with the same striking certainty that she knew Aya was dead.

  A deafening crash jolted them both, and she pried her wrist from his grip as one of the large windows ruptured with the sound of a thousand chimes. In that beat of distraction, she lunged, shoving her hands inside his robes and finding the Jawarat beneath the folds.

  He lashed out. She fell back against the arm of the Gilded Throne with a cry, the Jawarat in her arms. Light flashed across the Lion of the Night’s tattoo before the shadows rose, and Zafira was back on Sharr again, chains shackling her wrists. Only this time, Nasir wasn’t here. Kifah, Benyamin. Lana.

  Help—she needed help. She searched the floor for the jambiya, despite knowing Nasir’s gift to her was but a child’s thing in the face of the Lion’s power. Through the riot of fear in her heart, she heard a voice.

  We ached for you, bint Iskandar.

  The Lion gripped her arm, wrenching her forward and grabbing the Jawarat.

  We are here for you.

  And then the world came undone with a roar of anguish that brought them both gasping to their knees.

  Always.

  CHAPTER 54

  The cruel sun scorches everything in blinding white light, but he does not blink. He does not look away. Every drop of blood is a knife to his chest. Each red splotch on the ground he feels keenly as if it were his own.

  The stones strike again and again and again.

  Pride lifts the chins of the safin. They wear white, but their hearts are made of black. Their ears are like his, pointed and sharp. A display of their immortality, heightened senses, and unnatural speed. They are special, their ears claim, and he is not.

&n
bsp; He has no heart. He knows this, for there is no beat in his chest, but they see reason to remind him. Over and over and over. His body was shaped to hold a heart—like safin, like mortal men—but his ifrit blood birthed him without the pulsing mass of red.

  As the blood quickens from erratic drops to a terrible trickle, he wonders: Does one need a heart to feel compassion? Is the rise of pride the downfall of mercy?

  He is created of evil.

  His darkness is a curse.

  He deserves death.

  Then why are they killing his father instead?

  He is an anomaly. Too young to kill, too strange to be shown the light of day.

  Ropes bind his father’s wrists, locking him between two erected beams. The stones make sounds as they strike the ground, clattering like child’s play.

  “Stop,” he pleads through the sobs in his throat, and someone kicks him into silence. His bag slides down his arm, skinny and bruised like the rest of him. Hollow cheeks, ribs he can count. This is what happens when hate puts stones in the hands of men. His books tumble out. His reed pens, new and sharp, snap beneath angry calfskin sandals.

  The school is ten paces from him. It was built for safin scholars, a place his father had dreamed of sending him to ever since he’d been a boy with a tutor. He was to be a scholar, a man of ‘ilm. It is the reason for this madness.

  “Baba,” he cries until he thinks he knows how a heart must beat. Baba. Baba. Baba. It drowns out his sobs. It drowns out their hurtful words. It drowns out his father’s very, very last exhale.

  Their cruelty turns his father’s ocean-blue eyes glassy, unseeing. It makes his organs sputter and stop. Stop.

  Stop.

  What is mercy, if there is no one to give it?

  What does it mean to be lenient, if there is no one who deserves it?

  They ask, What of the boy?

  Others say, Leave him. Death takes what is owed.

  There is blissful silence then, for corpses do not speak. They cannot cry or feel pain. He picks up his broken pens. He slowly stacks his books and lifts the flap of his bag. It is new, sewn for his first day at this school. It almost smells stronger than the blood, but not quite. He’s never smelled blood before, but he will always remember this moment. The first time he inhaled the sweetness of spilled death.

  Your mother would be proud, my lion.

  His mother, who died gifting him to the world. His father, who died because his lion was not a gift but a curse. Ifrit are monsters, they say, not meant for union with pure-blooded safin. His mother was ifrit.

  What are ifrit, if not another race? If not beings with homes and families and wishes of their own? They are his kin. And they have nothing, for the Sisters deemed them monsters and banished them to Sharr.

  You are made from night, my lion, and no matter what my people say, you are one of us. Mightier than us.

  What is he now? An orphan. A half-breed left to die.

  Inside, he is ifrit: black blood, heartless. Outside, he is safin: peaked ears, heightened abilities.

  Outside: He is tears and boyish fear. Inside: He is fire and he makes an oath. It is brash and angry, but he will keep it. Shadows pool in his palms.

  He is a lion and he will claim the night as his own.

  They will fear him.

  CHAPTER 55

  Zafira lurched back into the present, gasping for air, teeth clattering from the force of her trembling. The turmoil continued around them, the same spear she had seen at mid-impact only now impaling an ifrit. An arrow in the air only now landed true. As if barely heartbeats had passed.

  The Lion was on his knees before the throne, his cloak sliding back from his shoulders. The high collar of his thobe was drenched in sweat.

  Discarded to his side, like an unwanted pamphlet, was the Jawarat.

  She froze when he lifted his head, but his gaze was dull. She’d seen it in the mirror: the look of a person who had shattered so many times that the pieces no longer fit together. All bruised edges and angles.

  No child should have to watch their father die. No child should have to stomach the smell of their own father’s blood.

  What did it mean when a monster became human? Because it wasn’t the Lion with his palms on the cold, hard stone. It was Haider, a boy who had witnessed the world’s cruelty firsthand. A boy who had once been like her.

  She carefully picked up the Jawarat.

  We promised you protection, bint Iskandar. Look at him. Pathetic. Weak.

  Rushing, roiling anger flooded her. Like when she realized Nasir still had his magic—anger that wasn’t her own but felt every bit as if it were.

  He is not pure. His will is too heavy, too fixed. He tried to control us, and now we will end him.

  She picked up Nasir’s jambiya—her jambiya—from beside Ghameq’s lifeless form. The blade sang to her, coaxed her even as some distant part of her fought against it.

  No, you fool. Steel is powerless. Use us.

  She loosened her hold, remembering her failed arrow at the Lion’s hideout. Remembering the Jawarat’s vision, slicing men in two.

  No. She fought back, sheathing her dagger. That was not her. Not like this.

  Perhaps they were all monsters, masquerading in costumes of innocence.

  For the first time since binding herself to the Jawarat, she finally understood what it had done. It had festered on Sharr long enough to sift through the Lion’s memories, to record the ones it had deemed most important and poignant. Most raw. Only, it hadn’t just recorded them.

  It had stolen them.

  It knew flesh and blood, sorrow and power. Somewhere on Sharr, it had become a being of its own.

  Yes. We are of the hilya.

  The Lion had wanted vengeance for centuries, but because of the Jawarat, he didn’t remember why. He had no recollection of why he hated the safin. He didn’t know why he wanted a home for his mother’s kind. She was struck by the way he had frozen in her room when she had asked. He truly hadn’t remembered.

  Until now, now of all times. Now, with the inexorable power of the si’lah heart surging in his veins.

  Her mind reeled with the fragments of his past, connecting one to another despite the chaos around her. His will is too heavy, the Jawarat had said. And by stealing his memory and stripping away the driving force of his vengeance, it had hoped he would lose his single-minded purpose, making him malleable, controllable.

  It had not worked.

  She shot down the stairs, belatedly thanking the seamstress for the slit down her dress, and crashed into a blood-streaked Kifah.

  “Yalla, Huntress,” she said, brisk as ever. “I thought we’d lost you.”

  “I have it,” she said breathlessly, a chill on her skin despite the heat. “He—he has it.”

  Kifah eyed her. “Slow down.”

  “I have the Jawarat.” Zafira held up the book with one hand. “He has the heart. Where’s Lana?”

  Kifah cleared three ifrit from their path as Zafira shoved the book between her thighs so she could knot her hair. “With Ghada and the Nine. They’re fighting, but she’ll be safest with them. What do you mean he has the heart? He’s always had it.”

  “No.” Zafira helped a man with a tasseled turban right himself, sucking in a breath at the wicked gashes across the back of his hand. “Nasir was right. The Lion—he found a way. He’s taken control of the heart. It’s in him.”

  Kifah fell when a guard knocked into her. She stood slowly, almost sluggish. “What?”

  “The heart is inside him,” Zafira stressed. His pulse echoed in her ears, her palm, her very soul. “He can use it the way the Sisters of Old could. The way the Silver Witch can.”

  “Bleeding Guljul,” Kifah breathed. “That’s—bleeding Guljul. Aya.”

  Zafira nodded, unable to form words. She remembered Lana describing the boy Aya had brought back to life. She didn’t think any other healer would have been capable of implanting a beating heart into someone without one.

/>   “Now we know why he never came for the other four.” Kifah looked at her spear, as if suddenly deeming it useless. “We need to get out of here. I only know Ghada and her daughter are alive. I haven’t seen the other leaders.”

  “Nasir?” Zafira asked. “Seif?”

  “Haven’t seen them. Hopefully protecting someone I’m not,” she said, and turned back to the fray.

  An arrow whistled past Zafira’s ear, and then she was running toward the fool who had fired it. She ducked past an ifrit fighting an armed wazir, then a girl swinging a jambiya as if she had never held one before in her life.

  The silver-cloaked guard nocked another arrow, his grip horribly wrong.

  Zafira stopped him. “I need that.”

  He looked her up and down, sweat beading down his brow. “Move aside, woman.”

  She tossed him a fallen sword, and he dropped everything to grab it before it could nick his shoulder. Dastard. He started to protest, but Zafira snatched his bow and arrow and used her dagger to cut off his quiver’s strap before ducking back into the crowd, heart pounding.

  Well. Now she couldn’t wear the quiver, either. Nor could she continue carrying the Jawarat around. She sorely needed more hands.

  Crimson splattered at her feet, a reminder that there was more to worry about. Clamping the quiver between her legs and the Jawarat with it, she nocked an arrow and turned a careful circle, firing at an ifrit attacking a woman in an iridescent gown streaked in blood. Not a woman—a safi. Benyamin’s sister, Leila.

  Zafira slung her bow and slashed out with her dagger, gutting the ifrit the way she gutted her hunting kills. When she threw another glance at Leila, she was relieved to see Seif with his scythes by her side. The Alder calipha herself was nowhere to be seen. Zafira fired another arrow, and another, saving a silver-cloaked guard only for him to fall with a stave to his back a moment later. She never thought death to be so mundane. So normal.

  There was always a chance the fruit one picked could be sour. The chance that the gift one gave might not fit. She had never thought the same applied to feasts and that she might die in one.