We Free the Stars

by Hafsah Faizal

  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. N
asir 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.

  CHAPTER 95

  Nasir saw Zafira slump over the Lion, and the darkness faded with the suddenness of a blade. Fear cut the air from his lungs. And then she rose with a heart in her fist, blood dripping down the length of her arm. The Lion tried to stand, but collapsed, panting as he struggled without magic, without a healer.

  The black dagger was in his chest.

  His blood stained the courtyard stone. He was dying.

  The safi he called Baba continued to approach. Dark-haired and blue-eyed, aristocratic in a way much like the Lion. And changing—features shifting, figure curving, hair fading to stark white.

  Recognition lurched in Nasir’s stomach.

  It was his mother. Wronged by the Lion, wronged by the world. She had done as she’d vowed, and Nasir’s pride was fierce.

  The Lion rasped a laugh. “That was cruel, Anadil. Even for you.”

  He sounded sad, broken.

  “You wronged me,” the Silver Witch lamented, and Nasir heard every last drop of pain in her words. “Far more than anyone ever will.”

  “I loved you as no one ever did.”

  Her mirthless laughter cracked. “You loved my power, as you claimed my Sisters had. You ruined me. Even in death they granted me a second chance.”

  Remorse reshaped the Lion’s features. “No. Some part of me loved you, as you had loved me.”

  A lie, Nasir thought in his bewildered state, but he trusted his mother. The Silver Witch knew the Lion more than any of them could imagine, and when she slowly knelt beside him, Nasir tried to ignore the warning bells as they tolled.

  The Lion rolled his head to face her, and Nasir wondered how different life might have been if the Sisters hadn’t locked the ifrit away. If the safin hadn’t taken to pride so violently.

  Perhaps, if Nasir hadn’t given in to wishful fantasy, he would have been ready when the Lion’s amber eyes flashed, an instant before he lunged.

  And the Silver Witch screamed.

  Nasir’s blood turned to ice, and he acted on instinct. On rage. On memory.

  His mother screamed.

  CHAPTER 96

  Altair loved her as he did most things: even when they did not love him in return.

  He’d had years to reflect, to try to understand his mother. When he was young, he’d wished she had never existed. When he was older, he’d been angry when she’d died. When he’d learned the truth upon Sharr, that she had fabricated her death, breaking the soul of the one son she loved so deeply, he’d felt, well, sad.

  Power begets pain. She wasn’t a cruel mother, or an evil one. Rather, she was ill-equipped for motherhood, too mired in her own mistakes and failings and their recompense, and both he and Nasir had paid the price.

  Still, she was his mother. He was her son. There were some bonds that remained no matter how they were tested.

  You’ve a heart of gold, she had once said.

  Is that why it weighs so heavily? he had replied.

  And so, when his mother screamed, every last drop of blood in his veins came to a halt.

  CHAPTER 97

  Zafira saw the moment the Lion lunged and sank his teeth into the Silver Witch’s flesh. One last attempt for si’lah blood. For power. Terror gripped the very air when Anadil screamed.

  Then both brothers moved at once.

  They did not think, they did not hesitate. It was innate, their actions. Unrestricted by sentience.

  Shadows swarmed from Nasir’s palms, light roared from Altair’s.

  Magic collided in a crash of thunder and a cresting hum. Both beams struck the Lion, black and white merging into a coruscating, iridescent pillar of magic that rose from the palace courtyard and disappeared into the clouds, dappled in every color Zafira could imagine.

  “Bleeding Guljul,” Kifah exhaled.

  They were draining him, siphoning every last dreg of his power into Arawiya. Ifrit shrieked, scattering into the shadows. Zafira struggled to breathe, something raw and broken upending her insides. It tugged her as close to the iridescent skeins of magic as she could go before Kifah shouted for her to step back, step away.

  The Silver Witch clutched Zafira’s hand. Her face was wet with tears.

  “Finish what they started.” She had drawn Zafira here. “His mind belongs in the Jawarat.”

  Before she could ask how, Zafira staggered backward. Memories plowed through her, a violent and powerful barrage of emotion. The Lion as a child, in adolescence. As an adult. Lonely, always lonely. The Jawarat trembled in her hands as his memories joined the Sisters’, flooding Zafira with yet another life she had not lived but would always hold because of her bond.

  The hum faded to silence.

  Nasir and Altair lowered their hands, and the haze steadily cleared.

  Where the Lion had lain, a tree now stood, dark branches curling into the sky like fingers seeking something out of reach. At its base, a body lay slumped, amber eyes closed to the world.

  Mind, body, and soul, the Jawarat said softly. It was how the Sisters had wanted to defeat him, years and years ago.

  “Why?” the Lion whispered. Only, his voice came from elsewhere. No—from the Jawarat, from her heart, where a part of him would live forever.

  She closed her eyes against the anguish in his plea. Hadn’t she stood before the Arz that had stolen her father, and asked that very same question?

  Against the black tree, the manifestation of his soul, the Silver Witch placed her hand. Lovingly, almost. Part of her truly did love him, the way the Lion might have loved her.

  Zafira watched as Anadil closed her eyes and opened them to a new world.

  “We are born with the promise of death,” Zafira said softly as a single rose, wild and white
, blossomed on one of the branches. It was a gift. “You had merely outlived yours.”

  CHAPTER 98

  Nasir could scarcely believe it to be true. That the monster who had controlled his father, held his leash, belittled him without end, was gone. The Silver Witch spoke first, breaking the trance that had fallen across the courtyard.

  “The heart. We must make for Sarasin at once.”

  In Zafira’s fist, the heart that once belonged to one of the Sisters of Old pulsed direly, a shade of crimson so dark it was nearly black. Nasir met her gaze and saw doubt, for the Jawarat had called it impossible.

  Nasir had never cared for magic the way Zafira had. He hadn’t spent decades working for its restoration the way Altair had. It did not signify vengeance for him the way it did for Kifah. Laa, for him, magic had signified destruction and pain. It had ruined his family and burned darkness into his life.

  And still, he wanted its return—for them, for this new family he had built himself.

  He led five horses to the palace gates.

  CHAPTER 99

  It was a thrilling kind of freedom to ride in the dead of the night, the thunder of hooves carrying one through. Kifah ululated as they charged through the streets, making it a little easier to ignore the destruction of the city, the heart dying in Zafira’s hand. The loss she felt, every time she recalled those amber eyes, closing to the world.

  Magic, she reminded herself. What she had dreamed of and desired for years and years on end.

  It will not work, the Jawarat said again.

  Zafira ignored it, just as she had ignored the black gleam of the organ, far from the crimson it should have been. The pulse had been steady, promising. Corrupt. Surely the minaret, created by the Sisters’ hands, could rid the heart of the Lion’s evil.

  The Jawarat only sighed.

  It was still learning how stubborn she could be. How much she would give up to hope. They had come this far. If she couldn’t believe the heart would survive, how could she expect it to?

  She would live in a world with glory akin to that of a century ago. Magic would roar in her veins, hum in her limbs. And it wasn’t only her, but everyone. Arawiya would thrive again.