“If they tried hard enough, they would be here.”
Lana considered that, her sweet features twisted in thought. “You’re a good person, Okht. But you can’t do everything you want to do.”
Zafira broke into a soft smile, realizing it had been a long time since she’d given anything the benefit of the doubt.
Lana paused on her way to Umm’s room. “You don’t have to go, though. It’s only an invitation.”
But every time Zafira thought of not going, she felt she was denying herself something she wanted, though she didn’t know how or why she wanted it, except that she did. It felt, somehow, as though she had been waiting for this, and now that the opportunity was finally here, she couldn’t let it pass.
It was Sharr.
It was danger and death in the worst possible way, yet the very idea made her blood hum, and she couldn’t explain that in a way Lana would understand.
So “I do,” was all she said, surprising them both.
Lana looked everywhere but at Zafira. She knew that Lana wouldn’t press, that Lana trusted her, but she still felt a sinking sort of horrible when her sister nodded and said, “Okay.”
“I’ll be back soon. I’m just going to the sooq to … to think.”
Zafira stepped away slowly and then moved quickly. She laced her boots and sheathed Baba’s jambiya at her waist. Baba had taught her many things—how to pull back a bow without a whisper of a sound, how to see with her ears and navigate with her heart. After her first venture into the Arz, he had taught her how to protect herself, how the Arz was hers to tame. But never remain unarmed was what he stressed the most.
What would Baba say now, about her desire to keep pretending to be a man, which Yasmine called foolish? Which Baba himself had once urged her not to do? Would he want her to venture to Sharr if he knew magic was to be gained?
Zafira lifted the latch.
“Okht.” Lana ducked her head and held out a small parcel of food. “To help you think.”
Zafira dropped it in her bag. Then she touched a finger to Lana’s nose and brushed a kiss to her forehead with a smile, leaving her sister with the mother Zafira refused to see.
CHAPTER 8
When Nasir and Altair approached the towering doors of the palace together, the guards couldn’t mask their wide-eyed surprise quickly enough. Nasir still didn’t believe it, either. He had gone to a tavern with Altair of all people, for a glass of water and a pot of coffee.
“Sleep well, Prince,” Altair murmured as he retreated down another corridor. “Try not to dream of me.”
Nasir ignored him and dragged himself up the dark stairs. Sharr. Sharr. Sharr. It was as if the word had somehow made him drunk on the arak he refused to drink.
Yet when he stepped into his chambers, he froze, Sharr forgotten.
Someone blocked the air to his right, barely holding back hushed breathing. He flicked his wrist before he remembered that his gauntlet blades were stored uselessly in his bedside drawer, and he almost laughed at his luck. He unsheathed his jambiya with a tug of its onyx hilt and loosed a breath as he took one slow step to his right. Then another. Inhale. Two more steps. Exhale.
Inhale. He pivoted on his heel, tightened his grip on the blade, and shoved the intruder into a silver beam of moonlight. Exhale.
Raven hair, golden skin, depthless eyes. The soft curve of dark lips.
“Kulsum,” Nasir breathed. His jambiya clattered to the ground. His hands slid to her face, and he cupped her smooth skin between his palms. He brushed his thumbs over her cheeks and the tension across his shoulders uncoiled. She stared back with the same hunger Nasir had seen when Altair’s eyes followed the server girl.
Maybe it was the dark. Or the desire on her face, which he hadn’t seen closely in so many months. Or maybe it was the mess in his mind and the way Altair had asked about her.
He didn’t stop to consider why she was in his rooms while he had been away with Altair.
No—he kissed her.
His lips slanted down to her mouth, his hands went to her hair, and his body pressed against hers. She kissed him back just as greedily, her hands reaching for his cloak and pulling him closer. In that moment, they weren’t a prince and a servant; they were two people, equal and one.
Rimaal, he had missed her. This girl, his mother’s servant who had become so much more after the sultana’s death. His shard of a heart raced and heat rushed through him. But when her lips parted with his, her hands lost in his hair, he froze. He remembered.
He remembered everything.
He stepped back, and Kulsum stared with wide, unreadable eyes. He wished the moon would reveal more than what he saw.
“Leave,” he whispered hoarsely.
She didn’t move. Neither of them breathed. This was pain worse than a sword. This was forgetting and then remembering everything afresh, the curse of memories.
“Get. Out.” This time, his words were a blade.
Altair was right: some people didn’t deserve to forget.
Kulsum tipped her head. She reached up, slowly, as if he might back away, and when he didn’t, she trailed her fingers across his right cheek, as she had done so many times before. His eyes fluttered for the briefest moment, and then she left without a word, dress billowing. What could she say?
She no longer had a tongue, and it was because of him that she did not.
CHAPTER 9
Night had fallen heavily across Demenhur, bringing a phantom silence with it. Snow swirled in wheezing gasps, and Zafira drew her scarf over her face. She was hooded and shrouded, yet it was easy to discern the Hunter, for chances of finding a man in the western villages with a sling of arrows across his back were impossible—she couldn’t even count herself. She smirked at her own joke. Yasmine would have snorted. Skies, she isn’t dead.
Zafira guided Sukkar up the sloping white streets, where houses stood like misshapen teeth. They were the tan stone and colorless mortar common in the desert.
Only, Demenhur was no longer the desert oasis it had been. She sighed, her breath clouding in the cursed cold, and pressed on.
The sooq was ghostly beneath the moon. The forlorn jumu’a boasted no sign of the wedding that had taken place mere hours before. Zafira passed Araby’s colorful sweet shop, the shutters pulled tight like those of most other shops in the sooq. Ornaments dangled on shop eaves, swaying eerily in the breeze.
She halted Sukkar before a shop well-known for catering to the jobless superstitious. Through the dark window, she saw grimy glass bottles glinting from the shelves, filled with Arawiya-knew-what. They were meant to be hung in the four corners of a house to deter ifrit, creatures of smokeless fire that could adopt the face of anyone, usually their victim’s loved ones. Despite not being able to wield magic the way humans and safin could, ifrit had wreaked havoc worse than either race before the Six Sisters of Old.
Each of the six hailed from the most prominent clans, united by their desire for a better world, rather than by blood. What intrigued Zafira most was what they were: si’lah, creatures mere humans couldn’t comprehend. Creatures not even the lofty safin could fathom standing beside as equals, let alone a handful of levels apart.
Once the Sisters had gathered their foes, the insidious ifrit included, they had no place to imprison them, until one Sister stepped forward with a plan. She was stronger than the others, for her heart was pure and she was adamant in her ideals.
On Sharr, the island she was to govern, she created an impenetrable prison where the Sisters jailed the creatures that plagued their people and where she reigned as its warden.
The ornaments hanging from the shop swayed, the strike of metal against metal drawing Zafira out of her thoughts. She eyed those glass bottles and wondered if they worked. If ifrit still roamed Arawiya, invisible to the eye or donning a human’s body.
She tugged her scarf back over her mouth and was just about to press Sukkar onward when tiny clay lions in the frontmost display caught her eye, sending a s
hiver down her spine. She didn’t know what the clay felines were supposed to fend off, because the Lion of the Night was dead.
The Lion’s mother was ifrit, and his safin father fought to keep him from being banished with the rest of her kind. But life in the safin caliphate of Alderamin proved more difficult, because pure-blooded safin bore a pride that none could rival. They murdered his father. Banned the Lion from magic. Crushed his core.
Baba always used the example of the Lion whenever he taught Zafira of oppression. Because the Lion did not let the safin crush him. He turned to Alderamin’s greatest asset—knowledge. He learned all there was, empowering himself with forbidden blood magic.
Before long, the only creatures more powerful than he were the Sisters themselves, though the fact didn’t faze him when he turned his wrath upon the Gilded Throne. Zafira always found it odd that the Lion, with all his knowledge, had made so bold a move. Because the Sisters quickly overpowered him, trapping him on Sharr and putting an end to his reign of darkness.
Decades later, he stirred trouble on Sharr itself, and the warden called for aid. The other Sisters flocked to her, armed with every ounce of Arawiya’s magic to defeat him for good.
No one returned.
His roar was the darkness. His den was the shadows. Yet Sharr swallowed them all—the Sisters, the warden, the Lion, even the prison. But the Fall of Arawiya was a victory, wasn’t it? Even if the people lost the Sisters and magic, even if the loss gave Demenhur a reason to prove that misfortune followed a woman’s actions, Zafira knew, in her heart, that the Sisters had protected them that day.
They had defeated the Lion of the Night with their last breaths.
She pressed her heels against Sukkar’s sides. Maybe the tiny lions were merely ornaments, a display of pride for the victory over a man who defied men, only to be slain by women.
“Whoa there.” She tugged on Sukkar’s reins before a run-down construction, charred black from a fire long ago. It stood behind the sooq, shadowed by the beauty of the House of Selah in the distance.
Zafira tied Sukkar to a beam under a half-broken eave and slipped between the old rails. The creak of the door echoed, and something scurried away in the dark. There was once a time when the hunger was so great, Demenhune of the western villages feasted on the putrid flesh of rats, which killed more than hunger ever would. That was before Zafira had succumbed to the call of the Arz.
She still remembered the bare relief on her parents’ faces when she had stumbled from the Arz with three rabbits in hand and a smear of blood on her cheek. Neither Baba nor Umm had known where she had gone, but it was the first time anyone had returned from the forest of no return.
Days later, Baba had shown her how to nock an arrow and how to ensnare a deer, just as his own father had taught him in the forests of northern Demenhur. But when Baba had taken the meat into town and began feeding the villagers, it was Umm who reminded Zafira that, as a woman, she would receive no respect for the work she did. Baba had only smiled, saying Zafira held the power to change the views of the caliph’s staunch believers, to give women the equality that was their right. The equality they received in Arawiya’s other caliphates.
In the end, Zafira chose fear. She donned a man’s clothes and continued to hunt in the Arz with her father, creating a name for herself that was never quite her own. It belonged to a masked figure. A person who, at the end of the day, did not exist.
It was a life Zafira could have lived with, if it meant seeing Baba’s proud smile and the villagers’ full bellies. Until the day when she, Umm, and little Lana fell ill with the flu that had been spreading throughout Demenhur.
While Zafira lay bedridden at home, food became scarcer. Meat ran low.
Baba had thought he could hunt as his daughter did. Instead, he returned crazed and barely human.
Zafira’s breath now puffed in the darkness. She made her way carefully up the stairs reeking of mold, knowing which slats were broken and which were weak. Each of the three stairwells ended in a level of empty rooms. It had been an inn once, welcoming people of other caliphates who used to visit for trade and leisure. Or pleasure, as Yasmine would say with a suggestive gleam in her eye.
At the top level, Zafira pushed open the door to the roof and tightened her cloak against the sudden gust of air.
This was where she came to be free of the world that expected so much from the Hunter, from herself.
But tonight she was not alone.
A silhouette stood at the end, profile cast in the light of the stars. It seemed someone else couldn’t stand enclosed walls, either.
“I just came to—” she started.
“Think,” Deen finished for her. He inclined his head, and the clouds parted so the moon could see his smile. “I know. But if you’re feeling anything like I am right now, I didn’t want you to be alone.”
Zafira didn’t know what to say. She wanted to wrap her arms around him, but after the way he had looked at her this evening, that didn’t feel so good an idea. Instead, she moved to his side, pressing her shoulder to his as she fought the swell of elation in her chest, and together they looked down at Demenhur.
Tiny houses sprawled to their left, shadowed by a crescent of darkness where the Arz encroached. The sooq parted directly below them, and the House of Selah rose to their right, periwinkle in the moonlight.
The House of Selah was a humble name for something akin to a palace. Its stone walls were crumbling, and dark veins of rot stood stark against the cream, for it had been built for the desert, not to withstand an unending wet climate. Yet despite the decay, it was magnificent—twin spires in brilliant ivory rising to the snow-heavy clouds. Between them, the main building arched into the sky.
If this was a beauty, Zafira couldn’t imagine the magnificence of the palace in Thalj, where the royal minaret stood, a beacon bathing in shadows ever since magic had disappeared. She couldn’t even begin to imagine the palace in Sultan’s Keep.
“Do you know what I’ve always wanted to do?” Deen asked. He slid closer and slipped the hood from her face.
Zafira felt exposed beneath the moon. Out of instinct, she glanced around quickly, but they were alone. “What?” she asked, thinking she knew.
“Explore,” he said, expression wistful.
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. He drew lines on the ice-covered railing with one gloved finger, deep in thought. “There’s more than Arawiya, Zafira. There has to be. The world can’t be just five caliphates, a wasteland, and one deadly sea. I want to travel, discover new places. Meet new people.”
She liked that plan, and so did her heart, if the warmth she felt was any indication. If life were simpler, she would want to explore, too. She stared into the distance, where they were blocked by a growing forest. A forest that might be stopped, if she accepted the invitation.
“You’ve been all over—Zaram, Pelusia, even the barren Wastes to get to Alderamin. You’ve seen sand,” she said, a note of envy bittering her tongue. She imagined a world covered in it, baking beneath the sun. Creeping between her toes and scurrying between her teeth. “What’s it like?”
“Beautiful. Endless. Freedom wavering beneath the relentless sun,” he said softly. “The heat is a pest, but then again, isn’t the cold?” He sighed. “I’m content, I am. But there’s this … this need for something more.”
It was the first time Deen wanted what she did: more. But something else was bothering him. She could see it in the heaviness tugging his lips into a frown. “What is it?”
He dropped his knowing hazel eyes to her, and she felt herself stepping closer. In this space, so close to the moon, anything felt possible. The wind whipped her hair. Deen lifted a careful hand and tucked the ebony strands behind her ear. He inhaled slowly, a shuddering draw that made her keenly aware of their solitude.
“Will you marry me?” The words swooshed past his lips in a rush, as if his heart wanted to savor them but his brain was too frazzled to allow it.
Sh
e opened her mouth. Closed it. She had known this was coming. She had known. But today of all days? Now of all moments?
His eyes fell from hers. How many times had she watched his lips widen into effortless smiles? How many times had he run after her, snarling and pretending to be the Arz monsters their parents had warned them of as children? How many times had he held her against his chest, sharing his warmth when she shivered in the cold?
He was the one who used what little money he had to buy rich safin chocolate and make the best drink Zafira had ever tasted. He was the one to hold her when Baba had died and her heart had hardened.
She stared into the night until her eyes began to burn.
“Deen, I—” Her tongue felt heavy. I’m not like Yasmine. It wasn’t that she didn’t want marriage. She just wanted more. Didn’t he just say he wanted that, too? “I’m not ready to marry yet.”
Doubt flashed in his beautiful eyes, and Zafira’s stomach twisted.
He asked, “And when you are ready?”
“I will marry you,” she said without a moment’s hesitation. Her heart told her brain she was lying, but she ignored it. It wasn’t a lie. It wasn’t. She couldn’t think about marriage when the sister of her heart had left her and maybe-assassins had been sent for who knew what. When the Arz had conjured a woman in silver who claimed she was cursed. When an invitation to daama Sharr burned on silver parchment.
Deen exhaled and nodded, but the tension only tightened with the stubborn set of his jaw. “I’m not an idiot, Zafira, asking you to marry me just because my sister’s married herself off. But I thought…” He paused, and her heart began to pound. “I thought I would be better than a death sentence. I thought marriage would give you another option. Another sense of purpose. Isn’t that what you search for in the Arz?”
“What are you talking about?” she whispered. She didn’t search for anything in the Arz. She hunted. She didn’t know what she wanted any more than she knew what she was waiting for.
We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya) Page 8
