We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya)

by Hafsah Faizal

  Nasir lifted his mask back into place. “A monster. For a monster will always be enslaved to a master.”

  CHAPTER 61

  Control was slipping between Nasir’s fingers like the sands of Sharr. He was aware he’d had very little control since arriving on Sharr, but it only worsened with each passing day.

  He had come with a simple plan: kill the others, find the Hunter, retrieve the Jawarat, and return to Sultan’s Keep. Now everything was in shambles, including himself. When she met his eyes and flashed her smile and spoke in her lilting accent, he wasn’t heir of Arawiya, hashashin, and Prince of Death.

  He was a boy.

  “We’ll stop here for the night,” Benyamin said when they followed a trickle of a stream to a glade of dying palm trees. Here, the structure was still intact, the pointed archways like mouths waiting to devour them.

  Altair frowned up at the starless sky. “Not that there’s a difference between night and day anymore.”

  “Do you ever not provide your opinion?” Kifah asked, picking up a scorpion’s molt and studying it.

  Altair bowed. “I like to think I’m lightening the mood, shifting focus away from our impending dooms. You’re welcome.”

  “I never thanked you.”

  “I know. I’m saving you the extra breath. You’re welcome for that, too.”

  Dread had settled across Nasir’s shoulders. If his calculations were correct, it was their tenth night on Sharr.

  Which meant his time was up.

  Altair made a face when Kifah returned from the shadows with hares in hand. “Once I’m out of Sharr, I will never eat hare again.”

  “Be thankful you’ve got hare to eat,” the Huntress said as Altair crouched to skin and clean the animals.

  “I’ll catch you a fox next time. Just try chewing on that,” Kifah said. She marinated the hares with her blend of spices before setting the meat on a makeshift pit. The fire crackled and the aroma of sizzling meat filled the air, permeating Nasir’s senses. It smelled good, he supposed.

  He didn’t miss Altair deliberately pressing his leg against Kifah’s when he stoked the fire, nor did he miss the surprised smile she sent his way, dark eyes soft. Well, then.

  Beside them, the Huntress fashioned arrows from wood she had gathered, painstakingly stripping them down just so the shaft would gleam white.

  “You really believe we’ll go home,” he heard Kifah say, ever optimistic.

  “The first step to getting anywhere is believing you can,” Benyamin said darkly.

  Kifah was silent as she turned over the roasting hare in the spit.

  Nasir wasn’t so sure of that—he believed in very little, but he got around. Ignoring the way his mouth watered at the hare, he had begun sharpening his scimitar when a shadow fell over him. He raised an eyebrow at Altair.

  “So. You and the Huntress?” asked Altair.

  Nasir wanted to run him through with his blade. He growled, “What level of daft are you?”

  “I wanted to remind you of what happened to the last woman you loved.”

  Nasir stilled, blade glinting in the firelight. “Which moment are you referring to? The time when she lost her tongue? Or when I learned it was all a lie?”

  Altair’s face stretched in a wolfish smile. “Both should suffice.”

  “You seem to have grown just as attached.”

  “This is about you. Before this game is finished, you will need to end lives, not grow attached to them.”

  Nasir rose, stone crumbling beneath his boots. He tolerated a great deal when it came to Altair, but interfering with his work wasn’t one of them.

  His voice dropped. “I don’t need you to tell me what to do. Unlike you, I remember my place.”

  “You couldn’t resist pulling that card, could you?” Altair asked, laughing softly. His face hardened into a cool mask before he bowed. “Forgive me, Sultani.”

  Altair returned to the others. An iris unfurled in his turban while Kifah looked on with a small smile. Oblivious, he murmured something in her ear and she barked a laugh before turning the meat again. Nasir pursed his lips.

  Me and the Huntress.

  * * *

  Here we go again, Nasir thought as he leaned against the tree.

  “Murderers are murderers. I know what I saw that day,” Kifah was saying, about an incident back in Pelusia’s capital of Guljul. She glared at him, but Nasir kept his gaze pointedly elsewhere. “Hashashin or not.”

  “No hashashin will kill a man in his sleep,” Benyamin insisted. “There’s nothing more cowardly.”

  “How do you know it was a hashashin? Maybe it was a drunkard prancing around in that ridiculous garb. I wouldn’t know the difference,” Altair said.

  The Huntress flitted her gaze to Nasir.

  Benyamin sighed. “You’re all being children—”

  “Compared to you, my grandmother is a child,” Kifah drawled.

  Altair snorted water, choking until the Huntress thwacked him on the back.

  “Enough,” Benyamin said, smoothing out his bedroll. “Kifah, you’re keeping watch.”

  “Your wish is my insomnia,” the warrior said with a salute.

  They took their time falling asleep. As if this were a trip of leisure, where they could rise when they desired and enjoy the world around them. But Nasir, unlike his father, was patient. Being a hashashin required it.

  He waited until Kifah turned before he wove his way through the bedrolls, pausing longer than necessary in front of Altair. His eyes dropped to the general’s neck again, the exposed skin calling to his practiced ease in swiping across flesh and tendons. Altair’s every exhale beckoned.

  But a hashashin never killed a prone figure. Even Benyamin knew that.

  Nasir carefully stepped over him and tossed more wood into the fire, watching the light dance across the Huntress’s pale features. The widow’s peak of her dark hair dipped into her forehead like the head of an arrow. Her hair—still plaited and coiled—looked like a crown, and she a queen.

  You will need to end lives. In his mind, he saw the slender column of her neck drenched in red as the light in her eyes dimmed to nothingness. He saw her skin ashen with death. His breath caught.

  Her hand moved, closing around the ring at her chest, murmurs shaping her lips.

  Kifah turned.

  Nasir pursed his mouth and darted for the ruins, pockets leaden with misfortune.

  He moved without a sound, the shadows setting his heart ablaze. It didn’t take him long to find a vestibule away from the camp, secluded with a window facing the other side. He shoved a plank of wood aside and entered. His footsteps echoed, and something skittered away.

  He wanted this to be quick, done before it began. But hope was for the desolate, so he cleared his mind and began his work. He gathered brushwood and scraps of wooden debris, piling them inside the shadows of the stone chamber. The cool breeze from the yawning window snatched his attempts to light the little hoard aflame. It wound its way around his neck, kissed his throat, and whispered in his ear.

  Nasir swallowed, ears burning against the sensations, and tried again, exhaling only after the satisfying hiss of the fire inhaling its first breath broke the silence. The chamber was soon awash in a dance of orange and gold.

  He pulled the cursed leather sleeve from his pocket. Inside were three strips of papyrus. Three, in case he lost one. In case he lost the second one, too, being the mutt that he was. Thoughts of his father stirred memories of his mother. Her dark hair, her quick laugh. Her razor smile when she bested him with her ebony scimitar in the training grounds. The words that calmed him, a balm in the dark when she worked Alderamin’s quick-healing black resin into his burns.

  No one truly treasured a mother’s touch until they could no longer feel it. No one missed a mother’s love until the well was depleted.

  The flames mocked him.

  He gritted his teeth and choked on his breath. This was the curse of memory. Of a wound ripped open. His
eyes burned, and he knew they were rimmed in red.

  The world wavered, and in the desolation of Sharr, Nasir Ghameq slowly came undone. He saw the hurt in the Huntress’s eyes. Felt the anger burning in Altair’s gaze. Heard the lash of Benyamin’s words. Tasted the blood of the hundreds he had slain. Smelled the burning of his own flesh when the poker touched his skin.

  Again and again and again.

  He fell to his knees and grabbed fistfuls of sand. The grit bit his palms and the darkness amplified, nearly swallowing the flames whole. He had people to kill and a book to find and orders to follow. He had an endless life to continue.

  He threw his head back and screamed a soundless scream to the sky. Only the stone ceiling stared back.

  Like a tomb.

  Dread spread through his limbs and numbed everything else. He climbed to his feet and gripped the wall with a steadying breath.

  He pulled one strip from the leather sleeve and tossed it into the fire, ignoring the words inscribed in blood. The Silver Witch’s blood, because only her blood rushed with magic, both vessel and wielder. The greedy fire crackled, devouring his gift.

  Jaw clenched, Nasir murmured the words and took a step back, waiting for the Sultan of Arawiya to arrive.

  The monster awaiting his master.

  CHAPTER 62

  Zafira woke drenched in sweat. Despite herself, she looked to the ledge where Nasir was resting, but the growling prince was nowhere to be seen.

  The glint of metal caught her eye—Kifah, twirling one of her black lightning blades. The fire had dwindled to embers, and the camp glowed with the waning moon that peeked between the laced leaves.

  She froze when the crackle and hiss of a new fire whispered in her ear. Then she was off without a second thought.

  She slipped between the bedrolls and into the maze of stone, taking in the alleys of a run-down sooq as she stole past. She felt her way past the ruins, ancient stone crumbling at her touch as she followed the crackling of the other fire. She should have made sure Altair was asleep before she left. The last thing she needed was to cross paths with an undressed general. Again.

  It didn’t take long to spot the dark stone painted in the brilliance of firelight.

  She recognized the unkempt hair, the still stance that barely concealed silent strength. Had she been anyone less attuned to the world and accustomed to silence, he would have noticed. Zafira did not doubt the stories of the hashashin prince.

  She did not doubt her own stealth, either.

  He was in a small chamber, barely as wide as a bedroll was long. She slipped beneath a pointed arch and through the length of a hall, stopping in the shadows of the crumbling threshold. He faced the fire stiff-backed, and that was how Zafira knew something was amiss. For even in battle, she knew, he was always relaxed.

  The fire howled eerily. It grew, bursting and roaring toward the ceiling, unnaturally tall. Zafira swallowed.

  The gigantic flames shimmered and hissed, shifting to the same shade of plum that permeated Demenhur’s skies in the earliest hours of the day. She heard Nasir draw in a quick breath.

  As a man rose from the fire.

  Sweet snow below. What dark magic was this? The prince wasn’t surprised in the slightest, which meant he was familiar with the occurrence. Zafira’s eyes were wide, burning from refraining to blink. Though the man seemed to exist before her, she had the sense he wasn’t really here.

  Then where was he? Who was he?

  He wore a turban, though his fiery form obscured the color of the cloth. He towered a full head over Nasir, and his thobe stretched across his broad shoulders. Power rippled from him.

  “Well?” the man asked Nasir by way of greeting. The cool tone of his voice was almost like Nasir’s. Zafira could barely make out the prince’s features, but he seemed to have changed.

  Weakened. Shrunk.

  Her confusion amplified, and so did the fear ricocheting in her chest. She shivered, and if she hadn’t been so focused on the scene before her, she would have heard the footsteps behind her. But when the barely perceptible crunch of sand sounded directly behind her, it was too late.

  A hand clamped around her mouth. She struggled as silently as she could, trying to part her mouth and use her teeth.

  “Shh,” a voice whispered, warm breath on her ear. “I’m going to let go, and you’re going to keep silent. Understood?”

  Altair. Oh, this kept getting better and better. She nodded, and after a beat his hand fell away.

  He stepped to her left, face grim.

  “Ten days have passed,” Nasir said to the fire, voice flat. Dead.

  The fire figure shimmered. “Do you think me inane like you, boy? I know how long it’s been.”

  Zafira flinched at the man’s discourteous tone. “Discourteous” was describing it mildly. He had the same gray eyes as Nasir but an even colder version of them. The rest of the man’s features looked vaguely familiar, too. Is that…?

  “Who is that?” she whispered, dread settling in her stomach.

  Altair set his mouth at an angle. “Your king. The Sultan of Arawiya.”

  The man who had murdered Sarasin’s caliph. The man who had sent two men after her. The man who made the Prince of Death, feared across Arawiya, cower before a fire.

  Nasir cleared his throat. “You wanted me to summon you.”

  “I know what I told you to do.”

  With that, the sultan turned away, leaving Nasir clenching his fists and staring at the back of his father’s head. His daama father.

  “What is the sultan doing here?” Zafira asked slowly.

  “Not here. He’s in Sultan’s Keep—Nasir summoned him using dum sihr,” Altair said, frowning. “Likely with blood from the Silver Witch, because there’s no other way to perform such a spell in Arawiya.”

  “He looks as grumpy as Nasir,” she said, then nudged Altair forward with her shoulder, whispering, “Say hi.”

  He cut her a look of disgust. “This isn’t funny.”

  She nearly laughed at the look on his face. “I didn’t say it was. I’m so used to you cracking all the jokes. I missed them.”

  Zafira paused. Altair stilled. “Did you—” he started, just as she said, “Actually—”

  Did I really just say I missed something about him? No, she told herself. She missed his easy banter, because she missed Yasmine’s. She missed Yasmine, khalas.

  “Why would Nasir summon him?” Zafira asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence. She refused to believe Nasir would do whatever the Sultan of Arawiya ordered. He was a prince. He was deadly. He was privileged. He—

  “He follows orders.”

  “But why? Is he afraid of the sultan?” She recalled the scars on his back. The rows and rows of black. “He’s afraid of being hurt.”

  Altair scoffed. “Nasir? He doesn’t fear pain. Not anymore.”

  Not anymore.

  The chamber brightened with a shift in the fire, and Nasir took a step back. Altair grabbed her hand and they froze, though they were safe in the shadows.

  “Have you retrieved the book?” the sultan asked, turning to Nasir again.

  “No.” Even that simple word made him shrink further into himself.

  “I should not have expected better.”

  Nasir flinched and Zafira bristled. What kind of father belittled his son with every breath?

  “Have you disposed of the others?”

  Disposed. As if they were trash in a bin. Nasir’s pause was answer enough.

  “You are failing, unsurprisingly. Altair?”

  Another pause, and the sultan scoffed. Altair tightened his grip.

  “I merely need more time,” Nasir said in that dead voice of his.

  It angered her. Why couldn’t he stand up to the man?

  “What of the Hunter?”

  Nasir stiffened.

  Zafira drew in a sharp breath, and Altair held her still, fingers pressing in silent admonishment.

  “The Demenhune Hunter is a
girl—a woman.” There was a crack in Nasir’s careful voice.

  The sultan didn’t react. “And?”

  Silence. Zafira craned forward, desperate for Nasir’s answer.

  The sultan laughed, a mocking sound that boiled her blood. “So you thought to spare her. Did you think this was your chance for redemption? Silly boy, darkness is your destiny. You were born for hell.”

  Nasir’s shoulders dipped, barely. If Zafira hadn’t been so focused on him, she wouldn’t have noticed. She doubted Nasir even noticed what he had done.

  Skies.

  The Prince of Death was trying to earn his father’s approval.

  “Kill them and bring me the book. Do not return until you do, or her tongue won’t be all she loses.”

  Kill them. So that’s what he was sent here to do. Her exhale shivered. Beside her, Altair muttered a curse.

  She waited for Nasir to speak. To stand up against the man.

  “Did you hear me?” the sultan asked.

  Silence steeped between them, and she sensed the sultan’s impatience. Every part of her awaited his answer. Awaited his protest—

  “Yes, Sultani.”

  —which failed to arrive.

  Zafira shook her head, his acceptance bombarding her calmness. Laa, laa, laa. She pulled free from Altair’s grasp and took a step back without thinking.

  Something snapped beneath her boots. The Nasir she knew came back to life, tossing something into the fire, ending it without a spark before he turned to the shadows.

  To where she and Altair stood.

  She drew a sharp breath.

  Altair grabbed her hand and they were off. She didn’t look back because she knew she wouldn’t be able to see or hear the prince. Hashashins defied senses.

  At the camp, Altair threw her a glare that said it was all her fault before he hastily settled into his bedroll and she into her makeshift bed, Kifah nowhere to be seen. Not two breaths later, Nasir crashed into the camp.

  His face was flushed, hair standing on end. His mask was gone—in its place, despair and red-rimmed eyes. He scrambled among the bedrolls, and Zafira closed her eyes, slowed her breathing.