“Rohifsa, where are you?” he whispered.
Raif had wanted to see the look on Nalia’s face when she first stepped onto Arjinnan soil. He’d imagined it a hundred times. How he’d say welcome home. Nothing grand, probably not what you were supposed to say when an exiled empress finally returned to her kingdom. But she would have heard everything behind the words, as she always had.
His gripped the gate harder, relishing the pain as the iron seeped into his skin. The Eye shredded his hope until none was left. Standing here before its impenetrable darkness, Raif could finally see what the others had accepted days ago:
Nalia was dead.
Her voice had felt so real in his dream, as though she were just across the room. But he’d woken up, alone. And that feeling in his gut—that she was still out there, fighting for each breath because that’s what she did, she fought against incredible odds—wasn’t that just his heart, protecting him from the truth? But how could he believe she was dead when everything in him screamed she was alive?
“Nalia,” he whispered. “Nal, please . . .”
It did her no good, his curling up into a ball and giving up. He had to act. For her. For Arjinna. It was what she’d demanded of him, time and again. He’d let her down so much. He had to do right by her now.
He had to do the hard thing. He used to be so good at that.
“Hey, little brother.”
He turned. Zanari stood behind him, eyes big in her pale face. He wanted to be angry at her for the way she’d let the others force him out of the Eye, taking away his best chance at finding Nalia. But all he felt was cold inside.
“It had only been a day,” he said quietly. “We might have found her.”
“I was dying, Raif.” He hated the softness in her voice, the pity. “If we hadn’t left then, every last one of you would be stuck in the Eye right now.”
“I told you to leave without me.”
Zanari sighed. “I couldn’t let you die for nothing, Raif.”
“It wasn’t nothing,” he growled. “I would have found her—I know I would have.”
But even now he could feel the hopeless desperation that had stolen through him during those last hours in the Eye, searching and never finding. She’d vanished.
Zanari slid her arm over his shoulder. He leaned into her for a moment, then pulled away.
“And your voiqhif . . . nothing?” He cringed at the pathetic hope in his voice—of course there was nothing.
“Just darkness,” she said gently, gesturing toward the Eye. “You know that.”
He stared through the gate’s bars, as though he’d somehow see her from here. A form running toward him, arms outstretched. He gasped, turning away from Zanari, a fist in his mouth.
I can’t, he thought. I can’t live without her.
If Zanari weren’t here, he’d get through that gate somehow. He’d run until he collapsed.
“Raif . . .”
“I heard her. In a dream,” he said, his eyes once more on the endless dark before him. “She called for me. She was scared. Terrified.” He turned to her. “What if she’s still out there, Zan?”
His sister tried to hide the pity on her face, but he caught it. This was worse than death, this not knowing, this wanting.
“I can’t do it, Raif.” She shook her head, not even bothering to wipe the tears that poured down her face. “The Eye isn’t like other places. It operates under a different set of rules. The only reason my voiqhif got us through the first time was because I could focus on a fixed location outside it. And I think the only reason I could do that was because I had an army’s energy to draw from and we were going to a place I knew like the back of my hand. Arjinna helped us through just as much as my voiqhif. But to find something in the Eye—one jinni with no chiaan? Raif, what you’re asking is impossible. The minute we stepped in there,” she said, pointing beyond the gate, “we’d just be wandering. Losing energy. We’d never find her and we’d never make it home alive. I’m sorry, little brother, but I’m not going to kill you, even if you do want to be put out of your misery.”
The words filled his chest, hard, cold stones stacked one on top of the other. So this is it, he thought. His future without Nalia stretched before him, years of . . . nothing. Existing, at best.
“There won’t be anyone to burn her body when she . . . when she . . .” He choked on the words. He couldn’t say it. “I won’t even see her in the godlands—”
Zanari took his hand. “I know.”
They stared into the Eye for a long time.
“I want to die,” he said.
“I know.”
The endless night seeped into Raif until every bit of light in him dimmed.
Zanari laid her head on his shoulder. “Are you scared?”
“Of what?”
“Whatever’s next?”
He was scared of living in a world where Nalia didn’t exist. That was all.
“No. We have the Brass Army.” He paused as a new thought came to him. “We don’t have the ring, but . . . this is how Nalia wants it. She thinks no good can come of the sigil.”
Past tense: wanted, thought. He couldn’t do that. Not yet.
Raif could still see the fear in Nalia’s eyes, feel the terror lancing her chiaan as she begged him to turn away from the altar where the sigil had lain.
Solomon’s ring would have made this fight against Calar too clean, too easy. Raif didn’t want easy. He wanted battles and blood. He wanted to make the Ifrit suffer.
11
EVER SINCE THE COUP, THERE HAD ALWAYS BEEN A PALPABLE sense of fear—paranoia, even—in the Ghaz. There was no telling how or where the Ifrit would strike. Though most of the jinn had never seen Calar, gossip from the palace reached the public relatively quickly. Her erratic, increasingly violent behavior was attributed to her alliance with the Ash Crones of Ithkar and an addiction to gaujuri. Calar’s decrees and arrests were so varied that the Djan, Marid, and Shaitan seemed to walk with slightly hunched backs, as though preparing for a blow to strike. Even the Ifrit civilians had begun to shrink into themselves. It wasn’t unusual to hear doors in the villages being pounded on at night and the sudden sound of Ifrit boots as Calar’s soldiers evanesced into the narrow streets.
Everyone was afraid of being named a collaborator. Friend turned on friend, family against family, relationships thrown to the fire to save a jinni’s own skin, or someone’s else’s. Where once the Ghaz was filled with lively shoppers and a bustling trade, it now held furtive glances and whispered transactions. Tonight it seemed as if something were different, a shift in energy that Shirin couldn’t quite put her finger on. Hope, perhaps, but from the murmured conversation around her, it was clear no one knew quite what to make of the past day’s events. Still, it was strange to see light in eyes that had long been full of terrified resignation.
She could get used to hope.
Though it was so late at night that it was nearly morning, the Third Wish was full when Shirin pushed open its creaky doors, the chorus of voices a comforting din that drowned out the endless pacing in her mind. That was why she was here, wasn’t it? The noise that wouldn’t let her think, the way no one here expected anything of her, least of all Shirin herself. Well, almost anyone—Yurik had expectations. She just wasn’t quite sure what they were and, at any rate, it didn’t matter whether she lived up to them or not. Though, if she were honest with herself, a tiny part knew it did matter.
The bar smelled of unwashed bodies and savri, stale. Every table Shirin passed was talking about the same thing: the mysterious army that had arrived through the Gate of the Eye. Shirin crossed to the bar and leaned against the end, careful to keep the hood of her cloak up—the last thing she needed was an informant tattling to the Ifrit. She was ready to fight whatever came her way, of course, but she wanted a break. For one godsdamned day she wanted to not fight. Yurik was busy pouring drinks at the other end of the bar and she caught his eye and held up one finger. He nodded, his e
yes lingering on hers. She looked away first.
“The whole thing was melted,” a Marid fisherman in a loose linen sawala was saying. “I heard that the Ifrit blasted the gate down so the ghouls would kill us all.”
“Aw, come off it,” said a toothless Djan. “I saw the jinn coming through it with me own eyes. It’s an army, I tell you! The tavrai carted them off to the forest right quick.”
The Marid laughed. “An army from where? You’ve been taking a bit too much gaujuri, friend.” He poured more savri into each of the clay mugs.
“I’m telling you what I saw!” the Djan insisted. “Hundreds of soldiers and they all had white and purple armbands.”
“Purple, you say?” asked the third jinni at the table, another Djan. He was quite a bit younger than the others and his hand shook slightly as he sipped from his glass. An informant, Shirin had no doubt—that nervousness was a telltale sign. Her hand moved to the dagger concealed beneath her cloak.
“Ghan Aisouri purple.” The old Djan leaned forward. “Maybe the rumors are true, eh? Maybe one of them’s alive. Maybe she’s come to fight that snake on the throne.”
The fisherman’s eyes filled with fear. “Keep it down, brother. You want a vacation in Ithkar?”
“What did you say your names were again?” the young jinni asked, voice tight.
Rookie mistake. Sometimes they made it so easy.
Before the jinn could answer, Shirin was at the young Djan’s side, her dagger inches from his heart. She leaned over him, pretending to hug an old friend.
“Move and you’ll sorely regret it,” Shirin murmured.
The Djan went still. “I think there—there must be some mistake—”
“What did the Ifrit promise you for squealing?” she asked, her voice still low. The other jinn at the table stared at her, open-mouthed.
“No! You’ve got it wrong—”
“I don’t think I do.” Shirin shifted forward, and the jinni gasped as the blade made the slightest bit of contact with his skin.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Please. They took my father. They said if I helped them, they’d let him go.”
The Marid’s eyes narrowed and he stood, his chair toppling behind him. “I’ll kill you with my own hands, you little skag.”
Several heads turned to stare. So much for keeping this quiet.
“Is there a problem here?”
Shirin glanced over her shoulder. Yurik was standing behind her, holding a bottle of savri by the neck, an improvised bludgeon. She kept a firm grip on the traitorous jinni’s shoulder but sheathed her dagger.
“An informant,” she said quietly. “You want to throw him out of your bar or should I? And by ‘throw him out,’ I mean kill him.” She gave the jinni who trembled beneath her hand a look of pure loathing. “Your father’s already dead. You were a fool to believe the Ifrit.”
Yurik motioned for a large Djan who sat near the Wish’s entrance. He moved across the bar with surprising speed. When he reached them, Yurik roughly pulled the traitor out of his seat.
“Take this one out back,” he said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Within seconds, the jinni was gone.
“Drinks on me,” Yurik said to the men at the table. He started toward the stairs and Shirin followed him to his room.
When they got inside, Yurik rested a hand on her shoulder, his eyes searching hers. It was heavy and warm, solid. She shrugged it off. Shirin couldn’t bear it, this tenderness. Unwanted. Undeserved.
He sighed and crossed the room, away from her. Whether she intended to or not, she always insisted on that distance. Being touched had not always been a good thing in her life—even now, it was hard to shake those childhood memories.
Yurik leaned against the table, identical to the larger ones downstairs, watching her.
“Are the rumors true?” he asked.
“Depends on which ones you’re talking about,” she said. “Raif’s back and he has an army—jinn from Earth.”
She wasn’t going to tell him the other part, that Raif hadn’t left his ludeen in two nights. If anyone but the tavrai found out, the jinn would lose the shred of hope Raif’s reappearance was reigniting within them.
“Did they really cross through the Eye?”
She nodded. “And they had a Ghan Aisouri with them, but she’s dead now, thank gods.”
Yurik let out a low whistle. “Maybe things aren’t as bad as you thought, eh? You’ve got your commander, an army . . .”
She wasn’t sure if she was imagining the slight sneer underneath the word your. Or the tension around his eyes.
Shirin shrugged. “We’ll see.”
There was a pause, heavy with all the things neither of them were saying. The bar below was only a soft roar up on the second floor. Despite the Wish being the most popular place in the land, Shirin always felt more at peace here, as though Yurik’s room was a secluded retreat deep in the Qaf Mountains.
“What happens now?” he finally asked.
“I don’t know. Everything’s different.” She sighed. “Raif is . . .”
Shirin pursed her lips, shook her head. She felt like a traitor just thinking the words—she couldn’t say them out loud because if she did they’d be true: I don’t trust him anymore. That was what it was, then—that hard thing in her belly. She loved Raif, yes. Always. But for the first time, she didn’t feel safe around him. Maybe he was even as unpredictable as Calar.
“Let me ask you something,” Yurik said. “Let’s say, by some miracle of the gods, the tavrai win the revolution. The Ifrit go back to Ithkar, if you’re lucky. Then what?”
“Then we . . . we . . .”
Shirin frowned, her gaze shifting from Yurik’s tanned face to his shelves of contraband, things that kept him and countless others alive even in the leanest times. Like her, he was a survivor. He’d been on the dark caravan, granted his master’s third wish, and come back to a war-torn land, a free jinni trying to ease the burden of everyone around him. He could have stayed on Earth and lived it up. But he hadn’t.
She lifted her chin, defensive. “After the war, we’ll . . . see what the people want. If it’s a leader, they’ll choose one—and of course it’ll be Raif.”
Yurik snorted. “Of course.”
She ignored his derisive tone. “If they don’t want a leader, then . . . fine,” she said. “At least we won’t be slaves of the Ghan Aisouri or Calar’s playthings.”
“Shirin—” Yurik stopped, growling. “Can’t you see how endless this war is? As soon as you defeat one enemy, another takes its place. What have you gained by fighting as you do?”
“What have I gained? My freedom, my life. Before the Djan’Urbis found me . . .” Her voice caught and she swallowed, hard. Yurik’s eyes softened, but that just made her glare all the more at him. “Let’s be honest—I’m going to die sooner rather than later. I just want it to be on my own terms.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” he said.
“What other way is there?” she spit.
Yurik crossed to her, tentative steps that made her want to flee and yet she waited, her heart beating faster the closer he got.
“There is an infinite number of ways to live out your years, love,” he said. “Infinite.” He reached out a callused, work-worn hand and placed it against her cheek. Her eyes shifted away from his, from the kindness in them. He knew her inside and out without her having to say a word.
“Look at me,” he whispered.
She forced her eyes to meet his—one gold, one emerald, both seeing right through her, past every defense she’d built up. She sucked in her breath as his chiaan swirled over her lips and he stepped closer.
“Shirin.” He said her name as though it were the answer to a question he’d been asking all his life.
She wanted to run, but her body wouldn’t move—no, it was moving, but toward him, what am I doing?, and then his lips were on hers, warm and gentle and his arms held her body against his and she wa
s melting, tumbling, swirling.
For one perfect moment, Shirin forgot the war. She forgot the past. She forgot Raif.
Raif.
“Stop,” she gasped, pushing Yurik away from her. He stumbled back, eyes wide. “What the hell was that?” Her voice was too loud, her breath too short.
He sighed and looked down, hands gripping his waist. She could feel the sadness and frustration and . . . and something else, that infinite, perfect moment of sweetness, rolling off him.
“From the moment I met you, all I’ve ever wanted to do is make you happy,” he said, quietly, looking up at her. “To take care of you.”
“I don’t need anyone to take care of me,” she snapped. A raiga through and through.
“I know,” he said, one side of his mouth turning up. “But wouldn’t it be nice?”
She laughed then, the sound too loud, cruel. “I’ve never liked nice. When are you going to learn that?”
She threw open the door and bolted down the stairs.
Shirin didn’t stop running until she collapsed on the edge of the forest, breathless, sweat and tears streaming down her face.
They were both fools—him, for thinking she was someone worth kissing, worth taking care of, and her, for realizing that a small part of her wanted him to.
12
KESMIR STEPPED OUT OF HIS CLOUD OF CRIMSON EVANESCENCE, not breaking his stride as he crossed the wide expanse of the Cauldron. Once the Ifrit seat of power in Ithkar, it was now Calar’s laboratory where she and the Ash Crones could experiment with the darkest magic in the land. Wrought from a warped dream, the palace had been brought to life by the first shirzas of the Ifrit thousands of years ago. Lacking a royal family, the Ifrit had long regarded their generals as the true royalty of their race. Calar was the last in a long line of shirzas, and it was her cruelty and power that allowed her to be the first Ifrit to wear the Amethyst Crown.
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