We Hunt the Flame

by Hafsah Faizal

  But he had stopped listening to logic when his mother died.

  “The Silver Witch is sending the Demenhune Hunter to retrieve the lost Jawarat, a book that will end this drought of magic.”

  So Haytham’s assumption was true. A breeze slipped past the open window, dry and dead, like all of Sultan’s Keep.

  “The Hunter is a da’ira. A compass. Hunting in the Arz is hard enough, but finding one’s way back successfully for five years? There is magic at play. A da’ira is one of the rarer affinities. He has only to set his mind to an object, and he will be led to it. I doubt the man even knows what he is, or he wouldn’t so recklessly reveal himself. The two men I sent to retrieve him never returned.” The sultan stroked his beard in apparent thought. “So you will have to catch him on Sharr. Use him to find the Jawarat, then kill him. Kill anyone else the witch sends, too.”

  Kill, destroy. That was what had replaced logic.

  “But magic—” Nasir started.

  “Did I ask for your thoughts?” the sultan asked, putting him in his place.

  He was a lapdog. He couldn’t expect to learn more. He didn’t deserve more.

  But how? he wanted to know. How could the Demenhune Hunter have magic when there was none? When it was clear that Ghameq’s fire summoning was done through the long-banished dum sihr, magic no one in Demenhur—an ethical caliphate—would, or even could, touch?

  It meant that everything about magic disappearing was more than black-and-white.

  “The witch has wronged me on more than one count,” the sultan continued. “Do not let the book fall into her hands. If my assumptions are wrong, and the Hunter is no more than a man with a goal, move on.”

  Move on. Innocent wording for “kill and be done with it.”

  “Understood?”

  Nasir dipped his head. Whether he wanted to do this or not was unimportant.

  “Why me? Why not a contingent?” Nasir asked. He might be the only one who wordlessly did the sultan’s bidding, but how was Nasir expected to succeed on an island not even the Sisters had returned from?

  “A more strategic option, but we are dealing with a fickle witch, not a mortal rival.”

  Fickle, indeed.

  Nasir thought of the ivory curtains to his left, in that room he doubted even the sultan slept within anymore. The words rushed from his mouth before he could stop them. “And if I don’t?”

  Sultan Ghameq’s answer was immediate. “Your servant girl can stand to lose a few more parts. Then there is the matter of the Dar al-Fawda boy, and Haytham’s son. You will never truly be left with no one. You will always find a sick soul to protect. Do you think I can’t see that? You are weak. Pathetic.

  “And until you murder the sickening leniency festering within, you will never be worthy of being my son.”

  The vile words echoed in the silence.

  Nasir had been a worthy son, once. The sultan was a man he had called Baba once. It was as if something else prowled inside him now, eroding the man Nasir once loved. To see a flicker, a glimmer, a bare hint of appreciation in his father’s eyes—Nasir would do anything.

  Even kill without morals. Murder without regret. Become a monster without bounds.

  A servant swept into the room. Nasir heard the swish of her dress around her legs, and he knew, without turning, that it was she. The sultan watched him, so Nasir stoned his features and stared back coolly.

  Kulsum glided forward and set a platter of fruit on the floor before the sultan. She crouched, chin tucked to her chest, quiet and expectant, not more than two paces away. Sweet jasmine struck Nasir’s senses. He remembered the softness of her skin. The pain.

  Ghameq looked down at the tray with silver bowls as if they had appeared on their own. A murmured order to get out—akhraj—was the only acknowledgment he gave.

  Nasir didn’t look at her, though every nerve in his body begged otherwise. Fruits were arranged in the bowls, a multitude of colors sliced delicately and displayed lavishly. They were fresh from Pelusia, the only caliphate with such fertile soil.

  The sultan ate. One grape after another, they plopped into his mouth, while Haytham’s son shivered in hunger, while the page boy licked his dirty fingers and the children tumbled from the backs of camels. While Arawiya suffered.

  Breathe.

  “If I may leave, Sultani,” Nasir said after a moment.

  The sultan chewed on, ignoring him. Darkness edged into Nasir’s vision.

  Finally, Ghameq grunted. “It’s tomorrow, boy. Get ready.”

  “Assuming I cross the Arz, how will I get to Sharr?” Nasir asked. They had no vessels for sailing the sea. They had no sailors to help them navigate.

  “On a ship,” Ghameq barked like he was stupid.

  Nasir did not think the sultan saw the tic in his jaw. “Yes, Sultani.”

  He resisted Ghameq’s orders, once, for as long as it took before he succumbed to the pain. And he endured it—more than most could. Until the sultan found a better way to ensure Nasir’s obedience.

  “Will I make the journey alone?”

  The sultan smiled, ever a snake, and dread settled in Nasir’s stomach. “Take Altair.”

  Nasir exhaled. What had the sultan’s favorite general done to incur Ghameq’s wrath?

  “And I’m to kill everyone.”

  “That is what I said, isn’t it?” Sultan Ghameq picked up a handful of pomegranate seeds.

  Sharr was the land of ghosts, an isle where even the land would be his enemy. Yet Nasir wasn’t afraid of that anymore. He was afraid of himself, and the lives he would take, starting with his father’s favorite general. For Kulsum. For Haytham’s son.

  Unless…, the voice in his heart began.

  He left it at that.

  CHAPTER 12

  Zafira had spent the rest of the night thinking of the woman in the silver cloak—a veritable, magic-wielding witch, who spoke of redemption and magic, who looked a handful of years older than Zafira but spoke as if she had lived for centuries. Zafira was not like Deen. She hadn’t convened with immortal safin. She hadn’t tasted the world beyond Demenhur’s western villages. Her knowledge of everything had come through tales spun on quiet nights. A witch was too much to comprehend.

  Deen hadn’t stayed the night in her house in the end.

  After the Silver Witch had vanished, he had slouched against the stable wall with a far-off look in his eyes.

  When he had finally gathered himself, Zafira could tell he didn’t like what he saw on her face. And when she stretched the silence between them, he took her downcast face in his hands and touched his lips to her forehead.

  “Zafira. Zafira, look at me.”

  But she couldn’t. She couldn’t look at him, and her eyes had fluttered shut. In the darkness, anything was possible. Baba was alive, Umm was herself, magic still existed. But eyes couldn’t stay closed forever, unless one was dead.

  And the dead never dreamed.

  “This is far beyond us,” he had whispered against her skin.

  Was it beyond them? Who decides what’s out of reach, if not we ourselves?

  The door to Zafira’s room opened now, framing Lana in soft light.

  “Okht? I thought I heard the bed creak. I didn’t see you come in last night.” Her features were lit with relief, and Zafira pulled on a smile. “Ummi asked for you.”

  The smile slipped from her face. “As she tends to,” Zafira said carefully, ignoring the yawning chasm of guilt.

  Umm’s sanity had been fickle ever since Baba had crawled from the Arz, but she had her rare spasms of lucidity. Moments when Zafira made herself scarce, for it was easier than facing her mother.

  “You should go,” Lana said quietly, hands clasped. The dying fire angled her face in shadows. Guilt tugged at her mouth. “I … I told her about the letter. And Sharr.”

  With a sigh, Zafira threw the blankets off and stood, the cold going straight through the thin fabric of her old dress and into her bones. Lana padded away, and
Zafira heard the shuffle of the majlis pillows by the front door, leaving her to her decision.

  Through the threshold, she could see the rust-studded doorknob leading to Umm’s room. The same doorknob she brushed past every daama day, guilt searing the fibers of her being.

  No more. She was going to Sharr. She could possibly die. She clenched her jaw and crossed over to Umm’s door. With every step forward, she felt like the condemned trudging to her beheading.

  Approaching the Arz scared her less.

  With bated breath, Zafira reached for the door. The wood scraped her bare palms. Push it open, coward.

  She pushed. The door moaned. Five years, it seemed to cry. Five years. The woman inside lifted her head immediately, eyes locking on her, fingers twisting with the same disquiet rushing through Zafira’s veins.

  Umm.

  Zafira hadn’t exchanged a word with Umm in five years. Five years of having a mother in the same house as her, five years of silence. Some days, before the screaming began, it was easier to think Umm was dead, too.

  She looked the same. Head held regally atop a slender neck like a gazelle’s. A slim nose that Baba loved. Lips a shade darker than red and eyes bright and cold as Zafira’s, feathered by lashes that softened their iciness. Her dark locks were feathered in white.

  Those aged strands were a fist to her stomach.

  “Zafira,” Umm said. Her voice was not the same. It was torn now, wearied by sorrow.

  Zafira couldn’t move from the doorway. She couldn’t breathe.

  “You never come to see me.”

  Umm never ventured through the house, either. These scant walls housed three souls and an abundance of memories. Zafira threw a quick glance behind her, to where Lana was curled on the majlis, dutifully not paying attention.

  “I can’t,” she breathed.

  Umm’s voice was soft. “It was him or you.”

  A conversation they should have had five years ago, had the pain not been so suffocating.

  “You should have saved him,” Zafira whispered. Umm’s blankets were strewn about her, even the pale pink one Yasmine had made herself.

  “There was no question of whether the child who had lived a fraction of the life he had lived should be spared or not,” Umm said, voice cracking in the end. When she drew her next breath, Zafira heard the rattle in her chest. The pain.

  Zafira rubbed her face and her fingers came away wet with tears.

  Umm lifted her hands. “Yaa, my abal, don’t cry for me.”

  Oh, my wild rose.

  Zafira hadn’t heard the endearment in years. Everything clawed up her throat, scraping her insides, tearing her resolve. Her father had whispered it last, and then she’d been fighting his iron grasp, gasping for her life.

  She remembered that sudden stillness after Umm drove her jambiya through his heart. Red darted across her vision now. Dark red, a line painted down Baba’s chest.

  Zafira stepped closer. She crouched. Sat. With each movement, her guilt grew as she realized how selfish she had been. She reached for Umm’s hands, closing her fingers around the coolness of her mother’s. The tears fell now. One after the other, they trickled from a crevice in her chest, turning into a stream flooding from her heart. Umm’s eyes wilted into sadness.

  “Sometimes I forget his face,” Umm whispered.

  How could something so painless as the loss of memory hurt so much? The raw despair in her mother’s gaze gripped her.

  Zafira could never forget Baba’s face. She could never forget Baba—khalas, that was that. Yet she had ignored her living parent. She had left her mother to mourn alone. For no matter how much time Lana spent with Umm, it was Zafira who had been there when Baba breathed his last. It was Zafira who understood Umm’s grief.

  That very mother who had saved her life.

  She had allowed her pain to harden into anger. Allowed that anger to fester, blinding her to Umm’s suffering. If Zafira grieved from seeing her father die at the hands of her mother, how did it feel for Umm to live with the hands she had used to slay her beloved?

  How had it felt for Umm to choose between one love and another?

  Zafira forced air into her lungs. She shuttered her selfish, burning eyes and dropped her head to Umm’s lap, the gesture foreign. Familiar.

  “Forgive me, Ummi. Forgive me,” Zafira pleaded. She repeated the words over and over. “For my elusion. For my anger.”

  Selfish. Childish. Hateful. Skies, there was no daughter in Arawiya worse than her.

  “Don’t beg, child. I, too, am sorry,” Umm lulled, and took Zafira’s face in her hands. There was no glint of madness looking back at Zafira from the ice-blue eyes she had inherited. “You did not come to me, and I did not come to you. We are both at fault, are we not?”

  No. It was Zafira who was at fault. She had failed her duty as a daughter.

  Umm brushed her thumb across Zafira’s damp cheek. “Lana tells me you will go to Sharr.”

  She supposed her tears had to do with more than Umm and Baba. It was everything else, too. Yasmine’s marriage. Deen’s proposal. This trek to Sharr.

  “I won’t be like Baba. I won’t return to hurt you. I will be victorious, or I will die.” There was steel in Zafira’s voice.

  “I am not trying to stop you, my abal. I only want to know what the search is for.”

  “The return of magic,” Zafira said. “The destruction of the Arz that took him from us.”

  Umm considered that before she curved her lips into a smile, sending a thousand memories soaring through Zafira. She could see Baba there. She could see warm bread fresh out of the oven. Blankets creating a cocoon. She could see Lana’s small hands and Umm’s favorite ma’moul cookies.

  It was gone now. All of it. Everything.

  Because of the Arz.

  “Avenge his death, Zafira. Avenge your father and destroy that forest.” Umm brushed her thumb across her cheek again, giving her a flicker of light to guide her unknown path. A path Zafira swore to follow.

  “Be as victorious as the name I have given you, and bring the desert to its knees.”

  Zafira took her mother’s words, one by one, and swallowed them whole.

  * * *

  Later, Zafira collected her newly fashioned arrows and slipped them into her sling with soft thuds that mimicked her heartbeat. Lana twirled a white feather between her fingers before gathering the trimmed remnants.

  “I’m going to take a wash and meet Simah,” she said with a yawn.

  “Oh?”

  “Lunch,” Lana hedged, and when Zafira narrowed her eyes, she said, “Her umm is sick.”

  “You don’t have to run and play doctor every time someone asks. You don’t owe—”

  “Neither do you,” Lana cut her off. Seeing the surprise on Zafira’s face, she scrambled closer and took her hand. “I’m sorry, Okht, but it’s true, isn’t it? I—I’ll be back later.”

  Zafira pulled Lana in for a hug before she could escape, wrapping her arms around her sister and holding her close. She took every word she wanted to whisper and said, “I’m sorry.”

  Lana pulled back to look at her and pressed a kiss to Zafira’s cheek.

  “I know,” she whispered, and Zafira heard everything in between those letters.

  After Lana disappeared down the hall, Zafira sank back into the cushions with a sigh. She picked up Baba’s jambiya, weighing it and its straight-bladed cousin, the dagger, in her palms to decide which would be better suited against an enemy.

  An enemy. She wouldn’t be hunting deer and rabbit anymore. She would be hunting monsters, if the stories about Sharr were to be believed. She would be fighting for her own life.

  She jumped at a rap on the door. Skies, Zafira. Her pulse quickened as she thought of the Silver Witch, but logic told her the witch would more likely materialize in front of her than knock. Some logic that was.

  Zafira pulled open the door.

  Deen stood at the threshold, curls dusted in snow. She braced h
erself for words about how she shouldn’t go. Why she should stay.

  But instead, he said, “You haven’t happened to see the Hunter, have you?”

  She smiled, and his eyes sparkled at her relief.

  “Last I heard, he was taking the day off,” she said.

  Deen stepped inside and looked from the strewn feather barbs to the pristine white fletchings of her arrows. He rubbed his hands before the fire and canted his head. “This isn’t called ‘taking the day off.’ Come with me.”

  She only stared.

  “It’s been forever since you’ve stepped out as Zafira.”

  She tossed the trimmings in the bin. “But then everyone will know how beautiful I am.”

  His smile was soft. “As they should.”

  Her skin buzzed, thinking of last night atop the roof, the cold at her neck. Their faces breaths apart. The curve of his lips and the moon running her fingers through his curls. “Where will we go?”

  “Hmm, let’s see. Maybe Bakdash?” he asked, his tone making it clear he had thought this through.

  Zafira pressed her lips into a line and glowered.

  He laughed. “I know you hate everything to do with it, but—”

  “I hate the theory of it,” she groused. “The idea of flocking to buy iced cream while carping about how cold the caliphate is.”

  “You, Zafira, have a very odd way of thinking.” Deen picked up her wool shawl and gave it to her. “Bakdash is ours. It’s one of the few things that makes Demenhur special. People used to flock here from all across Arawiya for a taste. Give it a try, hmm?” His voice softened. “Who knows when you’ll have another chance.”

  His words struck her. This would be her last day in Demenhur for quite some time. Possibly forever.

  A voice nagged at her, telling her this journey to Sharr was a lie of an errand that could only bring pain. But she had seen that look on the Silver Witch’s features. Zafira knew what it was like to crave redemption, to blame oneself for a moment’s weakness.